One of the many stressful aspects of the overall activities of a business owner is maintaining books of accounts. This is because of the complexities that are usually associated with bookkeeping. Statements have to be generated, heads of accounts tallied periodically and bank and credit card balances have to be reconciled monthly to pre-empt fraudulent transactions.

Once you take it upon yourself as a business owner to micromanage and monitor the accounting functions you will surely shift focus from your core activity of decision making and taking your business towards exponential growth and development. This can be damaging in the long run.

To save time and to be free of this tedious task, there are a couple of steps that you can take:

- The first is to hire a full-time accountant to take up the work. But here too you have to supervise and monitor the work so you are not really totally free to pursue your work. Further, having your in-house accounts department means having to invest substantially in sophisticated and cutting-edge hardware and software as well as incurring recurring expenses on a team of accountants.

- The second option is to hire the virtual bookkeeping services to take total control of your accounting functions. By doing so you save a lot of time that you would otherwise spend on supervising your accountants. You also do not have to invest in setting up accounting systems. These savings can otherwise be channelized into more productive business purposes.

Your obvious choice, therefore, should be the second alternative. But before signing on the dotted line and hiring virtual bookkeepers for your business you should have a clear idea about the benefits you stand to reap in this case.

Here are few of the main advantages businesses are getting by hiring virtual bookkeeping services:

Latest updated reports – As a business owner, key decision makers in the spheres of additional investments for expansion or acquisition rests largely, in fact solely on the state of your financials. Hence it is necessary that you have data related to key accounting parameters at your fingertips at all times. This is possible when you have virtual accountants working for you. You will get updated financial reports with the fields of your choice almost on a real-time basis. Since the best of software is used by these agencies, you can be sure about the accuracy of the statements.

Processed data at set time periods – Those times when financial statements and balance sheets were generated annually are long gone. Now you can fix receipt of detailed accounts information at such short periods as weekly or monthly. This will help you stay on top of the financial position of your business and will help you make course corrections should you find that you have deviated from your set goals and financial targets.

Direct access to accounting data – Outsourcing accounting functions to virtual bookkeeping firms ensure that you have direct access to all your accounting data from your laptop. This is possible since the accounting software you use will be matched by the service provider and processed data will be uploaded to your system which you can view at all times round the clock. Thus you are in total control of your finances round the clock.

Delegating access to others – Most virtual bookkeepers use accounting software that will enable you to delegate access authority to other employees of your choice. QuickBooks is one such software that has this property. In such cases, you can ask for processed data from another employee if you are not in a position to access the system at that time for any reason. You can also rest assured that even after you accord permission, your data will be fully protected and safe and no tampering by a second party is possible.

Server setup – Virtual accounting firms offer you the convenience of server setup and other additional benefits. This facility will allow you to have all accounting information about your company on your device any time that you want to. This is especially useful when you have to take crucial decisions from another time zone and access to your own systems is not possible at that hour.

All these points to one fact only – that in today’s modern business environment it is always advisable to opt for virtual accounting and reap the many benefits associated with it.

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