The job of a bookkeeper is to provide accurate information about your business, make financial reports, and, in some cases, even get involved with the strategic development of your enterprise.
Bookkeeping services are detrimental to the success of any business, regardless of its size. However, when you’re a small business, it’s quite hard to prioritize which services are worth paying for. No matter what you base your criteria on, bookkeeping will always have its place on this list.
With the help of virtual bookkeeping, the costs of hiring bookkeeping services are a lot lower, the whole setup is a lot more convenient, and there’s access to a whole new set of perks. Here’s why virtual bookkeepers are worth hiring, as well as a couple of more ways to justify this mandatory expense.
Saving Your Own Time
Bookkeeping services are detrimental to the survival of your business but they are a tricky thing to untangle. On the one hand, they seem fairly simple – tracking and noting down all the transactions. However, things are not so simple and you risk wasting hours of your time, as well as making countless mistakes, should you make an attempt to handle them yourself.
A professional is not always someone who can do things that you cannot. Instead, they’re people who can do this same thing with less effort, in a shorter time span, and with a lower likelihood of an error. You have your own responsibilities, duties, and fields of expertise. Why not focus on what you do best?
The very nature of virtual outsourcing is something that saves time. Think about having a traditional bookkeeper on a retainer. Would you save all the receipts and drop them off once per week? How much time would that take? Instead, you can send them an image, update the expense in a cloud-based app, or just take a photo of a business-related receipt.
To make the long story short, even old-school bookkeepers are handling their business mostly in the digital world. Why not take this concept a step further?
Cost-saving
There are several ways in which bookkeepers can help your small business save substantial funds. First of all, it’s important to compare the cost of virtual bookkeeping to hiring a full-time bookkeeper. Sure, an in-house bookkeeper would provide you with higher value (in terms of time spent on your case), however, how much bookkeeping work do you really need as a small business. With a virtual bookkeeper, you have the privilege of hiring the exact amount of work capacity that you need and paying for it proportionally.
Second, professional bookkeepers allow you to avoid making a mistake in your ledger or missing a vital payment. This may result in fees, penalties, and, in some of the most extreme cases, even lawsuits. Needless to say, all of this can be quite costly. With a virtual bookkeeper, you can resolve this once and for all.
Efficiency is also a money-saving concept and by hiring professionals equipped and trained with all the latest bookkeeping tools, you stand to vastly improve your bookkeeping services. Financial statements prepared by virtual bookkeepers with these tools are far superior to what they were in the past. This brings us to the next topic…
Utilizing Latest Technology
Bookkeeping tools and apps are designed to be simple. This way, they can allow people with no previous experience in accounting to handle their own bookkeeping and accounting. However, with the help of a trained professional, the full potential of these platforms might come to the forefront.
The best thing about bookkeeping technology is the fact that you have real-time feedback on all financial processes taking place. This means that you can check every edit that is made on these records. The problem, however, lies in the fact that this is time-consuming (which is the exact problem you originally intended to solve). Still, just the ability to check anything at any time serves as a powerful deterrent and drastically reduces the likelihood of fraud.
Forecasting and accuracy are critical bookkeeping processes and technology can effectively ensure that you get far superior results here.
Lastly, all these cloud-based platforms allow you access to talent across the region. Seeing as how you’re no longer narrowing down your search to your nearest vicinity, you get a much greater talent pool.
New View on Outsourcing
There are so many misconceptions about outsourcing which makes a lot of people cautious when it comes to seeking the services of a virtual bookkeeper. For instance, outsourced doesn’t always mean offshored. In fact, when it comes to accounting issues, you want to outsource to someone who comes from your region, seeing as how tax laws and regulations differ between countries.
Second, virtual bookkeeping doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re hiring a single person. Instead, you can hire an accounting agency that offers online accounting and virtual bookkeeping services. This way, you’re getting the service and you’re paying for the service that you’re getting but the work is performed by a team instead of an individual.
The biggest concern about outsourcing is the one regarding limited security. Now, while it is true that we’re dealing with sensitive information, it’s absurd to assume that your enterprise’s IT security is superior to that of an accounting agency or virtual accounting platform.
One of the greatest misconceptions is that you’ll have less control. Nowadays, you have real-time access to all the necessary accounting information. In fact, if your virtual bookkeeper or your accounting agency tries to dismiss you in any way, this is a massive red flag.
Scalability
As we’ve already mentioned, you pay for the services that you receive. From the very start, you have the privilege of negotiating the package of services that you’ll receive. With some agencies, you already have packages designed for small businesses. The charm is that you can switch a package whenever you feel the need for it.
This is great for a number of reasons. If your business shrinks and you’re forced to cut losses, you can temporarily cut ties (although your bookkeeping is the last department that you should suspend). If your enterprise expands and your workload increases, you can just switch to a superior plan. Just having this option provides you with flexibility.
Hiring new people is always difficult and if your business were to expand, you would have to hire more people, manage their payrolls, as well as manage them, in general. By outsourcing, you’re outsourcing the entire function. If you’re outsourcing to an agency and one of their employees (who was in charge of your company) quits, it’s their job to find a replacement, not yours.
Overall, choosing to look for virtual bookkeeping means future-proofing your business. This is especially the case seeing as how your bookkeeping capacities will grow alongside your business.
In Conclusion
In the end, bookkeeping is one of the most important cogs in the machine that is your business. Without it, nothing will work. Remember that the primary objective of any business is to make money but every piece of income and expense needs to be noted down. By having a virtual bookkeeper, this issue will be resolved in the simplest, most effective manner possible.