As your small business grows, you will accumulate more financial transactions and documents. Don’t continue to manage your company’s books and recordkeeping independently because you’ll just stress yourself out.
A responsible business owner understands the benefit and value of hiring a bookkeeper to maintain their company’s financial records for them. That way, the business owner can focus 100% of their time and effort on growing their business and increasing its productivity.
How can you successfully manage your company if you devote several hours daily to downloading financial transactions and calculating statistical and analytical information about them? It is better to free up your time by putting all the recordkeeping responsibilities onto the shoulders of a professional bookkeeper.
It All Starts with Trust
The biggest obstacle to hiring a bookkeeper is more of a personal one. Since a bookkeeper must access your company’s bank accounts and payment accounts, you have to entrust them with sensitive financial information for your company.
For instance, your bookkeeper will need to log into your company’s checking accounts with banks and payment accounts with online payment processors like Stripe and PayPal. That way, they can conveniently access spreadsheets that list all the financial transactions associated with your bank accounts and payment accounts. This will make the bookkeeper’s job much easier when they create financial reports for you later.
If you were to hire the wrong person or someone untrustworthy, they could do significant damage to your company’s finances, whether intentionally or unintentionally. That is why hiring a reputable bookkeeper with a long track record of providing high-quality bookkeeping services to past clients is imperative. Then, have the bookkeeper sign a contract with an ethics clause to give your company more financial protection in case your money gets accessed inappropriately.
Is there an alternative? Perhaps you still want a bookkeeper to manage your financial records on a Quickbooks desktop program, but you don’t trust them enough to give them access to your online banking and payment account information. In this case, you would have to personally collect your financial documents and retrieve transactional records from your online accounts to give to your bookkeeper.
A bookkeeper could still produce analytical reports and organize financial records data in a bookkeeping program, but they wouldn’t be in charge of gathering financial records and transaction details. So would it be worth hiring a bookkeeper if you cannot trust them with your online account information? The answer is “no.”
The entire purpose of hiring a bookkeeper is to simplify the financial recordkeeping of your company and save you the stress of having to deal with it yourself. Then you don’t need to rush to gather your financial documents at tax time like many other entrepreneurs and business people do each year.
Hire a Bookkeeper Full Time
A bookkeeping position is a long-term job position for each year. You won’t hire a bookkeeper to serve only the first three months of the year before the April 15th tax deadline. Even though a bookkeeper can help prepare your personal and commercial income tax returns, you’ll still be hiring them to maintain your company’s financial records for 12 months out of the year.
After all, you must make quarterly tax payments to the IRS anyway. That means you’ll continue to pay taxes beyond the April 15th deadline because that only represents the end of one tax quarter of the year. Therefore, you will rely on a bookkeeper to accurately maintain your company’s books and generate analytical reports to help you make better financial decisions as the company’s leader.
A well-organized business owner can track all the money going in and out of their company. Then, when your bookkeeper prepares financial reports, they make it easier to analyze the overall state of your business to determine if it’s growing or failing. In addition, the bookkeeper is knowledgeable enough to answer your financial questions if you don’t understand something in the financial reports.
Business finances go through changes frequently. As a business owner, you’ll depend on the bookkeeper’s financial reports to track the direction of your company in real-time. These reports should help you answer the following questions about the financial state of your company:
- How much useless spending exists?
- What have you bought that your company doesn’t need?
- Which of your products or services sell the most?
- Which products or services generate the most profit?
- Which products or services generate the least profit?
- Which services purchased assist your company in increasing profits and income?
- Which purchases are wasting the most money for your business?
Business owners need to answer these questions to understand the financial state of their companies. But you cannot answer these questions unless you have accurate and well-kept financial documents and record data in your company’s books.
Business bookkeeping is a 365-day duty. It is not something you do only to complete your income tax returns before the April 15th filing deadline. It is also something you do to obtain real-time knowledge about the financial status of your company and whether it’s growing or losing money. That is something you need to know on demand all year round.
Hire a Bookkeeper and Eliminate Your Stress
Hiring a bookkeeper can take a lot of stress and weight off your shoulders. Instead of worrying about maintaining your company’s records, you can focus on growing your business and making it more successful. And, of course, you’ll have access to updated financial data and analytical information regarding your business to make better decisions for your company.
Regular financial analysis is crucial to running a business because you need to know if your company is making money. If it’s not, you can take immediate action by making the necessary changes to turn things around and make your company profitable before it’s too late.
Investing in bookkeeping services is one of the best investments you’ll ever make for your business and its potential to grow in the future. The bookkeeper will maintain your books, generate analytical information, and answer your questions whenever you want. This is a great person to have on your side because business finance and recordkeeping is their specialty.
The first step is to hire the best and most trustworthy bookkeeper that you can find. Then your business will be on its way to growing to accelerated heights you never thought possible before.