Why Outsource Your Accounting & Bookkeeping Needs

Having More Time to Focus on Your Business

By outsourcing your accounting operations to a professional accounting firm, you’re effectively hiring a team of experts.  As an outsourced CFO, I work with clients from varied fields and backgrounds, each having a different level of complexity and challenge with their financials.

However, there seem to be a common theme with all these businesses: With the growth of their companies they eventually realize that they lack the expertise needed to fulfill all their accounting and bookkeeping functions and they really need to spend the time doing what they all do best and that’s running their businesses.

It is often the case where these business owners find that accounting and bookkeeping can be stressful and time consuming if not done correctly in the first place. Going back to find and correct errors can consume a lot of their energy and time which should be devoted to two vital areas of their businesses: specifically, business development and strategic planning.

Partner with the right professional and both challenges will be addressed. When you outsource your accounting and bookkeeping services to a Certified Public Accountant, you’ll be working with a team that has extensive experience. You’ll be provided with real-time financial insight that will aid your decision making process, you’ll have at your fingertips monthly financial packages (e.g. balance sheets, income statements and statements of cash flow) to more advanced analysis (e.g. cash reporting, budget-vs.-actual analysis, make or buy decision), simply put, you’ll have up-to-date financial information needed to make critical business decisions.

Risk and Fraud Prevention

Having a Certified Public Accountant as a valued business partner help you not only to address the first challenge but also affords you the opportunity to receive invaluable support in addressing the second challenge as well.

As a business owner you’ll need to comply with and be current with many rules and regulations that change frequently. Having to worry about being in compliant with all these rules and regulations can be another source of stress and distraction. You can eliminate this added source of stress by outsourcing your accounting and bookkeeping to a professional company, you’ll gain the peace of mind you deserve.

Among other things, you’ll need to prepare and submit sales tax filings, collect W-9s and manage submission of 1099s to the IRS, a professional accountant knows all the rules and will ensure you remain in compliance.

Other ways in which a Certified Public Accountant can reduces your exposure to risk is through the strengthening your system of internal control and with the segregation of duties. We’ll help you to define your company’s policies and procedures, and be that extra set of eyes to help in the prevention of errors or intentional mistakes (fraud prevention).

According to Association of Certified Fraud Examiner’s in one of their released study, most common victims of fraud are privately owned small businesses with less than 100 employees with an astounding median fraud amount of $147,000. This is due the fact that most small companies don’t have access to a controller or CFO who could look at the KPI and metrics which show abnormal activity in the transactional and billing data.

Cost Reduction

Outsourced accounting operations save you money by eliminating costly benefit packages to a full-time or part-time employee.  When you outsource accounting, you only pay for the actual accounting, nothing else.  This saves in productivity costs as well as payroll costs.  The cost benefit analysis of outsourced accounting vs. in-house bookkeeping can save up to 40% in monthly costs.

Prepare for Business Growth

Starting a business and just having a couple of clients makes it easy for the business owner to be act as the company’s accountant. Afterall, it’s easy to record few revenue and expense transactions in a simple excel spreadsheet. This initial ease and simplicity can set you up for big problems down the road once you start to grow. Things get complicated fast and very soon you realize that you’ve actually become the company’s bookkeeper while trying to run a business on the side, instead of the other way around.

When you start your business with a scalable system in place,  you won’t need to scramble to find a new system or resources when you’re in the middle of rapid growth. Your clients and vendors will enjoy the seamless operation—and you’ll have a much smoother path to growth, especially at tax time.

A Certified Public Accountant as you valued business partner can also draw upon their wide knowledge base and provide you with additional services as needed. You might be able to benefit from class and project accounting or analysis and planning. You might not know the financial ramifications of opening a new location or starting a new product line — but your Certified Accountant will. And you can enjoy the benefit of this expertise without having to provide benefits or devote management time to overseeing an in-house hire.

Now that you see how beneficial outsourcing your accounting really is, the next step is finding the right CPA for your business. In the end its really about different companies facing different problems that have a common solution.

User | 17/02/2020