Drive higher profitability for your practice with outsourced bookkeeping

If you run an accountancy practice, keeping your clients happy must be your ultimate goal.

To remain comprehensive, some accounting firms offer more services than they can handle resulting in delays, errors, and a drop in the quality of work. This leads to unhappy clients and a decline in profitability.

The accounting world is evolving at a great speed, thanks to the rise of AI, ever-growing competition, automation, and the freelance economy.

So the question arises, how can one boost the bottom line? Take more clients on board? Or offer more services? Whatever you do, you cannot do everything on your own.

Bookkeeping is a core function

Bookkeeping requires a thorough understanding of accounting principles. A bookkeeper should be able to guide the client on why the financials add up as they do.

Hiring an in-house bookkeeper is an option. It also entails time and money involved in onboarding and training them. How can we forget their benefits, salary, pension, holiday and sick leave and so on.

In contrast, outsourcing bookkeeping entails a fixed monthly fee with access to high-tech and experienced bookkeepers. You can assign tasks from the word go without any training.

There are many benefits of outsourcing bookkeeping. 

Now that you understand how outsourcing bookkeeping can help your accounting practice, let us guide you on the cost of hiring a bookkeeper.

Factors That Influence The Cost of Hiring a Bookkeeper

When you hire a bookkeeper, its cost depends upon many factors. These factors could be services needed etc. However, one thing you need to be careful about while hiring a bookkeeper is how you choose one.

Hire an experienced bookkeeper or bookkeeping agency who has worked in your niche and has received a positive rating from other businesses. You can check the online reviews to decide upon a bookkeeper or ask for references from close friends and family.

Here are the factors that can decide the cost of hiring a bookkeeper.

Service Requirements

When you are looking to hire a bookkeeper, note all the services that you expect from them. The following questions can help you figure out your requirements.

• Do you doubt if one bookkeeper would be enough to handle all your bookkeeping tasks?
• Do you also need accounting services in addition to bookkeeping services?
• Do you want to access the expertise of two or more bookkeepers to keep a sharp eye on your finances?

All these questions will help you decide the kind of services you desire to gain from a bookkeeper. If your answer to the above three questions is a yes, you should be thinking of outsourcing your bookkeeping services to rather than hiring a dedicated bookkeeper.

A bookkeeping agency offers you more than one bookkeeper to keep a close watch on your finances. They also provide additional services when your business needs them and offers experienced professionals at your service.

Your Company’s Values

Another important factor to consider while hiring a bookkeeper is the ethics and values of your company. Hiring a bookkeeper who seems shady but comes at an affordable cost would give you pain in the long term.

You should consider hiring a bookkeeper who has the same values and principles as your business. Getting references from friends and family is a good way of finding the right bookkeeper for your business.

The Cost of Hiring a Bookkeeper

The exact cost of hiring a bookkeeper in the UK differs for the three different modes of employment your business can offer. This means you can either hire a bookkeeper part-time, full-time or on a freelance basis. Let’s take a look at various pricing levels for three different employment types.

Full-Time Bookkeeper

An entry-level full-time bookkeeper can cost you anywhere between £15,000 and £20,000 in annual salary. This goes on to increase depending on the experience a bookkeeper has.

A bookkeeper with a few years of experience and great skills can earn anywhere between £25,000 and £35,000 in the UK. You can hire a newbie bookkeeper since a bookkeeper who just completed his training is bound to know the latest business tactics that can come in handy for you.

Please note that we are quoting the average market salary for a bookkeeper in the UK. This does not reflect the exact numbers. Also exact cost to company will be slightly higher by 20 to 25% because of additional costs like employer NI, pension contribution and office and infrastructure costs

Part-Time Bookkeeper

You can hire a part-time bookkeeper for your business if your bookkeeping needs are limited to a few days a month. To decide on the cost, you may have to sit with the bookkeeper to understand their billing criteria. Most bookkeepers cost per hour. You may need to decide how many days in a month you need bookkeeping services to arrive on a fixed amount.

Some business train one of their employees to do bookkeeping tasks. This is also a way of saving money and having an internal part-time bookkeeper.

Outsourced Bookkeeper

Outsourcing bookkeeping frees you from paying them employee benefits and also saves a few bucks on hiring a full-time employee. It will cost you anywhere between £10 and £40 per hour. Offshored bookkeepers will normally cost between £10 and £15 per hour

To Sum It Up

If you do not want to hire a full-time or part-time bookkeeper, you can outsource your entire bookkeeping to a bookkeeping and accounting firm.

This helps you gain peace of mind as someone more experienced will now be handling your books while you can focus on your other core business tasks. This way you can always increase or decrease the complexity of services you require and your cost would be adjusted accordingly.