Is Your Accounting Staff Able to Take You to the Next Level?
When your company is just beginning, you’re not necessarily thinking about the talents and skills your employees are going to need in the years to come. At first, you just focus on surviving, and that sometimes means that you’re willing to hire just about anyone who will work at the pay level you can afford.
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.
Do You Need More Skilled 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.
No one is managing cash, monitoring profitability, or building relationships with lenders-no one is paving the way for growth. Even if the owner knew how to present the business to a bank or investor, the numbers might not be reliable. It can end up literally handicapping the entire organization.
Help for the Business Owner
Many business owners don’t have an accounting or finance background themselves-leaving them ill-equipped to properly train and supervise a bookkeeper, much less tackle the bigger issues like cash forecasting, cost control and profitability analysis.
However, if you hire someone who’s a qualified CFO or controller, this can help you in a couple of ways:
* By training and supporting your existing accounting staff, so they can operate at peak performance-this might include creating procedure manuals, automating some processes, and cleaning up books that are in disarray so that the bookkeeper can start over with a fresh slate.
* The CFO can perform duties outside of the bookkeeper’s or owner’s expertise, such as analyzing and preparing financial statements, putting together business plans, determining budgets and making cash flow analyses.
This helps the business owner, too, because he or she then has the time to actually focus on running the business. In turn, the bookkeeper also tends to do much better once he or she is properly trained and has clear expectations that he or she can follow.
Efficiency Increases Your Bottom Line
Efficiently running your accounting operations directly impacts your profitability, in your favor. For example, if you process accounts receivable effectively, you can collect payments much more promptly, which in turn means that your cash flow is much more even. This in turn means that your bank sees this and you have much more credibility with them.
If you question your accounting staff’s ability to take you to the next level, you might want to consider calling upon a professional accounting service.