5 Accounting / Tax Tips to Make Your Personal Training Business Run Better

As an accountant who looks after a number clients including personal trainers/fitness professionals, I have been looking for a solution to the record keeping problems that we frequently encounter with our clients. Happily, Keepon has provided the solution, which allows you easily get your business up and running and simplifying the way PT’s manage their finances.

These are the problems that we frequently encounter:

1) Our clients struggled to get finance.

The problem that we needed to address was that our clients were great at training people but not always so great at recording the number of sessions that they had throughout the year. This is particularly true when the PT is paid predominantly in cash.

Banks will only recognise income that has been appeared on a tax return and generally look at two years of tax returns when assessing the trainer’s ability to borrow.

By using Keepon, the trainer is recording all their sessions and therefore increasing their ability to borrow when the time arises.

2) Our clients overpay tax

Tracking expenses during the year means that you pay less tax at year end. For example, if your taxable income is over $37,000 a year the value of your expenses is 34.5%. This means that for every $1,000 spent on your business your tax payable will reduce by $345.

By having everything recorded in Keepon, we simply export the summary at the end of the year and the information is all there.

Pro Tip: Remember to keep your receipts as well. An effective way to this is to photograph them on your phone as you enter them and save it to Dropbox or something similar, so you have a permanent record.

3) Maximise the value of your time

One of the key benefits of using Keepon is that you can see what you are making per hour worked. Many trainers will charge a session or hourly rate and believe this is what they are making.

This is not an accurate measure though as they there are additional costs they are incurring. By recording the expenses and comparing this to the income received you can see what you are really making and charge clients accordingly.

As an example, if you need to make $1,000 per for the business to be viable and you are prepared to train people for 25 hours per week then you could consider charging $40 per hour to be sufficient.

By using the app and recording your expenses we can see that this is not going to give you the income you require.

Say you pay;

a) $200 a week in rent;

b) $40 a week in fuel;

c)$20 a week on your phone;

d) $100 a week on sundry items.

We can now see that you are only making $640 a week. We can use this as a guide and realise that you need to charge $54.40 an hour to make $40 an hour.

4) Lower compliance costs

Talking about hourly rates you will find that a number of other professionals also charge based on the time spent.

Doing your tax and GST work is no exception. Your accountant or tax agent will charge you based on the time that your work will take them. If you are organised and have most of the work prepared, then this will dramatically reduce the time taken and the cost of your work.

Simply put if you use Keepon instead of a shoebox full of receipts your accountant will thank you by charging you less.

5) Cash is annoying!!

Being a trainer means that you are in the customer service industry. Speaking from personal experiences In the past. I have trained with a trainer that worked only on a cash basis. He was an excellent trainer but I found it frustrating that I had to remember to bring cash to the session and pay per session.

Pro tip: Having electronic payment facilities is a must and I would probably still be using him if my card was just charged and I didn’t have to worry about it.

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