Small businesses often face a dilemma when it comes to completing their accounts – save money or save time. They can save money by undertaking the work themselves or save time by outsourcing the work instead. Many businesses choose to outsource eventually, typically when the workload gets too great to continue to do it themselves. But is this the best time to outsource your accounts?
The Benefits of Outsourced Accountancy Services
Outsourcing accountancy services for small businesses has one huge benefit, along with other smaller ones, which will be music to any SME owners’ ears. It saves time. Keeping up to date with your bookkeeping, VAT returns, year-end accounts, Self-Assessment tax returns, tax planning, payroll, business planning and budgeting is hugely time-consuming. Imagine the time you have back if you were to outsource some of or all that work. In addition, having these tasks carried out by an experienced professional also ensures that they will be accurate, which will save money in the long term.
Outsourcing from the Outset
As we offer business start-up advice to SMEs in Sussex and Hampshire, we can get you started on the right track and keep your accounts straight from the very beginning. The benefits of this approach include being able to put practices into place from the word go, which can be sustained as the business grows. You’ll also have the confidence that your accounts are being managed properly (one less thing to worry about) and use the time you would have spent on your accounts developing your business instead. The only possible downside of outsourcing your accounts from the start of the operation is that it is a cost to your business at a critical stage in its life. However, it may be a worthwhile one in terms of the time you save and the savings your outsourced accountant can also make for your business.
Outsourcing at a Later Date
Many business owners defer outsourcing their accounts until their businesses have grown to the point where they are simply too busy to devote time to doing their accounts. Equally, they may not want to add another employee to the staff count and/or are not sure the accounts are onerous enough warrant such an appointment, or indeed are too onerous for a single person to manage any longer. The downside to outsourcing at this stage of your business’ development is the unravelling of old, out-of-date systems and the possible discovery of past errors, which can be time-consuming and costly to rectify.
At Approved Accounting, we offer flexible service packages, fixed fees and online accountancy to small and medium sized businesses in Sussex and Hampshire. This means we tailor our services to meet your needs. We have lower cost options for start-ups who want to outsource their accountancy from the outset without a large initial cost. Whilst for more established businesses who want to stop managing their accounts in-house, our flexible online accounting packages make the changeover as painless as possible.
To find out how we can help your business please contact us.
