“People want their lives back,” says Jess Crombie founder of Platinum Business Administration.

“I have a number of tradie friends or their wives who said they are constantly doing bookwork when they need to be focusing on what their core business is — they don't want to have all their bookwork to do at the end of the day too, so that's where we come in.”

Jess, who is an accountant with 15 years’ experience in business, has held positions from junior accounting positions right through to company general manager.

And as a mother of three children, she also knows just how important it is to maintain a work/life balance which is why she launched Platinum Business Administration in 2019.

“That is what I want to be able to give other people,” said Jess. “We are a BAS agent and do administration, but we leave tax to the tax experts. What we focus on is the day to day management of a person's business to then help reduce their time and costs at the end of the year.

“We can have as little involvement as just doing your BAS every quarter, payroll or doing your books from start to finish.”

Platinum is particularly focused on working with cooperatives and associations, but businesses big and small can benefit from their service.

“We have different packages tailored to different customers, but it is more about having a customer come in and say, ‘these are my goals’ and then we work on how to achieve those,” said Jess.

“With my business expertise from previous roles I can help people look at their business and say ‘well these are areas we can improve on’ whether that is budget, cash flow management, pre-tax checks, pre-audit checks or even just marketing and sales.”

For associations run by volunteer committees, Platinum Business Administration is there to help with auditing and can even help establish systems to streamline the administration to ultimately save you time and money.

“Sporting association volunteers are all usually working full-time and they've got kids involved or are playing the sport themselves, so they have limited time, said Jess.

“We find that associations are often struggling to meet the targets that are set up for them, especially with their annual audits. I've dealt with auditors since starting out in the industry and we can come in and say this is what your auditor is looking for and this is how you can improve this system to make it easier for you to meet their requirements, otherwise all those kind of things can become quite costly.

“We can come in to assist them, so they are not spending 15 or 20 hours a week on top of their normal job, plus kids sport and everything else in between to do their role as the secretary or member of the board.”

Jess is even available to come and help you work through an audit in person.

“A lot of the time there is all this accounting jargon that people can't understand. I find that I can be that person in between that can explain it to someone in their own terms,” she said.

Every business is different, said Jess, which is why there is no ‘one size fits all’ approach at Platinum Business Administration.

“It is best if you come talk to us and say ‘this is what we are looking to do and this is what we want to achieve.’ It can even be someone saying, ‘I want to take four weeks off and I want my business to keep running, but how do I do that?’

“That is where we come in. We can do the mundane tasks that you don't want to do, or we can actually help you streamline your business processes. It doesn't have to be all year round, we can help for short stints all the way through to day-to-day bookkeeping, year-round.”