WHY WORK WITH US
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LET'S GET ACQUAINTED!
Working days in a BIG 4 accounting firm, and after hours in my creative pursuits, I watched fellow dancers, comedians, visual artists and designers connecting through their creativity, telling stories on stage, but being misunderstood by their accountants or confused by financial consultants.
I realised I had a valuable way to help. I see accounting as the language of money, a language I can translate to people in the creative industries, and that is what inspired me to create The Real Thiel.
GET IN TOUCHWhy Work With Us
At the Real Thiel we educate, empower and motivate our clients by providing tax, accounting and advisory services, so the value of their work can be read in their business decisions and shown in their bank accounts.
With The Real Thiel you can always feel comfortable to ask any questions and know the answer will be explained clearly. We educate and empower creatives and creatively minded small business owners with training, resources and coaching.
We don’t pump out tax returns, we get to know you and your business so we can help you achieve your goals and build a sustainable creative career.
“The Real Thiel can support you with accounting, compliance advice and services, bookkeeping for those who have a little trouble keeping on top of it (or simply don’t have the patience for it) as well as business mentoring and coaching.”
Founder of The Real Thiel, Chartered Accountant, Lauren has a passion for the arts, small business as well as a few degrees*.
Lauren co-founded her first company, a dance school, at a young age. Switching between suits and sequins frequently, she may be one of the only accountants who also knows every move to ‘Single Ladies’.
Lauren still contributes to the industry on and off stage in various roles including Cabaret Fringe Producer and Board member.
“With an accountant dad and a visual artist mum, Lauren Thiel was probably always going to create a career somewhere in the middle.” Artshub
The Real Thiel clients are as diverse as our skillset - copywriters, comedians and content creators, performing artists, photographers and videographers, visual artists, venue managers, web developers and arts administrators in all stages of their career, all over the world.
We want to free you up so you can focus on your creative work - because we value the arts in more than monetary terms, and benefits of a sustainable creative community.
If we’re sounding like we’re a good fit for you, read ahead to find out more.
xoxo Lauren
*2 degrees, but who’s counting! Bachelors of Tourism, Event Management and Commerce: Accounting
The Real Thiel
Get on top of your business and personal finances.
WHY WORK WITH US
Inclusive & Kind
We are a safe space for everything weird and wonderful. Whatever you do for work, if it’s creative and makes you happy, then you are our people.
Respect
Tell us your pronouns and we will use them. We do have specific systems and ways we like to do things, but if you have particular accessibility needs let us know and we will accommodate as best we can. Working in a more ‘adult’ industry? No judgement (only love) from us - we will help you make all the money and be compliant at the same time.
Arts Experts
Lauren is a performer herself, and has been working with 500+ arts businesses for more than 5 years now, and is across everything small business owners in the arts need to know for tax and accounting. The team at The Real Thiel are ready to handle what you’ve got - grants, awards, income averaging, common deductions, sub-contractors and lumpy income management.
Offices (Online)
We’re 100% online. We designed the business and our systems so that it would be suitable for travelling performers and caters to creatives all around Australia and the world. The pleasant consequence is that The Real Thiel can also work from anywhere in the world - beach, office, backstage at a show!
The only things we print are a welcome pack, and restructure/ASIC documents when they need a ‘wet’ signature (old laws).
All of our meetings take place over Google Meets*
All of your documents are provided to us through Google Drive, email or our work-flow management software system Karbon.
Your tax return will be sent to you through Xero Tax (no you don’t need a Xero account to access it) and you can sign it online too!
*The only exception to this really is if you are my Grandma and you pay me in scones, or if you have accessibility needs that mean in person is necessary for you. We are happy to accommodate upon request.
Again, you do not need to have a G-Suite or Gmail to work with us, don’t worry!
Responsive & Approachable
If you haven’t heard from Lauren after 3 days feel free to follow up… but that will be very rare!
Email is the best way to reach us because our system basically adds your email to our triage and we try to get our triage cleared every 2-3 days. We also prefer email because we can assign your email to specific work items and tasks in our system, and search for it later if we need.
We’re pretty quick to respond - if Lauren is at her desk and it’s a quick question, you can expect a response within 24-48 hours max. If what you need is a bit more involved, we might take a few days, but never longer than a week!
Alternatively you can DM Lauren on insta, text or call her. If she doesn’t respond immediately then she will get back to you soon.
Lauren is super duper approachable, compassionate, and has seen it all! There truly are no dumb questions, and she will be happy to explain anything confusing.
We will always do our best to communicate with kindness and a candid level of professionalism. We ask that you do the same - be honest but kind in how you speak to Lauren and the team. We won’t stand for rude or disrespectful language. If you are having a bad day, we do understand, but maybe close the laptop for a bit first, or just let us know that you’re feeling stuck and we can try our best to help.
Customer Service
Little questions and general customer service time is included in your tax service fee. So, if you need us, just reach out! It is not a separate service that we can remove (and therefore reduce your tax fee). We are not interested in being a ‘tick the box’ basic accounting firm - no basic bitches over here - we built this firm to offer a higher quality, art specialised, and more approachable firm. We don’t think that charging you for every email or phone call would create a positive work relationship and it wastes our time (and your money) if we have to track all of that and then charge you for it later. We’d rather just know that you’ve paid us to support you… and when you need us you can rely on us to support you!!
If what you ask or need is more complex and requires a consultation hour, that would be out of scope - so we would let you know in advance and send through a new proposal for that additional service. No surprise bills. Ever.
MEET THE TEAM
Proactive
We know many people who have felt their accountants could be more proactive.
I’m not going to email you every time a tax law is updated, which is several times a week, and I’m not going to let you fall to the bottom of the pile for not getting something back to us either.
I will guide you throughout the year to keep you on track, send reminders when they’re needed and on the odd occasion, it might well be a kick up the bum - but it’s the type you’ll be grateful for.
How are we proactive?
- We add you to our mailing list specifically for our tax clients (not just a general marketing thing). We then email you when we have bookkeeping or tax prep reminders, or new information to share.
- We provide you with a (printed*) welcome pack and calendar outlining exactly what tasks you should be doing (and when) throughout the year in order to stay on top of your tax and accounting stuff.
- We email you every quarter with a link to our calendar so if you need to chat through anything with us you are invited to schedule a 15-min video call.
*It is one of the only things we print - some people might not use it, and that is their prerogative, but our focus group said that while they like the digital idea in reality they simply wouldn’t use it unless it was printed and posted to them so it was ready to stick on their wall and tick it off!
Billing & Pricing
As stated above - No surprise bills. Ever.
Generally everything is paid upfront on acceptance*.
We know not every firm operates like this, but we’re not every firm! There are a few reasons this is how we do it:
- You know exactly what you are paying, when, and what you get for it
- I don’t spend my life chasing you for money, which can create a yucky working relationship and is a waste of time.
- I know I have been paid appropriately, so can then offer you the very best service without having to worry about charging you later or you not being able to pay for the help you need
- It motivates us to operate efficiently in order to create a profit margin. Our fee is capped so we’ll get the work done to the best standard in the least amount of time. If you’ve ever been charged by the hour for someone who works at a snail's pace, you’ll understand completely!
We are a boutique firm that are experts in our field. We are not the cheapest, but we aim to be the best value for our niche clientele. We are extremely organised and responsive, and we are your accountant all year round, on call when you need us.
*There are of course some things you might ask for that either we haven’t come across before or that we cannot preempt how involved or complex they might end up being. For these, we might provide a proposal that states our hourly rate but where you will be charged on completion. We would then track our actual hours, keeping you in the loop as the work progresses, and then charging you in full on completion.
Mail Management / ATO representation
As your tax agent, I represent you to the ATO. This means I can receive copies of ATO correspondence on your behalf. We will always share these docs with you (via Google Drive) and are happy to translate the ATO mumbo jumbo whenever you need. We can also call them on your behalf, and negotiate payment plans and deadline extensions when you need.
There might be a few scenarios when you still need to call them directly but we can help you figure out exactly what to say if that’s the case.
The tax return process
The quick version: we tell you what we need, you provide it, we draft up the return and send it to you, you review and sign, we sign and lodge, you either pay the ATO or get a refund!
How it happens:
- When you join us, we first send through an Onboarding checklist through our system Karbon. You work through that, ticking things off and making sure to provide us all the important info (like name, address, TFN etc.) in the Google Form.
- Then we send another checklist for the relevant tax year. This will include a link to meditations (to get you in the mood for tax work), our info pack, links to our templates etc.
Don’t worry, we send full instructions, but here is a teaser of what you will need to do: - You set up a Google Drive folder and share with us
- In there you put a copy of our spreadsheet of Tax Questions
- Upload any financial reports, important documents, or use our template spreadsheets and fill them in, in detail.
- Once your checklist is ticked off, it triggers our workflow. We will schedule your work first in best dressed. If this is in the peak of the busy season (July to Oct) then it might mean a few weeks. If you tick it off after November then usually we’re chilled out a bit more and can whip it out in a matter of days.
- We prompt you to schedule a 15-min video call - for new clients this is about confirming your face to your ID, and it’s also an opportunity to catch up or ask any little questions.
- Then we smash out the return, email you with any questions, and then send it to you.
- You review, and when you are happy, sign it.
- Lauren will sign it and lodge it. Then upload a copy to that same Google Drive folder and confirm how much you owe the ATO, if anything.
Done!
Overall, the process we have designed is easy to follow and broken down into tiny tasks so you can tick them off at your own pace. If you have questions, get stuck, feel overwhelmed, don’t know where to start, you just need to tell me. We are here to support you every step of the way.
Thorough vs overwhelming
Little questions and general customer service time is included in your tax service fee. So, if you need us, just reach out! It is not a separate service that we can remove (and therefore reduce your tax fee). We are not interested in being a ‘tick the box’ basic accounting firm - no basic bitches over here - we built this firm to offer a higher quality, art specialised, and more approachable firm. We don’t think that charging you for every email or phone call would create a positive work relationship and it wastes our time (and your money) if we have to track all of that and then charge you for it later. We’d rather just know that you’ve paid us to support you… and when you need us you can rely on us to support you!!
If what you ask or need is more complex and requires a consultation hour, that would be out of scope - so we would let you know in advance and send through a new proposal for that additional service. No surprise bills. Ever.
We donā€™t do data entry (unless you pay me like a million bucks)
No one likes this job. Not even me.
If you have accounting software, we ask that you reconcile everything before ticking off your tax checklist for us. This means we can use your data there, export reports we need and know that the info is complete and accurate.
If you have your own spreadsheets, then just upload them to the drive and we will check them out! If not, then yes, you will need to grab a copy of our templates and start filling them out. Please don’t expect to just upload receipts and invoices and us to populate the spreadsheets.This would take forever and cost you a lot more money. I have my own business records to do - I consider bookkeeping your responsibility as the business owner/person signing off that tax return.
I promise it is not a huge task if you keep on top of it throughout the year, and once you have our folders and templates you can actually get ahead of the next year too!
If you literally have just a handful (like under 5 receipts) then sure, no big deal. But be reasonable, pretty please.
Reminders and Checklists
There are some serious deadlines, and then there are the ones we set in order to keep everyone on track and to manage our workflow. Whenever we send you a checklist through Karbon - for onboarding, or for your tax return preparation etc. - there will be due dates on those tasks. The system will send you automatic reminders a few days before, and then everyday for 5 days if you don’t tick off the tasks in time.
Some people love it. Some hate it, but it works.
Just let me know if they become a bit much. I can turn them off and within reason I can move the due dates - we just like you to communicate with us so that we can manage our expectations and plan our workflow.
You will know when we’re really hassling you because you will get personalised emails and texts and calls. Please don’t ignore your friendly accountant - just doing my job in keeping you compliant and in the good books with the ATO.
