Outsourcing Accounting to an Offshore Service Provider
Outsourcing accounting and financial related tasks to an offshore service provider can reduce accounting costs significantly. Small business owners can avoid hiring full-time or part-time accounting professionals; instead they can use an offshore accounting services provider for all their accounting tasks. Many small businesses have reported savings of thousands of dollars by outsourcing to a reliable and competent service provider capable of providing accounting services like bookkeeping, business taxes, accounts payable, accounts receivables, and account settlement. One such example is of a real estate company in St. Paul, MN that benefited from the expertise and experience of Cybelink, an offshore service provider. Cybelink translated the company’s accounts, which were mainly in Excel files and converted them into QuickBooks. This change in accounting allowed the client to review easily the weekly, monthly and yearly reports of financial transactions of the business. The accounting system set up by Cybelink allowed the client to communicate easily with their CPA and helped the real estate company to make informed business decisions.

Accounting Processes Standardization
Small business owners should see their entire accounting processes and standardize them within their company. The standardization should occur within their accounting processes and in their technology. For example, if two different employees engaged for accounts receivable and accounts payable and say if they use the customer list stored in two different computers, it is a problem. As a small business owner you should ask following questions:

* Can these two different processes be combined?
* Why the customer list stored in different computers?

If you look around the company you may see several inefficiencies in your accounting processes and how it is carried out. Fixing them will save you time and money.

Financial Controls
Financial controls are used to ensure that financial transactions are recorded accurately and the financial management system is not tampered with intentionally or unintentionally. Mere generation of accounting information is not enough, it is also important to make use of it for the growth of the business. All business owners should understand basic accounting and they should be able to read financial statements like balance sheet, profit and loss statement, and cash flow statement.

Indirect Expenses Related to Accounting
By creating a systematic and efficient accounting setup a small business can also lower the costs it would bear for tax return preparation or the fees to pay to the tax professionals. All the required information and data is easily found and well presented. For example, say you use QuickBooks for all your accounting and financial transactions, then with a click of a button you can export all the data to sent to you CPA for year-end tax purposes. If you are keeping your financial data in different software like Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Word it is difficult to consolidate the data, it will be a time-consuming and error prone process for the staff to prepare the data to send to CPA.

Reducing accounting expenses is not about cutting corners but about streamlining the whole process and making it more organized and structured using accounting software. And the mentioned guidelines can help small businesses benefit from decrease in accounting expenses.

Related articles:

1. Top Ten Reasons Why Small Businesses Should Use Accounting Software
2. How small businesses can manage their Paper-Based Invoices and Bills?
3. How Small Businesses Can Manage Offshore Outsourcing

Thus KPO takes outsourcing to a higher and more advanced level. BPO providers worked on simple tasks such as data entry, data merging, bookkeeping, by following standard procedures. In contrast KPO needs complex business expertise in which the analytical and intellectual skills of the experts solved the problem.
The KPO Market
The KPO market today is about $1-3 billion and it is expected to increase to 8-10 billion by 2010. KPO covers many areas, which until now were considered as strictly onshore operations are moving to offshore locations. Some of the growing areas of KPO include pharmaceutical, biotechnology research, analytical services such as equity research and financing research, intellectual property research, legal services and market research. Most of the KPO service providers are located in countries such as India, Russia, Israel and China, they employee professionals like Lawyer, MBA graduates, and Engineers. Following are some of services provided by KPO providers:

* Business and Market Analysis
* Business & Market Research
* Pharmaceuticals and biotechnology
* Medical Services
* Legal solutions
* Intellectual Property (IP) Research
* Data Analytics
* Training and Consultancy
* Engineering design and development
* R&D work on various vertical domains
* Various educational services

Benefits of KPO
There are several reasons for outsourcing and most of which are also relevant for KPO. The primary benefits of KPO are 40-60% of costs are reduced compared to cost of professionals in the client’s country of origin. KPO provides companies an opportunity to tap into specialized knowledge in various vertical business domains. KPO can bring different opportunities that a business may not have considered in their day-to-day work. The KPO team provides independent judgments within a framework allow businesses to benefit from their research and advice independently from their own employees. Also the KPO providers have been working in different but similar industries they can bring in fresh and innovative ideas they gained in different projects.

KPO service providers offer their clients an opportunity to work with some of the best brains in the profession without having to hire them permanently. Often the clients may not be able to find the skilled professionals that they need for the job and KPO provides them access to top quality and high-level intellectuals. Good KPO service providers are able to provide excellent infrastructure, multiple delivery modes such as offshore and onshore and can scale up or down their resources.

Businesses of all sizes can benefit from KPO as it allows them to chart a course of growth and expansion with the support of the service providers. KPO allows companies from across the world to come closer and create a global business community.

Related articles:

1. Raise of Knowledge Process Outsourcing (KPO)