HOW WE HELPED START-UP ACCOUNTING FIRMS TO MITIGATE OPERATIONAL CHALLENGES?

Overview One of our client completed his CPA and was planning to start his own Tax and Accounting & Bookkeeping firm. At present, they are well established and offering services to small and mid size businesses. Their major clients belongs IT, Banking and Finance, Restaurant and Hotel industry. They also offer wealth management and tax planning service along with other services.

Business Challenges

Initially our client has started his firm from his home, alone. He use to meet the clients at their workplace or restaurants or some other place. When work started flowing in the firm following are the some issues they were facing:

• • Space Management: The physical office limitations dictating the inability to expand and hire more staff was having a direct adverse impact on their business and revenue generation.
  • Funding and Financing: Like every start ups  he was also had a limited capital to invest in own practice. With it there were always a fee Pressure for start ups too, revenue model was also not accurate.
  • Qualified Staff and Their Training: He faced a consistent problem in getting qualified and trained staff because of funding and financing and space management. Because of Higher Attrition rate and Staff Turnover Ratio he ended up spending tons of time behind training people and kept away from him focusing from core business functions.
  • Quality and Efficiency: He wanted their staff to add value to their current clients and to grow the business organically through cross selling and referrals but they were already unable to meet deadlines and produce accounts on schedule during peak periods to an ever expanding client base. Because of lack of trained staff, they often failed to provide quality services to their clients.
  • Business Development: Business Development also became a Big challenge for them because they were not able to focus. They had more operations related issues to worry about than focusing on getting new clients. The speed of getting new clients also considerably decreased which affected their profitability badly and put the business existence in danger.

Having said all these, they badly needed to identify a solution which would enable them to achieve their ambitions while minimizing expenditure and at the same time make their business more efficient. In the absence of a dedicated and qualified accounting team, their operation faced huge challenges in controlling costs and maintaining efficiency. Their requirement in their approach to Entigrity was to reduce their operation cost and they needed qualified accountants who would be able to provide a top quality services plus have the ability to liaise with their widespread offices by telephone or written correspondence.

How Entigrity Helped

We undertook and in depth study of their systems and document procedures and produced a detailed plan outlining all the tasks. After careful consideration the client decided to go with remote Employee model with Entigrity. They were hesitant doing so but we were able to win their confidence through trial run. We firstly allowed them to concentrate on business development and client retention activities; and secondly, provided well trained Staff Accountants, Accounts Senior, Accounts Manager which they required at a lower cost base, without the physical office space and associated overheads. It helped them to a great extent reducing their operations cost. Since we were successful in providing a strong team of accountants, it eventually disappeared quality and efficiency issues.

Our plan of actions focused on a number of areas which included:

• Create a strong team of qualified Staff Accountants, Accounts Senior, Tax Associate, Tax Senior and Accounts Manager and train them on accounting and bookkeeping aspects
• Streamlining the accounting process with new process controls for seamless accounting
• Created Standard Procedures Document detailing all processes for training and process improvements
• Setting up KRA and KPI for individuals and teams to achieve optimum quality and efficiency
• Developed a reporting structure for timely delivery of data and reports

Entigrity™ is a trusted offshore staffing partner to over 500+ 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.