Outsource accounting firm BOSS shares a case study that details taking on an outsourced accountant for compliance work and how to really make it work for accounting firms
(PRUnderground) March 26th, 2025
Lee:
Can you tell us a bit about your firm?
David:
OK, the business was established in November 1999. We started out predominately, or with a focus on doing business advisory work and then along with that came the compliance part. Probably after about 3 to 4 years with two to three staff we started to have some issues with staff turnover and it was really hard that you’d spend your time training the people up, they’d get used to the work you’d want them to do – all your systems, all your approaches – then they’d basically say, ‘Thank you for that’, then they’d leave and go to another firm. It was really hard from a compliance perspective just to get the work done, and so now we’ve got two accounting staff internally and about one and a half non-accounting staff.
Lee:
And why did you choose BOSS?
David:
Well it sort of links to the issues we were having with retaining staff here, and then trying to find good staff in the local area and knowing you need to do the compliance work and then not having the staff to do it, we just thought ‘this is an option’, so we trialed it and we were quite pleased with how it worked. We dropped out for a couple of years because we had found local staff and that was fine and then with a few more staff changes we thought ‘we’ll go back to the idea of engaging BOSS’ in terms of outsourcing the compliance work.
Lee:
So it’s a definite strategy for you to outsource the compliance work now?
David:
Oh it is for sure, and going forward that’s what we’ll do. We need to keep a couple of staff locally, and that’s fine, some of it is on-the-ground work, but a lot of the compliance work, as we continue to grow and as that continues to build up, we’ll continue to build up the outsourced resources. And even as we were talking the other day, in terms of the bookkeeper role, now with having more online and net-based accounting systems that bookkeeping work can effectively be done anywhere. So provided we’ve got the people trained up in Zero and Sasu and the other programs I’m looking at outsourcing that going forward, yes, it’s a definite strategy in terms of using the outsourced resources.
Lee:
How did you go about setting things up with BOSS? Were there any particular things that you needed to set up in the beginning, or get orchestrated during the first few months?
David:
Well I suppose we were pretty fortunate because for a long period of time we’d been moving down the path of a paperless office so we already had scanning capabilities and our processes were pretty much aligned doing things online and electronically. So we didn’t have to make many changes in that area. We have had a few IT issues around slow internet access so we have purchased a terminal server and that seems to have fixed most of those problems.
But I think what you need to do with anything like this is that you look at your processes and how you can best do them efficiently. What we actually do is when we look at it we treat the BOSS staff member as part of the main partners team; one of the staff, they’re just not physically located here. So our processes, whether someone does the work here or whether it’s outsourced, the processes are exactly the same.
You’ve also got to make sure your processes are aligned so you have the ability to be able to scan information through on a timely basis. You need to have the ability to respond to questions also in a timely manner. To a certain degree the time difference actually helps that because some of the work being done in India is during an Australian evening when we’re not in the office. This means that when we come in the morning we’ve got queries so we can answer those queries upfront and then they’re ready to go when the BOSS person gets in about 1pm our time.
Lee:
You raised some interesting points there because I do know that clients that get the most out of outsourcing definitely collaborate a lot more and I think communicate a lot more with their accountants. You raised the point that if you’re treating them as one of your staff members and have them engaged in that way then you definitely get more out of it. So what have been the benefits of using BOSS?
David:
Well I think the main benefit is just being able to get the work done. Having the staff available and as I mentioned earlier that part of our ongoing strategy is to increase our outsourced component and being able to do that compliance work. So that’s the main benefit. I mean overall I think we just see it as having another staff member and just being able to have that reliability in relation to that staff member always being there and being available.
To see the rest of the case study interview, visit the BOSS accounting outsourcing website.
About BOSS, BACK OFFICE SHARED SERVICES PTY LTD
BOSS (Back Office Shared Services Pty Ltd) was founded in 2004 to provide skilled accountants and bookkeepers on a full-time, part-time and casual basis to commercial enterprises, accounting and financial services firms in Australia.
BOSS India is a subsidiary of BOSS Australia and runs just like an ultra-modern paperless Australian public practice because the Director and Accountancy Practice Principal, Peter Vickers, has been operating his own successful Australian public practice for over twenty years.
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