Guides and Articles

Most business voicemail greetings were recorded once, in a hurry, by whoever set the phones up, and nobody has listened to them since. Callers have. A greeting that names the wrong hours, mumbles the business name or asks people to "leave a message after the tone" with no idea of when anyone will ring back is costing you messages, because people who are unsure whether anyone will listen tend to hang up and ring the next business on the list. This guide gives you twelve professional voicemail greeting examples written for Australian businesses, grouped by the moment a caller hits voicemail: the main line during the day, after hours, public holidays and the Christmas close, a person's own line, a sole trader on the mobile, a tradie on a job, a clinic, a real estate agency and a mailbox nobody checks. Each script is short enough to read in about twenty seconds. Before the scripts there is a four part recipe you can use to write your own, and after them, the phrases to cut and how to set the greeting up so the messages reach someone fast.

Jack Westbury and the #29 Uniden Voice Over Cloud Ute finished the Bathurst 1000 weekend inside the top five in Sunday's Race 4 of the Tyrepower V8 SuperUtes round at Mount Panorama. Watch Jack's race-day message and read how the weekend went, from a tough Friday to a car that was "an absolute jet" by Sunday.

You have just been issued an Australian Business Number. Congratulations, you are officially in business. Most people then do the next few things in whatever order they come to mind: a logo, some business cards, a Facebook page, maybe a website. Then a few months later they discover that half of it has to be redone, usually because the phone number printed on everything was their personal mobile, the business name was never registered, or the bank account is still shared with the grocery shopping. This guide sets out the eight steps that follow an ABN in the order that avoids that rework. Most of them are quick. One of them, choosing your business phone number and the system behind it, looks like a five minute job and ends up being one of the hardest early decisions to undo. We explain why, and what to pick on day one.

On 1 July 2026 Australia's anti-money laundering regime grew from roughly 19,000 regulated businesses towards 100,000, pulling in real estate agents, lawyers, conveyancers, accountants, trust and company service providers and some jewellers. On 30 September AUSTRAC announced its first infringement notices for businesses that had not enrolled: $21,840 for a company and $4,368 for an individual, able to accrue daily. If you run a small firm in one of those sectors, this briefing covers how to tell whether you are in, the dates that matter, the eight things the law actually asks of you, and where your phone system helps with identity checks and records, and where it does not. It is general information, not legal advice, and it points you to AUSTRAC's own guidance at every step.

Uniden Voice Over Cloud is backing Jack Westbury and the #29 Ute in the Tyrepower V8 SuperUtes Series at the Bathurst 1000, Mount Panorama, 8 to 11 October 2026. Jack is 19, the leading rookie of the 2026 series, qualified third on debut in Sydney and took a round podium in Tasmania. This post introduces Jack, explains why an Australian phone and nbn company backs a young Australian driver, lists every SuperUtes session in AEDT with Foxtel, Kayo and Channel 7 details, tells you when to meet Jack at the SuperUtes Podium, and wishes him the very best for the weekend.

Watch someone take a customer call at a busy front desk and you will see the same pattern in almost every Australian business. The phone rings, they answer, and within ten seconds they are looking at a screen rather than listening. They type the name, get the spelling wrong, ask again, type the address, lose the thread of what the customer was actually worried about, and then, after the customer hangs up, sit for another minute or two tidying the note into something the next person could use. Meanwhile the phone rings again and somebody else waits. None of this is anybody's fault. Taking notes and listening at the same time is genuinely hard, and most businesses have simply accepted the cost as part of running a phone line. In 2026 that cost is optional. Phone systems can now transcribe a call as it happens and hand back a summary, action items and a clean note the moment the call ends. The technology is the easy part. The part that decides whether it works is how your people use it: what they say out loud so the note comes out right, how they check it in twenty seconds instead of rewriting it, and which kinds of AI note taking you should never allow on your lines at all. This guide covers all of that, with worked numbers on what wrap-up time is doing to your queue.

Most small businesses do not run out of cash in December. They run out in the second week of January, when the pre-Christmas pay run, the shutdown and a fortnight of customers on holiday all land at once. This year the squeeze is tighter than usual for reasons that are easy to miss: super now leaves with every pay instead of waiting for the end of January, interest on a tax debt is no longer deductible and sits above 11%, the ATO has signalled the end of paying tax by credit card, card surcharges are gone, and the cash rate is 4.60%. None of that is a crisis on its own. Together it means the buffer many owners relied on over the break is smaller. This guide explains each change with its date and source, shows how to build a 13-week cash flow forecast that finds the low point before you reach it, and works through the moves that free up cash, starting with the fastest: getting paid for work you have already done.

As of today, 1 October 2026, Australian businesses can no longer add a surcharge when a customer pays with eftpos, Visa or Mastercard, whether the card is debit, prepaid or credit, and whether the payment happens at the counter or online. American Express has announced its own no-surcharge rules from the same date. The Reserve Bank is also cutting the interchange fees that sit underneath what you pay to accept cards, and small businesses are expected to benefit most. For the roughly one in six businesses that surcharged, this week means removing the fee from terminals, checkout pages, invoice templates and phone order scripts, deciding whether to absorb the cost or build it into prices, and telling customers clearly. This guide works through each channel in turn, explains the numbers behind the change, lists the questions to ask your payment provider, and finishes with a first week checklist you can work through in an afternoon.

Most business phone systems in Australia are not replaced because they break. They are replaced because somebody finally adds up what keeping them is costing, and the number is larger than anybody expected. The box in the comms cupboard was a sensible purchase when it went in, and plenty of them are fifteen or twenty years old and still ringing every morning. The trouble is everything around them has moved. The copper lines they were built for are being retired, the manufacturer may have left the market entirely, the parts come from auction sites, and the staff who answer the calls now work from home two days a week on a mobile the system cannot reach. None of this shows up as a fault. It shows up as a receptionist writing messages on a notepad, a customer who rang three times on Saturday and heard voicemail each time, and a technician invoice that nobody queries because it is only a few hundred dollars. This guide is a practical way to decide whether your system has crossed the line. It gives you twelve signs to score in five minutes, explains what the real cost of staying looks like, sets out what you can keep when you move and what you cannot, and walks through a six week upgrade plan that keeps every number and never takes the phones offline. If your score comes back low, the honest advice is to leave it alone. That is a legitimate outcome, and we say so below.

Most owners only look hard at the phone bill when something annoys them: a price rise, a dropped call, a salesperson with a better offer. The better time is a few weeks before the contract renews, because that is when leaving costs the least and when a silent auto renewal does the most damage. This guide is a cost audit you can do at your desk with last month's bills. It walks through the seven places a business phone bill usually leaks money, from line rental and 1300 charges to handsets nobody uses and a PBX in the cupboard that still has a maintenance contract. Then it shows how to work out payback properly, with the exit fee, any lease payout, new hardware and a month of overlap included, using a worked example of a six desk office that is now down to three people. The figures in the example are illustrative. The method is the point, and it works whichever provider you end up with.

At 6.40 on a Wednesday evening, a customer rings a suburban mechanic. She has a service booked for Thursday, something has come up at work, and she would like Saturday morning instead. While she is at it, she wants to know whether the brake check is included. A simple chatbot can answer half of that. It knows the Saturday hours and it can send her a link to the booking page. An operational AI agent answers the whole call: it finds her booking, checks Saturday, moves it, answers the brake question from the price list, texts her a confirmation and leaves the workshop a note for the morning. That gap, between answering a question and finishing the job, is the most important idea in business AI right now. This guide walks one call through both, explains the five things that make an agent operational, and shows how to tell a real agent from a chatbot with a new label.

In early August 2022 a number of employees at Twilio, one of the largest cloud communications platforms in the world, received text messages on their personal phones. The messages claimed to come from the company IT department. Some said the recipient's password had expired. Others said their work schedule had changed. Each one carried a link to a web address containing words like "twilio", "okta" and "sso", and each address led to a page that looked exactly like the sign-in screen the employees used every day. Enough of them typed their username, password and one-time code into that page for the attackers to get inside. Twilio discovered the intrusion on 4 August and the last unauthorised activity was seen on 9 August. By the time its investigation closed, the company had confirmed that 209 customer accounts had been accessed, out of more than 270,000, and that 93 users of its Authy two-factor app had unknown devices added to their accounts. One of those customers was Signal, which disclosed that around 1,900 of its users had their phone numbers or registration codes exposed. None of this involved a software vulnerability. It involved a text message, a convincing web page and the assumption that a code sent to a phone is proof of who is holding it. For an Australian business in 2026 the incident is worth understanding in detail, because every part of it maps onto something you depend on: the provider that carries your calls and texts, the way your staff sign in, and the SMS codes your customers receive from you.

On 21 October 2026 the PHP project shipped emergency releases for two flaws in the PHP runtime itself, CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619, which researchers have named PHP2Shell. Both are rated 9.2 out of 10, both can be reached by a single request from someone who has not logged in, and details had leaked a day before the fixes landed. Security firms reported probing traffic within hours. That matters to anyone who hosts their own phone system, because a large part of the self-hosted PBX world is managed through PHP: FreePBX and the products built on it, Issabel, FusionPBX and several billing platforms. Even where the phone software itself is not PHP, as appears to be the case with 3CX, the server it runs on often shares a host or a network with things that are. This briefing explains how PHP2Shell works at a technical level, which phone platforms are exposed, what an attacker gets from a compromised PBX, and the exact steps to take today.

Imagine hiring a brilliant temp who has read every book in the library but has never heard of your business. On day one they can write a lovely email, but they quote the wrong price, book a job in a suburb you do not service and tell a caller you open on Sundays. That is roughly what a general purpose AI chatbot does when you point it at your customers. The shift now under way in business AI is toward specialists: models built or tuned for one industry or one task, and grounded in your own information. Gartner predicts that by 2027 more than half of the generative AI models businesses use will be specific to an industry or business function, up from about 1% in 2023. This guide explains what domain-specific AI means without the jargon, the three ways a model becomes a specialist, why the phone is one of the hardest places to get it right, and the questions and tests that sort a real specialist from a general chatbot with a new name.

Two of the most instructive security incidents of the last five years happened to the same company, and neither of them required anything clever. In May 2022 an attacker got into Cisco's corporate network after taking over an employee's personal Google account, which had the employee's work password saved in it, and then ringing that employee repeatedly while firing multi-factor authentication prompts at their phone until one was approved. In May 2024 a German newspaper showed that Webex meeting links belonging to the Bundestag, federal ministries and the armed forces could be found by counting up and down from a known link, which exposed the titles, times and invitees of thousands of meetings, some of them marked confidential. One was a failure of people and process. The other was a failure of product design. Between them they cover almost every way a communications platform can let a business down, and the fixes are specific, cheap and available to a ten person office in Australia today. This is a plain account of both incidents, written for business owners rather than security teams, with the controls ranked by how much effort they take and a list of questions to put to whoever supplies your phones and meetings.

Search for a business phone system and every result claims to lead the market. The word is cheap because nobody checks it. So rather than ask you to take it on trust, this article sets out seven measures that genuinely separate a leading business phone system from an ordinary one, shows the evidence for Uniden Voice on each, links to where you can check it yourself, and is candid about the businesses better served by something else.

Australia only just avoided a per capita recession in the June quarter. Real GDP grew 0.4%, which did little more than keep pace with population growth, and on 29 September the Reserve Bank lifted the cash rate to 4.60%, its fourth rise this year. Bank economists expect growth to slow further through the rest of 2026 as household spending cools. For a small business, that is the backdrop, not the verdict. In a downturn customers still buy. They compare more, ring around more and go with whoever answers, responds and looks after them best. This guide sets out eight practical moves to grow through hard times: answering every call, responding fast, looking after existing customers, keeping marketing where you can measure it, cutting cost without cutting capability, covering the phones without hiring, protecting cash flow and watching a few numbers every week.

In late July 2026 the extortion group ShinyHunters announced that it had taken 623GB of data from RingCentral and demanded payment. RingCentral disclosed the incident the next day, said it had been caused by a sophisticated social engineering campaign, said the core platform was not affected, and declined to pay. The group then published a 280GB archive, and on 13 August the breach notification service Have I Been Pwned loaded 1.6 million unique email addresses from it, along with names, phone numbers and physical addresses. That is the whole of the confirmed story, and on its face it sounds contained: no passwords reported, no payment cards reported, no call recordings, no outage. The problem is what that kind of list is for. A breach at a communications provider does not mainly hurt the provider. It hands attackers an accurate map of who uses which phone platform, who to call, and what to say when they do, and the group responsible has spent the last eighteen months proving that a convincing phone call is the most reliable way into a company. For Australian businesses the incident matters in two ways. Some are RingCentral customers directly or through the Optus Loop migration, and should assume they will be targeted. Everyone else should treat it as the clearest recent demonstration that the phone line has become the front door for serious intrusions, and check whether their own door is locked.

Choosing a business phone system is one of those decisions that gets made in an afternoon and lived with for three years. The demo goes well, because demos always go well: calls connect, the app looks clean, the menu says press one for sales. What the demo does not show you is the clause about leaving early, the line items that appear on the second invoice, who answers when you ring support at 4:45 on a Friday, or what your callers hear on the morning your internet drops out. Those are the things owners tell us they wish they had asked about. This checklist gives you twenty questions to put to every provider on your shortlist, grouped by the part of the business they protect. For each one you get the reason it matters, what a good answer sounds like and what a red flag sounds like, so you can tell the difference without being a telecommunications expert. There is a scorecard at the end to print and fill in during each call. We have also said how we answer each group ourselves, briefly, because a checklist from a provider that skips its own answers is not worth much.

On Tuesday 29 September the Reserve Bank of Australia raised the cash rate by 25 basis points to 4.60%. It was the fourth increase of 2026, a full percentage point since January, and the Board said it would do what it considers necessary to bring inflation down, "including increasing the cash rate target further if needed". For a small business with a variable loan, an overdraft or a car on finance, that lands as a bigger repayment. For everyone else it lands as customers who are a little more careful with their money. You cannot vote on the cash rate, but you do control a surprising number of the costs that leave your account every month, and fixed costs are where a saving shows up fastest. This guide explains what the RBA said, what a rate rise does to a small business, the five fixed costs worth reviewing this month, how to read a phone and internet bill line by line, our half price nbn offer for new bundles, and the costs you should protect even in a tight year.

Count the software your business pays for. For most Australian businesses between ten and two hundred staff the honest number is somewhere between nine and fourteen, and almost every one of them has added AI features in the last eighteen months. The accounting package can categorise transactions. The CRM can draft an email and score a lead. The job management tool can summarise a site note. The help desk can suggest a reply. Each of these is real and each of them works, and yet the thing that has not improved at all is the moment a customer rings up and says "I ordered a part on Thursday, the invoice looks wrong and nobody has rung me back", because answering that sentence requires four of those systems to be in the room at once and none of them can see each other. That is the actual state of AI in most businesses in 2026: a lot of narrow intelligence distributed across silos, with nothing in the middle holding a view of the customer. The industry data reflects it. Around eighty-eight per cent of contact centres report using AI in some form and only about a quarter say they have integrated it properly, and the remaining three quarters are exactly this: capability bolted onto the side of systems that do not talk. Fixing it does not require replacing anything, and it does not require a data warehouse project. It requires deciding which layer sits in the middle, and there is a defensible answer to that question that most businesses have never considered, because they have always thought of the phone system as an endpoint rather than as a platform.

A business phone system is the arrangement that turns a phone number into a front door for your business. It decides who rings when a customer calls, what happens when they are busy, what callers hear outside opening hours, and where the message ends up when nobody can answer. Most owners start with a mobile, and a mobile works until the second person joins, the first holiday, or the week you realise customers have been ringing out. This guide explains in plain English what a business phone system is in 2026, what it does that a personal mobile cannot, why the old style of office phone system has quietly ended in Australia, and the three types you will be offered when you go shopping. It also untangles the names. Cloud phone system, VoIP, hosted PBX and business phone system describe the same modern arrangement, and knowing that saves a lot of confusion when two quotes use different words for identical things. Finally, there is a simple sizing guide for sole traders, teams of three to twenty and businesses with more than one site, so you can walk into a demo knowing what to ask for.

It is 8.55 on a Monday. The shop opens at nine, the phones are not ringing through, and a customer has just told you on Facebook that your number goes straight to a dead tone. You ring your provider. A recorded voice suggests you visit the help centre. The chatbot offers you an article about resetting your handset. The ticket form promises a response within two business days. That is the moment you find out what you actually bought. Features, prices and apps all look similar across providers in 2026. What does not look similar is what happens when you need help, and it is getting harder to judge because more providers are putting chatbots and ticket queues between you and anyone who can fix the problem. This guide explains how to find a technology partner who knows your business, takes your call and owns the problem until it is solved, and how to test that before you sign rather than after something breaks.

Somebody has probably told you recently that your business needs AI, and there is a reasonable chance they were selling something. That does not make them wrong, but it does mean the question deserves a straighter answer than the one you have been getting. Here is the straight version: no business needs AI. Businesses need calls answered, quotes out the door, notes written, invoices chased, rosters filled and customers who do not have to ring twice. AI is not a goal, it is a means, and in 2026 it has become the cheapest available means for a specific and identifiable set of those jobs, and a genuinely poor means for others. The interesting question is not whether to adopt AI. It is which of your problems are now cheaper to solve than they were eighteen months ago, and whether any of them are costing you enough to bother. That question has an answer, and it is different for a two-person consultancy than for a forty-person clinic group. The Australian evidence is also better than it was: the Bureau of Statistics has measured business adoption, the National AI Centre is tracking it quarterly, and there are now enough real deployments in Australian small businesses that the productivity claims can be checked rather than believed. The numbers do not all agree, and the disagreement turns out to be the most informative part of the whole picture. This is what they say, what they cost, where they do not apply, and what to do first if the answer for you is yes.