As seen in the Cascade Business News on October 3, 2007.

By Karen Van Winkle

It’s no fun. If you don’t have a passion for details and crunching numbers isn’t one of your favorite activities, you won’t enjoy bookkeeping.  It will become a mundane task that you put off until absolutely necessary and spend as little time on as possible. Don’t you have enough stress in your life?

You’re bad at it. —No criticism here, but chances are you started your business because you’re really good at what you do; not because you’re good at accounting. Managing the accounts for your business is more complicated than just managing your checkbook, no matter what they print on the software box. Do you run your business out of your checkbook? Do you post everything you don’t know what to do with to “Miscellaneous”? Do you make adjustments every month to make things balance when your bank statement comes in? If so, you need some help.

It can be a big deal if you screw it up. Financial management is the most critical portion of any company and not something to be learned on the job.  This is the one area where a simple mistake can snowball out of control. Forget to file or pay your taxes on time and you get a bill from the State or IRS. Don’t have the correct information on a paystub and you could get a letter from an employee’s attorney.

It’s more expensive than you think.  You do your own books because you think it saves you money, right? Think again. First, there are the fees and penalties you pay due to late payments, incorrect tax filings, etc. or the interest you lose by not actively managing your money with interest-bearing accounts. There are the lost discounts you could be taking if you were managing your cash flow more closely. And, of course, there’s the extra money you pay to your accountant when you walk in with your shoebox and checkbook at the end of the year and ask them to sort it all out to file your taxes.

You’ve got better things to do. Did you start your business to sit around and pay the bills, create invoices, or balance your checkbook?  Most likely the answer is “no”. You started your business to fulfill a passion and a dream, to create something or to provide a service. The time you spend doing your accounting takes away from the time that could be spent building your business, creating something new and getting to know your customers. You can hire someone to manage your books; it’s much harder to hire someone to make your business successful.

Get back to doing what you love and the reason you started your own business.