24 Nov 2025 · 3 min
John Jonas shares how to safely give your online Filipino specialist access to your systems. Start small, expand as trust builds. The theft risk is comparable to hiring locally, and banks protect you anyway.
Hello and welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing Podcast, the podcast that's dedicated to making you better at outsourcing your work. My name is John Jonas and this is episode 17, giving access to your systems to a new OFS. So one of the biggest questions I always get is, how do I trust this new person? Or how do I know if I can trust this new person? Or how much access do I give to this new person before I trust them? And I remember the first time I hired someone from the Philippines. I call him Jake. It's not his real name. I changed his name to protect myself from you trying to hire him. Although he's super loyal to me, so he's been with me since 2005, so I'm not super worried about it. I wanted him to do some website work for me, but I wasn't. I didn't. I didn't want to give him access to my hosting account. I just wasn't sure yet. I was scared he would steal something or mess something up. And so for the first week, I would give him, like, special extra instructions, like, I want you to do this, but you don't have access to this, so I'm going to do this. And then I want you to do this, but you don't have that, so I'm going to do this. It was dumb. After a week of him not being able to do his job because I wouldn't give him access, I finally just gave in and gave it to him. And guess what happened? Nothing. Nothing. Well, everything happened, actually. He didn't steal anything or mess anything up. He didn't take my domain or my website or my idea. He just did his job. Like, everything that I had hoped he would do was now happening, and I wasn't in the middle of it, and I didn't have to create these weird insert me into the middle instructions so that I could not give him access to something. And all it took was just me giving him access to what he needed. And it made my life so much easier. And every time I've hired someone since, I just give him access to what they need. Now, obviously, I'm not telling you that you should go do something you're not comfortable with. I wasn't comfortable with it in the beginning, and then I became more comfortable and it probably took me a couple weeks. And that's fine for you. You at least have my experience of telling you that you'll make your life way easier if you give access. So here's a question I got, like, from Jim B a couple weeks ago, he says, hi, John. I'm considering hiring someone overseas to manage my QuickBooks accounting work. Any tips on how to secure myself? Obviously, I don't think I would give them my bank feed information. I would scan email those. But access to credit card accounts I think is safe. What's your experience with this? I just told you my experience with it. So even the bank feed information, like you're going to take all that information and spend the time to scan and email them rather than just enter them yourself? Seems harder to scan an email than to just enter it or just give them your bank feed information. Like the chances of them stealing something is so slim. And I mean, talk to your bank. Maybe if you give an employee access, they just. And they steal something, they just give your money back. Banks are pretty dang good about that. Credit card companies are. So my answer is start small and grow from there. So if you can give a little bit of access to whatever's necessary for them to do their job, great. Then as you gain trust in them, give them more. So if this were me at this point, I'd just given my bank feed info. Even if it's like my first day having them work for me, I want them to do everything. I don't want to be involved in the process. But I've been doing this since 2005 and so I have a. My trust level is pretty high and generally my personality. My trust level is pretty high. So that's changes things. My opinion is that having an online Filipino specialist is really no different than a local employee. Theft risk is about the same. So if you would hire a local bookkeeper, you know, it's just really not that different than hiring someone in the Philippines. Someone locally might lose their license, someone in the Philippines might go to jail. And digital theft punishments are twice as harsh as normal theft punishments in the Philippines. So talk to you later.
