ACCOUNTANT SUCCESS STORY - AMY JANE, CPA

About Amy Jane:

Amy is a Founder & CEO at Amy Jane Chartered Professional Accountant headquartered in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. Amy Jane is a certified public accountant (CPA) and she began her firm three years ago and now provides accounting and consulting services to her clients. She assists with financial statements and tax preparation. She’s been doing accounting for over 20 years. 

The firm was established by Amy Jane Lunov, a designated accountant since 2004 with a reputation for quality work. Amy has over 20 years of experience working in the industry, government, not-for-profit, and public practice. In addition, she has 10 years of experience giving back to her vocation through academia through instructing auditing and accounting courses at SaskPolytechnic and the CPA Western School of Business.

Today Amy Jane Chartered Professional has 2 Team Members with Entigrity, with plans to recruit another 4 soon.

Amy Jane Chartered Professional Accountant is a licensed accounting firm registered with CPA Saskatchewan permitted to offer services to the public in all areas of expertise for the accounting profession, including assurance, financial accounting, management and management accounting, finance, and taxation.

Challenges of being an Entrepreneur:

Amy says, “It was a lot of hard work and faith, like any entrepreneur you open the door and if the people come, they come, but you don't really know what to expect and so I would say the first couple of years was a lot of trial and error and really, you can't learn until you take a chance and there was many things that I could have done better but had I known when I wouldn't have learned the lesson that I needed to and so at the onset it was a lot of hard work, really heavy lifting in terms of being able to establish the proper systems processes. And then probably offshoring turned my life”.

Initial Start with Offshoring and Entigrity:

Amy says, “I had tried hiring in the local market and I tried with recruitment agencies. I work in a smaller center and I had an email in my inbox. I think it happened to me how it was worded and I was like, what can it hurt to give this person an opportunity. And so I spoke to Chris Rivera, one of the other people in Entigrity and arranged a call and he really opened my eyes in terms of the things that are available. I took a chance and it's been about a year and what a great year has been in a great time to have moved to offshore staffing, particularly with the challenges that people are facing all over the world”.

Tasks the Offshore Team is responsible for:

Amy Jane started giving teams smaller tasks in terms of bookkeeping, taking information from source documents that are in a digital format and compiling them. Using pivot tables, using a lot of the built in technology to analyze the data. In the last year she has seen the opportunity to expand with resources and move to, not just bookkeeping work, but over to assurance work in terms of compilations, assistance on review engagements, tax preparation and so on. They uses a lot of the best practice software i.e. Wolters Kluwer with the CCH case where these have all moved to cloud based. 

Majority of those types of tasks was a little bit of a gradual process, of making sure she had the review processes in place and also understood their capabilities. When you are dealing with clients' sensitive information, it is very important to work with the right partner.

Thoughts on Offshoring

Amy felt that there's an opportunity to grow her business and scale it up and she wanted to feel confident about understanding what it was like, stepping into offshore staffing.

She said, “I see that people are really proud to work for Entigrity and they also take time for pleasure and there's some employee engagement activities and there's bonding that employees have good relations. And when employees feel positive about coming to work, they feel positive about the work that they're doing. And that is really great.”

Data Security Concerns:

Amy Jane added, “I'm using very secure cloud based applications and if someone was in my office sitting in the chair next to me, I would have the exact same situation, same risk. These cloud based softwares have the authentication built in and with the onboarding process just in terms of setting them up and my team is set up and they can call the support people directly if they have some concerns. And so I have absolutely no concerns in terms of my client's information being at a breach. I was really pleased when I came here to see that people are accustomed to working digitally and virtually and I also really respect and appreciate the practices that Entigrity have put in place”.

Recommendation for firms who are looking for offshoring:

Amy Says, “If you have good processes in place the minute you turn off at the end of the day, someone across the world is picking up your work. And so I think that If you really want to see your margins grow, you have the opportunity to essentially work 24 hours a day, but maintain that work life balance. It may allow you six months to turn around your corporate tax return. But when you can turn that around to a client in a month, let me tell you, you're gonna have that client for life”.

Processes & Workflow:

Amy started to look at her processes and this was about the time she was getting into her third year of trying to stabilize her firm and map out some of her workflows and some of the routine processes. She was mindful about when she needed to step back and when she needed to delegate and check. 

Amy Says,”It's not just a flip a switch and all of a sudden you have a resource halfway across the world that's going to do what you need to, it gives a chance for self reflection from a firm perspective in terms of what duties of high value do I need to do, and what things can I delegate to others and that they can manage if they have the proper structure in place. And it was a really good opportunity to self evaluate my workflow and the processes and from start to finish. 

Conclusion:

There are two staff members from Entigrity who work with Amy Jane. They have done a wonderful job. We think Amy Jane will expand, she'll make those two people seniors and build a team under them. 

Entigrity is really happy to give that competitive advantage to the smaller firms so they can survive, grow and thrive in this competitive space of campaign again. 

Entigrity teamed with nearly 300 new accounting firms this year, adding 450 offshore staff to support them during tax season and throughout the year. 

Entigrity is a global leader in offshore staffing solutions for accounting firms. In addition to that, we're among 30 top 100 accounting firms' preferred offshore partners, notably Aafcpas, Somerset, HoganTaylor, KCoe Isom, LLP, and Perkins & Company. We're also among BDO alliance network firms' choice offshore staffing partners. 

The majority of the Mid-Regional & Leading Accounting firms chose Entigrity as their offshore staffing partner for a variety of reasons such as the innovative, efficient and streamlined service process we provide.

Entigrity™ is a trusted offshore staffing partner to over 600+ accountants, CPAs, and tax firms across the US and Canada. Our flexible and transparent hiring model gives helps firms of all sizes to hire staff for accounting, bookkeeping, tax preparation, or any other task for 75% less cost. As a firm 'run by accountants, for the accountants', Entigrity captures the hiring needs of accounting firms most precisely, providing staff that works directly under your control and management, still, you are left with least to worry about compliance, payroll taxes, overheads or any other benefits.