Better Book Keeping

If I had the means to start a business of my own, it would definitely be in book keeping as this is the field that I am studying. This type of business would be very low cost to start up as I could work directly out of my home, I already have a computer, and accounting software is fairly inexpensive if you only have a few accounts to look after. This business would be quite small to begin with (I'd probably have to keep my full time job.) until I developed efficient procedures and gained the trust of any current clients.

 In time, hopefully my name would spread by word of mouth and I could eventually open up a small accounting firm that would have a target market of small business owners. I would target this specific type of market because they are generally the ones who source outside help for this type of service. I find that many small business owners attempt to do the accounting on their own to begin with and often lose site of the important things such as marketing, quality of their products and customer service aspects. Another reason why they may source outside help in this area would be due to growth of their business. Keeping the books and doing payroll becomes far too much of a burden and they may not want to spend so much time focusing on the process when someone else could give them the numbers each month.

 

Long run costs for this type of business would be the amount of accountants employed, the cost of rent for an office space if I were to expand outside of my home and the number of software licenses that needed to be purchased.  

 

The short term costs as I mentioned earlier would be things such as up to date accounting software, a computer if necessary, office supplies and furniture.

 

Fixed costs for a home based book keeping business would be things such as an internet connection for keeping in contact with clients and a portion of the mortgage and utility bills could also be deemed a fixed business expense.

 

A business that I would eventually aspire to be like would be The Small Business Accountants who are locally owned and do exactly as their business name describes. http://www.smallbusinessaccountants.ca/. They provide several different types of services, including book keeping, tax planning, financial planning, business consulting and training services. I think that a lot of business owners are afraid of the monetary aspect of things in large part because a lot of it has a connection to the government and that's where a company such as The Small Business Accountants could step in to relieve some of the stress. Targeting specifically small businesses is a great strength because many larger companies have their own accounting departments and don't have the need to source outside help. According to the website startupcan.ca, between 2002 and 2007, an average of 104,000 small businesses were started each year. That being said, I think that getting into small business accounting could potentially be a very lucrative business as outputs could be quite large while maintaining low average costs.

Reference:
http://www.startupcan.ca/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Statistics-on-Small-Business-in-Canada_StartupCanada.pdf

 Site assessed on November 27, 2012