Categories: Blog

We are Big Enough Now for an In-House Bookkeeper

Really?

We hear this periodically from clients.

It’s funny because as many times as we hear this from smaller clients, we hear the following from larger companies.

We can’t stand our in-house bookkeeping staff. They are slow, non-responsive and costing us too much money. Can you take over our entire accounting?

The two sentiments seem diametrically opposed, and in fact they are.

Some in-house bookkeepers can be great, but the reality is that the goals for an in-house bookkeeper are often very different from the goals of an outside bookkeeping service.

The in-house bookkeeper typically expands work beyond what is really needed, sometimes to turn a part-time job into a full-time one. Or sometimes just because that’s just how they do things. Many long-term bookkeepers were trained to do things inefficiently. They often create voluminous paper files and enter long-winded memo explanations for journal entries into Quickbooks. In short, the in-house bookkeeper has little incentive to get work done quickly and efficiently. Their incentive is to make the job seem bigger and more difficult than it really is.

I can’t tell you how many times I have heard an in-house bookkeeper say, “you want what, when – really!”

At QBO, we stopped hiring experienced bookkeepers years ago. Instead, we look for tech-savvy people with minimal or no bookkeeping experience. We feel that we can then train these people to do the work efficiently.

Our goal as a bookkeeping service is to do the work as quickly and efficiently as possible. Paper is everyone’s enemy so we try to avoid it as much as possible. Our ultimate goal is to get the numbers done and done correctly at the lowest cost possible. We hope to save our client’s money on the mundane, but necessary task of bookkeeping. We typically cut costs 40% or more when we take over for an in-house staff.

My people are trained to be responsive to client requests. We typically turn special requests around that day, but guarantee 24 hr turn-around.