As a busy medical practice owner, you’ve probably wondered if professional bookkeeping services could help you save time. Because let’s be honest, managing your practice’s accounting and bookkeeping on your own is a time-consuming and tedious task. Most importantly, taking care of your books means you can’t spend as much time with your patients.
Outsourcing your practice’s bookkeeping and accounting may be the solution. At Sorenson & Company, CPA, we help medical providers and facility owners get back to helping patients by taking bookkeeping tasks off of their plates.
If you’re on the fence about hiring a professional bookkeeper, this article can help. We’ll go over the importance of accurate bookkeeping and how professional bookkeeping services save you time and money.
The Importance of Strong Bookkeeping for Medical Practices
Whether you run an eye clinic or a busy family practice, keeping an accurate record of your finances is essential for success.
Strong bookkeeping practices include accurate data entry, timely tax reporting, and careful financial audits.
Practicing strong bookkeeping processes also allows your practice to:
- See the practice’s current financial health.
- Ensure adherence to healthcare and tax regulations.
- Facilitate correct patient billing and insurance claims.
- Manage expenses and reduce unnecessary spending.
- Optimize tax deductions and minimize your tax liability.
- Maintain steady cash flow and working capital.
- Create insights for strategic decision-making and resource allocation.
- Prepare the practice for financial audits or reviews.
- Detect and prevent financial irregularities.
- Build trust with patients by managing finances ethically and accurately.
For example, part of a strong bookkeeping strategy is using medical billing best practices to accurately and efficiently collect patient payments. Unorganized and inefficient bookkeeping practices delay the billing and collection of client payments. This reduces cash flow and could disrupt your ability to pay expenses from clinic utilities to payroll.
In-House or Outsourced Professional Bookkeeping Services?
It’s easy to see why hiring a bookkeeper is a good idea for your medical practice. However, this can lead to a new question: how should I hire a professional bookkeeper?
There are two main options when choosing a bookkeeper:
- In-House: You hire a new full or part-time employee to manage the accounting and bookkeeping of your medical practice.
- Outsource: You contract with a third-party professional bookkeeping service to handle your practice’s accounting.
Both in-house and outsourced bookkeepers will help you save time, so you can focus on helping patients, and choosing which option is best for your practice isn’t always easy. Consider the pros and cons of each to determine if you should hire an in-house bookkeeper or outsource to a healthcare industry accountant.
When you hire a bookkeeper in-house, you take on a new employee. This can give you noticeable benefits, including:
- Control and Oversight: You’ll have more control and oversight in the hiring, management, and direction of the bookkeeper.
- Tailored Investment: Hiring in-house allows you to invest in skill development and training tailored to the needs of your practice.
However, there are several important drawbacks to taking on a new employee, such as:
- Cost: Hiring a new employee often costs more than outsourcing fees due to salary, benefits, training, and infrastructure costs. Data suggests it takes a company six months or more to break even on the cost of a new hire.
- Limited Expertise: Depending on your talent pool, you may struggle to find candidates who have the experience you need while fitting in with the culture of your practice.
- Longer Onboarding: It takes time for a new employee to understand your business and find their place in the team.
Meanwhile, outsourcing medical practice bookkeeping instead of hiring in-house provides specific benefits. Most notably, outsourcing bookkeeping services can give you:
- Medical Bookkeeping Expertise: Get access to specialized medical accounting knowledge from a team of bookkeepers.
- Flexibility: Outsourcing gives you the flexibility to scale your needs to meet bookkeeping demands without the challenges of new hires and layoffs.
- Time Efficiency: You’ll have little to no downtime during onboarding, making it easy to start deploying tax and accounting strategies right away.
- Risk Mitigation: Professional bookkeepers understand complicated tax laws that can help your practice stay in compliance and avoid legal consequences.
- Cost Savings: With no responsibility for employee salary, benefits, or equipment, you’ll likely save money by outsourcing bookkeeping services.
The biggest downside to outsourcing bookkeeping is you might not know what you’re getting from a third-party bookkeeping service. The good news is it’s easy to address these concerns simply through proper evaluation of medical accountants.
Get Professional Bookkeeping Services From Sorenson & Company, CPA
Working with a bookkeeping service that specializes in the medical industry will help you save time, stay in compliance with tax laws, and save money over hiring an in-house accounting team.
At Sorenson & Company, CPA, we put our extensive experience as medical CPAs to work for you. We help all types of medical professionals–from doctors and chiropractors to optometrists and dentists–maintain accurate bookkeeping records.
We understand the complex legal and financial factors of your industry and know how to handle them while avoiding medical accounting mistakes. When you hire us, you get access to specialized, professional bookkeeping services to help your practice run smoothly and provide a great patient experience.
Learn more about our bookkeeping services and see how we can save you time and money. Contact us today to get started.