GST-OK? Not even close
GST-OK? Not even close
With just months before the July 1 GST deadline, many Australian businesses are not fully prepared for its impact.
Just four months before the Goods and Services Tax (GST) begins its dramatic change to Australian business, many organisations remain unprepared for its effect.
The Australian Tax Office, preparing to be inundated with requests for information and assistance through its adviser program, has found that just 16 per cent of businesses have registered for the new system.
Only 400,000 businesses have applied for the Australian Business Number (ABN), despite the ATO sending out 2.5 million information kits.
If businesses rushed to meet the deadline, the ATO would need to process tens of thousands of applications per day.
"Organisations need a solution that is useable now."
Driven by this low figure, vendors in the ERP and financial reporting space have made their own attempts to aid businesses. Computron kicked off 2000 by joining with accountancy firm Pannell Kerr Foster (PKF) Worldwide to provide its GST-compliant financial reporting and management tool (as reported in Image & Data Manager, January/February 2000, page 6), called TCR2000.
Tax and business law information provider CCH has since joined this partnership to enable tax compliance reporting with full audit trails for electronic Business Activity Sheets (BAS) to be lodged with the ATO.
The solution was specifically developed to integrate data from existing sources in the business, as by the time it would be introduced many organisations would simply not have the time to overhaul their financial systems to accommodate the GST, said Computron vice president for Asia Pacific, Ossie Pisanu.
ATO PREPARES
The ATO itself has prepared for the new system, by installing three high-end scanners each in its Penrith and Albury offices. The six scanners, which are manufactured in Germany by Inotec, have the ability to scan up to 390 A4 pages per minute.
Other vendors have similarly realised that many businesses will have no choice but to integrate GST solutions with legacy systems. According to Fiona Waterhouse, director at business consultancy TBATI Consulting, GST will have the greatest impact on smaller businesses that have operated on manual accounting measures, which are not likely to stand up to the complex new system.
"The introduction of the GST has the potential to create an administrative nightmare and cash flow burden for the nearly 80 per cent of Australia's one million small businesses that don't maintain computerised records," she said.
TBATI has worked in conjunction with software developer Translogik Software to produce the SME-targeted GST calculation and financial management tool Kaos Manager, which it launched late last year.
According to Computron GM for Asia Pacific Peter Bissett, time has left both businesses and vendors little alternative but to integrate with legacy systems.
"It's almost too late to change legacy systems for the July 1 deadline," he said. "Organisations need a solution that is useable now."