7 Ways a Professional Bookkeeper Will Save you $$$ (Part 2)
Here’s a few more specific ways a professional bookkeeper will save you money.
4.
If you employ a bookkeeper directly, you normally have to guarantee them a certain amount of work each week. There is no incentive for them to implement efficiencies to reduce the amount of hours required to perform the bookkeeping functions for your company as it will mean they will be robbing themselves of a job.
If a professional bookkeeper reduces the role from one to two days per week, they can allocate that staff member to another client so the client is saving money and the bookkeeper will make up those hours at another client.
5. Flexibility and Backup
Guess who has to pay the wages and the bills while everyone else is on Christmas Holidays? That’s right- it’s the bookkeeper. If you employ a bookkeeper directly, there’s never a good time for them to take a holiday as there are certain duties that may be confidential and you may not wish to share with your other staff.
A professional bookkeeping firm will ensure there is backup for that role and that there is a second person with knowledge of those crucial areas so that there is no gap over Christmas Holidays or when the bookkeeper wants a holiday.
6. Save Payroll Tax and other Employment Costs
When you compare the cost of employing a bookkeeper directly as opposed to outsourcing to a professional bookkeeper, make sure you include all the additional on-costs associated with employment when making your comparison.
On-costs include superannuation, annual leave, sick leave, public holidays, workers compensation insurance, payroll tax and recruitment. For a detailed example, see our Hidden Costs of Employment example. In the example you’ll see how these on-costs add up to an additional 42% of the base salary.
7. Stricter
The
If you use a professional bookkeeping company that is properly qualified, your
I hope this gives you some ideas of how using a professional bookkeeper can save your business money. If you have any queries please contact us though www.booksonsite.com.au
Tim Johnston
Internet Search Engine Marketing
Traditionally, the marketing manager and the accountant have never “got on”. This is because an accountant needs to see concrete evidence that money spent on marketing has resulted in a quantifiable increase in sales that can be measured.
If I spend $10,000 on putting a sign up on the side of a building, I want to see an increase in sales by “x” number of units to make sure I at least cover the cost of the advertisement.
Marketers will talk about qualitative benefits of marketing such as building brand awareness, however for most small and medium business owners, you need to see an immediate return on your investment.
This is why I love internet marketing. There are 2 main forms of internet search engine marketing, Pay Per Click (PPC) and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Both of these methods provide you with detailed reports allowing you to calculate exactly how much you have spent to get customers to your site and how many of these you convert to sales. They also allow you to target your ads geographically by making those ads only appear to people based in specified geographical areas.
Pay Per Click
These are the ads you see under the “sponsored search” area of your search results. The great thing about PPC marketing is that as long as you have a website, you can start seeing results immediately. The catch is that you have to pay every time someone clicks on your ad. The cost depends on the popularity of the term you want to be found for and the higher you bid, the higher you appear in the results.
Remember you can “cap” your daily budget so you can give it a try for a month and see if the increased sales cover the cost of your PPC account.
Search Engine Marketing
SEO is the “Holy Grail” of internet marketing. It involves a number of different techniques such as backlinks and site content that establish your website as a credible resource for people searching for different keywords within the different search engines.
The formula used by search engines such as Google and Yahoo to rank different websites are highly guarded trade secrets which differentiate them from each other. By definition, this makes it impossible for anyone to “promise” they can get you a front page “natural” ranking for a specific website.
The beauty of it is, that once you achieve a decent ranking, it doesn’t cost you anything to drive people to your site. Achieving that ranking does cost and does take time. Don’t even try to do it yourself, just get an SEO expert who knows what they’re doing.
Robert Mirabito from Click2It Digital Marketing and and has achieved great results for me and some of my clients and has been good enough to offer his services to moderate the Internet Marketing section of our forum.
I personally believe that companies have been slow to pick up on the effectiveness of internet marketing because (without sounding ageist) managers from the “baby boomer” generation are probably not quite as internet savvy and don’t appreciate it’s potential. As more management positions are taken over by Gen x’ers and y’s, I believe it will become harder and harder to get your website found naturally.
So, if you’re not convinced, have a dabble with SEO and if you see results, start investing in SEO. It’s worth the investment!
7 Ways a Professional Bookkeeper will save you $$$ (Part 1)
Some small and medium business (SME) owners try to do their own accounts or they may employee a bookkeeper directly. This can be fine if you are lucky enough to recruit a good bookkeeper directly, however unless you have an accounting background and a thorough understanding of the accounting software involved, it can be difficult to know what questions to ask at the interview process.
Even if you find someone who looks good on paper, unless you know what reports to ask for it can take months to pick up if they are performing or not. Over 50% of clients that come to us have had a bad experience trying to employ a bookkeeper directly. Usually within the first week we uncover things such as:
- Double payment of creditors invoices
- Under-billing of revenue
- Incorrect GST coding usually resulting in under-claiming GST Credits
- Miscalculation of superannuation and payroll tax of employees and contractors
These mistakes can be very costly and sometimes terminal for some businesses.
Here’s 7 ways a professional onsite bookkeeper will save you money:
1. Help you work “on your business, not in your business!”
I know, it’s an old chestnut from that fantastic book E-Myth and which forms the cornerstone to most business coaching strategies. It is the key to being able to grow any business and applies to bookkeeping as with any other part of your business.
If you employ a bookkeeper, you still have to monitor the quality of their work, when they work, when they take holidays, etc. By outsourcing all of your accounting and bookkeeping functions to a professional bookkeeper, all of your accounts duties become their responsibility and you can focus on growing your business, with the confidence that you are receiving accurate reports on your performance and meeting all statutory obligations.
2. An onsite bookkeeper gets to know your business
There are some bookkeeping services that offer to take care of your accounts from their office which could be based anywhere in Australia or as far away as India. This involves transferring source documents either electronically or physically back and forth from your office to theirs. While this can be fine for micro businesses, it can prove difficult once your business begins to grow.
Before you can provide meaningful management reports, you need to know how a business operates and what are it’s key performance indicators. The only way to achieve this effectively is to get to know the company and the people who work within the company. This can only be done by performing the bookkeeping functions at the clients premises.
3. There’s “bookkeepers” and then there’s “bookkeepers!”
There can be a huge difference in skill level of people that call themselves bookkeepers. Just as an apprentice “chippie” and his boss with 30 years construction experience may both call themselves “builders,” people representing themselves as bookkeepers can range from data entry clerks through to qualified management accountants.
A professional bookkeeping firm should be accredited in the accounting software used by your company and they should have qualified accountants to support their bookkeepers to enable them to provide a management accounting level of service.
In part 2 of this blog I’ll look at a couple of more specific ways a professional bookkeeper can save you $$$.
Welcome to my SME & Bookkeeping Blog
Welcome to the first post of my blog about SME’s (Small to Medium Sized Enterprises) and Bookkeeping!
I’ve started this blog because I have a passion for small and medium sized businesses. I know, it may sound a bit odd but hey, I am an accountant so it doesn’t take much.
My career as a CPA and the current owner of a national bookkeeping business with over 40 staff has enabled me to build a client base of some amazingly entrepreneurial business people.
With the help of my fantastic team of bookkeepers, I get to know all of our clients intimately. I hope this helps me to post timely and informative pieces on all kind of issues that matter to SME’s such as technology, the economy, recruiting, etc.. (and of course- bookkeeping).
My next blog will be about 6 Ways a Professional Onsite Bookkeeper will save you money! I admit, it’s a little self-promotional and not all blogs will be of that nature, but it’s probably a good way to summarise what we are about and to get the ball rolling.
In the meantime, if you have any questions, feel free to use our bookkeeping forum or you can view our more serious bookkeeping site.
Regards
Tim Johnston
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About
Welcome to FINOS, the BooksonSite Business Blog. Here we provide bookkeeping advice for small business owners.
Are you an SME with a turnover of between $500k-$15 million and are finding bookkeeping a bit too challenging?
We provide onsite bookkeeping services in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane backed by MYOB Certified CPA support. Click below to learn more, or call us on 1300 226 657.
