Top 5 reasons to outsource accounting services

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Top 5 reasons to outsource accounting services

The office of Care Accounting in Narrabeen, outside of Sydney, Australia, had pretty much reached capacity and Bernie Gore, the firm’s chief caring accountant, was finding it tough to recruit accountants who would come work in the suburbs.

In Omaha, Nebraska, Stephanie Flansberg, executive vice-president of Verdant Accounting, faced a similar struggle. She found past tax seasons to be a “disaster,” due to not being able to find quality help during that time of year.

What Bernie and Stephanie have in common is not only their challenges in finding qualified staff, but the fact they turned to outsourced accounting for help. Their moves have paid off. Care Accounting has seen rapid growth in its number of clients, and Verdant has increased its capacity and is now delivering a better client experience.

Why outsource accounting?

Increasing capacity and finding qualified staff are only two reasons to outsource your work. If you’re the owner of an accounting or bookkeeping firm who’s also interested in improving your work-life balance and profitability, and learning about how the outsourced accounting process is easier than you may think, then keep reading because we’ll explain the advantages of outsourcing.

1. Outsourced accounting lets you focus on business development

Outsourced accounting will increase your capacity because you’ll have a global team completing your accounting and compliance work. This will enable you to turn your focus to business development – you’ll have the time to zero in on things such as how to improve your clients’ experience, for example, and on acquiring more clients.

Businesses that have outsourced their work have found this to be true. Eighty per cent of 1,700 small and medium-sized businesses indicated that what they appreciate most about outsourced accounting is that it gave them more time to focus on the business, Bill.com’s 2018 Client Accounting Services Survey suggests. Other results from the survey revealed that outsourced accounting:

  • Makes accounting easier and more efficient (for 60 per cent of respondents)
  • Enables owners to be more prepared to make decisions for their business (31 per cent)
  • Enables owners to create a plan for growth (23 per cent)
  • Owners worry less about mistakes (53 per cent)

One way TOA Global finds great workers for its clients is through hiring events, where candidates are made to feel welcome and appreciated.

2. Outsourced accounting can provide you with qualified staff

An outsourced accounting service provider will take care of your staffing needs by recruiting the team members you need to do your work and presenting you with their resumes/CVs and test scores. This saves you time on recruitment. Yet you still get to interview and choose who you want to add to your team.

“We had a really great experience with the quality of the candidates that were being introduced to us,” says Jonathan Badger, co-founder and partner of Badger CPA, a TOA Global client. “The quality of the resumes that we were seeing were just world-class.”

Shannon Badger, also a co-founder and partner of Badger CPA, adds she and Jonathan have been “thrilled” with the amount of responsibility their global team has been able to take on.

Providing you with qualified staff doesn’t end once you hire them, though. TOA Global, for example, offers team members continuing education opportunities through courses that will upgrade their skills and knowledge, enabling them to provide even more value to you and your clients.

A good outsourced accounting service provider will even help you build a good work culture and sense of belonging between your onshore and offshore teams.

3. Outsourced accounting can improve your work-life balance

With a global team now doing the work you were spending extra hours on completing, you have that time back to spend as you like. Take that creative writing class you’ve always been interested in or go to the gym without feeling like you have to quickly squeeze in a workout. Clock out at 5 p.m. and spend the evening with your kids.

Husband-and-wife team Shannon and Jonathan Badger are parents to four kids, ages 8 and under.

“Our relationship with TOA has directly impacted my ability to spend more time with my kids,” says Shannon. “I was probably consistently working 50 to 60 hours a week.”

With adequate time to rest and recharge, you can tackle each workday awake and alert, and give those higher-level tasks the concentration they deserve. You may enjoy work more, too.

This is the case for Shannon. “I enjoy my business and my work more because the client meetings that I’m in now are the more strategic meetings that I should be in that I enjoy and make my heart happy.”

Outsourced accounting can boost your profitability because you’ll have the time to work on attracting more clients.

4. Outsourced accounting can improve your profitability

This benefit relates to having the time to focus on business development and improving efficiency in-house, because your global team is working on the day-to-day tasks.

With a firm that’s running efficiently and with a business development strategy in place, you can then increase your profitability because you have the bandwidth to take on more clients and/or offer them a more specialized service, and a better overall client experience, too.

The results from Bill.com’s 2018 Client Accounting Services Survey backs this up: 28 per cent of survey respondents said outsourced accounting led to increased profit, and 23 per cent said it resulted in increased revenue.

5. The outsourced accounting process isn’t as complicated as you may think

Once you decide to outsource work, you need to get your business ready. This involves determining your business objectives, taking stock of what tasks can be completed by a global team (don’t hesitate to ask your current onshore team members to contribute to this list), and mapping out workflows. Then assign a member of your onshore team to serve as a “champion” to oversee your global team.

An outsourced accounting service provider such as TOA Global will also partner you with an account manager and client experience manager who will help you reach your business goals and manage your global team.

One sign that it might be time to outsource accounting is if you’re spending a lot of time on accounting and compliance work instead of business planning.

OK, but when should I outsource accounting?

The answers to whether you should outsource accounting and when you should outsource accounting are similar. Consider the following factors. If you find yourself nodding your head as you read them, then delegating your work to a global team may be the next step to take soon.

  • Your firm is growing and you need to increase your capacity to accommodate that growth
  • You’re having trouble finding qualified staff
  • Hiring and managing another employee and taking on the overhead costs is too challenging
  • You’d like a better work-life balance
  • You’d like to be able to focus more on growing your business but can’t, because you’re in the thick of “just getting the job done”

Conclusion

Once you’ve determined you should outsource accounting, you can look forward to embarking on the journey through an easy process, scaling your firm because you have the time to focus on business development and becoming more profitable, peace of mind in knowing your day-to-day tasks are being completed by a qualified global team, and a better work-life balance.

If that sounds good to you and you want to learn more, then sign up for our free accounting outsourcing strategy and plan and let us help you get started.