For the past couple of years we’ve been blogging relentlessly about the benefits of cloud accounting, all the different areas it can help improve/streamline and how almost every firm can save time and effort by automating many of the mundane manual areas of “doing your books”.
Almost all of our clients have embraced it, at least, in part, by moving to cloud based software… but there is another way to take advantage of all the tech without having to learn anything… Outsourcing.
A recent report by one of the Big 4 accountancy firms, suggests that 40% of small/medium companies intend to increase their use of outsourced accountancy to aid their post COVID-19 recovery, given its flexibility and generally being a more cost-effective option than an in-house solution.
So, what actually is it? In a nutshell you outsource some or all of the day to day accounts tasks to an external company, (Harold Sharp are a dab hand in this area by the way), either freeing up your own staff or more often the business owners’ own time to concentrate on running their business and making money.
The main advantages of Outsourcing:
- Access to experts – Whatever’s going on in your business there’s a good chance we’ve seen it before and can come up with an answer/solution.
- Cost savings – By only paying for what you need rather than having a full time recruit under-utilised. Cutting out national insurance, pension contributions, holiday pay, sick pay, HR, training etc. It really can work in your favour.
- Time – especially if you’re doing the bookkeeping yourself, we can free you up to do what you do best… running your business!
- Efficiencies – we’re partnered with loads of software providers and have access to analytic tools that individual businesses can’t justify purchasing.
- Effort – Whilst the time these apps save you is worth the investment in learning how it works getting them set-up, you don’t have to bother. We can use our existing knowledge to take advantage of whichever piece(s) of kit we think would be most suitable.
So, whilst the hourly cost of outsourced accountancy may be higher than that of internal staff, by cutting out the extra costs of employment and taking advantage of all the tech on offer we can often drastically reduce the time required to keep records up to date.
In the interest of being honest from the outset, there can be a couple of drawbacks to outsourcing too, as we want to make sure it’s the right solution for you, we thought it right to highlight these too!
- How we work – we’re experts in cloud accounting, and we’re likely to make changes to your current way of working in order to achieve the best results in the most economical way. So if you’re wanting to keep things the way they’ve always been, then perhaps outsourcing isn’t going to be right for you.
- Management/control – As an external provider we can’t always have staff sat around waiting for instructions. Whilst we will always do our very best to accommodate any changes or additional work, it’s not always possible to do this immediately.
I’d say it’s the business equivalent of me paying someone to do my ironing… I can iron, but I’m not particularly fast or good at it. Therefore, the cost to me, is more than worth the effort and time saved!
How can we help?
If you’d like to free up some of your own time, your current staff are under-utilised or unable to manage the amount of work, if your work is seasonal and you only need someone for a couple of months a year, please contact our digital advisory team by emailing fintech@haroldsharp.co.uk or call 0161 905 1616.