Payroll, job costing and tax for Diamond Creek's trades and shops.

From gold town to workshop town

Diamond Creek's working history starts with gold, found here in 1863 at what became the Diamond Reef mine. The mine is long gone, but the town kept its practical streak. Today the employment area bounded by the railway, George Street and Main Hurstbridge Road is home to factories on Elizabeth Street, fabricators, builders' yards and service workshops, and Nillumbik Shire Council names Diamond Creek as one of its hubs for manufacturing and construction. Construction is the shire's largest employing industry.

The town centre is the other half of local business life. The Major Activity Centre along Main Hurstbridge Road takes in Coles, Diamond Creek Plaza and the specialty shops around them, many of which belong to the Diamond Creek Traders Association. Around all of that is a town with deep roots, from the Diamond Creek Football Netball Club, the Creekers, founded in 1888, to the Diamond Creek Trail, a shared path of about 17 km linking Eltham, Diamond Creek, Wattle Glen and Hurstbridge.

Paying a crew properly

Once you have a few people on the tools, payroll stops being a quick job on a Friday. Apprentices move up a year, tradespeople claim tool and travel allowances, overtime varies week to week, and every pay run has to be reported to the ATO through Single Touch Payroll. Super has to be calculated and paid on time too, and leave balances have to be right when someone finally takes that holiday.

Our payroll service runs all of that for you: timesheets in, pays calculated, payslips out, STP lodged and super paid. You approve the pay run and get back to the workshop. Getting it right matters, because underpayments and late super are far harder and costlier to fix after the fact than they are to prevent.

Knowing what each job made

A Diamond Creek fabricator or builder can be flat out all year and still not know which jobs made money. The fix is tagging every cost to a job as it comes in: steel and timber, consumables, labour hours, subcontractor invoices and equipment hire. With bookkeeping done that way, you can compare what you quoted with what a job really cost, and quote the next one with more confidence.

When you're ready to look further ahead, our business advisory service uses those job figures to look at pricing, cash flow and whether a new machine or another apprentice will pay its way.

For the Main Hurstbridge Road shops

Retailers in the town centre deal with a different rhythm: point-of-sale takings every day, a steady stream of supplier bills, and GST on nearly everything. We reconcile your sales and purchases, prepare your BAS from those reconciled numbers, and lodge it on time, so the quarter doesn't end with a weekend of catching up. At the end of the financial year we prepare and lodge your tax return, whether you trade as a sole trader, a partnership or a company.

Local support worth knowing

Nillumbik Shire Council, whose offices are on Civic Drive in Greensborough, runs the Nillumbik Business Ignite Series each year and offers free mentoring through the Small Business Mentoring Service. Both are worth a look. We sit alongside them, keeping the numbers in order.

Diamond Creek is about 8 km from our office, with Diamond Creek station on the Hurstbridge line. Brian can see you on site, at our Greensborough office, or by phone and video, whichever fits around the working day.