The Outsourced Accounting Dilemma: Quantity or Quality?

Among the core service lines of accounting firms, Audit and Tax have historically been the biggest revenue generators. Over the past decade, the consulting service line, and Outsourced Accounting specifically, have experienced the highest growth rates.

Organizations are readily recognizing the benefits of outsourcing the financial close function, which includes reduced FTE time and cost, the ability to shift to strategic projects, and receiving unbiased expertise.

But if you’re an Accounting Outsourcer, how do you support a rapidly growing client base without jeopardizing your high standards and quality of work?

Outsourced Accounting firms must create as much operational efficiency as possible to effectively scale and satisfy their clients’ needs. While many Outsourced Accounting firms have been building technology stacks to help standardize their practices, there still remains work to be done.

Traditional manual accounting is simply not sustainable. While putting a dashboard or project management tool over close activities does provide incremental benefits, such as visibility, Outsourced Accounting firms need to consider modern accounting solutions.

A modern accounting platform provides a centralized workspace that unifies data, processes, and supporting documentation, automates high-volume transactional activities, increases global visibility, and allows Accounting to be executed as it happens, in real time.

Here are four achievable benefits to investing in close automation technology for your Outsourced Accounting firm.

Close task management and automated workflows ensure that Outsourced Accounting can keep up with multiple clients and growing businesses. Dynamic alerts also speed collaboration while adding checks and balances to screen out errors—ensuring complete and accurate client service.

With a cloud-based platform that’s accessible from anywhere, Outsourced Accounting has complete oversight of their clients’ F&A activities, including close checklists, PBC requests, tax filings, and more.

Dealing with multiple ERPs and technologies across your client base drains efficiency and increases risk. It also costs Outsourced Accounting firms time and resources when ramping staff on disparate systems to manage various reconciliation, journal entry, and intercompany processes. And it should come as no surprise that utilization rates can be greatly impacted as a result.

With one, data source agnostic, cloud-based platform, Outsourced Accounting can plug and play across all client ERPs and technologies. Client trial balances automatically feed into your centralized workspace so that outsourced accounting staff can eliminate unnecessary administrative work and focus on completing core close activities.

Modern accounting solutions help accelerate multiple business processes such as onboarding clients and staff, automating reconciliations, and orchestrating financial close review tasks. Cloud-based applications also facilitate easier collaboration with remote clients, auditors, and distributed outsourced accounting staff.

For Accounting Outsourcers, every resource efficiency improvement drives bottom-line benefits, which quickly compound across your staff and client base. With scalable technology, you can onboard more clients without adding unnecessary headcount.

The time savings gained by automating high-volume transactional work allows firms to provide higher-value services like strategic analysis. With real-time close activities at a glance, Outsourced Accounting firms can quickly understand what part of their clients’ financial close processes is ripe for reinvention.

With modern accounting principles and technology, Outsourced Accounting can up the level of advisory services offered to clients and deliver even more value to F&A organizations.

As your Outsourced Accounting firm reaches its tipping point, you don’t have to compromise between quantity and quality. Leading Accounting Outsourcers like RSM, Marcum, and Consero Global trust BlackLine to standardize workflows, automate the close, and scale successfully.

As organizations around the globe look to technology to increase collaboration and efficiency, don’t get let left behind. The time to modernize is now so your organization can increase market share without jeopardizing the quality of service.

Read our datasheet for Outsourced Accounting to learn more.