One of the many growing pains of your small business is the increasing volume of administrative tasks, particularly in bookkeeping. As a result, you face the dilemma of choosing whether to get bookkeeping services or do it yourself.
Growth is a good problem to have for small business owners like you. However, the decision of whether to outsource bookkeeping or not can make or break the growth of your business. We’re here to tell you that professional bookkeeping supports you and your business. Read on to find out why.
Bookkeeping as a Challenge for Growing Small Businesses
Bookkeeping touches on a lot of other challenges facing you as a small business owner. You want to be sure you’re getting an accurate reflection of your small business’s performance, which heavily relies on bookkeeping.
As your business grows, the volume of transactions follows. The bookkeeping workload increases too. As the data to be recorded increases, the more prone you are to missing a few transactions.
Soon you will realize it’s becoming time-consuming to record all the transactions of your growing business. You may even dread doing it because you’re overwhelmed or you’d rather get back to looking for clients and selling, which you’d stopped doing for some time. Thus, your business ends up with poor bookkeeping, inaccurate financial reporting, and tax payments.
When bookkeeping becomes a challenge to small business owners, they tend to do it themselves or delegate it to an employee who has some bookkeeping skills. You, however, don’t have to do it yourself or get one of your employees to do it. Instead, you can find a reliable team of bookkeeping professionals who can go the extra mile.
What Do Bookkeepers Do Exactly?
When you hear the word bookkeeper, your mind probably conjures an image of someone recording debits and credits, crunching numbers, and finding missing pennies. While this image is accurate, bookkeepers offer more than that. Here’s a quick rundown of a bookkeeper's services and what they can do for you.
Primary Bookkeeping Services
In the bookkeeping business, a bookkeeper is responsible for the following duties:
- Classifying and analyzing transactions — Bookkeepers classify transactions according to their types, such as revenue, expenses, receivables, payables, acquisition, sale of company assets, withdrawal, or infusion of capital, before they put them down on a journal.
- Recording — Commonly using the double-entry method, bookkeepers record the abovementioned transactions in two books: a journal and a ledger. These transactions will be used to make financial statements such as income statements, balance sheets, and cash flow statements.
- Updating and correcting entries — Bookkeepers prepare all the unadjusted transactions recorded during the accounting period and find any discrepancies in the recording to keep the journal and the ledger entries up to date.
- Reconciling and balancing entries — Bookkeepers conduct a trial balance and ensure that everything is accurate before handing it over to the accountant.
Additional Services
These are the duties bookkeepers can do that more or less overlap with their primary duties.
- Bank account reconciliation — Bookkeepers reconcile the business’s bank accounts to ensure that the cash balance recorded in the books is in sync with the bank balances.
- Payable and receivable supervision — Bookkeepers oversee the ratio of payable and receivable transactions. They do this to ensure a healthy balance between the amounts owed and the amounts yet to be received.
- Payroll — Bookkeepers can also do the company payroll to ensure the accuracy of the salary being disbursed.
- Financial reporting — While an accountant usually does this, a bookkeeper can also perform this function when requested by an accountant or in the absence of one.
With all these duties broken down, it’s easy to see how much work a professional bookkeeper can take off your plate. Still not convinced? We explore its importance further in the next section.
The Importance of Bookkeeping Services for Small Business Growth
Professional bookkeeping is invaluable for your business to grow and keep growing. Here are the reasons why.
- It saves you time and money. You know the adage, “Time is money.” The task of keeping transaction records and everything in between is time-consuming. When bookkeeping sidetracks you from growing your business, profit slips through your fingers. Imagine how much time and money you can save when you hire a bookkeeper.
- You get to know how your business is doing. For an owner of a growing business, knowledge is essential. You will want to know if you’re increasing your bottom line, keeping your costs low, and maintaining a healthy debt level with your growth efforts. Professional bookkeeping helps you find out all these things so that you can manage them effectively.
- It keeps you in line with your taxes. As a business owner, it is your responsibility to ensure you’re paying the correct taxes and you’re following government regulations when doing so. Taxes can be complicated, so it’s a load of weight lifted off your shoulders when you get a booker to do that for you.
Unloop: A Bookkeeping Company That Helps Your Business Grow
Now you know how important it is to have a bookkeeper. That’s great, but you don’t want to just hire any accounting and bookkeeping services to do the job. You’ll want your bookkeeper to be as invested in the growth of your business as you are. You’ll want a partner, not an employee.
If this is the kind of bookkeeper you want, consider Unloop.
Unloop is a bookkeeping company that understands you because we are founders, too. We know how to help you grow your business by providing the following:
- Low-cost but high-value bookkeeping solutions — Unloop is not only your virtual bookkeeper but also your business partner. That’s why we keep the cost low while maintaining a high quality of service.
- Financial reports on a consistent basis — You don’t have to hire an accountant to prepare your financial statements. That’s part of what Unloop does, and we will send it to you consistently. As your partner, we will let you know if your business is growing.
- Tech-savvy and efficient bookkeeping — Unloop is well-versed in bookkeeping and accounting software, which allows us to record data and provide it to you on-demand. All you have to do is ask, anytime, anywhere.
If this gets you excited, try Unloop’s bookkeeping services for one month for free. Get to know how committed we are to the growth of your business today.