ACCOUNTANT SUCCESS STORY: STEWART FINANCIAL SERVICES

G. Ted Stewart, CPA is the founder of Stewart Financial Services. Ted has been in business for about nine years. Prior to that he worked for a fortune 50 company for about 24 years. The growth of Stewart Financial is largely due to his passion for leading his team and developing leaders within his company. In May 2012, he received President’s Corporate at the 145th Annual Session of the Virginia Baptist State Convention.

Initial Start with Entigrity:

Talking about initial start with Entigrity Ted says, “There were some apprehension, we did little research on entigrity, but one thing that helped away my fears was the referrals I got from Entigrity, that I could call and talk to them about their experience and they shared some very good information with me.”

Stewart Financial Services tried it out with a minimal number of hours initially just to see how things would work and they found that things work very well.

Building process has been key in expanding your bandwidth offshore. More your practice has defined processes, the better and smoother it would be for you to onboarding and managing offshore staff. (Here is E-Book on 10 Best Practices on Managing Offshore Staff)

Ted told us that he has developed a process for additional training for his offshore team which helped him to build a better relationship with the staff.

“The whole process has been able to develop additional training mechanisms for my staff and we've implemented a process where we have weekly meetings with my staff for about an hour at a time, we go over any issues or concerns and address anything that they may have concerns about and it's worked very well. It's been a very enjoyable experience and I'm looking to potentially add another staff maybe next year as soon as possible. Also, I will be increasing the hours of my existing offshore accounting staff.” - G. Ted Stewart, CPA

Workflow Process with Offshore Team:

Though there's a fairly huge time difference between the United States and India, there is this sweet spot of opportunity where the time frame overlaps. 

Ted says, “I usually have meetings with my offshoring outsourcing staff or communicate with them in the overlap timeframe so these are fairly short brief communications. We only take an hour for the most part when we have our weekly meetings and then they're very responsive to communicate with me via email or skype. They've been very responsible and responsive and they communicate with me frequently through email as well.

Best Practices for Offshore Staffing

1. Able to communicate and that you should have a good understanding.

2. Understand your team's capabilities.

3. Prioritise data security and confidentiality.

4. Use agile team meetings to bring team members together.

The advantages of offshore staffing in terms of cost, scalability, global talent, and dependability are unparalleled, but only if a firm invests in good team management. Outsourcing for accountants enables you to build capacity such that your offshore team handles a large portion of your compliance, data entry, and review level work, while your core team onshore is responsible for investing time in their clients and their business. Offshoring outsourcing has been one of the answers that you must have in order to continue providing superior service to your clients.

Entigrity™ is a trusted offshore staffing partner to over 600+ accountants, CPAs, and tax firms across the US and Canada. Our flexible and transparent hiring model gives helps firms of all sizes to hire staff for accounting, bookkeeping, tax preparation, or any other task for 75% less cost. As a firm 'run by accountants, for the accountants', Entigrity captures the hiring needs of accounting firms most precisely, providing staff that works directly under your control and management, still, you are left with least to worry about compliance, payroll taxes, overheads or any other benefits.