Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

Hi all, I own a small 7 ee manufacturer, around 1 mil in sales in eastern PA. We do all accounting functions in-house on our accounting system except payroll which I have a service for.

Our accounts are used only to do our tax returns at year end.

The nagging question is: is there something else they could be doing for me? Apparently they have plenty of work to keep themselves busy year-round. But what are they doing that I should be tapping into?

Obviously, I could just ask but I want to go in with some prior knowledge before I do that.

1) What is your accountant doing for you besides taxes?

2) How often are you meeting with them?

3) Do they have direct access to your accounting system?

Whatever insights you could offer would be greatly appreciated.

Jim

Yes, that is true, they are really only my “tax preparer”. Virtually the whole accounting process is very mechanical. I can see why there is no real financial management in place in small companies.

The area where I always felt we fell short is on true analysis, maintaining the ratios and where we stand relative to other companies in the industry. It hasn’t been a glaring issue since the bottom line is always the bottom line and I always keep an eye on payables, receivables, inventory and cash. It’s just one of those nagging issues that has been bugging me for awhile. Especially now that we’re starting to feel the economy.

It has been suggested in the past that I should consider hiring someone other than my accounting firm to do the controller or CFO work. Not entirely sure what their logic was other than my accountant being somewhat pricey (they’re one of the larger accounting firms in the area). As my “tax preparer” is relatively intimate with my numbers and I’ll be sitting down with them shortly, I’ll float it past them to see what they say about a quick monthly analysis of month-end numbers. I’d like to think that they could knock out a monthly analysis and commentary pretty quick as we’re not all that complicated.

Perhaps even Quickbooks Enterprise, which we are considering to replace our old accounting system, also has some built-in analysis tools that might cover those areas too. I’d still like to have some 3^rd party commentary of the numbers though. Interesting stuff…

There’s actually a variety of reasons why we “need” to change accounting systems. Our current system (an old orphaned MS-DOS/Novell system) does work fine and has cost me “literally zero” for the past 14 years which is why I’ve held on to it for so long. Though it works fine, we are at a point where it does cost me in terms of lost productivity that could be gained with current systems. (fax/email po’s, invoices, EDI, MRP, CRM, financial dashboard, website integration, etc)

I will tread lightly with my accounting firm to see what they have to offer. Though I have two primary people working on my books at tax time, I know there are others that are brought in for specific tasks. They have something like 50+ people in their office. I remember reading that they offer offsite back-office assistance that can include remote login to Quickbooks as an added benefit.

It’s amazing what can happen in 48 hours. I purchased Quickbooks Enterprise on December 31^st at 3:45pm. Pretty funny. If it wasn’t for the last minute, nothing would get done around here…

Anyway, it was a slow process decision that was well over a year in the making (about a dozen pkgs researched) so I’m pretty comfortable with it. I’m sure I’ll run into some sort of hidden downside with a 5-user $3K accounting pkg but the price differential, the huge user base and the variety of 3^rd party apps make for a strong argument to at least try it. The 60 day money back guarantee was the cherry on the icing of the cake.

Thanks for the offer and the advise. I just discovered SUN. Though I’m not a startup, SUN looks like a nice place to hang out for business owners.