Business Connect is an online platform where businesses can manage their licences and permits from across government in one place. The platform is centrally-funded and free for councils to use with their local businesses. This platform is initially focussed on the hospitality sector because it’s an industry with above average regulatory requirements and has been heavily impacted by the pandemic over the last couple of years.
Visit the Business Connect website.
Business Connect is designed to address some of the key challenges businesses face when dealing with government. Specifically:
- Having to repeatedly share the same information with different agencies, and even with the same council.
- Needing to navigate government silos and try to make sense of different but related regulations.
- Having limited transparency of where they are at within a process, or how long it will take.
Through consistent form design and the reuse of information, businesses can complete an application 30 per cent faster the first time they use Business Connect and up to 80 per cent faster for each subsequent application. The platform brings related services together in one place, resulting in a more positive and coordinated experience for businesses.
From a council’s perspective, Business Connect is really flexible. It can provide a complete digital solution for your business customers or be a complementary tool in your digital journey. Business Connect can sit outside council systems or provide different levels of integration with back-end system and incorporate payment gateways. In terms of the cost, Business Connect is funded to provide both the customer-facing portal and a council-facing admin portal for free.
Our current services ready for council adoption are food registration, alcohol licences, trade waste and outdoor dining.
We’ve started with a sectoral approach and have chosen the hospitality sector because it’s an industry with above average regulatory requirements and has been heavily impacted by the pandemic over the last couple of years.
To talk more about how Business Connect could work for your council, or have a look at Business Connect, get in touch with Andy Hall.