At a recent industry gathering while vibrantly highlighting our stand on Outsourcing and conversing with conference goers, it struck me that there continues to be consistent myths around outsourcing that need to be dispelled, so here I shall focus on one. The big one!
‘If I outsource I will have no work for my team or less work income for my country’.
Let’s be honest here, in the accounting industry we spend a lot of time completing routine tasks, if we could create a machine to do it, we would and truth be known software has already taken much of that work.
Tax Returns and Financial Statements are based on formulaic processes, for some, there is an element of comfortableness in doing these, they love the numbers, the burying of self into the paper drama of plus and minuses to get an end result that either has the client breathing a wee sigh of relief, or writing a cheque.
Let’s for a minute think about what you could do if those jobs were outsourced and for the basis of the hypothetical scenario we will focus on a basic GST Return.
The GST return is charged to the client for $250 and the outsourced cost is $50. The internal budget cost to have the return done is $150 so on average outsourcing has just saved you $100. However what is your accounting technician going to do?
On the basis that the client is still paying the full amount for the GST return here is a possible scenario.
The GST Return has to be reviewed before being filed for the client and this now becomes the technician’s job, rather than someone else’s, who may or may not cost more than the technician. In the review process the technician can have a little more time to analyse and to better understand the client’s financial propensities.
Understanding financial propensities for a number cruncher should automatically have their brain functioning at a higher rate establishing rather quickly, areas of suggested improvement.
The Accounting Technician notes these areas for discussion/review with the Partner, the Partner tells the clients and suggests a remedy saving the client say $2000 dollars at a cost of $350 to have some extra work done by the accounting technician. The original revenue generated from the client to the firm of $250 has just increased to $600.
Admittedly this will not always happen but it only takes a few to increase your firm revenue substantially and in doing so you begin to create greater wealth for your clients (more money to spend on growing their business) and obviously greater client retention.
Ignoring these opportunities and only seeing barriers to outsourcing reduces the chance to increase staff skill and ability. So how about rethinking the myth and create a legend ..”If I outsource I have greater opportunity to up skill and provide my team with more challenging & revenue generating work”
