Any Australian person in business would now have heard of the JobKeeper payments, and the plans to support small business through the COVID-19 pandemic by supporting their workers.
JobKeeper payments support businesses to cover the costs of employee wages and salaries, and help support you through these challenging times. So, what exactly is a JobKeeper payment? The Australian government is offering financial assistance to help employers with their cashflow management and overall finances and costs during this difficult time through a scheme called JobKeeper payments.
If your business has been significantly impacted by COVID-19, you may be able to access a wages subsidy to continue paying your employees. Under the scheme, you’ll be able to claim a fortnightly payment of $1,500 per eligible employee from the 30th of March 2020.
This financial assistance will help you keep your staff and recommence operations quickly when the crisis is over. So, how do you check if your business is eligible to receive JobKeeper payments? Well, to be eligible for the JobKeeper payments, employers and their employees must meet a range of criteria.
The Australian Tax Office website contains full eligibility criteria.
You may wish to consider a temporary increase to your existing overdraft or a new temporary overdraft to provide short-term relief whilst awaiting the government JobKeeper payments. You may require additional funds to meet your employee wage and salary requirements you may wish to inquire about a temporary increase for six months on your existing overdraft limit at the same interest rate as your existing facility.
So the first step you need to make sure you do is register your interest. Most Australian businesses have done that through the Australian Tax Office website. The next step is actually to download a form called the JobKeeper Employee Nomination Form. So download and send that to all of your employees that are entitled to the JobKeeper payment.
Once completed, gather that information from all of your employees, and then complete the online JobKeeper payments forms in the ATO Business Portal. Make sure your business has access to the ATO business portal, through your myGov ID account. If you don’t have anything like that, quickly jump online and basically register and set up account there.
The next step after that is that you will probably have to fill out the online form put in your bank details put in the company details and also put in the employees details that you need to do the JobKeeper payment for after that you basically need to wait till May and May is probably the first time where you’ll put in the details of each employee and their pay, and you’ll need to put in your turnover up for the income of the business as well as your forecasted turnover.
From what information has been released so far, you will have to update that information on a monthly basis as well. So you need to tell the Australian government basically how much your business has earned for that month, as well as what you’re going to be earning in the next month moving forward as well,
You need to also input the employees details, so please make sure you update your single touch payroll and update all your payroll systems and accounting software and keep them all up to date.
That’s all you need to do to ensure that you’re ready for the JobKeeper payments.
