Practical notes from running these engagements — what to prepare, what to ask, and how to tell which shape of engagement fits. Useful whether or not you end up working with us.
The single biggest predictor of whether an outsourcing engagement goes well is whether the process existed in writing before anyone tried to move it. Here is what "written down" actually has to mean.
Most functions that feel messy are not complicated — they are undocumented. The work lives in one person’s judgment, built up over years, and nobody has ever had to explain it end to end. That is survivable while that person is there. It stops being survivable the moment you try to hand the work to anyone else, in-house or outside.
Before you brief a vendor, or before we start shadowing your team, these are the seven things worth having on paper. None of them take long. Skipping them is what turns a four-week handover into a four-month one.
1. The trigger
What starts this work? An email to a shared inbox, a row appearing in a spreadsheet, a ticket, a date on the calendar, a phone call. Write down every trigger, including the irregular ones. Work that arrives through an undocumented channel is the work that gets missed in month one.
2. The decision rules
At each step, what makes someone choose path A over path B? “We just know which suppliers need chasing” is exactly the knowledge that has to become a rule: chase after 3 days, or over a certain amount, or for this list of suppliers. If a rule genuinely cannot be written, that step stays with you — and that is a legitimate answer.
3. The exceptions
Every process has cases that break it: the client who is invoiced differently, the product that ships from another warehouse, the month-end that behaves oddly. List them. Exceptions are where outsourcing engagements quietly fail, because they are invisible until they occur and then look like incompetence.
4. Systems and access
Which tools does this touch, who grants access, and what does a new person actually need on day one? Include the small things — the shared mailbox, the folder that is not in the main drive, the portal with one licence. Work out early whether you will issue named accounts (you should) and who approves them.
5. Volume and timing
How many of these per day or week, and when do the spikes land? A function that averages 40 items a day but hits 300 on the first of the month is a different staffing problem from one that is flat. Two or three months of rough numbers beats a guess.
6. What “done” looks like
Define the finished state precisely enough that two people would agree on whether it was reached. “Invoice processed” can mean entered, or entered and coded, or entered, coded and approved for payment. This one sentence prevents most quality arguments.
7. Escalation
When something is wrong or unclear, who gets told, how fast, and who can make the call? Name a person, not a department, and name a backup. Then decide what a vendor may decide alone — if everything escalates, you have not outsourced anything.
If you do not have time for all seven
Do the trigger, the decision rules, and what “done” means. Those three carry most of the weight. The rest can be filled in while shadowing — which is what we do anyway: we write the process alongside your team during handover, and the document is yours to keep whether or not the engagement continues.
Moving your books to someone else is not a login and a folder. Here is the list that separates a clean transfer from three months of untangling.
Bookkeeping handovers fail in a predictable way. Access is granted, a few months go by, and then at year end the accountant finds balances that do not tie, entries coded to the wrong accounts, and reconciliations that were never finished. The cost of fixing it is larger than the saving that prompted the move.
A clean handover covers these, ideally before the first transaction is touched.
Opening position
The last closed period, and confirmation that it is genuinely closed.
Trial balance at that date, agreed with whoever prepared it.
Bank, card and cash balances reconciled at that date — with the reconciliation, not just the statement.
Open payables and receivables lists, with ages.
If the books are behind, say so up front. Catch-up work is normal, it is quoted separately, and it is far cheaper than discovering the gap in month three.
Chart of accounts and coding rules
Hand over the chart of accounts with notes on the accounts that get misused, plus your rules for recurring items: which supplier goes where, how mixed invoices are split, what counts as capital rather than expense, how you treat prepayments. Without this, coding becomes guesswork that looks fine until it is reported on.
The close calendar
Name the date the month closes and what has to happen before it: accruals, depreciation runs, intercompany entries, stock adjustments, payroll journals. Agreeing a fixed close date is what turns bookkeeping from an open-ended task into something you can plan a board pack around.
Document flow
Where do invoices, receipts and statements actually arrive, and who chases the ones that do not? Decide who scans, who files, and where the file of record lives. The most common cause of a slow close is not the bookkeeping — it is waiting on paperwork nobody owns.
Authority limits
Be explicit about what the bookkeeper may do alone: raise invoices, prepare a payment run, release payment, issue credit notes, write off small balances. In our engagements the default is that we prepare and you release — separating preparation from approval is a control worth keeping even when it costs a step.
Reporting
Decide the pack before month one: P&L and balance sheet at minimum, plus whatever you actually use — debtor ageing, cash position, departmental splits. Format it for the person who reads it. A report nobody opens is work you are paying for twice.
Your accountant stays in the loop
Bookkeeping support is not audit and does not replace statutory filing. Introduce the two parties at the start, agree who prepares what at year end, and the handover to your accountant becomes a file transfer rather than an investigation.
Nine questions to ask any outsourcing vendor before you sign
These are the questions that separate vendors who have run engagements from vendors who have sold them. Ask us the same ones.
Sales calls tend to cover capability and price. Neither is what goes wrong later. What goes wrong is continuity, accountability, quality drift and exit. Ask these nine, and listen for whether the answers are specific.
1. Who, by name, is accountable for this work?
You want a named manager, not a team alias or a ticket queue. Ask who you call when something is wrong at 2am, and what happens if that person leaves.
2. Who writes the process documentation, and who owns it?
If the vendor writes it and keeps it, your process is now their asset and leaving becomes expensive. The document should be yours, during and after.
3. What happens when someone is on leave or resigns?
The honest answer names a cross-trained backup and says how long ramping a replacement takes. “We have a large bench” is not an answer about your engagement.
4. How is quality measured, and how often is it sampled?
Ask for the sampling rate, who does the checking, and what happens when a sample fails. Quality that is only measured when you complain is not measured.
5. Where does my data live, and who can see it?
Named accounts or shared logins? Which country? What is removed when a staff member rolls off? Get the data-handling terms in writing before you share anything sensitive — and ask for an NDA at scoping, not at signature.
6. Is any of this subcontracted?
Perfectly legitimate, as long as you know. Ask who, for which parts, and who carries responsibility if the subcontractor fails. We deliver with our own staff, and where we do use a specialist we say so and remain accountable.
7. What do you need from us, and how often?
A vendor who cannot tell you your side of the work has not thought the engagement through. Expect specifics: decisions within a set time, an approver, access, a point of contact.
8. What does the reporting look like — can I see a sample?
Ask for a real one, redacted. You learn more from a sample report than from an hour of slides, and you find out whether reporting means numbers or adjectives.
9. What does leaving look like?
Notice period, what you get back, in what format, how long it takes, and what it costs. A vendor confident in the work answers this without flinching. If the exit terms are vague, assume the exit will be too.
One more, for yourself
Ask what would make this a bad idea. Any vendor worth signing will be able to describe the conditions under which you should not outsource this function at all — volume too low, process too volatile, judgment too specialised. If the answer is that outsourcing always makes sense, you are talking to someone selling, not advising.
Dedicated, project, or shared: picking the engagement shape
The same work can be bought three ways, and the wrong shape is the most common reason an engagement feels expensive.
Before comparing rates, decide the shape. Getting this wrong is what makes people conclude that outsourcing is costly, when the real problem was buying a full-time seat for two hours of daily work — or squeezing a continuous function into a project.
Dedicated team — when volume is steady and continuous
People assigned to you full time, working your hours, in your tools. This fits when the work is ongoing, the volume roughly fills a person’s day, and familiarity with your business compounds — support, back office, an operations function. You get consistency and someone who learns your edge cases. You pay for the seat whether or not it is full, so it only makes sense when it is.
Project-based — when there is a finish line
A fixed scope, timeline and handover: a build, a migration, a data cleanup, a catch-up on late books. Best when you can describe the finished state precisely. Weak when the requirement is still moving — scope changes cost more here than under any other shape, because each one reopens the estimate.
Part-time or shared — when the work is real but small
A few hours a week, spread across the month. This is the right answer far more often than people expect: monthly bookkeeping for a small company, review monitoring and responses, a weekly reporting pack. You get the discipline of a named owner without paying for idle time. The trade-off is scheduling — shared time is not instant, so it suits work with cycles rather than emergencies.
A rough test
Under ~10 hours a week, recurring → shared or part-time.
Most of a working day, every day, ongoing → dedicated.
A defined end state and a deadline → project.
Volume unknown → start shared, measure for a quarter, convert when the numbers justify a seat. This is the cheapest way to be wrong.
Mixing shapes is normal
Most mature arrangements use more than one: a project to clean up and document the function, then shared cover to keep it running, moving to a dedicated seat when volume grows. Since everything sits under one contract and one manager, changing shape is a scope change, not a new vendor search.
