If your business is in need of basic bookkeeping services, you are faced with two choices. You can hire a new staff member to perform the work or have your bookkeeping services outsourced. While hiring an employee might be worthwhile if you have 40 hours of bookkeeping work to be performed each week, what if you only require a bookkeeper to work for 10 or 20 hours? What if you only need a bookkeeper intermittently?
This is when one of the benefits of outsourced bookkeeping services becomes apparent – flexibility. You can hire experienced and skilled bookkeeping staff only when you need them. This article will help you understand some other benefits obtained by outsourcing bookkeeping services, to help you decide if it is the correct approach for your business!
Your business can save money by outsourcing bookkeeping services
If you hire a virtual assistant for basic bookkeeping services, you will avoid the associated costs of employment. You won’t have to pay national insurance, holiday pay, long service leave and other employee benefits including mandatory pension costs. You won’t have to purchase additional computer hardware or software for the bookkeeper to use and you won’t have to lease additional office space.
A virtual assistant service has their own computer hardware, software, and office supplies. They pay for their own office space and energy costs. They only get paid when they are actively working, as opposed to an internal employee who is often being paid while they are idle. Outsourcing services also have supervisors to monitor the productivity of virtual assistants, which further reduces your workload. Finally, outsourced bookkeepers tend to have lower hourly rates compared to in-house bookkeepers.
You can focus on core business objectives
Many business owners are forced to take on a variety of business tasks including bookkeeping. By having your businesses bookkeeping services outsourced, you can focus on more important business objectives like generating sales and promoting your products.
Your business gains access to experienced bookkeepers
There are many highly trained and experienced bookkeepers working as virtual assistants. Many of them have been working in the field for years and have a strong working knowledge of business bookkeeping and regulatory requirements. They can ensure your business correctly records its financial operations. You won’t run the risk of making a mistake by doing it yourself!
Your virtual assistant can help in a variety of ways
As well as performing basic bookkeeping services, your virtual assistant will be able to help you in other ways including:
- Other business finance support services:
- Virtual sales support
- Providing a business admin support service
- Time and task management
- Virtual assistant marketing support
- Event and travel planning services
Your business will be able to forward a variety of tasks to your virtual assistant. This provides your business with additional flexibility as you can forward different kinds of tasks to your virtual assistant as business priorities change.
Fewer distractions for your staff
In some cases, adding staff members can lead to a loss of productivity in the workplace. Staff may spend more time interacting with each other and less time performing their duties. They may also start competing for business resources like office printers and telephones.
By outsourcing bookkeeping services, your staff will be less distracted and more efficient in their work. Your virtual assistant will also be very productive because they aren’t surrounded by busy staff, noise, and distractions common in work environments.
Access to a team of talented individuals
By having your businesses bookkeeping services outsourced, you don’t just gain access to one additional staff member, you can gain access to an entire team. They can perform your bookkeeping and audit the results, ensuring that no mistakes have been made and that your business has fulfilled its regulatory obligations.
You can resize your workforce easily
If your business goes through a period of rapid expansion, you can easily hire more virtual assistants to perform bookkeeping and other roles. When your business quiets down, you can reduce the number of workers you are employing very easily. Using virtual assistants is much more flexible than hiring and firing in-house bookkeeping staff.
We hope that you enjoyed “What are the benefits of outsourced bookkeeping services?” If you would like to learn more about our virtual bookkeeping services, or our virtual assistants feel free to call us on 0800 994 9016 or use our contact form in the menu above.