An electrical contracting business is a busy business to run. You probably find yourself out on the road most days, spending your time traveling from job to job and working on quotes and estimates. Your clients demand your full attention, which means that you probably don't have a lot of time left over at the end of the day for the tedious task of bookkeeping.
Hiring a bookkeeper for your electrical contracting business is an excellent way to ensure your financial data is always kept up to date. It gives you access to a professional that can help keep your books in order and frees up your time so you can focus on your client’s needs.
When hiring a bookkeeper, keep these three primary considerations in mind:
1. Experience and knowledge in your industry
It is crucial to hire a bookkeeper that understands how the bookkeeping process works for your electrical contracting business.
They need to handle all of the typical bookkeeping tasks you require, like bank and credit card reconciliations, sales tax filings, coding of transactions, and preparing financial reports. They should also be capable of helping you set up your chart of accounts to allow you to organize your finances in a meaningful way. You want to have additional accounts set up for job materials purchased and equipment rentals for electrical contractors.
Electricians rely on job costing to understand their profitability for each job fully. You need to find a bookkeeper who can handle this task and can track the revenue and expenses assigned to each project. The bookkeeper you select should ensure that your staff costs are allocated to the direct cost of goods sold instead of the indirect management and office costs.
Doing so will give you a better understanding of how the business is doing from a gross margin perspective.
2. Payroll expertise
Payroll goes far beyond the simple calculation of salary. There are deductions, vacation pay, worker's compensation, and more. You need to fully understand how all of these deductions are calculated and need to adhere to strict legislation to stay compliant. Not every bookkeeper is trained to handle payroll. In order to be fully qualified to deal in these matters, they should have a payroll compliance certification.
If payroll isn't done correctly, it can be a significant point of contention between employees and employers. To avoid this, it is essential to have a payroll process in place where vacation is tracked correctly, benefits are appropriately reelected on employee pay stubs, and remittances are calculated and remitted accurately and on time. For these reasons, it is excellent to hire a knowledgeable and fully certified bookkeeper to assist you with your payroll requirements.
3. Tech-driven
There are so many new advancements in accounting technology. They all significantly reduce the need for manual data entry and physical document storage.
You want to hire a bookkeeper who works efficiently and can understand how to use these tools and create an efficient bookkeeping process for your business. They should be fully certified and able to use a cloud-based accounting software platform.
There are also other tools that they should be well versed in, such as Dext Prepare, which can assist with expense management, and Plooto, which can simplify your vendor payment process. You want to ensure that your chosen bookkeeper can provide you and your team with full training on how to use this technology for a smooth and seamless transition.
Hiring a bookkeeper is an excellent way to ensure you always have access to the financial data that you require to make sound business decisions. It also frees up your time and ensures that your primary focus is always on providing the best possible service to your customers.
If you are looking to outsource your bookkeeping process, Enkel can help. We are made up of a team of trained professionals that can assist you with all of your electrical contracting business's bookkeeping needs. Contact us now for more details on how we can help you streamline your bookkeeping process.
How We Select and Evaluate Our Recommended Software
We thoroughly research and test the apps we include in our regular workflow for Client bookkeeping services. After deciding on criteria for evaluating the software and then researching the app itself, we tested the app, noting its strengths and weaknesses. We then work with the app for at least a few weeks before deciding whether to recommend it to our readers. We use the software as it was designed for its intended tasks. For a detailed walk-through of how we select and evaluate software, please see the details of our process.
