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When you’re just starting out, you’re not necessarily thinking about what your employees are going to bring to your business long-term. You simply want survival at first, and sometimes that means that you’ll hire anyone who can do the job and is willing to work at what you can afford to pay.

As oftentimes happens, a business owner hires someone they already know and trust, such as a neighbor or sister, to do the bookkeeping for them. Now, it’s true that this person might not even have experience in bookkeeping, but they just are more skilled at it than the owner.

Are You Ready to Bolster Your Accounting Staff?

As your business continues to expand, so, too, will your business’s requirements and needs grow. There may come a time when the bookkeeper you hired can no longer do the job. As your business grows, transactions, too, will get more complex, and this can make the books undoable for some without that level of skill. And if the bookkeeper is just focused on keeping up with basic tasks, more finely oriented details get neglected.

No one is managing cash, monitoring profitability, or building relationships with lenders-no one is paving the way for growth. Even if the owner knew how to present the business to a bank or investor, the numbers might not be reliable. It can end up literally handicapping the entire organization.

Help for the Business Owner

Many business owners don’t have an accounting or finance background themselves-leaving them ill-equipped to properly train and supervise a bookkeeper, much less tackle the bigger issues like cash forecasting, cost control and profitability analysis.

A Qualified CFO or controller can help in two important ways:

* He or she can train and support your existing accounting staff, so that they operate at their best. This could include creating procedure manuals, turning some processes over to automation, and reorganizing books that are disorganized presently, so that the bookkeeper can start over fresh.

* By performing financial duties that fall outside the expertise of the bookkeeper and the owner-this might include things like preparing and analyzing financial statements, creating business plans, defining budgets and performing cash flow analysis.

This can take pressure off of the business owner, who is then able to have the time and energy to focus on running the business. The bookkeeper in turn tends to do much better once trained properly and with clear expectations to follow.

Efficiency Increases Your Bottom Line

Your accounting operations directly impact the profitability and growth of your company. For example, when you’re processing accounts receivables efficiently, payments are collected more promptly, cash flow evens out and banks view your business as being more credible.

If you don’t think your accounting staff can take your company to where it should go, perhaps it’s time to call upon a professional accounting service.