Signs your company already needs accounting outsourcing

You close the month when you can, not when you should

If someone asks when January closes and the honest answer is “when we finish”, you do not have a close: you have a pending task that sometimes gets done. A close is a date. Whether that date is met is the best indicator of whether the accounting is under control, far better than the size of the company or how much it bills.

You decide by looking at the bank balance

The bank balance tells you how much money there is today. It does not tell you how much of that is already committed, how much you are owed, or which part of what came in is yours and which part is tax you will have to hand back. Deciding on the balance is deciding with a correct figure that answers a different question.

When the accounting is up to date, that question —how much do I really have?— is answered in a minute. When it is not, it is answered with a hunch.

Nobody can answer something simple without opening three files

“How much does this client owe us?” “How much have we spent on this project?” If answering them means cross-checking a spreadsheet against the bank and the invoice folder, the problem is not the question: it is that the information is not in one place, and every answer costs half a morning.

You depend on one person who cannot go on holiday

This is the sign that gets hidden the most and costs the most. If there is a single person who knows where everything is, how each thing is recorded and what certain balances mean, the company does not have an accounting process: it has a person. People get ill, change jobs and, with luck, go on holiday.

What you file does not quite match what you have

Small differences that never get chased because “we will sort it out next year”. They pile up. And next year arrives with a review, an audit or a sale of the company, and then it has to be rebuilt backwards, which costs several times what keeping it current would have cost.

What is not a sign

Billing a lot is not one. There are small companies with impeccable books and large ones closing blind. Growing is not one either, on its own: growing only makes what was already untidy more visible.

And having an accountant does not mean the accounting is solved. An accountant who receives the invoices at the end of the month and files what they can with what reaches them is doing their job; what is missing is not accounting, it is operations.

When you do not need it

If you are one person billing a few services a month, with a single bank account and no inventory or payroll, outsourcing is probably spending more than you need. What you need is order and a periodic review, not a team.

We say it because it is worth saying: not everyone needs this, and starting before time speeds nothing up.

What actually changes, and what does not

What changes is the rhythm. The close gets a date, supporting documents are reviewed when they arrive rather than when it becomes urgent, and questions are answered with a report instead of a search. The effect people notice first is not the saving: it is no longer running late.

What does not change is the responsibility. Outsourcing the accounting does not outsource the obligation for the numbers to be true, nor the obligation to know your own business. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you peace of mind, not a service.

Five checks, today

1. What day does last month close? If there is no date, that is the first one.
2. Can you see today how much you are owed, and since when?
3. Are the bank accounts reconciled up to last month?
4. If the person who keeps the books were away for a month, would it keep working?
5. Does what you have filed this year match your own accounting?

If you hesitated on two or more, nothing has to be decided yet: it has to be looked at.

At FusHer Services we handle the accounting of more than a hundred companies every month, and the conversation always starts the same way: by looking at where you actually are. Write to us and we will take a look.