I’m sure we can all think of a time when we were glad to pay more for a better product or service. I’ll happily shell out $800 for a set of truck tires because the $400 tires were terribly noisy, prone to flats and wore out at 40,000 miles. But whatever happened to getting more than you pay for? Gas station attendants don’t pump gas or clean windshields anymore, there’s not a human clerk in sight at the grocer. Can you even remember the last time you got MORE than you paid for? The last instance that comes to mind for me was about 2 years ago, I found a salon that gave a manicure and hot stone pedicure for what the other neighborhood salons were charging for a plain old pedicure plus they gave you a nice shoulder rub while you were sitting at the nail dryer. As you might have guessed, that salon had as much business as they could accommodate and a very loyal customer following. In this economic climate, you’d think that every business would be striving to give clients the most for their money. But when I look around all I see are nickel & dime policies to extract more money from the customer for every little perk. Has getting more than you pay for gone the way of the dinosaur?
This week, I ran across a great article about how cheap bookkeepers end up costing more in the long run. It’s a classic case of “you get what you pay for”; we have all heard it before and know it to be true, cheap crap is… well, it’s cheap and it’s crappy. Through the years, we’ve witnessed countless horror stories about the havoc caused by bargain bookkeepers. And the impetus is completely understandable; great bookkeepers are worth their weight in gold, but paying top dollar for a function that generates no revenue can feel like an unnecessary luxury when pennies are scarce. Even with a great bookkeeper, occasional oversight from a controller or CPA is still required.
What’s a small business owner to do? Take a page from big business. Large accounting departments work in tiers, leveraging their resources. They hire a fleet of inexpensive data entry clerks to handle feeding all the numbers into the crunching programs. That data can then be used by the payroll team to generate paychecks, by the receivables team to generate customer invoices and by the payables team to satisfy vendors. All these teams are overseen by a controller or accounting department manager who reports to the CFO and the other executive bigwigs. This all makes sense, in theory. But there seems to be a major hitch here; that big business accounting department has at least 6 people on staff and my small business doesn’t need and couldn’t afford even 1 full time staffer.
This is where smart use of resources and technology swoop in and slay the dragon. My fleet of inexpensive data entry clerks comes in the form of bank/credit card/vendor imports and QuickBooks compatible apps that automate data entry functions. I use a service for my payroll processing. I hire a competent bookkeeper on an hourly contracted rate to oversee everything. And I send the whole shebang over to the controller once a month for a tune-up and my financial statements. Bingo, my very own big business style accounting department at a small business price.
But what if you have neither the time nor the desire to juggle all those resources and technology? Then let My Staff Your Staff be your one-stop shop for all of these functions. We offer top-notch data entry clerks, AP/ AR/payroll specialists, bookkeepers and controllers on a remote basis for a low fixed monthly cost so you work smarter, not harder. We can help!