Is Your Accounting Staff Capable of Taking You Farther?
Margot Brandlin
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.
Are You Ready to Bolster Your 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.
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.
Relief 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.
If you hire a qualified CFO or controller, this can help you in two 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.
Efficient Processes Increase 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.
About the Author:
|
