Your accountant is one of the most important partners that you will have in helping your business become a success. And they do a heck of a lot more than file your taxes.

A good CPA will be your financial advisor and business planner, as well as one of your best networking contacts. They can help you avoid mistakes before they happen and put you in contact with the people who can help grow your business.

Here’s five areas most accounting professional’s excel in. Use them to your full advantage to help your small business. » Read more: Good Accountants And Small Business – One Can’t Work Without The Other

Economic downturns have a way of uncovering the weaknesses lurking just under the surface in businesses. Business inefficiencies that go unnoticed during boom times can quickly cripple a business during a downturn. Those weaknesses and inefficiencies often impact profits, but even more critical is the impact they can have on cash flow.

When cash flow suffers, a business gets squeezed for working capital. Making payroll, buying raw materials, and paying operating expenses becomes difficult. During particularly vicious downturns, vendors and banks are less likely to grant credit and loans, making cash flow even more difficult.  » Read more: Accountants Hold the Key to Unlocking Small Business Cash Flow Mysteries

Perhaps you feel that the time has come. You’ve been outsourcing your IT operations to a local IT company or Managed IT Services Provider. But after looking at the annual cost for IT services, suddenly there are feelings of ambivalence. And it’s at that very moment when many important facts are inadvertently ignored. You just can’t help but think “for what we’ve paid to our IT company, we could’ve hired our own IT person!”

Many small businesses have faced this exact scenario. Why have part-time or per-diem IT support when you could have someone at your disposal, full-time? Think hard and consider these facts, which are based on our real world experiences.

1. Most small businesses owners and managers simply aren’t qualified to hire their own IT staff.

Do you know exactly what skills to look for and how to separate a truly seasoned expert from a well-spoken imposter? Experts say that a bad hire can cost as much as 2-3 times the annual salary of the employee. Here’s a handy calculator from ADP that you can use to estimate bad hire costs. » Read more: Five Reasons To Avoid Hiring An In-House IT Person For Your Small Business

For businesses with a larger workforce, training often requires outsourcing to some degree. In this environment, training becomes less the responsibility of managers. Instead, they merely juggle workloads and provide materials. Conversely, small business owners have smaller training needs and usually a smaller budget to match. As such, they are left to teach their own staff, usually with no experience or background in effectively facilitating a classroom environment. For those business owners, the following staff training tips may prove useful. These tips are written with a small, informal training approach in mind as most small businesses have less than 20 employees.

Staff training tips one is to keep business needs firmly in mind. Do all your employees really need to know how to use all of the office software? Is safety training for equipment usage necessary for all staff that? Would time management training benefit both office and production employees? Keep company goals and objectives firmly in mind when deciding what training, and what training methods work best for your business. A realistic approach to what your business needs in terms of training will keep costs down and prevent boredom on behalf of the employees who really stand to gain nothing from training. » Read more: Staff Training Tips – Training Your Small Business Employees

If you are going to set up your own small business out of your home, you are going to want to implement strong business management in order to see that everything runs well. Since you are the boss now, you are the one that takes the heat for mistakes. The same can be said about any success too however, and this is where it is most enjoyable to be the boss. You have no one to answer too, and this means that you need to make sure that you do everything right.

Setting Up Timetables

Strong business management means that you know how to make the company run effectively. This means that you are going to know when the best times of operation for you are the business will be. Working from home can be a lot harder than many people think, and if you are not serious or dedicated the distractions can easily take their toll. When you work from home, you will easily find things that can take you away from the business itself, and this is why it takes a strong character to make the business flow. » Read more: Strong Business Management