Office Managers play a central role in keeping your business running, with duties that may involve everything from human resources to customer service, to facilities management. Consequently, it’s not realistic to expect your office manager to be an expert in accounting, much less rely on them to maintain the financial health of your business. Reveal provides the level of guidance you’d get from having a CFO on your team. We’ll work closely with your Office Manager as we take steps to clean up past transactions and implement best practices going forward. Our cloud-based approach automates many day-to-day activities, reducing time spent on administrative tasks, which makes it easier for your office manager to do their job, while giving them more time to support you and your business in other ways.
A bookkeeper’s job is to record and classify financial transactions such as sales, payroll, and payment of bills, typically on a cash basis. Reveal delivers the financial savvy you need to help your business thrive. Our team of experienced CPAs ensure the accuracy of your financial reports, so you can see exactly what’s driving profits and what’s holding them back. We make sure you have a clean balance sheet that presents consistent, accurate details over time, simplifying your access to credit lines or enhancing the value of your business when it’s time to sell.
Ask yourself the following questions: Do you know your true costs for delivering services? Do you understand which services are most profitable? Do you have a good handle on your cash flow and fixed operating costs? If you answered ‘no’ to any of these, it’s time to re-think your accounting resource. If you’re currently relying on a tax CPA, their job is to minimize your tax liability. That’s important, but transactions categorized favorably for tax purposes obscure what’s really happening in your business each month. Reveal uses Managerial Accounting practices to categorize transactions, so you have a clear view of how your business is performing every month, giving you the information you need when you need it to make the best decisions for your business.
First, you need to understand what’s driving profitability. That means cleaning up your data so it’s accurate and can be used for analysis. To identify accounting problems that could impact the accuracy of your data, we start by conducting a financial diagnostic review, which can detect issues such as inaccurate or double postings, coding errors, chart of accounts problems, and more. Having identified any problems, the next step is to correct them. Once we have accurate data, we’ll be able to do things like match revenue and expenses to measure profitability. Our analysis and financial reporting deliver the clarity you need to help you grow your business.
You are a good fit for an outsourced CFO service if:
- Your business is growing.
- You have the humility and self-awareness to know the value of expertise and the positive impact it can have on your business and profitability.
- You are coachable and want to grow as a business leader.
- You can carve out time to engage in the process and be responsive.
We generally work best with businesses with the following attributes:
- Businesses offering professional services, such as consulting, project management, construction management, coaching, tutoring, car repair, law firms, etc.
- Small to medium sized construction companies
- Have an annual revenue of $2M +.
- Aspire to reach the next level and would like help growing their business
- Thinking about selling their business in 2-5 years.
Many of our clients tell us they sleep better at night. This is because they know they have the finger on the pulse of their business finances. Some other outcomes may include:
- Improved accuracy and reliable financial reports that you’ll understand
- Automation and smooth processes that create efficiencies
- Insight into business performance across all sectors
- Comprehensive cost-management strategy based on metrics
- An interactive business management dashboard to track, measure, manage and predict cost, revenue, profit, utilization, and banking
Yes! Businesses owners are often denied access to credit because they lack a good internal accounting process. That can lead to reporting inconsistencies and corrections which undermine a bank’s confidence. Reveal deals with those problems directly by cleaning up past transactions and implementing processes that ensure you have accurate data going forward. No more scrambling to pull together quarterly reports or going back to correct previous reports. By ensuring your information is always consistent, accurate, and up to date, we make it easy for banks to see how your business generates cash flow and how profitable it is.
Depending on what your needs are, we can help. Some of our clients are in urgent need of “clean up & coaching,” which falls under our Outsourced CFO services. We’ll conduct a diagnostic review to identify accounting problems and perform clean up services. Then, we provide templates, training and coaching to help your team execute best practice procedures going forward. We also offer a range of on-going service packages that match the needs of your growing business.
If you’re considering selling your business in 2-5 years we can help. The ability to show good financials for several years increases the value of your business. We’ll make sure you have accurate data and strong financials when the time comes to make the transition. Good systems and processes that work without the business owner’s direct involvement go a long way in increasing the value of your business.
A financial forecast involves deciding what will happen in the future by analyzing what happened in the past and the present. Financial forecasts help business owners make better decisions when dealing with uncertainty and are an essential part of business planning and budgeting. For example, a financial forecast can help you evaluate the outcome of raising prices 1% vs. reducing costs by 1% by allowing you to compare and identify the preferred scenario.
Actionable financial data provides the information you need to answer the following kinds of questions:
- Why does our business run out of cash every month?
- Why is the line-item expense for software so high?
- How much would it cost to open a second office?
We gather data from your business and then analyze it to help you answer these questions and many others. When you have actionable financial data, you don’t have to guess. It gives you the insight you need to make business decisions with confidence.
Outsourcing payroll can deliver a host of benefits such as reducing costs, saving time, avoiding IRS penalties, along with enhanced security and better employee access. Reveal’s solutions for payroll are efficient, accurate and fully compliant.
The purpose of People Advisory Services is to help you attract and retain talent, as well as foster a motivated workforce that will support the growth of your business. Reveal makes it easy for you to offer a competitive benefits package that delivers a convenient, employee-friendly experience without the big administrative cost. We can also help you implement electronic streamlined employment offers, employee onboarding, employee surveys and more.
Once you’re onboarded and our systems are in place, preparing for an audit or external review is no problem. We update reconciliations every month and issue monthly reports, so you’ll always be ready. You can rest easy knowing that you have accurate, up-to-date financial information whenever you need it, whether it’s for an audit, a credit application, or to make informed business decisions.
We offer a range of services and service packages designed for small business owners with different needs and budgets. Specific pricing often depends on things like the size of the business and what the owner wants to achieve. We don’t pretend to be the cheapest – you are paying for expertise that delivers value to improve your bottom line.
Onboarding is a two-step process and usually takes about 30 days. Here’s an overview of how it typically works:
Step 1 – We conduct a diagnostic review that helps us understand your business, the volume of work being done, the state of your chart of accounts, etc. The diagnostic review gives us a good financial picture of the business and how much work needs to be done.
Step 2 – We create an action plan based on the results of the diagnostic review. Typically, the action plan involves cleaning up past transactions and automating systems going forward. We have an efficient process that allows us to move quickly without overwhelming your team. Our workflow includes templates to break down and simplify different tasks. We know exactly what we need and make it easy for you and your team to provide it.
We use QuickBooks Online (QBO) because it integrates with many more tools and apps that makes the work incredibly efficient. For example, apps that integrate with QBO map data and populate forms automatically, eliminating the need for a lot of routine data entry, while improving accuracy and delivering better value. Once the system is in place, our clients retain the administrative access to the tech stack.
Some business owners like to keep track of important data in their head – things like who owes them money or how much a project cost, but as a business grows and becomes more complex, this strategy isn’t sustainable. Once a business reaches about $500K in annual revenue, you need a system in place to track your finances that isn’t dependent on your memory. We make sure your system generates accurate data and is scalable so you can effectively manage the variables that are part of growing your business.
Our mission is to help you improve profitability and grow your business. That purpose informs all our actions. Our team of experienced CPAs and accountants are certified in all the tools we use and have decades of experience helping small and medium-sized businesses just like yours. As a result, we know what needs to be done and how to do it. We drive the work, and you see results. You didn’t start your business because you love budgeting, analyzing costs or forecasting trends – but we do. By taking advantage of our expertise, we’ll help you build a better business while giving you more time to do the things you love.
Like doctors, CPAs have different areas of expertise. Ours is delivering the financial data you need to run your business. Tax CPAs are experts in tax law and their goal is to minimize tax liability. We encourage our clients to work with a tax CPA, but in the same way you wouldn’t ask a brain surgeon to operate on your heart, you shouldn’t expect a tax CPA to have the expertise to analyze your data metrics or advise you on how to become more profitable.
Cash Basis refers to an accounting method that recognize revenues and expenses at the time cash is received or paid out. A problem with cash basis accounting is that it can be misleading because it may show you are profitable when you simply haven’t paid your bills yet. Because it only provides a day-to-day view of your finances, it’s unhelpful when making business decisions, which requires a longer-term perspective.
Tax Basis simply refers to the intent to structure your transactions in a way that minimizes your tax obligation. Tax basis financial documents skew data towards what’s best for your tax return. Like cash basis, this approach doesn’t provide a good alignment of revenue and expense, which can lead to inaccurate information about net income.
GAAP is an acronym for Generally Accepted Accounting Principles. It refers to a common set of principles, standards, and procedures issued by the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB). The purpose of GAAP is to ensure a company’s financial statements are complete, consistent, and most importantly comparable. When sharing your financial statements with a lender, for example, they will expect to see GAAP basis, so they can rely on the reporting as presented. And they feel confident that they are presented according to the common set of principles, standards and procedures.
Managerial Accounting is the practice of identifying, measuring, analyzing, interpreting, and communicating financial information that enables business owners to pursue their goals and make well-informed business decisions. It encompasses many facets of accounting with the purpose of improving the quality of information business leaders receive based on business operation metrics. We maximize the use of the available dimensions (account, customer, class, location, etc.) to tag attributes to transactions, that make it easier to analyze and interpret.
Our focus is Managerial Accounting because our priority is providing you with actionable financial data. We implement GAAP basis because it is the best measure of the company’s assets, liability, revenues, and expenses. Financial reports that meet the standards of GAAP are intended for an external audience, ensuring you have the trust of potential creditors and investors. Financial reports based on Managerial Accounting are for an internal audience and focus on issues that maximize profit and minimize losses.