Transforming How Accounting Gets Done

Last week was our firm’s annual meeting, when our managing partner provides all employees with a recap of the past year and a look ahead at the next year’s goals. Each service line partner presents a similar perspective on his or her own practice area. Because we are adding new employees all the time, this also gives our most recent hires an opportunity to understand the firm’s capabilities outside of his or her own group.

As I prepared my talking points, I reviewed the first bullet on my PowerPoint, showing the mission of our Financial Management Outsourcing group: “To provide financial insight and leadership to help entrepreneurs, executive teams and investors take their organizations to the next level.” In years past, I have started my presentation by reciting this mission statement. While we certainly remain true to this longstanding customer-centric mission, I was suddenly struck by the following thought that seemed more appropriate as the kick-off of my presentation:

“We are doing nothing less than transforming the way accounting gets done in emerging growth and middle market companies!”

I have posted previously on the value proposition of finance and accounting outsourcing, so I won’t get down into the details again here. Doing so was not on the agenda for the annual firm meeting. But what I did say was this:

“Imagine you are talking to an entrepreneur about her great new product. And then she says she plans to build a factory to manufacture it. You would say, ‘You’re crazy! Find someone else to make it! Outsource it!’ You would give her similar advice if she wanted to hire several employees to form an IT department, or someone to process payroll. Yet with accounting, the default choice still seems to be to hire people internally. And THAT is what we want to change – to make outsourcing the default choice for accounting and finance, like it is for manufacturing, IT and payroll.”

Seems pretty self-evident to me. I am more enthusiastic than ever about the accelerating trend, and I look forward to being with others that share this passion at the CPA2Biz DigitalCPA Cloud User Conference later this week. Stay tuned for insights gained from this three-day event.