Elevating Your Firm’s Capabilities by Working with High-Quality Offshore Reviewers and Supervisors
The present competitive business landscape is bringing a challenge for firms to stay ahead of others. For this reason, firms are continuously seeking innovative ways to enhance their efficiency, maintain high service standards, and manage operational costs. One such effective strategy across firms is the integration of offshore teams into core business processes. The best part is with time, the scope of offshore practices has expanded dramatically, especially in accounting tasks. It is now not limited to specific tasks only.
Debunking the Misconception
It's a common misconception that only transactional, preparatory, non-client-facing, and basic data entry work can be done offshore. This isn't entirely true. Today, many firms have successfully transitioned complex, high-level work and even client-facing advisory tasks offshore.
In this blog, we will explore how hiring reviewers and supervisors can significantly reduce your workload, improve the quality of work, and provide best practices for building an effective offshore team.
The Benefits of Hiring Reviewers and Supervisors
Reviewers and supervisors in outsourcing accounting play a really crucial role and help your firm in increasing efficiency. They ensure quality by meticulously reviewing financial outputs, minimizing errors, and adhering to standards. Furthermore, they play a really important role in managing risks, training team members, and facilitating client communication.
Reducing Review Burden: Partners and directors are often overwhelmed with the task of reviewing detailed work, which can be a significant burden. By utilizing reviewers, the workload on senior managers, directors, and partners is significantly reduced. Reviewers take on detailed, meticulous reviews, freeing up the senior staff to concentrate on high-level advisory, strategic planning, and adding value to client engagements. This shift not only improves efficiency but also enhances the overall quality of service provided to clients.
Improving Review Quality: With reviewers taking charge of the initial and detailed reviews, the final review by senior managers and partners can concentrate on providing strategic insights rather than merely checking for accuracy. This approach allows for a more strategic or stratospheric review, ensuring that the focus is on adding value and offering high-level advisory services to clients. This not only enhances the quality of the reviews but also allows senior staff to leverage their expertise more effectively.
Increasing Efficiency and Volume: By incorporating reviewers into the workflow, offshore preparers and associates can take on more complex tasks and handle larger volumes of work. Reviewers can also take on client-facing tasks. This shift not only increases overall productivity but also enhances the volume of work that can be managed offshore. Consequently, firms can handle more tasks efficiently and effectively, leveraging the skills of their offshore teams to a greater extent.
Focus on High level Advisory and Planning: Partners, senior managers, and directors should not be concerned with the minutiae of ticking and tying numbers, after first level of deep review they feel more confident on numbers. And hence, they can focus on high-level reviews of tax returns to find out planning opportunities or financial statements for advisory, where they can add significant value to the client and the engagement.
Key Considerations for Hiring Reviewers and Supervisors
Organic Growth and Team Building:
When starting with offshore operations, it's essential to grow organically. Begin with basic, transactional tasks and gradually promote internal team members to reviewer positions or hire reviewers as the team matures. Many firms make the mistake of hiring reviewers from the start, which is not always ideal.
Internal Promotion: Before hiring externally, consider if someone from the offshore team can be promoted to the reviewer position. This can often lead to a smoother transition as they are already familiar with the firm's processes and clients.
External Hiring: If promoting internally is not an option, hire externally. However, ensure the new hire is given ample time to adjust. Often, accountants rush this process to offload their review work quickly, expecting immediate results.
Promoting an Internal Reviewer: A Step-by-Step Approach
When promoting someone internally to a reviewer position, proceed with caution. Initially, avoid promoting them outright. Instead, you can involve them in the process of interviewing, hiring, and onboarding new team members. This approach allows them to gain experience in training and managing others. If you've hired a mid-level person who has never been a reviewer before, you can ask them to help onboard and train three or four new members. Once they have successfully brought these members up to speed, you can consider promoting them to a reviewer position within a year or two. In their new role, they may handle complex preparation work, manage the team, and review the work. This could be a combined role of preparation and review or solely a review role. Ensure they receive the necessary guidance and clarity for their responsibilities.
Challenges with Onshore Buy-In
One of the significant challenges in hiring reviewers or managers directly offshore is gaining buy-in from the onshore team. Onshore team members may be hesitant to report to offshore staff or have their work reviewed by them. This reluctance needs to be tactfully handled. It's often more effective to build a team organically offshore and then hire a reviewer to oversee the team rather than starting with a reviewer position.
Addressing Mid-Level Staffing Challenges:
While the ultimate challenge lies in getting mid-level staff, where partners feel bogged down with the review work done by associates and seniors, there is a clear need for someone to share these responsibilities. We assist clients in hiring reviewers, but it's essential to understand the ideal organic growth process.
Onboarding and Training:
Reviewers need time to understand your clients nuances, the specific industries they operate in, and the unique nuances of each client. Having a well-documented review or control checklist for audit, tax, or accounting will accelerate their journey. Without such documentation, it will take time for them to get up to speed.
Example Scenario: Consider the scenario of unreimbursed expenses. These are not allowed against W-2 income but can be deducted against Schedule C income if the client has a side hustle. What tax position should a reviewer take?
Option 1: Directly deduct these expenses from Schedule C income, saving taxes for the client.
Option 2: Consider these as unrelated expenses, reach out to the client for clarification, and then decide.
Option 3: For clients paying a lower fee (e.g., $500), avoid back-and-forth communication and exclude such deductions.
Different firms have different approach and hence reviewer getting this handholding would help in taking the right tax position. Reviewers need to understand the firm's typical tax positions and document review checklists to handle such scenarios effectively. This ensures consistency and accuracy without stifling the reviewer’s ability to use their judgment.
Conclusion
Transitioning complex, high-level work offshore and even client-facing advisory tasks is entirely possible. By starting with basic tasks and growing your team organically, you can overcome the challenges associated with offshore work. Hiring reviewers and supervisors as your team matures can significantly improve the quality of work and reduce the burden on your onshore staff.
Adopting offshore strategy is an ideal approach in the present scenario. One reason is that it helps you reduce your operational costs, and it does so by handling routine and complex tasks efficiently. This allows the onshore team to focus on core tasks with proper strategic planning.
Of course, data security is a concern when you are offshoring your tasks, but to reduce this, you should partner with a trusted offshore company that has a strong history of 0 data breaches and should have security certificates.
Shawn Parikh is the CEO and Co-Founder of MYCPE ONE. A Chartered Accountant by qualification, he has over 15 years of experience of being a problem solver for small to mid-size firms and over time he has given consultation to thousands of CPAs, accountants and tax pros. Shawn has always been a big believer and advocate of social enterprises and small accounting firms & businesses. He consults and speaks on several topics ranging from Building Remote Team - Remote Working, Offshore Staffing, strategic planning, Scalability of Accounting Practice, cloud accounting, practice management, LinkedIn marketing, etc.
Nicholas Branson, CPA
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