Outsourcing your tax and bookkeeping needs to a professional service can be a great way to save yourself and your company lots of money and time. It can also be a disaster if you do not carefully screen the potential bookkeeping services and find one that is competent and qualified.
There are several personality traits that are associated with excellent bookkeepers and you should try to find a service that employs people with these skills and talents.
For starters, a good bookkeeping service will have individuals on staff that is passionate about what they do. That means that the bookkeepers love dealing with numbers and math. They should have a great grasp of the relevant mathematical concepts and love finding the errors in sums and calculations.
Another important quality for good bookkeepers to have is a penchant for details. This requires looking over and paying attention to Lots of details, and it those details that will make a big difference in whether your company gains or loses money. You want to choose a bookkeeping service that employs people who are good at reading the fine print, and sorting out the important and necessary information from the irrelevant data.
Using time effectively is also an essential characteristic of a top quality bookkeeping service. Since you are paying the service to take care of your books and ultimately save you money, you should expect the bookkeepers to know how to efficiently manage their time to make the most of your money.
This means that they must be able to prioritize all the required tasks and be able to give full attention to each task at a time. They should also plan enough time into their schedule to look for problems and mistakes and to fix or solve them. An especially good service will require its employees to keep an audit of their own time spent on your accounting projects.
Technologically Savvy
Fortunately, most of these services today are technologically savvy because they have to be in order to be competitive. The nature of business and finance today is all electronic and automated, so it is important to find a bookkeeper who is up to date with all the pertinent software.
It also helps if he or she is well versed enough in technical things in order to be able to troubleshoot any problems that come up. Finally, the right bookkeeping service will keep a full staff of very analytically-minded employees. This means they are able to review all the information and data from your business and understand the big picture and how each component of your finances affects the others.
They should be able to offer advice for future bookkeeping and financial decisions based on all the information they analyze. The best way to find a service with all the right qualities is to conduct in-person interviews and ask specific questions that will help you detect the presence or absence of the required characteristics.
After interviewing several bookkeeping services, you should be able to narrow it down to the one that seems most aware of the essential qualities needed to effectively take care of your finances.
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