When should I hire a book keeper?

When do I need to hire someone to help with my books?

Who do I hire?

Do I need a book keeper, a controller, both?

You’re not alone in the questions you are asking yourself - This is one of the most common questions I get asked when we host our BOOST events. We want to ensure we are always giving you the best information, so we reached out to a friend who specializes in finance, Nathan (@southbrookconsulting), and he gave us a tonne of incredible information to share with you.

First up is hiring a bookkeeper, or as Nathan recommends calling them, an Accounting Associate. Traditionally this is someone who takes care of AR/ AP, invoicing, payroll, wsib, quickbooks, creating cheques and recording everything that comes in. Most are not accountants, will also do administration and are the 1st touch point for anything to related to finances in the company. 

Cost for hiring is around $18/30 per hour or $40-45,000 as salary and is for sure necessary around $1 million in sales. Nathan recommends advertising the position as an Accounting Assistant because you will get a different type of applicant. One of the challenges a lot of owners can get into is that because most Landscape business owners got into business because they are good landscapers, they don’t really know what they are looking for and they often hire the wrong person. Because of this, outsourcing can be a great option.

A controller does anything to do with finance. The controller is in charge of setting up/ changing chart of accounts, cash flow, monthly financials and reporting on it. They will see the numbers and can explain why things are up/ down, journal entry. A bookkeeper inputs numbers but a controller also evaluates, creates budgets and cash flow projections. 

By 2.5 million you need to be looking into hiring a controller at $60 - 90,000 annually depending on the size of your company and the person's experience. This person is not hired to replace the bookkeeper but rather in addition to because they have very different roles. Having someone in these roles is crucial but can also be very expensive. Outsourcing these roles really starts to make sense at this point. 

CFO’s are responsible for managing a finance team, bank negotiations, insurance, purchasing part of things, working with it more than the owner in a lot of cases, signing authority and credit forms. The CFO protects the owner from the financials, completes cost analysis and projections going out 5/10 years. They ask and answer questions like where are we headed, do we need to get extra funds (secure extra funds from somewhere.) By $10 - 20 Million in sales you will want to have all three positions filled within your company.

A lot of companies are now outsourcing these positions because it’s such a specialty thing. Here are some of the benefits of outsourcing:

• Allows you to retain your technical and entrepreneurial spirit where you can focus your energy in creating and sustaining beautiful landscapes and not worry about the bookkeeping and accounting services. 
• The year end accounting firm will need to spend less time as we send them a working file with supporting files for all balance sheet accounts, accruals, etc. This saves on the year end accounting fee, as an accounting firm will usually charge around $120-200/hr for technician hours. 
• Rather than get a set of accurate financials only once a year, you get the same quality financials every month within 15 days.

If you have any follow up questions, please ask. You can connect with us via email [email protected] or by scheduling a call HERE.