End of Year Reflection

2020 in the Bookkeeping world, like everything else, has been a very interesting year. On New Years Eve very few people had heard of this Coronavirus thing, let alone Jobkeeper, the Cash Flow Boost, Jobseeker and all of the other terms that have now come to resemble 2020. In the bookkeeping world we had to adapt very quickly. The Government realised that they needed something done hastily otherwise the economy was going to completely fall over. So Treasury and the ATO sat down and worked through a whole series of ideas. Those ideas became known as the Cash Flow Boost and Jobkeeper, and the ideas, while good in theory, were a little botched in the execution. When I say botched, normally the ATO has time and space to be able to think these things through and then put them out. Given the pandemic situation that time wasn’t available. As a result they made things up on their own, changed things very regularly and the end results was the ATO confusing us bookkeepers who were then trying to work out what that meant for our clients, who got even more confused. Some of us had to adjust from working from home too, particularly in Victoria and others have had to work out different ways of working things, but at the end of the year, we still have elements of the pandemic around us and we can’t escape that. I think as bookkeepers both individually myself and as part of professional bodies we’ve certainly learnt a lot this year