Accounting and Bookkeeping Services in Singapore: What Makes Them Different

Finally, your efforts start yielding results. You start getting more customers, and the needle starts moving. The number of transactions increases, needing professional handling. Many owners hire accounting and bookkeeping services firms at this growth stage to track and manage their finances.

It puts you in a dilemma: hire a bookkeeper or an accountant to update your books. Yes, accounting and bookkeeping are different services though they have a few everyday tasks and appear similar. However, learning the difference between bookkeeping and accounting can simplify your job.

Difference Between Accounting and Bookkeeping

What is Bookkeeping?

Bookkeeping is a process of consistently identifying, measuring, and recording daily financial transactions of your business in a consistent manner. The bookkeeper maintains a tally of the money coming in and going out of your business. Their duties also cover many other aspects of financial management.

What is Accounting?

Accounting is a process that helps you summarise, analyse, and prepare various reports based on bookkeeping data. Accountants generate detailed and precise financial statements concerning business transactions over a particular time frame.

A closer look at their roles in a business’ finance management will give you a better understanding of these two definitions.

What Does a Bookkeeper Do?

Bookkeeping is an age-old service. Traditionally, bookkeepers record incoming and outgoing money. Under bookkeeping services Singapore, bookkeepers record the day-to-day financial transactions of your business systematically. These records are easy to read.

Bookkeepers are responsible for maintaining and updating your business’ General Ledger regularly. They enter all your business transactions in this document. You only need to go through this ledger to know your business’ expense receipts and sales amounts.

Nowadays, accounting and bookkeeping services use the latest accounting software to update and track transaction entries in the ledger. Putting all these records in place helps calculate taxes for your business.

Bookkeeping is a time-consuming and manual task. However, it is not as brainy work as accounting. A bookkeeper needs to be familiar with the rules and principles of accounting, financial terms, how to use accounting software, etc.

So hiring a bookkeeper or a bookkeeping service firm to update your books is more affordable than hiring an accountant for the same task.

You can get the data updated by a bookkeeper and scrutinised by an accountant. After all, they use it to generate various statements and reports. In addition, bookkeeping services execute other tasks for their clients, including:

• Keep an eye on the business’ day-to-day cash flow
• Invoicing
• Remind customers about due payments
• Paying vendors and suppliers
• Payroll processing
• Prepare trial balance statement
• Keep an eye on credit card transactions
• Reconcile bank account (including credit card transactions)
• Recording nominal expense
• Multi-currency transactions
• Other financial tasks at their client’s requests

What Does an Accountant Do?

An accountant’s work starts where a bookkeeper’s ends. They rely on the data updated by bookkeepers to do their job.

Accountants analyse bookkeeping data to provide detailed financial insights to you. You can rely on these insights to make effective data-driven financial decisions to further the growth of your business.

• Your accounting and bookkeeping services firm can also give you advice on new opportunities that you can capitalise on without extending your resources too much
• They help you pinpoint and eliminate wastage of money on unnecessary expenses
• They assist you in optimising the supply of resources to the right projects to increase Returns on Investment (RoI)

Accounting services execute various tasks for their clients, including:

• Data verification and analysis
• Preparing balance sheets and income statement
• Financial advise
• Forecasting
• Audits
• Taxation

Accountants have to be very familiar with the rules and principles of accounting. It is why they can do the bookkeeping. The significant difference between bookkeeping and accounting is that bookkeepers cannot do accounting. Depending on their needs, businesses hire accountants to execute their bookkeeping. However, this is a costly way of updating the books of accounts.

When to Outsource to a Bookkeeping Services Firm?

You should employ online bookkeeping services Singapore, if you need to track a business’ daily financial activities to pinpoint wastages. Doing so gives you a deep understanding of your financial transactions.

Bookkeeping gives you a chance to segregate necessary and unnecessary transactions. You can exert firm control to minimise unnecessary expenses and avoid wasting your valuable resources.

However, most business owners prefer employing accounting and bookkeeping services to execute their books and statutory compliance. In addition, they may also prefer their services provider for other tasks like taxation, payroll processing, etc.

It is more practical and convenient as their financial data stays with only one provider ensuring data security.

When to Hire an Accounting Service?

Accounting is a service that you may not need daily. You need it to prepare and table your business’ accounts to the company’s AGM. And for filing annual accounts to Accounting and Corporate Regularity Authority (ACRA) as part of the business’ statutory compliance.

Financial frauds and irregularities are one of the main concerns of businesses. They lose money to these incidents. Many of these incidences are so subtle that you professional help to spot them.

In such cases, you can hire accountants to audit your company’s financial transactions. These experts can spot frauds and financial irregularities for you.

Why Hiring Accounting and Bookkeeping Services Work?

You cannot make big financial decisions for your business without data. If fact, you cannot even grow it without such data. Accountants can prepare data for you to use to make path-changing business decisions. Their reports give you a true picture of your business’ financial status.

Accountants also give you reliable tax advice and lead you through Singapore’s tax system.

Bookkeeping and accounting services Singapore are necessary for your business’s efficient running and growth. You may choose different firms for them. However, trusting a single service provider with your financial information works well.

SBS Consulting Pte Ltd can quickly help you with daily, short-term and long-term financial tracking. Contact us at +65 6536 0036 or info@sbsgroup.com.sg for our accounting and bookkeeping services and customised solutions.