Pharmacies are busy places. Your patients rely on you to dispense their medications and provide guidance on the drugs used. You spend your days contacting doctors, checking prescriptions, and counseling patients, leaving little time left over for administrative tasks like bookkeeping.
Luckily, you can save yourself a lot of time, money, and hassle by outsourcing your bookkeeping to an experienced bookkeeping firm. If you consider outsourcing, here are some of the top reasons outsourcing is the perfect choice for your pharmacy.
1. Time efficiency and cost-effectiveness
Bookkeeping is a time-consuming activity. It can take up a lot of your time if you don’t have the right resources to work on it efficiently. When you decide to outsource your bookkeeping, it will guarantee that you have more time on your hands to focus on your pharmacy and make better decisions for your business.
On top of saving a significant amount of time, you will also benefit by saving your business a lot of money. You won't have to pay the costs of hiring full-time, in-house employees and won't incur the charges of paying for training, vacation time, and other benefits.
2. Technology efficiency
Outsourced bookkeepers tend to utilize accounting software and other tools to streamline the bookkeeping process. When you work with an outsourced bookkeeper, they can help your pharmacy pick a suitable cloud-based accounting software like QuickBooks Online and Xero, and set up your chart of accounts for proper tracking.
Your bookkeeper can recommend ways to integrate your dispensary with your front-of-shop systems and show you how to sync these with your accounting software. Not only will this streamline your billing process, but it can help minimize errors.
Your outsourced team will also have the proper knowledge to help you set up an expense management tool like Dext. This will allow you and your team to easily share your invoices and receipts with your bookkeeper while you're on the go.
3. Keeps your books up to date throughout the year
You didn't start your pharmacy business to become a bookkeeper, and for many pharmacists, bookkeeping may not be your area of expertise. Because of this, bookkeeping may get neglected until tax season arrives, meaning that your books are always out of date, and you never have complete access to the financial information that you need to proactively identify issues before they arise.
When you outsource your bookkeeping, your outsourced bookkeeping team will keep your books up to date throughout the year in an effective and accurate manner. They will ensure that a professional and experienced bookkeeper with knowledge of the pharmacy industry will be available to help you with your books and all of your business finances.
They can help your pharmacy manage your day-to-day bookkeeping tasks such as bank and credit card reconciliations, recording of transactions, and sales tax management. At month-end, they can provide you with accurate monthly financial statements like income statements, balance sheets, and cash flow statements to help you understand your profitability and overall cash position.
They can take care of revenue recognition and make sure it is recorded properly. They are also able to help you with inventory management to help keep your business lean and efficient by monitoring inventory turnover and gross margins. Plus, when tax season comes, your books will be up to date, meaning your accountant will be better able to quickly identify tax deductions for your pharmacy.
4. Provides support with additional accounting tasks
An in-house or part-time bookkeeper may not have the ability to support your pharmacy with other tasks like payroll or billing.
On the other hand, outsourced bookkeeping firms tend to have more capacity to assist with other accounting tasks apart from bookkeeping. They can help you keep track of insurance billing, keep your AR up to date, so you always know how much is owed by insurance companies, and help generate AR aging reports that are important for increasing cash flow.
They can also support you with your payroll needs. Outsourced bookkeeping firms like Enkel have Payroll Compliance Practitioners on staff. They can help you process payroll for your employees and remit your payroll deductions to the CRA, making sure that your pharmacy stays compliant with all payroll regulations.
5. Cash flow visibility
Cash flow is essential for your pharmacy because you need sufficient in-flow of money to pay your suppliers for inventory while also ensuring you are receiving payments promptly from insurance providers.
When you choose to outsource your bookkeeping, you can rest assured that your books are up to date and you always have good cash flow visibility. Your outsourced bookkeeper can generate cash flow statements to help you understand how much money you have in the bank and your upcoming expenses. This ensures that your pharmacy always has sufficient working capital to meet its obligations.
6. Scalability
When you are selecting an outsourced bookkeeping firm to work with, it is important to choose a team capable of growing alongside your business. In-house and part-time bookkeepers usually have a limited capacity to how far they can grow and how much additional work they can take on, which means you will need to hire additional employees to keep up with this growth.
Outsourced bookkeeping teams have more staff on hand to scale alongside your business. If you are opening more locations or have more transactions to process, they will be better able to provide you with more support. They can even help with tracking the performance of individual pharmacies.
Pharmacies are busy places that should remain focused on patient care. Bookkeeping can take away from this focus and add even more work to an already hectic environment. By choosing to outsource this task, you can ensure that your vital financial data is in the hands of a professional and can reduce your workload to better take care of your patient's health.
If you would like more information about outsourced bookkeeping or would like to find out how Enkel can help your pharmacy, contact us today.
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.
