IN ORDER TO CREATE a business that will thrive through all the fluctuations in your industry, you will need extraordinary planning as well as exceptional analysis. You will also need to make decisions that will not harm the business. Therefore, the success or the failure of the business will largely depend on your business acumen. Second to that will be the quality of your services or products. There are some business basics that you should keep in mind when starting a business. One of the most important (and most commonly overlooked) is the legal and accounting representation of the business.

When you start developing your business, the first thing that you will need to entrench is both your accounting and legal roles. Very small businesses that tend to be owned by a sole proprietor or run by a partnership can realistically perform their own accounting and bookkeeping. Similarly, for legal representation, a very small business can also contract a personal lawyer who will look into things when the needs arise.  However, for companies with a much larger structure, this has to be handled differently.  Larger companies will need to employ an accountant for their accounting representation.  Depending on how big the company is, the business may even need to enlist the help of banking professionals for their accounting needs. The same applies for the legal representation of a large business. Larger companies are better off contracting a law firm to handle their legal representation, as a personal lawyer would find the workload overwhelming. Before you sign a contract with anyone to do either your accounting or legal representation, ensure that you have done the proper background check and performance research. This does not matter whether it is a small business or a large company as the ramifications would be the same if you trusted your business to an individual or firm that is unscrupulous or incompetent. Getting the right legal and accounting representation for your company will ensure that it will not suffer any unnecessary downfalls or losses.

Accounting representation for your business is also important as it enables you to accurately assess the financial performance of your business. Documents such as financial statements, cash flow statements, and even balance sheets give you an indication of how well your business is doing or if you are incurring losses. This, in turn, enables you to plan a way forward if the business is making losses. Without accounting representation, you will not have an idea of where your business is headed because you will not be able to accurately take into account any profits or losses that your business has experienced.

One major mistake that most businesses make when they begin to become successful is that they forget the importance of legal representation as well as accounting representation. Instead, they focus on customer service, which should not be neglected, but neither should the financial and legal part of the business. Getting accurate legal and accounting representation could make or break a business.