​Typically, it’s followed by questions like:

• How can I tell if the team has the right skillset to do the job we need done?
• Do they have the resources needed to do their jobs effectively?
• Should we hire more personnel to lend additional expertise or bear the workload better?
• Should we make a change to our accounting policies or procedures?
• Is our accounting software helping or hurting the problems we’re experiencing?

These last few years have created unprecedented demands for the accounting and finance teams of small companies (and larger ones, too!). As a result, we have seen many clients come to us looking for assistance in getting their accounting tasks caught up to enable both internal and external reporting.
 
Let’s take a look at what kinds of requirements exist this year and who should be responsible for meeting them!

Should you outsource a bookkeeping/accounting role or handle it in-house? This is a question that we help potential clients with every day! Unfortunately, there’s not one single right answer for every organization.
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Exploring your needs and expectations around the role will help to determine whether you should keep it in-house or whether it would be best to hire a third-party accounting provider to do it for you. Ultimately, the answer will depend on several factors – time needed, functions needed, and of course cost!

​Architecting and building a successful accounting department is critical to a company’s growth and success. One of the keys is ensuring your accounting team has a thorough and complete accounting manual to instruct them on how, why, and when to account for all financial transactions within the business.
 
Just like a general contractor needs an official set of complete plans from a professional architect to ensure a successful build, so an accounting department needs a professional and complete accounting manual to ensure accounting operations are run with integrity and efficiency while maintaining all universal compliance requirements.
 
I have been in many accounting environments across various companies throughout my career and the best and most efficient accounting environments all have one thing in common – best-in-class accounting manuals. Why? Let’s look at the ways an accounting manual brings value to a company.

​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.