Ep. 324: Thought about hiring an OFS bookkeeper?

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 234 have you thought about hiring an OFS bookkeeper? So we get a lot of employers that want to hire a bookkeeper from onlinejobs ph bookkeeper or accountant and I can't really say what I want to better than what Rhonda said in this email that she sent me and so it's eye opening and I'm going to read this to you based on what she said. If you've thought about hiring a bookkeeper or an accountant, listen to this. We've been considering a side business of focused bookkeeping for a specific business type. Every business has its own quirks and it's a useful sales and marketing tool to have experience with the specific business model. If we had a US Accountant specialist in our business, we'd totally be interested in working with them too. As it is, we have a good enough US Accountant to file our state and federal year end returns. Actually a I would probably launch the side hustle if I had a great industry experienced accountant to work with. We have an amazing OFS bookkeeper who's learned all the ins and outs of our odd business and set up as much as we can to be automatically entered while also being looked at with a critical eye. She's recovering from giving birth at this moment, but trained her fiance to do the basics to cover while screen recording the process so we can train other people as we go too. We're trying to get her to take time off work to be with her brand new baby and recovery. She's more comfortable checking in bits and pieces to make sure everything is going well. As an aside from Rhonda's email, yeah, that's super common. When someone has a baby in the Philippines, they don't want to be gone for weeks and weeks or months and months. They want to be gone for a little bit of time. They want to come back to work, help your business grow to make sure they keep their job and then also they get to double dip because you're going to continue to pay them while at the same time the Philippines government pays them for their maternity leave continuing. We use Gusto for payroll primarily because they do local income tax returns too. Clarice prepared Clarice's her ofs. Clarice prepares and files our sales tax returns, government reports, licenses, insurance, audits, and all the odd things that come along. She prepared the whole information and application for Covid assistance with me and followed up the entire time with receipts, information changing weekly sometimes on the requirements, and then created and prepared the whole audit requirement for the external auditor, which I'm going to add is pretty dang amazing that her OFS did all all of that for her. If you've thought about this before, consider what she's saying her OFS is doing for her business. Continuing before we decided to hire Clarice through onlinejobs ph, we asked our accountant about doing bookkeeping for us. If his price had been in our reach we would have totally gone for it. But what they thought of as bookkeeping was only data entry and Clarice is more like an office manager and full charge bookkeeper. Arranging payment, asking for statements, questioning odd amounts, making sure we get copies of invoices, balancing cash payouts, filing our reports for the government and insurance company, balance checking and credit card statements, bringing missing deposits up for investigation, providing audit information, compiling payroll hours and reimbursements. Just a million things. Again, if you have thought about hiring an OFS bookkeeper, consider what she's saying Clarice does for them. Continuing Again, we hired her straight out of college and she had no experience with electronic bookkeeping, but she picked up QuickBooks Desktop in a flash and actually ran QuickBooks Desktop and QuickBooks Online side by side for months to make sure it was going to work properly for us. We've been blessed to have an amazing team overall and I can't recommend onlinejobs PH enough for the advice and help in going through the process of finding her. So just so you know, the process that Rhonda actually used was at 1vaoa.com the process where I describe exactly how to find someone great. She says start slow, make sure you get someone eager to learn and willing to ask questions and learn how to give feedback in a happy and supportive way. I take full responsibility for anything my people don't understand because it is my job to make sure I've given them the training and review their work ongoingly. This is very useful because if I get an apology from her, I know I've messed up somehow and let her know that too. It gives her so much room for asking and correction because she knows she's not going to get dinged or blasted, which is a very, very big deal in her culture from what I gather. I was extremely nervous about opening access to my books and accounts to see someone in a foreign country. We tried hiring a company in India, but they wouldn't keep one person in charge of our bookkeeping. So I Had to retrain folks every week. I'm so glad I took the chance, use anything useful here. Warmest Rhonda. So I mean there is so much to unpack here. Clarice is filing government reports, taking all of that off of the business owner, Rhonda. She's doing all their bookkeeping, she's following up with clients, she's managing office stuff. I mean, keeping their finances in order, making sure they're not getting charged extra or not getting paid. And on top of all of that, Clarisse was not an expert when she started. She was a beginner. She knew nothing basically, which is how I've started so many of my people. I know everybody always wants to hire an expert right at the beginning, which is fine. But I found over the years is so many of my amazing, amazing people started off not really knowing much. They're just intelligent people who are eager to work and to learn. And when you treat them well by training them and providing them a good stable job, they'll do amazing things for you. Just so you know, Rhonda's not the only one doing this. I see people, I mean, I get an email from someone probably twice a week saying I'm looking to hire a bookkeeper and they have another question for me. How do I pay them or how does the 13th month work? People are hiring bookkeepers off of onlinejobs.ph basically every day. Then the next question I get asked is how do I protect myself and my personal information? Which you can see that Clarisse was super nervous about that in the beginning. I was super nervous about that in the beginning and I wasn't doing bookkeeping. So let me just give you a couple thoughts on this. Number one, hiring someone in the Philippines, bringing them into your business, they're not a freelance outsourcer. You're bringing them in, you're insourcing, you're bringing them into your business. You're going to get everything as if they were a local employee. The difference is they can't be classified as an employee for the government. The Philippines government will not allow you to classify them as an employee. They are an independent contractor, but they're an independent contractor who works in your business with all the benefits of an employee without having to pay benefits or insurance or taxes or government oversight or anything like that. So then how do you keep your data safe? Well, they're very, very similar to a US based bookkeeper working in year off. Now I've done this since 2005. I've been watching other people hire people in the Philippines since 2007. We launched Onlinejobs PH in 2009. I've never once seen or heard of someone stealing data like bank account numbers or credit card numbers or something like that. I've seen workers steal stuff from employers almost every time. It was because that worker was just trying to get paid. The employer didn't like what happened, so they weren't going to pay the worker and the workers just trying to get paid. But I have never once seen someone steal personalized or personal information, financial information, Social Security numbers, anything of the sort Of. Now, that doesn't mean it's not going to happen. That doesn't mean it won't happen to you. I'm just saying it's super duper unlikely. Plus, part of the reason for this, I think, is because theft laws in the Philippines are super, super strict and then punishments for digital theft are double. So in the Philippines, there's very little incentive to steal. Number one and two, the cost of stealing if you get caught is so high that it's just not worth it. And if you work with someone, you begin to trust them. The chances of them stealing from you down the road are very low. They have a life like, you know where they live. You've sent them payments. It's trackable. We have government IDs scanned, we're verifying people's identities. You're paying them through Onlinejobs PH EasyPay. If you're paying them with EasyPay, then Payoneer also has their government IDs scanned and verified. Chance of them running off with a bunch of bank accounts to attempt to transfer money out of those accounts is very slim. But there are a couple things that you can do to protect yourself. Number one, you can use LastPass to share your password. So if you're using Quicken Online or Xero or whatever, QuickBooks, you can share the password with them through LastPass, which will allow them to log in, but will not give them the password. So they never know your password. If you end up letting the person go, you just revoke their access in LastPass and then you know they don't have the password anymore. They can't change your password and steal your account. I've never actually seen that happen, someone changing a password and stealing an account. But it could happen. And I don't want to say that it won't happen to you. I've just never seen it happen. So if you're thinking about this, now's a good time to take a leap. Search bookkeepernlinejobs ph and see the profiles that come up, see what kind of experience you find. It really is amazing the talent that you can find at onlinejobs phone.