Investing in accountancy services can be beneficial for business owners and their teams. Bookkeeping is one of the more stressful parts of running a business, no matter how small it is, and business owners need to recognize when it’s time to outsource this part of the job. Here are some clear-cut signs you need to outsource your bookkeeping.
Too much time is wasted on accounting processes
There is a lot of truth to the adage, “Time is money.” It’s just as valuable a resource as funds and people. This is why if you and your team find yourselves spending the majority of your time on accounting processes, now may be the best time to find professional help with your bookkeeping. At the same time, if none of your team members are trained in bookkeeping, they might be distracted from focusing on their core tasks and errands that play more to their strengths.
Multitasking can be costly for your business. A study cited by the American Psychological Association found that repeatedly shifting between multiple tasks can cause mental blocks, which can then cause people to lose 40 percent of their productive time. Handling your business’s financial records and transactions, taking care of the payroll, and other accounting-related tasks are serious practices that need care and attention, and you as a business owner need to focus on what you do best, which is growing your business.
No one in your team is well-versed on taxes
If you and your team members are not the most well-versed on taxes, employing the services of trained accounting professionals will be incredibly beneficial for your business. It will help you avoid tax problems, and will help you stay up-to-the-minute on accounting regulations, processes, and various tax laws. A third-party bookkeeping team will also help ensure that your company is always compliant with generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP)—which can then save you from plenty of costly and stressful tax-related problems in the future.
Your company is already experiencing delays in payroll
If your in-house bookkeeper is untrained and inefficient at bookkeeping, it will certainly trickle down to the most basic aspects of their job, which is to pay your employees on time and with the right amount. Another sign is if the accounting reports are often turned in late. Financial report backlogs can cause so much strain to your company, especially for your team members who depend on those paychecks for their day-to-day living.
When the payroll is affected, that is a clear-cut sign that you need to outsource a bookkeeper. It will provide you with peace of mind knowing that even in your absence, or in the absence of your team members who often take care of the payroll, your books are always balanced and consistently maintained.
The idea of an IRS audit concerns you
If your financial documents like receipts, invoices, payslips, and other important files are gathering dust inside a cabinet, it would be incredibly stressful if you were to receive a call for an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) audit. When your payroll data and accounting information are in disarray, it can cause serious problems for your company.
This is a good time to outsource your bookkeeping to a professional service because they are also experts at organizing financial information, and making that information accessible and available to you every time you need it. This way, should an IRS audit come, you can rest easy that everything is in its proper place and you can hand it over to an IRS agent anytime.
Your business is growing
If your business is expanding in ways that you did not foresee or expect, and if you’re adding more locations soon, additional staff members and integration of multiple processes will be crucial. If you choose to go with a third-party bookkeeper, you get to choose when to scale up or down your accounting processes, and it also allows you flexibility. It will also save you the trouble of hiring multiple bookkeepers for different locations, keeping everything centralized and organized in one place.
Moreover, when your company is rapidly on the rise, it’s when you need to focus all your energies and resources on keeping the momentum going, and being distracted by other tasks might keep you from your maximizing your energies on your current priority.
Spare yourself so much unnecessary stress on these tasks. Leave it to the professionals, trust them to do the job better than you or your team can, so you can get back to what you do best—which is growing your company.