WDM Drill Maintenance & Compliance Pty Ltd
- Accounting With Xero
- Succession Planning
- Taxation Advice & Compliance
- Superannuation
- Business Advisory
- Business Valuation
- Business Software
- Corporate Secretarial
WDM Drill Maintenance & Compliance (WDM) is an engineering service provider of drill rigs and equipment within the national mining and resource industries.
GeersSullivan helped the three founders set up the business in 2019. It has been our pleasure to be part of their journey of growth, and we appreciate the trust that WDM continues to put in us.
Background
In 2019, founders Eddie Banner, Tys Jansen and Nathan Pollard formed WDM to strike out on their own rather than working for someone else.
Eddie Banner has been a longstanding client of GeersSullivan via Director Chris Grieve for his personal income tax returns, and engaged GeersSullivan to assist in setting up WDM’s business structure and internal accounting procedures and systems from scratch.
Our Approach
Building drill rigs is a costly business, so the founders needed private, passive investors to inject capital into their first build, which took 12 months. GeersSullivan provides progress reports to the investors as needed.
The accounting around project costing per rig is also quite complex, so we created a system to capture WDM’s costs per project and manage the large initial outlay with the often-delayed profits.
As part of this, GeersSullivan applies tax legislation to map the percentage complete each project is versus the revenue that has been generated. This enables us to adjust when the revenue is recognised against key project milestones (similar to building a house).
Basically, we ensure tax liabilities align with not only when revenue is received, but also the actual progress of the drill build. For example, if the drill is 70% complete but 80% of the revenue has been received, we can delay the tax liability for the ‘extra’ 10% until the percentage complete matches the revenue. This is hugely helpful for managing cashflow.[RO1]
GeersSullivan also engaged a research and development (R&D) tax specialist to provide several tax minimising opportunities for WDM to develop integrated rig software. We assisted in separately tracking standard operational components from development-specific components (as you can’t count standard components like nuts and bolts towards R&D).
Additionally, GeersSullivan offers WDM our specialised CFO suite of accounting services, which includes:
- Financial management (e.g. weekly bookkeeping, payroll, accounts payable and receivable, tax compliance, BAS preparation and so on)
- Strategic advice, including financial analysis, corporate governance, reporting and growth management
- Support for human resource requirements, including onboarding new team members
- Ongoing availability for ad hoc queries
Outcome
Since 2019, we have helped WDM by:
- Creating the initial business structure and robust accounting systems
- Considering the peculiarities of their industry and then applying tax law to minimise tax and to weather the necessary cashflow peaks and troughs
- Advising on managing their growth from the three founders to seven employees and beyond
- Helping to incorporate a drill maintenance service offering for existing rigs to provide a regular income stream
- Achieving a highly positive result for the R&D tax offset through our network of experts
“Chris has always done right by me, from my personal taxes right through to helping us to set up and manage the accounting for WDM. He and the GeersSullivan team have really got to know our industry, so they can maximise our tax offset and cashflow.
They’re really easy to deal with, and always get back to us quickly. I suppose I can forgive Chris for being a Freo supporter”. – Eddie Banner, Founder & Business Development Manager