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A lot of online scams are pretty obvious. Your bank isn’t going to send you emails about your balance expiring soon. And you know the IRD isn’t going to send you a text to transfer your tax rebate. Unfortunately, the types of scams most likely to affect New Zealand businesses are considerably more sophisticated.

Even if your business makes millions, it won't be sustainable in the long-term unless you collect it. Your staff won't get paid, Inland Revenue will be knocking on your door, and your business will quickly fail. Business owners understand this, yet a surprising number do very little cashflow planning. Failing to forecast cashflow and plan ahead can cause even the most profitable businesses to rapidly fall into a death spiral.

Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI DSS) were established in 2004 by Visa, Mastercard, Discover, JCB International and American Express to consolidate and simplify their individual security programmes. These standards determine how retailers and service providers should store, process, and transmit transactions to protect payment card data.

Sustainability is a business imperative: Embrace it or fall behind

Included in this year’s budget announcements was a change to the tax rate for trusts, moving from 33% to 39% from 1 April 2024. Given the spotlight on trusts in recent years, the hike has not come as a surprise, however it will come as a shock to many Kiwis.

Exporting your goods or services can have enormous benefits. For the business itself, there’s the increased revenue, plus the growth opportunities and the way it can drive up the business’s value. For our wider economy, it creates jobs, upskills our people, improves our productivity and helps us learn from international markets to improve our own practices.

Watch: Grant Thornton New Zealand Post Budget event 2023

Our industry experts share what they wanted to see delivered in Budget 2023 and how this year's announcement impacted some of New Zealand’s key sectors. Read on to discover where the opportunities and roadblocks lie in this year’s announcement.

Initially touted as a “no frills” budget, this year’s announcement largely lived up to that expectation, with few surprises or major initiatives included.

The Budget is an exercise in resource allocation – trying to divvy out a limited pool of money across an almost endless list of New Zealand’s needs and wants. Nearly infinite demand but restricted resources: it’s the underlying challenge for all economics. But with some creative thinking and ideas, Budget 2023 can deliver meaningful outcomes for people and the planet.

In the lead up to last year’s Budget, we wrote about a build-to-rent asset class to incentivise the construction of long-term rentals – and it actually happened. So while we’re on a roll, for Budget 2023 we’re going to be even more ambitious.

With enormous and inexorable spending commitments barrelling toward us, collecting revenue to cover those costs is a priority for the 2023 Budget. But with an election impending, it needs to keep voters sweet, giving them a sugar hit of positive spending, without any unwelcome tax changes.

Unfortunately, New Zealand’s productivity has been lacklustre since the turn of the millennium. We work longer hours, but achieve less output when compared to the OECD average.

NZ IFRS 16 is applicable to all large-for profit entities and aims to improve transparency and comparability in financial reporting by requiring these entities to recognise the full extent of their lease obligations on their balance sheets.

The aged care sector in New Zealand has been neglected for too long by successive governments, and now, we are starting to see the outcomes of this neglect. Care home closures regularly make the headlines, and sentiment from operators within the industry is grim.

At the moment, the Non for Profit or For Purpose sector (NFP) in New Zealand reminds me of a punch-drunk boxer – a fighter who has taken a heck of a beating in recent years but continues to do good mahi anyway.