Offering auditing services can be a great way for accountancy firms to expand their service proposition while generating more revenue and growth, but completing this kind of work with your existing in-house team can be a real challenge if you also have a full range of other accounting services to fulfil to your usual high standards.
In this guide, we look at the benefits of using a trusted outsourcing partner to deliver a high-quality financial audit service to your clients, helping to transform and scale up your practice.
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Currently, recruiting, training and retaining good accounting professionals to deliver valuable accounting audits is a huge issue across the sector, as shown in our Accounting Talent Index. Not only is it very resource-intensive, it’s also expensive. Salaries, benefits and all of the overheads of expanding your in-house team can quickly add up, which can feel like a significant risk in uncertain times.
Outsourcing to trusted auditing accountants enables you to swap these extra fixed staffing costs for variable and flexible ones, which gives your firm much more control over your expenditure. You only outsource what is needed and pay for the work carried out by your partners. This removes the potential burden of staff that can be underutilised during quieter periods. This flexibility enables you to plan and manage budgets more effectively in response to demand, which can make all the difference to your bottom line.
Regulations and auditing standards are constantly evolving, and keeping up can be a full-time job in itself. An outsourced audit partner specialising in this specific area lives and breathes these regulations and any upcoming changes. They invest heavily in continuous professional development and are committed to maintaining the latest certifications and regulatory knowledge across different jurisdictions.
By working with a trusted outsourcing partner, you gain access to this expertise instantly, ensuring that every audit completed meets the most current compliance standards. This reduces your firm’s risk exposure and can also enhance your reputation with clients.
Sometimes, being too close to the data can be a disadvantage for accountants. An outsourced audit service brings a fresh, unbiased perspective that can uncover discrepancies, inefficiencies, or anomalies that might even be missed internally. This objectivity adds immense value to the audit process, increasing its integrity and potentially uncovering insights that drive better decision-making for your clients.
Financial audits have seen significant advancements in technology over the last decade. From automated data extraction and analytics to cloud-based collaboration tools and AI-driven error detection, cutting-edge audit platforms have revolutionised the process.
Many accounting firms find that adopting and maintaining these systems in-house requires significant investment, both in terms of money and time. The best outsourcing providers operate with best-in-class technology stacks as standard. When you outsource to skilled auditing accountants, you immediately gain access to these tools without having to invest in them yourself.
This not only enhances the accuracy and speed of the audit process but also delivers a modern, tech-enabled experience to your clients, adding even more value to your service.
Something that many accountancy firms find challenging is the seasonal demand for certain services, especially as the client base grows. Expanding your staff to meet demand for accounting audits that might soon tail off is very risky. Outsourcing removes that risk by enabling you to scale up and down on demand.
If you need to ramp things up to manage a busier period or to deliver essential services for an influx of new clients, a trusted outsourcing partner can provide that additional capacity seamlessly when it’s needed. This provides consistency of service and no compromise on quality, regardless of how the workload might change.
Experienced outsourced auditing accountants can bring a lot to the table. They have proven structured workflows, carefully refined audit processes and have made streamlined operations into an art. This brings greater efficiency, especially when supported by the latest audit tools. Not only does this speed up turnaround times, it can also reduce the error rate, which is hugely important in financial auditing because of the high stakes.
While accounting audits can be hugely important to your clients, they are time-consuming and resource-intensive for accountancy firms. If you can free up time by outsourcing your financial audit service, your internal team can instead focus on more strategic work, such as high-margin advisory services, while also being able to invest time into client relationships. This isn’t only better for your business, it is also often more satisfying for your staff too.
In order to provide your clients with continuity of service, enabling them to reap all the benefits mentioned above and without risking your professional reputation for quality, choosing the right partner is key.
Some areas to consider include:
Find out more about choosing the right outsourced accounting partner.
Successfully outsourcing accounting audits can help your business save money, but it’s not only a cost-saving exercise; it can actually be a trigger for enabling growth. It can help your accounting firm to expand your services, handle greater capacity even at short notice and improve the quality of the end results, all without the extra overheads and other complexities of making your in-house team bigger.
Book a call with us today to find out how Advancetrack can help your business with our specialist outsourced accounting services.
