Area accounting professionals are seeing small businesses moving toward streamlining their operations and are finding ways to supplement time and money as the economic slump goes into extra innings.
“My favorite clients are as small as they get,” said Laima Abbas, owner of Oak Street Bookkeeping in Norwalk. “Many of my clients are one- to two-people companies that used to do everything by themselves, but now they”™re branching out and they need to do more sales, more networking themselves and they need someone to take over the nitty-gritty, day-to-day money upkeep.”
Abbas founded Oak Street Bookkeeping almost two years ago and has been watching as her clients have increasingly sought out her freelance-styled business with the No. 1 word being change.
According to Abbas, there has been direct correlation between the slumping economy and the need for bookkeeping activities to be supplemented because business owner”™s time is being taken up by networking and working.
Howard Klein, managing partner of Eisman, Zucker, Klein and Ruttenburg Accounting and Consulting in White Plains, N.Y., said he has seen a trend of smaller companies cutting back on fulltime accounting services in favor of part time.
“If they have a firm doing the work they might be asking their accounting firm to cut back on their hours,” said Klein. “I argue though that clients need us more when they”™re not doing well, to figure out what”™s going wrong, than when they”™re doing well. But the easiest thing is just cut back on the amount of hours.”
Klein has seen some companies take a different approach.
“Some have asked us to do more internal stuff,” said Klein. “Rather than have us fix their books they”™re having us do their books. Though, in those circumstances, we have to be careful of our own independence and questions of ethics.”
Abbas said many small businesses can”™t shoulder a full-time bookkeeper and don”™t have time to manage the companies”™ finances on their own.
“They bring me on for a few hours a month and things get done,” said Abbas. “They need more time for their sales and networking because the need to attract business is more important than ever. My clients tell me they don”™t want to waste time sitting in the office when they need to go out and sell their services or products.”
According to Abbas finding ways to focus on their central business and supplementing the accounting to outside or temporary resources is proving to be successful.
“A lot of people also hire me who used to have full-time bookkeepers,” said Abbas. “On most of my clients I don”™t spend more than five hours a month. They are small businesses. They need to put invoices in, record checks and the most important part is getting their bank statements and credit card statements reconciled, especially now that late fees have gone up on everything. To keep track of your money is more important than ever.”
Abbas said it is not uncommon for her to take on clients who are consciously incurring hundreds of dollars in late fees every month just because they do not have the time to set their books straight.
“What happens is when you”™re a one- or two-person show, and you don”™t have the time, is that you do things like write checks with money that has not cleared yet,” said Abbas.
Abbas said it is important to remember that money loss to a small business is proportionately more of a hazard than to large shops.
Abbas said that many small businesses don”™t realize that being successful can have just as much to do with how the books are kept as with the perfection of their industry offering.
“It is the toughest job to make people understand that,” said Abbas.
Abbas said small business owners should be of the mindset that this is a time to streamline or be prepared to fail in the industry.
