Unlocking Success: Why Small Business Owners Should Outsource Bookkeeping & Accounting

So let's talk about why we should outsource accounting and bookkeeping. But before we get into that, let's actually talk about the difference between the two. So bookkeeping is really the ongoing, regular, day to day transactions and financial information that comes into a business. All of those transactions being pulled together and reported inside a bookkeeping solution or a financial solution. What that does, it compiles all the data so that you can see exactly what's going on in your business. It may include payroll, may include reconciling, it may include actually looking at monthly reports of where the business is at. But that's more of a bookkeeping related function. On the accounting side, it becomes more of a high level, the analysis of what's going on in the business, what's working, what's not working. Are we looking at budgets, are we looking at forecasts, financial reporting, tax filing? The accounting side of financial information is a little bit more highly specialized. And really when you look at outsourcing, that there's a lot more expertise that's available than you could ever really bring in. So from an accounting perspective, you should be looking at it. Even if you're an accountant, you should be looking at finding somebody who does this every single day, does these filings every single day, not just once a year. There's so much value in that expertise and in that guidance. But let's talk about bookkeeping and accounting, maybe more in general. Why would there be benefits in outsourcing any of this instead of bringing it in? One of the challenges that we see in our business, we work with about a thousand different business owners. When we bring a bookkeeper in and we hire a bookkeeper in a particular business, there's sometimes turnover, right? Especially as a small business, when someone comes in, they start learning the systems, how all of the bookkeeping works, and then they decide they're going to move on. It takes a long time to train somebody and get them up to speed. If you were to outsource your bookkeeping function instead, the organization has that knowledge. So even if someone within the organization were to transition, someone else can come in quickly and fill that void so that there's no lost time, no lost information. And that training and that ability to keep everything up to date happens instantaneously. And it's not your issue as a business owner, it's for the outsourcing agency. For us, we have about 30 to 40 bookkeepers on staff. If we have a client, we've documented how it works and how we can come in and bring another team Member in should a transition need to happen. Other reasons why we want to look at outsourcing efficiency for you as a business owner. If you outsource this, you're going to get a lot of your time back. A lot of times we see business owners spending significant amount of time doing their own bookkeeping and really not knowing what they're doing. They spend a lot of time trying to figure it out when they could outsource it for what I'm going to refer to as a nominal amount, because really that's buying back your time to be able to focus on the important things inside your business. Quality is another reason that you want to outsource this sort of function to a professional group. The quality and the training inside a professional outsource group is so much more enhanced than what you can bring in for one individual that's internal inside your organization. For, for our team, we have weekly trainings so that our bookkeepers are up to date and they know exactly what's going on in the industry. They've seen and we've learned from each other, from different challenges in different files and different organizations, so that we're always proactively looking for the next solution. You don't get that if you have one person internally who's doing this on your behalf. Really, the sleep at night factor is a huge component of it as well. Knowing that everything is being done right and that the outsourced organization is responsible for that level of quality. A little bit different when you're responsible for doing it yourself, you're not quite sure. You lose sleep at night because you're not certain that you've done things in the right way. When you can rely on a reputable organization to do this for you, you can sleep at night and focus once again on those important things. Lots of reasons why outsourcing this is a major benefit, really. If you're focused on building and scaling a large organization, this is a very scalable factor. If you need 2, 3, 4 bookkeepers to come in and keep up using an outsourced agency, they already know your organization. They can scale that up at a fast pace as well. Listen, if you're a business owner, outsourcing your bookkeeping should be one of the first things you actually do inside your business because the expertise and the knowledge outside of your organization is going to be much higher and it can help support you in scaling and growing a successful organization.