Is Your Accounting Staff Able to Take You to the Next Level?
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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.
Typically a business owner hires a person they know and trust, maybe a sister or a neighbor, to do their bookkeeping. This person may not even have a bookkeeping background, they just have a greater aptitude for it than the owner.
Do You Need More Skilled Accounting Staff?
As your business continues to grow, it stands to reason that your business’s requirements and needs grow as well. It may be true that at some point, the bookkeeper you hired is no longer capable of doing the job. This is because as your business expands, transactions will become more complicated, which in turn can make the books completely out of the realm of your current bookkeeper’s skill. If the bookkeeper is just focused on keeping up with basic tasks, the finer details get neglected.
For example, profits could be ignored, cash not managed. It may also be that you’re not building relationships with lenders you need to. In short, you’re letting opportunities for your business to grow slip away. If you as the owner know how to present the business to an investor or bank, your numbers might still let you down if they haven’t been done properly. This can negatively impact your entire organization.
Relief for the Business Owner
In fact, many owners don’t consider themselves knowledgeable in finance or accounting, and don’t have a formal background in it. This can leave them poorly equipped to properly supervise a bookkeeper, much less train them. In addition, they may not be able to handle issues like forecasting, controlling costs, and analyzing profitability.
A Qualified CFO or controller can help in two important ways:
* He or she can train and support your existing accounting staff, so that they operate at their best. This could include creating procedure manuals, turning some processes over to automation, and reorganizing books that are disorganized presently, so that the bookkeeper can start over fresh.
* 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.
It takes unnecessary pressure off the business owner, who is freed up to focus on running the business. And the bookkeeper tends to thrive with training and clear expectations in place.
Efficiency Increases Your Bottom Line
Your accounting operations directly impact the profitability and growth of your company. For example, when you’re processing accounts receivables efficiently, payments are collected more promptly, cash flow evens out and banks view your business as being more credible.
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.
