As any small business tax advisor will attest, when you own a small business, the quality of your books determines how easily and effectively you can run it. The benefits a bookkeeper provides can help you sustain and grow your business in ways, and to degrees, you may not be able to achieve or achieve so quickly, easily, or economically, without one.

Budget Your Finances

The most common reason approximately 20 percent of small businesses fail is a lack of funding. Bookkeepers can help you avoid that scenario by helping you more accurately budget the funds you do have. By organizing the records of your income and expenses and providing you with a clear and understandable snapshot of your company’s resources and costs, a bookkeeper can help you devise and adhere to a budget that allows you to:

• Forecast your projected income
• Plan your spending
• Differentiate between your plans and your current reality

Track Profitability and Growth

A bookkeeper can tell you exactly what your company’s profit or loss is at any given moment and what that says about your actual prospects for growth. They also distinguish revenue, expenses, receivables, and liabilities from one another, so you can see how your business is currently operating and how to adjust spending to make those operations more efficient and effective.

Attention to Detail

Bookkeepers provide a meticulous level of detail that most business owners couldn’t come close to achieving when attempting to keep their own books. Bookkeeping software can only do so much and is only as useful as the person utilizing it.

Without a thorough understanding of all the nuances of bookkeeping, you can easily make mistakes, even with the best of software, and these mistakes can cost you considerably in over-payment of your taxes or in penalties for failing to report correctly and submit a complete and accurate return.

A professional bookkeeper can also ensure you pay all your bills on time and your business credit remains intact. Your bookkeeper can also ensure you meet all regulatory requirements so your business can operate unencumbered by completely avoidable penalties and setbacks.

Save Time

Tracking, recording and reconciling bank statements, payroll, and financial transactions take time. That’s time you could better spend attending to the tasks more demanding of the company leader’s attention, like inventory, operations, collaborative partnerships, and customer relations. By delegating the tedious and time-consuming task of bookkeeping to a professional, you can work on nurturing and growing your business.

Be Prepared

Having a professional keep your business ledgers clean and orderly throughout the year prepares you and your accountant for a much easier time preparing your business taxes. How you need to prepare and file your return varies depending on how you’ve structured your business. If you don’t understand the proper way to do this, you could do it wrong and expose yourself to a potential audit. In the event of an audit, having your books professionally managed also better prepares you to come out of it squeaky clean.

A Second Set of Eyes

As a business leader, you invariably have lots of demands for your attention. This could cause even the best and brightest business owners to overlook or forget something or simply get it wrong. A bookkeeper is a trusted partner in the money management of your business, able to identify when these lapses occur and correct them before they cause your business problems.

A bookkeeper can also be an ally you turn to for guidance or confirmation when making big business decisions that can affect your company’s finances. You can use your bookkeeper to bounce ideas off of and educate you about the nuances of your company’s finances to make better, smarter financial decisions.

Maximize Cash Flow

Your company’s cash flow is how much cash-on-hand you have to pay employees and otherwise run your business day to day and invest in your business’s growth for the future. It provides an overall indication of your business’s financial health. A professional bookkeeper can help you track and, more importantly, manage that cash flow, empowering you to do more with your business.

Save Money

While you do have to pay for the services of a bookkeeper, the value a good one provides can save you inordinately more than you pay for it. Hiring a bookkeeper can save you money in:

• Cash flow problems
• Late payments
• Tax penalties
• Human errors

It can also lower your risk of an audit.

Mediate Disagreements

Often in business, disagreements involving business finances or expenses arise between partners or with vendors or customers. When these occur, a bookkeeper can serve as an informed and impartial mediator, helping all sides see the facts and figures that influence the matters in dispute and interpret them to reach the most fiscally sensible agreement.

Moreover, by maintaining the books, setting guidelines for how the business manages its money, and generating rules for how expenses are approved, the bookkeeper further helps resolve confusion and prevent disagreements before they occur.

Support Work-Life Balance

As a small business owner, running your business can often dominate your life, and other parts of your life, like family, fun, and relaxation, can often suffer as a result. But, why do you own your own business if not to be the master of your own destiny?

A bookkeeper can help take a big part of your workload off your shoulders. And, by giving you confidence that your business is running smoothly, efficiently, and under watchful expert care, even when you’re not present to personally oversee it, a bookkeeper can help ease your mind. This way, you can divert all that attention and energy to those other aspects of the full, well-rounded life you work so hard to achieve and maintain.

Impress Lenders and Investors

People considering investing in your business or lending your business money will feel more assured doing so when they see you have a professional bookkeeper managing those finances for you. It shows good business sense and bolsters their impression of your trustworthiness with their money.

A bookkeeper can even represent your interests on your behalf since your bookkeeper knows better than anyone your business’s financial condition and how much it would take to expand the business in the ways you foresee.

Where to Find Quality Bookkeeping Services in Charlotte

If you own or operate a small business in the Charlotte area, finding a qualified professional to do your small business bookkeeping is no small task. Charlotte tax accountants generally don’t also provide bookkeeping services, but Scott Boyar, CPA does. As both a bookkeeper and small business tax advisor, Scott Boyar can help you keep your books throughout the year and prepare your taxes when the time comes. Call 704-527-2725 or visit https://www.sboyarcpa.com/ now to learn more about Scott Boyar’s bookkeeping services.