Have A Question Needing An Answer?

Often times you have a quick question that we can answer, other times, a bit more insight is helpful. Here’s a list of some tips and tricks you may find beneficial.

1) How will outsourcing work in your business?

Outsourcing your bookkeeping will take about 15% of the time and effort of hiring and managing a bookkeeper in house. That’s on top of cutting the cost (see below). Best of all, it is the LAST time you will have to deal with the task. We don’t call in sick or bring emotional problems from home. We don’t even close – your accounting data is available 24/7 from your home, office, customers’ location, jobsite or even while you’re away on vacation.

Plus, you will have complete and total control of your business’s finances at all times. This is a critical ‘best practices’ upgrade for you. Very few business owners have a real handle on expenses, collections, cash position, profitability and back office activity. Good controls can make the difference between getting by and getting ahead. With outsourcing we put those controls in your hands every day – you know exactly what is working or not – every day.

2) A simple outline of how we manage your bookkeeping.

If you own a fax machine or scanner, you do not need a bookkeeper. Simply throw your daily invoices, deposit slips and bills on the fax or scanner. Once or twice a day hit the speed dial or email and your source documents end up on our secure server as PDF files in Allen Town, PA. We then link our PC to your PC. As we enter your transactions, reconcile your accounts and set your bills up for payment, you can watch the progress of your bookkeeping right from your computer. Depending on the current condition of your books, it could take 3 days to 3 weeks to get a handle on your business, but the entire process ramps up very quickly. You could actually be out of handling your own bookkeeping by this time tomorrow.

3) A detailed explanation of how we deliver ‘Best Practices’ bookkeeping & accounting solutions

Now most business owners do not want to know all the details, but in case you are wondering just how we can deliver a better experience and still cut your cost by half, here is the key to our process. We follow a set of standards known as ‘Best Practices’ when handling all of your bookkeeping functions.

We have a distinct set of tasks that we do over the first 3 to 5 days, 30 days and 90 days, followed by our 3-year plan to build out a ‘best practices’ business for you. (If you really want to see all the back office details, contact us and we can email the entire PDF document.)

4) How much does it cost to outsource your bookkeeping?

Of course that is almost impossible to answer until we see what your business looks like in terms of size, complexity and existing systems, but here are some of the indicators we use to determine your scope of engagement:

• If you want to keep your fee as low as possible, we can manage your accounts payable, enter deposits, reconcile the credit cards and bank accounts with a fee as low as $195 a week.

• Our full service, where we do most everything and provide financial advisory services (like a CFO), can run to $595 a week. (Maybe more if your business is complicated or your sales are over $2,000,000 a year.) Most of our customers are somewhere in between, as they decide what services they want.

• A good way to ascertain a ballpark figure on pricing is to calculate the burden rate of doing books in house. (We will show you how to calculate the total burden rate of employees if you need a formula.) In most cases, figure our fee is going to be about half of what it is costing you now. Keep in mind, however, that outsourcing is far more effective if you’re looking for ‘Best Practices’ to run a great business, not just trying to shave 100 bucks a week off your overhead.

• Bottom line, it will cost less than doing books in-house, even if you do the work yourself, as your time is better spent on sales and team management. In a short meeting I can look at your current bookkeeping processes and give you a very clear idea on the cost of outsourcing. For more details call Tim at 913-649-1040, ext 3.

5) How can I learn more about Virtual BeanCounters?

The first step is to call our office, Virtual BeanCounters, Inc, at 913-649-1040 and ask for Tim Sernett. Hit me with your toughest questions right out of the gate. We’ve helped lots of businesses and have addressed most problems with concrete solutions, so you can trust us to find a solid solution for your particular situation.

In fact, I will be happy to come by your office and take a quick look at your accounting records, and perhaps allow us to analyze your bookkeeping data file. In about an hour we’ll be able to give you three things…

1) What we can do for you and how much it will cost.
2) What you will need to do from your end to make this work.
3) What will happen in your business if we do this together

It is our goal to keep you out of the mundane tasks of bookkeeping as much as possible. We manage hundreds of details behind the scene to help you run a faster, better and cheaper back office. If you would like to get more details, simply give us a call at 913-649-1040.