Today’s accounting standards require professionals who know what they’re doing, not overburdened business owners putting in an hour a day handling their own bookkeeping duties—and certainly not inexperienced bookkeepers with limited knowledge who wouldn’t be able to tell you the principles of GAAP accounting if they had a gun to their heads.
The notion that your company’s financial information could be in the hands of an inexperienced and undereducated bookkeeper raises serious issues if you’re interested in walking the straight and narrow with regard to your in-house accounting standards. A failure to follow GAAP procedures can result in a number of issues, both great and small—not the least of which involves the very financial security and future of your business.
Failure to follow GAAP accounting standards can result in any one of the following intensely undesirable scenarios.
• The inability to make sound business decisions about future company direction. GAAP standards make it easy to review financial statements, allowing you and your business partners to arrive at critical decisions without having to worry that you’re throwing the dice and hoping for a good outcome.
• A failure to attract investors. The bottom line is, no outside entity is going to invest in a company whose accounting standards don’t meet up to GAAP—if for no other reason than most investors will be unwilling to entrust their investment to a company that can’t follow generally accepted principles. But even an investor that might be willing to overlook this would have trouble determining your company’s viability without being able to review your financial statements in a manner consistent with common practice.
If you’re not following GAAP accounting standards, you’re overdue to start. One of the simplest ways of falling immediately into line is to hire a third party accounting firm that’s staffed with educated, experienced accountants who won’t have to be trained to understand GAAP standards.
