Time is Money: 7 Reasons to Outsource Finance Functions

Wednesday, August 19, 2015 Unknown 0 Comments

Outsourcing your firm’s non-core components like tax planning, bookkeeping, accounts payable, and lead generation can bring you a lot of benefits. But some may think outsourcing finance functions deemed critical and difficult is a bad idea due to hidden costs and less control, but that has been proven wrong many times. In reality, there are greater benefits to outsourcing some or most of your functions than by doing the work by yourself or creating your own in-house team.

1. Save time – If time is gold, then insurers would do better to focus on projects that will help their firm grow rather than waste time on non-critical functions that are better left to insurance outsourcing providers. Strike gold by concentrating your focus on activities or projects that contribute to business growth.

2. Save money – It hurts your struggling company’s budget if you leave positions vacant for days, hire a single in-house employee to perform all functions (yet not up to standards), or acquire expensive tools and technologies. So as not to add to your growing financial woes, turn to a trusted third party service provider that can perform some or most of your finance functions at a more reasonable rate than in-house.

3. Access to world-class talents – Admit it; your employees don’t have all the necessary skills and expertise to perform all finance functions, from transaction processing to internal auditing, at a higher level. And if they do, they might not perform to industry standards. To keep up with the best practices in your industry, partner with a trustworthy finance and insurance outsourcing provider that has top-notch talents, the best work tools and systems, and quality training programs.

4. Simplify and standardize processes – Being complex industries, finance and insurance firms can achieve a better outcome by simplifying their processes to develop better performance benchmarks and meet regulatory requirements – functions that are more important than just closing books. Of course, they are doing these for clients whose confidence in the financial markets is diminishing.

5. Shift to strategic functions – Does your firm take a long and difficult path to close a book? Perhaps it’s time to review your strategies and determine if they rhyme with the finance services industry’s current mindset or people’s perception of the industry – or else tweak strategies to cater to people who are uncertain about their financial future. Ditch the process, and bring in the strategies.

6. Build partnership and strategic alliance – To grow your business amid an economic downturn, it helps to partner, not just network, with service providers who understand your business. The relationship that your firm can develop with a finance outsourcing company can be a great resource to help improve your service offerings and upgrade client support systems.

7. Leverage the power of data –The finance services industry would do better to infuse data with strategies and combine them than render data irrelevant in the transactional process, buried amid countless reports. Your finance and insurance outsourcing provider can gather relevant data to assist you with writing new business, creating budgets, analyzing forecasts, conducting internal audits, and supporting new projects.

Most finance and insurance firms know that in order to give their industry a boost, they must explore new ideas and seek new answers to streamline their finance functions. The answer lies in outsourcing, and outsourcing providers have the ideas, plus the tools, to help them hurdle the numerous challenges that their industry is currently facing.