How an Accountant Prevents You From Making Costly Mistakes

How an Accountant Prevents You From Making Costly Mistakes

You’ve finally got the running of your small business down to a science. Daily operations run with few problems, receipts are steady, and the bills don’t fluctuate all that much. You think you don’t need a business accountant to help you with your books because everything’s going fine. Or are they? Can you be absolutely sure that you’re keeping up with everything and maintaining your books correctly? You might not be doing as well as you think. Following are some ways an accountant helps you avoid costly mistakes.

Prevent Poor Recordkeeping Practices

Ever hear about a business owner who keeps all of their receipts for the year in a shoebox? It’s a bad recordkeeping practice and more common than you think. You need to track purchases, sales, and regular expenditures on a daily basis, not put them into a box or folder to look at later. If you’re not recording your transactions into a balance sheet, how do you know how much money you have, much less if you can pay a bill that day? A business CPA can monitor your cash flows and help you stay ahead of spending and income.

Eliminate Data Entry Errors

It’s normal to make a mistake now and again with data entry, but if you don’t reconcile or otherwise review your incomes and outflows, you might have an error that compounds over time. What started out as a small error can turn into a costly one down the road if it’s not caught and corrected in a timely manner. CPAs are trained to locate, identify, and correct errors that may otherwise be overlooked.

Keeps You From Running Out of Cash

Operating a business checking account is much more than making sure there’s a balance in the account to cover a check that was written. As a business owner, you’re most likely looking at forecasted profits or expecting money to arrive on the date as promised. But what if the money doesn’t come in on time? There’s no cash to pay the bills and employees and you wind up in a jam.

Situations like this don’t always happen on their own. There’s almost always a pattern of overspending, a vendor with constantly fluctuating prices, or a customer that doesn’t pay as promised. An accountant can spot these irregularities and advise you to not make a purchase of something that’s not necessary at that time. This kind of proaction keeps cash in your account to cover core needs of the business and makes sure the doors stay open.

Makes Sure You Don’t Fall Behind

Have you found yourself putting off the paperwork in favor of getting something done for the business? And you tell yourself that you’ll do it later, but never get to the books? Not doing your paperwork in a timely manner is costly. If you don’t pay your bills by the statement date, you can get charged extra fees that eat into your bottom line. You also wind up playing catch-up with the rest of the paperwork because you were running the business instead of making sure the accounting got done.

It’s the job of a business CPA to take care of these things on your behalf so you can run your business and find success. Outsourcing a task that you don’t have time to do is a smart move on your part. It’s far better to spend money on the services of a CPA than to pay overdue bills and their late fees.

A Charlotte business accountant is a worthwhile investment when it comes to keeping you out of trouble. No one is saying that you’re doing the wrong thing by not having a CPA, but all great businesses have accountants to keep them out of trouble. Retaining a CPA for your own business needs helps you save more money and gives you more time to run your operations.