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Picture this, you have subscribed to a cloud system such as Quickbooks or Xero, and it’s the end of the month. You login and are faced with 100 bank entries to explain for the month. You don’t go in more than once a month because it’s not a job you enjoy. You sit and try and remember what you’re supposed to do with each entry. Do you match it to an invoice? Do you choose the travel account and put it there? Oh, wait, was there Vat on that? 5 hours later and you’re losing the will to live. There’s 20 entries left which you decide to leave until next time….. With a sigh of boredom, you think thank goodness that’s over with for another month and you sign out of Quickbooks / Xero.
We get many clients who don’t want us to do their book-keeping. They would like to do it themselves for many different reasons, however one recurring one is to save money, but should that be the main consideration? What could be the roll-on effects of this decision? Think of what else you could have done with those extra 5 hours that you spent agonising over your books. Could you have done some of your own marketing material? Written a blog or a social media post to attract more customers? Could you have cleared a load of items from your to-do list?
Of course, some people really enjoy this aspect of running their business and these people tend to log in more regularly than once a month and also run reports to check their financial position, not log off as soon as feasibly possible.
Did you know that you could share the book-keeping responsibility with your accountant? If you wanted to still do some of the basics or just the sales invoices and leave us anything remotely complicated to action. We could set up some systems for you, such as Receiptbank, to make it easier and more efficient. There’s no hard and fast rule of where to draw the line between what you want to do and what you want us to do. It’s down to individual wants and needs and can be agreed and then changed later on.
Did you know that what you pay your accountant for any year-end work is likely to go down if they are doing your book-keeping for you? This is because we already have full knowledge of what is in your books and we know that it’s accurate and fully reconciled.
So, think about the cost of time as well as your own sanity when thinking about whether you want to keep on top of your book-keeping as a business owner, or if you are better off outsourcing to your Accountant.