Bookkeeping services are not just a luxury. They are actually one of the most practical services any business, new or established, can invest in. Three of the most remarkable benefits are time management, loss prevention, and increased potential for profit.
Time Management
Bookkeeping services allow you to hand off one of the most time consuming tasks in any industry to a reliable third party. Few people choose to go into business because they are especially good at handling complex spreadsheets and financial reports. While this is typically seen as a necessary evil, the fact is that it consumes a lot of valuable resources, especially if you aren’t an expert. After all, the longer you take to handle bookkeeping chores, the more time and wages you lose.
It is more economical and practical to hand this work off to a trained professional. Hiring your own bookkeeper is a massive expense that few businesses can afford. As an employee, that bookkeeper would also consume far more potential profit than a bookkeeping service. You don’t have to pay for a service’s health benefits, retirement plan, or vacation. A remote service also does not require much, if any, oversight. You can check over your books at your leisure. Since they are remote, you don’t have to pay to keep the office open while they work, either. The more you examine the benefit of time management and its associated benefits, the clearer bookkeeping services’ superiority grow.
Loss Prevention
Human error is an inescapable problem in any industry. Bookkeeping, however, sees much steeper costs for those errors. A single miscalculation or forgotten entry could result in tax fines, lawsuits, or even bankruptcy. Bookkeeping is never a non-essential task. Every month, you must ensure your profits exceed your expenses, and you must make sure you’ll have the money to pay each vendor, employee, and landlord on time. Failing to pay any one of these bills could have huge consequences for your business’s health and longevity. Even the healthiest businesses need to be careful how and when they make investments or other extra expenditures. Understanding the flow and timing of your resources is everything, and that is the whole point of bookkeeping.
Bookkeeping services come with far less risk than self-managed bookkeeping. When you handle your own books, you bear all the potential losses and consequences on your own. It’s unlikely you’ll trust anyone else to regularly check your numbers, so you have limited support to help catch errors. The busier you are, the more errors are likely to appear. A bookkeeping service provides more than one set of eyes to review and double-check your records. Any reliable service also recognizes its responsibility to maintain essentially perfect records, and they offer guarantees and other policies to protect clients. These go a long way to ensure businesses are not held solely responsible for errors. More importantly, the same policies drastically reduce the chances of such errors ever occurring in the first place.
Increased Potential for Profit
We discussed earlier the savings advantages associated with bookkeeping services. You don’t have to lose your own valuable time or pay for employees to do the work for you. Bookkeeping services’ value doesn’t end with savings, however. They also offer a significantly improved range of possibilities for profit. Many of these reasons tie into points we’ve already made, but they’re worth addressing on their own. For instance, when you aren’t breaking your brain over a bookkeeping system you only vaguely understand, you can dedicate a lot more time to studying results and analyzing reports. The best bookkeeping software gives you a lot of rudimentary BI tools that you can wield to your advantage. You can only do that, however, if you have the time. Cutting out bookkeeping work saves more time than pretty much any other single task.
Reduction of errors also improves your chances of making a profit. Again, potential fee savings aside, you can actually make more if your books are detailed and accurate. They let you see exactly what’s going on with your finances. Which employees are the most valuable? What traits to they have that you should look for in future hires? What customer base brings the most profit? Are you paying more for utilities than you need to be? What time of month do you make the most, and how can you take advantage of that period? Bookkeeping gives you insight, and the more detailed and accurate that insight is, the more benefits you can reap from it.
There are many more reasons to use a bookkeeping service, but these three reasons alone cover a host of the most pressing needs of any business. Bookkeeping services help you save money. They also help you make money, and they’ll offer better protection for your finances.
