Basics Questions about Accounting, Bookkeeping, and Working with a CFO
Who needs a CFO?
All businesses absolutely need the skill set of someone who is comfortable understanding financial statements — this includes income statement, balance sheet and cash flow. Without this basic minimum, your business is operating on limited information driving results more by chance than by intention.
When do I need a CFO?
Having a CFO will help you optimize decision making based on your accounting data; a skilled CFO can be invaluable from the moment you are ready to grow out of needing a bookkeeper.
By working with business owners to understand the long term vision, a CFO can implement a cost-efficient, scalable, accounting process that fits the stage the business is in by:
integrating an understanding of past results with future plans
identifying risks and opportunities to meeting those future plans
working with management to mitigate risks and capitalize on opportunities
What is “bookkeeping?”
Bookkeeping is the necessary act of tracking monthly/annual revenue and expenses. It is the bare minimum to ensure that you can stay compliant with local and federal tax reporting requirements. It will also ensure that you have an accurate understanding of your cash position and general inflows and outflows. All businesses with revenue or expenses — no matter the size — should have some basic form of bookkeeping.
What is “accounting?”
Accounting provides deeper insight than bookkeeping by providing an understanding of profitability, independent of how cash is spent or received. A business needs to consider developing accounting processes as soon as they are ready to support or start to implement growth of any kind. A properly deployed accounting process can simultaneously understand cash flow in tandem with profitability and how the two intersect.
What accounting systems do you support?
All cloud based accounting systems are supported. Since we are a remote solution we do not support on premises GL systems that are not accessible via VPN or other remote solution.