Business and accounting go hand-in-hand. There’s no way around not doing accounting, and the daily tracking of transactions happens with bookkeeping. However, with many startups and small businesses, a tremendous amount of the work day is focused on helping the business happen, grow and achieve sales.
Why Bookkeeping Isn’t Glamorous
Accounting becomes a bit of an afterthought because it doesn’t produce income; it’s a back-end activity that becomes an administrative cost or overhead. Ideally, sales cover this expense, but the business needs time on its core functions to make those sales happen. Bookkeeping takes away from that time, or becomes an expense to retain staff to do the same. The combination adds to the burden of a business’ start up and handicaps growth.
Most small businesses immediately choose one of two routes: hire a CPA to clean everything up at the end of the month or retain a part-time bookkeeper to handle tracking and input of all the paperwork.
While both these options technically work, they don’t produce great results, or they cost more than the service received. The better approach is to go online and retain the services of a business like Remote Quality Bookkeeping that is scalable to what the business needs at that moment.
The Benefits of Remote Bookkeeping
First off, related cost is contained much better with a remote bookkeeping service. A small business is only paying for what it actually needs versus retaining staff or professional services on retainer or payroll. Second, remote bookkeeping services can scale up quickly when demand is higher, and they can scale down too.
This provides the correct level of response and again helps with cost efficiency. Third, remote bookkeeping provides ready staff trained in standard bookkeeping who are computer savvy and easily work on the Internet. With hired staff, a small business has to spend time training up a person who may not have all the requisite skills needed on day one. Fourth, with the right software, everything can be compatible and seamless between in-office tools and remote support.
It’s important to note, however, bookkeepers are not functioning as accountants. There will still need to be a role that compiles all the ledger information, checks it for bottom line accuracy and validates the generated reports.
That said, remote bookkeeping can do quite a bit of the manual work involved to make the reporting side of the picture very easy as well as time-efficient for short deadlines. If a business needs to add accounting services, then it should think about the role of a CPA or an in-house accountant per se.
Modern Resources for a Modern World
The last few years have made it very clear how easy it is to run a business online, especially in regard to administrative functions. Small businesses are incredibly smart to leverage this cost-effective approach, especially with bookkeeping needs for daily financial tracking. It’s easy to start up, easy to maintain, and the results are just as reliable.