Wisconsin based CPA firm benefiting from Offshore Staffing

About the firm:

The firm was located in a small town of WI. It was a typical CPA firm with around 8-9 employees and a CPA owner. They were doing accounting over QuickBooks Online, QuickBooks Desktop. Payroll were being done over QuickBooks. Tax work was done Lacerte. They were also doing tax advisory and consulting work. The owner was also a noted speaker at some of the national level accounting confereces.

An interesting incident:

Altobooks owner Tejas was attending a conference at Florida and the owner was a speaker there for 3 days. At the end of the first session related to K-1, Tejas wanted to ask a question to the speaker related to the session. During the discussion, they both exchanged business cards and the speaker said this offshore services are not for us, but it is good to remain connected. At the end of 3^rd day of the conference, both, Tejas and this speaker-CPA-firm owner were leaving from the conference center together and he told Tejas that he discussed with some of his team members yesterday about him meeting Tejas and the nature of the work Altobooks does. And his team said they should give it a try for offshore staffing services providers like Altobooks. Both took the flights for separate destinations and met again after 3 months over a call to decide and discuss on the requirements. This is how an accidental meeting turning out to be a great work partnership between both the firms.

The problem statements:

Simple, they needed a full-time accountant doing bookkeeping for various clients and it was difficult to find a right talent locally.

Solutions provided:

An experienced team member was assigned for working full-time with this firm doing all kinds of bookkeeping work assignments.

How the relationship was scaled up:

1. Week 1 – Accountant started working on flexible staffing mode. Started onboarding calls, some training, some bookkeeping work.
2. Week 3 – The team member was handed over more tasks and was doing work independently.
3. Week 10 – Staff Accountant was provided full-time equivalent work assignments and is fully integrated with their own team.

Challenges:

1. Initial tech set up for secure work environment set up. The tech guy from the firm side was awful and even was not responding properly to the CPA owner.
2. Initial lag in communication between parties. In fact, most of the times the owner had to come over call himself and he was in a real tight spot over client deliveries.

Reasons for success:

1. Surprisingly, the firm and the owner were very confident and positive about the offshore staffing model. The main reason was they were provided with a customized solution by Tejas himself over a face-to-face meet. Tejas has been a trusted advisor to many CPAs for their staffing and capacity building needs.
2. Great onboarding calls by the owner.
3. Support from Altobooks senior team leader initially helped a lot in making things work for both, the Altobooks team member and the firm.

Top services provided:

Bookkeeper handling bookkeeping work using QuickBooks online