Accounting Outsourcing Services: An Overview

  • March 19, 2015
  • admin@ohi

In today’s high pressure environment, there is a pressing need to optimize performance and achieve operational efficiency. With ever regulatory nuances and compliance requirements constantly changing, it is safer to entrust essential services to those who understand it. Due to a desperate need to control and reduce costs, all the while achieving growth, company CFOs have equivocally recognized the importance of hiring outsourcing companies to handle all accounting and financial services. This helps the company streamline their operation models to better align their goals with their everyday work. The management is also granted much greater control of permission and access levels that they can assign to their staff regarding data and analytics.

By using professional accounting firms, companies can standardize accounting practices, financial service processes and daily financial operations. This way they can make standard procedures more clear-cut and recurrent transactions more cost-efficient and adaptable. They can also tap into the resources of the third party company and leverage their collective expertise, specialization and industry knowledge. Not having to worry about the drudgery of bookkeeping, they can focus on core competencies and business issues. Companies will be left with ample time to strategise their path to achieving long-term goals.

It also makes sense practically speaking to outsource this key yet time-consuming function considering the fact that accounting is not really a competency of all companies. Therefore, except for treasury functions and access to funds, other operational accounting and finance can be handed over to accounting outsourcing firms. It also saves the company a whole lot of time and money normally spent in hiring accountants, finance managers and so on who need to be further trained and supervised constantly. You can avoid loss of productivity as the entire operation is in the hands of specialists.

There is also the added advantage of scalability. A team of professional financiers can provide accurate information regarding your company’s financial health and also project overall industry trends. Having them as outside consultants gives you key information that you can base your decisions on. This is especially important when it comes to agility and scalability. There are times when you will need to expand and consolidate; others where you may need to cut back either due to restraints or to rapidly pursue a short-term goal. This will be made more possible due to the technological and operational efficacy provided by outsourcing firms.

Companies today have a choice of outsourcing the most basic accounting functions to the most strategic ones such as budget and projection or even important high level functions like internal auditing. Centralizing multiple disciplines in one professional firm neutralizes duplication of effort and other operational irregularities. Simplifying and standardizing financial and accounting procedures is the key to a well-run organization. It all depends on how outsourcing is viewed by the company and what sort of scope they are willing to give to it.