Improve Business Intelligence by Outsourcing Your Books

The knowledge gained from carefully monitored KPIs is a valuable asset to your company because it can help you make better business decisions by identifying opportunities for growth as well as areas in need of improvement. Once you have established the KPIs your business wants to focus on, you need to check them on a consistent basis.

Your end of the month reconciliation not only balances the books for the month, but it gives you a snapshot of your KPIs on a monthly basis. However, reconciliation involves a lot of manual work and employee time. Implementing changes to your business based on your business intelligence, including your KPIs, takes time.

If you consider the amount of time your business could save by outsourcing this monthly task, you could divert employee time and resources into improving and growing the business.

Here are just a few ways managing BI in-house wastes valuable company resources:

Time Lost for Errors

Whether you keep your books in spreadsheets or you have paper back-ups of data kept in digital form, such as in QuickBooks, discrepancies can arise due to simple human error. Let’s face it, we’re all human and we all make mistakes, but one missed keystroke can throw the books completely off-balance.

Unfortunately, when it comes to bookkeeping, a simple mistake can waste a lot of time trying to fix and reconcile the error. This is where using an outsourced bookkeeper can save you time and resources. When you outsource your bookkeeping to a dedicated service team, you have multiple sets of eyes on your books to not only check for errors, but to also insert an additional layer of internal control to prevent business fraud. After all, if the person writing your business checks is also the person reconciling your bank account at the end of the month, you are leaving your business wide open for employee theft. With an outsourced team, your reconciliation reports are delivered to you each month, saving you the time and aggravation it takes to balance the books, as well as giving you peace of mind that your money is being watched over.

Labor Costs

To keep your books in-house, you either have to hire a full-charge bookkeeper and pay them a weekly salary, or you have to take time away from other employees to complete the work. In the first scenario – you must deal with the headaches involved with recruiting, training and retaining a quality bookkeeper – and doing it all over again when they quit. In the latter example, you are trusting your books to an untrained bookkeeper with multiple roles and divided attention. Conversely, outsourcing the monthly reconciliation process to a professional bookkeeping service saves you from suffering the turnover woes and keeps your office manager doing what they do best – managing your business. This saves your company money in the long run.

Inconsistent Closing Processes

If your company is lucky enough to have a dedicated team, then your closing processes probably doesn’t differ from month to month. Yet, there are factors that can create an inconsistent closing process. If an employee is out sick or on vacation during the monthly close-out, the duties need to be shifted to another employee who may not have the same knowledge or closing process as the person who normally handles the activity. Or perhaps an employee gets promoted or up and quits –this may leave you in a lurch for finding and training a new employee. Outsourcing this process can help standardize your monthly closing process.