Love Your Accountant

 

Even if you are great with numbers, you should still have an accountant or CPA go over your numbers just to double check. Remember, these people are trained to find things that you may overlook.

The accountant is the person that generally gets overlooked in a business until tax time comes, but a good relationship with a great accountant all year round can and will be an asset to your business.

It doesn’t matter if your business is just you and a computer working from the library, (My business model for almost a year) or if you run a corporation with multiple employees, your accountant will help keep the numbers straight and the IRS off of your back.

What Is Accounting Anyway?

Anyone who's worked in an office at some point or another has had to go to accounting. They're the people who pay and send out the bills that keep the business running.

They do a lot more than that, though. Sometimes referred to as "bean counters" they also keep their eye on profits, costs and losses. Unless you're running your own business and acting as your own accountant, you'd have no way of knowing just how profitable - or not - your business is without some form of accounting system in place.

No matter what business you're in, even if all you do is balance a checkbook, that's still accounting. It's part of even a kid's life. Saving an allowance, spending it all at once - these are accounting principles.

Every business and every individual needs to have some kind of accounting system in place. Otherwise, the finances can get away from you; we wouldn’t know what we've spent, or whether we can expect a profit or a loss from the business.

Staying on top of accounting, whether it's for a multi-billion dollar business or for a personal checking account is a necessary activity on a daily basis if you're smart. Not doing so can mean anything from a bounced check or posting a loss to a company's shareholders. Both scenarios can be equally devastating.

Accounting is basically information, and this information is published periodically in business as a profit and loss statement, or an income statement.

I, myself, have always had issues with numbers; long story going back to 7^th grade and a teacher that didn’t like me much…but I digress. Anyway, in business, it is important to know the numbers but it is also one of those jobs in your business that you can turn over to a professional and concentrate on whatever it is that you do that makes your business money.

Remember that anytime you are doing something in your business that takes you away from what it is that brings in the money, you are losing money.

That being said, the next few posts are going to be about accounting, because even if you have the best accountant in the world, you still want to have an idea of where every dollar goes.