Running a business is already a great challenge, especially for small and medium-sized business owners who also manage bookkeeping. In any type of business – big or small – managing the books is a vital aspect of ensuring the profitability of the business operations.
Bookkeeping and Business Success
Professional bookkeeping’s crucial role in business success lies in the fact that without it, many businesses, not just in Brisbane, will potentially suffer from monetary losses from failure to track their cash flows.
While many business owners can run their business while doing their own bookkeeping at the same time, it takes away hours of their day spent balancing their books instead of strategising for the growth of the business.
This is where professional bookkeepers come in. Whether the time spent in bookkeeping is a few hours in a week or a few hours each month, those hours can be better utilised by businesses towards working on their business potential.
A snapshot of the financial health of the company can also be viewed daily. When a decision has to be made, the books will be a reliable source of information. Overspending can be easily tracked, and the need for increasing sales can also be easily tracked.
Role Professional Bookkeepers Play in Business
Hiring a professional bookkeeper helps align the goals of owners and their employees by focusing more on the sales and business potential of the company rather than getting caught up with the recording and updating side demanded by bookkeeping.
With the employ of professional bookkeeping, these are the areas that are taken care of:
Accurate and Timely Data Recording
Knowing the financial performance and position of the business is essential in making an informed decision. Business owners make a myriad of operational and financial decisions daily to ensure the business’s survival.
With professional bookkeepers, all transactions are recorded and posted correctly to their respective accounts. They also make sure that transactions are recorded as they incur, providing a current picture of the overall health of the business.
Better Cash Flow Tracking
There are no better people who can look after the trend of sales and expenses than professional bookkeepers. They understand the ins and outs of your accounts receivable and accounts payable and can easily spot delinquent customers or unusual spending.
This will help business owners run their businesses more efficiently since they get a real-time overview of their cash flow. If there are monetary issues, this will immediately be communicated.
Tax Filing Preparation
Nobody wants to fall behind in their tax filings. Apart from hefty fines, the time spent preparing the books in time for tax filing can be stressful.
If business owners spend their time sitting down and sorting through their statements and receipts, they miss the time they could have spent scaling their businesses and exploring other business potentials.
Professional bookkeepers make the stressful tax preparation season feel like a breeze. When the books are ready, missed and incorrect tax filings can be avoided.
Make Informed Financial Decisions
One of the most effective ways to unlock the business potential of any company is to have accurate and updated books done through professional bookkeeping. With updated financial statements, any business will be able to rely on its books to make better-informed decisions.
With the right decisions, the company is better able to strategise and achieve its goals.
Importance of Hiring Professional Bookkeepers
Many argue the importance of “savings” if a business owner does not hire a bookkeeper. It may be true that the bookkeeping fees can be avoided but what many lose sight of is a whole list of benefits – in terms of money and much more.
Let’s break it down here:
Time Savings
Bookkeeping is more than just going through your receipts and entering them into an accounting system. You have to sit for hours and enter each transaction into the correct accounts.
Once all transactions are entered, you have to reconcile. This is where most of the work happens. If you do not regularly update your books, there is a higher possibility of spending additional hours looking for discrepancies until you finally balance your books.
If you hire professional bookkeeping, this headache is avoided. The time spent sorting through your receipts and balancing your books has a cost. It is missed opportunity when you could have done to grow your business potential.
Cost Savings
This cost is easy to quantify. If you miss a tax filing or you make an error in your tax filing, you have to pay hefty fines or penalties. Errors and late submissions can be avoided if you have professional bookkeeping on your side.
Additionally, books that are not regularly updated usually show long overdue receivables that will be hard to collect or overpayments that you can no longer take back.
All of these costs, when added up are a loss that no company should ever have to incur if they just had professional bookkeeping help to begin with.
Final Thoughts
There are many advantages of hiring professional bookkeepers to manage the books of businesses that go beyond time and cost savings. Above all, it is the opportunity to grow the business potential of the company by aligning all the efforts of the stakeholders towards their common goals.
