Why always so late?

If you are a small business owner, have you ever noticed while waiting for your tax accountant to do you tax return that it normally gets pretty close to the deadline before it is done? Or that when you are waiting to receive your financials for the month you are normally already about to be done with the next month? I am pretty sure that if you think about it this starts to sound pretty familiar. The question is, is there another way?

Obviously it takes a bit of time for your accountant to do some data entry and to make adjustments where necessary. However, the most time consuming part of these tasks is generally nothing more then just the time spent collecting the required information. Now you would assume that with years of experience this would become a fairly streamlined process. However, due to turnover as well as miscommunication this process often times results in over 50% of the time spent on the tasks at hand. As you can probably imagine, a decrease in the amount of time necessary for this part of the project will result in fewer hours necessary to complete the task at hand which in turn will result in a lower price for you, the client.

The other two parts as mentioned before, data entry and adjustments are more in line with what your accountant should be spending its time on for the money you are paying him. But lets take a closer look at these and see whether it is indeed really all that necessary.

Data Entry: Being a small business owner you are most likely either doing the bookkeeping yourself, have your office admin person in charge, or have hired a part-time "freelance" accountant to help you out and keep things up to date. The problem with doing it yourself is first of all that you don't really have time or any desire to do so and thus are most likely to do the bare minimum (which makes perfect sense). The problem with having your office or admin person be in charge is that, yes, they probably have more time, but they most likely understand the actual business transactions less then you as an owner, and they probably also don't really fully understand accounting all that well. The problem with a part-time or freelance accountant is that they are normally trying to work for as many clients as they can handle to make as much money as they can and as a result they either might overlook certain details or make mistakes due to no proper time spend on review.

Adjustments: In line with the above mentioned issues related to incorrect or incomplete data entry, not having the right data input automatically leads to the need for adjustments to be made to reflect the correct accounting for your business. However, a larger problem in play here is the fact that all accounting software out there that is aimed at small business does not help you on a transaction basis to get the accounting done correctly.

Now I hear you thinking: "alright, that is all good to know and indeed seems to be in line with what I have found, but is there a solution or is this just information?"

Well, up until recently it would have just been a piece of information, however, Techne has made it its goal to address these items and offers a solution that will lower the amount of money spent by your business on your accountant. By drastically simplifying the way you interact with the software and with the use of transaction based specific requests for information as well as the use of artificial intelligence, data entry will become effortless and adjustments will be made automatically.

Techne. Next generation accounting for your small business.