Do you know what you pay your accountant for?

There are many things that people take for granted in life; when life gives you lemons, make lemonade; don't eat yellow snow; you need an accountant when you run your own business.

I am not going to argue with the first two examples, especially not the second one, but is the last one really true nowadays? Do you really need an accountant when you run your own business? And if so, what do you need them for?

It is not a secret that doing taxes can be overly complicated and time consuming. Having an accountant help you with your company's tax return is probably a great help to you and your business. The question becomes interesting if you start thinking about what else it is you need an accountant for. Many companies feel like it is part of what you do in life and as such they happily pay a few hundred to a few thousand dollars a month to make sure their financials are up to date. And of course, keeping track of your financials and especially your cash flow is crucial to your business. However, is it really worth paying an accountant relatively large sums of money to do fairly easy work like data entry or simple analytical review?

As you might expect, the business model of an accountant exists mainly off charging an amount of money per hour that you think their service is worth, and then having the work done by somebody that costs far less per hour to do the actual work. Lets say you end up paying your accountant the equivalent of $100 per hour. Based on some general assumptions that means that the person actually doing the work probably gets around $20 per hour. If you then think back and actually think about what kind of skill you expect to receive from somebody that makes $20 per hour, you will probably start to understand that many tasks that they perform might not be that complicated. And in fact, you are right, they are not.

When performing these tasks myself while working as an accountant I realized that with a few additions that can be offered by current day technology, there is no longer any need for small business to spend their hard earned money on these fairly simple and repetitive tasks. We developed Techne in order for you to be able to do these tasks in-house without having to understand any accounting jargon or concepts.

Techne. Next generation accounting for your small business