All of you small and medium-sized business owners know that keeping your business running requires spinning a lot of different plates all at once. Unfortunately, that means that good bookkeeping practices are sometimes allowed to wobble, or even fall. However, if you’ve outsourced accounting tasks you’ll improve your chances to keep all those plates up and running at the same time.
Outsourced accounting benefits
The blows to your bottom line can be big in a number of ways – government penalties, loss of contracts, accounts not collected in time, over or under-orders of inventory, and so on.
Everybody knows that they need to keep the books up to date, but it can be remarkably tedious, a real time sink, and for a lot of people, just a soul-draining bummer.
Oddly enough, your dislike for working the books can actually end up putting your business in a strong financial position. The following benefits you gain from using a virtual accountant can add up to a lot of saved time and money which will build up your opportunities for expansion.
Chuck the bookkeeping blues
Don’t underestimate the effect of your emotional state on your business. If you have other employees, they’re going to be affected by you, tinging their own attitudes towards getting work done. And all of this negativity gets passed on in some degree to your customers or clients.
But if you’ve outsourced accounting work to your overseas team all you need to do is collect the necessary info, and then pass it along. You can even designate an employee to act as your overseas funnel (something we recommend as part of your workflow to increase efficiency).
Save time
Outsourced accounting tasks save you immense amounts of time. If you’re still doing your own books, time your next session. Multiply that by how many times you have to sit down and do any sort of accounting work in a month.
Now imagine having all of that time back to work on customer relations, marketing, improving and/or expanding your menu of services, doing philanthropy work, etc. All of that time saved via outsourced accounting tasks translates directly into at least a chance at increased profits and expansion opportunities for your business.
In other words, you’ll get to choose how to spend that time instead of having it dictated to you by your spreadsheets.
Be a more informed decision-maker
Since you’re not bogged down in the nitty-gritty of getting the numbers right, you’ll have the chance to have a much better idea of what the numbers mean to your business.
Instead of spending the time getting your bookkeeping right, outsourced accounting tasks gives you the time to recognise how to use your monthly bottom lines to benefit your business.
For example, you now have the time to fiddle around with your pricing. If you wanted to up your monthly gross to X dollars you’ll have the info necessary to figure out if you can do it via a slight price bump – how many customers lost to the price bump will be covered by the increased estimated gross?
Or perhaps you’ll recognise that a particular employee requires an astounding number of sales just to cover their cost before you start to make a profit.
Maybe you’ll be able to note that you’ve been slack in collecting accounts, and that slack is costing you Y dollars a month and Z dollars per year.
Are you losing a dollar to save a dime?
It’s completely understandable that a small or medium-sized business owner would be hesitant to pay someone for outsourced accounting work when they’re working on a shoestring budget just to survive.
However, those business owners need to sit down and figure out if they’re losing much more than just the dollar-and-cents cost of an overseas team member. How much time per month are they losing? Are they making costly bookkeeping errors? Are they mired in details when they should be looking at the big picture?
How much is saving some fees really costing your business?
