Small business owners usually put up their business to go after their passion, whether such passion has to do with programming, writing, art, Web design, audio & video, etc. Your business makes headway via word-of-mouth, and you will soon be hiring employees or freelance contractors to delegate part of the responsibilities you have and not do everything yourself.
Somewhere along the way, you find the business growing large enough to take on a bookkeeper. You did all your books yourself before now using a certain bookkeeping software or even some system you have designed yourself. But because you have only gotten very big, you cannot work with this system anymore.
You engage a bookkeeper who is well-knowledgeable about software on financial accounting and can handle your books full-time or part-time. The person can be hired as one of your in-house staff or possibly a freelancer. Or you can be a smart business owner who outsources a bookkeeper that works virtually and then reports to you through phone as well as email.
Things proceed smoothly, however now that you are no longer doing the books yourself, you feel that the expansive financial picture of your company has somewhat become inaccessible. Your bookkeeper will be able to deliver the reports along with the spreadsheets to you, but it does not make sense all the time. You need somebody who will interpret all those data for you. Most significantly, you have grown sufficiently large that you require a reliable financial advisor who knows how to help you come up with excellent decisions for the fast growing business that you have.
In case financial controllership makes sense to you, you would think that financial controllers who work full-time come with a 6-figure pay. You might actually be right. The company does not have enough budget, and it is not really necessary to hire one anyone.
You simply need a person on a part-time schedule that will review your company’s books with you on a monthly basis, provide oversight for the in-house or else outsourced bookkeeper that you have, as well as be of assistance to you as regards financial planning in addition to budgeting either on a quarterly or monthly basis.
If you believe that financial controllers come with a high salary, think again. There are outsourced controller services which are less costly that you probably think and it can save money for your business in the long-run through improved financial planning.
You are probably concerned that engaging some outsourced controller would mean giving up your control over the company. While the controller delivers all the information that you require to formulated the right decisions for the business, but all decisions continue to be yours.