The most difficult task a business owner faces is the financial management of the business. Bookkeeping is particularly in retail with stock control, staff management and a multitude of other issues that make running your business extremely time-consuming. Bookkeeping is one of those huge time eating stress creating tasks.
Bookkeeping leads to overwhelm - overwhelm leads to stress
Because of time pressures, most often bookkeeping is done after hours when you really should be relaxing, reading a book or spending time with your family.
Doing your books after hours is stressful and impacts on the quality of your sleep. You can’t get a refreshing sleep if your brain is too active with numbers and accounts tumbling around in your mind.
This overwhelm can result in your books being left until the last minute exacerbating the problem.
Outsourcing your bookkeeping saves you time and money
Outsourcing your business’s bookkeeping operations frees up valuable time enabling you to spend your time more productively.
Back-end office functions can be a heavy distraction from the day-to-day running of things and having your bookkeeping in-house can lead to a conflict of interests. All of these time-wasters and distractions need to go—out of sight, out of mind.
But there are a couple of other even more relevant reasons to outsource your bookkeeping. If you're relaxed 1) you'll make better decisions and 2) you will be more creative in your thinking.
The more relaxed you are, the better your decisions. The term ‘sleep on it’ now has a basis in science.
Why your time is so valuable - Sleep inspires insight
Most good ideas and insights come after you have had a good sleep. Wagner U1, Gais S, Haider H, Verleger R, Born J. confirmed that this in their 2004 study conducted by Sleep inspires insight. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14737168?dopt=Abstract
The critical link between sleep and problem-solving
Participants in the study were given a task that included a shortcut.
They found that only 20 percent of the participants were sharp enough to spot the shortcut even though most wrestled the task for several hours. The key part of the experiment was that Wagner and Born let some of the participants sleep between experimental trials. To their surprise, 59 percent of the participants in the sleep condition found the shortcut. The research team concludes that sleeping and dreaming “facilitates extraction of explicit knowledge and insightful behavior.”
In 2004, the neuroscientists Ullrich Wagner and Jan Born published a paper in Nature that examined the relationship between sleep and problem solving. In one experiment, they tasked participants with transforming a long list of number strings. The task required participants to apply a set of algorithms that would scare off most save a handful of math geeks. However, the researchers integrated an elegant shortcut that made the task easier. How many people, Wagner and Born asked, would catch it? Reference
A relaxed state of mind encourages creative thinking and insights
Wieth and Zacks conducted another interesting study. Their study also established a strong link between a relaxed state of mind, creative thinking and insights.
One lesson from Wieth and Zacks study is that when it comes to moments of insight, it’s important to approach a problem with a relaxed state of mind. Historical examples of this include Henrí Poincaré, who conceived non-Euclidean geometry while boarding a bus; Arthur Fry, who thought up the Post-It note while singing hymnals in his church choir; and Archimedes, whose eureka moment came during a bath (though this is likely a myth).
Repose, not Red-Bull, is key when it comes to moments of insight. Reference
Sleepless nights?
One of the most common reasons business operators stay awake at night is because of the books. Bookkeeping, BAS returns, wages, and taxation issues all contribute to after hours work that reduces relaxation time and quality of sleep and increases stress.
Reduced relaxation time and quality of sleep: The consequences
Stress reduces sleep quality that leads to more stress - a vicious cycle
If you're not careful, stress can be a catalyst for a vicious cycle of sleepless nights: You're stressed, so you can't sleep. And then your lack of sleep makes you more stressed, and so on. According to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, nearly three-fourths of adults say that their stress-induced sleep problems have caused an increase of stress or anxiety in their lives. Reference
Outsourcing accounting services does make sense, but the benefits don’t end there.
More reasons to outsource your accounting
If you outsource your bookkeeping you save money, have specialist expertise on your side, and experienced staff focussed on your business. You contract a team to help you grow your pharmacy.
For more information contact peak Strategies because we specialise in the Pharmaceutical and medical industry.
When you outsource your pharmacy’s bookkeeping, you get to work on your business - not in your business. You get to 'think outside the box.'
Because you get more help you get more time to relax which means you’ll solve more problems, sleep better, get more insights into your business, and make better decisions because you will be working on your business not in your business.
For more information contact John Thornett from Peak Strategies, specialists in the pharmaceutical and medical industry.
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