Finance Article Directory

The advantages of outsourcing can be significant for small business owners and for the business. Reviewing the history of outsourcing as a business strategy demonstrates that the need for specialized and low cost labor was a key driver. Small businesses are often constrained by the need to keep costs down and to find competent labor. Many small business owners cannot afford, and do not need, a large number of employees. Yet, small businesses need to grow to survive.

How do you grow your business without increasing your staff? How do you stay focused on your business vision and strategic plan? Managing your every-day business activities can be hard work; adding growth objectives to that day-to-day effort can be overwhelming. Hiring outsourced services can help you meet your business plan.

What is outsourcing? It is hiring outside resources to do what you can’t, or don’t want to, do within the business. Large scale outsourcing is becoming more common on a global basis. Businesses are trying to narrow in on their core competencies and to contract out services that don’t align with their primary business. For example, a number of North American phone companies outsource call center work to India. Law firms outsource legal research to countries with lower labor costs. On a small business scale, outsourcing is about hiring services that a small business owner can’t handle internally.

Outsourcing specialized services can help your business contain and minimize payroll costs, reduce the need to recruit more staff and to manage more staff, and improve your utilization of resources (people, equipment, time and money). There are excellent benefits and paybacks to contracting out services, particularly highly specialized services.

There are many functional services that can be outsourced. Here is a short list of some of the most common ones: human resources support – including recruiting, training, salary surveys, writing of job descriptions, writing of employee policies, payroll and benefits; accounting support – such as accounts receivable, accounts payable, bookkeeping, financial statements; marketing – such as specific direct marketing programs, new product launches, promotional brochures, and email campaigns; information technology support – such as vacation relief, backing up remotely, hardware maintenance, and software analysis; transportation – such as warehousing, inventory, shipping; building and grounds cleaning and maintenance; sales – such as independent sales agents or distributors; management consultants; and more.

Transition from outsourcing services to hiring a full time person when the cost of outsourcing is significantly more than the cost of hiring staff; but make sure that you recognize that outsourced services are often specialized whereas an employee may be more of a generalist. For example, if your accounting outsourcing is costing you 20 percent more than an employee would, hire an employee who can do the accounting (receivables, payables, costing, and financials) and help in the administration of the office.

There are many good reasons to outsource but the best reason is that it allows you to focus on what you do best, and to focus on what’s harder to outsource (your passion for the business). Consider your strengths and weaknesses and focus your efforts on the higher impact and higher profit endeavor. Your decision to outsource needs to be balanced with what you gain or lose by outsourcing.

As a small business owner or manager, your goal is to grow your business. The advantages of outsourcing will help you achieve that goal by saving time and money, focusing on your strengths and weaknesses and achieving your plan. Find more proven strategies and resources from the More For Small Business site to better manage your business.

This article is written for the business owner who has a bookkeeper and has thought about terminating that employee. As business owners, we need to make tough decisions all the time and this one is important. No matter what the company size, there comes a time for any business, to replace or eliminate an employee’s position. No one likes to terminate an employee, especially in this economic environment. We all know, that its important to always care about our employees, so this type of decision is very important and often is hard to make. Sometimes your perception is blocked by your feelings for the employee which often results in no decision. This is article is written to help you realize that it may be the right time to make a decision.

As a small business owner, its tough to make this type of decision, because there may be no one to talk too, and also if you really haven’t had the sufficient time to devote to this problem. Here are 10 reasons or indicators to help you make that decision or to reinforce your decision to change your bookkeeper. If you can identify with a couple of these reasons or perhaps just one, and you believe that the problem cannot be fixed, then it may be time to terminate your bookkeeper or reduce their working hours.

1. Financial information is received late and always has mistakes.

2. You or someone in your family have the time to do the bookkeeping and are financial and computer savvy.

3. You need to replace the income of your wife, your parents, your in-law(s) or other family members.

4. Your bookkeeping doesn’t seem as complex and you are too dependent on the bookkeeper.

5. You have discussed this problem with the employee, it can’t be fixed and you have made every effort to be fair and equitable.

6. Your bookkeeper doesn’t communicate well with you.

7. Your bookkeeper is always too busy to give you the answer to your questions.

8. Your bookkeeper comes in late and leaves early and doesn’t get all the wok done.

9. Given the decrease in your annual revenues, you believe you have too many people employed.

10. Self Realization – A little birdie or an inner voice tells you that it’s time to terminate your bookkeeper or reduce their bookkeeping hours.

Remember,any one of above-mentioned indicators may provide the necessary impetus to internalize the bookkeeping within the family, assuming the replacement person is computer literate and/or is willing to become financially literate. Like any other accounting related decision, ask your CPA or accountant for their input.

If you are the owner of a small business, who is interested in saving a portion of your payroll costs,thinking about outsourcing your current accountant or bookkeeper, a family member is out of work, outsourcing to family may make sense for you.

Outsourcing your bookkeeping functions may result in reduced salary expenses, or the conversion of fixed costs to variable costs, insurance benefits and some tax savings, etc.. Before you begin to outsource, you will need to purchase a quality fax machine or scanner. The type of fax machine or scanner is dependent upon the volume and frequency of paper documents (i.e. customer invoices,vendor bills, bank statements, etc.) to be scanned and sent to your outsourced accountant. Scanning or faxing is necessary because all of the source documents have to be sent either by email or fax to the outsourced accountant to record the accounting transactions.

As an owner of a small business or the person responsible for the accounting or bookkeeping, it’s important to establish a process by which to monitor the activities of the outsourcing company or person. Outsourcing may make sense, providing a competent and independent person oversees and monitors the financial results on your behalf.

We often read that that if you outsource, some of your business accounting functions to a foreign country, then your labor costs will decrease as compared to what you would generally pay in the United States. In these uncertain times, when small business owners are facing survival issues resulting from lost sales, skyrocketing costs, contraction, often exacerbated by family unemployment, then it may make sense to give thought to employing a family member to help with the small business accounting. By employing a family member in your house or outsourcing your accounting function with family in a distant location, rather than outsourcing to another country, you may actually help the U.S. economy, in your own way, by keeping jobs in this country. A baby step,but certainly the right one for our country. This idea works, if the owners or members of the owner’s family can learn QuickBooks, or another comparable online accounting software program. It’s helpful, if the family member has some basic financial knowledge to undertake this responsibility of entering the financial information into an online accounting software. Given the current economy in the United States, there are situations where family members are now unemployed and are now ready, able and available to help and make a positive contribution to the family business.

Quite frankly,QuickBooks Online Plus is simple enough that with proper training, most detail oriented people with common sense can handle QuickBooks, as long as a CPA or accountant is available to ask questions,and there is mechanism to allow for real time or after the fact corrections or adjustments to the accounting records.

Under either scenario, outsourcing with a family member or to a foreign country,a CPA or accountant or a skilled financial services consultant is the ideal person to monitor either the real time, or monthly or quarterly financial information, and to check that the reconciliation process is working and more importantly, that outsource person or team, are doing the right job.

With the correct QuickBooks Online or other QuickBooks versions with remote access, it is possible for your CPA or accountant to remotely monitor an outsourced accounting department, whether the outsourced department is in a distant location or outsourced to family.

If you decide to outsource, then you should speak to your CPA or accountant in order to ascertain if whether or not outsourcing is appropriate for your particular small business accounting situation. The CPA or accountant is best suited in helping you evaluate the potential skill set of the person to provide the outsourced service.

This concept of outsourcing to one or two family members may not work for a large or mid size business. However, if you own a small business, interested in effectively reducing a portion of your payroll costs, have decided or thinking about outsourcing your current bookkeeper, and someone in your family is unemployed, outsourcing may be right for you. Once again, this will work as long as the outsourced family member is properly supervised and monitored by a CPA or accountant. In the beginning there may be more time required by your CPA or accountant to train and to oversee as compared to time that your accounting professional currently spends each month or quarter. In the long run, the amount of time required by your accounting professional should diminish. Notwithstanding, some time will always be required of your accounting professional to monitor the activities of the outsourced person.