If you have finally decided to take the step and hire a bookkeeper for your engineering firm, you have taken a step in the right direction.
As an engineer, it's imperative that you spend your time focused on providing high-level consultancy to your clients. They rely on your analytical, problem solving, and planning skills to provide them with the highest level of service and the best possible outcome to their project. With all this on your plate, you don't have time to worry about the tedious task of bookkeeping.
A professional bookkeeper can help keep all of your finances in order, provide you with accurate and up-to-date reports, and give you clear visibility on your company's financial health to make sound business decisions. Here's what you should look out for when hiring a bookkeeper for your engineering firm.
1. Experience
One of the most important characteristics to look for in a bookkeeper is deep knowledge and extensive experience in your specific industry. A bookkeeper with other engineering firms as clients of a similar size to yours will be much more capable of managing your finances as well. They will have a deeper understanding of your unique bookkeeping requirements, such as the project-based accounting that your firm will need.
Your bookkeeper must be capable of helping you set up your chart of accounts to enable proper tracking and customization to produce reports like project budget to actuals and profitability by project.
2. Responsiveness
Accounting for an engineering firm can be an extremely complicated process. There are many different moving parts as projects start, are in progress, and come to completion. Due to this fact, you need a bookkeeper that can keep track of the status of your projects and communicate with your project teams regularly.
Many engineering firms choose to outsource their bookkeeping to save costs, so good communication and a quick response time are essential since these bookkeepers will be working from a remote location. You need to ensure that you can get in touch with them quickly and easily if you need access to crucial financial data.
3. Tech Savvy-ness
Over the past few years, there have been many significant advancements in accounting technology that have changed the way bookkeeping is handled and altered the bookkeeper's role.
In the past, many companies would use Excel to track their finances and store the hard copies of their receipts in filing folders. With the rise of cloud-based accounting software and applications with extensive functionality, your company can save significant time, money, and hassle by using these efficient tools.
Your bookkeeper should have a solid, working knowledge of the latest trends in bookkeeping, especially as they relate to the engineering field, and should be able to keep up in the future as things continue to advance.
4. Scope of Work Provided
The right bookkeeper should be able to provide you with all of the services that your engineering firm requires. They should be able to handle all of your daily financial needs, such as recording purchases, expenses, sales revenue, invoices, and payments.
Some bookkeepers, however, provide a much broader scope of services. Some can provide payroll assistance, handle account payable and receivables, budgeting, and reporting.
You should also consider whether the bookkeeper you select can scale alongside your company's growth. An in-house or part-time bookkeeping contractor usually has limited capacity and may not be able to handle the influx of duties as your firm grows. To prevent this from happening, consider outsourcing your bookkeeping needs to a professional bookkeeping firm instead. These companies usually have the capacity to scale alongside your business for a much more extended period of time.
If you are looking to find the right bookkeeper, look no further. At Enkel, we have a team of professional and experienced bookkeepers that can help you with the project-based style of accounting that your engineering firm needs.
For more information on the extensive list of services that we can provide or to find out more on how we can help with all of your firm’s bookkeeping needs, contact us now.
