![]() ![]() ![]() The downfall with these accounting software programs is that they could only be accessed from one computer, not only making it highly inefficient but also a more significant risk of loss or theft. If you opted to do your books yourself, then you had to familiarize yourself with Sage (Simply Accounting) or Quickbooks, as those were the only two small business options over the last few decades. That may not seem like much, but it was enough of a barrier for many business owners to neglect looking at their financial reports until after year end. ![]() In the desktop accounting world, getting access to your financial statements meant asking your bookkeeper for them and having them sent to you as a PDF or in Excel. As far as taking receipts to the bookkeeper, many business owners are so busy that they fall months behind in getting receipts to the bookkeeper, meaning their books are always many months out of date. You might find that many bookkeepers are reluctant to come to your office for just an hour a week, even if that’s all you need. In the first two options, you are limited to bookkeepers located close to your office. In the past, most entrepreneurs, startups, and small business owners had three options: find a bookkeeper willing to come to their office for a couple of hours a week, find a local bookkeeper and take receipts to them or get desktop accounting software and learn to do bookkeeping themselves. The Frustrations Of Old-School Bookkeeping So you may be asking yourself, why and how is it that a virtual bookkeeping service helps me do this? Let’s explore that a little further. You will know how your business is doing at any time during the year, not just a few months after your fiscal year-end, by which time it may be too late to make the changes necessary to survive. If you get audited, it will be easy to quickly supply all the requested documentation to the CRA and get them off your case.Ĭurrent books will also help any potential investors understand how your business is doing, by just the click of a button. With careful bookkeeping, done by a certified bookkeeper, you will be able to keep track of all your revenue and expenses, file and remit your various sales and corporate taxes on time, and generally avoid surprises, the kind that could put you out of business! This is why keeping up with your bookkeeping is so important. You might hear about other business owners who owed considerable sums to the CRA for sales tax collected and paid heavy penalties for filing late. You can very easily find yourself at the end of your fiscal year, perhaps having had a fantastic first year, and suddenly realize you haven’t kept track of your HST. You have far bigger items to tackle-like getting your first customers and keeping them happy! The Importance Of Bookkeeping For StartupsĮntrepreneurs often get in touch with us when they are in trouble. If you are like many entrepreneurs, you figure you will save your receipts, get someone to type them all into a spreadsheet and let your accountant deal with it at the end of your fiscal year. When you are starting a business, you generally find yourself looking at the big picture: which market you’ll go after, what product or service you’ll offer, how you will run your operations. Those questions take up the bulk of your mental energy and so you might only give a fleeting thought to bookkeeping and the work that needs to be done to track all your transactions so you can meet your CRA obligations. You already know all this, but if you are reading this article, then chances are you’ve neglected your bookkeeping because you’ve decided that you have more significant challenges you must conquer first. ![]() I’ll run through some of those shortcomings in a moment, but first, let’s establish why having up-to-date books and financial reports is essential for running your business well. Even a cursory look at traditional paper and desktop software-basedīookkeeping will allow you to spot its many significant shortcomings. You are wired to love efficiency and find new and better ways of doing important activities. Alternatively, perhaps they come to your office and work on desktop accounting software. Probably, every month, you take your receipts to a bookkeeper, and they chose the desktop software they like working with. You already work with remote designers and developers and manage them using cloud apps like Slack, Asana, G-Suite, Zoom, Loom, InVision, Upwork, and Harvest - so why don’t you use a virtual bookkeeping service? ![]()
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