Business Services

Small Business Accounting • Forecasting and Budgeting • Internal Controls Evaluation • Policies and Procedures

Small Business Accounting

Our small business accounting department provides thorough, accurate reporting and critical analysis that allows you to evaluate the financial health of your business and achieve your business goals. Our firm can help you by delivering accurate financial statements and reports and handling all accounting tasks so you can concentrate on running your business.

To support your accounting needs, we can prepare the following on a monthly basis:

Reconcile your bank account
Generate an income statement
Generate a balance sheet
Clean up your general ledger

Bank Reconciliation

Reconciling your bank accounts each month allows us to keep your accounting and taxes up-to-date.

Having us reconcile your account each month allows you to:

Identify lost checks, lost deposits, and unauthorized wire transactions.
Detect and prevent excess/unjustified bank charges and ensures transactions are posted correctly by your bank.
Detect and prevent embezzlement of funds from within your company.
Manage your cash more effectively. Proper management of funds not only saves money, but it also makes money for you.
Protect yourself. By timely reconciling and promptly objecting to your bank about any unauthorized, fraudulent or forged checks presented to your bank and paid by that bank, you can relieve your agency of responsibility for the shortfall and transfer the risk to the bank. This reason to reconcile alone should be enough.

Income Statement

An income statement, otherwise known as a profit and loss statement, adds an itemized list of all your revenues and subtracts an itemized list of all your expenses to come up with a profit or loss for the period.

An income statement allows you to:

Track revenues and expenses so that you can determine the operating performance of your business.
Determine what areas of your business are over-budget or under-budget.
Identify specific items that are causing unexpected expenditures. Like phone, fax, mail, or supply expenses.
Track dramatic increases in product returns or cost of goods sold as a percentage of sales.
Determine your income tax liability.

Balance Sheet

A balance sheet gives you a snapshot of your business’ financial condition at a specific moment in time.

A balance sheet helps you:

Quickly get a handle on the financial strength and capabilities of your business.
Identify and analyze trends, particularly in the area of receivables and payables. For example, if your receivables cycle is lengthening, maybe you can collect your receivables more aggressively.
Determine if your business is in a position to expand.
Determine if your business can easily handle the normal financial ebbs and flows of revenues and expenses.
Determine if you need to take immediate steps to establish cash reserves.
Balance sheets, along with income statements, are the essential elements in providing financial reporting to potential lenders such as banks, investors, and vendors who are considering how much credit to grant you.

Maintaining a Clean General Ledger

The general ledger is the core of your company’s financial records. Since every transaction flows through the general ledger, a problem with your general ledger can materially affect the accuracy of your books.

Having us review your general ledger each month allows us to identify any discrepancies such as double billings or unrecorded liabilities. We’ll correct the inconsistencies so your books are accurate.

Forecasting and Budgeting

A budget is a plan expressed in quantitative, usually monetary terms, covering a specific period of time. A budget is a systematic plan for the utilization of human and material resources. In a business organization, a budget represents an estimate of future costs and revenues. Budgets may be divided into two basic classes: Capital Budgets and Operating Budgets.

Budgeting and forecasting are vital in maintaining control of your business, but it can be a time-consuming task as budgets must be continuously updated with new forecasts.

Internal Controls Evaluation

Internal controls should be designed in a practical, efficient, and effective way. Having someone review your internal controls with a fresh set of eyes can be helpful to ensure your controls are still operating as intended.

The Internal control structure consists of the policies and procedures that are designed to protect your assets, facilitate accurate financial reporting, and ultimately assist in achieving your mission as an organization. The emphasis of a properly designed system of internal controls is on prevention rather than detection. The goal is to create an environment where fraudulent activity, such as financial misstatements or misappropriation of assets, is not only discouraged but is difficult to achieve.

A well designed internal control system includes the control environment, risk assessment, tests of the control activities, and oversight. Management’s commitment to competence, attitude toward reporting, and approach to evaluating and monitoring risks creates the control environment. Risk assessment considers the culture created by management, external relationships, industry factors, and the organization’s financial characteristics to determine which areas are more susceptible to fraudulent activity. Transactional data is tested to evaluate compliance with policies and procedures, and monitor controls. Most importantly, oversight should be provided externally by management and those charged with governance.

Our hands-on approach to internal control evaluation begins with a review of your process and procedures and an assessment of your operations from a different perspective. We gain an understanding of current roles and responsibilities. We then assess your workflow to evaluate internal controls by identifying “who” initiates, authorizes, and records transactions; as well as, “how” they are recorded. We review job descriptions, segregation of duties, cross-training opportunities, safeguarding records and more.

Upon completion of our evaluation, we work with the client to devise remediation plans for any areas of deficiencies that are identified.

Policies and Procedures

Many businesses have the right strategies, but still fail because they are unable to put those strategies into practice due to failures in the processes necessary for implementation. Whether your business processes are broken, or in need of improvements we can help you break through your execution issues.

By analyzing existing processes, identifying bottlenecks and redesigning or improving processes we can significantly reduce costs and improve satisfaction for all stakeholders in your organization.

We can review existing policies and procedures, make recommended changes to existing policies, assist in the creation of new procedures and ensure that all policies and procedures have been addressed.