For the past week, we’ve been hearing a lot about the Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer’s policy to put an end to Yahoo employees working from home. Everybody, from corporate managers to work-at-home employees, seems to have an opinion on the matter.
Most of the AccountingDepartment.com staff, including all of our 50+ bookkeepers spread across the country, work at home. But we don’t take the extreme view of Virgin Group CEO Richard Branson, who said managers should be “trusting people to get their work done wherever they are, without supervision.”
The processes, policies and procedures we have in place, in fact, ensure that our work-at-home bookkeepers get the job done. Although our bookkeepers work-from-home, they are not “without supervision.”
AccountingDepartment.com uses state-of-the-art productivity software which tracks our employees’ time and how they are spending it. When you pay for a virtual accounting team managed by AccountingDepartment.com you know that you are getting all the services you need, handled in an accurate and timely manner. You receive all the reports you need on a daily basis, to put you in better financial control of your business.
Service Level Agreements Make the Difference
When we sign on a new client, we spend time outlining your needs and putting them all together in a Client Procedures Manual. This lets your full-charge bookkeeper know exactly what’s expected from her and when it’s expected.
Additionally, we sign a Service Level Agreement that says we will deliver what we promise every day. An in-house bookkeeper doesn’t make that kind of commitment to you. (You already know this if you’ve been through strings of bad bookkeepers.) Our employees may work-at-home, but they are far from unsupervised.
Fewer Distractions for Work-at-Home Bookkeepers
Studies have shown that work-at-home employees are often more productive. They don’t face the distractions of the water cooler, they don’t waste time commuting, and they also take less sick days. (Perhaps because people are more willing to tough it out and work if they can do it from home, rather than risk contaminating co-workers with their germs.)
Yahoo CEO Mayer wanted to inject a spark of creative collaboration within her organization, and feels she can do so by bringing all the employees back into the office. But bookkeeping is not a “creative” profession. Our virtual accountants and bookkeepers work from home, in a secure environment, without distractions. It works for us and it works for our clients.
