Sep 19, 2021 

Small businesses make up 96% of the 2.4m businesses actively trading in the Australian economy. These businesses have less than 20 staff, employ 44% of the workforce and generates 35% in GDP. Small Businesses are the backbone of the Australian economy. 

The financial year 2021 saw an increased number of new businesses by 3.8% in terms of net growth (source: ABS Aug 2021). This is great news especially in certain growth sectors such as ‘Construction’, ‘Professional, Scientific and Technical services’, and ‘Health Care and Social Assistance’.  

However, since the NSW and VIC extended lockdowns, recent data from Xero and Gobbill is showing a slowdown in the ‘time to payment’ between Jun to Aug 2021. Small business income has also dropped by 12.5%, payment defaults have risen in last month for the first time since May 2020, while bank loan deferrals increased six-fold according to CreditorWatch. 

Gobbill is a secure bill payment automation company for Australian small businesses. During these uncertain times, the company has found its clients are more in control of their payments using Gobbill instead of bills being automatically debited (direct debited). It’s a nasty surprise if you are not expecting the amount or timing of a debit against your bank account. Small business owners can deferred bill payments using Gobbill with a few clicks. Checkout https://gobbill.com for more details.

There are winners and losers from this pandemic but the lockdowns only exacerbate the divide between those that have to close their businesses and those that can still trade. 

The outlook leading up to this Christmas is bleak for small businesses that cannot or have restricted trading imposed on them.

Bill payment automation company Gobbill is seeing more small businesses doing it tougher drawing on reserves to meet their payables. The 2019 Federal Budget may be good for some small businesses but certainly lacks investment in innovation. The increased instant asset tax write-off may help bricks and mortar type businesses but is unlikely to help high-tech innovative companies using scalable cloud processing and other subscription-based services.

There should have been more support and a broader view of R&D as new fields and methods of engineering and scientific development have emerged and do not necessarily fit the traditional R&D models. A different lens should be applied to larger corporations conducting R&D compared to start-ups, especially in incubators and accelerators.

Australia is competing with the rest of the world and we’re losing out. For example, the UK provides entrepreneurs with a personal relief tax rate of 10%. In addition, Australia has also loosely copied the UK Enterprise Investment Scheme to help attract early stage funding but we could do much better.

Watch full interview of Frank Labs’ Senior Advisor Jasmine Koh interviews Gobbill CEO Shendon Ewans about the Federal Budget impact on Small Businesses and Startups.

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