Outsourced Accounting: Is It Right for Your Company?

There are many reasons to outsource your accounting functions, enabling you to focus more on your core business. Here are the main advantages of outsourcing:

• Reduces overhead.
• Cuts training and managing costs.
• Lets you stay productive and keep noncore competencies out of the way of your main business focus.
• Simplifies business processes related to bookkeeping and finance by building good business habits. If you've been neglecting bookkeeping, you may panic when tax time comes; with outsourcing, you can throw out the shoebox and use the Dropbox folder of receipt scans in a positive way.
• Develops good business habits to keep a tighter rein on expenses and lets you know where your company stands financially with accurate and up-to-date bookkeeping records.
• Teaches you the how and why of bookkeeping so you understand what is happening every step of the way.
• Provides the information and analysis you need to seek investment capital.
• Arranges the financial statements you need, along with explanations about the data in those financial statements.
• Offers advice, counsel and insight, helping you monitor all your financial data, including financial statements, budgets, forecasts and dashboards. Your outsourcer should explain what financial statements mean, helping you make decisions and steer your company toward growth.
• Fosters easier ways to change outsourced services than dealing with hiring and firing internal staff.
• Scales with your company's needs. While today you may only need a monthly service to reconcile and close your books, down the road you may need comprehensive daily services. Outsourcing will help you start with a service that can handle your needs today and tomorrow, instead of your having to manage a major transfer from a single part-time in-house bookkeeper in the future.

​Although the advantages can be enormous, you do have to take into account several implications to really make an outsourcing solution work:

• You're dependent on resources outside your four walls.
• You may not hit on the right outsourcing firm the first time. Treat this like you would any vendor or service firm — check recommendations and references and ask to see past work.
• You will have to document all policies and procedures so you know who is responsible for what.
• You have to remember that it's your financial data. Make sure you own your own data — your security depends on it.
• If you don't like to have to email everything or find that not being able to discuss projects face-to-face turns you off, you should know that video conferences work better and better all the time.

What about outsourcing outside of this country? One business owner, Bruce Clark, describes outsourcing as an efficient, professional and profitable tool in his book, "Beyond the NCI (New Clients Inc.) Effect: Sales Strategies That Matter to Grow an Accounting Practice," authored with son Chris. He writes: "We're able to process 50 clients with one part-time person working 80 hours per month. The work is done quickly, correctly and at a fraction of the price if done here in the U.S."

​Are you interested in outsourcing your accounting functions? Give us a call.