Future of SME Sector Accountancy Services
The traditional Accountancy service provided by practices to SME’s is compliance focused. The main aspects of such a service are:
- Ensuring your tax return is completed on time and you know your tax liability
- Completing and filing year-end accounts
- Preparing annual returns for submission to the Companies Registration Office
- Dealing with ad hoc enquiries from revenue throughout the year
While all of this is extremely important every decent Accountancy Practice should be able to provide the above services efficiently.
When selecting your Accountant wouldn’t it be great if you could choose a firm that would become a partner in your business and “Add value” to your business where you would see a direct impact on its performance and ultimately the bottom line.
While some business owners will always see their accountancy cost as an overhead I believe if you are progressive and wanting to improve your overall business you should see your Accountant as more than just a cost.
How closely have you analysed the below in the past;
- Weekly sales and P&L performance
- Monthly management accounts
- Budget, actual and prior year variance analysis
- Inventory or stock control
- Gross margin analysis – do you know how much profit you make from each product line? Better still do you know which customers you make money from and those that are costing you money?
- Cashflow forecasting
- Production efficiency – direct labour cost review, utilisation, wastage etc.
- Overhead review and cost centre analysis
Consider each of the above when choosing your Accountant. Through the correct planning, set up and use of technology (e.g. cloud accounting solutions) to not only record bookkeeping transactions but to capture appropriate information at point of input, critical KPIs could be available on a regular basis. This will ensure that you can be in a position to review all of your business KPI’s as if you had your own in house financial controller at a fraction of the cost. The real bonus to such a service is that it is scalable and you will always be able to control the cost to your business by increasing or reducing your requirements as you see fit.
