Maintaining current and clean financial records is a key factor in reducing expenses and boosting your bottom line. An efficient bookkeeper can increase your cash flow and reduce cost by leveraging vendor relationship, increasing financial visibility, and allowing you to make well informed financial decisions.
This begs the question: is hiring a dedicated medical bookkeeper the right move for you?
What You Will Gain
Retaining high-quality bookkeeping is in any firm’s best interest. Here’s why:
Cost Savings
Each hour that a physician manages his or her finances is an hour that could be devoted to patient appointments. Hiring a medical bookkeeper can lead to a 90% increase in savings, which means more time for clients and, subsequently, more income.
Financial Reconciliation
Accurate bookkeeping improves your understanding of the firm’s finances. This strengthens budget planning and ultimately lowers expenses.
Automation
Some firms offer automated systems that streamline the bookkeeping process. With a firm’s expansion, it becomes harder to manually track every transaction. As practices grow and add increasingly complex systems, process automation becomes a necessity.
Payroll
The medical field is demanding. Large hospitals must be sufficiently staffed every day to deal with last-minute emergencies. This causes increased overtime rates. Employers who consistently provide accurate salaries will likely improve their retention rates.
Financial Analysis
Financial experts indicate when their clients overpay for supplies. Knowing that you are paying the right price for the right items and leveraging economies of scale can only be accomplished with experienced and thorough analysis…there is much more itc than knowing what you paid last time.
Going Paperless
Going paperless makes it easier for even the largest firms to keep organized financial records. Digitizing content also benefits your firm by centralizing information and, in turn, increases productivity.
Who Should You Hire?
Now that you’ve read the benefits offered by a medical bookkeeper, let’s consider your options.
Handle It Yourself
If you can balance bookkeeping with your other responsibilities, be sure to invest in the best software. If you require less specialized options, there’s software for organizations of all sizes. The problem is that most Practice Management Systems (refer to our previous post on the best dermatology billing software programs for examples to get you started… if you require less specialized options, there’s software for organizations of all sizes) are completely segmented, leaving out traditional cash control, accounts payable, and bookkeeping functionality. This can make the DIY model quite complex as you have a whole new program, workflow and set of tasks to learn.
Hire In-House
At large organizations, there’s a strong incentive to hire bookkeeping staff that provide necessary skills at a moment’s notice. This does, however, require software, staff and benefit costs.
Hire a Dedicated Firm
An independent contractor saves you the headaches associated with bookkeeping. Leave the books to a specialized bookkeeping company so you can focus on what your practice does best: medicine.
The Auctus Group knows how to use the aforementioned strategies and more to reduce expenses for your business. If you ask us, it’s in the best interest of your firm, and your patients, to hire a company explicitly qualified to handle your books.
