staff There is bookkeeping and then there is quality bookkeeping. The difference speaks for itself. Less than stellar work involves errors, missed data, omissions, and can also lead to downstream problems and damage through indirect impacts.
Quality bookkeeping produces work that is correct, accurate, reconciled timely and provides a dependable basis for good financial decisions. That can lead to better strategies and implementation as well as gains, profit, revenue and growth.
Clearly, one option sounds a lot better than the other. So then why do companies continue to settle for mediocre bookkeeping anyway? The answer has to do with trying to control costs but focusing on pennies and missing dollars, as well as resistance to change.
Savings Pennies, Losing Dollars
Why do people consistently focus on the small things and miss big opportunities? Much of the habit has to do with comprehension. Big issues that involve sizable complexity are hard to comprehend quickly. Small issues or those with familiar topics are far easier to digest quickly and thus become easy to focus on as well.
Looking at the cost of a bookkeeper with a current system that costs $20/hour versus an outside system that costs $21/hour seems to be a pretty obvious choice; all things being equal the current system is cheaper.
This is a small detail perspective. However, when that same choice deals with downstream benefits from the outside service being able to scale up as needed with greater surge workload, or the skillset involved can also by a hybrid with automation and handle more data faster, then it involves more details that are not so comparable. Using the previous analysis, all of those other benefits get missed saving $1/hour.
Resisting Change is Unnecessary
The other negative influence tends to be cultural resistance to change. This is very common in the scenario of in-house staffing versus outsourcing, because the assumption is that people automatically lose jobs. And there’s a basis for that fear due to actual downsizing that has occurred in manufacturing in the 1990s, for example. However, downsizing of staff is not an automatic reaction.
Smart companies who have more than enough accounting work focus on redirecting their people to more complex matters for greater challenging output, relegating the mass processing to services for more efficiency of the same activity times 1,000.
Your Bookkeeping Shouldn’t Dictate Your Organization
Remote quality bookkeeping helps a business move forward by having timely, accurate records for making financial decisions. Poor accounting procedures create delays and add to problems with organizational flow. It’s entirely avoidable, now with cloud tools, Internet capability, and remote support.
However, companies need to be willing to change and embrace more efficient bookkeeping methods and resources. If that cultural fence can’t be jumped, a business will continue to hold itself back from financial management progress. And the ripple effects eventually impact the rest of the company too.
