Consider Outsourcing Your Small Business Accounting
As a small business owner, you are well aware of the headaches that come with running a profitable enterprise. Staffing, marketing, production: Your job is a constant juggling act of responsibilities. Where the rubber hits the road, so to speak, is your balance sheet. And that is yet another important task.
Keeping track of accounts receivable/payable, bank reconciliations, and corporate taxes are just a part of the small business accounting pie, but a very big part. As their business expands, small business owners come to the point where they have to consider either hiring a full-time onsite accountant or retaining an outside accounting firm to balance their sheets. You might be at that point yourself.
The reasons for hiring an outside accounting service are many. The primary is the cost benefit. Hiring an experienced CPA full-time can easily cost you thirty-five dollars an hour in salary, and that’s not counting infrastructure costs and benefits. On the other hand, outsourcing would drop that hourly rate to as little as ten dollars.
Flexibility is another reason. Your staff accountant sees his workload ebb and flow with production schedules, billing cycles, and tax filings, which can lead to resource issues come crunch time. An outsourced accounting service spreads the increased deliverables among its dedicated staff of accountants. Even strict deadlines can be met more easily.
By hiring an accountant service, you also ensure continuity. Your staff accountant can leave with little notice, giving you no time to train her replacement. An accounting service has procedures in place to ensure an easy hand-off between its staff accountants. The “institutional knowledge” of your business’ books and accounting practices don’t rest in the hands of one at-will employee but with a contracted agency whose professional reputation relies on competency and confidentiality.
As you parse the difficult decision of whether or not to hire a full-time onsite accountant, it might be worth your time to consider the alternative.
