Outsourcing Bookkeeping is Good for Self-Care! No, Really!

Self-care is quite the buzzword these days.  And, there’s a lot of positives to a focus on self-care in our society.

Being able to prioritize health and well-being, whether through restorative yoga practices, journaling, or through focusing on how to generate more positive human connections, good self-care impacts longevity and quality of life.  There is a great Ted Talk playlist on The Importance of Self Care that we would recommend to anyone wanting to explore the topic.  My favorite is Brene Brown’s talk on The Power of Vulnerability, but they’re all worth a watch!

How Does the Accountix Team Practice What it Preaches?

One way that we at Accountix prioritize self-care is by promoting a good work-life balance and a healthy workplace.  It is encouraged to have a regular exercise pattern and what people are doing outside of work is a frequent topic of conversation.

Within the workplace itself, we follow many of Forbes’ tips for achieving work-life balance and encourage our employees to take time for themselves when they need.  Walks outside during lunch and healthy snacks throughout the day help our employees to prioritize health and wellness.  We also feature a variety of options in the office to improve the ergonomics of desk life.  They include:

• A variety of sizes of medicine balls to sit on in lieu of a chair
• Standing/sitting desks
• Foam pads to reduce joint stress while standings
• A Fluidstance balance board (that’s quite the core workout!)
• Quality desk chairs

How do we extend these benefits to our clients?

Recently, the Accountix team lead a survey of our current clients.  It was a pretty general practice just to check in and make sure we were doing a good job. One of the questions was a free-form question and asked: “What have you liked about working with Accountix?”

We wanted to leave the question open-ended to just see what clients felt the positives of working with our outsourced bookkeeping team has been. While many talked about the feeling of calm they get from knowing that their finances are handled, several of our clients also mentioned that since working with the team they have had the power to better allocate the hours in their day.

Business owners are BUSY and it’s hard to achieve any time for self-care when you’re running the whole show.  And, even with the advent of technology and automatic intelligence in the bookkeeping field, the maintenance of even a small business’ finances can take up a lot of valuable time.

We’ve always said at Accountix that we handle the books so that our clients can grow their business.  Our thinking when we made that statement is that if the business owner can take payroll management, bank reconciliation, bill pay, and other bookkeeping services off their to-do list, they can spend more time focusing on their passions, their customer outreach, their relationships with employees, etc.  Until touching in with our clients, though, we hadn’t considered the ways that working with a bookkeeping team frees up hours for one of the more underappreciated (but important!) components of being a business owner that gets lost when they’re too busy: caring for themselves!

Take Care of Yourself, Leave the Books to Us!

It is often said that successful leaders delegate. They trust their team to pick up what they don’t have time to do and are then able to look at the big picture more and lead effectively. There is growing research now that successful leaders also meditate, exercise, and think about their health. The linked articles from Entrepreneur Magazine and Harvard Business Review indicates that good self-care rituals lead to better decision making and all around better quality of life.

We are happy to know that Accountix’s team can do a little bit more than we thought we did.  Let us become part of your self-care ritual and watch your business flourish while you achieve that otherwise unattainable work-life balance.