Small business accounting and bookkeeping services are undergoing somewhat of an evolutionary phase. Historically, especially for small business, interactions with the accountant were limited to an annual visit to review how the year had gone, maybe set some budgets for the year ahead and sign off on tax reporting.
If it was more than that, at best it was a couple of times a year, maybe you wanted to buy an asset and needed to check its impact on cashflows and whether the business could afford it, etc.
And for several decades now, small business owners have been employing staff (internal and external) to tap away at keyboards, entering information into accounting software so that invoices (and employees) got paid, bank accounts were reconciled and reporting obligations were met.
It’s just how thing have always been done – the ‘normal’ way of operating a business. Except before the 80s, it wasn’t. If you were in small business, it was all done by hand. Hours of laborious double column entries in big hard cover books.
Now, however, accounting and bookkeeping services are morphing yet again to help you, as a small business owner, make better decisions around how you run your business – looking forward (not backward). And just like Microsoft Excel made all the columns magically add up in the 80s with out a calculator in sight (as long as your formula was correct), today’s accounting technologies are making the need for excel spreadsheets (and their formulas) less necessary*.
Better still, almost gone are the days where accountants and bookkeepers would be presented with a shoebox full of paper receipts, that would then be manually data entered.** Technologies like Shoeboxed have made that a thing of the past.
Minimizing manual data entry and errors can result in massive savings of your precious time and money. Need we say more? And then there’s the added bonus of being able to track where your business is at financially at any given time – in real pretty close to real time.
Even better, having everything in the cloud (especially if you’re using Google Drive or Dropbox for your working files) allows you complete freedom from your office location. Yes, you really can work from the café by the beach or atop the Eiffel Tower (internet connection permitting).
And then there’s the increases in time/productivity that result from better utilising your resources (staff time and your time/money) on things other than data-entry and admin. Things that matter most to you. That might be growing your business, spending more time with customers, building better product, smoothing customer service or all of the above – all of which are likely to grow your future revenues.
Or it might even be spending more time on something of a more personal nature to claw back a bit of that life balance you were after when you first started your business – i.e.: spending more time with your family, improving your golf swing/fly-cast/baking skills, or turning your memoirs into a best selling book on Amazon.
Of course, if you’d like to talk more about maximising the value of your automated processes, we’d love to chat. You can call us on 1300 00 1333 or get started with 30 days free.
* Although, as at the time of writing, rumour has it, that around 80% of Australia’s businesses are still run using excel spreadsheets and invoices that are either handwritten or created in MS Word.
**Our accountant and bookkeeper ProPartner clients tell us it still happens, but it’s much, much rarer now.
