Every year, when the tax season appears, most accountants feel overwhelmed. CPA firms feel stressed to keep up with the pressure and volume of the tasks they have to do, including being constantly updated on the changing rules and regulations regarding tax laws.
Imagine a CPA firm with 2 staff members, one doing bookkeeping and year-end close and another for tax. What happens if your tax guy gets overburdened with client random questions (Can I claim my dog as a dependent? He eats a lot! Or I bought a new TV for my living room. Can I claim it as an office expense if I sometimes work from the couch?) and simultaneously handling client intake, tax returns processing, filing, handling technical stuff, personal issues, reviews, DocuSign! Phew!!!
Many accountants and CPA firms are not updated regarding the changing tax laws, rules, and regulations due to their workload, which can be problematic and burdensome during tax season, resulting in increased stress, reduced productivity, and errors that may cost the firms dearly.
A lot of firms handle this with the following magic tricks:
- Hiring additional staff before the season, say November, so they are ready to fight it all together (By January, your office might resemble a sleep-deprived zombie convention)
- Hire offshore (the Time zone issue sucks!)
- Saying no to clients. (Experience the strange and elusive sensation of a work-life balance (allegedly exists, but rarely sighted)
- Hiring interns (Your coffee supply may mysteriously deplete, and you’ll become an expert in answering “Is this on the exam?”)
Where there is no perfect solution for this issue. However, the one thing that has always helped small and midsized accounting firms is offshoring and outsourcing.
Let’s find out how! This blog will discuss offshore staffing and how it helps you in tax season.
What is offshore staffing?
Simply put someone in India and the Philippines or maybe in Mexico or Africa doing the work your in-office team is doing. Come on, you are not new to this. Forgot Covid?
What happens when you think of your IT team? Some Indian faces come to your mind, right? So, they migrated or maybe some people are doing the work from India and doing it well. That is what is offshore for accounting too. Someone credible from India you are comfortable with doing your books and tax all year long or just during the tax season.
This offshore staffing method has many benefits that can help the firm expand its capabilities. Let’s discuss them in detail after learning more about offshore staffing.
Understanding the pressure:
During tax season, accountants can face numerous challenges like:
- Increased Workload: Those 3 months of work are insane. The volume of clients and transactions will increase, requiring attention to every detail.
- Tight Deadlines: Deadlines always add pressure on accountants, which can cause errors.
- Client Expectations: Clients expect quick and accurate service, which can increase the stress of the accountants.
- Limited Resources: Many CPA firms operate with fewer teams, making managing the workload during the tax season difficult.
These factors can cause stress and pressure, impacting accountants’ well-being and the firms’ overall efficiency.
Expanding Firm Capabilities:
Tax season is reasonably challenging for the firms. Hence, CPA firms must consider viable and pocket-friendly solutions that can expand their capabilities to easily navigate the challenges, like offshore staffing. This can benefit your firm in many ways:
- Cost Efficiency: The key benefit of offshore staffing in tax season. It reduces operational expenses like salaries and overhead costs. You can save up to 60% and more on salary and overhead cost
- Access to Skilled Professionals: There are many talented people worldwide, and offshore staffing can help you find the required talent with minimal payouts. Skilled offshore staffing can also help you improve the work’s quality. India has rich manpower in the accounting space.
- Increased capacity and workload management: This is a significant benefit of offshore staffing. Offshore staffing can increase the capacity to manage the workload more effectively and help meet deadlines on time.
One survey also reveals that 72% of the firms/persons who chose offshore staffing are filing their tax returns on time or before the due date.
- Flexibility and Scalability: With offshore staffing, scale operations can be done effortlessly within the time given and with very accurate tax preparations, and flexibility of the working is increased, making you feel at ease this tax season.
- Focus on Core Activities: Offshore staffing can also help focus on core activities and tax preparation. They can also help with high-value tasks, strategic planning, and maintaining client relationships.
- Safety of your Data: There is a definite risk that in-house staff can misuse the data, but offshore staff will have a contract, resulting in less risk of data, privacy, and security breaches. Hence, offshore staffing can also help you protect your data, privacy, and security and lower the risk of misuse.
Thus, offshore staffing can help you navigate the firm’s challenges effectively and efficiently and eliminate all the problems during tax season. Offshore staffing can help you benefit individually, the team, and the overall firm.
Offshore Staffing Solutions:
The services where offshore staffing can help the firm in the tax season are:
- Tax Preparation and Filing: During the tax season, offshore staffing can help you with tax-related tasks, such as preparing and accurately filing the tax information.
- Audit Support: Offshore staffing can also provide services in audit-related work, arranging the papers regarding the audit work according to basic standards like IFRS and U.S. GAAP during the tax season.
- Bookkeeping and Financial statement preparations: Offshore staffing can help you accurately book and prepare financial statements to support your work and ensure operations run smoothly this tax season.
- Tax Returns: Offshore staffing can help you prepare individual, partnership, and corporate tax returns for this season.
In summary, offshore staffing can help you with tax-related tasks. The above-mentioned tax-related tasks can burden the accountants and the firm during the peak tax season, and this method of offshore staffing will ease your work. It also has many benefits.
Limitations of Offshore Staffing:
There are also some limitations of offshore staffing that can impact your work in tax season like:
- Time-zone differences.
- Cultural differences.
- Technology-related setbacks.
- Dependency.
These limitations can be minute but can be overlooked. You can avoid these limitations by meticulously selecting your offshore staff, reflecting on their work, giving guidance, and helping them work effectively in this tax season.
The Future of Offshore Staffing:
In the current situation, the demand for offshore staffing is increasing. Of Course, there are emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, but sometimes, the emerging technologies can be a burden due to lack of human touch.
At such times, offshore staffing can help you with complex and value-added activities.
Intellgus has a proven track record of supporting CPA firms during tax season. Our offshore staffing solutions have helped numerous firms manage their workload more effectively, resulting in increased efficiency, reduced stress levels, and higher accuracy. Since 2018, we have been helping many firms with accounting solutions, empowered with technology to meet client requirements. To learn more about our services, visit our website.
Conclusion
As tax season approaches, CPA firms should think about innovative solutions to manage stress and workload.
Offshore staffing will ease your work in the tax season by helping you in tax preparation, filing, audit support, bookkeeping, financial statements preparation, and also in tax returns with benefits like reducing cost efficiency, giving access to skilled professionals with improved quality of work, with increased capacity and workload management, improved flexibility and scalability, and focus on core activities. This innovative solution not only helps you ease your workload but also helps you expand the firm’s capabilities.
Of course, there are also some limitations. Still, you can overcome them by meticulously selecting your offshore staff, reflecting on their work, giving guidance, and helping them work effectively and efficiently.
Realize that offshore staffing is in demand. Ease your burden and your work this tax season by offshore staffing, and partnering with Intellgus can provide the support your firm needs to thrive during this critical time. Let’s make the tax season the best one to expand your firm’s capabilities.
