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Discovering Cost-Effective Outsourced Bookkeeping Solutions

Discovering Cost-Effective Outsourced Bookkeeping Solutions

6 months ago
in Bookkeeping

Have you noticed how expensive it can be to keep up with bookkeeping in your small business? It seems counterproductive to spend so much money keeping track of your money. The good news is there is a better way, and we’ll explain it below

Key Takeaways

Quality bookkeeping practices are essential for business success
Outsourcing bookkeeping is an affordable and efficient solution
Record keeping accuracy can improve with outsourced bookkeeping
These services can be customized to suit your needs
Upgrading to outsourced bookkeeping can make an immediate impact on your business

Saving money is always a worthwhile step to take, whether in your personal or professional life. As a business owner or manager, you already know that you need to find every opportunity to cut down on costs if you are going to see the bottom line add up nicely at the end of the year. Outsourced bookkeeping solutions are one way to bring your operating costs down in a manner that isn’t going to do any harm to your business. In fact, not only can you save with outsourced accounting, but you’ll also find that there are many other advantages, including streamlining the process and enjoying excellent accuracy.

If you have been thinking about outsourced bookkeeping as a way to save money, this post should provide you with the motivation needed to take that step. We’ll look at why moving bookkeeping services outside of your offices to be handled by a third party is an excellent strategy and how small businesses of all kinds can leverage this technique. Swiftbooks is proud to offer these kinds of remote accounting services, so reach out today if you’d like to learn more.

Why In-House Bookkeeping Services Are Expensive

The cost of managing your own bookkeeping services can be shocking to a new business owner who is just starting to get familiar with what it takes to run a company. You might come into this situation feeling like bookkeeping should be a relatively inexpensive, simple thing to manage, only to find that just the opposite is true.

As a starting point, you can get good accounting software for a modest investment. So, that part of the puzzle isn’t going to be what weighs you down. Rather, it’s simply the cost of paying people for their time to create an in house accounting team that will add up in a hurry. Between salaries and benefits, the costs can get out of control – and might be beyond what most small businesses can reasonably manage. As we’ll see later, turning to an online bookkeeping service is the way to get around this issue effectively.

Small business accounting is just as important as corporate accounting services, only a small business doesn’t have the advantages of scale that are enjoyed by big corporations. With revenues in the millions and beyond, a big corporation can easily afford to invest in robust in-house accounting services or pay a range of large accounting firms to do the work. You don’t have that capability, so it’s important to manage every dollar to get what you need and keep your business finances under control.

Bring Costs Down Through Outsourced Bookkeeping

In many ways, outsourced bookkeeping services allow you to leverage the scale of a large corporation without growing to that size. Think about it this way – the outsourced bookkeeping services you use are going to manage the books for many other businesses, and when you add the revenues of those various businesses up, the group starts to look more like a big corporation.

So, at that scale, the bookkeeping services company can deliver effective and efficient performance at a cost that just wouldn’t be possible for you to achieve on your own. Outsourced accounting makes it possible for you to get the kinds of financial reporting that are available to bigger companies without having to invest more than you can afford.

Putting scale on your side is one reason that it’s more affordable to go with outsourced bookkeeping services, but that’s only the start of the story. Other benefits that will save you money include –

A Variety of Pricing Options

A good outsourced bookkeeping service is going to have a range of pricing options for you to consider. This will make it easy to dial in precisely the service you need at a price that fits into your budget at the moment. Only need limited services when first getting started? No problem – you can just sign up for something like accounts payable help or tax preparation, knowing you can always pick up more services later as your budget and needs change. Understanding these outsourced bookkeeping rates is crucial in tailoring a cost-effective solution for your business.

Only Use What You Need

The flexibility of outsourcing bookkeeping is what gives it such a big advantage over other models. Simply put, you only need to use – and pay for – the services that you actually need to run your business. If you don’t need it, you shouldn’t have to pay for it. We mentioned above that you could hire an outsourced bookkeeping service for accounts payable, but what if you don’t actually need help in that area? In that case, you’d keep that off of your services list and enjoy the savings. Small businesses tend to run on tight margins, so every little bit helps.

The Training Drain

If you are going to have an employee or employees manage this job instead of using accounting outsourcing, it will be necessary to train those workers to do the job correctly. Even if they come to you already having some degree of accounting and bookkeeping experience, they’ll still need to get up to speed on how your business works and what your financial reporting needs look like.

It might not seem like a big deal to have to train an employee one time, and it isn’t. But you won’t just be doing this training one time. You’ll have to do it each time an employee leaves and you bring in someone else, which can be frequent in small businesses. Over time, the drain on your time and resources that are incurred simply through having to train people can become significant. Outsourcing bookkeeping can eliminate this drain because you will be a customer of your chosen bookkeeping service, and they will want to do everything they can to keep you around as long as possible.

Saving on Infrastructure

This last point may be incidental for some small business owners, but it’s worth mentioning nonetheless. If you are going to use employees instead of outsourcing bookkeeping, you’ll need to provide those employees with what they need to do the job. That means they’ll require things like a desk, a computer, other supplies, and on and on. The costs associated with providing them the infrastructure to get the job done and produce accurate financial data might surprise you.

You'll Never Outgrow Outsourced Bookkeeping

Hiring a bookkeeping service makes so much sense because you aren’t going to be able to outgrow this solution. Assuming you want to grow your business – and that’s a pretty safe assumption – your needs for things like payroll assistance and other bookkeeping work may increase dramatically over time. Instead of trying to keep up with that demand by hiring more people and expanding your accounting office, you can simply retain more service through your virtual bookkeeping partner and you’ll be all set.

Affordable Outsourced Bookkeeping Done Right

Swiftbooks makes outsourced bookkeeping look easy. If you want a truly hands-off solution that will allow you to focus on the things that matter most in your business, get in touch today to schedule a call with our team. With our outsourced bookkeeping solution on your side, the sky will be the limit for where your business can go in the months and years to come. It would be our pleasure to serve you!