Is Outsourcing The Need Of The Hour?

Jason and I have been school buddies. He was always the numbers guy. While I went on to be a Marketing person, Jason preferred to be his own boss! Today, he is among 664,532* CPAs in 2the USA.

Like other good friends, we too don’t agree on everything. For instance, the other day over coffee he shared how it is becoming a mammoth task for him to balance between focusing on expansion and profitability while delivering compliance work such as accounting, bookkeeping, taxes and payroll for his clients.

He is right! The industry is getting competitive with each passing year. To stay ahead, firms not only have to offer varied services at a fair rate but also has to be flexible in their schedules. In our industry, every minute counts. So a CPA’s time should be used for the firm’s growth rather with staying busy with tedious and, time-consuming tasks such as bookkeeping, payroll accounting, and tax returns.

Outsourcing compliance allows firms to use their time more efficiently and focus on value-addition services such as financial advisory, wealth planning, tax planning and more.

Why you should outsource your accounting services?

1. You get too busy doing compliance: This happens to best of us! We get caught up doing our paperwork that the priority tasks take a backseat. Outsourcing your accounting services, helps you focus on increasing profitability of firm knowing there’s an experienced team of professionals taking care of your accounting services.
2.  You are not tech-friendly: If your firm still goes by old books and no one in the team is tech-adaptive, maybe it’s for best to outsource. Outsourcing firms are digitized and have moved most of their operations to the cloud. The automated process helps in mitigating risk and creates a transparent working process.
3. Access to talent: Not only that, the world’s second highly populated country, India has no dearth of young and technically sound trained accountants.  One CPA who has successfully transitioned to outsourcing tax work is Patricia Bell Harik, who heads up the tax department at Zdonek & Wolowicz in Torrance. She says “It’s fabulous. Five years ago, we were forced to do this because we couldn’t find any staff members. So we started out of need.”  She works with a liaison in India who helps coordinate tax return activities using electronic data. The workers are all Indian chartered accountants who have been trained to comply with the US tax laws”.  Outsourcing your accounting services to India not only gets you access to qualified and trained professionals but also helps you save up to 50% on your estimated budget.
4. Overheads: I understand the scepticism that surrounds outsourcing. But let’s say you choose to do this in-house, will you be able to bear the recruitment cost, the salaries, perks, taxes and holidays? You just get one or two people doing the compliance work in-house, while if you outsource, you have an entire team working for you with no additional recruitment or infrastructure cost.
5. 24/7 operations: Outsourcing companies are not restricted to 9-5! With India being the hub of outsourcing services, a lot of companies deliver round-the-clock service. This helps in improving the productivity of your firm, just like this New York’s CPA firm benefited.
6. Security: With the advancement in cloud technology and offshoring, Outsourcing companies are well-versed with compliance standards, thereby mitigating data and security risks.

However, this is what I would have done! What do you think? If you are a CPA, we would like to know your thoughts on the same! Or you can tweet us your thoughts at @QXASInc.

Your voice matters! It may be helpful to someone looking for outsourcing!