Tax Talks Podcast: When your business can’t pay its bills

Estimated reading time: 1 minute Business survival

Recently I was interviewed by Heide Robson, a professional accountant and the founder of the Tax Talk Podcast (www.taxtalks.com.au) about business insolvency in Australia.

Sewell & Kettle & Tax Talks podcast

When your business can’t pay its bills

What I’ve done is broken the answer down into 19 questions that I go through in this interview. 

At the start of my career in the early 2000s small to medium sized enterprise (SME) directors really only had one option – their accountant recommended an immediate voluntary administration when a business became insolvent. Since then we have the safe harbour from insolvent trading commencing in 2017, small business restructuring commencing in 2021 and a long term move away from voluntary administration. And also there is the prepack insolvency arrangement – it isn’t yet universally accepted but it is practically accepted anyway.  

So you now have 4 options for an insolvent SME to undertake a restructure:

  1. Voluntary Administration
  2. Small Business Restructuring Process 
  3. Safe harbour from insolvent trading 
  4. Pre-pack insolvency arrangement 

With the permission of the Tax Talks Podcast, the interview can be accessed at the following links:

Part 1

Part 2

Others

An image of a puzzle being put together, with pieces representing different SBRP eligibility requirements

Does your insolvent business qualify for the Small Business Restructuring Process?

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

2021 introduced sweeping changes to Australia’s corporate insolvency laws with the introduction of the Small Business Restructuring Process (SBRP) under Part 5.3B of the Corporations Act. This innovative restructuring process aims to give struggling small businesses a lifeline by enabling them to restructure their debts and bounce back more resiliently whilst leaving directors in control of their own business. This blog post explores the key hurdles to qualification for restructuring under the SBRP.