Accounting is a crucial activity in the life of any business – whatever the core activity of the business and whatever its size, it will need a wide range of accountancy services, from recording sales and expenditure to filing tax returns and from ensuring compliance with tax laws to activities related to payroll. Here are some of the most common services that professional accountant firms and independent accountants offer.
Accounting and Bookkeeping
The most common service provided by accountants is, no surprise, accounting – the process of producing financial records, of tracking revenues and expenditure in a way that provides accurate, up-to-date information regarding the financial situation of the company whenever the information is needed.
Accountants and accountancy firms also offer bookkeeping services – a service that also involves keeping track of transactions, like accounting, but at the more basic level of recording invoices, bills and other transactions in the relevant accounts sections. Bookkeeping is a service that is usually available not only from full-fledged accountants, but from bookkeepers as well.
Auditing and Consultation
An Accountant Highlands Ranch professional can also perform financial audits to identify weak points that require improvement and to help with achieving certain financial goals, such as consolidation, growth or the reduction of debt. Many companies need such audits and consultation occasionally, either because the owner or the management need the data for deciding whether moving into a certain direction would increase profitability or because the company’s internal guidelines or other documents require them.
Preparing Tax Documents and Tax Filing
Another important and common area of specialty for accountants is the provision of services related to taxes. Accountant Highlands Ranch financial professionals keep up with the legislative changes that affect the techniques used for calculating taxes and filing tax documents and they ensure that the company’s accountancy practices are in compliance with the applicable laws. Accountancy firms use the company’s revenue and expenditure calculations to fill in tax documents and to file those documents by the deadlines they need to be filed.
Specialty Services
Beside the services related to the client company’s day to day finances and tax return calculations, many accountants also offer specialty services, such as consultations to help with financial planning or business valuation, that is, the calculation of the company’s value based on the company’s assets, liabilities and its position on the market to be used for the purposes of mergers and acquisitions or for credit purposes.
To meet the demand for systems that ensure the highest level of security for business data, many accountancy companies have included information security services into their range. Clients can use these services to examine the integrity of their computer systems as well as of their IT practices to prevent data loss, security breaches, data theft and other illegal activities that could have dramatic consequences for the company’s operations.
Another area of specialty services provided by accountants and accountancy firms is forensic accountancy. Forensic accounting is practically the examination of a company’s finances and the preparation of documents that summarize the findings of the examination for being used in legal proceedings.
