Outsource Accounting
Thinking of outsourcing your accounting needs? Here are all the things you need to know regarding how it can benefit your company — and how to go about it.
Outsource Accounting
Thinking of outsourcing your accounting needs? Here are all the things you need to know regarding how it can benefit your company — and how to go about it.
Accounting Functions, Roles, And Tasks
Proper accounting is crucial to every business. Having the right financial data allows you to make better decisions accurately. Thus, getting a decent accountant can help you reach your business goals faster.
But hiring one can be pretty expensive. That’s why companies often outsource accounting for their business operations.
What Is Outsourced Accounting?
Outsourced accounting is a practice where business owners hire a third party to handle their accounting tasks instead of maintaining an in-house accounting department.
This practice doesn’t just reduce operating costs. It also ensures that clients are able to get high quality, experienced professionals to manage the company’s finances. It thus allows for better scalability and flexibility in the overall accounting process.
Outsourcing: Opportunity Or Threat?
Many think that outsourcing is a threat to local jobs. But that’s not the case.
Start-ups and SMEs have tight budgets. So some can’t afford to hire many local employees, so the business is usually understaffed. As a result, their profitability and growth is limited. Fortunately, when companies outsource for financial services, it makes their limited business funds go farther.
This way, they can hire a few more virtual staff to handle certain areas of the business. They can also have both local and virtual staff on their payroll — allowing them to operate at the desired capacity without compromising staffing needs.
Ultimately, the business grows faster to the point that they can afford to hire more local staff in the long run. That’s a win-win, right?
What Accounting Functions Can Be Outsourced?
So what accounting tasks can you outsource?
The most commonly outsourced accounting tasks are as follows:
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- Bookkeeping Preparation of tax returns
- Regulatory compliance
- Payroll processing
- Financial analysis and forecasting
- Preparation of financial statements
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Depending on your needs, most accounting tasks
can be performed by remote talents.
So what accounting tasks can you outsource?
The most commonly outsourced accounting tasks are as follows:
-
-
- Bookkeeping Preparation of tax returns
- Regulatory compliance
- Payroll processing
- Financial analysis and forecasting
- Preparation of financial statements
-
Depending on your needs, most accounting tasks
can be performed by remote talents.
Who Is Outsourced Accounting For?
Wondering who outsourced accounting is for? Here are some scenarios where outsourced accounting can be a great fit:
Small Businesses
Resources are limited for small businesses. But even so, accounting is critical for tracking profitability and growth and to some extent, determining the direction of operations.
Fortunately, outsourced accounting services are more affordable. This can help small enterprises avail of the right accounting expertise without breaking the bank.
A Company Struggling To Hire the Right Talent
Finding the right talent is quite challenging. There’s so much trial and error involved when you’re trying to find the best accounting staff for your business.
When you outsource accounting staff, you know they’re experts in their field, especially when contracted through reputable agencies like Remote Staff that have a rigorous selection process in place to find the right accounting staff for you.
You won’t have to waste precious resources on subpar talent.
Growing Companies
When a business is growing, you need more staff to fuel expanding operations. For faster business growth, these staff should be hired as soon as possible.
Growing businesses also tend to have a higher demand for additional accounting staff because of increased income items, expenses, and other regulatory requirements to fulfill.
Outsourcing accountants is an excellent way to track these crucial accounting items at the soonest time possible.
Not-for-Profit Organizations & Charities
Not-for-profit and charitable organizations receive many donations from their stakeholders.
But like small businesses, most have limited budgets to hire their own in-house accounting staff to stay on top of their funding.
Outsourcing accountants can help free up resources so that these organizations can focus on the core operations of their advocacies.
People Who Need Help
Do you need help with accounting tasks like invoicing or account management? Or perhaps you need a consultant who understands your finances?
Outsourcing accounting staff can help if you need assistance in this field. Outsourcing might be up your alley if you have neither the capacity nor the expertise to handle all the accounting tasks yourself.
Basically Anyone!
Accounting is the language of business. When you have your financial numbers straight, you can make better decisions for your
company.
Should you invest in new machinery to accommodate the increase in demand? Should you stay liquid in anticipation of emergencies? You can find the answer to all of these questions with the right accounting data.
And with outsourced accounting staff, you can collect these data in a more cost-effective way.
What Are The Benefits?
Outsourcing your accounting staff comes with a lot of benefits. Here are some of them.
Save Money
When you outsource your accounting staff, you can take advantage of significant cost savings versus hiring in-house.
Virtual staff tends to be more affordable because of different salary rates and the inherent advantage in the AUD-PHP exchange rate.
Also, reputable agencies like Remote Staff already factor in the mandatory contributions like healthcare and social security into your service fee. Thus, you don’t have to worry about compliance with government regulations.
Business Continuity
Accounting is a time-sensitive process. If your accounting department is understaffed, how can you finish the requirements for taxation season or yearly regulatory compliance in time without sacrificing productivity in other areas?
When you outsource your accounting staff, you will not have that problem. You won’t need to disrupt your usual business operations because you will have enough staff to handle your different accounting needs.
Save Time
Finding the right accounting staff can take time. It’s a specialized role and it’s hard to hire someone who will match your specific accounting needs.
When you outsource, you can save time with the readily available top tier accounting staff at your fingertips.
Access to Comprehensive Expertise
Outsourcing accountants can potentially give you access to more comprehensive services and expertise than in-house accounting teams.
This allows budding businesses to access the same level of accounting services as large corporations from accounting firms — without the astronomical costs.
Improve Productivity
Since it’s a crucial business function, SMEs allocate a chunk of their funds for hiring accounting staff — resulting in a smaller budget for other roles.
But if you outsource your accounting roles, you can hire more – and better – staff for other areas of your business, improving overall productivity.
Expert Accountants And Bookkeepers
When you outsource your accounting staff, you don’t have to spend precious time sourcing for the qualified talents. Reputable companies like Remote Staff have a screening process in place to match you with expert accountants and bookkeepers.
Automate & Go Digital
You might still be using a traditional accounting system. Nothing wrong with that.
But if you outsource your accounting tasks, you’ll be upgrading to a digital system because your outsourced staff works online.
Done right, you can even automate some of your accounting tasks with the help of your virtual staff – saving you even more money and time over the long run.
Scale Up Easily
Do you want to scale your business? You need manpower to support the additional growth. And this is where a lot of entrepreneurs struggle because they lack the resources to do this. Furthermore, accounting requirements and government compliances tend to increase as your business grows.
By outsourcing your accounting activities, you have more leeway to scale up your business. You can hire additional accounting staff as needed, and usually, at the fraction of the cost.
Enhanced Data Protection
Your accounting staff will inevitably have access to sensitive financial and proprietary information about your business.
Fortunately, established agencies like Remote Staff have strict protocols and agreements in place to protect your data when your outsourced staff handles it.
Reduced Errors
The handling and processing of financial data is prone to accounting errors, especially if you do it yourself.
When you outsource your accounting needs, you’ll have access to experts that can do the job with greater accuracy. Some of them can even audit your financials to check for possible erroneous data.
Accounting Outsourcing Allows You To Focus On Your Business And What You Do Best
Accounting is a necessary task that’s crucial to achieving your business goals. But it can take away precious time from activities that can really move the needle forward.
Outsourcing your accounting needs empowers you to capitalize on your core business activities and thus have more time to grow your business.
Accounting Outsourcing Allows You To Focus On Your Business And What You Do Best
Accounting is a necessary task that’s crucial to achieving your business goals. But it can take away precious time from activities that can really move the needle forward.
Outsourcing your accounting needs empowers you to capitalize on your core business activities and thus have more time to grow your business.
What Are The Possible Challenges You May Encounter
While Working With An Outsourced Accountant?
Finding the right accountants can be a challenge when you’re sourcing them yourselves. It takes time to shortlist possible candidates. And when you do hire, there’s no guarantee that your candidates will be a good fit for your existing team. However, if you partner with reliable agencies, you can mitigate some of these risks.
Common Mistakes People Make When Outsourcing.
There are a couple of mistakes that lots of people make when they try outsourcing. They are as follows:
Choosing A Firm With Unaligned Values
In any business partnership, the alignment of values is crucial to make it work in the long term. In the absence of such, you might encounter ethical issues and disruptive incompatibility in different aspects like decision-making.
Ultimately, it’ll hinder your company’s growth.
Choosing Someone Who Doesn’t Understand Your Business
If you outsource your accounting, your partner company should understand how your business works to properly record the flow of transactions.
With this, they can provide you with industry knowledge and proactive insights into your financial data. They can also customize solutions for you, such as how to increase your income or manage expenses while considering your operational capacity and goals.
What To Do Before You Hire An Outsourced Accountant?
What do you need to prepare before you hire an outsourced accountant? Scroll down to find out.
Define Requirements And Scope
One, you need to lay out the requirements and scope of your business needs.
What accounting tasks do you need done? Do you need help with regulatory compliance?
By defining the requirements and scope early on, expectations are clear on both sides once you start hiring your staff.
Cost-Effective Price
When you outsource, you can choose a cost-effective way to hire accounting staff.
Virtual accounting staff is definitely more affordable than their office-based counterparts.
You can choose either part-time or full-time staff.
Expertise
What kind of expertise do you need? Do you need someone well-versed in taxation? Perhaps a licensed CPA? Or maybe, you need someone who is adept with sophisticated accounting software.
Be sure to specify the expertise you require for your accounting needs.
Security
Your outsourced accountant will likely encounter proprietary information pertaining to your business as they carry out their tasks. Thus, you might need encryption software and VPNs to safeguard your data during transmission.
And perhaps an additional Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) for your virtual staff.
But rest assured, when you work with reputable agencies like Remote Staff, stringent data security policies are in place to protect the data. There’s even an IT team on hand to assist just in case you have any problems.
The Remote Staff Advantage: Why Choose Remote Staff
As Your Extended Team?
So, out of all the agencies out there, why should you choose Remote Staff as your extended team? Remote Staff is one of the pioneers in the industry, operating for more than 15 years and counting. We’ve developed industry standard outsourcing practices to ensure that we match you with virtual staff that can help your business get to the next level and then some.
Manage Seasonal Needs
More specifically, you might need extra accounting staff during tax season.
Remote Staff can help fill this gap so that your regular employees don’t have to step in and thus compromise daily operational tasks.
Additionally, when you retain your outsourced accounting staff permanently, it sets your business up for further growth.
Quality & Certainty Delivered
Matching the right talent to each client’s needs lies at the heart of our business. We take special care to determine what they are so we can shortlist the right talents from our pool of expert bookkeepers and accountants.
And aside from their skills, we also have a personality compatibility test to ensure that they share the same values that are compatible with your company and existing team.
Accessing Our National And Global Network
Compared to other agencies, we maintain offices both in the Philippines and in Australia. We also have operations in other countries like the USA as well.
So you can communicate directly with us by accessing our national and global network.
Here’s How Remote Staff In Australia Can Help Your Business
Remote Staff is your partner in growing your business every step of the way.
Our services don’t stop after we match you with your virtual accounting staff. We also provide access to an advanced monitoring tool to ensure that your outsourced staff are productive.
We also take care of their payroll, leaving you with one less thing to think about.
The Remote Staff Advantage: Why Choose Remote Staff
As Your Extended Team?
So, out of all the agencies out there, why should you choose Remote Staff as your extended team? Remote Staff is one of the pioneers in the industry, operating for more than 15 years and counting. We’ve developed industry standard outsourcing practices to ensure that we match you with virtual staff that can help your business get to the next level and then some.
Manage Seasonal Needs
More specifically, you might need extra accounting staff during tax season.
Remote Staff can help fill this gap so that your regular employees don’t have to step in and thus compromise daily operational tasks.
Additionally, when you retain your outsourced accounting staff permanently, it sets your business up for further growth.
Quality & Certainty Delivered
Matching the right talent to each client’s needs lies at the heart of our business. We take special care to determine what they are so we can shortlist the right talents from our pool of expert bookkeepers and accountants.
And aside from their skills, we also have a personality compatibility test to ensure that they share the same values that are compatible with your company and existing team.
Accessing Our National And Global Network
Compared to other agencies, we maintain offices both in the Philippines and in Australia. We also have operations in other countries like the USA as well.
So you can communicate directly with us by accessing our national and global network.
Here’s How Remote Staff In Australia Can Help Your Business
Remote Staff is your partner in growing your business every step of the way.
Our services don’t stop after we match you with your virtual accounting staff. We also provide access to an advanced monitoring tool to ensure that your outsourced staff are productive.
We also take care of their payroll, leaving you with one less thing to think about.
What Are The Accounting Outsourcing Services
Curious on what accounting tasks you can outsource? Here’s some of the most common ones:
Bookkeeping
Recording your daily income and expenses is the foundation of accounting. But with the volume of transactions, do you really have time to do it yourself?
Why not outsource this task to our expert bookkeepers and keep your books of account up-to-date?
Management Accounts
Do you have big client accounts you need to manage? It’s essential to allocate enough resources to service these key clients, especially if you earn a significant sum from them.
But incidental transactions can be overwhelming. Instead, assign an outsourced accountant to manage some of your key client accounts for you.
Payroll Processing
Timely payroll processing is crucial for any company. Your staff should be paid accurately at the right time to keep them happy and productive.
No need to worry, though. You can outsource expert accounting staff for this purpose.
Data Entry
Almost all companies need a record of their accounting transactions. But the sheer number of transactions can be too time-consuming for them to handle on their own.
You can hire accounting staff to do the data entry for you. They’ll be familiar enough with accounting rules such as GAAP, so the data entry will be more accurate and suitable for accounting purposes.
Compliance And Reporting
Every business needs to be compliant with government regulations and taxation. Thus, you might need to prepare financial statements throughout the year. Or maybe, there are financial targets you might need to compy with for your industry.
You can outsource CPAs to prepare your financial statements and make sure that you hit your targets for compliance.
Accounts Payable
Most businesses purchase goods and services on credit for better cash flow. But tracking your accounts payable is not an easy task. However, the failure to do so might incur hefty penalties.
Hiring accounting staff can help manage your accounts payable better. They can also process invoices, manage vendors, negotiate discounts, and schedule payments.
Accounts Receivable
Does your business sell your goods or services on credit? You might have a lot of accounts receivable then.
Your accounting staff can handle the invoicing, billing, tracking of payments, credit checks, and collections of your accounts receivable. They can even conduct aging analyses to pinpoint accounts that are past due and need to be followed-up.
Want To Get Started?
Ready to get started? Here’s how!
Outsource To Remote Staff
You can outsource to Remote Staff by first requesting a call back in the upper right corner of our website. Afterwards, we will schedule a discovery call to learn more about your specific needs — and then set you up with the right remote talent for your business.
Frequently Asked Questions
Ready to outsource your accounting staff but have some questions? The following Q&A’s have got you covered.
Why Do You Need A Bookkeeper?
The process of bookkeeping involves recording your transactions within the generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) for financial reporting.
You might think that you can just record your business transactions with your own system. But these rules are standardized and required by banks, government agencies, and other institutions when they ask for your financial statements.
So unless you’re an expert, hiring a bookkeeper is the more effective and cost-efficient alternative.
What Are The Pros Of Bookkeeping?
Bookkeeping has a lot of advantages. The number one advantage is that it keeps track of your assets, liabilities, income, and expenses. With this information, you can make better economic decisions.
Also, bookkeepers follow the generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) when they record your transactions. To comply with taxation and other regulatory requirements, financial statements must comply with these standards.
So if you hire bookkeepers, you don’t have to worry about getting your compliance requirements wrong – and possibly getting hit by corresponding penalties for it.
Do We Provide A Free Trial Before Getting Started?
No, but if you’re unhappy with your current remote accounting staff for any reason, we can put forward other candidates that might be a better fit.
Do You Need To Outsource Your Entire Accounting Work Or Just A Few Tasks?
The answer would depend on your needs. Some of our clients already have an in-house accounting department. But they just need an extra hand for more tedious functions like managing receivables or invoicing.
Some don’t have an accounting department at all. So they opt to outsource their entire accounting requirements through Remote Staff.
What Are Software Capabilities?
When you partner with Remote Staff, you’ll have access to an advanced tracking software that can monitor your accounting staff’s productivity. It can provide you with desktop screenshots, app usage, percent idle time, and more.
How Much Does It Cost To Outsource Accounting?
The cost of outsourcing accounting staff can vary depending on their specialization, but you’ll find the Philippine peso-Australian dollar exchange rate very much in your favour. But on average, you can hire a full-time staff for around AUD 2,047.73 to AUD 3,070.46 per month.
Where Is Accountancy Headed?
The field of accountancy is constantly changing with the rapid development of technology. 10 years ago, some financial products like cryptocurrency were non-existent. One can only imagine how this field will continue to develop in the succeeding years.
With this, the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) creates and updates current accounting standards to ensure the accurate and financial reporting of each registered business’ financial information.
That’s why competent accounting personnel are in-demand for recording and preparing financial requirements following the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRSs) and International Accounting Standards (IAS).
Is Outsourcing Accounting A Good Idea?
Definitely! You’ll have access to expert accountants and bookkeepers at a fraction of the cost.
Also, Remote Staff is an expert in sourcing top talent that can match your accounting needs.
And the company doesn’t just go over each candidate’s credentials. There’s also a personality compatibility test to ensure that you can collaborate with your accounting staff harmoniously in the long run.
Is It Cheaper To Outsource Accounting?
Yes! When you’re hiring remote Filipino accounting professionals, you can enjoy more affordable labour rates (while still providing a competitive salary) thanks to the stronger AUD-PHP exchange rates.
You also save on money and time on trial and error during recruitment because you’re partnering with a reputable agency that’ll take care of all the leg work for you.
How Much Does It Cost To Outsource Bookkeeping?
Outsourcing bookkeeping services can vary in cost depending on the specialty required. On average, you can hire a full-time
employee for AUD 1,451.14 to AUD 2,303.41 per month.
There you have it: a handy guide to outsourcing
your accounting needs through Remote Staff.
So don’t miss the chance to optimize your business operations with our topnotch accounting talents.
