An average day at a veterinary practice can turn out to be tedious and challenging. Having to practically do everything by oneself does not ease things too. If you are running a veterinary practice and are thinking about how you can unburden and focus more on your core job which is tending to pets, you need to identify tasks that you can have an outsourcing partner do for you. One important back-end operation that your veterinary practice can outsource is accounting. Having outsourced veterinary accounting support can help accelerate your practice growth and improve profitability.
Veterinarians must keep accurate records of each patient’s financial information as well as the animal’s medical history. In order to maintain a healthy cash flow, accounting must also be handled meticulously, which means transactions must be recorded and spending and income logs must be carefully monitored. Since finding a qualified veterinary bookkeeper and accountant is quite difficult, outsourcing your veterinary practice’s accounts to a seasoned firm will help in increasing accounting and bookkeeping efficiency.
Let us look at 5 reasons why you should consider outsourcing your veterinary practice’s accounts.
Reduce Business Complexity
It is possible that a part-time or internal accountant won’t be able to assist your practice with other duties like payroll or billing. Also, a team or individual with less experience in veterinary accounting might result in several inconsistencies in bookkeeping and accounting. This might have an impact on how taxes are filed, among other things. It can be challenging for veterinarians to handle because of the stress it can cause. Veterinarians can feel less stressed and concentrate more on their core duties by outsourcing to professionals.
You can be confident that your books are current and that you always have strong visibility into your cash flow when you opt to outsource your bookkeeping. You may get cash flow statements from your outsourced bookkeeper to better understand how much money you have on hand and what costs you have coming up. By doing this, you can be certain that your chemist always has enough operating cash to fulfil its responsibilities.
Action Plan
Outsourcing your veterinary practice’s bookkeeping alleviates the burden of managing various financial tasks, ensuring consistency and reducing stress for veterinarians while providing better cash flow visibility.
Better Prepared for Tax Season
Dealing with tax-related issues is quite difficult, and if the accountants are not experienced, they can lead to several issues, not to mention, errors in tax filing might result in huge fines. This means that bookkeeping gets neglected until tax season your books are always out of date and you never have full access to the financial data you need to proactively spot problems before they develop.
When you outsource your veterinary accounts, your outsourced bookkeeping service provider will effectively and precisely maintain your books up to date throughout the year. They will make sure that you have access to a qualified bookkeeper with the understanding of the veterinary sector to assist you with your books and all your accounting needs. Practices could also save money on hiring accountants, integrate with the HMRC’s Making Tax Digital plan, and receive greater value for their money on their information technology needs by offshoring tech support and upgrading their books to cloud-based accounting solutions.
Action Plan
Outsourcing veterinary bookkeeping ensures up-to-date records, reducing tax season errors and fines. With professionals managing accounts, proactive financial oversight is enabled. Cost savings, HMRC compliance, and IT improvements are also benefits of outsourcing.
Improved Business Scalability
It’s crucial to have a staff that can expand along with your company when choosing an outsourced accounting company to work with. Due to the fact that in-house and part-time bookkeepers typically have a limited capacity for development and the amount of new work they can take on, you will need to hire more staff to keep up with this expansion.
Teams that handle your books on an outsourced basis have additional personnel to grow with your company. They will be better equipped to offer you additional help if you are expanding your veterinarian practice into new areas or handling more transactions. They can even assist in monitoring the effectiveness of different practices. By opting to outsource your veterinary accounts, you may lessen your burden so that you can focus on pet health and make sure that your important financial information is in the hands of an expert.
Action Plan
Outsourcing veterinary bookkeeping ensures scalability, as external teams can adapt to business growth. Unlike in-house staff, outsourced providers have the capacity to handle increased workload and expansion into new areas. This allows veterinarians to focus on pet care while experts manage financial data efficiently.
Cost-Effectiveness with Automation
Costs associated with in-house accounting include hiring, training, allocating resources, and others. Also, the majority of these accounting duties are performed manually by accountants who may not be familiar with the specifics of the veterinary industry. That means the investment is high but the turnaround on returns is long. However, with the help of outsourced accounting, these expenses will be significantly reduced by outsourcing and it will enable substantial cost savings for these tasks.
Veterinarians can also avoid buying separate accounting software by outsourcing their accounting needs. All the accounting software required to perform pertinent tasks will be available at outsourced companies. Accounting software can simplify tasks and increase accuracy. Further, your outsourced bookkeeping team will advise you on how to link your front-end systems with your accounting software and how to connect your veterinary business with them. This would not only simplify the billing process but also aid to reduce mistakes. This will make it simple for you and your staff to send your bookkeeper copies of your invoices and receipts while you are on the move.
Action Plan
Outsourcing veterinary accounting saves costs by automating tasks and providing integrated software, streamlining processes for efficient financial management.
Extra-Accounting Support
Accounting does not always end with a perfect-matching balance sheet. Say for instance your taxes have been submitted on time, but nobody is investing the time to regularly analyse financial data like profit and loss statements. This implies that nobody is keeping an eye out for anomalies or possible issues, such as inventory costs that are excessive sales, falling revenue from particular services, or payroll expenses that are greater than advised percentages.
In addition to doing monthly or quarterly inspections of financial statements to check for these and other problems, your outsourced accounting staff has a wide range of knowledge and resources that your in-house tax adviser most likely does not. They can assist you with your payroll requirements as well. Due to the fact that the majority of outsourcing companies employ payroll compliance specialists, they may assist you with processing payroll for your employees and remitting payroll deductions to the CRA, ensuring that your pharmacy remains in compliance with all payroll laws.
Action Plan
Outsourced accounting provides extra support beyond basic bookkeeping, offering regular analysis of financial data to identify anomalies and potential issues, along with specialized payroll services to ensure compliance with payroll laws.
Conclusion
Being able to comprehend and accept an outsourcing-based business model is essential to owning and managing a profitable veterinary office in today’s cutthroat industry. It is becoming more critical for owners of veterinary practices to understand and analyse the cost-benefit relationship of outsourcing their veterinary accounts as running a practice grows ever more challenging.
Thankfully, there are ever more veterinary accounting outsourcing providers who cater to the requirements of veterinary clinics. The availability of alternatives and affordable pricing will benefit veterinarians looking to outsource to more credible partners. Most importantly, it makes practices more effective, improves accounting accuracy, and gives practitioners and their staff more time to concentrate on critical responsibilities like improving pet health and pet-parent experience.
Further Information on Accounts & Tax
Our team of specialist accountants and tax experts can help manage, process and structure your business’s finances. From management accounts and payroll & pensions to tax planning and cash flow management, we can take care of the full back-office function of your business.
Book a free, no-obligation consultation with one of the team to find out how we can make your accounts & tax easier, quicker and cheaper.
Make sure you never miss any of our articles, webinars, videos or events by following us on Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and Instagram.
Reviewed By:
Nigel Crossman
Head of Commercial Finance
Nigel is a former banker and head of commercial finance at Samera. He specialises in raising finance, negotiating deals and structuring finance applications for healthcare businesses.
Dan Fearon
Finance Manager
Dan is a former banker and the head of our dental practice sales team. He specialises in asset finance for healthcare businesses and dental practice sales.
Arun Mehra
Samera CEO
Arun, CEO of Samera, is an experienced accountant and dental practice owner. He specialises in accountancy, financial directorship, squat practices and practice management.
