If you're going to become a profitable business owner you two are going to have to hire an accountant. So who do you hire you've got bookkeepers and controllers and accountants and CFOs and CPAs I mean the list is endless.
In this article, we're going to talk about what kind of accountant you should have for what circumstance. So we're going to talk about that if you hire in-house should you get because there's a lot of options and there's a lot of different budgets out there that you need to be aware of.
Bookkeeper:
So you don't get the wrong person for the wrong job description, okay the first person you're going to hire is your bookkeeper. Now, this is the data entry specialist depending on where you live you're going to pay a different amount to this person.
So if you live an idle for example you might be on the lower end around eighteen to twenty thousand dollars a year but if you're in Dubai or Abu Dhabi you could be upwards of forty thousand or even forty-five thousand dollars a year.
This person serves a specific role they're not going to be strong and creating reports for you or doing business analytics or accounting processes. Their job is to get data into the system and if you're a new entrepreneur this is likely you've been doing this yourself.
This is a good option to offload some of the heavy kind of you know grunt work of accounting and allow you to begin analyzing some of the reports a good hire for anybody that is ready to expand their business but not really ready to invest in the high top tier accountants just yet.
Accountant:
A lot of people think bookkeeping and accountants are the same things they are not its very different and you're going to pay a different amount for somebody that's an accountant. So here's how it works your bookkeeper has been putting data into the system all month long.
Your accountant typically is helping to oversee that process and then at the end of the month, they're doing some of the more heavy lifting tasks. Which requires you to know reconciling your trial balance making month and journal entries doing some of the accrual work that's going to need to happen in your financials?
If we're going to be right and in some cases, they help create the financial statements but not always but they are at that month-end position. Now for an Outsource accountant depending again on where you live you can expect to pay anywhere from maybe thirty thousand dollars up to sixty thousand dollars that's probably a fair range for somebody in this world.
Controller:
Now I love to do controller work as I grew up in my career it's this process of overseeing the whole accounting system. You get to orchestrate what's happening and when you're making sure that data is getting into the system on time does the month in journal entries are happening on time and you're really responsible for the final product that's coming out of the accounting system.
This is the balance sheets the income statement the cash flow statement those kinds of documents rests on the shoulders of your controller. Now, this is a more expected accountant and it should be because this person needs to have a good amount of experience.
You absolutely at least a bachelor's degree in accounting if not getting into their master's degree and having completed that expect to pay anywhere from the very low-end 45 thousand up to maybe seventy-five thousand for this person I've seen it at eighty-five thousand actually for certain areas of the country.
CFO
We're going to talk about the king or queen on top of the mountain. This is your CFO, CFO stands for a chief financial officer they in fact hold a c-suite position in your company. This person's expensive you want to be careful when you hire a CFO because not all CFOs are created equal.
Everything up to this point has been really task-related focusing on just journal entries and debiting and crediting. But when you step into a CFO role this requires strategic thinking and not all accountants have that capability. They're not able to see the big picture and create a plan that our business development related.
But that's what a CFO should be doing in to be taking all that work the rest of the team is doing and translating that into your goal as the entrepreneur to make sure that we're hitting the targets. We need to hit with the right amount of money behind each goal so a CFO you can expect to pay anywhere from seventy-five thousand to two hundred and fifty thousand is typically what I've seen nationwide for somebody.
CPA:
The CPA stands for a certified public accountant; this is the person that almost all of you probably have in your life right now. If you've started your company you know that you need a tax guy I lift the CPA his job to do two things really
- One is to prepare your tax strategy to take everything you're doing throughout the year and prepare it so that you are not spending more than you need to and giving it away to FTA that's the goal
- CPA often feels the role of auditors where they come in as an independent party and they make sure that your books are accurate and clean and actually reflective of what's happening in the real world and nobody's cooking the books
So if your CPA ever fills the role of your auditor they're not allowed to feel any of the other accounting rules. It would be breaking those of the laws of accounting really so be aware of that now what I do see happening a lot of the time in businesses as I consult and engages them is they're actually using their CPA for lower-level functions.
So using their CPAs, yes to prepare their taxes but also to do their bookkeeping and their accounting work and they are controller and CPAs sometimes will take that work. Number one it's like it's really easy for them to do. But it's also they're making a ton of money per hour doing your data entry and it's a bad decision for you don't do that.
You need to make sure you have a bookkeeper doing the bookkeeping work CPA doing with CPA work in terms of cost you're going to spend anywhere between one hundred and twenty-five dollars an hour to upwards of four hundred and fifty dollars an hour.
If you're getting into really crazy stuff as you know we're derivative stuff or like oil and gas sometimes those guys get really expensive. So just be aware of the industry you're in and the complication of what you do is going to affect the rate that you're paying your CPA but a good CPA is usually worth the investment.