So it’s a new financial year and it’s time again to start thinking about getting your financial records together including reconciling your accounting system data file, collating bank statements, receipts; you know the drill. You collate it all and hand it over to your accountant so they can start working on the previous financial years' return and financials. While preparing your accounts your accountant asks you about transactions that might have happened well over 12 months ago by now, and you can’t recall what they are because the bank statement reference doesn’t help and, you know, it’s over 12 months ago!
If this sounds all too familiar, then you’re not alone.
A lot of micro, small and even some medium sized businesses still operate in this way to some degree or another. There isn’t necessarily anything wrong with operating this way, ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix it’, right? But doing things this way is likely costing you in a few different ways; time, money and opportunities for some. Over a series of blogs we’ll be going through a few of the things we’ve experienced over the years with clients, and how the start of a new financial year is the perfect time to start making some changes that can greatly improve your year end experience with your accountant. Below we’ll highlight a couple of the bigger topics we’ll look at whilst we also discuss other pain points clients have experienced throughout the series.
Manually collating your information generally means you’re taking time out of your day to manually do your data entry, which takes you away from your expertise in operating your business. We’ll look at some of the ways accounting system automation can significantly cut down on the time you spend here, giving you more time to focus on other things.
This manual kind of record keeping also means that it’s likely you’re only ever looking at historical figures which could be so old they don’t reflect how things may be going for you today, either positively or negatively. It’s also possible, that you and your accountant spend all your time looking at this historical data and focusing on issues in the past, rather than plans for the future and where you’d like to be. We’ll discuss some of the ways getting more up to date data allows you to implement plans for business improvement and lets you review the impact these plans have made.
On top of this, we’ll look at how you might be paying more for your end of year processing than you otherwise could be, even if you’ve already moved to a more automated accounting solution. We’ll cover some of the problem areas we’ve seen that you can implement to save you and your accountant time at the end of the year, and more.
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