Help is at hand for small business

SIMPLIFYING superannuation payments for small business owners is essential to making their administrative requirements far easier, an industry expert says.

Golden eggs in nest

SIMPLIFYING superannuation payments for small business owners is essential to making their administrative requirements far easier, an industry expert says.

Council of Small Business of Australia’s chief executive officer Peter Strong said SMEs are constantly faced with the battle of being bogged down by “red tape” and “a lot of paperwork.”

Individually paying employees their superannuation can be an arduous task with staff having different super funds and varying payment amounts.

National Australia Bank’s head of small business David Bannantyne said it’s an “administrative nightmare.”

“At the moment if you have 12 part-time employees and 15 full-timers somebody has to organise the superannuation payments,’’ he said.

“You have to sit there and calculate it and you have to then work out which fund the employee’s super goes into, they might have a choice fund and you also look at the default fund.

“Then the company will have a default fund and that’s an administrative nightmare for small business.’’

After a successful trial of Super Pay, NAB recently introduced the new superannuation clearing house to make paying employees easier through an online portal.

Mr Bannantyne said it makes paying customers easier by allowing an automatic payment cycle for super to be paid to all employees across all funds regardless of which fund they are with.

The Australian Institute of Superannuation Trustees chief executive officer, Tom Garcia, said SuperStream — part of the government’s Super Reform package — was helping make super payments easier for employers.

“Every super fund will be offering some sort of system to provide a quasi-clearing house effect and it’s a gateway to moving data,’’ he said.

“From an employers’ point of view they can send information to their default fund and they will send that information out to all the other funds via the gateway.

“It’s making the back office of super more efficient.”

Commonwealth Bank’s acting managing director of payments and cash management Andrew Cheesman said they had also introduced methods to make it easier for small business owners to pay super contributions to their employees.

“Our customers can simply make payments directly into employees’ superannuation fund accounts by direct entry or BPAY,’’ he said.

“This means busy small business owners don’t need to go to other websites to pay super contributions.

“To make paying super even easier, our customers can also schedule payments in (the business banking site) CommBiz for up to 14 months in advance.”