5 Reasons to Work with an Accounting Firm that Specializes in the Pest Control Industry

In this short article we will discuss the triggers for outsourcing your accounting and the general benefits. We will then conclude the article with a quick summary of why outsourcing with a company that specializes in the pest control industry provides exponential advantages for your business.

What Triggers Owners to Consider Outsourcing

As an outsourced accounting firm, we generally find that one or more of these triggers usually occurs for a business to consider finding a new accounting solution:

– Reaching $1 million in revenue

– Struggling with a market downturn

– Need to increase profitability

– Turnover with their existing accountant/bookkeeper

– Accepting outside investor capital

– Thinking about selling the business or passing to a new generation

– CEO can no longer be involved in every aspect of the business

– Entering the accelerated growth stage of the business life cycle

– Needing to get more out of routing software and QuickBooks

– Wanting technology systems to interface and talk to each other

– Requiring more sophisticated financial reports for smarter decision-making

These all can be summarized in one general bucket. The business owner wants to “get better,” and he or she sees outsourcing as a competitive advantage without any upfront investment of time or money.

General Benefits of Outsourcing Accounting

Once the decision is made, you will soon discover there are multiple advantages to outsourcing your accounting.

Scalability – Hiring an outsourced accounting service with controller oversight enables the business to scale (or contract) without having to hire or train additional staff.

Training and Management – Most business owners are not in the position to be able to train or manage bookkeeping staff—primarily because their bookkeepers likely know more about it than they do. But the benefits of having a bookkeeper up-to-date on the latest QuickBooks features and working with accountants that have comprehensive knowledge of state tax rules or reporting methods makes a big difference in the quality of bookkeeping.

Maximize Your Resources – When business owners try to save money by doing their own accounting or delegating it to another key employee, they are expending valuable time and energy that could be better used growing the business. When they outsource their accounting services, they free themselves up to spend their time doing what they do best.

Tax and Audit-Ready Financials – Using outsourced professional accountants to prepare financial records makes the IRS, investors and banking institutions happy. There is no lost sleep over whether the books are accurate or questioning the integrity of the financial data. There is no doubt about the data.

Outsourcing accounting helps a business owner focus on the most important tasks at a lower cost. In addition, it gives business owners peace of mind and confidence that they are always current with the latest regulations.

The Added Benefits of Outsourcing to a Firm with Pest Control Industry Experience

What makes working with an accounting firm that specializes in the pest control business an even greater competitive advantage?

Domain Expertise – PCO Bookkeepers was built by professionals that understand how to grow pest control businesses. Our founder and our managing partners have worked in the industry from the ground up.  They have run pest control businesses, grown pest control businesses and then sold pest control businesses. They understand how accounting can be leveraged to help owners set and achieve their goals.

Benchmarks and Industry Best Practice Financials – Our firm, client managers and accountants currently work with hundreds of pest management companies on a daily basis. In fact, our clients represent $600 million in annualized pest revenue. What that means is if you exclude Terminix, Orkin and Rentokil, we are running 10% to 15% of all the revenue in the U.S. pest market through our accounting firm. This allows us to anonymously combine really interesting data that you can use to benchmark yourself in two different ways:

First, we created an industry cost study. That cost study was sponsored by Syngenta and it is the definitive study for the industry. You can download a copy of the study below.

Even more exciting is that we allow you to benchmark yourself monthly in our Monthly Custom Dashboard Report. You will have the ability to see your score in areas like labor percentage, revenue per technician, and average revenue per customer.

Quick Demo of Monthly Dashboard Reports

PCO Bookkeepers Provides Customized Monthly Reporting, Goal, and Competitive Dashboard Reporting Based on Industry Best Practices

Optimized Technology

We know routing software for the industry. We work with PestPac, PestRoutes,  ServSuite, Real Green and several others. We actually get into those programs and optimize their integration with QuickBooks. This allows us to pull out the revenue by category as customer payments and accounts receivable and marry it together with QuickBooks to get the financial statements (that you can check out in the video above). This gives you:

– Unparalleled visibility into your system

– Alerts when you are meeting or exceeding cash flow goals

– Alerts when you are at risk

Strengthen Your Internal Team and Help with Training

All of our client managers are certified QuickBooks ProAdvisors. Our best client has somebody strong on the ground who can leverage QuickBooks on a daily basis. And when they have questions, they need training or anything comes up with QuickBooks, we can help them.

Free Best Practice and Data-Driven Consulting

Once we’ve streamlined your visibility, reporting and analysis, your data will tell a story and we can help you take action on those insights. We’re always only a phone call away and always willing to talk when you need some help deciding on a strategic financial decision.

Maybe you want to buy a truck and want to know whether you should be leasing or purchasing. Or you want to add staff and you want to know what benchmarks you’ll have to hit in order to make that work financially. Or you need to figure out if you need to spend more on marketing or simply change your product mix and pricing. These are all areas where we can help you make data-driven decisions.

We understand that some of our unique value is our ability to work with you to make sure our financial statements and business owner scorecard conveys a concise picture of profitability and financial position so you can achieve your goals.

Eight Key Profitability Ratios

Here is an Educational Webcast of the eight critical ratios you can impact to increase your profitability.

Summary

There are multiple reasons to consider working with an outsourced accounting firm. This is especially true for companies trying to grow or to find new ways to increase profitability.

We make tapping into our knowledge, systems, benchmarks and expertise easy. So, in summary, industry expertise is critical.

We create the monthly financial reports, the monthly operating reports and cash analysis.

We can help with budgeting and measuring progress towards those goals.

We can take care of taxes and tax projections.

When you are thinking about selling we can help you prepare yourself to market your business and, if necessary, can assist with multiple facets of the sale.

We understand that different businesses have different needs and there is not one price or one package that meets everyone’s needs. We work with our clients based on their goals and objectives to help them decide what may work best for their needs.