With seasoned practitioners taking their retirement, and the industry unable to attract the next generation of professionals, the U.S. accounting world is experiencing a serious shortage of talent. What does this mean for existing accountants? Their workloads are often grueling, and the hours they are forced to work grow longer. As a result, mistakes are being made with increasing frequency, and burnout is hitting the industry hard.
But what can be done to ease the accounting industry’s troubles? Could offshore bookkeeping be a viable solution? Or would outsourcing to a country like India present a more realistic answer to the problem?
Let’s take a closer look:
How can accounting firms successfully address shortages in the industry?
While the scarcity of accountants is deeply troubling for the industry as a whole, ultimately, it’s their clients who suffer.
Fortunately, the industry is taking positive steps towards rectifying the problem, through promoting remote work policies, transforming curricula to attract more students, integrating automation and advanced technology, adopting recruitment strategies focused on diversity, and both offshoring and outsourcing to countries like India and the Philippines.
All have great potential for getting the country, and the industry, out of the rut it has gotten itself stuck in, but it’s perhaps this last strategy that is one of the most viable solutions to the ongoing problem. Having been helping to bolster the available workforce for some years now, outsourcing gives accountants the freedom to pursue other areas of their business they may have been forced to neglect, while still providing their clients with the standard of service they expect.
Offshoring and outsourcing to India
While offshoring involves jobs or operations moving overseas, outsourcing is when functions or tasks are delegated to third-party service providers overseas. With the shortage of accountants not set to remedy itself anytime soon, both approaches are worth exploring if you’re a CPA firm struggling to cope with your workload, or one who wishes to expand their business and offer more services.
With outsourcing, you’re given access to a team of accounting professionals who can handle whatever tasks you assign them, whenever you need them to. This eliminates the need for hiring temporary or permanent accountants and bookkeepers, and enables you not just to manage your workload better, but to be able to focus on other, higher value tasks that you couldn’t focus on when you were short staffed.
Offshoring can be partial or complete, and offers many of the same advantages as outsourcing, although a higher level of expertise is typically offered when compared to outsourcing. But for accountants wanting to relieve themselves of the burden of back office bookkeeping tasks – that are both time consuming and labor intensive – outsourcing may present a convenient and affordable solution for many CPA firms, large or small.
If your accounting firm is struggling with the ongoing shortage of qualified accountants, the decision to outsource bookkeeping services to India, could help turn things around. Just be sure to choose an experienced provider with the skills necessary to help you maintain your reputation, and attract new clientele. With plenty of outsourcing partners to choose from in India, this shouldn’t be hard.