We asked Heather Townsend, founder and author of The Accountants Millionaires’ Club what should be the ideal structure of a small accountancy practice who wants to start outsourcing.
How to outsource accounting services: team restructure
To get the full benefit of outsourcing your year-end accounts prep to an accounts outsourcing provider, you need to rethink your workflows, roles and responsibilities in your team.
The practices that will fully benefit from outsourcing will remove or reduce the jobs that can easily be outsourced from the qualified members of the team. Don’t pay a fully qualified accountant to do something which a very competent administrator could do.
Outsourcing champion
To get accounts outsourcing off the ground successfully in your practice, you would require the appointment of an outsourcing champion. Unless you are a 1-3 person practice, this role should not be allocated to you, but to one of your team. This person will initially work with the accounts outsourcer to identify how they will work together, in particular: how and when they will need to communicate, and who does what in the year-end accounts process.
The outsourcing champion will need to put together checklists which should be completed before a job can be sent over to the accounts outsourcer.
Outsourcing co-ordinator
Once the accounts outsourcing process is defined within your practice, you want to release your outsourcing champion from the day-to-day aspects of liaising with the outsourcer. These outsourcing champions are normally too expensive to be involved in getting jobs together to send over to your outsourcer. This is where your Outsourcing Co-ordinator comes in.
Their role is as follows:
- Liaise with the clients to get their records in at the right point in the year
- Project manage the year-end accounts prep jobs with the outsourced provider
- Let your client-facing accounts managers know when they have started to chase for records and when the first queries will come back
What does this leave your managers and qualified staff to do?
Many practices have gotten stuck with outsourcing when their staff get worried about what they will be doing if the accounts prep is outsourced to an outsourcer. The resistance isn’t so much “how to outsource accounting services”, but what will I be doing if we outsource accounting services. If this resistance isn’t tackled, the project to start outsourcing year end accounts prep normally grinds to a halt.
This is why it’s so important to help your staff see a compelling vision of the future when your practice is outsourcing year-end accounts prep. Identify what they will they be doing after you outsource year-end accounts prep. Let them know if the practice will still retain some year-end jobs in-house. Provide some reassurances that the crappy jobs won’t stay with them and that the outsourcer wouldn’t simply get allocated the easy jobs.
As long as you keep your team informed and manage their expectations appropriately, outsourcing your year-end accounts prep work will be easy.
For any further advice on this topic or enquiries about outsourcing, please don’t hesitate to contact us.
