Standard Business Reporting

Business Intellect Group

Peter Polgar, Director, Business Intellect Group (New South Wales, Australia)

As a group of accountants we have six offices on the northern beaches and over a thousand clients. We cover most areas of business and we also have some international clients as well.

With the number of reports that entities have to produce now, in some cases larger entities reporting virtually monthly in one shape or form or another, it's necessary to be able to do this electronically.

We really want one robust system to be able to transmit to government, and for us it's SBR.

Transmitting data rapidly to various government institutions and entities for us is a big time saver. I think too as we get more and more forms on the SBR process, we'll enhance our efficiencies even further.

We've trialled the employment declaration forms. That data, once installed inside the payroll system electronically (means) the process of issuing the employment declarations electronically is a fraction of the time and the data is accurate. So there's no transposition, no manual intervention, no postage, no paper, it's all electronic.

The training's not that much really in the overall scheme of things. It's simply understanding that you need an AUSkey – you need an AUSkey to be able to have the correct credentials to get through with the system.

But essentially once you've got it set up it's really no different to what we're doing. I mean we still do the basic data entry, we still get the data into the configuration that we need to be able to transmit it, but once that's ready SBR takes over and does the rest. So it's fairly straightforward, not a huge learning curve.

It's working well and I think the staff themselves find it a lot easier to transmit data for their clients.

There's one staff member actually came to me one day and said um “Gee, this SBR's fantastic isn't it” and I said “well why do you think it's fantastic?” and she said “well its so easy to transmit the data”. And I said “well that's the whole idea. The idea is to get it to the various government departments as quickly as possible. Get it proven back to us that the data's correct and checking it, and then sending it off. I said that's the whole process, in the past we haven't been able to do that”.

I think it's going to have an enormous impact as the take up increases, and people realise that this is the way to go.

We talk to a lot of groups in our day to day activities and they do ask me what do you think about SBR and I say “I'm using it, it works, give it a go”.

Last updated: 06 Feb 2012
Page ID: 7867