The Big Power Of Small Business

Andre Rowell

New Zealand really is a country of SMEs, not only do they make up 99% of businesses here but they also employ 42.6% of all workers. Not only are these businesses opening up opportunities across different sectors but they are also heavily involved in the communities in which they are based. In spite of this scale of impact, business owners can often be spread thin across a whole lot of admin that detracts from the core business or being ‘Good Busy’ as MYOB calls it. M2 has teamed up with MYOB to not only showcase some of these amazing SMEs but also how leveraging clever technology can help ease stress and increase productivity. And to help other SMEs get Good Busy, they also have a free 30 day trial for their easy online accounting software for small businesses to help manage cash flow, send invoices and automate GST reporting all in one place plus more. Here’s how four New Zealand businesses are using MYOB for their business.

Going Global
New Zealand balustrade systems company, Glass Vice runs a global operation and, of course, deals with multiple currencies. Previously this had to be manually calculated for cash flow and the books, but now MYOB takes care of this.

“We’ve got multiple currencies, we’ve got payroll and inventory and it covers everything that I need it to do. It’s in the cloud, so you can work anywhere in the world,” says Glass Vice Co-Founder, Jane Allen
“Most of the stuff that we pay is in US dollars, so you can use multiple currencies. When MYOB made the online version that we use, the ability to do that then, that just improved what I did overnight, it just made it so much easier. Before I was doing it manually, so it is evolving with what I need.”

Growing Day To Day
Running a business can be a dynamic affair as the fast-growing Luma Analytics will attest to. The value of the growth insights that they provide to their clients has in turn seen them grow and scale quickly.

“As we’ve grown, we’ve been able to grow with MYOB. We’ve been able to add on payroll and financial reporting, which we now use monthly. We’ve started to implement budgeting. We’ve gotten big enough now that we’ve set budgets and we’re about to load those into MYOB,” says Luma Analytics Co-Founder, Emily Shaw.
“We have been able to outsource a lot of our day-to-day tasks through MYOB, especially financial, which makes the tax process much easier because it just gives you the number that you’ve got to load in and pay. It does all that for you.”

Keeping it together
An important part of New Zealand’s marine sector are the manufacturers which contribute to our world-renowned boat building industry. And while hatch maker, Cule Marine, integrates their product with other businesses in the sector, there are a lot of connected elements that go into their business.

Twin custom hardtop hatches on the Tristram 821.

“The great thing is that MYOB is fully integrated, which is brilliant because when we started to evaluate some of the other options, we realised that while the initial platform looked really good, you would have to bolt on a whole lot of added extras to get what you needed. That concerned me a little bit, that you would need to use a number of different software suppliers to achieve what you wanted to, and then you had no real control over all those individual software providers. So that was certainly one thing that appealed about MYOB, it was all fully integrated, “ says Cule Marine Director, Ursula Hanson.
“It works seamlessly for us and I’m using it every day. From quoting, through to fulfilling a sales order, to invoicing, to managing our stock level or supplying our accountant with reports that he requires and sending reminders to people about invoices, which is a great way just to keep on top of your cashflow. It’s been a great system. I’m really happy with it.”

Simplifying Complexity
Te Mata Estate might be one of our oldest and most revered wine brands, and they are not only dealing with the current realities of a highly regulated industry and a complex global market, but also continuously fine-tuning and evolving their processes.

“Part of our drive to make great wine is underpinned by the process of refinement. We are always drilling down into our operations, breaking vineyards up into different varieties, different plantings, different pruning systems and finding these smaller and smaller blocks within them. We had reorganised our wineries. Hand-in-hand with all of that is all the record-keeping behind it. We want to understand the last dollar of what’s gone into our efforts so that we can work through and understand, if we did this to it, does it make it a better wine? How much did it cost us? Could we achieve the same thing by doing it in a different manner, just as effectively? If we spent more on it, would we get more benefits? Could we afford to do this across more parcels elsewhere to try and improve the quality further?” says Te Mata Estate CEO, Nick Buck.

“What we enjoy about using MYOB is that flexibility. That ability to customise it for our business needs and then drill down into that data and get reporting insights back out of it so that we can really analyse individual things. It means that we can understand these aspects of our business to a much, much greater extent.”