There are many benefits to outsourcing backend work, the two biggest benefits are saving money and time. Say you take the leap and decide to contact a business process outsourcing (BPO) company for your financial needs, they tell you about all of their services, and now you’re stuck. Which service works best? Which is the service that will bring you both monetary savings and allow you to have more time in your day to do other things?
The two main outsourcing service styles that work best for financial staff would be:
- Remote Staffing
- Hourly and Project Based
Each comes with its own benefits but in most cases, one will fit your immediate business needs better than the other.
Remote Staffing
A full-service BPO gives you access to high-level staff all over the world, effectively expanding your recruitment efforts to a global scale. The most common service style in these types of companies in the remote staffing model. Essentially, you’re getting a high-level professional to work from a remote location at a drastically lower cost, and all without any of the administrative tasks associated with hiring an employee as the BPO will take care of that.
In regards to salaries, an average accountant in the US makes about $3,000 a month, whereas the same level accountant makes between $700 to $1,500 a month in the Philippines. With the amount saved, you could afford to hire more than one financial staff for your business or reallocate the capital towards other parts of your business.
In terms of time saved, not needing to worry about any of the administrative aspects of employees will save you a great deal of time. Your selected BPO partner will take care of the internal management. The HR team taking care of your remote staff will keep you in the loop on any big shifts or changes with your employee but will mostly work in the background to ensure that you get to focus all of your time on your employees’ productivity instead of backend minutiae.
Remote staff are essentially permanent employees who don’t work in your building. If you’re one of the many companies that made a shift to work from home or some hybrid of working at the office and home, then you wouldn’t be a stranger to remote staffing. This is pretty much like that, except the remote staff you hire through a BPO will probably never work in your office (unless you invite them over, which some people do) and the cost. This allows you to fully integrate your remote finance staff into your company culture, which in turn helps your retention rates.
This next benefit only comes from certain full-service BPOs, and that’s control. Many people believe that call centers are BPOs and in a way, they’re right as a singular business process is outsourced there. The differences between a full-service BPO and a call center are the roles offered, the bespoke solutions, and the level of control you have. A full-service BPO offers any role that can be done from a computer, such as a graphic designer, a developer, a CPA, or an architect, the sky is the limit. A call center has either customer service or technical support and you have to abide by their rules and processes. With a full-service BPO, you have full control over your employees and the processes they follow in terms of productivity. You get to decide what they do, how they do it, and the time frame they do it in, which is the exact opposite of what you get at a call center.
Hourly And Project Based
As the name suggests, this service is good for businesses who need a one-time task completed or a reoccurring task at specific times during the year. A good example of this in the financial industry is tax season. Tax offices can supplement their team by hiring either hourly or project-based accountants to help offload some of the work.
When comparing the price of hourly or project-based finance staff, it’s cheaper than hiring locally. When compared to remote staffing, it is still cheaper as the fee is a one-time payment and not a reoccurring monthly expense. In addition, the more hours you select for an hourly-based person, say 400 hours versus 180 hours, you will pay less for each of those hours.
Unlike remote staffing, hourly and project-based employees aren’t permanent. Another big difference between the two services is the ability to choose your staff. In remote staffing cases, you are included in the final interview and you are able to choose which candidate you think best fits the position and your company. Hourly and project-based staff are assigned to you purely based on their ability to complete the required task(s). Basically, you can’t choose your staff for hourly and project-based staffing.
The Wrap Up
When hiring remote financial staff to help your company, remember that you have various options when picking a service. Sometimes you don’t need a permanent worker and you simply need a project completed, in this case, a project-based employee would work out better than hiring permanent staff. If your business is struggling to keep up with its finances, then permanent professional financial staff would be the better option as they can grow with your company and will ensure that your financials are in order for as long as they work there.