What Are the Benefits of Hiring Accounting Services?

Growing small businesses inevitably meet the challenge of their internal accounting methods no longer being sustainable. Whether because of time constraints from the function owner, inefficiency in the process, or a need for more meaningful financials, every business has to decide how to address this challenge. Small businesses can either hire internally or outsource their function. 

What Are the Benefits of Using an Accountant?

Small business owners often own the bookkeeping function during the start of their business. This can make them reluctant to give it up, especially because an accountant is an extra cost. Here are 3 benefits of using an accountant. 

Efficiency 

The first benefit of using an accountant is efficiency. Accountants can streamline processes from their experience or technology. Additionally, small business owners are likely putting out other fires and leading other initiatives. These can lead to backups in reconciliations and posting entries that may be important to know the real-time financials of the business. 

Accuracy

Introducing another trained set of eyes to your company’s financials is a good thing. Small business owners doing their accounting can be like reading your writing. It’s easier for someone else to catch errors and question inconsistencies than for the business owner to do the same. Additionally, it will drive best-practice accounting for your company. 

Decision Making

Highly experienced accountants can leverage financials to help your business make informed decisions. The first way an account does this is by providing expert insight into the financial statements and reports of your company. The second way is by measuring certain aspects of the business. Measurement and management go hand-in-hand, so accountants drive management by measuring KPIs. Finally, high-level accountants leverage forecasts and financial models to indicate the implications of certain decisions, such as hiring or layoffs. 

What Is the Importance of Hiring a Good Accountant?

Hiring a good accountant is essential to the current and future success of your business. First, accountants help you understand the current state of your business. Your burn rate, growth rate, revenue, expenses, and profitability depend on good accounting. Accounting mistakes, slow accounting, or cash basis can create a “flying blind” mentality in your decision-making. Second, accounting is one of the most important parts of fundraises or acquisitions. Deals can be lost or millions of dollars of evaluation lost if your accounting isn’t clean. However, the benefits of accounting and bookkeeping can be better valuations, a better understanding of growth trajectory, and informed decision-making. 

One of the benefits of hiring accounting services is they vet the accountants for you, and it’s easy to check their work. Check outsourced accounting services referrals and reviews. These are telltale signs of the quality of the business.  

What Are the 5 Benefits of Accounting Outsourcing Services?

Outsourcing your finance function is a big decision. It’s important to understand the benefits of outsourcing accounting services before deciding. Here are the 5 benefits of accounting with an outsourcing company. 

Time

Time is often the enemy of small business executives. Outsourcing can save hours off of your week. This newfound time can be spent growing your business, improving your product, and optimizing your operations. 

Expertise

Small businesses can have access to higher-level accounting expertise than they could if they were hired full-time. Companies can outsource their bookkeeping, controllership, CFO function, forecasting, and/or financial model builds. Having expertise also gives you a third-party resource that understands your business to help inform decision-making. The best outsourced accounting companies are partners to help drive growth for your business. 

Cost

Hiring outsourced services is way less expensive than full-time employees. Full-time employees’ salary plus the cost of benefits, equipment, and retention is expensive. Fractional services allow you to have access to multiple levels of expertise while still maintaining that fractional cost. Most small businesses do not need a full-time CFO, controller, or bookkeeper but still need all 3 functions at different times. That’s why fractional services can be the perfect middle ground of cost and expertise. 

Scalability

Outsourced companies that have multiple levels of expertise allow you to scale without drastic change or new hires. Their experience with different-sized companies allows them to implement scalable processes to fit your growing business. 

Experience

The nature of outsourced companies means they typically have more experience than hiring internally. This means the companies bring a wealth of experience in processes, technology, and problem-solving that may not exist internally. 

How to Find a Business Accountant

Depending on the type of service (fractional or full-time), the best avenues to finding a good business accountant differ. We all know finding good talent is difficult. Here are some tips for both types of service. 

Outsourced/Part-time Accountant

The best practice for finding an outsourced accountant is to vet multiple businesses from different sources. First, leverage your network. See if any business owners you know have had good or bad experiences with different fractional accounting companies. Second, search online for businesses that serve your company type frequently. Look at reviews, case studies, and the website. Businesses that serve enterprise clients may not be great fits for small businesses and vice versa. This should narrow you down to 2-4 companies to vet. From there, it’s about determining whether their value proposition and style fit your needs and business. Check referrals and discuss the value of each company internally. 

Full-Time Accountant

Finding a full-time accountant typically happens more traditionally. First, leverage your network and its connections. According to LinkedIn, 85% of people land a job through their network. If people are looking for jobs through their network, small business owners need to be using theirs to find people as well. Job boards can also be effective for sourcing applicants. However, these can require a heavier lift internally to vett and promote the job. 

How Milestone Can Help

Milestone is a strategic finance partner. We differentiate ourselves with our tech-driven processes, forecasting, and meaningful financials. Whether you need support from a  CFO, controller, bookkeeper, or all three, we’ve got you covered. Contact us today to take your finance function to the next level.