Posted by Cory List on 22nd Apr 2014

​Level of Accounting Knowledge for Startups

Level of Accounting Knowledge for Startups

Accounting is definitely a big part of business. To track your progress and failure, you need to be looking into your cashflow. You need to record your income, debts and expenses, so that you can control everything and make proper adjustments if necessary. More so, for tax purposes, you will need to get things organized so that you do no incur a fine.

Most people hire an accountant to run these functions for them. It keeps things organized and saves you a lot of time and effort, but you can always choose to do things on your own for the following benefits:

1.It is cheaper. Instead of hiring an accountant either to be on your payroll or as an outsourced service, you can do the accounting on your own. It is a plus, if you have basic accounting knowledge, but there are short courses and seminars that you can attend for this. Some people do their own accounting and hire an accounting to do the end-of-year procedures as they are more complicated. This is still cheaper compared to hiring an accountant to work for you all year, but the overall cost is still low.

2.You will be more hands-on. If you want to keep an eye on your own progress and growth, it is much better that you are hands-on with your finances. A lot of companies face financial problems because owners entrust their books to other people. They do not know they are losing money because they are not looking after their own books, and find out in the end that they have lost so much.

Small business accounting is not so complicated. It is more or less repetitive and although things could be quite overwhelming in the beginning, you can easily get a acquainted to things. As already mentioned, you can attend seminars and short courses. You can start by working with someone, so that you can learn the ropes, and take over from there.