You need more from your accountant. Your business has grown and if you’re honest, what you really need is an entire finance team. But you can’t afford that – yet. And so, until then your only option is bringing an accountant onto the payroll.
But here’s the problem. Now you’re faced with a trade-off.
Do you hire a higher level finance director, who’ll be able to help you with the big picture but will leave you to do all the bookkeeping and pay runs?
Or do you hire someone who can do all the admin but will leave you trying to work out all the strategy on your own?
This is a really common quandary among scaling businesses. And what tends to happen is one of 3 things:
- You stick with your external accountant and take on an office junior to help with the day-to-day
- Hire a middle-of-the-road accountant to manage your finances
- Pay someone a lot of money for consultancy advice as a finance director
Stick with your current accountant and hire an office junior
If you’re going to stick with your current situation this means that you’ll continue to have reactive rather than proactive financial advice, you’ll become a bottleneck in your business as you’ll still be the person that has to pass information back and forth between the team and your external accountant, and your accountant can’t really advise you strategically because they don’t know your business intimately enough.
Middle of the road manager
If you decide to hire a middle of the road manager, usually they’re going to be fairly junior and while they’ll be able to ease the admin workload, you’re going to lose out on the expert advice you need to get to the next level.
Bring in a consultant
So the obvious solution seems to spend a lot of money on a consultant. You’ll get the strategic advice you need, but you’ll be paying them a lot of money, and the payroll and admin and all those other bits and pieces you don’t have time for will still fall at your desk.
Multi-layered finance team
What you really need is a multi-layered finance team who can cover off the admin, help you plan your strategy, forecast problems before they happen, and ultimately be more profitable. But you can’t have that yet … well actually yes you can.
Because there is a fourth option, and that is taking on an accountant who is able to offer you all these layers of support but without the 6 figure price tag, and this is what we do at de Jong Phillips.
Here’s why it’s better than putting all your budget into one new employee:
- You get the breadth of experience of a whole financial department. Rather than choosing between a bookkeeper or an FD you get both and everything in between.
- You don’t have to worry about what you don’t know. When you put someone on your payroll it’s up to you to make sure that person has all the bases covered and is doing a good job. Instead, this way you have a whole team working with you, with years of experience running the finance function of a business like yours.
- It’s better value. You get a whole team for the cost of one employee. And you don’t have to worry about the hidden costs of having employees like holidays, sick pay and recruitment fees.
This is exactly how we’ve been working with our clients over the last 5 years and every single one of them has said that it’s totally different to any other experience they’ve had with an accountant.
At de Jong Phillips we see this as the new way of accounting for small and medium-sized businesses. We don’t just want a transactional relationship with our clients, we want to help you grow your business and be more profitable. And this is how we do it.
Give us a call to find out more
If you are ready to take your finance team to the next level, drop us an email or give us a call.