Any small business owners/managers here use 3rd party accounting?

I am not a small business owner, but I saw a commercial for this kind of thing recently. I never would have considered something like that before the virus, but now, I don’t see why it wouldn’t work fine. You can do anything through a Teams/Zoom call that you can do in person.

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Have you considered a local firm auch as V Graham or Lemoine for accounting aervices combined with Netchex or similar payroll service?

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We use a CPA who basically signs off on our books and does our taxes. But they basically just reconcile our stuff after the quickbooks files are all still compiled in house. I'd like to sub it all out completely.

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I'd like to sub it all out completely

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. Right. I believe the V Graham and/or Lemoine firms will do that.

I'm going to try to keep this as short as possible. In the past we used Insperity and then switched to Paycom because it was a lot cheaper than Insperity. We dropped Insperity last October.

We use QBO (QuickBooks Online) and I ended up contacting a few bookkeepers last summer that our CPA recommended to assist with setting up some accounts, reallocation, investor items, etc... We have investors in the U.S., Norway, and UK so there are other accounts and things we are dealing with. On top of this we were using an MRP system called Unleashed.

After discussions with our bookkeeper I realized we were way under utilizing QBO. She also convinced us to take a hard look at SOS inventory instead of Unleashed. As it turns out we were pushing Unleashed financial data into QBO. When you are having to push things into your reporting you have a problem. SOS has seamless integration with QBO so all aspects of our business... purchasing, sales, serialization, traceability, payroll, etc... are all handled in SOS and we have amazing visibility of our entire business.

The answer to your question is YES. We had budgeted for an in-house bookkeeper/accountant. We now have no use for one at all. Once our bookkeeper got us on board with SOS and QBO we no longer need one. QBO is directly linked to our bank accounts and all transactions move in/out of QBO. Our bookkeeper now reviews and reconciles our accounts at the end of the month. Now that everything is caught up she typically bills us for 3 hours at the end of the month @ $90 hour. So, our in-house "accounting" is $270 month. The payroll module in QBO is an add on cost of about $85 a month. So bookkeeping and payroll run us about $350 a month total. Of course the workload on our CPA is going to go down tremendously because everything is in order and easily pulled from QBO so I expect the end of year CPA charged to drop a fair amount based on discussion with her.

I would imagine you have a lot of transactions for each individual job. Do yourself a favor, talk to your CPA if you have one. Ask them for a recommendations for a bookkeeper with QBO experience. Ask the bookkeepers to send you their resume. Find one that is well versed in QBO and discuss what you want to do. Inexpensive and powerful.

FYI... the ADP, Insperity, Paycom, etc... all offer payroll, benefits administration, hiring, work place safety, etc.. in my experience they are good at providing brochures for small companies and that's about it. IF you are a large company they will actually visit and hold employee presentations but for small companies it is rarely worth the cost in my opinion.

My firm does this. Everything from bookkeeping to CFO services. We also handle payroll and HR. Let me know if you want to drop your email address and we can connect. Some of the companies mentioned above won't do the day-to-day of AP and AR processing, only the reconciling and high level work.

subtle hijack - whats been your most successful method of recruiting construction laborers? and do you self perform or mostly hire subs?

As a CPA, this is good advice. Depending on the complexity of your business, you may want your CPA to review monthly, but you should feel that out. I do think for small businesses without a seasoned Controller or strong bookkeeper who understands financials and tax impacts on the owners, they should be reviewing financials with your CPA quarterly for an hour or so. It’s hard for a CPA to tax plan and provide guidance if you aren’t meeting at least semi regularly.

we are switching our software to sage 100 later this quarter which hopefully will help. Same boat as you, shite gets complicated as you grow

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I’ve researched ADP and they offer a service called Totalsource. It’s an all-in-one type service (payroll, employee benefits and benefits administration, hiring, and workplace safety, etc). But it’s a big leap.

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Why is it a big leap? Using a 3rd party ‘leased employee’ service is essentially what you are talking about right? Their services are essentially a percentage of your payroll usually, so fairly easily to calculate.

It sounds like you aren’t really using a 3rd party accountant, but 3rd party payroll and benefits company?

Both 3rd party accountant and 3rd party benefits/ payroll are very popular. There’s a lot of options, have your accountant interview them.