Benefits of outsourcing your bookkeeping services. As your business grows, it becomes harder to manage invoices related to your company’s financial documents, so as to maintain a track of your expenses. Or you simply don’t have an affinity with numbers and wonder why you would waste time setting up your bookkeeping while would be more productive developing new products, prospecting new clients, meet more often with the team, among all your daily tasks.
So a bookkeeping service saves you time handling the financial tasks of your business from organizing the financial information from your bank statements to track your bills and income yet to be recognized. Even better, it synthesizes your financial statements in a clear language to guide your decisions.
Essentially, bookkeeping is the process of tracking all the financial transactions of your business, categorizing where your company is spending money, where your revenue is coming from, identify financial challenges, and which tax deductions you are able to claim. In this article, we present a guide for what small businesses such as startups, law firms, restaurants, and retail must consider when hiring a bookkeeping service and the benefits of doing so.
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Bookkeeping for Small Business
Since bookkeeping lays the basis for the accounting process from the collected data and gives a clear picture to budget better, it’s important for small businesses to pay attention to the following points below when outsourcing their bookkeeping services. Bookkeeping and accounting are often confused and in this article, we explain the differences between both functions.
Expertise – many bookkeeping services tend to specialize according to their owners’ expertise and to the clients’ industry along the years, you must also pay attention if the bookkeeper has all the relevant expertise for your business considering laws, regulations, and other particularities.
Tasks that are Covered: What tasks are included in the bookkeeping service you’re hiring? You may not need all the services the bookkeeper is offering you, so at the beginning, it’s time to prioritize your urgent needs for financial and accounting, which may mean report to investors, organize monthly reports or the payroll services, for example.
Flexibility to Scale: Is it easy to add more tasks and features as your business grows? Flexibility to scale your bookkeeping service is very important to pay attention to when outsourcing, and to discuss before closing any agreement.
Cost and Payment Scheme: Before hiring a bookkeeping service, make sure the payment schemes and price range suit your budget and your needs. However, it’s important to remember to not consider solely the cost-effectiveness of the service.
Location: Where is your bookkeeper is based? What about the timezone? Depending on your business and your preferences, you may need to meet in person with your service provider to discuss your statements and how to avoid mistakes, for example.
Benefits of Outsourcing your Bookkeeping
Outsourcing your bookkeeping as a small business gives you access to professional help to make sure your financial statements are accurate and follow all the legal requirements. The biggest three benefits of outsourced bookkeeping are on maximizing your resources, minimizing inaccuracies, and sharpen your decision-making process, detailed in this section.
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Maximize your Resources
Outsourcing your bookkeeping, you have the time to concentrate on your business without the headaches of possible mistakes after messing up any single detail of your invoices while trying to make an intelligible report.
Minimize inaccuracies
In addition to avoiding headaches with mistakes, a bookkeeper can really organize all your financial statements into an intelligible report, easy to read and analyze, which will be helpful for reliable planning and budgeting, catch incorrect payments, and even frauds. Banks, investors, and tax authorities will also be happy with an organized financial report.
Sharpen your Decision-Making
Handling reliable planning and budgeting is crucial to the quick decision-making process regarding where and how you spend your company’s money, so as to where your revenues are coming from. Such information also brings insights into your business plan.
Recommendation for Small Businesses
While outsourcing bookkeeping services, we recommend small businesses subscribing to online software through a monthly fee to make the processing of your financial statements at a lower cost than an in house bookkeeper. A spreadsheet is the cheapest option but suiting your business needs may turn into a disaster if you don’t know too much about Excel, and adding features may bring headaches as your business grows. At Stilz Bookkeeping we use QuickBooks® Online Bookkeeping Service to help you manage your bookkeeping from any device connected to the internet.