If you are a small business owner, interested in effectively reducing a portion of your payroll costs, contemplating outsourcing your current accountant or bookkeeper, and someone in your family is unemployed,outsourcing to family may be right for you.

Outsourcing your bookkeeping functions may result in reduced salary expenses, or the conversion of fixed costs to variable costs, insurance benefits and some tax savings, etc.. Before you begin to outsource, you will need to purchase a quality fax machine or scanner. The type of fax machine or scanner is dependent upon the volume and frequency of paper documents (i.e. customer invoices,vendor bills, bank statements, etc.) to be scanned and sent to your outsourced accountant. Scanning or faxing is necessary because all of the source documents have to be sent either by email or fax to the outsourced accountant to record the accounting transactions.

As an owner of a small business or the person responsible for the accounting or bookkeeping, it’s important to establish a process by which to monitor the activities of the outsourcing company or person. Outsourcing may make sense, providing a competent and independent person oversees and monitors the financial results on your behalf.

It’s is often advertised that if you outsource to a foreign country, then your labor expense will be less than what you would pay in the United States. However,when small business owners are facing issues such as contraction, business survival or, to make an already bad or problematic situation worse, family unemployment, it may make sense to employ the family to help with the small business accounting. By employing a family member in your house or outsourcing your accounting function with family in a distant location, rather than some outsourcing to another country, you may actually help, in your own way, the balance of payments for the United States by keeping jobs in this country. Not a bad idea during these times. This strategy should work,if the owners or members of the owner’s family are able to learn QuickBooks, or some other comparable online accounting software program. Its also helpful that the family member have some basic financial knowledge to undertake this responsibility of entering the financial information into QuickBooks. Given the current economy in the United States, there are situations where family members are recently unemployed and are now available to help make a contribution in the family business.

QuickBooks Online Plus is one of many online accounting programs that is easy to learn and with some training, most people with common sense can handle. If you decide to chose this route, it’s important to have a CPA or accountant is available to ask questions as well as a mechanism in place, to allow for real time or after the fact corrections or adjustments to the accounting records.

Under either scenario, outsourcing with a family member or to a foreign country,a CPA or accountant or a skilled financial services consultant is the ideal person to monitor either the real time, or monthly or quarterly financial information, and to check that the reconciliation process is working and more importantly, that outsource person or team, are doing the right job.

It is important to monitor an outsourced accounting department, whether the outsourced department is in a distant location or outsourced to family. By using QuickBooks Online or other QuickBooks versions with remote access, it is possible to have a CPA or an accountant remotely perform this monitoring function.

Before making any decision about outsourcing, it is recommended that you first speak to your CPA or accountant in order to determine if whether or not outsourcing is appropriate for your particular business. The CPA or accountant can also help access the skill of the person to provide the outsourced service.

This concept of outsourcing to one or two family members may not work for a large or mid size business. However, if you own a small business, interested in effectively reducing a portion of your payroll costs, have decided or thinking about outsourcing your current bookkeeper, and someone in your family is unemployed, outsourcing may be right for you. Once again, this will work as long as the outsourced family member is properly supervised and monitored by a CPA or accountant. In the beginning there may be more time required by your CPA or accountant to train and to oversee as compared to time that your accounting professional currently spends each month or quarter. In the long run, the amount of time required by your accounting professional should diminish. Notwithstanding, some time will always be required of your accounting professional to monitor the activities of the outsourced person.

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