By: vish ks
Submitted: 2010-04-22 06:14:51 | Word Count: 531
Getting the right person with the right skills set to accomplish the bookkeeping tasks and accounting functions of a small business is vital to its growth. One might have seen many ways of getting the accounting books done; here are some of the major variations. In some cases, the owner or the owner's spouse does all the bookkeeping and payroll tasks, and someone else does all the taxes. In other cases, the secretary or the receptionist doubles up as the bookkeeper or the payroll person; the CPA does the tax returns and the payroll part. In yet another case, the CPA keeps the accounting books for the company or the owner, and carries out all the payroll activities and other tax returns. You would have seen these basic scenarios, jumbled around to a small degree, but that is how it usually is configured there. Now we shall take a look at the bad aspects of these methods. In fact, these methods are not simple, efficient or cost effective, and none of these common place methods produce good results.
In general, these receptionists or owners' spouses are not at all trained bookkeepers or accountants. They are also not knowledgeable about the way to handle accounting's tricky aspects. It needs to be reminded that if accounting were an easy task, everybody could have done it. Most of the time, the books would be a mess by the time a CPA is hired, and it usually requires a lot of adjusting and fixing apart from fine-tuning. There could be a lot of mistakes that need to be corrected. Typically, the accounts do not balance or reconcile, and the account balances might be way off. This can turn out to be very expensive. The fees CPA s charge per hour would be always on the higher side. In addition to that, the owner may never really know how he/she is doing in his/her business. He would be forced to gauge the bookkeeping things by means of cash in the bank account or through gut instinct. This is not good, and one might get to see this situation sometimes. Finally, the owner would be forced to have a CPA clean up the books at a huge fee per hour. Or else, he may have to live with inaccurate accounting information throughout the financial year.
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Doing the bookkeeping tasks on one’s own is the worst thing one can do. This is not at all an owner's job because the owner owns a business, not a job. In fact, that is foolishness, since they are wasting their energy on some thing else. Actually, their duty is to build up the business, not to remain as a clerk. In some cases, the CPA handles every bookkeeping work; or sometimes they do just the heavy work, usually for a monthly flat fee of big dimension. Engaging the services of CPA s are worth it; but, it is also expensive. Usually, they do not want a mess handed out to them.
