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If your business is still on the smaller side, you might imagine – at least first – that you can handle your own bookkeeping responsibilities. After all, small business owners are highly resourceful, and hiring a bookkeeper might seem like an expense more costly than it is worth.
The truth, though, is that bookkeeping is extremely important to businesses of all sizes for quite a number of reasons. That, in turn, might make ‘DIY’ bookkeeping an increasingly unacceptable risk, especially if you’re spending a lot of time on it and becoming distracted from your core business.
At a certain point, your business must move away from DIY bookkeeping for good – particularly given the importance of professionalising every aspect of your operations. But the question is: when? With so many tasks and so little time on your hands, when exactly should you call in an extra set of hands?
Bookkeeping services in Ipswich are readily available from our own team here at ST Accountancy. And we’re here to shed light on the circumstances – like those listed below – when you may look to take advantage of them, instead of continuing to struggle along on your own.
The books are backlogged
If everything related to finance is falling apart and you’re unable to figure out unassigned income, expenses, and unreconciled payments, you should get your money invested in hiring an expert in accounting and bookkeeping services. They can also help you make informed decisions about your business, and recommend ways to improve its performance.
After all, this is an unsustainable situation, one your business cannot weather in the long term. Your business may experience swift spurts of growth, which runs the risk that your books become even more unruly and outdated. Even so, managing your books is an unavoidable task amid surging business, and you must have someone professional and responsible to handle it.
By outsourcing your bookkeeping function to professionals like our own here at ST Accountancy, you can regain control of your firm’s finances and ensure you get back on top of your books permanently. Our experts can also help streamline any financial processes so that you can invoice, record expenses and track time all in one system, not several.
There’s not enough time in the day to get things done
A growing business is a very busy one – and the more clients that come in, the more the daily running of your core business will become your central focus. This will leave you with little time for managing the books as they should be managed, and crossing off the necessary tasks on your to-do list.
If there isn’t enough time in the day to get things done, this would be an appropriate point for your company to take advantage of our own bookkeeping services in Ipswich.
Not only will an outsourced professional take an unbiased and critical view of your books, ensuring they are handled correctly, but they can take a hefty and time-consuming burden off your hands. This will then free you to focus on what you do best in your business – which, unless you are a bookkeeping professional yourself, will almost certainly not be bookkeeping.
The business is missing out on tax deductions
Many business expenses are tax deductible, but you wouldn’t necessarily realise them, if not for the keen eye of a bookkeeper. Bookkeeping services can take your telephone bills, broadband, online subscriptions, office maintenance and more into account. These deductibles can offset your total business income, and therefore reduce the amount of tax you owe.
However, in order to achieve this, you will need to track every deductible possible! This can be an insurmountable task without bookkeeping services. With them, it’s easy. You will never miss a tax deductible, or obvious write-off, again.
A major part of a bookkeeping role is to continually record transactions, assign the right expense categories, and consequently reduce the total tax bill. When a bookkeeper does this for your business, they may soon find business expenses that you didn’t even know were eligible.
There’s no replicating this expertise through ‘DIY’ bookkeeping alone, and for the betterment of your small business, bookkeeping services could be worth taking advantage of for tax reasons alone.
Cash flow is unpredictable
A pressing issue in getting small businesses off the ground is cash flow. Cash flow is an unpredictable thing and can often leave you worrying about covering all of your commercial expenses. Some months, you might have all the cash you need to keep your business running, while during other times, there may be hardly any money left at all.
Many factors result in this outcome, including businesses having insufficient clientele, unforeseen or emergency expenses, and delayed payments from customers. Whatever the reason, your cash flow is bound to be affected by adverse and unexpected events.
As bookkeepers track your accounts payable and receivable, with the authority to follow up on overdue invoices, they can help your firm regain control of its cash flow in the long term.
Don’t make do with risky ‘DIY’ bookkeeping!
Hopefully, if we’ve shown you anything with the above rundown, it’s that there is a wide range of circumstances in which it can greatly make sense to ‘professionalise’ your company’s bookkeeping – although of course, you should be doing that from the very beginning of your firm’s operations.
If you’re experiencing sudden growth, high tax bills, unpredictable cash flow or backlogged books, these are all valid reasons to request bookkeeping services. So, why not contact the ST Accountancy team today for advice and guidance on how we can help?
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