Domestic services are a growing market in Australia

CarePayCo

The Australian on-demand domestic services market continues to grow as our lives get busier. In fact, recent data collated by TechSci Research predicts that it won’t slow down, as our lives get busier and our leisure time becomes more valuable.

Home care, child care, tutoring, repair, maintenance, and cleaning are currently the most popular services, but over the next few years, health, wellness, and beauty services on-demand at home, are likely to become more and more popular, particularly with an increasing number of women in the workforce or, running their own businesses.

Having help simply makes sense. And now, you can simplify the hiring and payment process too, with the services we offer at CarePay Co.

We’re dedicated payroll experts. This means that once you’ve found the help you need, we can ensure that as an ‘employer’ you’re set up with everything to ensure that the employment relationship you have with your home help team adheres to both employment and tax laws as well as ever-changing health and safety regulations.

Let’s look at some examples.

Gardening, cleaning, and other casual maintenance services

You might pay the gardener, the pool maintenance company, and home cleaners on invoice every time they complete work for you, which is how most people handle these arrangements. But what if you handed this payment responsibility over to a professional? For starters, you can be sure that the invoices are paid on time and recorded.

Essentially, the day-to-day benefit is that it’s less for you to worry about and spend time working on – you know the invoices will be taken care of in a timely way. But the additional benefit is that when it comes to tax time you have a full log of your payments – if there’s anything you can claim, we can provide you with an annual statement. This can help with household budgeting too.

We’ll also make sure that all your home helpers have appropriate insurances and ABNs too.

Regular services such as a nanny or housekeeper

If you’re employing a nanny or housekeeper on a more regular basis, then there are different considerations when it comes to employment law, even if you’re not the ‘sole employer’ or a ‘full-time employer’ and you do pay via invoice.

There are also a range of considerations, if, for example, the nanny has accommodation within your home, uses the family car, or if you provide bonuses from time to time, like shopping vouchers or entertainment vouchers. Superannuation obligations may also apply.

Compliance with Australian law

Australian employment law and tax law can be very complicated and we all want to know we are doing the right thing, so having an expert in your corner is simply peace of mind – it means that you may avoid being audited (although random audits are on the rise) and it means that you can provide your home helpers with a record of their earnings and employment which can help them down the track if they need to secure a loan or apply for another job.

When you know the value of good home help, you want to look after your team, and the best way you can do that is to ensure that the financial side of your agreement runs smoothly.