Outsourced accounting can include responsibilities normally met by in-house processing personnel such as payroll clerks, right through to total responsibility for the chief financial officer or finance director role. The solution can be permanent, or on a secondment basis.

While we work with you to identify the scope and extent of services required, there are a number of fundamental aspects of financial management that provide a basis for our involvement as outsourced providers.  These include:

• Oversight of accounting system operation and processing to ensure integrity, completeness and relevance of data
• Involvement in establishment and preparation of regular management reporting, including financial and non-financial performance measures, cashflow and funding
• Taxation (income tax, provisional tax, indirect taxes)
• Statutory reporting requirements
• Budgeting, cashflows and profitability forecasting

Our focus is on providing the qualitative aspects of financial management rather than bookkeeping and data processing.  We will work with your administration staff as appropriate to ensure that the underlying processing is done in a cost effective way.

In short term secondment arrangements, we match our range of accounting personnel to meet your immediate needs. Such a solution provides seamless access to specialised technical expertise on an as needed basis including:

• Taxation (effectiveness, structure, transaction)
• Human Resources
• Information Technology
• Access to industry best practice and benchmarking
• Corporate finance (valuation, capital raising, sale, purchase)

On a cost benefit basis, outsourcing can have the additional benefits of:

• No staff recruiting and retention costs
• No staff training and development costs
• Cost effective compared to maintaining a lower or similar level of expertise in-house

 “We have used Deloitte staff on several occasions to supplement our finance and accounting function. Over a number of years they have provided assistance with budgeting and forecasting, preparation of monthly management accounts and annual accounts.

"We have used Deloitte staff not only to carry out such work but to review our processes and to train our staff, ensuring that when the Deloitte staff member leaves we have the competence to continue to do these things properly ourselves.

"Having access to the assistance we need, when we need it, has meant we have kept our permanent staff numbers to a minimum, while at the same time never feeling shorthanded for those peak periods and those special projects that arise from time to time.

"The staff continuity that Deloitte has been able to provide, together with the institutional knowledge they have built up about our business makes Deloitte a better bet for us than a casual temp.”

Jacky Percy, Chief Financial Officer, Baldwin Shelston Waters