Please take a moment to view my video on the Accounting System Checkup and give me a call or shoot me an email if you have any questions or would like to schedule a checkup.

It is a scenario that I see way too often:

Many businesses purchase an off the shelf accounting system – the business owner or an employee sets up the software or maybe they hired a temp. They pop the disk in the computer and begin to answer the setup questions the best they know how.

Each one of these questions are designed to tell the accounting software to do something in the accounting process. The person setting up the software doesn’t have the accounting knowledge or the overall understanding of the accounting process so they just accept the default answer and move on to the next question.

An employee – maybe a dedicated accounting person – maybe someone who has other duties and only does accounting part time they enter transactions. They prepare customer invoices and they pay the bills. They may miss a few steps – they may or may not reconcile the bank accounts.

Then what they have is an accounting nightmare. The income is over stated – the balance sheet doesn’t balance – the bank balance is not accurate – and the information provided by the system cannot be relied on to understand the activity of the business.

We provide an accounting system checkup –Look at software, processes, people determine what services we can offer to improve overall accounting system. – We meet with the person or people performing the accounting tasks – We look at the reports that are prepared by the system and then I talk to the owner or managers who are using the reports and We look to see how the accounting information is being used to run the business.

The purpose of this service is not to provide any assurance on the accounting process, but to recommend technology and process solutions to help them run a more efficient and effective accounting system. We provide a report that shows the strengths and weaknesses of the accounting system and We benchmark the results against other similar businesses. Then we show them how an outsourced accounting solution can provide reliable financial and accounting information and provide that information in a timely manner.