Accounting for small businesses can be intimidating, but if you’re willing to seek help, a certified public accounting (CPA) team can play a critical role in helping small businesses through the dreaded tax season, in addition to supporting their day-to-day operations. If you are a small business owner, take the time to understand how integrated CPA teams can help benefit a company like yours.
Accounting for Small Businesses: The Benefits of Using a CPA Accounting Team
Accounting Can Be Time-consuming
Some of the most time-consuming tasks for yourself as a business owner can be your accounting responsibilities, especially if you don’t have an education or previous experience in the field. If you aren’t comfortable handling the aspects of your company’s accounting can be outsourced when using a CPA team.
An integrated CPA team can provide you with expert services in small business bookkeeping, tax savings, data entry, reconciling, and more. They can also take on chief financial officer (CFO) responsibilities, which is a position in the company that you may not currently have filled. Unless you’re confident that you can tackle this aspect of your business alone, you should seek outsourced help.
Keeping Up-to-date on Accounting Trends
Additionally, an integrated CPA team will keep your company up to date on new accounting trends and policies and will take the time to find solutions and tools to make your financials easy to manage.
Establish a Proactive Tax Strategy
You would be smart to establish tax strategies early—something that a CPA team can help you with—in order to get the most out of your profits.
Although hiring a CPA team will initially cost more than doing it yourself or keeping an in-house accountant, you’re going to benefit in the long run in terms of money saved thanks to their expert advice.
Let’s Talk About Tax Deductions
What are Tax Deductions?
Tax deductions are expenses that you can claim against your tax payments in order to reduce the amount you pay.
As a small business, there are certain tax deductions that you might benefit from even if you don’t know it yet. Following are a few examples of deductions you can make for your business:
Work-Related Travel Expenses
Any travel that you might do for work, whether it’s a train ticket train, gas for your own car, staying in a hotel, etc. The trip itself must be necessary for the business, it must take you away from your home, and it must be longer than a working day.
Home Office Expenses
For those small businesses who’ve not branched out to their own office yet, a home office is the norm. Anything you buy for your home office that is for your work can be claimed. So if you sell handmade products, everything from the packaging you use to your equipment to make your product can be claimed. You can even take $5 off of every square foot of space that’s utilized by your office.
A CPA team can talk you through all of the possible deductions you might be able to make and ensure that you’re saving as much money as possible.
Getting Audited
Audits Happen
Audits happen on a regular basis, and it is mandatory that you comply with the IRS when they decide to audit you. The main reasons for an audit include ensuring your financial statements as a business are free from incorrect information and errors that may otherwise point to suspicious and criminal activity.
The Pain of Audit Compliance for Small Businesses
An audit can be a pain because it requires you to pull information from all of your accounts and to source any information that the auditors might want. That means you’re at their beck and call whenever they need you, whatever they need from you. This puts you at a serious disadvantage when trying to handle accounting for small businesses.
Minimizing Your Risk of Being Audited
Audits can be avoided by following the advice of a CPA team. It’s less likely that you’ll be audited if your financials are handled by a professional. Although it’s not guaranteed that you will not be audited if you hire a CPA team, they can take preventative and preparatory measures to make your auditing process as smooth as possible, should you undergo one.
A CPA Team Will Help You Understand the Financial Effects of Business Decisions
Whenever you make a business decision, there will always be financial implications and negative or positive effects of your actions. With that being said, a CPA team will be able to help guide you to make the right choices and avoid the wrong ones; in other words, they can help you understand what your money is best used for, and what you can do to increase your profits.
For example, if you want to hire a new staff member or invest in certain staff training courses, your CPA team will be able to advise you on what’s best and how it affects your budgeting as a business.
Strategizing & Planning With A CPA Team
With a CPA team, you can easily look at the bigger picture and create a detailed strategy for the future of your company. They can help you explore the opportunities that you have as a small business and how you can leverage your resources to grow. Together with your CPA team, you can make the right decisions to ensure your business is continuing down a positive financial route.
Take Advantage of Your CPA Team
When it comes to your accounts, take advantage of what an integrated CPA team can offer you. Weigh the pros and cons of outsourcing your accounting and financial duties and consider how a whole team can make accounting for small businesses a breeze.
Contact us at Insogna CPA to learn how we can help your small business with its accounting needs.
