Outsourcing Bookkeeping is a Good Idea – 6 Ways to Sell this Idea to In-House Staff

Here’s a scenario for you. As a firm owner/partner, you are well aware of the advantages of outsourcing bookkeeping, but you have a problem, and it is a big one. Your staff, especially those who have always been tasked with bookkeeping, won’t like it one bit.

This point of concern against outsourcing shouldn’t surprise any firm that wishes to outsource accounting and bookkeeping. However, before you search for the best outsource bookkeeping services, you must make your staff aware of the plans and take the crucial next step– dispelling their outsourcing fears.

Outsourcing fears? What are those? Let’s take a look:

• Redundancy

Let’s face it. The fear of being made redundant is THE biggest fear of employees if you are outsourcing some of their activities to offshore accountants. Put yourself in the shoes of your in-house bookkeepers. If you are outsourcing the services they were experts in, they are within their rights to feel “unwanted” and lost.

• Job Loss

This particular area of concern naturally follows the earlier point. If employees feel redundant, they might also think that they will be out of a job soon enough. This results in a lack of motivation, which might have a detrimental impact on the quality of the ongoing accounting jobs. You don’t want that to happen.

• Team Spirit and Cohesion Going for Toss

It’s essential to make your team a part of the outsourcing strategy because the best bookkeeping outsourcing India services provider will work as an extension of your internal team. It would help if you sold the outsourcing idea strategically to your team. You must be able to bring home the point that it is good for the firm from the business angle and good for the existing staff from the professional growth perspective. As we said, outsourcing is to be seen as a strategic endeavor rather than just a cost-saving exercise.

This will ensure that the team spirit you have spent so long building is not destroyed by the specter of bookkeeping outsourcing looming large over it.

So the question now is, how do you make sure that your firm’s employees are perfectly comfortable with the idea of outsourcing? It’s a tough ask, but it needs to be done. So here’s what you can do:

1. Don’t Approach Outsourcing Clandestinely

Life’s not a movie. You can get away with doing things under the radar in a film, but real life is different. News spreads, especially news that is considered ‘bad news’ spreads like wildfire. This is why the outsourcing move should happen transparently, and it shouldn’t be a shock to your employees that this move was being contemplated and fructified.

2. Discussion with all Stakeholders

Irrespective of the size of your firm, the decision to outsource bookkeeping should be inclusive. It would help if you made it a point that the need for outsourcing and the advantage of outsourcing bookkeeping is discussed with key stakeholders. They need to be told about the strategic reasoning behind outsourcing, and they should be asked to offer their suggestions and opinions around this move.

3. Evaluate and Highlight the Pros

Bookkeeping is typically time-intensive and low-margin work. As a firm, you need to maximize the potential of the resources at your disposal. Firms are just getting out of the pandemic mode, and many are experiencing a downward price pressure on their services. This is why it makes sense to outsource low-margin work and focus attention on high-value work. By outsourcing to the best outsource bookkeeping services providers, you will be freeing up valuable time of your resources to explore high-margin growth activities.

This should be a critical discussion point with your in-house accounting professionals. First, list down the pros of outsourcing, which will be integral to business growth. Then, tell your employees that outsourcing can drive firm growth, which will translate into individual growth.  Don’t think of these only as the USPs of outsourcing that you can sell to your employees. Make sure they know that the benefits experienced by the firm will essentially benefit them also; after all, they are a part of the firm as well.

4. Upskilling and L & D

Accounting firms are constantly suffering from an absence of time. Much of their time is spent in compliant tasks, which, as we underlined earlier, many a time, don’t bring in a lot of ROI. However, as a firm, you cannot say no to clients. This results in an insurmountable problem wherein you do not have time to implement learning programs for your staff. The need to continuously build skillsets is paramount because 54% of buyers purchase bundled accounting packages.

Take a very good look at the above figure, and check how many services your firm offers. Your firm must provide a mix of the services mentioned in the figure above as a bundled offering to potential and existing clients. If your firm does not have the expertise or the in-house accountants haven’t kept themselves updated about the latest development in the services, it is time to build this expertise; for that, you need time.

This is where one of the key benefits of outsourcing your bookkeeping enters the picture. First, it helps free up your firm’s time to invest in other activities like L&D. This will allow your staff to reskill and upskill themselves to handle other critical accounting tasks.

Far from being redundant, this will serve to make them in demand.

5. Cost Efficiencies

Your firm might be falling behind others because it isn’t competitive enough. One of the reasons for this is that it doesn’t have the money to invest in tech-enabled transformation or implement customer engagement programs. The idea behind choosing the best bookkeeping outsourcing India services provider is to build cost efficiencies by saving operational costs. The costs savings will help the firm make necessary investments in multiple areas that can drive your firm’s next level of growth.

As can be imagined, cost efficiencies can also result in your firm getting a freehand on developing more employee-centric policies that demand a specific amount of monetary investment. But, again, this is something that has to be conveyed to your employees.

6. Managing Client Expectations

One of the key advantages of outsourcing bookkeeping is that quick turnarounds can be achieved that can result in more satisfied clients. But managing the demanding and ever-increasing expectations of clients is not only about getting the work done on/before time. It is also about going above and beyond and making meaningful suggestions. But again, for this to happen, you have to invest the needed time and attention and make an effort – this cannot happen if you don’t have the necessary time. More often than not, your team of accountants and bookkeepers will be hard-pressed to go the extra distance and know more about the client’s needs and requirements. E.g., they expect your firm to not just do taxes for them but also help them with long-term tax planning; some clients want help to build a financial plan; so on and so forth. The idea is to be able to manage their expectations.

Conclusion

Pitch the benefits of outsourcing your bookkeeping to the larger team confidently and empathetically. It is essential to be aware of the concerns they will have with bookkeeping outsourcing, and you should always keep these at the back of your mind while explaining to them the merit of the move. It shouldn’t be something you throw at them and ask them to accept. If you do it right and make your internal employees a part of the whole process, you will find that the assimilation of the offshore team with your in-house team is seamless and will deliver the returns you want.