Why vacations are good for your business

By the time you read this, I will have just returned from a family vacation where both my husband and I were able to get away with our kids and enjoy time together. As a self-employed bookkeeper, I know how stressful it can be to try to leave your business, but I can’t stress enough how important it is to take time away from your business to rest and rejuvenate. It’s also important for your employees to take vacation!

Even if you just get away for an extended weekend, your business will benefit.

Here are three reasons that vacations are good for you and your business:

Cross training

By leaving the business operations to your employees, you are helping them learn new skills and see different sides of the business as they are sharing new responsibilities. Cross training your staff will help them learn new skills and it will better equip the entire team to cover for when someone is absent (including you!).

Helps catch potential fraud

Fraud is something we never want to suspect because we all want to believe everyone we deal with in our business has our best interests at heart. According to the 2018 Association of Certified Fraud Examiners Fraud & Abuse Report to the Nations, small businesses lose almost twice as much per scheme to occupational fraud compared to large corporations. In 2018, the median loss for businesses with less than 100 employees was $200,000 compared to $104,000 for businesses with greater than 100 employees. 

Most people think of fraud as a white collar, big corporation-type crime but the statistics consistently show that it’s small businesses and nonprofit organizations that have the highest instances of fraudulent behavior.

So how does vacation time help catch fraud? Asset misappropriation, i.e. stealing money, is the most common category of fraud, occurring in 89% of the cases in the 2018 Report to the Nations. 

By having an employee take time off and have someone else do their job, it is possible to catch any fraudulent disbursements that they were doing. The substitute employee will start questioning things that don't look right. Generally speaking, an employee can't steal money if they are not at work. This is often how fraud schemes are blown wide open.

Even God rested

Even God, the Creator of our universe, rested on the seventh day. According to Stephen Covey’s “Seven Habits for Highly Effective People,” this concept is called “sharpening the saw.” If you keep trying to saw with an increasingly dull blade, you will get nowhere and even get behind on your work. If you stop working long enough to sharpen your proverbial saw, you will be refreshed and more capable of doing your job.

Self-care may be a buzzword, but it’s true. You need to take care of yourself by taking a break from work so that you or your team members can come back refreshed and do your best work.

Let me help

One of the reasons small business owners don’t like taking vacations is because they feel overwhelmed with all that goes into running a business. I can help lessen the load by managing your bookkeeping, giving you the peace of mind you need to know your finances are in order. Also, stay tuned for my next blog where I give tips on how to go about going on vacation when you’re a small business owner!