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.
Have You Outgrown Your Accounting Staff?
As your business continues to expand, so, too, will your business's requirements and needs grow. There may come a time when the bookkeeper you hired can no longer do the job. As your business grows, transactions, too, will get more complex, and this can make the books undoable for some without that level of skill. And if the bookkeeper is just focused on keeping up with basic tasks, more finely oriented details get neglected.
It may be that profitability is being neglected, that your cash is not being managed. Or, you may not be building relationships with top lenders you need to. In short, you're not making means available for your business to grow. Even if you as the owner know how to present the business to an investor or a bank, your numbers might not be reliable if they haven't been done properly. This can end up literally negatively impacting 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.
* 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.
This can take pressure off of the business owner, who is then able to have the time and energy to focus on running the business. The bookkeeper in turn tends to do much better once trained properly and with clear expectations to follow.
Efficient Processing Adds to Your Bottom Line
Your accounting operations directly impact the profitability and growth of your company. For example, when you're processing accounts receivables efficiently, payments are collected more promptly, cash flow evens out and banks view your business as being more credible.
If you don't think your accounting staff can take your company to where it should go, perhaps it's time to call upon a professional accounting service.
Article Source: http://www.orbitaloc.com/
About the Author: Margot Brandlin writes and works for OWL Bookkeeping and CFO Services. Owl Offers Businesses in Minneapolis Quickbooks implementation and training.
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Article Title: Is Your Accounting Staff Able to Take You to the Next Level?
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