Virtual CFO Services and Partnering with Bookkeepers
Many accounting professionals seek to become more involved with their business clients, helping to institute the controls and establish the processes which support sustainability and higher levels of business performance and value. Acting as the Virtual CFO to the business, these professionals use historical financial information and detailed operational data to guide their clients towards stated goals.
While this move to engage clients are deeper operational levels is a worthy effort, there is often a disconnection in the supply chain for these services. In too many cases, there is discord or a lack of understanding and trust between the CPA and the bookkeeper supporting the daily processing of the business information.
The business bookkeeper is the person “in the trenches”, getting daily information organized and processed, reconciling accounts, and generally tasked with recording transactions resulting from business activities. Because the bookkeeper operates very closely with the business, they are perhaps in the best position to provide insight into how operational tasks and various business functions are performed and “accounted” for. While the bookkeeper may not have the skill or experience to design change in these systems, they are a particularly powerful source of current process information and, in some cases, represent the barrier to change.
Years ago, as CPAs removed themselves from daily bookkeeping services to focus on “higher level” work, the opportunity was created for outsourced bookkeeping services to fill the gap in providing daily book and record keeping tasks for small businesses. Small business owners in particular need help with the management of their bookkeeping and accounting, and without the availability (or affordability) of getting this service from the accounting professional, businesses turned to the bookkeepers who stepped in to fill the gap. Yet every year, businesses turn over their bookkeeping and documentation to CPAs who simply re-create the bookkeeping in the form of “write-up”, trusting only their own work when it comes to tax and financial statement preparation.
It would seem that there would be a naturally occurring desire of CPAs to partner with professional bookkeepers in order to provide a full service capability to business clients and eliminate the need to reinvent and write-up the information, but this is often not the case and may be partly due to the reality that CPAs are trained on accounting principles while many bookkeepers are really only trained on the use of a software product. Too often, bookkeepers gain their education primarily based on using QuickBooks software, and “speak” the language of QuickBooks rather than “accounting” resulting with a minimized view of the bookkeeper value by the CPA.
The CPA is thinking in terms of AR and AP subledgers, while QuickBooks bookkeepers think in terms of customers, invoices, and bills to pay. While the language of QuickBooks has been designed to be meaningful to the non-accountant user, it is this very language and presentation which has made QuickBooks both a popular small business accounting solution as well as a foundational solution for an outsourced bookkeeping offering.
Working more closely with the bookkeepers, CPAs could help their clients not only achieve a more accurate and timely accounting of activities, they could also influence areas where necessary controls should be implemented, or where inefficient processes might be improved. Providing not just information but also direction and actionable ability, these accounting professionals are now positioned more directly to provide the CFO services businesses need.
CPAs must find a way to get past their prejudices in working with business bookkeepers, and recognize that these operators “in the trenches” could be their most useful resource – and their most powerful ally – in the supply of Virtual CFO services to the client.
Make Sense?
J
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Cooper Mann Company 