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They help businesses:
They do this at various levels of an organisation and for different types of companies:, from administrative (BA(SA)), to management (CBA(SA)), to executive leadership (CFO(SA)), as salaried accountants or as accountants in practice (BAP(SA)).
Being an entrepreneur and starting your own company is both exciting and daunting. You will need someone on your side that understands your business idea and can help you make it shine.
Accountants are able to paint your business idea into numbers helping you understand the impact on revenue, expenses and the bottom line. They prepare budgets and projections so you can see how much money you will make every month and how much you will need to invest or borrow.
Use them as your trusted business advisor to reflect, improve and shape your new business idea, and help you plan and structure your idea in the most tax efficient manner.
As a business owner you will be responsible to register your company with various authorities, and submit regular compliance reports. Ask an accountant to do this for you so you can focus expanding your business idea into an empire.
Examples of what an accountant can do for you include:
To be successful every business owner needs to set personal, financial and business goals, and measure them monthly.
Your accountant can help you with this process.
They are able to draft these goals into Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and present them to you in a dashboard helping you see your progress and identifying areas for improvement.
Managing your cash flow is the most important part of running a business. If you run out of cash you lose control of your business. You need an accountant to help you project how and when you will receive and spend cash. This requires planning, negotiations with creditors, intimidate knowledge of internal business requirements and an ability to present these in meaningful cash flow reports.
Accountants have seen it all. They help many types of business become successful and have seen what works and what doesn’t. Tap into this knowledge and learn from the mistakes, and good decisions of others. Use your accountant as a mentor and a coach to test your ideas, motivate you when things are tough and help you make those hard decisions.
Utilising debt the right way can be beneficial for your business. However you need to understand the implications of borrowing, when it has to be repaid, how you will do this, and apply the funds to help you grow your business.
An accountant can help you prepare and submit a loan or funding application, advise on the cost of capital and help get this lowered, monitor the flow of funds, renegotiate payment terms, and provide reports on spending patterns.
Chasing your debtors to pay their outstanding invoices is not a pleasant task. It requires constant attention, follow-ups, reminders, issuing timely and correct invoices, monitoring payments received, re-negotiating payment terms and sometimes taking legal action to collect.
Your accountant can help you manage this process allowing you to focus on expanding your business, and building positive relationships with your clients.
Budgets allow you to plan your activities for the next year and how they will impact your income, expenses, assets and liabilities. This allows you to compare what you thought will happen to what actually happened. This is crucial. You can now make informed decisions on what to change, stop doing or do more off. Budgets helps you become efficient.
Accountants as specialists in preparing budgets based on valid assumptions and use budgets to give you early warning if things go wrong.
Accountants can provide crucial support to your hiring decisions. You will need to know how the new employee will impact the bottom line. This includes how much they will cost and what contribution they will make to revenue. Having employees require the maintenance a monthly payroll system including paying taxes and filing returns. Accountants can do that for you.
Accountants can help you set up your whole accounting system in the cloud. This allows you to automate many accounting processes, see live data summarised in dashboard, greatly improving business decision making. Cloud accounting includes:
Understanding what to order by when and why inventory go obsolete will help you improve sales by being able to make timeous product delivery.
You accountant can help you do this by identify the cost of holding inventory, how to improve and save money, review sales data and predict inventory flow. They can help set up software that tracks inventory levels and place new orders.
All businesses incur costs to help them generate revenue. As your business change you need to constantly monitor if these costs are still relevant and obtained at the best price, and from the right suppliers.
Avoid cost creep and ask an accountant to review your costs structures regularly so you can save and not spend your hard earned cash on unnecessary items, or pay too much.
Technology allows most of your accounting system to be automated. This can generate a lot of costs savings and give you access to the better and more timeous information.
Your accountant can drive your system automation for you. Examples of systems that an accountant can help automate for you include:
Accountants are best known for their ability to help you stay compliant with tax authorities. Accountants are however duty bound to act in the best interest of their clients when helping them with their taxes.
This means carefully reviewing your personal and business tax affairs to ensure you can claim all allowable deductions and disclose all relevant income. In this way they make sure their clients claim or are refunded the legally appropriate amount, and not what the tax collector says you must pay.
An accountant can help you:
can claim all allowable deductions and disclose all relevant income. In this way they make sure their clients claim or are refunded the legally appropriate amount, and not what the tax collector says you must pay.
An accountant can help you prepare and file:
Accountants can help you set up control systems that help safeguard your business from fraud and accounting errors. This improves the reliability of your financial information and avoiding risks of theft, and misallocation of funds.
Accountants are able to draft your Internal control policies and procedures with regards to:
Accountants can help you identify, apply, distribute and report on various funding and loans available for SMEs, and prepare your business plan, feasibility study, and offer coaching and mentoring support.
Funding opportunities for SME that require the support of an accountant, include the following. All of these require an accountant to prepare and present
Department of Trade and Industry
COVID19 relief funds
Bank loans
Go to CIBA Academy and start to specialise.