When you do your own bookkeeping and accounting, you will never achieve the ability to get the financial insight to make great business decisions. To gain business insight, you must have the accounting essentials and financial fundamentals covered. Doing this will take time and expertise – commodities on short supply for many businesses. Outsourcing your accounting will be the solution to ensure you can enjoy both time and the insights promised by our accountants.
Insights Start with the Accounting Essentials
Bill pay, invoicing, payroll, and other accounting essentials are tedious tasks. Yet these tedious tasks are the foundation for getting the right information you need to make good business decisions. If you have been struggling with time or expertise to do the basics, gaining business insight will be hard to achieve. This is why we recommend outsourcing your accounting.
Financial Fundamentals are the Next Step
The next step towards gaining business insight is getting the financial fundamentals right. Financial fundamentals include proper bookkeeping, reconciliations, and controls that ensure your information is accurate. If these first two steps are done right, generating good reports and other information is easy. If done wrong, all the financial reports in the world are useless or at best misleading.
Now Gain Business Insight
With good financial processes and execution, you’re ready to gain business insight. What insights might you gather? Start by asking some basic questions like:
- Are my accounts receivable increasing or decreasing?
- How long does it take me to get paid?
- Which customers are or are not profitable?
From this point, you can make informed decisions to optimize or increase your business. Once you start getting answers to good questions, you’ll find more will arise – some of which are very specific to your industry. In technology businesses, such questions might include:
- What’s my burn rate and when will I need to raise more capital?
- Can I afford that expensive developer?
- Will the sales volume from a partner make up for the margin I give up?
Summary
If you are bogged down in your books and not getting enough from your accounting, it’s time to stop doing your own accounting. You only gain business insight by getting the dependent activities right and if you probably don’t have enough time to do this.
