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CPA firm, Pennsylvania
A midsized CPA firm in Pennsylvania providing bookkeeping, taxation and consultancy services to small medium enterprises
in IT, hospitality and retail industries. Most of the accountancy services were on two software packages namely QuickBooks and Peachtree.
Problem
The customer was interested in exploring outsourcing bookkeeping services. These services initially included invoice
processing and vendor and bank reconciliations. Since the customer had never outsourced before, their prime concerns
were related to quality and data security. Further the diversity of their customer base meant that our offshore
accounting team learned quickly in multiple invoicing formats and methods across different industries. For example
one of their clients dealt with spare parts, and needed inventory tracking of items. Another client was a business
services firm performing contractual jobs and needed progressive invoicing to customers.
Solution
We started with directly addressing every query of the customer about data security and quality. We explained our
security infrastructure and various data security measures undertaken at our premises during the data transfer
process. Our measures like encrypted transfer of data between customer and us use of firewall in our server,
and the regular data backups relieved customer concerns about data security. Our use of encrypted technology
during data transfer, similar to the one used during online credit card transactions gave added credibility to our claims.
The prior experience of our key staff in accounting outsourcing coupled with the extensive training imparted to our
processes in QuickBooks helped us to address the questions confidently. To ensure the quality our dedicated quality
control resource checked the output files before processing. Further we established a system of double data entry
(parallel processing of the same invoice) by two of our accounting staff for critical invoices to ensure process accuracy.
In the trial phase, the customer would upload the data (invoices, purchase orders and bank statements) in scanned form
onto his server. Our offshore accounting team in New Delhi, India would then remote access to the customer server through
a 128 bit SSL encrypted connection and download the files. We would then batch process this data in the QuickBooks software
and upload the file back into the customer system. This file would then update the records in QuickBooks in the customer
server.
Business Benefits for our customer
We helped the customer achieve savings of about 40% in invoice processing and reconciliations during the pilot
project phase. The full project is under implementation. Early results have confirmed the savings achieved during
the trial phase. Cost and timesaving through our accounting outsourcing made our customer in providing other
higher-end services like account consulting and auditing services to their clients.
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