Outsourced accounting can be a great solution to solve staffing issues and expand your business. But working with outsourced staff requires some adjustments in order to give you the best results.

Maximise Your Outsourcing Efficiency: Two Important Foundations to Succeed

Organisation & Communication

“ By implementing organisational strategies, you can prevent potential bottlenecks, minimise non-billable hours, and significantly enhance revenue growth. ”

Organisation

Organisation is sometimes the toughest part. Many firms don’t realise just how unstructured their workflow can be (or indeed how disorganised some team members may be). A semi-organised workflow may allow your firm to scrape by with a small in-house team, but once the pace of work quickens as you plug into an almost limitless resource, (your outsourced accounting team) you start putting pressure on the in-house team to do their part better and faster.

The smart thing to do is to ensure you get the best possible leverage out of your in-house team. A sole trader can engage outsourced accountants and gain benefits, but as soon as your firm grows above a certain size, it may prove more feasible to employ an admin assistant (or at least dedicate one of your existing staff members to take care of your outsourced staff queries).

So for the sake of this example, we’ll assume your firm has three staff: Principal, Senior Accountant, and Receptionist.

Note that any administrator, including a receptionist, can be trained in a few days to be a Client Services Administrator (CSA). The aim is clearly to lighten the burden of your in-house Senior Accountant – (or Client Relationship Manager – CRM) in order to keep them focused on their own work.

In fact, a good Client Services Administrator can handle getting answers to queries from a client. It all depends on the complexity of the job and the queries.

You may not yet have a CSA, and that shouldn’t hold you back from outsourcing your accounting work. It is most important to be systematic, then as resources allow, get leverage with a CSA as soon as you can.

Some Key Organisational Tips

Aside from job roles, there are a few other things that can be important…

Bigger Jobs Are Better

Since a bit of preparation is required to send a job to your outsourced accountant, there is a level at which compiling information with a CRM’s involvement is not going to be efficient. Like those ITRs that you can knock out in 30 minutes almost as you are interviewing the client. Although BOSS can do small jobs, once you are at three hours and below, you need to be hyper-organised with your workflow.

Expect Two Rounds of Queries

BOSS will strive to send you only one lot of queries, but sometimes it takes two rounds of queries as your client’s accounts are unravelled. The priority here is getting your client to answer queries quickly. This will avoid jobs being in limbo and unbillable. With the pace of accounting work quickened by your outsourced provider, you might be surprised how many jobs can be in limbo waiting for clients to answer queries.

Educate Your Client

If your clients get work to you in the last few weeks before lodgement, you should change this. For example, an organised firm will send out letters to clients in July and December to get the next lot of work early. When you send out a letter, send out the checklist of data that particular client needs to give to you.

Consider a Workflow Manager

Some of our clients employ a workflow manager. The job of a workflow manager is to keep things flowing. It’s a mix of job delegation, discussing jobs where work has been held up, setting targets and checking they are achieved, liaising with management and advising on improvements, and assisting HR (a CSA could also add the role of workflow manager to their duties). It all depends on the size of your firm, but again – the objective is to keep accountants and directors doing productive billable work.

“ BOSS staff can handle the same Australian taxation, super fund, and regulatory issues you do. ”

Communication

BOSS allows clients to speak directly with their outsourced staff via Microsoft Teams and email. If there is anything you are not happy about, getting in touch directly with your outsourced staff or, if necessary, a BOSS manager, will ensure things flow better and you get the most out of your outsourcing experience.

Queries

Being organised should facilitate better communication. But handling queries requires significant attention. Firms that are disorganised may struggle when it comes to handling queries.

Get data upfront before handing a job to your outsourced accountant, and you will avoid delays in them having to raise queries just to get the correct data to begin the job.

The usual round of mid-job queries will be provided to you by your outsourced accountant in a logical, digestible manner. A BOSS accountant normally emails an Excel spreadsheet of queries. The trick is to get all of the answers and then send the answers back to your outsourced accountant. Sending queries piecemeal doesn’t help the processing of the job.

BOSS will not normally proceed until all queries are answered.

In addition, the emphasis is on the accounting firm to ensure the answers to queries are satisfactory for BOSS to continue with the job. This avoids unnecessary back-and-forth communication and inefficiencies caused by both the accounting firm and your outsourced accountant having to stop/start with a job.

Frequency and Feedback

You should communicate with your outsourced accountant over Microsoft Teams in the same way you would talk to your in-house staff. If you are used to having two-minute conversations about queries with in-house staff or briefing staff verbally about a job, then this is how you should use Microsoft Teams with BOSS. Some of our clients have daily team meetings and include their BOSS outsourced accountant in the meeting – to check on things like progress of jobs, outstanding issues, etc. This smooths the workflow.

The BOSS account manager looking after your accounting firm will also be present to help out if and when necessary. If things aren’t performing as expected, we endeavour to find out what the issues might be and sort them out to make sure things flow well. However, it is really up to you to speak up about anything that isn’t happening as expected. Clearly, an outsourced accounting provider can’t help with things they haven’t been informed about.

Clients can have challenges that are readily dealt with – and we know how to sort them out – but time must be invested by your firm to check on progress and be available to resolve any teething problems.

So, my suggestion is, just like having a new in-house employee join your firm, in the first few months of using an outsourced accountant, have regular meetings and bring up anything that is of concern. Continue in that nurturing role until both parties are happy things are cruising along nicely.

Tools

BOSS uses software to internally monitor the progress of jobs and data on productivity. Using this information a weekly Excel update is sent to you so you can monitor job progress (this level of transparency facilitates communication on things such as refining procedures for increased efficiency).

BOSS is familiar with a large array of accounting software but if you happen to use an obscure software, we can train up your BOSS staff. (Note: BOSS is almost unique in this regard).

In summary, get organised and treat your outsourced accountant as one of your team in terms of nurturing them, feeding them work and working cooperatively with them and you will get the results you want and expect.

For an explanation of work flow in detail between an accounting firm and BOSS watch the video below