How Does Bookkeeping Help a Business?

Finding the right bookkeeper, who can smoothly apply themselves in the role they’ve been hired to do, gives your business an edge. You need to be able to trust your bookkeeper to competently handle the important financial and accounting tasks such as reconciliation, invoicing, payroll, and preparing financial statements.

When you’re a small business owner, you may prefer to be your own bookkeeper, likely because you’re still dealing with a few transactions and want to avoid the hiring cost. However, in the future, as you expand and acquire more customers, you may struggle to catch up with your books as you will not just be handling income and expenses. You will have to track factors such as assets, employees, and taxes that require an extra hand to document consistently.

Further, bookkeepers are increasingly becoming invaluable to businesses as they advance into consultancy, training, implementation, and maintenance of business systems. Growing your brand means you are wearing many hats, which limits your ability to achieve your vision. A bookkeeper will help make the transition less stressful, as they will fill in the role of sustaining your business’s lifeline.

How a Bookkeeper Can Help Your Business

A bookkeeper essentially keeps your books in order. They undertake the mundane but vital tasks that help your business stay afloat. A growing business needs good decision-making, strategizing, and planning. Maybe you need to add another line item, develop a marketing campaign, or hire new employees; bookkeepers are tasked to prepare reports such as the cash flow, profit and loss, and balance sheet, which reveals if you have the money to do all that.

A well-rounded bookkeeper will also offer you solid professional advice and be a good problem solver to rely on when going through a rough patch in the business. In the coming decade, bookkeepers, along with other financial professionals, will largely help boost the revenue and growth of many businesses by leveraging digital tools and their professional skills.

Regardless of the size of your business, a bookkeeper is important to help ease the daily pressures of being an entrepreneur.

You’ll Have More Time to Focus On Your Business Functions

Businesses spend on average 12 hours in daily meetings, making cold calls, negotiating terms with vendors, and training their staff. If this is what your day looks like, you still have to prepare a payroll, generate invoices, and file taxes, which could take endless hours of gathering and reviewing your reports. This allows room to make costly errors with your finances and taxation.

A bookkeeper could halve or completely save the time you spend collecting, analysing, and reporting on financial documentation. This frees up your time to fully take up your leadership role and come up with ways of getting your business to the next level in your industry. Most successful organisations have not reached where they are without at most delegating work to their teams.

Save Money With an Outsourced Bookkeeping Service

Cost reduction is a leading factor when organisations outsource services, according to the Deloitte Global Outsourcing survey. This trend will likely carry on into the future as more workers and organisations embrace working online and remotely, opening spaces for third-party services.

Thinking that you’re saving money by doing your own books could potentially open your business to grievous financial consequences. One of the mistakes you can make is failing to be consistent in following up on your invoices, leading to cash flow problems. Another mistake is inaccurate tracking of your payments, which will prevent you from claiming the correct GST and tax deductions to reduce your tax bill. Outsourcing to a bookkeeper may cost you upfront in fees, but in exchange, you potentially insure your business against losing money and facing a huge tax burden.

Find Business Opportunities and Optimisations With Improved Reporting

Working with a bookkeeper who is knowledgeable about accounting systems makes sure you get reports like clockwork. Your financial reports show a big picture of whether your business is failing or succeeding. A bookkeeper handles thousands of financial transactions, which need to be captured and be analysed in detail and summarised into reports that influence your decision-making. For example, when doing a market analysis to determine if you can set up a new store in a different location, a cash flow projection will inform you if it makes business sense. Your bookkeeper is best suited in preparing a cash flow projection as they are deeply involved in the operations of your business.

Reports also enable you to identify areas needing improvement to boost your business’s revenues and market position. Also, taking advantage of automation in your reporting helps your bookkeeper to give you value for your money.

Get the Most Out of Your Existing Bookkeeping Software

Many bookkeepers are going a step beyond their normal roles, like training staff on how to use accounting software. They are also helping in choosing the right software that is customised to a business’s needs.

Most cloud-based accounting software like Xero helps bookkeepers to smoothly perform expense tracking, financial reporting, billing, invoicing, and budgeting, so your business stays on a growth trajectory. However, bookkeeping software is only useful if it’s fed with relevant and accurate information, which a bookkeeper can handle without a challenge.

Outsourced Bookkeeping Is More Affordable Than Hiring a Full-Time Employee

Many growing businesses prefer to outsource to third-party providers rather than have an employee on payroll to save costs. A full-time employee can cost you thousands of dollars in training and benefits. In comparing costs, the annual salary of an in-house bookkeeper is an average of $67,500, while outsourced bookkeeping services will cost you from $500 to $5,000 per month, which is $60,000 per year if you’re a small to medium-sized business. The difference in service charges is $7,500, which is significant. 

In addition, outsourced bookkeepers have the tools and capacity that your business may lack, which translates to better tracking of spending and generating more revenue. They can also act as your trusted advisor as there’s no conflict of interest, unlike with an employee, which could expose your business to fraud.

Working With a Bookkeeper Is the Right Move for Your Business

Your team is one of the best investments for your business. Having a bookkeeper as part of this team means your accounting and financial needs will be met with the utmost professionalism and integrity. Ultimately, you have to get the right person for the work to avoid paying for messy accounting work in the future. Aside from having the right training and experience, finding a bookkeeper who is dedicated and strategic with your vision is impactful to your success.

If you’re looking for a reliable and trusted bookkeeping solutions provider, Visory is here for you. Our bookkeeping experts will help fix any issues with your books of accounts that are stopping your business from scaling up. Go ahead and get in touch with us today to learn about Visory’s bookkeeping services.