Top 5 Reasons Every Business Needs an Accountant
Whether you have a just-opened single owner sole proprietorship or a family business that has been passed down for generations, having access to professional accounting services and advice can add significant value to your business. From saving you time and money to partnering with you to help you grow your business, accountants provide valuable information and insight drawn on their cumulative experience with other clients in your same industry. Every business should find an accountant advisor to support their business.
1. Accountants Save You Time
The problem you are pondering in your business is likely not unique. Every company, at some point in time, has experienced tight cash flow or a payroll processing glitch. There is no need to problem solve alone or wait on the phone for customer support from a national software company, staffed with customer service agents, not accountants.
As a business owner, especially of a startup, your time is valuable. You are needed to likely work both in and on your business. You may be filling the role of salesperson, service professional, account manager, employee trainer, and accountant.
By outsourcing your accounting function, you get some of your valuable time back, and you don’t have to worry about bookkeeping. Let an outside accountant handle it. From experience, they will plow through the paperwork with higher speed and accuracy, saving you time and frustration. An accountant can ensure your customers are invoiced on time, so your cash flow stays positive. An accountant can provide you with insightful information so you can make strategic decisions based on objective data.
2. Accountants Save You Money
In addition to time, an accountant can save you money. Focus on the baking or the designing and let your accountant handle the intricacies of selecting software programs that sync with your accounting software. Making the wrong choice or having to switch later are costly errors both in terms of downtown and monetary cost. To avoid this, accountants can think of functionality that you might need down the road that may not even be on your radar screen now. From experience and testing, your accountant will know which software works best and which play nicely together.
And when it comes time to expand and hire employee number one, accountants can help there too. Across all their clients, an outside accountant will have processed payroll and benefit deductions for thousands of employees. With payroll comes many deadlines, which can be time-consuming to research and costly to miss. Leave these responsibilities to someone who has been there and done that.
3. Accountants Give Great Business Advice
You will need an accountant at tax time, but by then, it is too late for many of the value-added services an accountant could have provided for you. If you wait to engage an accountant until year-end, you likely missed out on advice that could have reduced your tax liability. Secondly, you missed out on having your accounting software set up professionally. Therefore there might be extra costly bookkeeping work required to fix errors and obtain the needed year-end reports before taxes can be prepared.
4. Accountants do more than just taxes
The most significant loss for a business owner that doesn’t have an accountant is the loss of meaningly explained financial reporting available every month. When you bring your books to an accountant at year-end, the financial statements are prepared or reviewed and cleaned up. By this point, the data is historical, and you’ve missed out on having the use of this reporting throughout the year. Yes, you will have saved some money on professional fees, but the information you lost is of higher value.
Reviewing accurate financial information every month is vital, especially for new businesses. The first year of business operation is crucial and can have a significant impact on how long you stay in business. Accountants see companies rise and fall and can share their experiences with you so your business can not just scrape by, but flourish.
Accountants are not just tax pros. Accountants are business partners that can help you monitor cash flow and objectively weigh the pros and cons of growth decisions. Outside accountants are not bogged down in the day-to-day operations of your business so they can objectively look to the future to help answer operational questions about when to buy that new machine and how much inventory to buy.
5. Accountants Help You Avoid An Audit
Of course, an accountant is an excellent person to call if you receive notification of an IRS audit. However, it would have been better to have the help of an accountant to avoid being selected for an audit in the first place. Accountants know what the common triggers of an audit are and can help prepare error-free tax returns that won’t flag the system. Accountants also can help with decision making throughout the year and advise of tax consequences and rules so decisions can be made in light of the tax law and not despite it.
And if an audit happens anyways, having properly prepared historical and current financial statements with the needed documentation to back up your transactions will save a lot of time, hassle, and denied deductions.
Contact Szweda Consulting For A FREE Consultation
We offer the very best accounting services in our field. We never settle for second best, and always have your satisfaction as our top priority. For help with any accounting matters, reach out to us at (216) 509-1561 for the best consulting and bookkeeping services.
