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Is Your Accounting Staff Able to Take You to the Next Level?

Author: MargotBrandlin
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Word Count: 550
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When you start a company you're not thinking about the skills and talents your employees will need years down the road. You're focused on survival, and that often means hiring just about anyone who will take the leap of faith with you at the pay you're able to offer.

As oftentimes happens, a business owner hires someone they already know and trust, such as a neighbor or sister, to do the bookkeeping for them. Now, it's true that this person might not even have experience in bookkeeping, but they just are more skilled at it than the owner.

Have You Outgrown Your Accounting 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.

It may be that profitability is being neglected, that your cash is not being managed. Or, you may not be building relationships with top lenders you need to. In short, you're not making means available for your business to grow. Even if you as the owner know how to present the business to an investor or a bank, your numbers might not be reliable if they haven't been done properly. This can end up literally negatively impacting your entire organization.

Relief for the Business Owner

It's true that many business owners don't think they are versed in accounting or finance, and don't have a formal background in these types of skills. This can leave them with little skill and knowledge so that they can't properly supervise the bookkeeper they've hired, much less train them. It's also true that they might not be able to handle issues like financial forecasting, keeping costs under control, and analyzing profitability.

However, if you hire someone who's a qualified CFO or controller, this can help you in a couple of ways:

* The CFO or controller can support and train your existing accounting 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.

* In addition, the CFO or controller can perform tasks that the business owner or bookkeeper are not qualified to perform, such as preparing and analyzing financial statements, putting together business plans, making out budgets or 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 Processing Adds to Your Bottom Line

How your accounting operations are run makes a direct impact on how profitable and able to grow your company is. As an example, when you process accounts receivable efficiently, you collect payments more promptly, cash flow comes in more evenly, and banks can see your business has more credible.

If you don't think your accounting staff can take your company to where it should go, perhaps it's time to call upon a professional accounting service.

About the Author

About the Author: Margot Brandlin writes for OWL Bookkeeping and CFO Services. Owl Bookkeeping supplies Businesses in Minneapolis Quickbooks implementation and training.