Are you considering outsourced accounting services as a means to save money for your small- to mid-sized business? Are you concerned about how to keep your financial information secure?
When these companies with revenues over $1 million first consider outsourcing their accounting or bookkeeping, a few questions typically come to mind:
- Is my financial information really secure?
- What protections are in place for my financial data?
- How can outsourcing save me money and provide better quality than an in-house bookkeeper?
It's understandable to have these questions when hiring a company to manage your business bookkeeping needs. After all, your company's finances and future are at stake.
How Does Your Security Stack Up Now?
Let's look at the answers to questions about your bookkeeping processes and procedures:
- Is my financial information really secure now?
Many business owners keep sensitive financial accounting information in unlocked file cabinets. Bookkeepers may work in a common area or have an office that other employees can enter and leave at will. Does your bookkeeper lock her office when she goes out to lunch? You can't monitor your bookkeeper all day, every day, to make sure she's not doing something careless that could put your company's financial data at risk. And you wouldn't expect her not to trust her co-workers, right?
- What onsite accounting protections are available for my data?
Even if your in-house bookkeeper is meticulous about security, actually locking file cabinets, restricting access to her office, and not typing in passwords with other employees hanging over her shoulder, your financial data is still only as secure as your company's server. Hackers know that many mid-sized companies don't have the ability to allocate enough resources to security, and so they specifically target these firms for attack. Many times, small to mid-sized business owners don't even know they're at the mercy of online attackers.
- What sort of fraud protection and embezzlement protection do I have right now?
If you're like many business owners, you're at the mercy of your bookkeeping staff. You trust your bookkeeper to do the right thing as she handles all your sensitive financial data. But nothing is certain in life or in business, and even if you do all the right things, the opportunity exists for fraud and embezzlement. Then you'll find yourself pressing criminal charges and wondering if you'll ever see restitution.
Secure Financial Information with Virtual Bookkeeping
Now, let's look at the concerns business owners may have regarding outsourcing their accounting and bookkeeping services:
- Is my financial information really secure?
Our bookkeepers work from home in private offices with a three-monitor setup that permits them to do their jobs quickly, efficiently—and securely—including working in a secured environment that prevents local printing or saving documents locally. When you sign on with AccountingDepartment.com, you'll be provided with a high-speed scanner so you can digitize all your financial documents and store them on our secure server. No open file cabinets. No nosy co-workers. And read on to hear about the on-site accounting protections where your data is actually stored.
- What onsite accounting protections are available for my data?
AccountingDepartment.com is its own Application Service Provider (ASP), so we host your bookkeeping software and data files. You own the information and can access it any time, but we protect it for you with top level security, including the same SSL encryption used and accepted by most major e-commerce sites and financial institutions.
The servers that store your data are located in an SAS 70 Type II certified facility, which means stringent, third-party security standards. It's also backed up regularly, in triplicate, to a secure off-site facility. How regularly do you perform back-ups to your office data? And where is it stored?
Save Money with Online Bookkeeping Services
You're probably beginning to understand how we can keep your financial data more secure than you could with an in-house bookkeeping staff. But you might still wonder how we can provide all this value at prices lower than it would cost you to hire, train, and manage an in-house bookkeeping staff.
The answer is simple:
We put our money into our security protocols, our training, and our people. We don't have to pay a lot for office space or other overhead, because our full-time staff of trained bookkeepers all work from home. Because the bookkeepers work for us, you don't have to pay unemployment insurance or benefits— that's tremendous savings right there.
Because bookkeeping is our only business, you get a full-charge, QuickBooks Pro Advisor-certified bookkeeper who can manage your books and provide you with the information and financial reports you need on the schedule that you set together. A financial controller oversees your full-charge bookkeeper to ensure that all your financial accounting is timely and accurate—and it costs less than what you're paying for an in-house bookkeeper right now.
Let's put it all together:
- No more managing bookkeepers.
- Enhanced security for your financial data.
- Less out-of-pocket costs.
To find out exactly how much you can save by outsourcing your accounting and bookkeeping services, contact one of our dedicated representatives for a free consultation.
