Our Boundaries

Safe Harbour is a provision of Australian law. Our role is to provide the financial, accounting, business and implementation support that helps a director understand the company, develop and pursue a course of action, measure what happens and maintain a contemporaneous record of that work.

We are deliberately clear about where our role begins and where it ends.

What We Do Not Do

The application of section 588GA depends on the legislation and the particular facts and circumstances of the company, director, relevant period and debts.

Where legal interpretation or advice is required, appropriate legal advice should be obtained. Where formal restructuring or insolvency expertise is required, an appropriately qualified insolvency practitioner may also need to be involved.

What We Do

Our role is substantial.

We Establish the Financial Truth

We work to ensure that the financial information being used to make decisions is current, reconciled and reliable.

We want to understand the Balance Sheet, cash, debtors, creditors, taxation obligations, employee entitlements, loans and finance, director accounts and the underlying profitability and cash performance of the business.

Before important decisions are made, we want to be able to answer a fundamental question:

We Help Develop the Course of Action

Once the position is understood, we work with the director and, where appropriate, their other advisers to identify what needs to change.

We help turn those decisions into a structured course of action with identifiable priorities and actions.

Some things may require immediate attention. Others develop over the following weeks and months as the financial position becomes clearer and results begin to emerge.

We Help Implement It

A plan has little value if nothing happens.

We remain involved while actions are being taken.

We ask what was agreed, whether it happened and what resulted.

Where the financial information leads to questions about pricing, quoting, debtors, costs, finance, productivity, staffing, customers or other operational issues, we work through those issues with the director.

We Measure and Challenge the Results

We regularly review the information and compare what actually happened with what was expected.

• Did the action happen?
• Did it produce the expected result?
• Has the financial position changed?
• Does something now need to be corrected?

That creates our continuing feedback process:

We Document the Journey

As the work progresses, we maintain a contemporaneous record of the information considered, decisions made, actions agreed, results measured and changes made along the way.

The purpose is not to manufacture evidence after the event.

It is to create an accurate record while the work is actually happening.

Those records may be relevant in demonstrating the course that was being pursued and what occurred during that period. They do not, by themselves, determine whether Safe Harbour applies.

We Work Alongside Other Advisers

Safe Harbour can involve accounting, business, legal and insolvency considerations.

We do not need to pretend that one adviser should perform every role.

Where appropriate, we work alongside the company’s existing accountant, solicitor, insolvency practitioner or other specialist advisers.

Each adviser should remain responsible for the area in which they are qualified and engaged to advise.

Our responsibility remains clear: financial truth, structured action, implementation, measurement and documentation.

Our Guiding Principle

Our boundary can be expressed simply:

That distinction matters.

It allows us to be rigorous about the work we are responsible for without making promises about matters that properly require legal determination or specialist advice.

And it allows the director to build the right professional team around the circumstances of the company.