Staffing challenges? How cloud accounting can help professional services organizations thrive

According to Business Development Canada, 55 percent of organizations are struggling to fill job openings. For small and mid-sized businesses, the labour shortage means business owners like you are working more to pick up the slack — an unsustainable situation that’s creating stress.

Switching to cloud accounting can offer you multiple benefits and help alleviate diverse challenges, including staffing challenges.

Many businesses have an in-house employee handle finances as well as other tasks, including serving clients and customers. With staffing shortages, you may find your employees are focusing more of their time and energy on customer service. More and more businesses are in this situation and are therefore seeing a need for permanent team members to take care of finances — a challenge in some markets, especially in smaller regions.

Having someone in house to focus on your bookkeeping and accounting may have made sense in the past. But cloud accounting offers you an opportunity to outsource your bookkeeping and accounting for a lower cost and better results.

Cloud accounting advantages

The main advantage of cloud accounting and bookkeeping is that it gives you all the information you need to understand the health of your business and make targeted financial decisions. The web-based platforms include access to a range of accounting and bookkeeping tools and provide a line of sight into all aspects of your business.

A solution like MNP’s ease Bookkeeping and Cloud Accounting service also gives you access to an experienced financial advisor who’s available to answer your questions and support you in making the right decisions that foster business success.

One of the biggest issues you face as a business owner is that bookkeeping often isn’t top of mind for the person doing it in house, especially when experiencing staffing shortages. There’s simply too much to do; tracking the numbers is a task that can seem easy to put off for another time. If you own a family business, you may be inclined to have your spouse or kids handle bookkeeping, but again, there are competing priorities. In both cases, bookkeeping can fall behind, leaving you unable to access real-time financial information.

Using MNP’s ease Bookkeeping and Cloud Accounting service ensures your books are always up to date. Financial information is available in real time, displayed on intuitive dashboards, so you always know where you stand and can make decisions based on current financial data.

Adopting ease cloud accounting

Our firm’s advisors work alongside small and mid-sized businesses across all regions and industries. Most of these businesses have seen the labour shortage impact their finance, AP/AR, or bookkeeping departments in some way. A local brewery, for example, might need to shuffle responsibilities in the workplace so that trained managers who have been handling bookkeeping and accounting in the past are able to provide services to customers.

To free up resources, you can talk to one of MNP’s Cloud Accounting and Bookkeeping advisors, who will ask you about your specific needs. We’ll get all the details about your organization’s financial situation, including bank accounts, credit cards, and the activities that need to be covered: payroll, receipt management, paying vendors, and more.

MNP uses two platforms for bookkeeping, so if you aren’t using one of these, we’ll migrate your data to the best platform for your needs and train you and your staff on how to use the system and get the information you need. Various apps allow for the creation of models and projections to give you knowledge about the future of your business — key for making decisions today.

Data entry from bank accounts and credit cards is automated, going right into the accounting platform, and payroll is a quick and easy process. Ease also allows you to generate invoices quickly and automates payment reminders so you’re always aware of what you owe and when. And there’s no more keeping track of receipts — take a picture with your phone and it automatically goes into your financial management system.

Finding the right people to help your business flourish isn’t easy for a lot of business owners right now. Ease Bookkeeping and Cloud Accounting means you don’t have to spend hours on finances and you don’t have to worry about finding someone to do it for you — helping you solve your staffing challenges for good.