You need to keep in mind that, as a business owner, you don’t have to do everything yourself. That’s the reason why you have employees as well as outsourced bookkeeping services. You might need to oversee everything that’s going on and make sure that all the necessary tasks are being performed, but you don’t need to do everything yourself. If you’re unsure about whether you still need to hire a bookkeeper, here are the signs to look out for:
You’re running a business in order to make money, and you need to collect what your clients owe you. If you let them get away with it, many clients will postpone payments. It’s not that they mean to cheat you out of your hard-earned money. It’s just that everyone has a shortage of ready cash. So if they can postpone making payments, they will.
One of the things a bookkeeper will do for you is make sure that your clients are paying up on time so that you don’t run short of cash yourself. This will enable you to buy raw materials, pay your employees on time, make rent and utilities etc. You won’t be scrambling for cash at the end of every month.
As this article from All Business states, “Small business owners often pay for expenses out of pocket or with their own personal credit card, then make the mistake of failing to track these expenses.” There are also many other ways in which your own money might get mixed up with your business’ money. At times, business expenses may come out of your personal account and vice versa. High-level executives within your firm might also make the same mistake.
If you see that there’s a lot of confusion about where your business expenses are coming from and there’s no paper trail, that means that you need a bookkeeper.
You might be scrupulous about taking care of the big expenses in your business. After all, you have to pay rent, you have to pay your employees and you have to pay utilities. You might also have to buy raw materials. These are big expenses.
But what happens when you or one of your execs takes a high-level client out to dinner? Do you take that money from petty cash? Are you putting it on your own credit card? Do you or your execs remember to take the receipts and save them so that the books can be reconciled at the end of the month?
You might not think too much of small expenses at first. But the truth is that small expenses add up in the long run. And they can be claimed as deductions when tax time comes around. So it’s a good idea to have a paper trail of everything.
Hiring an online bookkeeping service will help to make sure that you and your employees are on point when it comes to keeping track of small expenses. At the end of every month, you’ll know exactly where all your money went. When you look at your books, you’ll also be able to see when you need to cut down on certain expenditures which aren’t serving any purpose.
Contact us for more ways to figure out when your business needs to hire a bookkeeper.