Accounting is the language that we use to communicate the health of our business. When many of us think of accounting we think of April 15th – TAX DAY.

However, there is a lot more to the accounting function with respect to the Service Firm owner than taxes. A competent CPA should be able to file your taxes and prepare statements for banks, creditors and other stakeholders in your business.

However, the overall goal of your accountant should be to help you accumulate and preserve wealth. Saving taxes is just a small part of this overall task. A competent accountant recognizes that he/she needs to be a valuable member of his/her client's management team and is able to provide many more added value services than just tax preparation. The growing pest management business needs help with many of the financial aspects of their business.

As your business grows you need the internal structure and financial controls to support this growth. This aspect of accounting is called Management Accounting and will be the focus of this article. Management Accounting has to do with compiling and reporting information that you need to improve the results of your operations.

Many CPAs are in a unique position to help you in this area by helping you to set up procedures to accurately record the daily transactions associated with doing business and by making observations about your firm and comparing that information to other clients that they work with. Your accountant should be a trusted member of your management team, providing you information on ways to improve the efficiency of your business.

The following are essential elements of the inside accounting function required to run a successful pest management business.

Preparation of Financial Statements

Financial Statements are the culmination of the accounting process. They are used to convey a concise picture of the profitability and financial position of your company. The two most important financial statements that allow you to get an accurate snap shot of the results of your business are the Profit and Loss Statement (P/L) and the Balance Sheet.

The P/L shows how much profit or loss your firm made for a given period. But more importantly it shows how that profit or loss was derived by category of expense and revenue. It is extremely important that your accountant understand the pest management industry because we use terminology specific to the industry (i.e. specials, intensives, one shots, baiting, termite labor, pest labor, etc.), and we have certain financial benchmarks to rate our businesses using this terminology that are unique to our industry.

The entire accounting process revolves around a general ledger chart of accounts. A chart of accounts is nothing more than a list of categories that define how we record our revenues, expenses, assets, liabilities and net worth. Without specific knowledge of our industry an accountant will use a generic business chart of accounts, perhaps the same chart of accounts that a candy store might use.

A growing pest management firm that uses a generic chart of accounts is at a distinct disadvantage to the larger players in the industry who use their chart of accounts to generate financial statements that allow them to analyze their businesses and answer important questions such as:

• Is my Material expense in line with my revenue?
• Is my direct labor cost in line with my overall revenues?
• Am I spending more or less as a percentage of revenues than the average firm on advertising?
• What percentage of my revenue do I spend on running my office?
• What are my vehicle costs as a percentage of revenues?
• I know I spend a lot on overtime…But do I spend too much on overtime?
  

The Balance sheet shows the financial position of a firm on a given date (i.e. assets, liabilities and net worth).

An easy way to distinguish the P/L from the balance sheet would be to think of the P/L as a statement showing how our business did in terms of revenue, profit, and growth for a given period, and the balance sheet would show us what our firm is worth as a result of all cumulative P/Ls and financing activities in the past.

Bookkeeping

Your accountant should be able to help you prepare your financial statements by providing you with bookkeeping services or over seeing the person who performs your bookkeeping. With the proliferation of the Internet many accountants now offer online bookkeeping services. This is an outstanding way for the Pest Management Professional to have his internal accounting supervised by a qualified accounting professional at a very reasonable cost, and it is done using ATM like security.

In this day and age, most bookkeeping is done using a computer. In this regard, I suggest that the Service firm owner and his accountant use two types of software:

1. The first program should be industry specific and track all the money coming into the business. More specifically, revenue types, customer payments and accounts receivables. This program should also provide you with information on technician productivity, and other marketing and operational information used to run your business.
   
   The program should have the capability to provide you with periodic reports that can easily be exported to your accounting general ledger package. One such program that I've had experience with and provides excellent reporting is PestPac ® or Routepoint ® by Marathon Data.
   
   
2. The second program should be an off the shelf accounting general ledger and accounts payable system such as QuickBooks ® by Intuit or Peachtree ® by Sage Software. For the most part we as service firm owners do not keep large complicated inventories or sell our services using sophisticated point of purchase devices and therefore don't require elaborate and very expensive general ledger programs.
   
   In most cases these off the shelf programs should be adequate, and they are extremely powerful. However, they need to be set up properly to give you the type of information that you require.

These programs will provide you information such as how much money you owe to suppliers, how much you have paid them in the past, and profit by service class. The general ledger program will actually generate financial statements at the push of a button. One word of caution though, the statements produced are only as good as the as the data entered into the package. Therefore your accountant should set up office procedures to insure that information is entered into your accounting system in an accurate fashion.

Budgeting:

Budgeting is nothing more than formulating a coherent financial plan for some period in the future, usually one to two years. As the plan is implemented we are able to rate our efforts compared to the budget that we created. Budgeting allows us to predict the amount of technicians, vehicles, equipment, etc. that we will need in the future based on our revenue projections.

While many business owners think that they are too busy to do budgeting, there is nothing further from the truth. You see, the reason that most small business people do not budget is because they are so concerned with meeting a payroll each week, that they rarely take time to plan. Lack of planning continues a vicious cycle that underscores a relationship between the failure of a business to maximize its profits and the absence of planning. If you are running a growing service firm you can't afford not to budget for the future.

During the budgeting process we determine the areas of spending that we can reduce. Revenues are analyzed to determine which are the most profitable and if there are other sources of revenue that can contribute profitably to the bottom line. Budgeting should be done annually and actual results should be compared to budgets monthly.

Accounts Receivable Management

Accounts Receivable Management is an extremely important area of Management Accounting. A business that doesn't have control of its accounts receivable will usually have poor cash flow and have trouble meeting its expenses in a timely fashion.

Accounts Receivable Management starts with laying out a formal procedure for their collection. This procedure starts with an Accounts Receivable aging report. This report should categorize the firm's receivables by age. There should be a “Current”, “Thirty”, “Sixty”, and “Over Ninety Day” column. At each point along the way a collection effort should be made (i.e. at 30 days perhaps a phone call to the customer, at 60 days perhaps a letter and at 90 days perhaps a stronger effort). In any event the pest management firm should not allow a very large percentage of their receivables to go over the sixty-day column. History shows that the older a receivable is, the more difficult it is to collect.

Conclusion

The accounting function is far more than filling out tax returns. The accounting function in the successful service firm allows the owner to make sound business decisions about expansion, cost reduction and efficient operation of his firm. The Management Accounting function provides controls that insure financial transactions are recorded properly and provides the information that allows the successful owner to make those decisions based on hard facts.

At a minimum, the internal procedures within a pest management firm should include the use of financial statements, a well-supervised bookkeeping function, a formal budgeting procedure and an aggressive accounts receivable management program.

As your firm grows there are several other aspects of management accounting that should be explored and implemented. But the firm that successfully uses the principles of Management Accounting outlined above will accumulate much more in terms of wealth than the firm that operates by “Shooting From The Hip.”