Whether you’re a solo veterinary practitioner or manage a multi-location clinic, you get to live your passion every day.
You help clients and their pets improve their quality of life. You can also aid them in recovering from injuries or illnesses. There’s just one thing about the job you dread: veterinary accounting.
You joined this profession to do something meaningful. As such, you don’t want to spend hours crunching numbers or generating reports. The good news is you can eliminate time-consuming tasks and streamline the accounting process by outsourcing to a capable team.
Let’s examine some common challenges that clinics and businesses like yours face. We’ll then shift our attention to the vet practice accounting solution you’ve been looking for.
Solo Vet Practices: Common Accounting Challenges
If you run a solo office, you probably encounter accounting headaches such as the following.
1. Mountains of Paperwork
In small clinics, everyone has to do their part to manage the back office. As you no doubt know, “everyone” includes the vet.
You don’t mind lending a hand, of course. But every minute spent on accounting takes away from patient care. You might see fewer animals each day, meaning some will receive delayed care. Or, you’ll have to re-schedule appointments, hurting customer satisfaction.
2. Poor Revenue Visibility
Want to grow your business and help more pets? If so, you must be able to track revenue and costs. This can feel like a huge task when your back office is out of control.
The first step to improving revenue is to get your finances in order. That means replacing your current time-consuming approach with a better way.
3. Financial Reporting Inefficiencies
Preparing financial reports is a key part of running any business. However, manual accounting methods make creating financial reports difficult.
Basic software includes reporting tools. But these tools are not helpful if your data isn’t up to date. Running reports without all the data available yields inaccurate or incomplete documents.
Multi-Location Vet Practices: Common Accounting Challenges
Multi-location vet practices and animal hospitals face even more accounting hassles, including the following.
1. Tracking Expenses and Revenue Across Several Offices
Keeping track of revenue and expenses is difficult enough. Managing financial data across multiple entities is much harder, especially if your accounting workflow is not organized.
To make sure every location is profitable, you need a way to increase financial visibility and track profit/loss. One important step is to have a Chart of Accounts in place for each location that aligns with the AAHA/VMG Chart of Accounts standard.
This standard is useful for tracking financial information such as revenue, expenses, and balance sheet accounts in small-animal veterinary practices.
2. Managing Inventory
Managing inventory and its associated expenses requires attention to detail and structured, repeatable processes. A lack of inventory visibility can lead to over or under-ordering supplies and medicine for each location.
- A lack of visibility diminishes liquidity and can leave you without the capital you need to absorb other expenses.
- A lack of inventory can lead to stock-outs and diminish the quality of care you provide.
3. Ensuring Taxes Are Handled Correctly
Keeping up with federal tax laws and state-level regulations for each of your locations is an important part of vet accounting.
When you operate in multiple areas, you must deal with different sales tax rates and other regulatory considerations. Overlooking a seemingly minor tax requirement can lead to delayed filings, late fees, and other penalties. Focusing on tax planning is essential for larger entities.
Solve Veterinary Accounting Headaches with Finlyte
Want to make your veterinary accounting woes a distant memory? If so, take advantage of Finlyte’s outsourced accounting services.
We offer a dynamic array of accounting services to support your accounting, finance, and business needs. Whether you simply need a hand getting your financials in order or want to outsource your entire back office accounting function, we’ve got you covered.
- Manage your accounting data.
- Provide a single source of truth for all your financial data.
- Prepare reports.
- Track revenue and costs.
- Assist with tax prep.
- Monitor business performance and keep you in the loop.
Schedule a consultation today to learn more about our accounting support. Your practice – big or small – stands to benefit from working with our expert team.
