5 Benfits of Outsourcing Bookkeeping
A winning strategy for businesses looking to grow
Are you on the fence about outsourcing bookkeeping services? You are not alone. Many business owners wonder, “Can I afford to outsource my bookkeeper?
You can’t afford NOT to if you are growing your business. Here are five pros of outsourcing bookkeeping services.
5 benefits of outsourcing bookkeeping services:
1). Prevent Missed Opportunity Cost
Anytime you are doing something, it means you are not doing something else. That ‘something else’ could be costing you more than you realize.
You should be asking yourself, “Is this the best action I could be taking right now?” and ” What am I giving up to do this action? Is it worth it?”
Every step of your day you must make decisions. What clients am I pitching today? What should our brand message be? Where are we going to get back-ordered supplies from? How will we handle demand changes?
Decisions like these are important.
You need to focus on these decisions before completing the bookkeeping yourself. Let me be clear – you need a financial record. Your financial record is critical, and every business must have one. But you don’t need to be the one to create it. By outsourcing bookkeeping services, you’re creating space for you as a business owner to focus on scaling your business. You should not manage your books yourself while you are in a growing phase. Let the professionals take it off your hands.
Don’t lose out on what you could have been doing instead.
2). Less Personnel Management
When you use outsourced bookkeeping services, you are the customer – not the employer!
This is a great benefit when you are growing your business. H.R. headaches can derail any well-laid plan. They absorb time, capacity, and resources away from your business. If the personnel problems escalate, your bookkeeping could fall through the cracks, leaving you without proper financial records.
Even when staffing goes to plan, you will need to train and provide resources for your staff to complete their job.
When you are mired in the details of a routine business function, you are missing the bigger picture of what your growing picture can accomplish. An outsourced bookkeeper service will handle the training, hiring, firing, and natural personnel turnover. So that you can focus more on sales.
3). More reliability
In most systems, redundancies and alternatives prevent downtime and increase robustness. Meaning it is less likely to fail when a critical event occurs. Outsourcing bookkeeping services builds in these redundancies.
You are not hiring a single person. You are hiring a service that ensures coverage. That means if someone is on vacation or sick leave your books still get done.
A bookkeeping service has a team of trained and skilled bookkeepers ready to provide coverage in the event your primary bookkeeper cannot work.
4). Speed and Accuracy
Professional bookkeeping firms can often provide more speed and accuracy than a single bookkeeper. If you have a one-time clean-up project or reporting needed, a bookkeeping firm can add a person or two to the team for a day. Many of our new clients are behind on their books when they choose our virtual accounting services. We then assign the appropriate number of bookkeepers needed to get them up to date.
Also, bookkeeping firms leverage automation and software. This means you can rely on fewer data entry errors, faster delivery times, and more bookkeeper time for review and analysis. Plus, you get real-time access to your financial records. Think a 5-day turnaround for month-end is impossible? Not when you’re outsourcing bookkeeping services.
5). Professional Expertise and Risk Management
Outsourced bookkeepers have extensive cross-industry experience and can quickly identify historical mistakes and/or areas to increase efficiency.
As, Suzy Strutner writes for NetSuite, “Someone who’s “been there, done that” with many, many other businesses can help you avoid common pitfalls that you might otherwise miss when revving up a business for the first — or even second or third — time.”
Outsourced accounting firms should be able to confidently advise you on the best processes for your unique business and software that will help you do it. They can prevent errors by advising on your systems and setting up controls to safeguard against possible mistakes.
Expertise in this sense is not just one person’s experience, but many people’s experience. Many heads are better than one when it comes to your business.
Outsourcing bookkeeping services means prioritizing your growth.
Growing a business is not for the faint of heart. You can succeed at anything when staying dedicated to your business and working smart. This does not mean you can do everything. You must be judicious where you apply your limited resources. Spend it on the most important things first.
Have professionals handle routine bookkeeping to keep the ‘fires’ away. Free up your mental focus to grow your business.
Being a small business owner keeps you busy, like choosing between-eating-or-sleeping busy. The simplest way to carve out more time in your day is by outsourcing bookkeeping services.
