Small businesses flock to easy super clearing house
Sunsuper appears to have filled a gap left by the Federal Government's small business super contributions clearing house with an online employer portal that has attracted 1500 employers per month on average since its launch in February.
Employers Online has doubled the fund's employer base, netting 94 per cent of the over 12,000 new employers it has picked up since the same time last year.
Sunsuper said the majority of new employers were small businesses, which they class as having less than three members in the fund.
The solution leverages online marketing to make it easy to find in a search.
Sunsuper's general manager of business growth Craig Godfrey said it had purchased the URL, www.paysuperonline.com.au, and invested a lot into search engine optimisation (SEO).
"None of this has been advertised, it's just purely through web search and employers looking for a simple online solution," he said.
While the system is not publicly advertised, Sunsuper has also attracted employers to the portal through segmented social media marketing, according to Godfrey.
The employer portal is plugged in to over 70 different payroll companies to make it easier for employers, and is supported by an internal IT team, he said.
Employers can register to get instant access to the clearing house facilities, and can pay by filling out a contributions grid or uploading a payroll file directly from their payroll system.
Just last month, the Government met with the industry to discuss easing contributions legislation for small businesses.
The Council of Small Business of Australia (COSBOA) wanted pay-as-you-go (PAYG) and super contributions to be combined for small businesses, but the meeting produced only an agreement from participants, including accountants and super funds, to promote the Government's clearing house.
The Small Business Superannuation Clearing House was launched in May 2010 and has attracted 32,000 small businesses covering 210,000 employees and $465 million in super contributions.
COSBOA executive director Peter Strong said that the problem with the clearing house was that small businesses did not know about it.
He said retail funds were generally more conducive to the needs of small business, but that super funds should not have their own clearing houses at all.
"The majority of retail funds are easy and the majority of industry funds aren't ... To lodge money with them is quite easy. Not all of them, but the majority of them, because they are true private sector - they get it," he said.
"The Government's set one [clearing house] up. It's very easy to use … I don't think we want industry funds, or any funds, setting up their own clearing house…I would not trust them to be efficient. I would not trust them with the data - they would probably lose it. I wouldn't trust them to manage any changes. They don't care about small business. I have no trust or faith in them," he said.
COSBOA will continue to lobby Government to combine PAYG with super contributions, he said.
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