Cybercriminals are targeting your company right now, and it’s your job to stay informed about the most common cyber scams and take the right precautions to avoid falling victim to a cyberattack! Bookkeepers and accountants are on the frontlines of this rapidly emerging battle, making them an integral part of keeping your company safe. 

​The role you need depends on your business needs, so let’s look at common business triggers that most likely require needing the next level of financial role, and what kind of activities and responsibilities each role typically includes. We’ll start with bookkeeper and work our way up to Chief Financial Officer (CFO). 

Whether it is due to taking a job elsewhere, switching careers, personal/family needs, medical reasons, or some other cause, the unexpected loss of an accountant can throw a business into disarray. Reining in this chaos as quickly as possible is critical to ensuring the viability of the company.

Recently, we talked to a set of business partners that epitomized this situation. They suddenly found themselves managing a family business after the untimely passing of their uncle who had been running the business for the last 20 years. They were coming to the table with little accounting knowledge and too much grief and shock to be able to invest themselves in running this aspect of the business themselves. They needed help!

Now, this example may not represent exactly where you are, but there are plenty of situations where people find themselves at the helm of a company’s finances without the experience needed to be confident in the work that they are doing. If this describes you, you’ve come to the right place! This guide will give you a quick overview of what is most important when it comes to managing your company’s books and overseeing its accounting functions. It will also offer additional resources for each topic so you can gain a greater understanding of the places where you need the most help, allowing you to feel better equipped to lead in these areas.

No matter what the specific scenario is, they always come to us with the same two pain points: cost and fear of making a mistake. 

​Every decision-maker we talk to is juggling concerns around price (“How much will accounting services cost?” and “Is there room in the budget for outsourced accounting?”) and purchase anxiety (“How do I know what to look for in an accounting company?” and “What if I chose the wrong accounting provider?”) Unfortunately, sometimes we see these concerns derail the research process and the organization chooses to take the “I’ll do nothing for now” approach. Trust us when we say that is never the right solution! If you were at the point of looking for outsourced accounting and bookkeeping services, there was a reason why and that reason will not simply disappear because you feel overwhelmed by your options.
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If your team is stretched too thin to keep up, does not have the experience needed to do a good job, or has a new situation that they need help with (like an expansion or audit), you need to get someone in to help right away.  So, let’s discuss what you should be on the lookout for and how to know when you find it: 

And while A/R problems are often errantly believed to exist most commonly at large companies processing a high volume of invoices every month, the research proves that to be false. The companies that tend to be the most behind are those processing between 300 and 2,500 invoices every month.

Clearly, small businesses are the ones most likely to have A/R issues, which is a real problem because the fewer invoices a business has, the more important collecting on each one becomes. For instance, if a company is processing 10,000 invoices every month, and 50 of them are outstanding, that is only 0.5% of its revenue that has not been collected; whereas, if a company is processing 1,000 invoices, and 50 of them are outstanding, that is 5% of its revenue that is outstanding every month.

Failing to collect on outstanding accounts receivables is a serious problem because, as the CFO Selections team explains, “The longer an invoice goes without being paid, the less likely it is to get paid at all. On average, 26% of invoices are uncollectable at the three-month mark, but that number rises to 70% at six months and 90% at 12 months.”​