In Pursuit of Profit
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 Here at ASP, most of our clients are small-to-medium-sized businesses and nonprofits that need part-time accounting and bookkeeping help. After years of working with clients, we have noticed that many of them fall into the same few unfortunate patterns. But the good news is that we are uniquely able to help them break out of these patterns to find long-term success. Let’s look at some mini case studies that illustrate the types of scenarios where we can help!
 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.  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. 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!  Family businesses are a true gem! They are integral to the soul of our country and touch so many people’s lives in a way that’s unlike any other type of business. And, according to the US Chamber of Commerce, they also play a big role in our country’s financial infrastructure employing 63% of the workforce and generating 57% of America’s GDP. Of course, most family businesses are not nearly as large as the ones that have made it big over the years (like Ford, Chick Fil-A, Dell, Aldi, and Walmart). But, nonetheless, family-run businesses are still essential to our local communities, and always will be. That’s why we are particularly passionate about helping family businesses succeed! We understand that in family-run companies there are a lot of challenges that must be overcome to find success, and we want to offer the resources that help them along the way.
Today we’re going to be addressing some of those challenges through a financial lens by looking at the top accounting-related obstacles for family businesses and discussing ways to address them.
What about your accounting platform? Is it keeping pace with business needs? Does it provide the kind of functionality that your business needs to take that next step (whatever it may be)? Does it offer sufficient automation to streamline human efforts?
The reality is that the companies that need accounting help the most typically aren’t even aware that they need help. If you’re not sure how your accounting staff and systems are working together to deliver on key accounting functions, here are some red flags to keep an eye out for: 3/23/2023 Do We Need a Chart of Accounts?
We’ll break down what a COA is and why you need one, give you some pointers on how to create a COA, provide an example of a chart of accounts for you, and give you some helpful reminders to be aware of as you create your own COA. Let’s get started talking about accounting chart of accounts fundamentals:
What is Growth?
For our firm in the early days, growth was not a given. In fact, we didn’t really plan to grow at all. Growth was much different in those early days. But because we had a very talented consultant group, we were able to land quite a bit of business and our team would get full. Unfortunately, at that point you have two choices – add to the team and grow organically or slowly lose market share as clients go elsewhere because you’re too busy. Now, 20 years later growth means somethings completely different. In today’s world growth for us means geographic expansion across the US. It is a very carefully planned strategy that we work very hard to execute. But our definition of growth may not be your definition of growth.
What is your recourse if you cannot remedy performance issues? How do you set up future hires or service providers for success to avoid these kinds of issues in the future?
We’ll cover these topics in our guide to accounting management:
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11/5/2024