3 Factors That Most Influence Outsourced Bookkeeping Quality

Outsourced bookkeeping clients care about one thing: quality. If you’re not producing quality work, customers aren’t going to stick around.

Micromanaging employee performance can be frustrating and time-consuming, so it’s important to construct your company to be success-oriented from the ground up.

There are many factors that can influence quality in outsourced bookkeeping, but there are three that regularly top the list:

1. People

You’re only as good as your team. Ensuring you have the right people for the job is of the utmost importance for quality deliverables. First, make sure everyone you work with is the best at what they do. Hiring an inexperienced team is a surefire way to destroy the quality of your bookkeeping services.

When hiring your team, it can be tempting to go all-out and hire the best senior-level professionals. That’s certainly a good way to maintain high-quality bookkeeping, but it’s also quite ineffective when creating an organization that can evolve and grow.

Hiring a well-rounded team of senior- and junior-level staffers allows the junior level employees to learn from their more experienced coworkers. When it’s time to grow and reorganize your team, they’ll be ready to step up.

Training a new team every few months leaves too much room for mistakes. Once you get your high-performance team onboard, work to retain them. Review company policies, incentives, benefits, and working conditions.

2. Processes

Having concrete bookkeeping processes in place delivers consistent results. Effective processes yield consistent quality.

Quality staff management processes tend to be the most important:

• Appointing process leaders – Delegate responsibility to promote efficiency and make managers accountable for the quality of their department’s work.
• Evaluating client experience – It doesn’t matter if you think your company is producing quality work; what do your clients think?
• Onboarding new clients – Create established protocols and clearly lay out expectations and protocols early.
• Onboarding new staff – It might take some time, which means money, but if you can get your employees to understand company processes early, it will lead to more quality and efficient work in the future.
• Running a monthly close – Creating processes and not regularly checking up on them is like buying a car and never changing the oil. Running a monthly close by checking inventories and financial statements is a good way to regularly ensure your company is staying efficient and producing high-quality work.

Ensuring processes remain consistent, even during staff changes, is the key to quality work.

3. Technology

Technology supports consistency and efficiency. It can provide strategic insights, organize data, and enhance team/client collaboration. In the digital era, there’s software to help with every bookkeeping project.

Just because software exists doesn’t mean you need it. Being an expert in one technology is better than struggling with a dozen. Picking supporting technology is just like picking your team. It’s important to take your time, think about your goals, and be selective.

Technology can get confusing. It can also be helpful for an outsourced bookkeeping team to have a dedicated technology expert to handle the selection, implementation, and support for any new systems.

Just the Beginning

While these might be three of the most influential factors for determining the quality of an outsourced bookkeeping company, they’re not the only ones.

But, they’re s start for determining whether or not a prospective bookkeeping company is a good match for your small business.

Improve your bookkeeping and accounting processes with tips in our guide below.