BDO New Zealand offers the full spectrum of business advisory services in pharmacy, including:

• general compliance, accounting and tax returns
• tax planning
• asset protection
• structuring

We also have a lot of experience with helping businesses to buy and sell pharmacies. This could involve anything, from liaising with the bank, providing forecasts, due diligence on the pharmacy and advice on valuation.

We understand that funding is unique in pharmacy. With so much coming from the Ministry of Health and other government bodies, this is where our specialist knowledge comes to the fore. We know exactly what to look for when analysing funding models, and we're able to look at the information provided to ensure that everything is presented in a fair and complete way.

Our benchmarking services will give you valuable insight into where you could be taking your pharmacy next. We collect benchmarking data on a range of areas relevant to pharmacy, meaning we can provide you with up-to-date information on your key performance indicators and show you where your business is at compared to the median. We operate a large, end of year benchmarking, as well as a more frequent service that happens every two months.

This more frequent service involves a high level benchmark of your data at each GST return. It will give you a more regular snapshot of where your pharmacy is at and how you're tracking compared to the benchmark. We send this to our clients and have a conversation about your results, finding ways to get you back on trend if you've dropped off at all. It will also give you a good idea of which aspects of your business plan are working well, and what areas need improving.

We do a lot of work on strategic planning. Rather than simply focusing on compliance, we want to get alongside business owners and understand exactly what your strategy is for your business over the coming years. We want to help you look to the future, identifying areas to move into or out of, and ultimately help you grow.

This involves going beyond traditional accounting advice to help you with every aspect of your business. For example, recently we worked on a project that involved implementing Xero. This allowed the pharmacist in question to use a more up-to-date system that has saved the business huge amounts of time and given them access to real-time information.