Time Management - Outsourcing your bookkeeping

Time Management is discussed a lot in our bookkeeping practice and I imagine in any place of business, similar conversations happen. We all know that good time and resource management is key to effectively and efficiently running your business, but do we always look enough at how the time is being used by members of our team?

At a top-level there are some key things we can do, which we’ve shared below:

Clear short term and long-term goal setting

Ensuring that staff have individual clear short term and long term goals that align with the business strategy. Did they hit the goal? If not, why not? Is it training and support that is required or are there issues with the workflow to be resolved?

The software you are using

Ensuring that software is being fully utilised. Is there duplication of effort or is there functionality not being used to enhance efficiency?

Dividing jobs effectively between key team members

You know your team members better than anyone, are the right tasks being given to the right people to complete? Have you got more highly paid staff working on things which others could be doing?

Time tracking

Historical time tracking can help you identify areas of wasted time that could be better used or delegated to a team member and also whether each job is achieving a sufficient margin.

The fundamental question

In addition to the above, which you may already be doing, there is a more fundamental question: whether the jobs being done are appropriate of the time being put into them. Many accountants continue to provide bookkeeping for their clients despite this being lower fee earning work and it taking time away from higher fee earning client work. Have you considered outsourcing this work? The time and cost savings could dramatically change your business revenue income potential.

Bookkeeping is essential to any business and has to be done well for you to be able to provide the higher level services, but is it worth the cost to you to recruit and train someone up within your business to offer booking keeping to your clients? Outsourcing will offer you a flexible resource, support you to streamline your year-end processes, release time to focus on higher level services and mean you don’t have to train team members to provide bookkeeping services.