Issue

This client was struggling with an unreliable financial reporting process that included:

  • Financial statements not being produced in a timely manner
  • Reports were prepared in a way that made uncovering actionable insights challenging
  • No review process when issuing invoices
  • Inconsistent processes for AR collections and applying payments
  • Customer frustration due to incorrect invoices and other issue related to unresponsive accounting support

The Client Tried Outsourced Accounting Before with No Luck

Because the client needed reliable, informative, and timely financial reports to make business decisions, they had tried outsourcing the financial reporting process to another accounting firm, but were not satisfied with the results.

The Solution

PBMares was able to quickly understand the client’s concerns and take action that accomplished the following for the client:

  • Improved customer satisfaction
  • Minimized unpaid invoices and the AR balance
  • Designed a pricing plan that led to a reliable increase in revenue streams
  • Optimized the financial reporting process so decisions makers could easily access actionable financial insights

Our Approach

When the PBMares Financial Accounting & Outsourcing (FAO) Team met with the client to understand their needs and their points-of-view, it was clear that the client’s situation required a two-step approach.

Step 1: We addressed the above issues that required immediate attention.

We began the engagement by addressing customer satisfaction in these two areas:

  • The invoicing and AR collections process. Improving these areas immediately was understandably quite important to the client since capital to continue running the business originates here.
  • Old outstanding AR. We worked with the client to identify:
    • Any potential accounting errors
    • What could/should be collected from customers vs. what should be written off as uncollectible

Step 2: We then began strategically optimizing financial reporting processes.

The client needed us to develop a plan to drive efficiency from cost and decision-making perspectives. We did exactly that by:

  • Investigating and discussing price increases based on industry-specific indexes 
  • Streamlining and reformatting the pricing model to account for variables including: location, changes in operating costs, overhead coverage, etc.
  • Designing efficient financial reporting processes that reduce costs and make financial reports more user-friendly and actionable for decision-making.

How the Client Was Impacted Along the Way

Along the way, we met weekly with the client to discuss their concerns and the details of the project. 

Typically one point-person — maybe two or three — from the client attends these meetings. In this case, however, almost the entire financial reporting team chose to attend the meetings for the following reasons:  

  • Employee anxiety. Some members of the team were understandably anxious because the changes would impact their daily tasks. Our FAO team completely understands this and took the time to hear their concerns and explain each step of the process to as many team members as was necessary.
  • Employee curiosity. Others were deeply invested in the process and wanted to see exactly how we were rebuilding certain processes, identifying and rectifying accounting errors, and addressing new pain points as they arose.

As employees became more comfortable with the plan forward, attendance at these meetings decreased. 

Learn More

Learn more about outsourcing all or part of your accounting or finance function. Contact us today.