Athens, GA based CPA firm outsourcing payroll and hiring staff accountants with Altobooks

About the firm:

It was a small CPA firm having a young owner servicing mostly individuals, gas stations, convenience stores, motels etc. Small-low paying clients. They were doing all, bookkeeping, payroll, tax returns, everything in-house.

The problem statements:

When Altobooks owner and the CPA firm owner spoke for the first time, they identified the following issues:

1. He needed to cut the costs to enhance the profits and he was looking for some reliable outsourcing partner.
2. He also had high staff turn over and he was unable to train the new team members once onboarded. Frequent training was eating lot of his time.
3. He was having so many after-the-fact and live payroll clients for whom many times, he has to run the payroll.
4. He used to receive so many emails of outsourcing services providers. However, he was unable to trust them whether they would be having a proper data security framework in place

Solutions provided:

1. A competent team member along with a senior team leader was assigned for payroll outsourcing assignments. Since the firm was using QuickBooks Payroll for the clients, it was ensured that the assigned team was having experience working on Quickbooks Payroll.
2. Initially, it was started as a simple outsourcing project. Over time, the firm owner ended up hiring the same team member as a full-time staff accountant.

How the relationship was scaled up:

1. Week 1 – Few onboarding calls with the CPA team and Altobooks team and they worked on few after-the-fact payroll processing. It was more of a hands-on training.
2. Week 2 & 3 – The team worked on 2 live payroll assignments. It was also hands-on training and by this time. Both the teams gelled well with each other and it was an amazing transition outcome.
3. Week 4 – Gradual hand over of clients was made. And Altobooks team started handling payroll independently. At times, they sought clarifications from the onshore team.
4. Week 6 – Most of the payroll assignments of the CPA firm were outsourced to Altobooks.
5. Week 24 – It so happened that the firm was scaling and they ended up hiring the Altobooks team member working on their payroll project as full-time staff accountant who was helping them in bookkeeping and tax returns as well.

Challenges:

Nothing as such.

Reasons for success:

1. The firm was very willing and open to the idea of outsourcing. They carried out great onboarding sessions with good patience and that ensured that the firm almost entirely was able to outsource the payroll function with Altobooks.
2. Great team work from Altobooks team side and support from Altobooks senior team leader during initial phase.

Top services provided:

1. Payroll outsourcing services over QuickBooks Payroll.
2. Full-time Staff Accountant working on QuickBooks Payroll, QuickBooks online bookkeeping and Tax preparation over UltraTax CS