Specialist flags crucial strategies for building offshore accounting teams

Staffing continues to be a major challenge for many accounting firms with unemployment still low, a large proportion of Baby Boomers leaving the industry, immigration failing to bring enough accountants into the country and fewer younger professionals entering the industry, according to Frontline Accounting director Jonathan Ryall.

Speaking in a recent Accounting Times webcast, Mr Ryall said he has even seen some firms looking to make acquisitions just to secure the staff they need.

Mr Ryall said that given the pressure firms are now under with workloads and a lack of staff, some firms are increasingly looking to offshoring as a way of accessing an alternative talent pool.

“Let’s take an accounting firm in say Ulladulla, there’s under 10,000 people in the town and there would be a couple dozen accountants in the whole town at most but if you offshore then you’ve got access to staff in Manilla where there’s around 20 million people,” he said.

“You can then start to cultivate and build your own team and lots of firms have been doing that for the last decade.”

However, Mr Ryall said that building an integrated and skilled team will take some investment in training, communication and systems to make it work effectively for the accounting firm.

“When you hire in the Phillipines, they generally won’t have Australian experience, they’ll have local experience and understand debits and credits but they won’t know what Telstra is. They won’t know GST, superannuation and all those things you take for granted. So that needs to be in the training,” he said.

“[Within our own firm] we’ve developed an eight week bootcamp course that recruits go through that covers all those sorts of end to end tax aspects and also how a business services job should work. They’re not going to be experts in eight weeks but it will get them familiarised.”

Mr Ryall said there is a broad range of different technology tools that firms can use which can streamline and systemise training for staff.

Tools like Loom for example enable managers record a training session for staff where they walk through how they want a particular job to be done.

“That recorded training session then gets uploaded and a link is provided to the offshore team. As it’s a video that also allows them to rewatch it multiple times if there’s something they didn’t understand well,” he said.

While firms can also purchase good quality training session from education providers, Mr Ryall said it’s important to do the in house training as well.

“Every firm wants jobs done in certain ways and with certain systems and software and so on,” he said.

For firms planning to implement an offshoring arrangement, Mr Ryall recommends making a plan of the types of work they’ll use the offshore team to complete, particularly for the first six months.

“You need to have a think about what types of jobs will be easy to get moving quickly that don’t require as much hand holding or routine type stuff that’s more repetitive. That will help them to become more familiar and become more productive over time,” he said.

“It could be things like bookkeeping, BASs, simple income tax returns initially and then you can start to increase the complexity over time.

“I know have staff members who have been with me for almost a whole decade and they can now do everything from tax planning, superannuation jobs and training other team members.”

Once the training has been done, Mr Ryall said that knowledge remains within the offshore team and compounds over time making it easier for the Australian firm.

“So if you’re going to go down the offshoring route, it will be a little harder in those early days but you’ve got to see it as an investment,” he said.

“It’s like having a graduate out of university, you need to train them, they’re not going to be productive straightaway but once you get them moving they’ll start to grow and you’ll get the benefit of that.”

Mr Ryall said that communication is also a critical component with offshoring and said firms should avoid relying on email alone.

“I think best practice is always going to be using something like Zoom and Skype or getting face to face with your offshore team. I’ve seen plenty of things go wrong with bad communication and so seeing the person on the other side is crucial,” he said.

“A good chat tool like Slack to keep things out of email can also be usual.”

Jonathan Ryall recently discussed the compliance requirements and business considerations for offshoring arrangements as well as strategies for training and communicating with offshore teams in the latest Accounting Times webcast with Frontline Accounting. You can access the registration for the recorded webcast here.