Business financial statements and financial documents are essential for any growing business. Financial documents and statements are needed to stay compliant and are necessary if you are audited for any reason. If you face any sort of internal or external investigation, not having required documents can result in severe penalties and fines.
There are other reasons to back up your small-business financial statements, too. These documents provide important clues to help you grow your business. Being able to review past financial data, sales, revenues, expenses, debts and other financial details can help you evaluate how you got to your current status and can help you recreate past wins. Looking at past financial data can also help you avoid the pitfalls you may have already learned from.
Why Should You Back up Your Business Financial Statements?
You may feel your business financial statements are secure. If you run a paper-based business, your documents may be in locked file cabinets in an office space. If you have a digitized system, your financial statements may be on a secure hard drive or even in the cloud, which can make you feel even more secure.
While you may take many steps to ensure the security of your financial statements, however, many things can go wrong. If a natural disaster or fire occurs in your area, your documents and hard drives may be ruined. If hackers or malware targets your computer system, you may lose your digitized statements and even your backup. Even if your statements are in the cloud, you never know when they are accidentally deleted or targeted by someone holding a grudge.
Now that you know why you should back up your business financial statements, how can you make sure your statements are backed up correctly? There are a few ways to get a little peace of mind:
- Set up automatic backups on all computer systems
- Back up software as well as files
- In addition to automated backups, conduct regular manual backups
- Back up data onto external hard drives, secure cloud servers and disks every time you backup
- Keep data you have backed up secure in safe locations
If you would like bookkeeping support to ensure your financial statements are accurate, compliant and secure, contact SLC Bookkeeping for bookkeeping services aimed at growing businesses. Our outsourced bookkeeping services can help you ensure your financial statements are safer.
