"Don't you need to come to my office to do my books?"

In short, no.

For some it’s scary to think of the person or people doing your books not actually being where you can see them. Why is that? From our experience it’s about two things, tradition and trust.

Traditionally the person that did your books sat nearby. But let’s be honest, most times business owners have no clue what their CFO, Controller or Bookkeeper is doing anyway. They know the finished result, but they are usually not skilled enough in the software or accounting practices to know when any of those positions is doing something technically wrong. If you’re a business owner, can you picture peering over your bookkeeper’s shoulder and correcting the general ledger account to which they are posting? Or will you be helping them streamline the chart of accounts? In the majority of cases the answer is a resounding NO. That is okay. The financial part of any business no matter the size requires a whole different skill set than the intellect and knowledge on which the business was built.

Trust is invaluable when you have someone else doing your finances. A business owner needs to do their due diligence to find a company or a person who has a proven track record of happy clients, is highly skilled in what they do, and is continually growing that knowledge. If they are untrustworthy, they will perform poorly and possibly steal from you no matter where they do the work.

If you trust your bookkeeper, controller or CFO, all that is holding you back from not having them on site is your allegiance to a traditional role that is becoming less and less traditional as cloud applications become more the norm.

What is the benefit for you? In most cases it can save you money! Having a cloud based finance department means you don’t have to pay for the space they would take up in the office and the utilities they use. If this cloud based finance department is it’s own company like JPZ Inc., then you don’t have to pay for insurance and employer payroll taxes. Since you will most likely have implemented cloud based apps to make the outsourcing possible, you and other members of your staff have the capabilities to work offsite more.