Running an interior design business is complicated no matter how you slice it.
You’re juggling subcontractors, clients, your own creative vision, and sourcing supplies. And that doesn’t include the laundry list of other necessary tasks that crop up when you own a business!
While you’re focused on being an expert in your field, financial planning can fall by the wayside. But the truth is, bookkeeping and accounting will always be a huge component of your business – it can either operate out of a well-organized system that provides clarity about your finances, or it can be managed chaotically, and become a constant burden and source of anxiety.
That’s why hiring a bookkeeper or accountant can be a great choice for the life of your company.
So what exactly are bookkeeping and accounting, and how do they relate to each other?
Bookkeeping functions as the building block for financial stability and success in long-term money management. This is where all of the financial minutiae occurs; managing payroll, tracking purchases and payments, and handling other daily financial tasks.
In contrast, accounting is a more specialized role that has a wider focus in the areas of taxes and financial strategy. To learn more, this blog post expounds on what accounting and bookkeeping are and what they aren’t.
Today we want to point out that while bookkeeping and accounting are distinct, they need each other in order to thrive!
Great bookkeeping is the essential foundation for great accounting – imagine if you hired an accountant before having your books in order. That accountant wouldn’t be set up to do their job well, because they need to know what your businesses’ financial situation is before they can make judgements on next steps.
But it can take immense time and energy to retroactively gather up information from past financial transactions that weren’t documented correctly to begin with.
If the building blocks of your bookkeeping aren’t established well, then your accounting will become wobbly quickly, and your company’s financial foundation can be in jeopardy.
So rather than viewing these as separate, we hope a comprehensive viewpoint of both will pave the way for greater financial management in the future.
Outsourcing is your friend
The good news is that you can have great financial management without having to be the one responsible for all of it!
You can hire a professional bookkeeper and/or accountant, and that’s a great start. Even better than that, you can hire an accountant for your interior design business who’s a Certified Profit First Professional.
These bookkeepers and accountants are equipped to:
- Use working knowledge of how bookkeeping and accounting work to benefit one another
- Provide comprehensive services so that your finances are never left in the dust again
Partnering with AccountSolve means that…
- You can spend more time creating beautiful spaces
- You can feel confident that your business is running smoothly
- You’ll have the information you need to make wise business decisions
- You’ll have time and energy to express the creativity needed to do what you love.
Conclusion
If you’re still feeling unsure of where to start, here are some steps you can take to evaluate your accounting needs:
- List the financial activities that you do each week and estimate how much time you’re spending on those tasks.
- Then ask yourself: What is my time worth? And what things can I delegate on this list?
- Another question: Do I need help with the big picture (accounting) or the day-to-day manual functions (bookkeeping)?
If you think that it might be time to get some help in these areas, we invite you to schedule a call. Our team of Profit First bookkeepers and accountants can’t wait to help take some of these burdens off your plate.