Phil Whitman, CPA, has been voicing his opinion on remote working and offshore staffing for the accounting firms, especially during this current pandemic, where a lot of firms are laying off their employees and cutting down overheads.
EXPERT OPINION THAT MATTERS - SERIES - EPISODE 1
Phil Whitman, CPA, has been voicing his opinion on remote working and offshore staffing for the accounting firms, especially during this current pandemic, where a lot of firms are laying off their employees and cutting down overheads.
In his recent interview with Entigrity, Phil pointed out, “Today, accountants need to open their eyes, Offshore Staffing is an essential part of practice growth multiplier strategy. It’s not just cheap labor, it gives you significant leverage, lower your costs, expand your capacity, and a game-changing solution in the current times where you don’t have flexibility or control over your Staff cost and overheads.”
Phil was a pioneer in introducing offshore staffing in his earlier assignment, being a COO at one of the Top 30 Accounting firms in the US. “During my time at Berdon LLP, I started an initiative called MOTI (Move Operation to India), and Today they operate with a big dedicated Team in India.”
When asked why people perceive onshore remote staff & offshore remote staff differently, he mentioned - “Whether staff is working remotely from ‘New York or New Delhi’, ‘Boston or Bangalore’, ‘Miami or Mumbai’; the reality is both are remote, but the latter saves a lot of money. And offshore staffing is no different than any of your existing employees working remotely from the US.” Watch Phil’s complete video here.
Ever thought, apart from being cost-effective, what kind of benefits can you drive from Offshore Staffing?
The accounting industry is highly competitive; thus, new CPA firms must maximize their profits as soon as possible. Profit is one of the major parameters to define growth and expansion for accounting firms. However, cost efficiency is a very narrow down benefit of remote staffing for accounting firms as there are multiple other unveiled benefits present beneath the offshoring hiring model for accounting firms.
1. Dedicated and Qualified professionals
In the interview Phil said, “When you offshore, you will get extremely talented tax and accounting professionals at a fraction of the cost. Offshoring needs to be one of the solutions that you have so that you can continue to service your clients...”. You get to choose who you want to work with. Interview them, test them, choose them. You get professionals sourced as per your needs who have requisite qualifications and required software knowledge. The basic qualification for all the staff personnel would include a minimum of Bachelor’s degree, QBO, and Microsoft Suite. They work directly under your control, similar to any local staff working remotely.
2. Capacity Building
The best thing about offshore staff is that dedicated and qualified professionals can help with capacity and overflow. Therefore, your ability to handle bookkeeping and accounting for your clients dramatically increases. In addition, if you have hired offshore accounting firms from different time zones such as India and the US, where they have 12 hours of the time difference in between them, you will be able to provide round the clock services!
3. Retention of Employees
If you’ve been an accounting firm for a long period of time, then you must know how hard it is to find a competent employee. How difficult it is to retain your good employees in this competitive industry? If you have an offshore accounting team, then you won’t have to worry if an unforeseen situation happens such as your local staff associate quits without giving prior notice. That’s because offshore accounting companies have support from various accounting professionals to tax experts. You just need to contact them for certain services and they will instantly provide that to you!
4. Able to offer something extra to your clients
According to Phil, “Business development is a wonderful thing because everyone wants to grow their firms.” If you’ve always wanted to scale your practice and offer additional services to your clients like auditing, tax preparation, payroll, etc., then, you might have heard about the challenges in doing so. Lack of time, limited budget, unavailability of experts, and a number of other factors. For example, if you want to provide tax preparation services to your clients during tax season, then you can offshore these services for a limited time and provide complete financial solutions to your clients all under one roof!
5. Delegate the Extra Workload
Offshore Staffing solutions allow accounting firms the opportunity to easily handle the extra workload in any given period without increasing the staff hours. This will offer flexibility to the accounting firms which is unheard of nowadays. Many of us strive for work-life balance, as Phil recalled from one of his experiences, “Many partners have said to me, you know what? If I bring in a new client, even if it's twenty thousand, fifty thousand, one hundred thousand, it means I'm going to have to work harder and I already have little or no work-life balance. Offshoring will enable you to give your team an additional work-life balance.”
6. High profitability without extra efforts
The main objective behind offshore staffing in the accounting and bookkeeping fields is to make more money by reducing expenses without disturbing the workflow and the least amount of effort. With flexible hiring models you foremost reduce costs by cutting down overheads like part-time wages, payroll taxes, and health benefits. This offers the opportunity to accounting firm owners to utilize their own free time in creating marketing ideas to promote their business. While being more client-facing as well. By offshoring work accounting firms can increase their profit in many different avenues!
Offshore staffing for accounting firms can open up the amazing benefits by which they can increase their profit, flexibility, productivity without strenuous efforts. There are plenty of other benefits that are generated by accounting firms by trusting the expertise of their offshore staff.
If you or any of your colleagues wish to learn more, let’s have a quick chat and discuss future possibilities.
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.
About The Author
Mike Goossen, CPA
Mike is a CPA and has over 30 years of experience in thought leadership and mentoring. His experience and constant efforts in solving prevalent issues of accounting industry is his biggest stand out point. He has been instrumental in mentoring scores of entrepreneurial accounting and finance professionals to get up on their feet and convert their practices into successful ones. He has authored a book called 'Principles of High Performance Leadership'
