From about January to April, every finance professional’s primary focus (or at least primary source of frustration) is taxes: getting ready for taxes, doing taxes, answering so (so) many questions about taxes. However, there is a whole lot more to bookkeeping than making sure your financials are tax-worthy.

If the world hit a big reset button tomorrow and taxes were simultaneously, globally eradicated, a lot of professions would go away. There would be no tax preparers, of course, but also significantly reduced need for financial advisors (why bother with tax shelters?), and payroll companies (can’t I just hand my employees whatever I’d like to pay them?).

But you would still need a bookkeeper.

You would still need to track not only your income and expenses, but also who owed you money, and to whom you owed money. You would still have loans to track, and need to break out the amortized interest from the repayments. You would still need to know how much your assets were worth, and how much your company as a whole was worth.

There are so many things a good bookkeeper can do for you that are relevant not only at tax time, but throughout the year and over the whole life of your business.

Take some time, away from tax season, to take a look at your financials and discuss them with your bookkeeping professional. Getting the best possible tax return is important, but there’s so much more you can be using your financial data for.