The day-to-day accounting work adds up fast. Between categorizing receipts, reconciling accounts, doing payroll, and making sure you file sales tax on time, it can take hours from your workday or weekends. And while it’s easy to push aside until you find the time, that everyday work is the foundation of your accounting. When it falls behind, everything that depends on it falls behind too.
Outsourced bookkeeping hands that work to someone else. At Dillon Business Advisors (DBA), an outsourced accounting and advisory firm for small businesses, every client gets a Team of 3: three specialists who each own a different part of your accounting. One keeps your day-to-day books and payroll current, one handles your taxes and compliance, and one helps you plan for cash flow and growth. Together, they cost, on average, 70% less than hiring a full-time employee.
The person who handles the day-to-day work is your Client Service Manager. This post explains what that role is and what outsourced bookkeeping includes.
What Is a Client Service Manager?
A Client Service Manager is your day-to-day point of contact who keeps your books and payroll current and answers questions as they come up, like how to add a new employee to payroll or how to track expenses across several company cards.
Your Client Service Manager works alongside the other two members of your Team of 3: your Client Controller and your Client CFO. Both of them work from the books your Client Service Manager keeps, so every tax return and planning conversation starts here.
What Does Outsourced Bookkeeping Include?
Here’s what your Client Service Manager handles at DBA. Some tasks happen every pay period, and others close out each month.
- Payroll every pay period. Wages, direct deposit, pay stubs, and tax withholding are handled for you, so your team gets paid correctly and on time. For payroll clients, quarterly payroll tax reports and year-end W-2s and 1099s are covered too.
- Bookkeeping in QuickBooks Online. Income and expenses are categorized as they come in, and receipts are captured along the way, so your books stay current instead of a quarter behind.
- Reconciliations. Every transaction is matched to your bank and credit card statements, so small discrepancies get caught while they’re still easy to fix.
- Monthly financial statements. Each month, you see how money moved through your business and what’s left at the end of it, along with a video walkthrough that explains what the numbers mean.
- Sales tax. If you collect sales tax, it’s filed on whatever schedule your state requires.
Why One Point of Contact Makes a Difference
Say you’ve just hired someone and you’re not sure how to get them set up on payroll before their first paycheck. It’s a quick question, but if the person who handles your books is also buried in tax deadlines, it can sit in their inbox for days. By the time you hear back, payday is around the corner, and a simple setup question has turned into a scramble.
A Client Service Manager gives everyday questions like that a clear home. And because they know your accounts and payroll setup, you don’t have to explain your business from scratch each time you reach out. DBA’s team responds to requests and questions within 24 hours, and you never have to save things up for a scheduled meeting.
Your Client Service Manager doesn’t work alone, either. Assistants help with routine weekly tasks, and each Client Service Manager learns from a group of peers doing the same job for other clients. When one of them finds a faster way to handle something in QuickBooks, the others pick it up, and that improvement reaches your account.
Next Steps: How to Tell If Your Books Are Keeping Up
You don’t have to hand off your books tomorrow to see whether your current setup is working. Start with these:
- Check how current your books are today. Ask for last month’s financial statements. If they aren’t ready, or nobody has walked you through them, your books may be falling behind.
- Look at where your time goes. If you’re spending evenings or the first week of each month on bookkeeping, that’s time you could put back into your business.
- Ask how often your accounts are reconciled. Monthly reconciliation keeps small errors from turning into large ones, so it’s a fair question for any provider.
- Notice how long your questions wait. If simple payroll or QuickBooks questions take days to answer, a dedicated point of contact would help.
Get Help Keeping Your Books and Payroll Current
DBA’s first step is a free business analysis. The team walks through your finances with you and shows what your Team of 3 would tackle first. Get your free business analysis to see what handing off your books could look like.
