Accounting and financial tasks in a business are often quite complex, but pulling them off correctly is incredibly important for a wide variety of purposes like ensuring legal compliance, gathering important data, and keeping your books in order.
This creates a major paradox for most businesses that can’t support a full in-house accounting team or require specialized expertise for new accounting needs as the business grows.
The best way forward here is to outsource online accounting services as this will save you both time and investment and allow you to leverage some of the best financial assistance and tools available out there. But the major question here really is that, whether your business is currently ready to outsource accounting services?
How can you possibly know that? Right? Well, there are some major signs to look for here that will allow you to gauge this issue much more vividly and clearly. Here are 10 major signs that you need to look for:
1. You don’t have enough time to work on your major strong points
For entrepreneurs and business owners, ensuring sustainable business growth remains the top priority and for this, they need to get involved in strategic decision making, culture improvement, enlisting new investors on board, focusing on marketing activities, and more.
But one can’t do all of that if a major chunk of their time is being taken up by accounting-related tasks.
So ask yourself this question: do you have enough time on your hands to focus on growth-oriented activities or are you too much taken up by accounting tasks at hand?
If the answer to this question is No, then this is the first major sign that you are now ready to outsource your accounting services to a credible service provider.
2. Are your financial decisions being backed up by informed data?
When running a business, you often have to take major financial decisions on things like cost-cutting, and investing in new revenue opportunities among others, but you can’t make these decisions in the best way possible without having solid financial data presented to you in an actionable form.
This financial data will only accrue to you if your books are in order and all of your financial records are up to date, in line with modern standards.
So if you don’t have such data with you at the moment, it’s a major sign that you need to get outside help in building up this data and ensuring its continuous delivery.
3. Is your current team overwhelmed?
If you have a small business, chances are that your in-house accounting team is also quite small. And if the business is growing, your accounting team will be overburdened with tasks, making them more prone to mistakes and unable to deliver reports on time.
Look for overburdening of duties in your accounting team and if you do find them in such a situation then you really need to opt for outsourcing account services.
4. Is your in-house accounting team in line with industry standards?
Adherence to industry standards is extremely beneficial to businesses as far as accounting and financial tasks are concerned. So if you have an in-house accounting team, you need to gauge whether they are following industry protocols and know about the latest developments in this arena.
This will surely be a tall ask for them since they might not have access to a large pool of contacts from where they can learn more about these things in a timely manner.
And if you do see such a problem in your accounting team, then it’s high time that you get outsourcing based help so that they can bring in their global expertise on the latest trends and help your business fall in line.
5. Are you able to provide your in-house accounting team with relevant tools and technologies?
This is perhaps one of the most important signs you need to look for and it won’t be too difficult to find this out. Most modern accounting tasks are complex and require the assistance of specialized tools like Quickbooks to pull off.
And if your in-house accounting team doesn’t have access to such tools due to any number of reasons like you not being able to bear such additional costs, you need to look for outsourcing your accounting services so that you can benefit from access to such tools for your accounting processes.
6. Are the current accounting practices adequate to serve growth needs?
As businesses grow, their accounting processes require evolution too. Following this line can bring increased operational efficiencies in accounting tasks and help this business function keep pace with business growth activities.
But if you feel like your current processes in place to handle your accounting tasks are inadequate, then you can opt for outsourced accounting services in order to acquire assistance in upgrading your processes.
7. Is there a constant flow of similar mistakes?
If you want your accounting processes and your financial books to be error-free, you definitely need the assistance of an experienced and qualified set of professionals to handle these tasks for you.
An in house team can be prone to mistakes if they don’t hold much industry experience in identifying and fixing common errors. And while these errors might sometimes seem inconsequential to you, they can have far-reaching implications for the data you acquire from your books in the end.
This data can be flawed and thereby significantly affect the viability of the decisions you take through them. Don’t let this happen by enlisting help from outsourced accounting service providers.
8. Do you have confidentiality issues with your accounting data?
For some firms, keeping accounts and financial numbers private and out of view of their own employees is incredibly important, but with an in-house accounting team, this often becomes increasingly difficult.
That’s because, when the accounting team works in-house, they are bound to have interactions with other staff, which can be easily exploited by any employee smart enough to crack through.
If you too are facing this issue and don’t want this to linger on any longer than this, then this is an evident sign for you to start outsourcing your accounting services.
9. Do you really need a full-time CFO?
Most outsourced accounting firms offer a specialized service called outsourced CFO service. Ever wondered why?
That’s because, while having a CFO is important for businesses, the pay rate for in-house CFOs can be prohibitively high, making businesses shun the option of having a CFO on board altogether.
If you too, as a business, are facing a very similar dilemma where you cannot justify costs to a full-time CFO in return for the services you are acquiring off of it, then you can simply have an outsourced CFO service on board for this task.
They charge you by the hour or by project, making things easier to manage on the cost front.
10. Are your out-of-depth accounting services a major obstacle in driving business growth?
If you are priming for business growth in the long run on a sustainable model, you need to have the best, highly customized accounting processes in place.
Issues with your accounting processes like late payroll processing, and irregular financial records among others can wreak havoc on your growth plans as they do not just dampen the morale of workers but also don’t let you know the real insights from your business in time to make suitable decisions.
Here, you need to understand that growth for businesses is directly linked to the top of the line accounting services and if you still don’t have them, then you can get an outsourced accounting service provider to get these things done for you and save you from the hassle of getting important things sidelined or bungled up due to such issues.
Umair Javed is a highly renowned professional in the field of outsourcing solutions for the accounting and financial sectors. He has over a decade of industry experience and he is now bringing it to use by offering his insights on the latest in this field for the benefit of the industry.
