“How much time will this take?”
That’s the most common question during the initial phone interview and it’s impossible to answer without considering all the pieces.
Other people will state that their company made so much (or little) money and in this case the amount doesn’t matter but rather how many transactions have to be handled to get to that point.
As a general rule, if you want us to maintain vendor bills and payments, which are time sensitive, plan on services every two weeks at a minimum to avoid late payments. If the bills are being paid by someone in house in a timely fashion than you may be able to limit it to 1 visit a month to deal with all the review and reconciliations.
Ask yourself
- How much transactional activity takes place, is the bank statement several pages long with multiple debit card transactions
- How many bank accounts are there
- Are there credit cards to be tracked, again are the tons of transactions to track
- Are there loans or line of credits to track
- What accounts are regularly reconciled, what accounts have never been reconciled
- How current are you with taxes
- Do you have an accountant
- Do you use a payroll company
- Do you track the expenses directly to the clients, we’ll want to look at the current protocol to ensure nothing is slipping through the cracks
- How do you track the billable time, again we’ll want to ensure the current protocol isn’t leaving money on the table
- How often are client billings being done, how many per week/per month
- Who will be doing the client billings and what tasks(if any) do they want to delegate
- Do you
collect and pay sales tax - Do you accept credit cards for payments
- Who will be doing the physical deposits of any client payments, those should always be done promptly
- How are you handling vendor payments
- Do you print checks to your vendors
- Is there flexibility to work on site or do you want to provide remote access
- What software is being used, if using Quickbooks, what version
Once you’ve considered these questions, contact us to set up an initial phone interview.
From there we can schedule an onsite assessment to help you consider your next steps.