A CPA explains when to outsource bookkeeping versus hire in-house. Outsourcing works if the cost is less than the owner's time and that time gets used productively. Switch to in-house when the business grows complex enough that you need deeper insight into operations, like multi-location gyms where each site has different patterns.
Should you do your bookkeeping in-house? Should you outsource it? When do you know which method is right? At the end of the day, the answer is always going to be what is your preference and what gives you the best information so you can make decisions. With the accounting. Certainly we're fans of, as a bookkeeping firm who— accounting firm that offers bookkeeping services, we are a fan of having that outsourced to us. We understand how that should look. We're efficient at it. And so you may feel like my response here is going to be biased, but I promise I'm going to give you my truth. Um, but so anytime you can leverage your money that saves you time, that can be a good thing for the growth of your business. Now, I'm not saying spend money to give yourself back time. I'm using the word leverage because if you're spending money to save yourself time, it's super critical that you use the time you saved On higher-value activities. So while bookkeeping is super important and we love it, it's probably not the best use of your time because you can just get the end result handed to you. Here are the financials, here are the metrics, and then you can make business decisions off of those. In fact, you can then direct your accountant to tell you the numbers that you specifically want to see and how frequently you want to see them. If you're just spending money because you don't want to do it, and then you pay money to do that, and then you're not doing anything else— look, if you have the cash to do that, great. There's nothing wrong with that either. But if you're trying to grow your business and cash use is important and you want to make sure every dollar is productive, you need to make sure you, you are utilizing your time to do those higher-level activities like Sitting down and having an on-ramp session with a coach, onboarding a new employee, bringing on a new prospective client, having the meetings with them, goal setting with your members. I'm sure you can think of 100 other things that are more valuable for your time than sitting down and doing your books. I do believe, though, that lots of businesses can get to a point. Where it is important that they keep the bookkeeping in-house. They wouldn't be doing— the business owner wouldn't be doing the work themselves, but they would have someone in-house who's a full-time team member that's going to do that for them. I think there are definitely places where that happens, and I've had conversations with many clients over the years that I've been doing this where I'm like, look, we got you to this point, and now based on what I think you need to make really good, better decisions with your accounting, you probably need someone full-time in-house who's going to do this. Because a full-time in-house team member will always be able to have more insight into the flow of your business than an outsourced bookkeeping company will ever be able to have. Like for us, while we understand the gym industry, You know, when we're doing the books, if a gym gets to a certain point where they've got stuff going on, they're big enough, maybe they have crazy amount of locations and each location is doing different things and there's intricacies there, an in-house bookkeeper is gonna better know the differences between those locations. We just aren't gonna have that information as an outsourced bookkeeping company. So when is it right? When you can afford to do it and you know what you're gonna Use your time that you save with the money that you're paying to save that time. That's a good time to outsource it. If you get to the point where you feel like there's more metrics you could be doing or more sort of financial or non-financial data that could be gathered that will then help you make better— that will help you make better business decisions, you can bring that in-house and have a full-time dedicated team member. that does that for you. So I hope that helps with some guidance on the way I, as a CPA, look at bookkeeping services. Profitability is a choice. Be financially resilient.
