Is Your Accounting Staff Able to Take You to the Next Level?
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.
Help for the Business Owner
It’s true that many business owners don’t think they are versed in accounting or finance, and don’t have a formal background in these types of skills. This can leave them with little skill and knowledge so that they can’t properly supervise the bookkeeper they’ve hired, much less train them. It’s also true that they might not be able to handle issues like financial forecasting, keeping costs under control, and analyzing profitability.
A Qualified CFO or controller can help in two important ways:
* By training and supporting your existing accounting staff, so they can operate at peak performance-this might include creating procedure manuals, automating some processes, and cleaning up books that are in disarray so that the bookkeeper can start over with a fresh slate.
* In addition, the CFO or controller can perform tasks that the business owner or bookkeeper are not qualified to perform, such as preparing and analyzing financial statements, putting together business plans, making out budgets or making cash flow analyses.
This helps the business owner, too, because he or she then has the time to actually focus on running the business. In turn, the bookkeeper also tends to do much better once he or she is properly trained and has clear expectations that he or she can follow.
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.
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