How to Switch to Bookkeeping Services Without Disrupting Your Business

Introduction

If you’ve landed here, you probably don’t want to handle your own bookkeeping anymore. It could be because your business has grown (way to go!) and maintaining books has become more complex. Maybe you want more time to explore other expansion opportunities and keep your weekends free for things that matter in life.

Despite all such very practical reasons, switching to bookkeeping services can feel daunting, confusing, and even outright scary. Rest assured, you're right to feel that way because it is a big step for your business.

But trust us getting accurate books without bending your back over excel sheets will be worthwhile. The good news is that you just need the right approach to switch to bookkeeping services smoothly and seamlessly.

In this guide, we are going to take you through every step to transition to a bookkeeping service effortlessly. Let’s get started.

Why Businesses Switch to Bookkeeping Services

It’s easy to manage your own books (recommended even) when your business is in the pilot stages. For example, if you are only dealing with 10-20 accounts, DIY bookkeeping is highly manageable. However, as the business starts gaining momentum, bookkeeping often feels like another big thing to handle.

Currently, about 64% of small businesses are using bookkeeping software. You might want to jump on the bandwagon as well.

Top reasons why small businesses eventually shift to bookkeeping services:

1. Insufficient time: Founders and business owners have all their fingers and toes dipped in multiple areas of their business. In addition to product development, you might also be handling the GTM function. As a result, bookkeeping takes a backseat. Hiring a bookkeeping service frees up your time and allows you to focus better on running your business.
2. Messy, inaccurate or late books: Building on the previous point, when you can’t give bookkeeping the time it deserves, your books can quickly become a mess. It’s easy to miss recording a transaction, enter a wrong value, or record duplicate transactions. And before you know, monthly bookkeeping is taking longer than it should. Outsourcing bookkeeping though ensures the accuracy of your books. Bookkeeping services further make sure that books are updated on time.
3. Tax season preparation: One of the most common and important reasons for business owners to outsource bookkeeping is the approaching tax season. Chaotic DIY bookkeeping can easily land you in a lurch and leave you unprepared for tax season. Bookkeeping services can clean up your books and ensure smooth tax filing.
4. Increasing business complexity: Rapidly scaling business, while a great sign of success, involves more vendors, more employees, more transactions, and several other accounting factors. Soon managing books in-house becomes complicated and unscalable. This is why founders and business owners like yourself onboard bookkeeping solutions to help them keep track of every financial activity.
5. Need for financial visibility, compliance & audit-readiness: Growing a business effectively requires enhanced visibility in finances. How else can you see where your money is going and how it's coming in, right? This information is critical for identifying better growth opportunities. Moreover, as a business scales their compliance requirements also increase. A bookkeeping service, in such cases, gives you real-time financial information to make better strategic decisions. It also ensures that your business is always up to date with regulatory compliance and audit ready.

In essence, onboarding a bookkeeping service at the right time will give you the peace of mind you need and will be cost-effective in the long run.

Also read: Advanced Bookkeeping Services for Small Businesses: Streamline, Save, and Succeed

Before we move on to the actual process of hiring a bookkeeping service, let’s address some of the major fears that business owners have about taking the leap.

Fears and Frustrations About Bookkeeping Services that Need a Cure

If you’re still unclear about making the switch to a bookkeeping solution, you’re not alone. Most founders and business owners have the following concerns about considering a bookkeeping service:

1. Lack of control over finances: Business owners often worry that they won’t be as hands on with their finances as they need to be with a bookkeeping service. They fear that they won’t know what’s going on with their books.
2. Security and privacy concerns: Handing over your financial information to a vendor can always seem like a risky business. Founders usually have concerns about sharing sensitive data with a third party, especially where cloud accounting or online bookkeeping services are concerned.
3. Cost-related anxieties: It may feel like transitioning to a bookkeeping service will cost you more than it’s worth. For small businesses and startups especially, a bookkeeping vendor can feel like an unnecessary luxury.
4. Tricky transition process: A lot of business owners in your position assume that migrating to bookkeeping services will be complicated and disrupting.
5. Unclear pricing: Owners fear that a lack of transparency when it comes to pricing and deliverables can lead to them losing money instead of getting better grasp over their finances.
6. Too many providers: Making the final decision is deterred by an overcrowded marketplace for founders. They find it difficult to evaluate too many options and make the right choice.
7. Learning new tools and processes: Business owners already have so much on their hands that they fear onboarding a new platform for bookkeeping will require a learning curve that they can’t commit to.

Honestly, we get it. We hear it from our prospects and customers everyday about their anxieties regarding the entire process.

That being said, all you need is that one good vendor and your bookkeeping will be sorted. And we’re here to help you figure out how to make the transition as painless as it can be.

Step-by-Step Guide: How to Switch to a Bookkeeping Service Without Disruption

Now we get to the main agenda of talking about how you can switch to bookkeeping in a smooth, seamless, and friction-free manner.

Step 1: Evaluate your current bookkeeping setup and clarify your goals

First and foremost, you need to have a clear idea of why you want to switch to bookkeeping services. Thoroughly evaluate your current bookkeeping setup to understand what’s been working, where you need help, and how you move forward with not just bookkeeping but also your business goals.

Ask yourself the following questions:

• Do I need someone to take bookkeeping off my hands?
• Are my books getting delayed and chaotic because of DIY bookkeeping?
• Do I need specific industry information to manage finances and drive growth accordingly?
• Do I need automation and real time insights for better decision making?

Once you determine the key reasons for transitioning to a bookkeeping service, you can choose a platform that suits your needs. At the end of the day, you need a provider that addresses your pain points.

Step 2: Choose the right bookkeeping partner

After understanding your bookkeeping needs, you will start evaluating vendors in the market. Now comes the most important step of choosing the best possible option for your business.

Your bookkeeping partner will have a huge impact on how you run your business and the direction it takes. They will influence your financial health and whether you can handover a crucial aspect of your business with a sense of ease.

Therefore, you need to research bookkeeping service providers properly before you make the final decision.

Checkout our bookkeeping services evaluation checklist to find the right vendor.

Step 3: Pick the right time to switch

At this point, you’ve found a vendor that takes care of your specific bookkeeping needs. The next step is to decide when exactly you should switch to a bookkeeping service.

Even though you can onboard a bookkeeping service at any time, you can make the process more efficient by picking the right time. Most importantly, you don’t want this development to disrupt your business operations. Therefore, you need to consider the following to minimize complications:

• It’s better to switch at the beginning of the financial year to make things easier.
• If possible, transitioning to a bookkeeping service after closing books for the last financial year will be ideal. However, if you can’t do that there are bookkeeping platforms that offer catchup bookkeeping services (like Fincent).
• If tax preparation was your biggest pain point, then you can ideally switch before you start planning for the tax season. But make sure you’re not transitioning too close to the deadlines.

Step 4: Gather all the financial data

The next step after choosing the vendor and deciding when to onboard them is to ensure all your financial data is available in a single place. If you haven’t checked your financials in a while, it would be a good idea to ensure you still have access to your previous financial records. This will make it easy for you to share all the needed documents and information with the vendor during onboarding.

While this may not seem like a priority, but collecting all your business financial information beforehand will help in making the switch as manageable as possible. Remember, the goal is to onboard a bookkeeping service in the least disruptive way.

Step 5: Onboard the vendor and plan the transition timeline

Now that you have finally onboarded a bookkeeping platform, you should have a timeline in place to ensure the transition happens smoothly. This step should happen in tandem with the vendor you have onboarded.

A good onboarding process should ensure there’s sufficient communication between you and your vendor. Just like you will tell them about your specific bookkeeping needs, they need to keep you informed about the entire onboarding process and how they will ensure the clean-up and accuracy of your books.

Here’s a list of things to discuss and set up a timeline for with your bookkeeping service provider:

• Timeline for migration: Confirm the timeline of migration with your service provider. Ask for specific dates when tasks will be completed.
• Data import and clean-up: Discuss how and when the data import and clean-up for past books will happen. Let them know your requirements and ask to be updated on developments.
• Tools setup and integrations: Inform your bookkeeping vendor about your finance tech stack and ensure that they provide seamless integrations with the same. You would also need to stay on top of the bookkeeping platform setup and understand how everything works.
• Communication checkpoints: Setup regular cadences with your provider to ensure the migration happens without any hiccups.

Step 6: Testing and validation

A best practice after the onboarding is to keep a close eye on how things are progressing with your bookkeeping service for the first month. Ensure whether the service provider is mapping things like accounts, categories, vendors, and reports correctly.

Basically, you can use this time to understand how the service works, handles bookkeeping, and handles feedback.

After a month or a certain time, a review call with your vendor is highly recommended. You can let them know if you want certain tasks to be done differently, or if you’re satisfied with their service.

Step 7: Keep monitoring things (but more importantly, relax)

If everything keeps going well and up to your standards, this means you’ve done your job well and hired an expert bookkeeping service.

All you need to do now is have regular calls with your vendor (they can be weekly or monthly) to get better insights from your financials.

And there you have it, the entire process for switching to a bookkeeping system.

Download our bookkeeping migration checklist for smooth transition to bookkeeping services

Mistakes to Avoid while Transitioning to a Bookkeeping Service

You have a solid plan now to transition to a bookkeeping provider without disrupting your business. Let’s take a quick look at some of the common mistakes you can avoid during this process:

1. Waiting until the last minute: As we have already discussed, don’t wait until the last minute to hire a bookkeeping service as it can create unnecessary complexity.
2. Not reviewing contracts with current providers: In case you had a bookkeeper or a different bookkeeping service provider, you need to review the contracts before you partner with a different provider.
3. Failing to clarify expectations with your new provider: Proper and effective communication can’t be stressed enough. If you don’t clarify your needs to your service provider, you won't be able to get the full value out of the partnership.
4. Ignoring software compatibility: It is highly important to see if the bookkeeping platform you want to onboard is compatible with your existing tech stack. They should provide all the necessary integrations for a seamless experience.
5. Not involving key stakeholders in the switch: A recommended best practice is to keep all the key stakeholders informed about every crucial development during the transition process. This will help everyone stay aligned and allow for a frictionless switch to a bookkeeping platform.

How Fincent Makes the Switch Seamless

Fincent has helped hundreds of SMBs and startups switch to our bookkeeping platform effortlessly. Our platform and experience are particularly curated for founders and business owners, so they get the best possible bookkeeping service. Moreover, our special blend of AI and human expertise ensure that our customers’ books stay up to date and provide them with actionable financial insights.

Here’s why customers love working with Fincent:

1. White-glove onboarding: We take care of everything for you – from financial data review and clean-up to syncing your accounts with our platform. Your books go live in 2–4 weeks, not 2–4 months.
2. Dedicated customer success manager and bookkeeper: Fincent provides you with your own customer success POC to hold your hand throughout the transition process. Once the switch is completed, you get a dedicated bookkeeper who stays on top of your bookkeeping, always.
3. Simple integrations with your tools: Our platform integrates seamlessly with all your favourite tools so there’s never a broken link that disrupts the flow of financial information processing.
4. Real-time collaboration and visibility: With a dedicated bookkeeper, our customers always have the option of getting on a quick call and getting visibility into their financials.
5. No disruption to cash flow or payroll: Fincent’s team is adept at ensuring that transition to our bookkeeping platform doesn’t affect your cash flow or payroll in any way.