How the Federal Budget’s Focus on Innovation Can Help You Grow Your Business
There has been a lot of buzz about the 2022-23 Federal Budget with its focus on innovation and helping Australian businesses become more competitive, but how can you maximise these incentives to grow your business?
Budget Incentive Recap:
If your business has an annual turnover of less than $50 million, you can take advantage of the two incentives below immediately.
1. Technology Investment Boost:
The Technology Investment Boost allows businesses to deduct an additional 20% of costs incurred on business expenses and depreciating assets that support digital adoption. It can be applied to items such as subscriptions to cloud-based services (e.g. Salesforce) for up to $100,000 of expenditure incurred from 29th March 2022 until 30th June 2023.
2. Skills and Training Boost:
To support businesses in training new staff and upskilling existing staff, the Skills and Training Boost will offer a 20 per cent tax deduction for the cost of external training courses delivered in person or online such as Salesforce training. This measure applies to expenditure incurred from 29th March 2022 until 30th June 2024.
NOTE: Australian registered entities must provide the training courses, and in-house or on-the-job training is excluded.
The Government has also committed $1.3 billion over six years to improve regional telecommunications and connectivity – a significant advantage for businesses around Australia.
Three key reasons to take advantage of the 2022-23 Federal Budget:
1. Stay ahead of your competition.
Businesses that don’t utilise this opportunity are likely to fall behind their competitors who choose to take advantage of them. “Many Australian businesses will be using the Technology Investment Boost to adopt and implement Salesforce products such as Sales Cloud, Service Cloud and Marketing Cloud,” says Fullcrm Managing Director Helen Peterson.
“With a strong Salesforce CRM solution powering their business, they will be able to offer a significantly better customer experience giving them a competitive advantage. Companies that don’t leverage these incentives by investing in a CRM platform like Salesforce will find it increasingly harder to close the gap as time goes by.”
2. Maximise your Salesforce investment with a well-trained team
“The Skills and Training Boost is a great opportunity for every business to capitalise on their investment in Salesforce by focusing on best practice user training. Our most successful clients know their solution intimately and consistently use it every day. This is achieved through a great training programme,” says Peterson.
“We recommend taking a staged approach to ensure user adoption, focusing on different roles and responsibilities. We work with clients to design bespoke training modules which can be rolled out to all areas of the business. This is a much more effective way to train staff rather than offering one big training course at the end of the implementation and then not much else afterwards,” says Peterson.
Both new and existing Salesforce clients should take advantage of the skills and training boost by considering where they could utilise additional training, such as training new employees, addressing gaps in current processes and further reinforcing consistency amongst the team.
3. Build your remote team
With the Government set to invest $1.3 billion over six years to upgrade telecommunications in regional, rural, remote and peri-urban communities, having your business in the cloud will become increasingly advantageous.
In order to attract and retain top talent, businesses now more than ever need to offer a flexible working environment. “By implementing Salesforce your team will be able to work and access the platform from anywhere,” says Peterson. “This provides them with great flexibility and the business the visibility of customer interactions with any alerts that may arise, good or bad.”
The Fullcrm team will also be able to implement Salesforce and train your staff no matter where they are located. This is a huge win for Australian businesses that want to become more agile.”
Start taking advantage of the incentives now, as it is a chance for your business to get ahead.
The Federal Budget incentives offer a golden opportunity for Australian businesses to invest in cloud-based services to help them get ahead in the current market. Whether you have been thinking of adding Salesforce to your technology stack or you are already using Salesforce and would like to increase its capability in other areas such as service, marketing or analytics, there has never been a better time to take the plunge by leveraging these tax incentives.
Investing in Salesforce without hiring an expert implementation team is tantamount to buying a jet without a pilot’s licence. Our Fullcrm Salesforce specialists can help you determine your business’s specific needs, design a roadmap and implement the platform to ensure you make the most out of your investment. No matter what stage of the Salesforce journey you’re at, we can guide you on your path to expansion and success.
