One of the best ways to waste time and/or money is to do your own bookkeeping in-house. But we all do things like that because we are so busy focusing on client problems that anything that’s not dangerously broken gets ignored. Until it does break, and then we console ourselves that it could be worse for some reason or other.
We all know why not sweating the small stuff is a good thing to do but let me give you some more reasons why this one is such low hanging fruit.
Redundancy – You are the Client Now
People get ill, go on leave, move to another job, move to another town, have bad days. etc etc. You deal with that stuff all the time in operations, and admin staff might seem blissfully reliable in comparison but when you do get caught out it’s a pain in the butt. There are more important things to spend your time on.
Better Quality – Because of Specialisation and Economies of Scale
VW Golf’s are great cars, and great value, because the R&D costs are spread across such large production numbers. One of the things we find hard to do here at T2 is to sit with a client and have more questions than answers because their books aren’t up to scratch. And to be honest, it’s very rare for the books to be that they’re good enough to make decisions based on the numbers in them. It is you as well.
It Actually Does Save a Lot of Money
And that’s just the bookkeeping – before the money you save on accounting fees for tax, because that’s usually built-in and someone doesn’t have to sort through a bunch of errors to do your tax return. If you have an accountant you really like using keep them just for advisory and high-level tax advice. They prefer that sort of work anyway.
Just make sure you use a specialised bookkeeping firm, and if they do farm out the work to another firm or country, make sure they have good processes for quality control.
Give me a shout if you want a couple of names.
Photo by Nik MacMillan on Unsplash