Small business owners too often find themselves getting distracted by administrative tasks and minutiae, at the expense of their clients and the future of their business. Here are five signs you should be outsourcing bookkeeping services.
- You’re doing bookkeeping late at night.
Are you answering emails and sending invoices at two in the morning after a full workday?
As a founder or owner, you’ve got better things to do with your time. You should be focusing your time and energy on the core tasks and leadership functions that you cannot easily delegate away:
- Strategic planning
- Dealing with investors
- Client service
- Business development and acquisitions
- Training and focusing your senior and mid-level managers
- Marketing and branding decisions
- Media appearances
- Community service and visibility
- Developing and improving your product or service
- Quality control
- Taking care of your family
Yes, bookkeeping is a necessary function. But as a non-core task it can be delegated away.
Yes, hours are long in the growth phase of any business. But your long hours should be spent on the core business functions listed above. That’s a full work day and then some! If you find yourself slogging through data entry and bookkeeping in the wee hours of the morning, that’s a sure sign you need to be delegating our outsourcing your bookkeeping, accounting and other back-end, non-core business functions.
- Doing bookkeeping during prime business hours.
As a founder or owner, doing bookkeeping at 2 in the morning is bad enough. Even worse is finding yourself doing routine bookkeeping tasks and fiddling about with bookkeeping software issues during prime business hours. That’s when your customers, prospects, employees and vendors are all working and able to do business.
If you’ve got your nose in a computer screen punching in transactions between 8 AM and 7 PM, you’ve disengaged yourself from all that opportunity. You should be talking to customers, clients, employees and suppliers and closing business and making things happen.
You need to have someone else do your bookkeeping so you can free yourself up to serve existing clients, attack business opportunities and develop your product, services and market.
Everything else is a drag on your time and should be delegated.
- You need to scale up.
Maybe you have someone handling your bookkeeping in house, but it’s too much for one person to handle alone. Outsourcing some or all of the bookkeeping to a remote bookkeeping and accounting services firm can help free up a good employee for more productive tasks – such as handling accounts receivable and collections, for example.
Outsourcing to a bookkeeping and accounting specialists can help you access more advanced bookkeeping and accounting capabilities that most smaller companies can’t afford to do in house. Few general administrators and assistants have the accounting-specific skills to generate the reports you need to make financial decisions.
If you’re experiencing rapid growth, outsourcing bookkeeping means you won’t have to spend valuable time hiring and training in-house staff – only to risk losing them to competing employers and having to start from scratch.
- One person is doing all your bookkeeping.
Many times we see small businesses relying too much on one person for all their internal bookkeeping tasks – with inadequate support, training or supervision. This can be quite risky, as it provides an opportunity for embezzlement or fraud – especially if the same individual doing the data entry also handles transactions and payment.
- Your staff bookkeeper has left the company.
When your in-house bookkeeper leaves, it’s often a smart move to outsource bookkeeping functions from that point on. It’s expensive and risky to carry full-time employees on the books. With virtual, cloud-based bookkeeping services, you only pay for what you need. Meanwhile you save on benefits costs and taxes, while sparing yourself the effort and expense of recruiting, hiring and training a new bookkeeper.
Need help?
Schedule a call with LedgersOnline and let us show you how we can help you free yourself and your senior managers from mundane, time-wasting bookkeeping tasks and let you focus on growing your business.
