Summer is here! The kids are out of school, and it’s vacation time for many, including your employees. As a business owner, you have two key responsibilities – taking care of your business and taking care of your people.
Humans aren’t machines – they need understanding, flexibility, and the occasional time away from work demands. But, your business needs don’t stop just because a key person is away on vacation, needs to take some extended personal time, or perhaps has made the difficult decision to leave your employment. We’ve all been in the place of supporting individual employees while wondering “How am I going to manage their work while they’re gone?”
And, if there were one area you can’t afford to let lapse, it would be your accounting and payroll functions. Without daily attention, the opportunity for errors and missed deadlines increases significantly. It’s at times like this that the importance of your back office operations, which often run invisibly in the background, are front and center.
Small wonder. How you run your business operations on a daily basis is critical, and disrupting those functions directly impacts you and your people. You may have heard the term “single point of failure” as it relates to systems. For example, airplanes are traditionally designed with multiple redundancies in the form of backup systems if a primary system fails. When you’re encased in a metal tube flying seven miles above the ground, that’s extremely comforting. The same is true for your business. The loss of a single person can bring everything grinding to a halt
Having a plan in place before you need to cover a key employee will ensure a smooth transition and uninterrupted operations.
So, what is the answer to business continuity? You have a couple of options. One is to ensure you have enough employees to manage a staffing gap, but that is expensive. Once you figure in benefits, training, and other expenses, that employee will cost you about 40% more than their base salary, and that’s a conservative estimate. Plus, you’re paying for that employee even when that extra manpower may not be needed.
A second option is to partner with outside experts who can assume key accounting and financial functions when you need support. This gives you the capacity to flex when you need it while not assuming additional payroll and benefits costs while paying only for the help you need. An added benefit is that your accounting partner can support you not only through temporary employee absences, but can also step in to ensure continuity when you lose a key employee. And, if it makes sense, you have the option to entirely outsource your bookkeeping and accounting needs and not worry about potential interruptions or training new employees.
Providing critical business continuity and peace of mind is a large part of what we do. You may not need us now, but why wait until you do? Putting a coverage plan in place now will ensure we can step in seamlessly when the need does arise. After all, don’t you have enough emergencies to manage?