Local bookkeeping providers can be of enormous help to a growing business. It’s important to ensure that this collaborative process between two companies flows well. Here are five key ways companies can get the full benefits of working with local bookkeepers.
1. Understand Your Core Competencies
Working with local bookkeeping providers is simpler when you have a clear understanding of your own business. With that understanding, it’s easier to organize your finances. You can better delegate responsibilities that aren’t related to your core competencies.
Make sure that your company has a clear and defined focus. When you have that, working with local bookkeeping providers saves both time and money. Then you can augment the internal processes surrounding your core competencies.
2. Know What the Numbers Mean
One critical mistake that a lot of small business owners make is not paying enough attention to their financial statements. It’s not necessary for a business owner to also be an accountant to understand the significance of the numbers on those statements. Knowing what your balance sheets, income statements, cash flow reports, and other documents show will help you see the health and progress of your business.
You can learn more about how these kinds of financial reports work by checking out one of our previous blog posts here.
3. Go Paperless
Here’s another great way to work better with local bookkeeping providers. Get rid of the paper! To some business owners this might sound like a fantasy, and to others it might sound dangerous or scary. That’s because there is value to keeping hard copies of your paperwork around. The IRS itself recommends keeping paperwork on hand for 3 years. In some circumstances, you’ll need to keep documents around for as long as 7 years. anything older than that you can destroy.
When we talk about going paperless, though, we’re not saying that you should ignore that advice. We’re saying that you should make sure that all the papers that you keep in physical form are also stored on computers. In the event that you need to access old documents for a tax audit or any other purpose, it’s so much simpler to find and produce the relevant files that way. Electronic storage should be the primary way you handle your files.
4. Get Local Bookkeeping Providers’ Help for Tax Time
Speaking of taxes, don’t ever try to go it alone as a small business owner. Especially in the United States, tax codes can be fiendishly complicated. It’s essential to get certified professional help with your business taxes.
As a small business owner you need to have a CPA you can turn to at tax time. Local bookkeeping providers like SyncLedgers don’t have CPAs on staff, but they do work closely with the ones you prefer. Your bookkeepers are helpful intermediaries. That’s because they are intimately familiar with the day-to-day finances of your company. SyncLedgers bookkeepers prepare all the reports a CPA needs to verify your tax situation.
5. Run Headfirst into the Digital Age
We still remember or know many small-business owners who kept all their financial records by hand. Sometimes, it was in minuscule detailed recorded on scraps of paper. Others used large, official ledger books.
It’s so important for small business owners to recognize that that kind of labor is no longer necessary in any way. Modern software has made it simpler than ever before for businesses to record their daily income and expenses. Keeping track is no longer a matter of pulling out a calculator and doing math problems for hours every month. The best programs available do that for you. There are even some applications out there that plug right into your point of sale systems. They record every single transaction straight onto your ledgers.
As a small business owner, you owe it to yourself to take advantage of those technological blessings. Not only that, but they make working with local bookkeeping providers even more streamlined. It’s no longer necessary to hand over physical books and copy the entries by hand, ever again.
If you’re ready for your small business to start growing smarter, contact us today! We’re one of the top local bookkeeping providers for the Salt Lake City & Wasatch Front area of Utah. SyncLedgers serves businesses big and small in Silicon Slopes Lehi and beyond!
