How Does Outsourced Bookkeeping Work?
The Bookkeeping Services You Need… When You Need Them
Why Outsource Your Monthly Bookkeeping
Bookkeeping is essential to the success of every business. As a small business owner, you can probably attest to some of the challenges associated with tackling your bookkeeping in-house. In addition to being time consuming, it costs more than what most small businesses can afford.
In fact, having bookkeeping employees can end up costing your business more than 50% of their stated wage thanks to benefits and idle time. While successful bookkeeping hinges on how you operate and organize your business, outsourcing the more tedious tasks frees up more of your time so you can focus on other aspects of your business.
For many small business owners, outsourced bookkeeping is the perfect solution. Here’s why outsourced bookkeeping may be the perfect solution for you too.
Here are some of the top reasons why you may want to consider outsourcing your monthly bookkeeping:
- You’ll save money on labor costs
- You’ll work with professionals who have a higher level of expertise
- You can scale services up or down depending on your business' bookkeeping needs
- You’ll have more time for tasks related to your core business
- You can say goodbye to tedious and frustrating data entry tasks
- Your financial records will always be current and accurate
- You’ll have a clearer picture of your finances
When Should You Consider Outsourcing Your Bookkeeping?
Outsourced bookkeepers are a good fit if your business falls into one or more of these categories:
- A small business that requires a skilled bookkeeper but can’t support a full-time in-house employee for the role either in terms of affordability or quantity or work
- A company that needs temporary services, like compiling end-of-year fiscal reports
- YA small business that frequently needs to scale their bookkeeping up or down due to fluctuating work volume
Small Business Bookkeeper vs Accountant
A bookkeeper's role is to provide accurate financial reporting of the day-to-day transactions of your business on a monthly basis.
While there are overlapping areas between accounting and bookkeeping, these are some of the specific tasks that bookkeepers perform:
- Categorize and reconcile all business transactions, including payroll, purchases, receipts, sales, and payments
- Provide accurate monthly P&L statements, balance sheets, and cash flow statements
- Track accounts payable and accounts receivable and balance the books
- Liaise with accountants, tax preparers, investors, and auditors to provide them with accurate financial reporting as needed
- Collate data from bank statements, credit card statements, payroll records, invoices and import them into one financial software that keeps track of all transaction categories
- Offer after-the-fact bookkeeping services for businesses unable to do it in real time.
Accountants, on the other hand, focus on the bigger financial picture:
- Verify the accuracy of financial documents
- Analyze financial reports to provide financial advice and strategies
- Ensure legal compliance
- Prepare and maintain financial reports
- Prepare tax returns and ensure timely tax payment
When evaluating outsourced bookkeepers, make sure they have a proven track record, offer a cost-effective package, and use the latest accounting software.
The 6 Key Steps to Outsourced Bookkeeping
We’ve tackled the why, but how does bookkeeping work?
Step 1: You provide us with all your statements
We’ll let you know what statements we’re expecting based on our agreement with you (bank, credit card, loans, etc.). If you provide us accountant login credentials, we’ll even gather these statements for you.
Step 2: We enter in all your data
Once we have your statements, we get to work entering the data from them that needs to be reconciled.
Step 3: We balance your books
We do all the calculations to balance books and make sure your beginning and ending statements match what your banks say they should be.
Step 4: We ask questions, on an as-needed basis
We may need to ask you how to classify certain transactions, especially early on in our partnership. The longer we work with you, the better we’ll know your business, and the fewer questions we’ll need to ask.
Step 5: You provide us with the additional information we need
The more information you provide us about your transactions, the faster we learn what to look for in your monthly statements. Responding to our questions in a full and timely way will streamline your monthly process.
Step 6: We send you all applicable reporting
You receive your P&L and balance sheet, on time and in good order, which you can then share with your accountant “as is” at tax time.
Zero Error Model
Core competence and incentive driven.
Dedicated Bookkeeper
We assign a dedicated, certified bookkeeper to your account, who will be the only bookkeeper that will work on your account. This bookkeeper, along with the lead accountant, will carefully review your account, ask any categorization questions during a review meeting, and then get started on your books. A dedicated bookkeeper model helps with brain drain and eliminates errors.
Bookkeeping Service
Your bookkeeper will import your bank statements into your QuickBooks Online or QuickBooks desktop account, categorize the monthly transactions, and prepare the necessary financial statements.
Communication
The lead accountant on your account will be the point of contact for all your accounting questions via phone or email. Along with your accountant, a support team ensures that you receive a same-day response. When your books are complete and ready for review, your lead accountant will contact you for a review meeting. We also schedule quarterly review meetings to go over your financials, answer questions, and make adjustments to categorizations.
Tax Ready Financials
Tax ready financials! We'll organize your financials into a Year End Financial Package that contains all of the financial statements that you and your CPA will need to file your taxes. If your CPA has questions or needs any adjustments to your books, your Remote Books Online lead accountant will work directly with your CPA to sort everything out, so that you don’t have to play the middleman.
Back Bookkeeping
Behind on your books? No need to worry! Back bookkeeping services help to get you fully caught up with tax-ready financials. We guarantee a 1 week turn around for up to 12 months of retroactive bookkeeping.
Data Security
We take the security and privacy of our customers seriously. We protect your data with 256-bit SSL/TLS encryption. That's the same level of encryption you'll find with online banking.
Get started with Remote Books Online today.
Try us out for free!
Remote Books Online will enter all transactions, make all necessary journal entries, and reconcile one month of your books for free. Our goal is to establish long term relationships, so this gives you a way to evaluate our bookkeeping services, prior to making a final commitment.
Speak with an agent to get a quote and set up an appointment with a Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor to go over your books.
Bookkeeping checked off your list
Now that bookkeeping is off your mind, what will you focus on next? After all, you have a business to run! Running a business is difficult enough, but no longer has to be with Remote Books Online on your side.
- No late nights of data entry and other tedious bookkeeping work.
- No spending time and money training employees on bookkeeping.
- Your books will always be current and accurate.
- More time available to focus on your core business.
{{Quote.CallbackNumberError}}
Here’s What People Say About Our Online Bookkeeping Services
Giving our clients the financial support they need to succeed in their business is our only business.