An Admin Assistant Is Not a Bookkeeper: It's Time to Hire an Accountant

Many business owners decide to forgo hiring a dedicated bookkeeper and choose to have their office assistant perform the company’s bookkeeping services instead.

We get it, and we see it all the time. As a business owner, you are focused on making cost-effective decisions for your business. You don’t want to spend excess money on accounting services when you have a perfectly capable person already in-house to perform these tasks.

However, there are many problems with this approach, and in the end, you may not be saving as much money as you thought.

Let’s explain.

3 Reasons Why Your Small Business Needs to Hire a Bookkeeper

1. Most office assistants don’t have an accounting background. Bookkeepers do.

First and foremost, it’s important to recognize that you didn’t hire your administrative assistant to be your bookkeeper. You hired them to manage the day-to-day tasks in and around the office. Because of this, they are unlikely to have any finance or accounting background experience. When it comes to complex transactions or managing payroll taxes, they might have to drag you, the business owner, into the process.

To truly free up your time to run your business and not manage your books alongside your office assistant, you need to hire a professional accounting staff. You could also consider outsourcing these needs to a reputable firm, like MGA.

Leave the complex accounting work to someone who knows how to do this stuff without assistance or guidance from you.

2. Your bookkeeper should be solely focused on your business financials and offer you financial solutions. Does your executive assistant do this for you?

Administrative assistants often juggle many tasks inside the office. Their primary goal is to make sure the day-to-day operations of the business run smoothly and efficiently. They may be answering phones or handling client requests or assisting you with other daily duties, constantly being pulled in different directions. This often results in the accounting work being left on the back-burner.

If your financials are not clean and accurate, things can get missed. If things are missed, you’ll never have a clear picture of where you could be saving money. Your bookkeeper should be passing along this type of information to you. You shouldn’t have to go digging for it yourself.

3. When your books are wrong, you are creating more work for your accountant, which ultimately costs you more money in the long run.

This is where you are unlikely to be saving as much money as you hoped by having your executive assistant manage your books. When you have a non-accounting person in charge of your books, some complex situations may have them in over their heads. This will likely create more work for your accountant to tackle.

Also, when you don’t have a dedicated bookkeeper managing your books, things are bound to get missed. When tax season rolls around and your books are not accurate, your accountant will have to spend time cleaning things up. The fees that accumulate from scenarios like this can be hefty.

Hire a Bookkeeper or Outsource Your Accounting Services, Today!

We want to stress that, overall, it would be much more cost effective to have a qualified person in place from the beginning to manage your daily accounting needs. You would also have proper financials throughout the entire year to help you make better business decisions as a whole.

By not hiring an accounting professional, you risk having wrong numbers and miss out on efficiencies that would help you save time and money as well as produce financials more timely. Your office assistant is going to do what they have to do to keep up and get things done, but they won’t know all the “tricks” of the trade. A qualified accounting staff will be versed on the best accounting software or add-ons that are available and how they work in conjunction with your books.

If you don’t think you need a full-time bookkeeper in-house, we strongly suggest that you outsource your services to a professional firm. At MGA, our Finance Accounting Support Team (F.A.S.T.) is here for you. We have helped many business owners grow their businesses by freeing up their time to focus on things that truly matter — not doing bank reconciliations.

The Frankel Building Group and Rockstar Capital are two perfect examples of how our F.A.S.T. service has helped real-life business owners grow their companies.

Is our back-office accounting support team the right solution for you?

Let’s talk!