Does your business qualify for the Australian JobKeeper Payment?

Use your Epos Now Dashboard to see if your business qualifies for the Australian JobKeeper Payment

What is the JobKeeper Payment

Announced in March by the Australian government, the JobKeeper payment offers eligible businesses a payment of $1500 per fortnight (before tax) per employee that meets the criteria.

This scheme is hoped to keep millions of Australian residents employed and provide the needed incentive for businesses to adapt to the current situation. Payments began in May, and can be backdated to March 1st.

Businesses will be eligible for the subsidy if:

• Turnover has fallen by 30% or more - This is for businesses with annual revenue of less than $1 billion and turnover is based on a one month period comparative to the previous year.
• Turnover has fallen by 50% or more - This is for businesses with an annual revenue of more than $1 billion and turnover is based on a one month period comparative to the previous year.

Read more about the eligibility criteria for your business and employees: https://treasury.gov.au/sites/default/files/2020-04/Fact_sheet_Info_for_Employers_2.pdf

Use your Epos Now Reports to Check your Eligibility

The JobKeeper enrolment opened on the 20th of April, and the 31st of May was the final date to complete the steps if you want to claim JobKeeper fortnights payments for April and May.

To begin the process of checking your businesses eligibility for the subsidy, you need to demonstrate that there has been a 30% or 50% (as above) decrease in monthly revenue when compared to the previous year. An easy way to work this out is by using the feature rich Reporting capabilities in your Epos Now Back office.

By using a Time Comparison Sales Report in your Back Office you will be able to:

• View your Sales inc Tax compared with the same time period from the previous year.
• Select appropriate date ranges from weeks, to months or custom date ranges.
• Break the numbers down by Monthly, Weekly or Daily intervals.
• Export the report out as a CSV, Word Doc, Excel or even print it out.

This report will show you a comparative breakdown of your selected time period with the previous years. You will then find in the “DIFF IN PERIODS” column a line to show if sales have increased or decreased.

For example in the above report, we have analysed a time period from 24/02/2020 until 20/04/2020 and have chosen to view a weekly breakdown.

At the bottom is a total of all the weekly data and which gives us a total drop in sales of -$397,090.68 when compared with the previous year. This is a total decrease in sales of over 45% for this period.

To calculate the percentage using the figures from this report you simply have to divide the overall decrease by the sales from 2019 and then multiply that number by 100 to get a percentage value.

% Decrease = Decrease ÷ Original Number × 100
% Decrease = 397,090.68 ÷ 875,939.18 x 100
= 45.333%

For the JobKeeper Payment, this is an important figure to follow and keep an eye on. If your figures haven’t shown a big enough decline for the current period, you could be eligible the month after.

You can also use this report to compare other data relevant to the current situation.

• Transaction Qty - See the change in the number of transactions processed
• Item Qty - See the number of items sold for that period
• Discounts & Promotions - See any changes

For more information on the COVID-19 situation, check out the Epos Now Support Page