I’m a firm believer in spending money to make money (as long as you are spending wisely).  As business owners and entrepreneurs we find ourselves in a trap of trying to do everything just to save a buck or two.  The “right things” can take many forms such as an employee, software that fits your needs, or a great piece of technology that is more portable, faster, and less likely to get thrown out the window when you are at your wit’s end.  Keep in mind what your strengths are and what you envisioned your life to be like while having your own business. Spend some money on the things you are not good at to give yourself the opportunity to serve your clients with your full attention.

Save Time

Your bookkeeper will know the ins and outs of your accounting software. They will know the correct way to track your assets, expenses, and liabilities. Do you really need to be spending your time figuring out the quirks of your accounting software?  Wondering if you are tracking your income and expenses correctly? Fretting over if what you are doing is even correct? No, you don’t need to be expending that energy.

Being a business owner is its own full-time job, running and managing all the odds and ends of your business can easily turn into a second full-time job.  You need to stay focused on your strengths which managing and directing your business at high level, not trying to learn every nuance in your accounting software. Time is money, don’t waste it.

Save Money

Throughout the years that I have been doing bookkeeping, I have realized that spending money on the right things can also save you money.   For example one of my clients got to experience the joy of going through an IRS audit. It was a long and time-consuming process but they made it through unscathed.  How? Because all of their records were in place and everything was accounted for with documentation to back it up. Could this have been a disaster if they had a half-assed excel spreadsheet of their business finances? You bet! Could they have ended up paying the government a ton of money if they could not prove the proper documentation for all their financial doings? Absolutely.  Did they spend money by hiring a bookkeeper to save money in the long run? Yes.

When you hire a good bookkeeper and their sole job is to watch the financial transactions of your firm they will essentially pay for themselves (and probably more) by discovering some things happening in your books.  Examples of this could be, spotting erroneous invoices, noticing you’re paying too much for other services, (such as credit card processing fees, payroll expenses, unneeded office expenses) tracking your income and expenses correctly to save you at tax time.  For most business owners their bookkeeping ends up being the last thing they do for the month usually on Friday night or weekend and at the given time it is the last thing they want to be doing at all. As a business owner, you are over it. You just want to click “Add” in your Quickbooks and be done with it.  Having another set of eyes on this removes the dread of doing this on a weekend and also prevents autopilot errors. Autopilot errors can take the form of allowing a $6,000 check pass through your account because the accountant accidentally cut a check to a plumber from the wrong clients’ account. Entering $500-$1,000 in accounts payable in one month from erroneous bills and invoices from companies that you never even used.  (Yup, I’m convinced there are some serious crooks out there that do just that and make the big bucks off of complacent bookkeeping in small businesses.) Or being a little over-zealous in your keyboarding and adding an extra 0 to an employee’s paycheck and then having the fun talk about the error that was made on their paycheck a month later. Mistakes happen, and I am by no means perfect but having another set of eyes on financial transactions will certainly help spot these.

Consider the true needs for your business today.  What is a real time suck? What do you really hate doing?  Maybe you love doing your books, Awesome! Maybe you need to hire an assistant or maybe it is time to for a serious upgrade in a laptop.  Whatever it is, make that leap of change and get back to doing what you wanted to do in the first place which is running and growing your business.