The Future of Outsourced Accounting Services: A Guide for 2022

These days, technological advancements have seeped into the core of operations across all industries alike—and accountancy is no exception. The advent of new methodologies to carry out the functions of accounting as a service without being confined to traditional techniques is liberating the professionals of this industry, leading to revolutionary innovations.

The embodiment of this can be seen in El Salvador in the way that this country recognized Bitcoin as a legal tender back in June 2021. All the functions of a legal currency, including taxation, can now be carried out using Bitcoin in this country, expanding the ambit of accountancy in the coming years.

The tendency for outsourcing accounting services displays a trend inclined steeply towards deploying technology to cater to the clients. Let’s discuss some of these trends.

Technology and Automation Drives Delivery of Services

Accounting services are already being delivered to clients remotely in the aftermath of the pandemic. Firms have accelerated the adoption of technological tools that enable them to get in touch with their customers through digital channels and carry out accounting operations. Solutions like cloud technology have expanded the security protocol to enable secure data exchanges between clients and accounting firms.

Blockchain technology has transformed the way decentralized finance works. This technology is playing a pivotal role in terms of securing the transactions happening over DeFi. The impenetrable security of blockchain technology will be revolutionary for accounting outsourcing in the future, especially for large firms where reconciliation is frequently delayed due to the existence of multiple legal entities across the globe.

With the more tech-savvy and mobile-friendly nature of clients these days, accounting firms are increasingly likely to adopt more mobile solutions for service delivery.

Automating operations across accountancy has created new opportunities to efficiently reduce turnaround times. This kind of automation, which is often end-to-end, has pushed manual professional skills to the backseat.

The Rise of the Gig Economy

The pandemic thrust the world into a remote working environment, inducing a scattered workforce that took up “gigs” as freelancers. Communication over digital channels significantly facilitated this; it is possible today for accountants across the globe to operate solo over short-term contracts (that could be specialized or cover a wider scope) for companies. The Gig Economy—as it is called—is expected to be on the rise.

Let’s look at that in more detail.

Accounting Professionals Acquiring New Skills

The online education market took off with the pandemic lockdowns and is predicted to rise to a whopping $350 billion market size by the end of 2025. Accounting novices and professionals alike have begun to augment themselves with new knowledge and skills of the industry. The trend is helping drive companies of all sizes to outsource accounting to skilled hands.

Accounting professionals today, by way of remote services, are able to learn new skills and deliver services to their clients virtually over digital channels simultaneously. While the pandemic did impose restrictions, it also helped pave the way for new accounting business models that bank more on Software as a Service, Cloud deliveries, and accounting software.

Client Accounting Services

Client Accounting Services is a business model that is rapidly soaring. The fact that a single professional handles all of the accounting tasks for a firm—be it taxation, transactional and strategic services, performance and compliance services, and much more—is a concept that is steadily catching on. The rate of growth in CAS over 2020 was 20%, which is a significant rise of 8% from 2018; the numbers all point towards an accountancy ecosystem that is increasingly customer-centric.

Evolution of Client Expectations

Recent developments in technology have led to a significant shift in client expectations from outsourced accounting services. Remote access that is mobile and democratized has become a must-have attribute of any online accounting service. Clients today expect speedy response and delivery of books, which is being facilitated by the powers of automation, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. A new normal has been achieved where clients are aware of the scale, capability, and response times of operations related to accountancy, and as such, the firms in the industry are quickly evolving to catch up.

The Takeaway

Technology is only one aspect that drives the trends in accountancy today. The compounding effects of it on the accounting industry have changed the way professionals operate and deliver products and services and the benchmark performance and convenience levels that clients have come to expect. Blockchain and similar technologies have tremendously impacted security in operations, and these changes are set to be perpetuated throughout the accounting industry.

About Us

OHI is a specialized finance and accounting outsourcing service provider with over fifteen years of finance and accounting outsourcing experience. We have strong functional outsourcing expertise in end to end accounting processes covering daily accounting activities, reconciliations, month end and year-end account finalization processes, employee reimbursements, payroll processing, management reporting and financial analysis.

OHI serves close to 300+ clients across USA, UK and Canada. We invite you to experience finance and accounting outsourcing through us.

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