Hire a Bookkeeper

So you run a small business and it doesn’t take long to enter all your transactions and you can do it yourself – right?

It’s not difficult to enter all your payments and all your receipts. Anyone can do it – right?

You have an accounting software program – what more do you need?  You just need to enter the transactions and the software will do the rest. It’s just a couple of clicks and your BAS is produced and ready to lodge with the ATO.  All too easy – right?

So, when you can do it all yourself and save money why should you hire a bookkeeper? A bookkeeper is going to cost you money – right?

But before you make this very important business decision take a few minutes to answer the following questions:

1. Am I confident I can enter all the transactions without missing any?
2. Am I confident I can code each transaction correctly for GST and taxation purposes?
3. Do I know when GST applies and to which transactions and if so, in which BAS or accounting period I should claim each?
4. Am I confident I will issue an invoice correctly to all my customers and that I will enter all invoices?
5. Am I confident I will be able to track all my outstanding customer invoices to ensure all customers pay their invoices?
6. Am I confident I will remember to enter all my supplier invoices correctly?
7. Am I confident I am able to reconcile my bank accounts and credit card accounts correctly?
8. Am I confident I can prepare my BAS correctly?
9. Am I confident I will be able to identify and fix any errors on my software generated BAS that may occur from time to time?
10. Am I confident I will have my BAS ready to lodge on time so I won’t incur any late lodgement penalties?
11. If I am audited by the ATO, am I confident they will not find any errors that will result in penalties or fines?
12. Am I confident that I will be able to pay my staff correctly, meet taxation and superannuation obligations and set up employees entitlement accruals correctly?

If you answered ‘yes’ to every question above, you probably don’t need to hire a bookkeeper.

However, if you answered ‘no’ to one or more of the questions you should consider hiring a bookkeeper.

While you worry about the cost of a bookkeeper in the short term; hiring a bookkeeper may well save you a lot of money in the long run. It will always be more costly to find errors and fix them later than it will cost to do the bookkeeping right the first time by a professional bookkeeper.