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Does Your Small Business Need An Accountant?

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When most people think about accountants, they think about huge corporations and other large entities. However, many accountants work for small and medium businesses. While not all businesses need accountants, the workload demanded of accounting can make it a smart move. Here are a few reasons why your small business might need an accountant.

Spend Your Time Elsewhere

Most small business owners don’t start a business to deal with money, yet many owners find themselves spending more and more time working on accounting tasks over time. Small business owners and managers are at their best when they’re working with clients, making business-related decisions, or otherwise working within their expertise. Hiring an accountant lets people focus on what they do best while letting an accountant deal with the rest.

Another way to think about the cost of hiring an accountant is the opportunity cost not hiring one demands. Accountants work quickly, and, even if they command a relatively high hourly wage, they can perform work much faster than an inexperienced business owner or manager. As a result, some companies, including small companies, can effectively save money by paying for an accounting by freeing other individuals to perform other tasks.

Ensure Accurate Work

Accountants have extensive training and education, and many have years or even decades of experience. As a result, they know how to work accurately and efficiently. This is especially important for small businesses, where money is often at a premium and small financial mistakes can have disastrous long-term consequences.

Accuracy also matters when it comes to handling various legal issues, especially taxes. Mistakes while filing taxes can lead to significant fines, and small mistakes can often pop up years later, after a significant amount of interest has built up. By hiring an accountant, small businesses can greatly reduce the odds of having to deal with these issues.

Better Analytical Data

As digital technology continues to become essential in the business world, data is becoming more and more important. Many computer accounting programs generate data reports and other information automatically, but it can be difficult to interpret and analyze; it can even be misleading for untrained individuals. Accountants know how to come up with accurate and useful data that business owners and managers can use to better understand how the company is performing.

Although many accountants are not analysts, they often have the education and experience needed to interpret data, and full-time accountants, in particular, can become valuable resources for owners and managers. By having accountants attend relevant meetings, businesses can mitigate the odds of making potentially expensive mistakes or missing out on potential opportunities.

Maximizing Business Growth

Small business owners are sometimes afraid to take on debt, but failing to do so at the right time can lead to missed opportunities and, potentially, falling drastically behind competitors. The data provided by accountants helps companies make wise decisions when it comes to taking out loans, and it enables companies to expand when the opportunity presents itself.

Loans can be complicated, and while a business owner might be able to handle basic accounting and tax-related tasks, understanding how loans work is often difficult. Companies such as Business Credit and Capital provide various types of loans for small businesses, and these loans can be the difference between a company flourishing and stagnating or failing. An accountant can help.

Legal Issues

Laws vary significantly, but some types of businesses are required to use accountants for certain tasks. Failing to hire a properly certified accountant can lead to fines and other sanctions. Business owners need to determine if laws dictate they hire an accountant for certain tasks.

In addition, hiring an accountant shows a level of competency that can be especially useful when resolving civil matters. Lawsuits can effectively shut down many small businesses, and companies can better fight against charges of negligence or malfeasance by showing that all financial work was handled by a qualified accountant.

Running a small business can be incredibly rewarding, but it comes with a host of challenges. While some businesses can operate fine without hiring an accountant, owners of businesses of all sizes need to ensure that they’re ready and willing to hire an accountant if doing so in the the company’s best interest.

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A Human Approach to Digital Marketing

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Digital marketing has become an affordable and effective way to market your brand. Unfortunately, it’s easy to lose your perspective in social media and blogs and email blasts. While you can carefully curate your online presence, marketing messages can get overwhelmed in notifications, news feeds, and updates.

While this is unfortunate, no business that hopes to evolve can ignore the potential of digital marketing. Whether we understand it or not, the world has become a digital consumer, meaning not even the smallest business can afford to disregard the importance of connecting online. With a single upload, business has extended their commercial potential, reaching new customers and markets. But this is alongside consumers discovering more junk mail flooding their accounts, more abandoned shopping carts and, worse, knowing there are a kabillion places to find the exact same products and services.

Putting a Face on Your Brand

They may love their devices, but customers still appreciate an authentic and personalized experience. If a business wants to deploy digital marketing, they need to manage one of the most critical components of their campaigns and that’s to maintain a human relationship between their brand and the customer. As a business, you have to recall a day when a name and a brand meant something to a customer.

So, how do you bring more humanity into your digital marketing?

Start with Persona Based Targeting

Persona-based targeting begins by grouping your customer base by shared interests and commonalities. This gives your business the opportunity to better personalize messaging. Despite their sophistication, customers still want emotional connections. They appreciate brands that make the effort. Persona-based targeting helps you develop marketing lists, design effective conversion ads, manage compelling website content and tailor email campaigning to different audiences.

Maintaining Face on Facebook

For all-important social media interaction, the challenge to remain human can be great. Social media marketing is often coordinated and organized like a social calendar and many forget its effectiveness is dependent on active participation. This can be difficult outside of having a team devoted solely to the endeavor. Still, we have to find a way to manage personal messaging in social communities. Find a balanced approach to content categories and targeting specific customer segments. It might be good to do a little research and see where groups and organizations are already segmented in social media communities with customers you want to reach. There is tech that can automate the process while still allowing the business to remain human through compelling and original content.

Support Channel Partners

Customers are not the only entity that may require a human approach to digital marketing. If you have channel partners, they could be looking for guidance and support. We often assume these operatives already know what to do and how to use programs from the onset. This can be a risky assumption. Channel partners may be looking for personalized support. See what guidance they may need and manage communications to ensure everyone is always on the same page.

Create Human Experiences

The Internet gives us greater opportunity to exchange information, but it’s become so easy we often forget to replicate the human experience. Real world interactions engage visual and emotional cues. Since that can be difficult to duplicate through a keyboard, our safest bet is to rely on the best aspects of social contact.

  • Let your customers know their opinions are respected and want to be heard
  • Take the time to create strong relationships
  • Understand the frailty of trust and how it has to be earned
  • Give customers the opportunity to voice their concerns, be it through email, chat, social pages, etc.
  • Use polls and surveys to get better views of what your customers are thinking and want
  • Use incentives, discounts, and programs to reward loyalty

Conclusion

From getting leads to good reviews and referrals, your digital marketing campaigns will be vital to success. While we cannot duplicate the one-on-one contact with the real world on the Internet, we can create a sense of empathy and understanding in our digital media campaigns. The human approach is living digitally using the same mutually beneficial social contracts from the real world.

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Tips on How to Help Control Your Small Business Finances

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A small business requires constant financial monitoring to ensure that revenues continue to stream in and expenses remain within reasonable bounds. One of the most difficult tasks of business owners is to take the time to review their financial statements on a regular basis to ensure that these two numbers are matching up appropriately. However, it is easy for expenses to overtake incoming revenues, whether because of uncontrolled spending or because of the need to spend on opportunities that have arisen unexpectedly. Here are a few areas that should be carefully monitored to ensure good financial management of your business:

Review Expenses Regularly
The workweek goes quickly for most small business owners. They are usually engaged in meeting with clients, finding solutions for problems, scouting out new markets and ensuring the efficient operation of daily tasks. Business owners often neglect going over financial data to ensure that they are making a profit. But weekly and monthly profit-and-loss reports can alert them to problems that are currently occurring that could have a large impact on the business’s success. Setting aside time each week to review this important data will help to avoid a variety of financial problems that can come up unexpectedly.

Monitor Expenses and Get New Quotes
Business owners should always be wary of “expense creep” that inevitably causes the upward movement of prices from vendors that can undermine the ability to show a profit for the month or the year. If the owner doesn’t have time, delegate the monitoring of the most common expenses to someone in your purchasing department. When prices get out of line, look for new vendors and get new quotes for these items. You should also get a new quote annually for business insurance and auto insurance to keep these regular expenses from inflating over time.

Control Credit Card Purchases
Credit cards make it easier to keep track of travel and entertainment expenses, but they can also make it too easy to go over-budget. Allow only your most trusted staff members to have a company credit, with strict instructions about acceptable expenses. Monitor credit card expenses regularly to ensure compliance with your restrictions.

Have Access To Financing When Needed
Small business owners should always be alert to the need for short or long-term loans that will help them through difficult times in the economy or that will allow them to take alternative-business-financingadvantage of opportunities that come to their attention. It’s always a good idea to establish a working relationship with a company like Business Credit and Capital, so you can tap into the cash you need when you need it.

Pay Off Loans Quickly
When a small business owner does borrow money for business operations, he or she should make every effort to pay the balance off as quickly as possible, so you will be ready for the next opportunity. If possible, pay off loans before their term, so you establish a good credit record that you can tap into whenever the need arises.

An old adage says that if you take care of the pennies, the dollars will take care of themselves. If you maintain a daily effort to keep your expenses in line, you will be rewarded with financial gains at the end of every month and the end of every year.