Trends in Finance & Accounting Outsourcing Services

A Brief Introduction to Finance & Accounting Outsourcing Services

The current era of commercialization and globalization are witnessing the adoption of outsourcing as an integral fragment of the core business strategies. With numerous companies getting on the outsource mode, the market is exhibiting a lot of growth in this sector.

Latest market studies point out that a huge chunk of existing outsourcing industry clients plan on growing their investment pooled into outsourcing. Lately, process outsourcing for finance & accounting is steadily growing and majority of the firms are undertaking the same.

Accounting Outsourcing is basically subcontracting some/all accounting operations and processes to an external vendor. The outsourced functions include Purchase to Pay, Fixed Asset Management, Order to Cash, Employee Reimbursements, GL Accounting etc.

Current F & A Outsourcing trends

• Management of Transactional services is the largest opportunity in the F&A BPO space, whereas payables are amongst the highest outsourced function in F&A.
• Earlier companies used to only outsource certain parts of their accounting processes such as AP/AR and some reconciliation processes. In the current scenario however, companies are sub-contracting the full gamut of activities involved in their financial processes. A probable reason for the same is that companies have understood the significance of being at the centre of strategic activities rather than transactional.
• Service providers are in the process of improving skills and polishing capabilities in process execution and their clients are accordingly trying to achieve the best from that.
• Stringent federal regulations in the European &US markets are driving corporates to adopt outsourcing in order to save their time, efforts and cost.
• SMB’s offer a plethora of business opportunities for Financial Outsourcing domain.
• Some recent market statistics have also revealed that companies these days are primarily adopting finance and Accounting Outsourcing  to save their expenditure, as well as to migrate the F&A function from being a cost exhaustive support function to a dynamic core business function.

The Varied Needs of Modern Business ....

In today’s economy, it does make sense to have an effective and efficient finance organization. Therefore to achieve high performance in challenging global market, companies are looking for finance and accounts outsourcing to drive their business. On a global scale there should be a deep understanding on how to leverage technology and commitment to drive operational excellence.

There are outsourcing companies with internal teams which focus on core business issues. They work on standardizing the financing and accounting process which transform the finance costs and lower the costs. Most organizations across the world are keen on improving the financial transparency and managing the costs on core business areas.

Since India has a rich pool of talent and substantial cost advantage, it remains one of the most preferred outsourcing destinations. In today’s fast evolving business process, the organizations are increasing to speed up their operations and free up their resources for core business activities. Therefore they need to outsource their non core functions for fixed assets management.

Nowadays the definition of BPO is changing as it is changing their scope as companies are also going for human resource outsourcing. This has accelerated over the years and will continue to do so. Therefore companies entrust all their outsourcing solutions to a single firm so that they concentrate on their core business issues. The work of Human Resource is to develop, retain and train the best people. They are also responsible for compensation, benefits, employee and labor relations, data collection, business partners and other legal issues.

Speaking about employee expense reimbursement, it is the act of compensating someone for the expenses made. Usually a person is reimbursed for out-of-pocket expenses when the expenses are made through an employment while carrying out the duties for third party. Some common examples are firms when they compensate for individuals that buy supplies for the company or compensate the employee that go for out-of-town assignments.