Our team specialises in working with entrepreneurial individuals and their businesses around Australia. As an entrepreneurial business ourselves, we truly understand what drives success.
At Baumgartners, we bring decades of experience and cutting edge expertise to each and every client engagement. We work with enterprises across a broad range of industries and at every stage of the business cycle to optimise their taxation and management profiles, and to maximise and protect the wealth of the entrepreneurs behind them. To deliver exceptional outcomes, these are some of the key areas we focus on.
Taxation
A by-product of success in business is an obligation to pay income tax. There are many other taxes affecting day to day business life in Australia including GST, Fringe Benefits Tax, Stamp Duties and Payroll taxes. We are experts in ensuring our business clients’ affairs are structured so as to minimise the tax burden. We implement cutting edge strategies to deliver superior outcomes and help our clients achieve their objectives faster.
Business Structuring
Correctly structuring our clients’ business affairs is critical to achieving their taxation, asset protection, succession, and wealth creation objectives. Flexibility is also important in order to adapt to changing business and economic environments. Structuring is an area that requires considerable expertise and experience, and a careful weighing of competing objectives, to deliver the right result. Our team has considerable experience structuring businesses across a range of industries.
Management Consulting
Do you have the right information on a regular and timely basis to make the best decisions in your business? We help our business clients to implement best practice accounting and management reporting systems using our internally developed checklists and processes. This includes identifying and tracking Key Performance Indicators, implementing appropriate internal checks and controls, undertaking financial analysis of their business on a regular basis and assisting in the budgeting of cash-flows and profitability.
Business Transition & Valuations
We have particular expertise in assisting our business clients with the buy and sell process, and in undertaking valuations of their businesses for a range of purposes. Buying or selling a business is often the biggest transaction in the life of a business owner. It is important to partner with experienced professionals who understand how to maximise value and protect against adverse outcomes.
Emerging Business Program
Our Emerging Business Program is a unique offering we devised for start-up ventures. We recognise that this is the time in the life cycle of a business when it needs the most professional support, however is also when cash flow is the tightest. We understand that start-ups need to watch every dollar and, through our EBP, offer discounted rates, fixed fees and additional support for the first two years of a new venture’s life. Our philosophy is successful selationships, which we live and breathe through our EBP concept.
Case Study
Business ownership restructure adds flexibility and achieves ongoing tax savings.
A new client to the firm operated a profitable and well-known retail outlet within a company structure. We assisted in restructuring the share ownership of the company, through the use of the small business CGT concessions, to achieve a greater degree of flexibility, wealth protection and ongoing tax savings.
As part of our new client process, we undertake a review of the existing structures and overall taxation affairs to identify any areas of potential improvement or opportunities that may have been missed in the past.
In this case, we identified that the share ownership structure of the operating company was not providing as much benefit as it could for the individual shareholders. We were asked to advise on how a restructure might be undertaken and any tax costs involved.
In completing our review, and after considering relevant rulings and general anti-avoidance provisions, we determined that the optimal structure would be if the shares were to be held by a discretionary trust, rather than by the individuals personally. This would provide a degree of flexibility for the distribution of future business profits and, over time, a higher degree of wealth protection
When transferring shares in a small business, capital gains tax can apply. In this case, the value of the shares had increased substantially since they were first issued and there was potentially a large capital gain that would be realised when transferring the shares from the individuals to a discretionary trust.
The small business CGT concessions can potentially apply to reduce, or defer, capital gains tax on the disposal or transfer of shares in a company that carries on a small business. Since their introduction these concessions have been acknowledged as particularly complex.
In our review, we determined that a number of the concessions were able to be accessed in order to reduce the otherwise taxable capital gain. This resulted in no upfront tax becoming payable by the client on restructure of their shareholdings into a discretionary trust.