Written by Ask yourself why you went into business for yourself. We’ll bet you don’t respond with ‘to spend my days working on financial accounts’!

Managing your accounts yourself is an understandable approach, particularly amongst start-ups and small businesses. After all, it’s these early days where you need to be as frugal as possible to turn a profit and begin to grow your enterprise.

However, it turns out that by taking on this administration yourself, you’re actually costing your business money rather than saving it.

What if we told you that managing your business accounts is losing you at least £15,000 a year?

Gravitate Accounting surveyed over 500 business owners in the UK, and 27% stated that they tackle payroll, VAT returns, invoices and other finance-related admin tasks themselves.

This takes up, on average, over 80 days per year, according to the study, time that you could spent growing your business. So we worked out magic and calculated that based on this data, every year, UK businesses waste more than £25million.

Additionally, 54% of businesses surveyed reported that, they don’t have bank feeds tied into their accounting software, and nearly 20% don’t use any accounting software at all. This disconnect means they’re spending even more time away from their businesses than they have to and, more importantly, losing even more money.

Only 42% of small-to-medium companies are still operational after five years; therefore, finding ways to save as much as possible is essential for the safety and health of your business.

More than that, you may not be aware of the multiple ways you could save money and be efficient with your company finances.

What £15,000 annual savings could mean for your business

£15,000 is a considerable loss, one that could be put to much better use. For example, you could use your savings to:

• Take on an apprentice – the minimum age for an apprentice aged 16-18 means their gross salary would be £6,708 each year for a 30 hour-per-week contract.
• Build your own warehouse space – each square foot will cost you between £64 and £84 to build your own space rather than rent it. That means that you can snap up 178 square feet of space on the lowest end of the scale to store your products.
• Set up a great financial system. Just over 15% of UK firms polled haven’t done this, which means they are spending far more time and money than required monitoring business budgeting, pursuing bad debts, and other time consuming tasks.
• Launch an entirely new product line – most enterprises raise £5,000 to launch their business. So, you could easily launch three entirely new product lines with your savings.​