To keep better track of your business purchases, you should hire a bookkeeper. Here’s everything an Arizona business needs to know about hiring a bookkeeper.
For years, outsourcing was a dirty word as it usually meant that there were people in other countries working for pennies on the dollar doing hard work. Since the best of the tech and digital outsourcing in the world is now located within the United States, we can have that conversation guilt free. If you’re looking to hire a bookkeeper, your options for hiring or outsourcing have never been greater.
Here are five things to think about when you’re hiring a bookkeeper.
1. Look At Their Industry Knowledge
It’s important for you to find out what the potential bookkeeper you’re thinking of hiring knows about your industry. Every industry has their own internal language and things that differentiate how business is done by other companies. If you’re in a specialized industry, you need to find someone who knows how things work in your world.
They don’t have to have worked exactly in the kind of work that you do, but they should have some familiarity with how things work in your world. If they don’t know how things are created from start to finish, they’ll have a hard time with bookkeeping. Products, services, raw materials, and payments all have different tax laws that apply to them.
Your bookkeeper needs to know about some of this before you hire them or they should be ready to learn.
If you’re in an industry with a lot of regulations, there might be special certifications that bookkeepers get before they get hired. Make this a requirement for applicants so that you ensure you only get the best people.
2. Go Beyond Their Resume
When you’re in search of a bookkeeper, you need to think about things other than what jobs they’ve had and what certifications they have. If you’re a business looking to hire a bookkeeper, it means that you’re either a new business or a growing business. If this is the case, you need someone who is ready to get down for the long haul.
IF they’re not prepared to become a part of your growing business, it’s going to be hard for them to be flexible when you need them to be. You need creative thinkers who want your business to succeed because they care about what you do in a special way. If they’re just there to punch a clock and crunch the numbers, they’ll wait for you to notice a problem before speaking up.
Make sure your bookkeeper is a good culture fit by introducing them to the key members of your team that they’ll be dealing with. Listen to what the team has to say and see what kinds of questions they’re asking. They’ll want to ask some technical questions but make sure they get a feeling for what the applicant is really like.
3. Can They Manage Payroll As Well?
Bookkeepers might be well versed in every aspect of running a business from a financial point of view. They might have spent the last few years of their career doing just one specific aspect of bookkeeping and have lost touch with the other elements of the job. If that’s the case, they won’t be able to do more than just one thing that you need.
If you’re a small enterprise, you need your full-time staff to be flexible enough to take on lots of different types of work. If your bookkeeper can provide added value like managing payroll as well as balancing your books and handling invoices, they provide extra value.
It’s hard to find just a part-time bookkeeper without outsourcing them. If you want to hire someone, the applicant pool is going to be better if you offer a full-time position. However, if you don’t have enough work to give them, you’ll need to expand the role and ask them about their skills in advance.
4. Do They Handle HR?
Some people who work in payroll end up handling all sorts of other tasks related to a business’s internal operations. There are hybrid roles for people who handle HR matters, bookkeeping, payroll, and even who manage health benefits for employees.
Finding someone who’s ready to wear all of these hats at once is a challenge, but it’s possible. If you find someone with varied administrative experience and you have a strong corporate culture, they may be able to hop in and swim on day one. Offer them the employee handbook as study material and you might end up surprised.
Human resources requires a lot of sensitivity, honesty, and a congenial attitude toward other coworkers. It’s hard for someone to dive into this role, but it’s vital to have someone from day one.
5. Would It Be Better To Outsource?
Consider all of these issues that arise when you bring someone new into your organization, there might be other ways to approach the problem. Since there are now more ways to work remotely than ever, you could easily have a bookkeeper located halfway across the country handling your business.
If you’re a company that handles most of your payments and receipts digitally, you could pretty easily get someone from a bookkeeping services company.
The great thing about outsourced bookkeepers is that you’ll get the best of the best at a much lower cost. You’ll also have someone dedicated to your efforts with a backup that’s going to ensure that there’s no downtime for your bookkeeping. If you want your company to run smoothly 24/7, outsourcing works.
If you’re wondering what kinds of businesses are using outsourced bookkeeping, check out what Scrubbed has to say about it.
Hire a Bookkeeper and Save Money
One of the things that a bookkeeper does for your business is to ensure that every penny is accounted for. So much of a company’s waste happens just because of poor money management. Rather than letting that be the case for you, hire a bookkeeper to ensure money is managed right.
If you want to invest some of that money you find with better bookkeeping, check out our guide for how businesses should invest.
