Outsourced Bookkeeping: Your Solution to Year-End Pains | LBMC

Blog / Outsourced Bookkeeping: Your Solution to Year-End Pains

Accurate, timely bookkeeping is important to every business: regardless of whether you’re a well-established construction firm or an entrepreneurial business taking on an exciting emerging market. High-quality bookkeeping streamlines access to financial information, enabling business leaders to make better decisions with a higher degree of confidence.

Despite the clear importance of bookkeeping, it’s a task that many businesses struggle with. Bookkeeping is a meticulous task. Doing it right takes significant time and attention to detail. This is often overlooked, with many entrepreneurs allowing their bookkeeping processes to function with minimal oversight. That creates room for unwelcome financial surprises: particularly at year-end.

While a substandard bookkeeping function can lead to problems year-round, the issues are often more pronounced as businesses prepare for the end of the year. For most businesses, this is a time to take stock of the year’s performance and plan for the future, not scramble around trying to understand their financial data.

All too often, it’s not until year-end that many business owners find insufficient data or unexplained issues in their books. By then, fixing the issues is often much more challenging than it would have been to address them at the time.

The answer to these challenges? Outsourcing your bookkeeping needs to an accounting firm with the services, systems, and skills required to ensure your business retains access to accurate financial information year-round.

Common Year-End Bookkeeping Challenges

The end of the year can be an exciting time, especially if your business has had a strong year. There’s a lot to look forward to: the holidays are coming up and after that, there’s the excitement and promise of a new year.

One thing that can ruin the festive mood? The stress that comes with being forced to deal with outdated, inaccurate financial records.

Without strong bookkeeping processes, it’s difficult to understand how your business performed. Your accounts might be a few months behind and the data in them might not even be accurate. If that’s the case, tasks like planning for the year ahead or filing your business taxes can all of a sudden start to become a real headache.

Fixing these issues can take a lot of time. Bookkeeping tasks are often relatively labor-intensive, and include:

Reconciling bank accounts
Maintaining ledgers and recording transactions
Producing periodic financial statements and reports
Monitoring accounts receivable and payable

If you’re a busy entrepreneur, it’s unlikely you have the time to spend on these tasks. One option is to hire a full-time bookkeeper to work for your business. Even though bookkeeping is a relatively low-level position, you can still expect to pay a salary ranging from $52,000 to $75,000. That’s on top of additional costs associated with hiring, training, and providing additional benefits to your bookkeeping staff. Alternatively, hiring an outsourced controller offers an elevated solution, combining bookkeeping services with advanced financial analysis, forecasting, and planning support.

The solution to these common bookkeeping challenges? Partnering with an outsourced bookkeeping service. Let’s explore what that process looks like.

Outsourced Bookkeeping Services: What’s Involved?

By working with an outsourced bookkeeping service, businesses of all kinds can benefit from more timely access to accurate financial information. These services are typically overseen by accounting professionals and are comprehensive in nature: covering every bookkeeping task your business requires.

Outsourced bookkeeping services typically use a digital-first approach to bookkeeping that automates routine tasks and offers business leaders a real-time overview of their financial position. That, paired with regular monthly reporting, helps leaders to gain a firm understanding of important issues like cash flow and outstanding liabilities.

Many outsourced bookkeeping services offer a pre-packaged approach that offers a full range of bookkeeping services. But at LBMC, our priority is to create fully customizable outsourced bookkeeping solutions that are adaptable to the needs of any business. Your business might require additional support with some tasks but have others well under control, emphasizing the importance of a fully customized solution.

The Benefits of Outsourced Bookkeeping Services

Partnering with an outsourced bookkeeping service alleviates many of the points of friction within your business––no more so than at year-end. The most significant benefits offered by a trusted outsourced bookkeeping provider include:

Cost Savings: partnering with an outsourced bookkeeping service often represents significant cost savings compared to hiring and staffing an in-house bookkeeping team.
Accuracy: when you outsource your bookkeeping, you know every task will be handled by qualified financial professionals who use established systems and processes to proactively manage your books.
Time Savings: outsourcing shifts the workload away from you and your team and onto an outside partner. That means your business has more time to focus on doing what you do best: serving your customers. Plus, there’ll be no more nights spent late at the office trying to get your accounts to make sense: by the time you see the numbers, everything will already be done for you.
Peace of Mind: partnering with a reliable outsourced bookkeeping service gives you the reassurance that your financial data is accurate. You’ll rest easier knowing the true financial position of your business at all times.
Access to Additional Support as Needed: many outsourced bookkeeping services can provide additional support as required by your business. LBMC’s team supports clients with everything from basic bookkeeping tasks to high-level outsourced CFO engagements.

LBMC’s Outsourced Bookkeeping Services

At LBMC, we’re passionate about supporting the needs of local businesses in Tennessee, Kentucky, and across the U.S. through our outsourced accounting services, also known as Client Advisory and Accounting Services (CAAS). We strive to provide exceptional advisory and accounting services to all of our clients. We know that no two businesses have the same needs and are committed to offering fully flexible outsourced bookkeeping services that can be tailored to the unique requirements of your business.

Entrepreneurship is in our DNA and our team knows the importance of going the extra mile to take care of your business. That’s why we prioritize responsiveness above all else: focusing on replying to our clients’ questions the same day and helping resolve issues in an efficient, timely manner.

We provide outsourced accounting and bookkeeping services to a wide variety of organizations across the region, from the nonprofits improving our communities to the manufacturing and distribution companies making the products we all rely on every day. We use this experience to share best practices from across our client base, helping to make your business more efficient.

If you’re interested in learning more about how LBMC’s outsourced bookkeeping solutions can address your year-end pains, contact us today.