HR’s tasks are wide ranging and span across the business. Interviewing, hiring, and onboarding are the most common functions but not all of them. Handling employee training and concerns, managing payroll, and ensuring legal compliance are all essential human resources tasks. Essentially, HR becomes a link between employer and employee, and also acts as an arbitrator who prevents or resolves workplace issues.

The question now for managers and owners: is the time required to handle all of those staff-related issues worth your time or is it better for the company for you to focus on growing the business and running day-to-day operations?

Organizations with less than 20 employees are often better off when the owner delegates HR responsibilities to someone else, experts say. One school of thought says the general organization of your business is an indicator as to when you need HR. As a business grows and roles and departments become formalized, that’s when HR needs to be brought on. Another school believes headcount is the indicator to listen to – once the business has between 50-100 employees is when a human resources department should be considered.

Perhaps the most important factor is by focusing on revenue and asking “Would my time be better spent growing the business?” If you can use that time to generate additional revenue then the cost of a new salary is worth it.

Another important factor to consider is that HR deals with a lot of paperwork that requires precision and dedication. If a business owner is barely coping with the responsibilities of running the business and managing HR, they could find themselves in record-keeping trouble fast. Important paperwork, up-to-date records, archived materials are just a few of the backend things HR deals with and that need to be exact as documentation issues can quickly balloon into legal problems.

It is not only important for business leaders to delegate at the right time, you should also consider whom you’re entrusting with this work and how they will add value to the position, department, and company.

Finally, if you do decide to start an HR department, you need to find someone who is discreet and can be trusted, is organized, and is an empathetic listener who can properly guide employees. Ideally, that person would understand and appreciate small business and have experience in that environment. 

This doesn’t mean you have to employ a full-time accountant or hire one on a retainer. Sometimes just a couple of hours of professional time is enough. The answer depends on how long it would take you to do tasks such as taxes, and then ask yourself, can I find a better use of my time? 

For example, if it takes you 5 hours to do taxes and your time is worth $100 an hour. That’s a cost of $500 to do your taxes yourself. Also, there’s the risk you make errors and mistakes, especially if you’re multi-tasking as most business owners do. If you hire an accountant, it’s likely they will cost less per hour, allow you to focus on revenue generation, and get the details right.

Having an accountant during the formation of a business is important because they can help with ideation and formation of a business plan, advise you on your business’s entity structure, and help you set up your bookkeeping from the ground up. Most small businesses don’t need to have a bookkeeper on an ongoing basis immediately but there comes a point where you’ll want to outsource these activities.Until then, you can probably handle your own bookkeeping and hire a bookkeeper to do periodic reviews of your work. 

An accountant can also help measure key metrics such as the ratio of salaries and other employee payments to total revenue. If the accountant uses cloud-based accounting software, they can share your business accounts quickly and easily and they can produce tables and charts that will better your understanding of your company’s current financial situation. Accountants also help improve your chances with bank loans. Just the fact that you have an accountant can make the bank look at you favorably. The accountant will be able to answer any questions your bank has about revenue projections and expenses and guide you to choose which loan to go for, what the terms and conditions are, and which interest rate is better for you.

As you can tell, accountants help out during every stage of a company’s development. This doesn’t mean you have to hire one right now, just know, the right accountant makes life easier for you and lets you concentrate on growing your business.

A qualified accountant will be able to:

• Complete and file legal and compliance documents related to your business
• Stay up-to-date with the latest tax policies and regulations
• Prepare annual, audit-ready financial statements 
• Keep your company’s status updated with the relevant ministry
• Maintain administrative and personnel documents
• Manage payroll