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Can Your Accounting Staff Take You To The Next Level?
By Margot Brandlin
When you're just starting out, you're not necessarily thinking about what your employees are going to bring to your business long-term. You simply want survival at first, and sometimes that means that you'll hire anyone who can do the job and is willing to work at what you can afford to pay.
Typically a business owner hires a person they know and trust, maybe a sister or a neighbor, to do their bookkeeping. This person may not even have a bookkeeping background, they just have a greater aptitude for it than the owner.
Do You Need More Skilled Staff?
As your business continues to expand, so, too, will your business's requirements and needs grow. There may come a time when the bookkeeper you hired can no longer do the job. As your business grows, transactions, too, will get more complex, and this can make the books undoable for some without that level of skill. And if the bookkeeper is just focused on keeping up with basic tasks, more finely oriented details get neglected.
No one is managing cash, monitoring profitability, or building relationships with lenders-no one is paving the way for growth. Even if the owner knew how to present the business to a bank or investor, the numbers might not be reliable. It can end up literally handicapping the entire organization.
Relief for the Business Owner
Many business owners don't have an or finance background themselves-leaving them ill-equipped to properly train and supervise a bookkeeper,
much less tackle the bigger issues like cash forecasting, cost control and profitability analysis.
If you hire a qualified CFO or controller, this can help you in two ways:
* The CFO or controller can support and train your existing staff, so that they can operate at optimal levels. This might include putting together procedural manuals, automating some processes, and reorganizing disorganized books, so that the bookkeeper can have a fresh start.
* The CFO can perform duties outside of the bookkeeper's or owner's expertise, such as analyzing and preparing financial statements, putting together business plans, determining budgets and making cash flow analyses.
This can take pressure off of the business owner, who is then able to have the time and energy to focus on running the business. The bookkeeper in turn tends to do much better once trained properly and with clear expectations to follow.
Efficient Processes Increase Your Bottom Line
Efficiently running your operations directly impacts your profitability, in your favor. For example, if you process accounts receivable effectively, you can collect payments much more promptly, which in turn means that your cash flow is much more even. This in turn means that your bank sees this and you have much more credibility with them.
If you don't feel confident that your staff is poised to take your company to the next level, it's time to call in a professional service.
Bookkeeper and Writer, Margot Brandlin writes and works for OWL Bookkeeping and CFO Services. Owl Bookkeeping supplies Businesses in Minneapolis Quickbooks implementation and training.