Streamlining Success in Accounting: Harnessing the Power of Team Collaboration

So this week we're going to touch upon streamlining your success in your accounting firm and how you can harness the power and grow your team. So when we talk about growing your team, I think we all get to a point, especially if we're just starting, that you can't even imagine ever having a team. I remember I just had enough work for myself, and I didn't really expand on my work. I had enough, and it became, became more than 40 hours, and it became 60 hours, and it became a little bit unmanageable because there was just so much work to do. So you get to a point where you're like, maybe I've got a lot of work coming in. Maybe I should consider expanding my firm and hiring. So you've got a couple of options. You can hire a contractor, and they'll work as independently— an independent contractor. You assign the work, they get it done whenever they need to get it done for you. Give them a deadline. They do it whenever they want to do it. That's one way. And that's basically how I started out. I hired a contractor, and I worked with her hand in hand. I would give her the accounts to do and then she would return them back. And then eventually that kind of became, it wasn't enough. So I ended up having to outsource and I considered a global team and talking with my friend, we, we decided that, you know, he had had a lot of success with it. So maybe I should do it as well. So we started to add the team and it really started very large, started out with some hourly accounts where they would do the work. They didn't know my industry, so I ended up really working with them, giving them basic accounts to do. And this is with my old firm that was a generalist. So I had a lot of very basic firms, contractors, different types of companies that— Pool guy and a designer and a TV media guy. And there's a real potluck of different variety of industries. So they had that experience. So that's what you're gonna get when you hire someone that is an outsourcing firm. You're dealing with another company who has people that work for them. Uh, you don't actually ever know who's working for you unless you hire a firm that gives you a specific person to work with. But I didn't have that kind of work. It started to grow kind of small. I gave them so many hours, they would get the work done every month, and I built it from there. They were really good at doing, uh, the cleanup work. So they would clean up an entire file, which took that off my plate because that was my job in the beginning. So that part was good, and it allowed me to grow my firm. So if you look at a resource to grow, you've got more work coming in than you know what to do with. You can definitely go with outsourcing. Now, if you hire within and hire outsourcing, This is where we are at our firm now. We are at a place where we're trying to make this a really beautiful partnership where the outsourced team or the global team— I don't like to call it outsourced. They really are team. They're just global. They're in a different country. So they're in a different country, and you work with them, and they pretty much do some of the work while we're sleeping. So when we get up in the morning, that leaves the US-based team that deals directly with the clients more time to work on getting the details for the work and maybe doing some of the higher-level work. Not saying that the outsourcing team or the global team can't do that work, but a lot of times if it requires a lot of interaction with the client, that you might want to set it up where you've got the global team working at a specific level. Maybe they're clearing the bank feeds, maybe they're handling customer payments, maybe they're handling the accounts payable, anything that came through that Hubdoc or Dext or whatever product you're using. And then you have the US-based team wakes up. They're in there. All that kind of work is done and they can work more on the financial statements. They can work on any of the KPIs. They can work on the 3-way bank reconciliation. They can work on gathering the documents. There's a lot more that they can work on. Maybe the transactions that we just don't know the answers to. They can work on that and get those answers to kind of work together as one big happy firm. That's the goal. That's the endgame. We want that collaboration between the in-house team and the team that's out of the global team. So we want to have that to be a part of the whole organization's success. And the advantage to tapping into a diverse talent base is you can grow together. You can learn together. You can drive forward together. Perhaps they have an ability to have other resources, maybe they know more software. Different perspectives, always a good thing. You can have maybe out-of-the-box solutions, things that they can figure out for you to help support the, the, the staff that's in, in-house. So that's one thing. Part of this is all due to this wonderful world that we live in, where there's the ability to work with a lot of software. We have Zoom, we have methods to work together. That supports the ability to do this work. Desktop would've been really difficult. You would've had to have people logging in remotely through a portal. I mean, it's just, that's just thankfully those days are gone and you're able to really work with the two teams to support one another. They can work and drive forward for the ultimate endgame is keeping your clients happy. And that's really what we're looking to do. So there are a few barriers that you might run into depending on what country you're working with. Some of the countries like India, for example, has a ton of holidays, different holidays than we have. So in that respect, yeah, they're work— they can work on Christmas, but sometimes they take our holidays and their holidays. So just know that that might be a factor when you work with a firm in India. You might find, based on our experience, that if you work with a firm in India, Indian people are very family-centric, and they may have an entire slew of people living together. That's different than the US. So you might have mother-in-laws, father-in-laws, so that, and those people get older, they get sick. A lot of times that falls on the shoulders. Maybe your workers will have to care for them. They might have to take a lot more time off. So you might run into that. The purpose of the firm though is to be able to have support where if that person's not available, it shifts to somebody else. Whereas if one of your in-house people gets sick or is not there, it's gonna fall on one of your other in-house people. So you have to be careful and cognizant of how much you overload or burden your own team. So those are the things you might wanna look at. Obviously, the language barrier can be an issue, but for the most part, all the firms we've worked with for global teams, they very much know that they need to speak English with us and they are very good about speaking English. I feel bad 'cause that's not an easy language to learn, but you might have trouble understanding them. So know that a lot of times when you're working with them, and I hate to pick on India again, but Indian people, The men in the Indian crew will talk very softly and maybe have their head down, or won't have their camera on at all. And that's another factor, because if I need to kind of read their lips to understand what they're saying, it's difficult if the camera's off, and a lot of them don't put the camera on. And I think it doesn't help for a firm to be collaborative if, when you're having meetings, the camera is off. And I think that maybe in the get-go you should insist that the cameras are on. It's just helpful. It kind of personalizes it, makes it feel like a person. You'll find that sometimes you get a firm that they don't wanna turn the cameras on. And I think that's a, that's a mistake on the outsourcing team or the global team side that they really should make it so that the, the, the firm, you know, they're working at a place, they're working in an office, they really ought to have their camera on. It just helps with feeling like you're all part of a team. It's not us against them, which can come from hiding behind just your initials on a screen. Another thing you might think about is the software that you have. Some of the softwares are really good for this. I mentioned Zoom. There's also Microsoft Teams, Slack, Google. We have a lot of things we do collaboratively with Google, and those are the things that are gonna help us work together on some projects that maybe we're— even though we're separated by a lot of miles, we can actually work on the same documents together, and that makes for almost— it makes you feel like you don't have those geographical distances that are inside of working with an, a firm, another firm that's not in our country, that's outside of the country. So project management, you definitely want to have some kind of collaboration when you're working on a project. You do this piece, I do that piece. It should be really spelled out, and try to make sure that they have the ability to work through whatever project management software you use. We use Financial Sense. Love the software. It works really well for our firm. There's other ones out there that are very good. Carbon's another one built for accountants. So those are the ones you wanna kind of think about if you're getting that space. Asana or Asana. Asana. I always call it the wrong name. Asana. Asana. Asana is a pose in yoga, which is what I'm familiar with. Spelled the same way, Asana. So Asana is a great tool. Trello boards I've heard people use. There's a lot of different tools out there. Just find the one that works for you and try to stick to it. Yeah. You wanna have places to store your documents. Of course, we use Liscio. We're big believers in Liscio, but you can have other tools, Dropbox, Box, you know, ShareFile. There's other ones out there. So think about what you're gonna use for your tools as well as when you start to think about onboarding an outsourcing team, they are just like onboarding any other person in your firm. They are gonna need to have time with you to learn. They need to learn your processes. They might need to learn how you like to do things. Maybe they're used to using the uncategorized expense, but at your firm, law firms use the Ask or Ask Questions or Ask My Accountant account. Whatever your processes are, you need to really spell it out, dial it in, have it inside your Financial Cents with a little video so they know, so they have a place to learn while you're sleeping. And that'll help some of the— ease you into the space. We obviously are in a space of working with law firms. So legal-specific stuff, we want to make sure that all that is spelled out the way we like to do it. Everybody's got a different way and and the importance of learning the software. And your outsourced team should learn the software and get certified in it. They should be front and center taking the time to learn the products that you're using so that they're able to at least work within the software. Of course, there's always little different processes that you need to, to learn, little things that they're just a little bit more difficult to navigate and we try to spell those out for them. So I think that if you are an accounting or bookkeeping firm and you need to move forward with Hiring, it's certainly important to consider multiple things. What country do you wanna work with? What's your time zone? It's a lot more difficult in most of these unless you're dealing with maybe a Mexican team. Pacific Coast is a lot harder to navigate if you're working in, let's just say Eastern Europe or if you're working in India, all of those, it makes a difference. And India has a couple of weird time zones that are like on the half hour. We actually put a clock on our software so that when we're in meetings in our Zoom, we can tell what time it is because their meetings are late and you try not to keep them too long, although that doesn't always happen. But it's another thing you might wanna do to be cognizant of the hour that you're working with them. I know they're supposed to work our hours if they're gonna work with the US, but just, you know, it's hard to work at night in my opinion, unless you're a night owl, it's hard to work at night. So knowing that you should kind of work with them in their hours. I guess that's about it. Implementing good software definitely and having good collaborative tools. I think that those are the most important things you should look at. And interestingly, uniting the two firm, the two teams. So uniting the in-house with the global team is paramount to success and growth in your firm. And take it in small steps. Hope this was helpful. You're hearing from me, you're learning from some of the things we have done in the past that have worked, some that haven't. So I'm hoping this will help you move forward and drive forward to a very prosperous future. Thank you. Future in your accounting firm. Go get 'em.