Bookkeeping is one of the most vital aspects of any business, no matter how large or small. However, as it often happens in business, some tasks are just more immediate than others, and it can be pretty easy to forget about bookkeeping during those moments.
But as we’ve said, bookkeeping is an integral part of your business and it can’t be forgotten about. That’s why we feel like everyone should have a professional doing their bookkeeping for them. If that is not convincing enough for you, here are some additional reasons as to why you should never do your own bookkeeping.
1. You’ll Lose Focus
We’re going to assume that if you’re still doing your own accounting that you’re a small start-up business. Now, what’s common for every start-up is that they have the potential to grow. However, to develop a business, you need to focus all of your attention on it. That can be pretty hard to do if you have too much on your plate.
You should be focusing on strategizing and finding new ideas on how to make your company bigger and better and not “wasting time” on keeping books in check. If you do that, you’re most likely going to end up overworked, you’re going to lose focus of what’s really important and that is growing your business.
2. You Don’t Know How To Do It
While it is true that bookkeeping does seem relatively easy to do, that’s actually not the case. The vast majority of people don’t have enough financial knowledge or expertise to keep the books in order.
More often than not, what happens is, an overworked individual ends up making loads of mistakes and then has to hire an accountant or some kind of a financial professional to sort things out.
So, why not do it from the get-go? It would be much wiser to just hire a professional that has done their fair share of work in the field and are far less likely to make mistakes than you are. This move could potentially be saving you a lot of money, amongst other things.
3. It’ll Take Up Too Much Of Your Free Time
Another thing that you have to quite well if you want to run a successful business and still be somewhat sane and happy is to maintain a proper balance of your work and personal life. All the wealth and success in the world won’t amount to anything if all you do is work, eat and sleep.
As you could guess, when you’re starting a business, you have a lot more work to do and adding on to the pile of duties will most certainly take a toll on your personal life. People often underestimate the importance of free time and personal life on their physical and mental health. Too much work can only get you so far, and to be fair – it takes away a lot more than it gives back.
4. You Won’t Get To See The Bigger Picture
Although it can be quite beneficial to be constantly involved in your company’s finances, too much information can make you blind to the bigger picture. Sure, everyday tracking of your finances does put some things in perspective, but according to northcarolinabookkeeping.com, that’s not something you should ideally do.
You’d be much better off just looking at the final number at the end of each month and seeing how you’ve operated in a 30-day period. You could have a meeting with your bookkeeper at the end of each month once they’ve crunched all the numbers and then simply look at the final results. This should give you a bigger picture of the whole project and possibly provide you with insight into what you might want to improve.
5. You Won’t Actually Save Money
One of the most common reasons some start-up business owners avoid hiring a bookkeeper for an extended period of time is because they want to cut the operational costs of their business. However, that rarely ends up being the case. You see, what often happens is, you get so overworked that you end up making a lot of costly mistakes.
Not only will you have to hire a bookkeeper to fix your errors, but you’ll have to pay them more than you usually would. Why? Because you’ll most likely give them a call just before you have to submit your fiscal reports and after you realize there’s no way you’ll be able to do it all by yourself.
Or even worse, you’ll submit your reports and IRS or someone else is going to notice all these mistakes, and you’re going to end up fined or worse. As you can see, none of these are outcomes are money-saving. They’re quite the opposite, in fact.
6. It Highly Unlikely That You’ll Enjoy Doing It
Now, we’re fully aware that no one enjoys every aspect of their job, but bookkeeping probably isn’t atop your list of favourite things to do. What will most likely happen, you’ll get so bored of tallying up payroll and other stuff that you’ll end up feeling unmotivated for everything else, as well.
Now, we’re not saying your bookkeeper will hop in place out of excitement over the job, but for them, it’s probably not going to be as dreadful as it might be for you. You are paying them for it, after all…
7. It’s Going To Be Hard To Maintain Cash Flow
All it takes for your cash to stop flowing is one late payment that you’ve forgotten to make. If you’re working with a lot of clients, this is more likely to happen than it is not if you try and juggle all of it.
With a bookkeeper on a payroll, they’ll make sure no one’s payment is ever late and everything on this ship is flowing smoothly, including cash. As you could guess, that is quite important for an up and coming company.
Conclusion
There you have it – it is pretty evident that the cons outweigh the pros when it comes to doing your own books. If we’re being completly honest, there really aren’t any pros unless you’re managing a business with a single employee and a single client, which is almost never the case. So, keep these in mind if you ever consider doing your own books.
