In many businesses, small startups in particular, success or failure hinges not on the product or service, but on the financial management side.
There’s a chicken-and-egg element to it: a good product is worthless without proper financial management, and proper financial management won’t create a good product.
While many entrepreneurs have sufficient skill, knowledge, and experience to monitor financial performance, they frequently enough on their plates just keeping up with the product side of things.
The opportunity cost of spending time on the books instead of quality control or productivity is too high, and small firms may not have enough financial work to hire a full-time employee for the job. A working mom with hopes of making it home for the first T-ball at-bat will be eager to be freed from this chore.
That leaves many CEO’s and upper level management searching for a way to outsource this work to an experienced, trustworthy provider who can produce meaningful, accurate data for analysis and planning.
Farming out this critical work to 3rd party systems like Goldleaf Financial Solutions frees you up to commit fully to providing top quality services and goods, instead of slogging your way through hours and hours of spread sheets, reports, and charts.
So what are some considerations you should make? This is not an exhaustive list, but it will get you started.
Electronic Funds Movement
Everybody pays everything electronically. We know that these days. Debit cards, electronic payments, and other types of computerized funds transfers dominate the movement of cash–if you can still call it cash–in today’s financial transactions. A worthwhile firm should offer efficient ways for your business to move money from customers and to vendors and employees.
Security, Security, and Security
Secure data storage, management, and handling is to today’s business what the strongbox was to the stagecoach. All the slick operating platforms and voluminous data in the world won’t bring back money that is hacked or misdirected, and they will show you no mercy on behalf of shortchanged vendors or underpaid employees. The systems they use must have fail-safe protections against both theft and error.
Broad-Based Services
If you just want someone to keep up with inflows and outflows, then throw you the occasional report, you’d get a freshly minted CPA and put her to work. Utilizing a larger firm that is involved in dozens of areas of financial management gives you the benefit of their insight and their awareness of what’s ahead. Which brings us to…
Adaptability and Responsiveness
Software and systems for financial transactions are changing constantly. Anyone who is attempting to maintain their own systems, while still juggling the other work of a company, finds that staying in the latest edition of everything is a job in and of itself. Even ordering a coffee is a computerized event now. Successful businesses must seek out and utilize firms with a history of staying up to the minute on technology.
The physical office is a reflection of our attitudes about our business. If we spend as much effort keeping our finances organized as our office environment, we’ll be in great shape. Because of the complexity and ever-changing technology in modern financial management, we’re better served to delegate to a professional for these tasks and dedicate ourselves to the widgets that make them possible.
Article contributed by Jenna Smith
