Does Outsourcing My Company’s Bookkeeping/Accounting Make Sense ?

I am new to blogging and have realized that there are numerous topics on the subject of Online Accounting to write about. From the blogging experts, I have been told to read other blogs on similar topics to ascertain current topics of interests. To this end, I am beginning to research and have found very few topics on the subject of Internalizing Online Accounting for the Small Business owner. But what I have found, are blogs from service providers in India and the Philippines on the subject of outsourcing. This perked my interest in the topic of outsourcing. Consequently, this week’s blog deals with current global topics and my attention is drawn to the topic of outsourcing to foreign countries and to outsourcing in general.

Outsourcing may result in reduced labor costs, or the conversion of fixed costs to variable costs(to some extent), reduction of training costs, insurance, benefits and some tax savings, etc. But you need to invest in scanning , because you need to scan all of those source documents to the outsourced accountant and have confidence that the outsourced company is reliable. As a business owner or the person responsible for the financial department, you must also make sure there is a process in place to monitor the activities of the outsourcing company. An important consideration is that outsourcing may make sense, as long as a competent and independent person oversees and monitors the financial results on behalf of the small business owner. We now live in very unusual times and our priorities sometimes change.

Under good economic times, outsourcing may make sense. But when business owners are facing issues such contraction, or even family unemployment, it may make sense to employ the family to help. This novel concept works, if the owners or members of the owner’s family are willing to invest the time to learn QuickBooks, or other comparable accounting programs, and have some basic financial knowledge to undertake this responsibility of entering the financial information into QuickBooks providing they are not adverse to details. Given the current economy in the United States, I have seen situations where family members who have lost their jobs are now available to help in the family business.

Quite frankly, QuickBooks is simple enough that with proper training, most detail oriented people with common sense can handle QuickBooks, as long as they have resource, consultant or CPA to ask questions, to receive timely answer and there is mechanism to allow for real time or after the fact corrections or adjustments to the accounting records. Under either scenario a CPA or a Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor or a skilled financial services consultant and is the ideal person to monitor either the real time, monthly or quarterly financial information, and to check that the reconciliation process is working and more importantly, that outsource team, or the internal bookkeepers are doing the right job. That’s called “Checks and balances”.

With the Online QuickBooks version or any other QuickBooks version with remote access from a desktop PC, the monitoring process can be accomplished for outsourced accounting departments.


Sandor Lenner CPA,MBA and a Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor who works as a part-time consultant with Susan Missal Lenner, P.A.

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