Many business owners consider their bookkeeping and tax preparation to be separate issues that require separate professionals to complete. While it’s true that there are financial professional who specialize in each of these areas individually, it’s often better to work with a CPA, who is qualified to provide both services for your company. What are the benefits of using a CPA for both your bookkeeping and tax preparation needs? Keep reading to find out.
Reduced Sharing of Sensitive Financial Information
Both your bookkeeper and your tax preparer will need access to sensitive financial information for your business. The more often this data is put in transit—either via emails, faxes, standard mail, or even a secure client portal—the more chances there are of that data being intercepted by hackers or corrupted during transmission. When you work with only one financial professional for both your bookkeeping and tax preparation needs, you cut the amount of file sharing you have to do in half, significantly reducing your chances of becoming a victim of cybercrime.
Less Time and Effort for Your Company
As a business owner, you know that duplicate work kills productivity and wastes and time and money. When you have multiple financial professionals requesting financial information or otherwise requiring your time and attention, you’ll likely find yourself performing the same tasks again and again—granting permissions, sending financial records, and overall, wasting precious company time. By hiring separate accountants for bookkeeping and tax preparation, you’re creating unnecessary duplicate work for your employees and yourself.
Your tax preparer will need access to your books to file your tax return. Your bookkeeper will need to verify that your taxes match your books. You’ll have frequent déjà vu as you have very similar conversations with each of these professionals, and may even end up playing the middleman between your two accountants as you pass updated information between them. Working with a CPA that can handle both the bookkeeping and the tax filing for you means you can step out of that middleman role, cut out the duplicate work, and focus on make your company more productive.
Greater Consistency and Accuracy
As we mentioned above, you will likely have to pass financial information back and forth between a tax preparer and a bookkeeper. This is because numbers in your books may be updated while your tax preparer is working on your return, and your bookkeeper will need to update your tax accountant to ensure that the correct financials are used. If that information isn’t passed along, your tax return will not match your books, and you could find yourself with a rather large mess on your hands if you’re audited by the IRS.
For example, let’s say you provide your tax preparer with a copy of your business books at the beginning of the year so they can start working on your taxes as soon as possible. A couple of weeks later, your bookkeeper spots some expenses that hadn’t been input for the end of the previous year. They update this in your books, but the information is not passed along to your tax preparer. So, your tax preparer continues to prepare your return using outdated information.
A few weeks later, you get your tax return for review before it’s submitted to the IRS. In the best-case scenario, you spot the discrepancy, and you have to pay your tax preparer for additional time spent correcting the return. The other option is that you don’t spot the issue; you’d then miss out on deductions, and even risk audit complications if the discrepancy is noted by the IRS.
When you have a single CPA working on your tax return and your bookkeeping, you don’t need to worry about these communication obstacles. If your books need to be updated, your tax preparer will automatically have access to that updated information when preparing your return. There will be fewer mistakes, and an overall greater level of accuracy and consistency across all of your financials.
Get Professional Bookkeeping and Tax Preparation for Your Business
At Peter Witts CPA, we specialize in working with business owners like you to simplify the complications that are often involved in business accounting. Contact us today to schedule a consultation with one of our experienced and qualified CPAs to learn how we can help with your accounting needs.