Benefits of Outsourcing Your Accounting

Hiring in today’s climate is difficult, and many small businesses are not confident doing their own accounting. More and more owners are finding that outsourcing is the best answer for their business for a number of reasons.

Refocusing strengths

• Wearing too many hats dilutes your effectiveness in driving your organization’s success. Letting an experienced and trustworthy accounting team take over the details will free you up to focus on the big picture.
• Leaders who attempt to DIY their financials often miss out on important time needed to focus on strategizing the main goals of the organization.

Cost savings

• Outsourcing to a firm that devotes significant resources to hiring and managing the most qualified team eliminates the need for you to recruit, hire, train and handle turnover for an accounting staff.
• A full-time, salaried accountant can be overkill for your specific needs and includes collateral costs such as office space and benefits.
• The level of accounting support you need will change with the life cycles of your business. Outsourcing your accounting allows the involvement to increase or decrease as needed without losing continuity.
• An experienced team will set you up for growth, and understands what to expect as organizations gain in size and new opportunities arise.

Better talent

• Outsourcing with a firm known for low turnover and good work-life balance ensures you are working with a team that attracts the best talent.
• Outsourcing means you have CPAs involved in your accounting, day-to-day. You can access your accountants when you need to, without having to fill them in and wait to get on their schedule.
• Hiring a full-time accountant usually means that you are looking for stability, someone that has been at one or only a few places in the last decade (not a job hopper, right?)

That also means the ideal full-time candidate has only been exposed to the same workflow, the same set of issues and the same set of solutions for that decade. A seasoned team of CPAs has collectively seen a multitude of issues and solutions at work and collaborates to brainstorm and share that knowledge when designing the best solutions for your organization.

Technology, security and privacy

• Businesses need to design and troubleshoot the best workflow, applications and integrations for their operations. That troubleshooting can be costly and painful. Using a team that constantly researches and vets the best solutions will get you to the finish line quickly, and with fewer hiccups.
• An experienced team will pinpoint areas of opportunity in your accounting workflow. For instance, you may be taking advantage of your bank’s online bill pay for convenience – kudos to you for getting passed printing out checks! You can improve even further by using a bill-pay solution that gives you a single place to store proof-of-purchase, a more seamless approval process, audit trail and multi-factor authentication.
• Automate, automate, automate. Manual entry is expensive and error-prone. The less time spent entering repetitive data, the more can be spent on harvesting the most useful information and getting results. Outsourcing to a team that automates, as part of their model, is a huge benefit.

Additional back-office areas to consider outsourcing:

• Data entry and bookkeeping
• Financial reporting and dashboards
• Payroll processing
• Accounts payable
• Accounts receivable
• Budgeting and cash flow planning

Find out more about our outsourced accounting services, here, or contact Ruth Lott, Associate Director of the Business Solutions Team.