​As we talk internally as a team and externally with our colleagues, there seems to be one common thread across the conversations we’re having: slowness!

Everything related to bringing in accounting help has slowed down. The prevailing trend right now is business leaders being more cautious with hiring and dragging their feet when it comes to outsourcing.

Part of this reduced pace isn’t their fault. A worsening talent shortage in accounting is stymieing the hiring process. But a dearth of accountants isn’t the only factor leading to a slower hiring process. Business leaders are also taking longer to make hiring decisions and/or decide to outsource their critical accounting activities due to concerns of an impending economic slowdown.

An organization’s fiscal calendar is not set in stone, but it’s often treated like it is. Why? Because it’s extremely cumbersome to move it! And yet, circumstances may arise where an organization really has no other option but to move its fiscal year. A change may be strongly recommended by a trusted advisor, or even required due to major organizational changes.

There are many reasons why an organization could decide to shift a fiscal calendar, but the most common instances are to:

• Facilitate better budgeting and strategic planning
• Increase operational efficiency
• Align the company’s finances with business cycles
• Improve financial reporting
• Allow for easier tax planning
• Sync up with a parent company’s fiscal calendar
• Adhere to government or regulatory requirements
• Meet stakeholder requirements
• Reflect major organizational changes

Undoubtedly, when a business owner, financial leader, or executive team is considering making a fiscal year shift, there is a valid reason to do so because the headache that results is not worth undertaking without good reason! 

Accounting company vs CPA firm – what’s the difference? There’s a lot of confusion regarding this topic among non-accountants, so we’re going to answer it for you by breaking down the differences and explaining the similarities.

While they may sound similar (and some people may even use them interchangeably), an “accounting company” is distinctly different from a “CPA firm.” Often, the confusion results when people refer to a CPA firm as an “accounting firm,” which makes it sound very similar to an “accounting company.”
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So, how do they differ? The main differences are seen across credentials, regulations, services, and price. 

The biggest challenge we hear about every day is being behind in ongoing accounting activities!
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We hear it over and over, “We’re so behind on _________. I feel like we’re never going to catch up because we just don’t have the people or time to do it all!” You can fill in that blank with almost any bookkeeping or accounting activity and it would describe the kinds of conversations we have with prospective clients. Whether it’s payables, receivables, close, reconciliations, reimbursements, payroll, or reporting, we have heard it all!

Starting out in public accounting as a fresh-faced graduate, I naively thought there was a reasonable chance I would find fraud as part of an audit. Assessing fraud risk was always part of the prep work, but after years of auditing, no fraud had turned up. Turns out I shouldn’t have been surprised. 

The 2024 Report to the Nations by the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE) sheds light on the persistent threat of occupational fraud. According to the report, only about 3% of occupational fraud is actually discovered by external audit. Turns out that employee tipsters are responsible for the lion’s share of fraud detection.

This proved true in my experience. The one real instance of fraud I ran across wasn’t discovered through the audit process. I can’t even remember if the organization had been audited before. In this case, the fraud had already been uncovered by the organization and now they wanted to understand its scope.
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Turns out that the Executive Director of a nonprofit was submitting invoices from a fictitious vendor and also turning in personal expenses for reimbursement. This resulted in about $250,000 in stolen funds. The mind-blowing part was that this person had stolen money from a previous employer! The former employer hadn’t charged the individual, probably to avoid bad publicity, nor had they been contacted during the ED’s hiring process. Learning from their error, the nonprofit did bring charges this time around. When the culprit was located, they were in another state already working at yet another nonprofit.

When your business is growing and requires additional capital to keep it moving in the right direction, it will need to decide how to come by that funding. This is a complicated decision that can benefit substantially from the expertise that an experienced financial leader like a CFO or Controller can provide to the business’s owner or CEO. But, regardless of which avenue a business takes, it will need to be prepared to open itself up to scrutiny by funders.

Companies looking for funding need to have the right essentials in place to land the money they are hoping to secure. Whether the funding will come from a bank loan, grant, angel investor, VC or private equity firm, corporate investor, or other type of financier, applying requires the right kind of financial planning and preparation. Simply put, you will need to not only have your financial house in order but be able to prove it! This is where your accounting team is instrumental in the process. 

A resource offered in partnership between The ASP Team and CFO Selections

​One commonality among our businesses at The ASP Team and CFO Selections is that we often talk to business leaders that aren’t sure which kind of accounting role they need. They typically understand the duties they would like the person to perform and the deliverables they expect to receive, but they aren’t sure what to call the role exactly. Without the proper title it makes it difficult to hire into the role or find an accounting services company to provide exactly what they need.

Sometimes clients will come to us at The ASP Team saying that they need a “bookkeeper” as a catch-all phrase for someone doing any kind of accounting work but what they are really looking for is something more – an Accountant, Senior Accountant, or even Controller. Similarly, sometimes clients will come to us at CFO Selections saying that they need a “CFO” as a catch-all phrase for someone doing more advanced accounting work or leading an accounting team but what they actually need is something less – a Controller, Accounting Manager, or Senior Accountant. How do you know which you need? 

As accounting consultants, we have seen AI usage increase dramatically over the last five years across daily accounting activities throughout organizations of all sizes. So, where is AI most widely used in bookkeeping and accounting these days?
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When it comes to AI in accounting, A/R and A/P augmentation has proven to be the low hanging fruit. As accounting technology has grown more sophisticated machines have been tasked with doing these types of repetitive functions that have traditionally bogged organizations down with manual work. With A/R and A/P already being powered by AI, what can we expect next?

​Usually, we discuss more specifically focused accounting and bookkeeping topics to share in-depth industry knowledge with our readers. However, today we’re going back to the basics to answer a fundamental question: “What does an accounting services provider do?”

​Simply put, an accounting provider does less than full-time work. This work can be either ongoing part-time work or short-term work (which includes interim engagements and project-based work). What does that entail exactly? 

​Research shows that today’s bookkeepers and accountants are making mistakes as their workloads have increased due to economic volatility and newly enacted regulations. The data also shows that the more capacity constrained accounting professionals are, the more likely they are to make data errors on manual work and miss issues when conducting regular reviews on accounting records.

And while this certainly does not mean accounting professionals across the board are doing poor work, even the best accountants are feeling the pressure. As their time continues to be squeezed and their responsibilities expanded, good accountants are finding that they need to work even harder to maintain the top-notch work that they are doing. The result is an environment more conducive to burnout and errors regardless of the integrity and work ethic that they bring to the role.
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If your books are messy due to overworked bookkeeping and accounting staff or turnover in those roles, you need to be able to figure out what needs to be fixed, understand how to fix it, and take a proactive approach to avoid future accounting issues!