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Essentials to Strengthen you Small Business
The ATO have developed a free small business webinar series in the coming months to support SA businesses.
A link to this series can be found here.
The series is based upon their recently launched new online learning platform: Essentials to strengthen your small business.
Essentials to strengthen your small business has been developed to provide free and professional education to support small businesses thrive. It provides a range of courses covering:
- business lifecycle stages – idea, start-up, day-to-day, change and exit
- reporting obligations – for example, businesses with employees, GST or fringe benefits tax
- learning needs – what good record keeping is, how to improve cash flow or grow the business
- other circumstances – for example, help setting up a business, checking if the business is viable or needs to be closed.
Essentials to strengthen your small business provides you and small business owners in your region with the comfort of knowing that the content is accurate, timely and reliable.
As well as the online learning platform, they also work with organisations to provide masterclass discussions on specific topics, enabling members to ask questions to further develop their expertise.
What training are the ATO offering?
- Training involves small business owners undertaking some online learning via the newly released platform Essentials for your small business and a Q&A Webinar with the ATO (Masterclass) to follow on from the online learning. Masterclasses are an opportunity for small business owners to ask questions about the online course content and how it can be applied to their business.
- Completing the related course(s) prior to attending a masterclass is not a pre-requisite but it is strongly recommended to provide foundation level knowledge of the course content, allowing business owners to reflect on what they learned and consider questions to ask during the masterclass.
- Masterclasses are not open for anyone and everyone to attend. They are created as closed sessions specifically for the organisation they are working with so only business owners in this council region can register to attend.
- Masterclasses involve a webinar - Discussion based on one topic (per masterclass) with an experienced ATO officer delivering the training and ready to answer all the questions from attendees.
- The ATO is not able to provide specific advice during the masterclasses; any answers to questions will be general advice only. Anyone looking for specific advice related to their own circumstances should direct those enquiries to their professional advisor (accountants, etc). That said, the masterclasses will all be presented by experienced and knowledgeable tax officers, all of whom have a solid tax technical background and have a great deal of experience dealing with small business, including an understanding of what many business owners struggle with in running their business.
- Masterclasses will generally be approximately 1 hour sessions depending on the number of questions asked. They briefly recap on the online course content then most of the session is the opportunity for attendees to ask questions.
- There are currently 21 online courses available with several more under development soon to be added to the site.
- They are more than happy to host as many Masterclasses as may be beneficial to our small business community.
This short video will take you on a site tour: Site tour Essentials to strengthen your small business