This is a great point. With all things in a business, you need to decide what you want to outsource. Whether it's radiography or bookkeeping, everyone's situation is unique, and you're not a cheapskate if you crunch the numbers and base your decision on that
Hey, he's talking about me!
I'm doing my own bookkeeping. I really feel like it gives me a great opportunity to understand my finances and expenses. I spent an hour on it this week going through every account/button on Xero teaching my wife, but I could have done it myself in 10 minutes and been up to date. At my last office, my partner fired an office manager who had done our Quickbooks work and he wanted to pay the office accountant $1400 a month to do the bookkeeping. Fancy people want fancy prices. Started implementing rules so future income reconcilation will be even easier - everything Novitas, Cigna, BCBS will just be a click to reconcile. I really feel like this is one of the parts of a business that an owner needs to understand completely before they pass it off to someone else. I also think there's something hilarious about paying someone else to input your receipts for you. You potentially already have to pull the invoices out of your accounts so by the time you put together everything someone else needs you'll already be about 10 minutes from the job being done. But to each their own.
I also changed all my air filters. Office has -6-, but after I changed them I decided that next time I would go longer because they didn't look that bad. Past office again paid someone to do this for us. We didn't buy the filters so I'm sure there was an upcharge there too.
Sprayed weeds in my parking lot a week ago and did some edging. Laid mulch. The past owner had planted groundcover in a front bed and it was climbing over into and covering part of a handicap ramp at the corner of the street. Cut it all back.
What's funny to me about all these things is yeah - if I saw 25-30 people a day and was swamped I could just pay someone else. But I'm not really doing that much work and the most I've seen in a day is 13 people. The act of spraying/cutting weeds taught me something more valuable - I don't need a yard crew coming out digging me for $200 every other week with nothing actually to cut. There's not enough work for them. I've had the building for like 3-4 months and it took the dead of summer and me being out of town for a weekend for things to get out of hand and lead to 1 partial morning of work. What I really need to do is - patch the parking lot. The places where weeds are growing are minor damage spots in the parking lot. If I clean them and patch them there won't be weeds there.
All of this will seem laughable to hospital people being showered with money, but I'm out here trying to spend an hour a week getting stuff right in the hopes that I can turn my prior "keep 40%" situation into a "keep 50-60%" situation. Yeah, the same amount of time into podiatry work should produce more income, but I already played that game at my last office. No amount of increased work seemed to produce increased income. I'm controlling the cost side this time.
