With the massive influx of offshore firms now providing outsourcing and offshoring (i.e. labour hire), there is the temptation for Australian accounting firms to go cheap.
What usually ends up as a cost comparison exercise normally ends up as a costly exercise.
In this blog we look at why selecting an Outsourcing leader is critical for Australian compliance outsourcing.
There are usually several interrelated factors in outsourcing, but they can be simplified down to: Quality, Timeliness, Cost. When you are considering your outsourcing or labor hire from an offshore provider, it is critical that you have a clear idea of what is most important to your firm.
This requires taking time to think about the outsourcing. Yes, outsourcing does still h great benefit of saving you money and helping you speed up your compliance work, however modern Australian accounting outsourcing should do so much more, especially as Australian compliance outsourcing is now over 12 years old.
You should expect the older outsourcing suppliers to be continually reinventing themselves, and staying ahead of the competition by investing in new processes and systems. If they aren’t, then you’re at risk of getting the same old service levels that were acceptable a decade ago.
The world is changing quickly, and that requires companies to be equally nimble. You can easily bog down your Australian compliance team by attempting to keep all of your compliance in-house. The real question is whether every last bit (or any) of the compliance actually needs to be within the walls of your firm. Probably not, and by outsourcing compliance work you’re going to free up your in-house team to work on critical value-add work.
The reality is that doing the same old compliance work in-house is fact risky. And it’s becoming riskier as time progresses.
If you are going to outsource, then you can mitigate the risk of engaging sub-par providers by ensuring you are dealing with established providers. And paying more for quality work means better customer service down the line, and less time reviewing cruddy compliance work.
Australian accounting firm owners need to do away with the thinking that in-house people work better than outsourced ones because they physically work with you. In many cases outsourcing providers have people dedicated to compliance work, and access to skill levels beyond what is available in the accounting firm.
The firm of the future needs to change the way their practices operate, not only because of globalization and offshoring, but through the impact of the cloud and automation. Working with offshore outsourcing is now a norm, rather than an exception.
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