The end of the tax season is a great reminder that you need to get away from your stack of spreadsheets and back to the tasks that will attract and retain customers—the real reason you started that small business.
Whether you run a start-up or an established business, it’s also likely that you simply prefer to spend your time on your product or service and marketing. Not financial spreadsheets.
The cost of doing business the old way
The New York Times tells the story of Michelle VanAllsburg, a hair salon owner who essentially worked for free for eight years and was on the verge of selling her profitable salon because she never had any income. Why? The author told Ms. VanAllsburg: “You should have made a profit of $32,000. The fact that you don’t have the cash means you have a cash flow problem, which is different than not making a profit.”
She is not alone. Bloomberg Businessweek reports that GoDaddy’s recent survey of 600 business owners had eye-opening results: “40 percent of small business owners labeled bookkeeping and taxes the most unpleasant part of owning a small business.”
Bloomberg Businessweek cites one reason they feel this way: “more than half still use spreadsheets—or paper and pencil—to track company finances….”
You may believe that you cannot really afford—in terms of cash or time—to hire a full-time accountant, or spend huge sums on new accounting technology and the training to use it. So you do it all—tracking income and expenses, planning for taxes, trying (and maybe failing) to figure out cash flows, and handling .
Ease and benefits of a Virtual Accounting Department
As Bloomberg Businessweek advises, consider outsourcing to a trusted professional accounting service. Here’s why:
- The virtual accounting department becomes a true partner, collaborating with you on your strategic business planning and then managing the financials—forecasting and cash flows included—so that you can focus on what you do best.
- The best financial partnerships come with financial technology that makes sense for your size business. Typically that will mean cloud-based accounting tools that support, rather than overwhelm, your business needs, yet are simple to learn.
- The latest financial technology also can be accessible on any device so that you and your new partner can access your accounting information simultaneously wherever you are.
- The new cloud-based systems are agile, so that when you make product or pricing changes, the software changes are easily managed.
- Compliance is always a special headache for small business owners. Fortunately, the best new financial management tools are equipped to ensure that compliance issues are easily taken care of.
- A Virtual Accounting Department requires no new hiring commitments. Your business receives just the right amount of financial support for its size, and that support can grow with you as your business grows.
Prioritizing your time
As a small business owner, your time may be your biggest asset. So it makes good sense to focus that asset on your product and your customers.
Turning to a secure, trusted Virtual Accounting Department to handle your business’s financial management allows you to free up your time to do just that.
Simple Bookkeeping Solutions is here to help answer any questions about virtual accounting departments and cloud-based accounting for your business.
For a look at how we can help meet your business’s financial accounting needs—now and into the future—please contact us.