By Stacey Gorowitz, CPA, MBA

If you own a small business, you’ve no doubt been astounded at the changes you’ve seen to the technological and economic landscape over the past decade. There are so many more choices and options in this post-internet, digital world that it can make your head spin! Adjusting may be hard, but the possibilities are fantastic news for business owners.

One such change is referred to as Client Accounting Services (CAS). This paradigm offers the benefits of the three mega-trends of digitalization, virtualization and transformation, and it can help all small businesses see bigger profits.

By using new technology, your financial professionals can access your accounting records virtually, of course, but they can also interact in real time with you. They now have easy online access to banking records, payroll – anything needed to complete your financial processes and accounting. This means nearly all information can now be transmitted and downloaded – eliminating the need to rekey information, which was standard operating procedure prior to the digital revolution.

Your accounting professional does not have to be at your site, either, which means that they’re not taking up physical space or computer resources. The upshot of all this increased availability and remote access is more timely information, lower overall costs and significantly decreased time investment. Business owners are free to devote far more time to running their businesses and accounting professionals can spend more time analyzing and planning now that the time it takes to complete accounting processes has been so sharply curtailed.

This changes the basic equation for business success, in many cases, so it makes sense to revisit your employee structure. CAS may mean you may not even need someone performing in-house bookkeeping and accounting services any more since it is often easier and less costly to outsource these tasks. The real upside is that you may even save money and get a higher level of expertise at the same time!

Does your business still need internal services to achieve the best results? It’s possible. But often these days, outsourcing these services is a way to add value by including additional information and analysis that might be beyond the scope of the internal providers. Things that business owners care about and that traditionally didn’t come from basic in-house service providers – like key performance indicators (KPIs), analytics, reporting operating results compared to budgets and targeted goals – is now available through client accounting services. Because of the advances in technology and software, a high-quality, outsourced provider can illustrate this kind of financial data as well as providing it to third parties with no difficulty or delay.

For example, if your business typically processes 200 credit card and payroll transactions monthly, making manual entries for hundreds of transactions was a time consuming drain on internal resources not to mention the errors associated with less experienced bookkeepers or owners entering these transactions incorrectly and not reconciling the activity to payroll tax returns and credit card statements. Today, we can download payroll information and credit card activities directly into the accounting system and focus our time and attention on what the data mean rather than what they are.

Because we can do the basic processing so rapidly, we have time to analyze the tax consequences and cash flow – all the things that affect the bottom line. The information we can compile results in a far more useful, clear and timely picture of the business as a whole.

Most business owners would rather be thinking about their business than performing accounting duties. For them, the new CAS paradigm qualifies as a true windfall that offers lower costs, more time to spend on their core business, instant access to KPIs and the availability of expert advice. Now is the time to embrace the change and free yourself to run your business in a whole new way, unshackled from the tedium of lower level manual processes that offer only limited views of what’s going on. If you’d like more information about CAS and how it can help your business, please call our office. We’re excited about what we can do for your business and look forward to sharing the good news with you.