Good to Great: How to Scale With an Outsourced CFO

More and more Australian businesses are outsourcing their financial departments instead of hiring in-house accountants and bookkeepers. Would your business benefit from outsourcing your finances and accounting?

There are many benefits of an outsourced CFO, and you may find that some of these reasons allow you to focus on your core competencies and make greater strides toward your goals. The following are 10 strategic reasons to outsource a financial department.

 

1. Finances Get Focused Attention

When your financial department is executed in-house, it often receives less attention than other departments. After all, creating revenue must be the primary focus of any business. When you outsource your financial department, however, your finances are handled by a finance and accounting services company that gives its utmost priority to managing the financial departments of its customers. Therefore, your financial department receives the same kind of focus as the rest of your business.

 

2. Access to Special Expertise

Outsourced financial service providers usually have more experienced staff than you can afford to keep on payroll, and they are specialists in different areas. Therefore, you have access to experts in a variety of different fields such as accounting, regulations and taxation.

 

3. Time to Focus on What You Do Best

Outsourcing your financial department lets you focus on increasing revenue instead of worrying about the many issues and complexities of running a financial department. You can leave the details of accounting processes and systems to experts who focus exclusively on finances.

 

 

 

4. Fewer Staffing Hassles

Finance and accounting departments have several peaks and valleys throughout the year in order to meet quarterly and annual reporting deadlines and tax filings. This makes staff scalability difficult when you handle your financial department in-house. When you outsource, however, you can take advantage of minimum cost commitments for temporary staff.

 

5. Less Risk

When you outsource your financial department, you shift the associated risks from your business to the outsourcer. You no longer have to worry about risks like systems crashing at difficult times or employees falling ill right before big deadlines.

 

6. Minimal Errors

When in-house financial departments find errors, it can be extremely expensive and time-consuming to resolve them. By outsourcing, however, you can take advantage of the multiple layers of review built into their processes, allowing them to catch most errors on time.

 

7. Better Compliance

It can be difficult for business owners to keep up with ever-changing compliance regulations because there are so many other, more pressing tasks competing for your attention. A financial and accounting outsourcing company, however, will have experts on staff who keep up with regulations as integral parts of their responsibilities. 

With expert eyes on all of your finance and accounting procedures, your compliance will improve, and you’ll be better able to handle regulatory changes as they come.

 

8. Reallocation of Resources

If you can save money on your operations by outsourcing your financial department, you’ll have more funds available for other priorities. For example, if you’ve been wanting to expand into a new territory or funnel more money into your marketing or product development, outsourcing your financial department could help you with your reallocation.

For more information about outsourcing your financial department, or to speak with us about any other business issue, contact us at Altus Financial.