When To Hire A Bookkeeper: Signs Your Startup Is Ready

Become familiar with the prospective bookkeeper’s qualifications and credentials. Since nearly anyone can call themselves a bookkeeper, you’ll want to ask about their background. Many bookkeepers will have a degree in accounting, be a CPA, or even be registered with the Tax Practitioners Board. You can also ask friends or colleagues who have utilized bookkeepers for their businesses.

For basic financial tasks, it’s usually better to use a bookkeeper than an accountant, since the former charges a cheaper hourly rate. Remote bookkeeping services typically charge a flat how to hire a bookkeeper monthly fee, based on how much time it will take to complete your books every month. The number of accounts you’ll be tracking—and the frequency of transactions—may affect this.

More Complex Financial Transactions

This attention to detail will ensure that your finances are accurately managed. Outsourcing the financial management of your business is a great way to save time, stress, and money. QuickBooks Online is one of the best bookkeeping software used by accounting and bookkeeping professionals. You might need one if you ask this question yourself more often as a small business owner. According to Investopedia, the number one reason a small business faces failure is the lack of capital to carry out operations. Choosing the latter will be the best thing you can do as a small business owner.

Take a course or schedule an introductory meeting to confirm that what you’re doing is right, or to elevate your DIY bookkeeping to a higher level. Skilled bookkeepers notice and identify trends that can help you capitalize on — or avoid — a situation, season, or event. For example, if businesses within your industry typically see an increase in sales during autumn but yours has not, a bookkeeper can help figure out why, then recommend a solution. Whether you’re still traumatized from high school calculus or simply don’t consider yourself a math aficionado, dealing with business finances is tough. Any bookkeeper worth his or her salt has honed their skills and has experience with most of the situations you’d encounter on a day-by-day basis.

You’re uncertain about your cash flow

In this article, we cover all you need to know about hiring a bookkeeper, including what skills and abilities to look for, and how to test for them as part of the recruitment process. These questions should give some insight into how the candidate thinks and processes challenging scenarios in a professional environment. Meanwhile, here are answers to some questions you might have about hiring a bookkeeper for your company. Following are some tips for finding a talented bookkeeper to help support your business during this critical time, and to work remotely, if needed.

You might consider setting up a weekly call or in-person meeting to connect with them. Once you decide on your new bookkeeper, setting expectations and promoting transparency is critical. You’ll want to establish a timeline for your month-end close and ensure your bookkeeper makes any compliance filings according to state and federal deadlines.

QuickBooks Support

I’m a control freak and afraid to trust anyone with my financials. The exception is Colson Strategies who has become a dependable partner. But it’s scary to know you have to trust someone else with your money. Hiring a bookkeeper is important even if they only come in once a week for a few hours. Bookkeepers should be aware of all the tax law changes, creating a tax-efficient structure for your small business. Learn the benefits of outsourcing bookkeeping, including savings, accuracy, and more.

And with that perspective, you can make informed business decisions to impact the health and vitality of your business. If you’re self-employed, it can be hard to put a price on your time. Use an online calculator to determine how much your time is worth. This can help you better determine whether bookkeeping is worth the hours it takes you to complete on your own.

Using custom questions for bookkeeper candidates with TestGorilla

The bottom line here is to make sure you have access to the data and files the bookkeeper will be working with to ensure transparency. For example, consider a company that automates its bank transactions through online accounting software. The software records all the cash transactions, but the owner doesn’t realize that certain non-cash transactions, such as depreciation or accruals for future purchases, should be recorded. Your business likely started with startup funding and minimal transactions. Hiring employees or purchasing equipment began to increase the complexity of recording your growing transactions.

You may have enough time to manage your bookkeeping in the early days of operation. However, success can quickly alter your situation, and you may have less free time, setting back accounting activities. A qualified bookkeeper manages your finances, saving you time and resources while you do things only you can do for your business. Our skilled bookkeepers are equipped to prepare comprehensive financial statements that provide valuable insights into your business’s financial health.

Do your due diligence and ask for reference checks from accountants who have worked with your bookkeeping candidates. The first thing to decide is whether you need to hire a bookkeeper full time or engage someone on a temporary or temporary-to-hire basis. You could use a specialized staffing agency to find skilled candidates who would be a solid match for your company until you’re ready for a full-time hire. If bookkeeping is not handled effectively, receipts and paperwork will pile up. Typically, it’s more expensive to hire a firm than a freelance bookkeeper, since firms have higher overhead to cover. That’s why it’s important to find a bookkeeper who knows what they’re doing.

• To ensure the best combination of flexibility and speed, optimize for an accounting firm that can do the vast majority of the accounting work in-house.
• After you’ve figured out what type of bookkeeper you need, determine what bookkeeping process best suits your company.
• Once you hire the right bookkeeper for your business, you’ve taken the first step to better understanding how your business works and plotting a course for future growth.
• Information created by third parties that we may link out to or feature on our site is not endorsed by us and remains the responsibility of such third parties.
• Financial accountants calculate assets and liabilities and show outside investors how a firm is doing.

Real-time information is also vital if you want to make sound business decisions. In this guide we’ll look at what a bookkeeper can do for you, and when you might hire one for your business. When the growing pains are over, it won’t take long to see how efficient a bookkeeper’s recommendations can be compared to your old methods. A bookkeeper might introduce you to different software or new ways of doing things. They might help you in the long run, but there’s no denying that it can take a while to get the hang of something. While there are plenty of great reasons to hire a bookkeeper, there are some drawbacks you might want to consider.