Show your bookkeeper some love

It appears I was recently distracted and missed giving a shout out to all my talented peers during Global Bookkeeping week. Here is my belated love letter to you all for the magnificent work that you do.

“I just do all the bookkeeping myself on the weekend”

“My mate down the pub taught me how to do bookkeeping”

“We can’t afford a proper bookkeeper, so my best friend’s boyfriend’s grandma does it for me cheap”

Once you have been in this industry a while, you wish you had a dollar for every time you heard something like this. You could retire early. And although I admire the attitude of “I’ll give that a crack!” (I have built my whole personality on that little pearl of wisdom), if you would not let your mate teach you to fly a plane, do not let him teach you to manage your business finances while sinking pots at the pub. His heart may be in the right place, but he probably has not kept up with his compulsory 90 hours of professional education so his skills might be a little bit rusty.

Do not get me wrong, I am definitely not judging the finance skills of your mate or any grandma. I am also on board for reducing business costs. But be careful which costs you reduce. The possibility of bookkeeping errors is significantly increased if a business is using an unregistered bookkeeper to do the work. You might save money in the short term, but at what cost?

The types of errors we have seen in new clients when we have taken over from unregistered bookkeepers are significant. Here are just a few

• Employee super not paid for over a year
• Employee super paid twice
• BAS not lodged for 3 years
• Double paid suppliers
• Long overdue customer invoices that are now unrecoverable

The list goes on. Every one of these errors caused extra cost and heartache to the business. Some of the errors put the business on the radar for an ATO audit. The silly thing is they could have all been easily avoided.

These are just the basic errors. This list does not consider the lost opportunity cost of all the bells and whistles that professional bookkeepers provide. For example

• Creating automated systems to reduce workload
• Staying on top of debtors
• Managing your cash flow
• Putting aside cash for tax obligations
• Accurate timely reporting you can use to adjust your business today
• Measuring the business performance against budgets, KPIs and industry benchmarks

If your business is an important asset that you want to nurture and grow, it is worth paying to get good advice. Let your mate teach you to play golf instead.