During the start of almost every meeting, when a client is looking to leverage highly qualified talent to assist them with their business needs, the one aspect that seems to boggle their mind is “how do you do it”? What they always want to know is how do I provide remote accounting services if I never step foot in their office.
It’s quite simple if you break it down like this.
Information in – How is it received?
If you get many of the bills your business owes through email or logging into vendor websites (also called portals), you are 75% there. And choosing a remote option for key services such as accounting or financial consulting are easily adapted to your current processes.
If you get many of your bills through the mail or must log in to all your vendor websites to gather your bills, you will need to alter your processes to adapt. Which can be simple as scanning all your bills daily/weekly to an email address.
Information out – How do you send information?
Currently, if you mail checks or invoices; you run the risk of it piling up on a desk somewhere if it reaches its destination. I don’t know about you, but mail services just aren’t as reliable as they used to be. If this is your bag, and someone “has always done it this way”. I will kindly try to hide my youthful eye roll and suggest that if that person wants to continue to send them by mail, you can always follow up by giving customers the option of receiving their invoices by email.
How do your customer pay you? If the tried-and-true method of checks is your answer, that’s ok. We can still work with this. However, for security and processing reasons I highly recommend ACH deposit.
There are couple of different ways this can be done. Which I might reserve for a blog post another day. Bottom line, safety and security is ideal and of course getting paid by your customers faster is always the best option. The key to successful remote accounting services, is information processing.
Processes – How stuck are you?
When I say stuck, I mean are you so set in your ways that the phrase “that’s the way we have always done it” is finished with “and will keep doing it”. To be honest, if that is your answer, I will not be your cup of tea and many of my ways of operating are probably not for you either.
I use tools. Whether they are websites, apps, or software that I have painstakingly vetted to ensure they are meeting my business need and providing me the security I would expect for the services they provide.
If it is an app or website or tool you have thought about using, I have probably tested it our or will google it after we are done to see what they do. Curiosity is what keeps me in business. 😉
But there is always room for improvement in processes and how we do things. Some of us, our brains work in a way that we are constantly evaluating how something works. If it’s not broken, it can probably be made to run better. And now there are apps in the world that will help automate and use computer learning to complete a task.
The last is wicked, and another topic for a later post. Time is money. Whether that means you want to buy more time to do the things you want or more time to earn the money you want.
You decide.
If you want to learn more or need to schedule a business consult, please feel free to reach out and schedule a meeting.