The cost of owning a business becomes very expensive without the right small business accounting solutions and back office setup. You should really be asking, "How much does it cost my business to NOT use online bookkeeping services?,” instead of normally asking, "How much does your service cost?"

Small Leaks 

This is probably the most important should ask question of your outsourcing due diligence. I'd love to "thin slice" your business and tell you how much NOT using invizibiz.biz is costing you. I know very well how most businesses are suffering. It's just a matter of how bad's the suffering. Benjamin Franklin learned so many years ago, "A small leak will sink a great ship." 

Most people repeat and misquote this by saying, "A small leak can sink a big ship." There are two important words in the latter, CAN and BIG, completely changing the meaning of WILL and GREAT in the former. WILL means 100% certainty and CAN means certainty between 0% to 100%, which means may or may not happen. In addition, GREAT has nothing to do with size and BIG has no correlation to greatness. Franklin's quote can be restated like this for clarity, "A small leak sinks great ships of any size with 100% certainty." Said another way, your microbusiness of one all the way to Fortune 500 companies are sinking right now. It's just a matter of how many leaks and how big they are before your ship, your business, sinks. 

Sinking Ships

In business small leaks are inefficient non-value added resource wasting processes. One small leak may not appear to be sinking your ship, but multiple leaks abound in your business processes because every business has them. How fast is your business taking on water? If your business was a ship sinking at sea would you want to be on your own ship? How urgently would you bail out the water to keep from sinking? 

Invisible Expenses

What's certain is your business is paying more for NOT having The Ultimate Back Office™ than simply paying for it and actually having it. I'm sure your thinking, "How did my business pay for something is it doesn't have?" Leaks come in the form of blind spots, all those things you don't know you don't know. They're invisible expenses with no invoice, date, dollar amount or accounting definition. An invisible expense happens when a business pays for one thing but gets another more expensive thing without knowing it. The same thing applies when a business avoids getting the thing altogether. When you finally get this you'll understand the value of invizibiz.biz and how much of a bargain the price is for any of our services. 

Top 17 Examples of Invisible Expenses:

1. Failure to invoice customers and/or follow up with customers in a timely manner. 
2. Hiring someone to do clerk work. 
3. Sending and receiving paper mail and using paper checks. 
4. Letting customers and vendors dictate your business processes.
5. Using email to send and receive documents. 
6. Thinking that accounting software is the same thing as your back office. 
7. Thinking that hiring cheap bookkeeping services means your entire back office is covered. 
8. Not using a password manager. (and this is a very big one)
9. Trusting an employee too much and using trust as an internal control. 
10. Letting your employees provide your business process outsourcing instead of having your business supply your business processes to your employees. 
11. Not reviewing actual business expenses for the real identifiable leaks. 
12. Thinking that all virtual business bookkeeping services are the same and failing to hire one. 
13. Using ONLY price to compare choices when buying stuff.
14. Thinking that do-it-yourself is saving money or thinking that you have to do it yourself. 
15. Letting your customers pay you with any method or process they feel like. 
16. Always looking for free advice and free services while not realizing free advice is the most expensive advice. 
17. Being careless with and not having a process especially for addresses and emails.

Bonus: The inability to get new customers because of the other 17 invisible expenses

You've Paid for It and Don't Have It

If we had to answer this "should ask question" in one sentence about how much NOT using online business bookkeeping services is costing you, then Henry Ford has captured it better than anyone, "If you need something and don't buy it, then you'll find you've paid for it and don't have it." This rule applies in business and in life from tools, computers, software, services and everything in between. 

Three Paying for It Don't Have It Examples

1) Fred needs cash to cover payroll and rushes to his business PO Box or alternate virtual office address looking for a check from a late paying customer. He runs into Bob (a personal friendship) whom he hasn't seen in awhile and gets sucked into a 45-minute conversation only to find out the check didn't arrive yet. Frustrated Fred drives 35 minutes back to his home office wasting more than 2 hours without solving his cash flow problem. Fred can never get his two hours back, has to work extra hard that day and can't bill $400 for 2 hours of lost billable time.

Invisible Expense #3, #4, #12, #15 & #17 were present in this example.

2) Terri has unbilled client accounts well over 2 years old. She never set up a standard process for billing time and materials requiring her employees to rely on her for some of the billing. She faces total embarrassment if she goes back to the customer years later asking for money even though it's owed to her company. Terri is magically motivated to finish the deferred invoicing resulting from a severe cash crunch. She is thinking about offering a 50% discount of $10,000 off the invoice since her company has major outstanding bills to pay. 

Invisible Expense #1, #7, #10, #12, #14 & #17 were present in this example. 

3) Bill saves all his passwords in an excel spreadsheet. He also allows 5 employees access to ALL the company passwords. Bill couldn't figure out why accounts payable was getting bigger with generally the same revenue and same expenses as the previous 8 months. He suddenly remembered he hadn't look at bank statements in as many months. After reviewing the statements for several hours he felt sick to his stomach upon discovering an AP clerk was writing checks to themselves as a fictitious vendor. Bill's company is out $27,000, searching for a new employee and won't likely recover any of the stolen funds. 

Invisible Expense #2, #3, #8, #9, #10, #11 & #12 were present in this example. 

People Don't Run Businesses

Most business owners undervalue financial accounting information until they realize they've wasted thousands and thousands of dollars. They start a business and suffer from "Technician Syndrome" as distinguished in the business classic, The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber. (A must read book if you haven't read it yet) Technicians are experts at a skill or service and get a hankering to start a small business, however they ignore and don't understand the need for a well-oiled business process machine. Michael Gerber best describes the golden rule of a successful business, "The system runs the business and the people run the system." Technicians make the mistake of thinking the people run the business while ignoring the system. The system is the entire set of business processes and without them technicians stay small and fail. When the system runs the business people are simply replaceable eliminating overreliance on any one individual. 

Your Business Can't Afford It

Start saving your ship by stopping your small and expensive leaks, buy the things you need when you need them, and get a system to run your business. Peace of mind, the single most valuable asset, never shows up on a balance sheet, but you can have it when you eliminate invisible expenses. Your business can't afford to let another day go by without virtual business bookkeeping services by invizibiz.biz.