When you start your business, your receipts and bank statements are piled up as you are not sure what to do.Even when you smoothly run your business,you notice that the books are not updated as the papers/invoices/filings are still in the drawer. Now a bookkeeper can come in and get the job done. He or she works hard to bring your books up to date and get things reconciled and organzied.Is that it? Is that what you look for good bookkeeping?
Nope. That’s not enough.
As a business owner, you are not only looking for a bookkeeper to get things organzied but you are expecting someone to bring some value to your business as well.Generally, you want to see some management reports like balance sheet and income statement to understand how the business performs and whether the business is making money(most likely, you should have some sense if you are making money before seeing the income statement).Some key metrics are presented to you and you feel comfortable with your financials, like what your business owns and owes at year-end, what’s the margin, how much that your business needs to pay to HST, payroll remittance,etc.
But is that all?
General bookkeeping process stops here as all the tasks are done.
It is true that a lot of small businesses focus on books just because of compliance like income tax, excise tax (GST/HST), payroll tax, etc, as those are the priorities on the list.But think about it, there are a lot of data involved in the transactions, number, attributes, description, date,etc, all those data becomes small dots of your business outlook. A good bookkeeper can tell you a story from those connected dots.The story is about what the business owns, how the business runs with various strategies, and whether it is viable/profitable in the long run?
Isn’t that amazing?
The numbers are alive.They are not dead.Now you may question why the business owners need to know the story. Let me tell you this,the biggest enemy is yourself.The story helps you better understand how the business runs, what challenges that you are facing(by the way, did your bookkeeper tell you about this?), what are the options available. Once you know more about your business, the industry, the competition, the technology available and the stakeholders in the area. You, as a business owner, once gain all the insight about your business, you can make better business decision, either improving the process or looking for resources to expand/to buy out other business.
Now you got some sense on “good bookkeeping service”. Has your bookkeeper provided all those insights and asked the questions?
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