An increasing number of small businesses are hiring virtual bookkeeping assistants to help them keep on top of their financial transactions.
Keeping up to date with bookkeeping tasks is vital if a business is to run smoothly; therefore, you need to ensure that all your financial activities are well documented. Otherwise, it could lead to severe repercussions.
Hiring a virtual assistant for bookkeeping is the perfect way to ensure all those time-consuming tasks are done on time.
This article focuses on the main things you need to consider before hiring.
Benefits Of A Virtual Bookkeeping Assistant
These are the three main benefits of hiring a bookkeeping virtual assistant.
Free Up Valuable Time
One of the main reasons businesses hire virtual bookkeeping assistants is to help them free up time for doing other tasks and, for example, dealing with multiple clients.
Companies hire a virtual bookkeeping service because dealing with financial documents can be tricky and requires expertise to ensure that financial statements are handled correctly.
Many business owners make the mistake of thinking they can handle all the sales tax reporting themselves but soon become overwhelmed without the knowledge and skill of virtual bookkeepers.
The bookkeeping process can be complicated and time consuming, especially as your revenue grows; therefore, hiring a virtual bookkeeper is vital.
Reduced Employment Costs
Cutting costs is a crucial factor in all businesses, and hiring a virtual bookkeeper can help you to achieve this.
When you hire bookkeeping virtual assistants, you pay them hourly for their tasks, so you don’t have to worry about additional employment expenses.
Preparing financial reports can prove time-consuming and takes knowledge and skill, so hiring a virtual bookkeeping assistant to do this means it is always done correctly and on time.
Using an exemplary virtual accounting service means you don’t have to stress about keeping on track with accounts receivables and payment reminders, and you can still reduce costs.
Speed Up Bookkeeping Tasks
Hiring a bookkeeping virtual assistant helps to ensure your tax returns are filed correctly and on time, to avoid heavy fines.
Even though your bookkeeping service provider may operate from a remote location, they can help ensure tax preparation is done on time, allowing your company to stay ahead of tax deadlines.
Identifying The Most Time-Consuming Tasks
These are some of the tasks virtual assistants can help with.
Data Entry For Sales And Expenses
Using a virtual assistant bookkeeping service worker for your financial data entry and expenses can save you heaps of time.
Keeping your balance sheets up to date is vital, but it takes a long time. A virtual accounting services assistant will have the knowledge and skill to keep accurate records.
Every transaction that goes through your business must be registered and accounted for, which can be challenging. Each transaction, be it debit or credit, must be entered into a ledger.
Ensuring all this information is correct is vital and will be needed to calculate taxes correctly.
Extract Financial Reports
Writing detailed and accurate financial reports is a challenging task that requires knowledge and skill.
Dealing with figures and statistics and then using that information to write a report allows you to devise detailed long-term strategies to improve business growth based on how much you have to spend annually.
Business owners need help doing their financial reporting correctly, as poorly written reports lead to poor long-term strategic planning, which has a detrimental effect on the company’s overall performance.
Handle Payroll Preparation
Handling payroll means managing all the staff’s wages and ensuring they go into the correct bank accounts on time.
Many payroll tasks are time-consuming, involve bank transactions, and need your virtual assistant to manage all staff expenses correctly.
The bookkeeping virtual assistant you hire may require further training, such as creating a payroll calendar and automating your payroll processes using the right accounting software tools required for payroll management duties.
Identify Overdue Payments
Tracking and staying on top of all business transactions and approving expense reports is a vital part of a virtual assistant ‘s duties.
It may seem easy to track your finances and outgoings, but many small business owners lose track and fail to identify overdue payments.
As a business grows, it becomes even harder to manage financial transactions without hiring a virtual assistant bookkeeper.
Issue Invoices
Issuing invoices is paramount if you want your business to run smoothly. For every product or service you sell, you must give the customer a purchase invoice, allowing you to track each transaction.
Hiring a skilled virtual bookkeeping professional means they can set up invoice templates for you, which can be issued with every purchase.
The exact process must be done when you receive an invoice or any additional expenses your business incurs through staff expenses.
An excellent virtual assistant will deal with all these tasks, which will help you get on with your company’s day-to-day running.
Critical VA Skills For Bookkeeping
These are the skills you need to focus on to find the ideal VA.
Real Estate Experience
When you hire a virtual bookkeeper, you must ensure they have experience working for a real estate company.
For example, when hiring a virtual accounting assistant within the real estate industry, they must have experience dealing with significant financial figures, managing paying bills, and taxable accounts, compiling ledgers and expense reports, and dealing with all the financial transactions of your business.
A highly-skilled virtual bookkeeping assistant will manage all your company’s financial affairs including simple cash flow and clearly understand what accounts transactions belong in.
Bookkeeping Software Skills
The virtual bookkeeping assistant you hire will be trained in using the latest accounting software that helps them manage financial data smoothly and correctly.
Due to the high number of financial transactions your business will be dealing with, it is vital to be accurate with all the figures.
Your virtual bookkeeper must also have experience working with the leading accounting software and communication tools you use within your organisation.
For example, your company may use Xero, a world-class cloud accounting software tool popular across Australia with 3.7 million worldwide subscribers.
The virtual accountants you hire may need additional on-the-job training to bring them up to speed with your company’s requirements in this area.
Flexible Working Hours
A key advantage of hiring a virtual assistant bookkeeping services professional is that it allows you flexibility in the number of hours they can work.
For example, you could hire a part-time virtual assistant bookkeeping service professional and increase their hours as your business grows.
Larger businesses will use accounting firms to manage their financial records, but the cost is far higher than hiring virtual assistants to do tasks such as cash flow reports.
A business can save money by hiring high-quality bookkeeping professionals to perform core functions, and the flexibility they provide with their work hours is beneficial in the long term.
Let Us Handle Your VA Hiring Needs
Hiring a virtual accounting assistant is an excellent way of ensuring all their financial affairs are managed professionally and cost-effectively.
When you consider the time and effort it takes to get all your financial records in order, hiring a virtual bookkeeping service professional makes perfect business sense.
Our team can help you identify, hire, train and manage your virtual assistant so you don’t have to take on this significant task.
Call us today to find out how we can help with all your virtual bookkeeping services needs.