Due to the emergence of online bookkeeping services, bookkeeping has become easier for SMEs to shift from traditional bookkeeping to the online one. The online ones contain a mix of bookkeepers and accountants to whom you send your books and they revert back (privately) with the bookkeeping, accounting and payroll services on a monthly, quarterly and annual basis.
The Mechanism:
The bookkeeping firms give you easy-to-use accounting software, mostly a top name one which requires simple accounting knowledge, wherein you feed the details of your transactions. Bookkeeping services is also an available option! A bookkeeper will usually feed your purchase bills into the system once you send it to him (electronically or through the post), and then he will track aged creditors and debtors from the bills you might have raised. The statements of your bank and credit card are also tallied.
Advantages to SMEs:
The particular advantages of outsourcing bookkeeping to firms like the tax accountants in Oakville offers. These are:
- Storage costs and space that would otherwise have been used by desktop software for backups, is saved by the online accounting software. Offsite backup of data takes place.
- Salaries of personal bookkeeping staff are saved.
- Any personal time invested in accounting by you is saved.
- The office space taken up by hard documents are saved and converted to space your soft copies occupy in a pen drive, which is actually accepted by tax authorities. You just need to upload it to a Dropbox account. You can even send digital to the bookkeeping team and keep the originals to yourself if you want.
Availability of Choices:
As per the tax accountants in Oakville, though based on the vastness of your business, three basic choices are usually at your disposal, and these should be made keeping in mind the basic fact of who does your accounting for you, yourself or your staff. The first is in which you just get the software and do all the work yourself (or your staff does it), though you do get assistance from the software provider during issues. The second choice gets the service provider to do all the work and you just have to raise bills and access the info updates for you. The final choice is a midway leap, wherein you discuss who does what before getting the software.
Pricing:
Prices usually increase with the complexity of the business. As for example, an independent single-man business might only require quarterly updates of invoices and bank reconciliation, but a multi-staff business requires at least payroll and prepayment adjustments done on a monthly basis.
Your personal bookkeeping or accounting staff can be supplemented or replaced by online bookkeeping business thus making them very important and almost indispensable. But in order to assess and reason which one would be better for you, you can use the free trials that online bookkeeping services generally offer. However, the offers and services differ from firm to firm and one needs to check before finalizing the one.
