How Outsourced Accounting Solutions Can Boost Your Bottom Line

By Bradford Jones, CPA, CVA, CMA, CFF

Many companies outsource their accounting function primarily as a cost-saving strategy. However, there are a variety of other benefits outsourcing can provide, including the sophisticated insights it can uncover. These insights include customized industry solutions and analytics that can help drive profitability.

Gross margin, inventory turnover, debt to equity ratios — these are all invaluable metrics that provide insight into the current and future state of your business.

Drive Profitability by Uncovering Actionable Insights

There’s no doubt about it: Understanding your organization’s liquidity, efficiency, and profitability on a granular level makes your decision-making process more effective and elevates your ability to manage uncertainty and deliver results.

But with more and more accountants leaving the profession and fewer students enrolling in college-level accounting programs, we’re seeing companies struggle to:

Hire and retain qualified people to staff the finance and accounting functions
Find time to produce accurate, reliable, and relevant financial reports
Dig deep into trends and data analytics

By outsourcing the accounting and finance function to a reputable CPA firm, organizations leverage a well-trained and deeply skilled talent pool. These firms handle digital transformation of critical business processes for their clients on a regular basis. For CFOs, this means elevating and modernizing the finance and accounting function to perform more efficiently and effectively.

As our clients work to accomplish strategic goals in today’s economic landscape, one of the solutions they consistently want to discuss further is FAO — finance and accounting outsourcing.

Tackle the Future with More Confidence

The complexity of today’s economic landscape has increased the need for teams with advanced capabilities. However, amidst today’s talent gap, businesses are scrambling to find talent pools that include professionals with niche technology skills and accounting expertise.

As businesses work to address the talent gap and, at the same time, keep their accounting function lean and productive, outsourcing helps shoulder some of the transactional burden.

But an often overlooked benefit is the organizational insight that emerges when some breathing room appears and there is time to actually dig into the financials.

On your own, undertaking a top-down review might not even be possible because of staffing constraints. But when you partner with an outsourced accounting firm, that firm helps break down the process into more realistic and attainable steps.

It all begins by identifying which financial key performance indicators will reveal the most meaningful insights. Different industries track different KPIs, and your unique business model will inform which metrics will be most revealing and informative. For example:

Companies in the manufacturing sector will likely want to know granular details about inventory.
Service providers will gain more insights from uncovering KPIs like revenue generated per employee.

With the right metrics, your organization can design a doable and scalable growth strategy.

Not sure which metrics will tell you the most about your business? When you find an outsourced accounting firm with specific experience in your industry, you’ll be able to leverage their expertise with analytics and their understanding of industry best practices.

Before you know it, you’re regularly reviewing cash flow trends in a much more sophisticated and insightful way and making data-driven projections. And your assumptions become much more informed and reliable.

Construct Reliable Forecasts and Strategies that Fuel Forward Momentum

Being able to develop budgets and forecasts with confidence helps guide your organization through any economic landscape. What was once unclear comes into focus.

Identifying and monitoring the right KPIs enable decision makers to see otherwise buried risks and opportunities and, in turn, more effectively focus on the big picture.

Outsourcing a part of (or the entire) accounting and finance function can truly enable the finance department to operate as a valuable business advisor for the organization:

Add an external perspective can uncover items that an overwhelmed in-house team that’s become accustomed to a routine way of doing things may overlook. This external perspective helps uncover key business processes and scenarios that warrant change consideration.
Build an early-warning system. Unlock ideas for how data analytics can trigger early warnings. When you track the right metrics, you can use historical data to help predict future market movement.
Tap into innovative financial strategies that draw on experience with industry best practices that can elevate the organization’s trajectory.
Partner with an expert team as you navigate uncharted territory. Evaluate plans for growth with a new sense of confidence. Move forward by empowering your business and leveraging agile business processes and tested solutions.