Your Eye Clinic Deserves the Best Bookkeeper

Why delegate bookkeeping for your eye clinic?

As an eye clinic grows, the owner will come across a variety of issues. The increased influx of customers comes with the need for a more refined custom management system, for example. Having more customers may necessitate hiring more employees, which comes with all sorts of other considerations. Payroll, employee benefits, days off, and even employee morale become things which the business owner has to consider. Growth of any kind necessitates delegation!

This applies to anyone in the medical industry. You can read more about the wider industry’s relationship with bookkeeping here.

It is in this environment of growth that the bookkeeper comes in. The bookkeeper’s job is simple:

• Track all transactions related to the business (money in, money out)
• Create reports which summarize those transactions for the business owner.

While these are relatively simple requests, they take a lot of time to do. And it’s exactly because of this that it’s better to hire from outside your clinic than getting a direct employee.

Why you shouldn’t hire an in-house bookkeeper

To be frank, it all comes down to cost. Ask yourself this: is it really the most efficient use of your money to hire someone who will:

• Commute for thirty minutes to your location five days a week to do a job which they could do just as efficiently online
• Work for 3-4 hours a day but get paid to do twice that
• Spend the other 4 hours doing small tasks to pass the time

And, of course, this is not even considering the employee benefits and morale issues!

All of these aspects of hiring an in-house bookkeeper serve to primarily drain your eye clinic of its hard-earned profits. Instead of bleeding money, hire a contractor to carry out an agreed-upon task. He or she will do precisely the amount of work which you need done, and all within an agreed upon price range.

Efficiency in a role as pivotal as a bookkeeper lays the foundation for your clinic’s future growth.

Signs you found a great bookkeeper for your eye clinic

All bookkeepers can do the basic tasks expected of a bookkeeper. By generating financial reports and balance sheets, a bookkeeper can provide you with an accurate understanding of your business’ revenue, profit, and expense. This information will be important for tax records and detecting potentially fraudulent transactions.

There are several signs that you picked the right bookkeeper.

If he or she has experience in your field, you have identified a competent bookkeeper. She can look through the financial reports which have been written for you over a given tax year. Through their experience with the industry, they will know which tax laws allow you to save money. They will also know which tax write-offs apply to you. This not only allows you to pay the Internal Revenue Service what it’s owed, but it also helps you avoid paying it too much!

Awareness of common practices in your field is also a great benefit. A professional bookkeeper will have experience with identifying common problems and mistakes which eye clinics often run into. They can guide you through these issues in order to mitigate any risks your business experiences. In fact, speaking directly with a professional can help you highlight what issues concern you specifically. Set up a free one hour consultation with a Yoke Tax professional to better articulate what matters to you.

A detail-oriented bookkeeper seems to be the type of thing which is expected. After all, someone who is trusted to work with your money and report how it moves has a lot of responsibility. Things can get especially hairy if your bookkeeper missed some details which the IRS didn’t! However, an inexperienced bookkeeper is more likely to fall into these traps. They might forget to log a transaction, or they might simply log it incorrectly. A smart bookkeeper will have several methods in place to avoid this and save you the headache of false information.

The bookkeeper who is a powerful communicator changes the game for any eye clinic which they work with. Reporting accurate information on your business transactions is important. What’s more important is articulating exactly what this means for your business two months, six months, and even a year in the future. A powerful communicator is able to take complex concepts and break them down for you. This bookkeeper will not only have a positive attitude on their skills- they will also spread that confidence to you!

What eye clinics need to remember about bookkeepers

It’s incredibly easy to dismiss bookkeeping as a more complex form of data entry. In truth, bookkeepers who approach the position with such a mindset are usually the ones who will waste your money in the long term. A great bookkeeper crunches numbers, but he also cares about what those numbers mean for your business. He cares about communicating where your business is struggling and even suggesting resolutions to those issues. A great bookkeeper is not an employee- he is a partner.

The medical industry in particular is in need of partners: people who want to build, rather than simply take. Because of this, some business owners are unsure of what they should expect from their bookkeeper, and why a partner bookkeeper is a better choice than an employee. Asking the right questions and getting honest, direct answers is the first step towards success for any eye clinic.

Ophthalmologists should not have to deviate from their primary mission- providing their patients with the best eye care- in order to stress over bookkeeping tasks which could be done more efficiently. Give Yoke Tax a call, and let us handle the numbers.