Posted by Cedric Joshua Martinez
Sep 01, 2025
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If your professional services firm belongs to the finance and accounting sector, it may sound implausible to outsource the same services you offer to your target market.
After all, we’re talking about your core services; your firm’s bread and butter. Your clients know you to be THE expert in this area, so why let some external vendor take part in the process?
But the more you chase growth, the more you’ll realize how challenging it becomes to maintain your firm’s operational capacity. To boot, the challenges facing the finance and accounting sector doesn’t seem to disappear any time soon. Hiring accounting talents remain a major concern, new competitors keep appearing, more powerful tools are being released, and regulations continue to flex with all the changes happening around.
When you outsource, and you do this process right, it’ll be easier for your firm to scale.
Your outsourced accountants can be the extension of your practice. While your in-house team focuses on client-facing activities, your outsourced team can work at the back end and take care of areas you can no longer handle. As a result, your firm can remain operational, and your in-house accountants will have more manageable loads.
Where should you get started, then?
Below is a list of services you can outsource based on the classification of your professional services firm.
Read Next: Outsourcing Offshore Accounting to the Philippines: A Guide
Finance and accounting outsourcing services for your professional services firm
Professional services firms from the finance and accounting industry can be too diverse. Some firms offer general accounting and bookkeeping services while others have more specialized offers. It becomes more varied if we factor in the location and industry of their target market.
From this, we can deduce that each firm faces unique challenges and follows different rules and thus requires specific outsourcing solutions to fit their needs.
To give you a clearer idea of the finance and accounting solutions your firm can outsource, we grouped the firms into four categories:
2. Audit firms
Note that based on the common setup here at D&V Philippines, most professional services firms prefer to outsource back-office accounting solutions. Under this arrangement, accountants handle the grunt work behind the scenes. There are some cases where our clients entrust their outsourced team to do front office duties. In such cases, the outsourced accountant represents the client, not D&V Philippines, to preserve their market’s trust and secure business continuity.
1. Accounting firms
Accounting firms outsource back-office support for two main reasons. One, they cannot find qualified accounting professionals locally. Two, the cost of recruitment and managing an onshore, in-house employee is becoming more expensive and is causing dents to their profit margins.
Among the common services they outsource include:
a. Bookkeeping
Bookkeeping is one of the basic tasks in the accounting team. This includes maintaining the books, looking after the cash flow, compiling invoices, and generating basic financial reports.
As a continuous and repetitive activity, bookkeeping can consume much of your team’s time. With the use of cloud-based accounting software and automation tools, outsourcing your bookkeeping functions is much easier to do now.
Outsourced tasks under the bookkeeping functions may include:
- Setup and data entry
- Bank and credit card reconciliation
- Accounts receivable
- Accounts payable
- Invoicing and monitoring
- Monthly closing of books and activity statements
- Periodic management reports
- And other ad-hoc jobs.
b. Payroll processing
Just like bookkeeping, payroll is a repetitive and time-consuming activity that can take much of the resources of your accounting team.
Accounting software providers have integrated payroll processing functions in their software. This software can now process your payroll after placing the right information. However, you might be taking too much of your people’s time by assigning them to prepare payroll information.
Fortunately, there are specialized outsourcing firms that offer payroll services to help you prepare and input the needed payroll information and augment your operations.
c. Management accounting
This service focuses on creating internal financial reports and analyses to support business decision-making.
Outsourced professionals can prepare management reports, budget analysis, variance reporting, and cost accounting to help your clients understand their financial performance and make informed strategic decisions.
d. Compliance and tax preparation
Compliance preparation is hard work. To do this, accountants need to track transactions, review statements, stay updated with changes in compliance requirements to avoid penalties, and double check the accuracy of financial documents.
Outsourcing compliance preparation services can save your in-house accountant's time. All they need to do is to file the returns, then get back to their higher priority projects.
Your outsourced team can cover the prep work, such as sorting out the requirements, preparing documents for compliance, and assisting in lodging the payments and requirements.
e. Business analytics
Outsourcing business analytics services work best if your firm lacks either the expertise or tools required to transform financial data into actionable business insights.
Outsourced analysts can help you prepare financial dashboards, trend analysis, and performance metrics through:
- Cash flow management
- Revenue and cost analysis
- Budgeting and forecasting
- Balance sheet and income variance analysis
You can then use these to give your clients meaningful information on their business performance and identify opportunities for improvement.
2. Audit firms
Audit firms can make use of outsourcing either to handle intense seasonal demands or as a long-term back-office support.
Due to audit’s extensive process, it’s common for outsourced audit professionals to be involved in the entire audit lifecycle: Planning, Execution, and Conclusion.
Here’s what an end-to-end audit support solutions typically cover:
a. Planning
The planning phase involves risk assessment, materiality calculations, and audit strategy development.
Outsourced professionals can assist with preliminary analytical procedures, control testing design, and audit program preparation to help your team develop comprehensive and effective audit approaches.
b. Execution
In terms of execution, a phase where the bulk of audit fieldwork happens, outsourced auditors can assist in performing primary substantive procedures, test of controls, journal entry testing (including balances), review of board minutes, detailed testing, and more. They work closely under your supervision to complete audit procedures efficiently and accurately.
c. Conclusion
This final phase involves evaluation of audit findings, report preparation, and quality review processes. At this stage, your outsourced audit professionals can assist with final analytical procedures, review of financial statements, preparation of audit closing meeting materials, preparation of management letter comments, and accomplishment of disclosure checklist and routing slip.
3. Part-time CFO firms
Like accounting firms, part-time CFO firms outsource finance and accounting services so they could spend more time delivering high-value strategies services to clients instead of getting buried in never-ending back-end tasks.
To do so, they outsource services like:
a. Bookkeeping and management accounting
The time-consuming nature of these services makes them the easiest functions to outsource. Although they’re not part of a part-time CFO’s core task, clean books, accurate figures, and well-written management reports are still critical for delivering quality CFO services.
b. Financial forecasting and modelling
These strategic services support business planning and decision-making processes.
Outsourced financial analysts can provide real-time support in developing cash flow projections, scenario analysis, forecasts, budgets, and three-way financial models that enable your CFO services to provide valuable strategic insights to client businesses.
c. Business performance reporting
Through this service, outsourced professionals can help part-time CFO firms maximize their client’s data, analyze, their operations, and give professional recommendations on how they can use data for service improvements.
4. Wealth management firms
Wealth management firms outsource back-office support for three key reasons:
- They must follow strict investment regulations.
- Wealth management firms need specialized knowledge to handle complex financial products.
- They require flexible operations that can grow with their business while they focus on serving clients.
Some of the services they outsource to help maintain their day-to-day operations include, but are not limited to:
a. Fund accounting
This specialized type of outsourced accounting service focuses on the effective and proper allocation of funds.
It covers several accounting tasks, such as bookkeeping, financial statement preparation, Net Asset Value (NAV) calculations, and the maintenance of full accounting and portfolio records, to name a few.
b. Investor services
Outsourced accounting-related investor services involves:
- Investor onboarding
- Monitoring an investor’s interests in the fund
- Investor reporting
- Subscription and redemption processing
- Investor inquiry management
c. Financial reporting
Outsourcing financial reporting service allows wealth management firms to prepare timely fund financial statements, regulatory filings, and investor reports to key stakeholders. This ability to provide financial information whenever needed is necessary to ensure compliance, be it with complex reporting requirements or deadlines.
d. Verification services
This quality control service ensures accuracy and compliance across all fund operations.
Outsourced verification specialists can perform independent price verification, trade confirmation, third-party review of a manager’s Investor Capital Managed (ICM) and historical track record, and reconciliation procedures.
e. Tax support
Wealth management firms can also outsource tax support services to guarantee tax compliance, especially in terms of funds and assets.
f. Onboarding services
For wealth management firms that are experiencing an increased demand for their services, it can be smart to outsource onboarding services.
An outsourced back-office team can assist in verifying a client’s information and establishing financial processes. They can also help with:
- Cleaning up a client’s import files
- Sending queries to verify client information
- Assisting with the setup of funds on the client’s database
- Analyzing a new client’s cash activity before the first accounting cycle
Outsourcing finance and accounting functions should be done in no rush. You can start off with basic tasks and aim first to get your time back from doing time-consuming work. Doing so will give you time to be more familiar with your new work process with your outsourcing partner. Once you’re comfortable with them, you can move up and work with your outsourcing team on more complex and meaningful activities.
How can your firm benefit from outsourced accounting services
Professional services firms, regardless of classification, can benefit from outsourcing through:
- Getting an extra capacity without the headcount constraints
- Improving the firm’s overall productivity and service delivery quality
- Saving huge amounts on recruitment and employee management
- Finding qualified accounting professionals who are hard to find locally
- Providing access to trained professionals, established processes, and technology infrastructure
The combination of cost savings, access to specialized expertise, operational flexibility, and risk mitigation makes outsourcing an essential component of modern practice management.
When done the right way, outsourcing can be a strategic tool to sustaining your firm’s growth while increasing your competitive advantage.
The first step to doing it right?
It’s to find and select a suitable outsourcing provider. And when we say suitable, it is not just about finding a provider that fits your price point. Instead, you should dig into their reputation, track record, service quality, culture, and several other areas. It's only by doing so that you can ensure cultural alignment, which is a key factor in making the most of your engagement and achieving outsourcing success.
Ready to extend the capacity of your practice?
D&V Philippines specializes in providing finance and accounting solutions specifically designed for professional services firms like yours.
We function as an extension of your practice. Throughout our engagement, we constantly find ways to seamlessly integrate with your team.
Our comprehensive solutions for professional services firms include bookkeeping, audit support, tax services, fund accounting, and strategic financial analysis. All of these services are delivered by our qualified professionals who understand the unique demands of professional services environments.
Get a free consultation with our experts today to check if we’re a suitable outsourcing partner for your firm.
Not yet ready for a call? Download our guide, Outsourcing: How to Make it Work, to get more information on how you can succeed with outsourcing.
This article was first published on 24 May 2018 and has been updated since then for relevancy and comprehensiveness.
Last edited and updated on: 18 August 2025
Updated by: Mary Milorrie Campos
