Outsourced Bookkeeping Saving St. Louis Businesses Thousands $$$!
You started your new business a few months ago and the receipts, bills, and bank statements started piling up. Being an entrepreneur with limited funds you decided to keep overhead costs like accounting low or nonexistent and started doing the bookkeeping yourself.
But now you often find yourself feeling unsure if you are doing it correctly. Is this receipt from Walgreens a business deduction? How do I handle receipts when I paid with cash or used a personal credit card or bank account? What is a bank reconciliation and should I be doing one? Should I be paying quarterly tax estimates? Will today be the day that I get a surprise letter in the mail from the IRS notifying me that I owe interest and penalties for not filing a form?
In addition to uncertainty you probably spend a lot of weekend or evening time wrestling with a pile of receipts and doing tedious data entry. Or, you may have put off bookkeeping for a few weeks and now you are facing an enormous pile of documents and hours of time tied to you desk. Instead of talking to customers, organizing work, or even better, taking a break from the nonstop stress of running a business you are doing bookkeeping.
Here is the topper, unless you are an experienced bookkeeper or accountant you are probably improperly classifying expenses, under or overstating income, missing tax deductions, over or underpaying taxes, and creating a mess that will not provide accurate financial statements for running your business, for a bank loan, or for the IRS when you prepare your business’s tax return. Even worse, you could wind up paying an accounting firm hundreds or even thousands of dollars to “clean up” your bookkeeping at the last minute when your tax return is due and you’ve discovered that you do not trust your financial statements enough to use them to report income to the IRS. It’s very frustrating to discover that not only have you spent countless hours doing bookkeeping but now you have to pay a lot of money to have that work re-done.
The average bookkeeper in the St. Louis region makes about $15/hr as an employee but a small business usually cannot afford or justify hiring a part-time accounting person. Often time, the part-time person that you do find is doing your work on the side, trying to fit your bookkeeping work into their work and personal schedule. Even if you can find someone willing to (reliably) work 10 hours per week you probably don’t have ten hours of accounting work and that part-time person will end up costing you about $800 per month when you consider wages, payroll taxes, and unemployment insurance.
Outsourced bookkeeping is a great option for many businesses. The cost is reasonable (far less than hiring a part-time bookkeeper) and the work is done by a full-time professional. You receive monthly financial statements, your financial records are kept up-to-date, you no longer have to worry about missing filing deadlines and incurring costly penalties, you have unlimited access to an accounting professional, and your accounting is managed by a CPA who keeps you abreast of changes in tax law and cost saving opportunities.
But now you often find yourself feeling unsure if you are doing it correctly. Is this receipt from Walgreens a business deduction? How do I handle receipts when I paid with cash or used a personal credit card or bank account? What is a bank reconciliation and should I be doing one? Should I be paying quarterly tax estimates? Will today be the day that I get a surprise letter in the mail from the IRS notifying me that I owe interest and penalties for not filing a form?
In addition to uncertainty you probably spend a lot of weekend or evening time wrestling with a pile of receipts and doing tedious data entry. Or, you may have put off bookkeeping for a few weeks and now you are facing an enormous pile of documents and hours of time tied to you desk. Instead of talking to customers, organizing work, or even better, taking a break from the nonstop stress of running a business you are doing bookkeeping.
Here is the topper, unless you are an experienced bookkeeper or accountant you are probably improperly classifying expenses, under or overstating income, missing tax deductions, over or underpaying taxes, and creating a mess that will not provide accurate financial statements for running your business, for a bank loan, or for the IRS when you prepare your business’s tax return. Even worse, you could wind up paying an accounting firm hundreds or even thousands of dollars to “clean up” your bookkeeping at the last minute when your tax return is due and you’ve discovered that you do not trust your financial statements enough to use them to report income to the IRS. It’s very frustrating to discover that not only have you spent countless hours doing bookkeeping but now you have to pay a lot of money to have that work re-done.
The average bookkeeper in the St. Louis region makes about $15/hr as an employee but a small business usually cannot afford or justify hiring a part-time accounting person. Often time, the part-time person that you do find is doing your work on the side, trying to fit your bookkeeping work into their work and personal schedule. Even if you can find someone willing to (reliably) work 10 hours per week you probably don’t have ten hours of accounting work and that part-time person will end up costing you about $800 per month when you consider wages, payroll taxes, and unemployment insurance.
Outsourced bookkeeping is a great option for many businesses. The cost is reasonable (far less than hiring a part-time bookkeeper) and the work is done by a full-time professional. You receive monthly financial statements, your financial records are kept up-to-date, you no longer have to worry about missing filing deadlines and incurring costly penalties, you have unlimited access to an accounting professional, and your accounting is managed by a CPA who keeps you abreast of changes in tax law and cost saving opportunities.