Yes. Keeping your business alive means paying your employees, your key suppliers, your rent, and your accountant each week. These are the assets you use to navigate a crisis. Nothing else matters in the short term.
You may need to delay making payments of GST, PAYG Withholding Tax and Employee PAYG Tax to the ATO.
You should set up a second bank account (separate from your main trading account) and each week transfer cash for these payments across into it. If needed, you can then dip into this cash reserve to keep your business alive.
- Businesses can request a deferral of some payments (by up to 4 months) and vary instalments.
- If you have under $20 million turnover, you can elect to report and pay their GST monthly instead of quarterly to accelerate access to GST refunds, but only from 1 April 2020, and must remain monthly for 12 months.
- Payers can vary their PAYG instalments for the March 2020 quarter, and claim a refund of instalments paid for the Sep and Dec 2019 quarters.
- You can request remittance of interest and penalties applied to tax liabilities incurred after 23 January 2020.
- You can also request a low-interest payment plan.