Accountants play an important role in the financial fitness of your business. Here’s the importance and purpose of accountants—and why your gym needs one.
You got into the fitness industry to help people live better and healthier lives. But there’s more to running a business than helping people meet their fitness goals.
The health and fitness industry is an over $30 billion business, and each gym owner contributes to the industry by offering quality equipment, personal training, and keeping people motivated—and ultimately healthier. We have found in working with our fitness franchise clients that gym owners also have close ties with their communities, so any success is not theirs alone, but also helps the community at large. So, for all involved, you need to pay close attention to your bottom line.
Wondering how to keep your finances in line? Hiring an accountant may be one of the best ways to give your gym the leg up it needs.
The purpose of accountants is to keep your business’s finances as simple as possible. But if you’ve never worked with one, you probably don’t know what to expect.
Here’s what you need to know about how an accountant or accounting firm can help your business and how to find the best accountant for your growing gym.
They Protect You from Costly Errors
When small businesses file taxes, there’s more to worry about than simply documenting income and expenses. An accountant or accounting firm can protect you in two ways.
1.) Having accurate and up-to-date books all year means you won’t be scrambling at tax time.
2.) If you have an accountant prepare your taxes, they can look for qualifying deductions and help you manage quarterly payments.
The average tax rate for small businesses comes to around 19.8 percent. But that number will vary based on the type of business you have and the amount of money you make each year.
The purpose of accountants is to reduce the risk of mistakes in tax filings each year. When you hire a professional CPA or firm, they’ll make sure every document is accurately prepared.
An Accountant Saves You Time
You have more important things to do than worrying about than keeping your books or filing your taxes. On average, business owners can expect to spend about 24 hours preparing their taxes. That’s approximately 3 workdays’ worth of time you’ll lose to tax prep, not to mention the time you spend monthly keeping your books. If you have a staff that manages your bookkeeping, that takes time away from you growing your business.
Accountants or accounting firms can manage your bookkeeping and prepare your taxes for you. You’ll be free to focus on what you do best—owning a gym and managing your business.
They Take the Stress Out of Preparing Financial Reports
Financial reports help you know how your business is doing throughout the year. But even if you’re good at managing your bookkeeping, finding time to prepare and interpret financial reports can be difficult.
Accountants can prepare financial reports that make sense of your financial data. Growing revenue is great, but keeping an eye on your revenue as a percentage of your costs is the key to a successful and profitable business. Insights like this allow you to create a solid business plan to address costly problems or potential problems, while also growing your business. When you use a firm that automates your accounting and bookkeeping, this financial information is typically accessible by you from a laptop or mobile phone.
Best of all, financial information that is benchmarked will help you compare yourself to your peers giving you critical insights into ways to grow your business.
Saves You Money
Accounting is one of the most important parts of keeping your business’s finances in order. When you handle it on your own or hire someone who is not skilled, you can end up making costly mistakes that keep money out of your pocket or miss areas of potential fraud. When automation is used, daily transactions can be automatically coded into the correct categories so you can easily spot anomalies you need to review.
An experienced accountant or accounting firm will save you money by preventing those mistakes or alerting you to fraud. Further, they’ll spare you the hassle of hiring and training a permanent employee to handle your accounting tasks, which is just another person for you to manage.
How to Hire an Experienced Accountant
Look for an accountant who has expertise in your industry and one that specializes in helping entrepreneurs. The fitness industry can be complex and when you work with so many vendors, contractors, and equipment dealers, and your finances can be confusing. The best person or firm for the job will understand the unique challenges gym owners face and have some expertise to help you understand your financial information.
Learn More About the Purpose of Accountants
The main purpose of accountants is to take the burden of accounting and bookkeeping for the small business owner off their plate so they can focus on growing their business. Accountants that have industry expertise and specialization can provide benchmarking data so that gym owners can learn from others in their specific brand if they are a franchise owner, or their industry in general.
Looking for a way to streamline your small business’s accounting and bookkeeping and gain insights?
Contact us to see how we can help. We’ll make sure your accounting is handled while providing you insightful benchmarking data you can access from anywhere—so you can get back to business.
