Duluth Accounting Disaster Preparedness
Do you know how Duluth accounting disaster preparedness protects small businesses? If you have an outsourced accounting firm on board to handle your financial management, do you also know they can keep you afloat should disaster strike? Disasters can show up in many ways. You could be facing a natural disaster, a data breach, or a tech failure. Here’s what you need to know about Duluth accounting and disaster preparedness.
Be Ready for Natural Disasters
When a natural disaster hits your area, and that isn’t uncommon in the southeastern part of the United States, it can wipe out a significant portion of a town or significantly impact a city. Statistics show that nearly 25% of businesses can’t bounce back after a natural disaster, closing for good after one strike. There are ways to prepare yourself and your company. First, have an emergency preparedness plan in place. You can find useful information and advice from the U.S. Small Business Administration. You can find disaster checklists, sources for disaster assistance programs, and emergency preparedness training courses.
Aside from prepping for the disaster itself, it would help if you had a plan for backing up, restoring, or safely relocating vital hard-copy records and files. This is where your outsourced accounting firm comes in. They can ensure you have enough cash to cover expenses and cover lost or delayed income during the post-disaster downtime and recovery. They will also have a backup of your financial information, data, bookkeeping records, and tax filings.
Guard Against Data Breaches
We’ve all heard about the dreaded data breach. Some of us have probably even been victims of such personal data violations. Which is why it’s vital to protect yourself from such a disaster, whether to prevent it or to recover from it should it happen. If someone hacks into your company information, you can lose not only your private data but your entire company. When you outsource your accounting, you don’t have the security risk of storing your financial information on a local computer or a local network. Your accounting firm will have a security protocol in place that you might not be able to integrate yourself. These security measures will keep your information safe from outside sources.
Prepare for Technology Failures
Have you ever gotten the blue screen of death on your laptop or computer? At first, you freeze – could this be right? Then you get angry – come on, computer! Then you panic – oh no. Because you know that if your computer crashes, you’ve probably just lost everything stored on it. The good news is that most people and small businesses are getting better and better at backing up their data to an external storage device, the cloud, or some other service provider. Unless you forget, or you plan to do it someday, but you haven’t yet. Or if your entire network fails. Please don’t put your financial information and all of your data at risk by storing it locally or forgetting to back it up. Put it in the hands of an outsourced accountant, and you can rest assured they have backups for their backups. If you have a tech failure at your business, your accounting is still safe.
There are countless ways your Duluth small business could be at risk from a disaster. Taking necessary precautions can keep you out of hot water and keep you in business even when unforeseen things happen. One way to protect your business is by taking advantage of all of the things an outsourced accountant can offer, including financial preparation and guidance if you experience downtime following a disaster and security for your data.
Contact Duluth Accounting Disaster Preparedness Experts
Call 678-990-0924 for a consultation with our experts at Accounting Partners to learn how we can help with Duluth accounting and disaster preparedness for your business.
