When my first small business was in its infancy, I was struggling to make ends meet. Marketing my new business and finding customers who would trust their money to a startup wasn’t easy. The bills were piling up.
I started my business as a one-man show, and as I finally started getting some momentum, my first instinct was to hire a bookkeeper.
This isn’t typical. Not at all. But it worked for me, and here’s why: Most entrepreneurs are happy to leave the day to day bookkeeping to an outside firm. Outsourcing this work allows them to focus on their natural skill sets and leave the tedious responsibility of managing invoices and receipts to someone else.
Early on, I couldn’t even afford an outside bookkeeping service, so I did it all myself. While it was time consuming and non-revenue generating, I soon learned the value of having up-to-the-minute financial data on how my business was performing. I was addicted to this information; the sales, margins, overheads and expenses were always in front of me in black and white. These numbers didn’t lie and they gave me a sober view on how I was managing my cash flow and what was driving the profit in my business.
When it came time for me to break free from those bookkeeping tasks, I was already knew how certain transactions should be allocated and was accustomed to seeing it all in real time. Switching to an outside service would mean that I’d receive monthly statements, at best. In my opinion, that information was too old to act upon in a meaningful way, so I hired a part-time bookkeeper to come into the office several hours a week. This allowed me to influence how the books were organized, and meant my statements were only a few days old at any given time.
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