Ready to outsource? Electing to hand over your business’s operational accounting and bookkeeping to an external partner involves careful consideration. While it has the potential to yield improved operating efficiencies, greater scalability and cost savings, enlisting a partner that is ill-suited and lacks the requisite experience and infrastructure can have devastating effects for your business and your bottom line.

Outsourcing is a synergistic amalgamation of people, processes and technology. Getting each element right is integral to the partnership’s success. Uncertainty in what to look for, or where to start, will hinder your chances at employing the right solution for your business. To aid in your search for an appropriate outsourced accounting partner, be sure to consider the following six traits as the most important attributes for a potential candidate.

Committed, Experienced Team of Professionals

A Hybrid Outsourced Accounting Partner must bring with them a depth of expertise and sophistication that is often unattainable when building your own team internally. Through specialisation, an outsourcer should deliver a shared services model that provides an optimised mix of skills and experience to match your business requirements. Your ideal partner operates as a seamless extension of your existing team and can scale up and down as needed. You need a dedicated team that knows your business intimately and helps to improve or upgrade legacy processes rather than simply adding more resources.

An Established Methodology + Infrastructure

The delivery methodology and infrastructure are integral to ensuring a successful working relationship, particularly when utilising an offshore team. Your outsourcing partner needs a methodology that leverages best practices but can still deliver a bespoke solution. The methodology should provide steps to help them deeply understand your business and be supported by documented processes and checklists to ensure deadlines are consistently met. Outsourcing is not about acquiring the cheapest labour, it is partnering with an expert team using established processes and innovative technology to deliver an effective, efficient and value-added solution.

Level of Service + Team That Meet Your Needs

Another layer to a well-suited outsourcing partner is strong and capable service delivery. On top of having quality and experienced personnel with robust processes in place, being able to commit to providing timely, valuable service is essential. This means having adequate resources available to scale with your business or the backup and redundancy of skills on their team to cope with the increasing demands as your business grows.

Ensure Real-Time Information with Proactive Advice

Sound business decisions can only be made with real-time, accurate information and data. But the ability of an outsourcer to provide real-time information is constrained by the resources it has available. Your ideal accounting provider will have the backup resources and virtual capabilities of a shared services model, to deliver timely and valuable information to the stakeholders who need it. Their ability to then combine information with expertise to offer tailored advice will help you steer the right path and pursue opportunities for continuous improvement.

Passion for Small Business and Creating a Win-Win

Consider your intended partner’s track record. Do they have a history of helping similar franchise businesses effectively grow and scale? Is it what drives them? Finding this partner and leveraging their passion, capability and experience will be your best path to success. And if both businesses work together to create a constant win-win scenario, each will bear the fruits of that success.

Adequate Security Processes to Protect Sensitive Data + Intellectual Property

Outsourcing accounting services requires businesses to send highly sensitive financial information to a third party. This comes with risks that need to be appropriately managed. There are several features that you should expect to be provided by your outsourcing partner to keep your information secure – encryption methods on client portals and sites, physical security measures, information management procedures, risk management policies, and the ability to provide you with ongoing access to your data.

Once you’ve landed on an outsourced accounting partner that meets all six aforementioned criteria, it’s time to get to work. The next phase of the process should be driven largely by your new prospective partner, but here is a glimpse of what an effective onboarding process will look like.

Discovery

It’s the first date. Shirt’s pressed, shoes are shined and you’re both looking sharp. Now it’s time to ask some deeper questions to get to really know each other. This is an opportunity for you to size up their capability as a long-term partner, and for them to assess your current position and how to best meet your needs.

Conversations should then evolve quickly into actions. By providing (limited) access to your information, the outsourcing partner can perform a basic health check of the current financial and accounting infrastructure to ascertain exactly what your business needs.

Observations

Following a review of your current accounting operations and financial information, the prospective partner will be able to offer a summary of their observations and where the opportunities lie for them to implement best-practice and improve the quality of information used to run your business.

Proposal

If both parties are happy with the observations and associated conclusions, a formal proposal of work will be submitted by the new outsourcing partner. This should outline the appropriate steps in the implementation, responsible parties, required resources, ongoing costs and, most importantly, the proposed outcome. The next step is to implement the partner’s strategy.

Implementation

Moving quickly to eliminate any transition headaches, the outsourcing partner will implement their solution as an extension of your existing team(s). Hopefully at little to no cost – the value to them should come via the management fees for delivering ongoing improvement to your accounting and finance systems.

Success

With the seamless integration of the Hybrid Outsourced Partner as the new commander and chief of your franchise’s accounting function, you will begin to reap the benefits quite early on. Operating as an extension to the existing team, your newly acquired partner will bring about the consistent delivery of best-practice accounting. Providing you with accurate and real-time financial data, eliminating accounting and transactional errors across your entire franchise network, streamlining out-dated legacy processes, and freeing up staff to focus on more value-accretive tasks and offering premium customer service.

When committing to an outsourced solutions provider, you need to consider the benefits of the partnership, the risks involved and whether they have capacity to scale with your business. Review all available options when selecting the right accounting services provider for your business. While it’s tempting to side with the lowest cost provider, this poses significant risks if they cannot meet your ongoing business demands.

Ready for your accounting A-Team? Aretex can deliver everything you’re looking for and more. Get in touch today to start the discovery process.

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