Subject to the usual proviso about lies, damned lies and statistics the latest “Counts of Australian Businesses” makes for interesting reading. 

Over the past 4 years the number of businesses in Australia (measured by the number of ABNs) has grown by just under 4%, with all that growth coming in the 2010 year.  At the same time Australian GDP has grown by just under 10%, which suggests that the growth in GDP has been absorbed by existing businesses doing more, rather than more businesses. 

As usual the ABS has provided an analysis of “failure” rates measured by the longevity of those businesses that closed during the previous 4 years.  They report that of all business in existence as at June 2007 almost 40% had cancelled their ABN by 30 June 2011.  But if you look at just the 300,000 ABNs that were issued in the 2007/08 year 52% of those had exited after 4 years.

The big unknown amongst all this is how many of these businesses are “failures” (either went bust or closed because the owner wasn’t able to make a go of it) as compared to how many were “successful closures” (retirements, business sold profitably, etc).   There are competing schools of thought on this, but these numbers certainly do seem to support the case that surviving the first 1 to 3 years in a new business is tough.

I recently came across an interesting study looking at predictors of business failure for SMEs, which is too long to cover in this blog (besides I haven’t finished reading it yet).  But sometime soon I will put up a blog relating to this article - it should make for another interesting read.

At the beginning of January Paycycle released the new HTML version of their software to all users (we had been running our payroll on this release since the early December as part of their beta testing).  As of this week this is the only version available – they have now shut down the old Silverlight version (the “black and green” screens many of you will have been familiar with).

The new “look and feel” of the product is in line with Xero – lots of blue!  My first response was a bit negative but after running 4 payrolls in the new release I can scarcely remember the old screens and am really impressed with this new version.   This video shows an introduction to the new release, plus there are extensive help notes on the Paycycle website.

The next major objective for Paycycle is a full integration with Xero, so for those of you who run both these products you will have the option within a few weeks of running your payroll inside Xero, it will just be a separate tab (and yes access will be controlled by user log on, so your payroll data will remain confidential).  Keep an eye on our blog over the next few weeks for news of this.

If you need any help transitioning from the old version of Paycycle to the new, or are interested in implementing either Paycycle or Xero in your business please contact Viridity.