Ep. 306: OFS For Accounting and Tax Firms

Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at working with OFS online. Filipino specialists. This is episode 306, OFS for accounting and Tax Firms. So this is going to be interesting for a couple reasons. Number one, so Kathy sent me an email and she owns a brick and mortar accounting firm. She wants to hire an ofs, but she's not really sure how it will work for her. And so she sent me a bunch of questions. Now before I got these questions, this is what makes this extra interesting. Before I saw this email, one of my ofs who checks my email had read it and responded to all the questions. She had written a draft email, which is how we do my email. She reads them and she writes draft emails and sets them in my inbox. And so when I got this email from Kathy, I was actually kind of like, oh, that's really painful. And I don't want to respond to this. I hadn't seen the draft yet because I knew this is going to take me 10 minutes and that 10 minutes, wow. Like I don't have to do that, but I also, I want to help. And then I saw the email from my OFS and it was as good or better than what I would have responded. And so I just sent it to Kathy. And actually I told Kathy, I said, hey, look, this was sent, this was written by my ofs, but she gave you more than I would have because I mean, Kathy sent me seven questions here. So I'm just going to read what Kathy sent and what my OFS responded. So here we go. Number one, I'm looking for an income tax preparer. I would like to know if they have access to dual monitors. If not, is there a possibility I could set them up with a system? My OFS responds, many ofs have multi display set up. You can add it to your list of requirements in your job post. If not, I'm going to add to that if they don't have a multi monitor setup, it's not that hard to buy another monitor and buy whatever is needed to hook them up to two monitors. Kathy continues, what would that look like? How much would it cost in the Philippines? Julia says while it's not that expensive, as low as $145, especially if they purchase a secondhand display, around $45. This still falls under the do not prepay your new OFS rule, which is my rule. Don't prepay for things. Don't buy a new monitor when you just hired someone. Wait until you trust them Question number two. When it's slow and not a lot of tax returns to do, like currently, what other tasks could I have them do? Julia says you can have them help market your business for you. Like writing blog posts, generating leads or handling your social media. Yeah, I don't have a better answer than that. 3. I do need help cleaning up my inbox. Is that something I would ask a tax preparer accountant to do for me or is that beneath them? Julia says it depends on the personality of the worker you hire. Most of my ofs don't mind it when I ask them to do small tasks for me. That's why we have a disc personality test at onlinejobs PH and I ask a lot of email questions when I hire someone. I prefer to hire specialists who also don't mind doing small tasks for me when I ask them to. Now I'm going to add to what Julia said. Beneath them is an interesting question. Is it beneath them to also do your email? Well, probably not. Most people in the Philippines are just going to be happy to have a job and especially to have a well paying job that's stable and long term. I mean if you're, if you're hiring someone to do tax preparation, well that's very, very seasonal. If you're trying to keep them employed long term, they're going to be really, really happy with that. Kathy's question number four. I don't think I would have enough work for them to do full time. I'm struggling to come up with tasks that would be in their best areas of work. Any suggestions? Julia says focus on tasks you know how to do and teach. Gosh, what a good answer. This will help you get stuff off your plate immediately and give you control over the quality of the work they produce. So I'm going to add to this. It's shocking how much work there is to do. When I first hired someone, I didn't know if I could keep someone busy full time. Now I have 40 full time people. Like there's so much to do that that first person. As long as you're willing to teach them to do other things, keeping them busy full time is just not that hard. It only took me a couple months before I hired my second person and I see this super commonly. Question number five, how long does it take to actually hire a VA from start to finish? Julia says not long. With my one VAOA challenge, it shouldn't take more than a few hours from start to finish. She's right. It shouldn't take you more than a few hours, including watching all the videos which we just looked at it. It was 92 minutes of video start to finish from there. And in those videos I tell you exactly how to make this as short as possible. Taking another hour and a half to hire someone is just completely reasonable. And plus you're doing a bunch of the work as you watch the videos. It just shouldn't take you very long. As part of her question six, she says with a tax preparer, would I have them do a simple tax return? Julia says yes. Yep, that's probably a pretty good task. Test task when you're hiring someone. Question 7 what type of time difference is there between Eastern time and their time? She says Philippine time is 12 hours ahead. 9am Your time would be 9pm for them same day. Although 9pm for you. I'm going to add this. 9pm for you would be 9am for them the next day. So if you you're on Pacific time there, then 15 hours ahead. The easy way to figure this out is add three to whatever your current hour is and flip a.m. and p.m. or if you're on Eastern Time, just flip a.m. and p.m so for me right now it's 3:00pmI'm on Mountain Time, so I'm going to add two, which means five. It's 5:00am for them. Super simple way to figure out the time difference. So my last thing is not part of Kathy's questions, which were her seven questions. Can an OFS help you do your email? Yep, they can.