The Unstoppable Accountant - Grow your Accounting Firm

Unlocking the Benefits and Process of Setting Up your own dedicated Accounts Offshore Center

• Arun Mehra • Season 1 • Episode 2

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Ever thought of offshoring your business operations but don’t know the benefits or where to start? Well, you're in for a treat! Our guest, Gagan, joins us to share our own journey of setting up a successful offshore center in India. We'll walk you through the steps we took, the training and development strategies we implemented, and how this move has not only reduced costs but also improved the quality of our work. We'll also address the hesitancy often experienced by accountants when considering outsourcing and the importance of client communication about your global team.

Get ready to learn how technology has played a crucial role in maintaining data compliance and control, even from afar. Gagan will discuss the concept of creating a global workforce, and how this has enabled us to quickly and efficiently scale our business. We'll also touch on the first step towards starting an offshore center, the often most intimidating part, and provide you with some valuable insights from our own experiences. By the end of our conversation, you'll have a better understanding of how an offshore center can be beneficial to your business and how to kick start the process. So grab a cup of coffee and join us in this informative session about the perks of offshoring.

Speaker 1:

Hello and welcome back to the Samara Global Podcast. Now, today we're going to be talking about the off-shoring side of things, where we've had some success, more real success, in setting up our own offshore centre in India. And today I've also been joined by my colleague, guggen, who manages the operation here in the UK and managing the team in India as well. So, hi, guggen, how are you doing today? I am, yes, very well, thank you Good. How are you doing? Yeah, I'm good, I'm good, thanks.

Speaker 1:

So right, so we've done things a bit differently, haven't we here at Samara we always do okay, and certainly this time around we've done it differently. So just to give a bit of a background to people, with Samara, our firm of accountants here in the UK, chartered accountants we've been running it for almost 20 years and over those 20 years we've been off-shoring and outsourcing to third party providers in India, okay, to do accounts, tax returns, payroll, all of these types of things. And in recent years we kind of start seeing the problems the quality drop, the costs rise and we thought you know what, we know enough to do this ourselves. So about this time last year we took the decision you know what we're going to do. It okay and myself and Guggen put our heads together and we kind of jumped in with two feet and pretty much 12 months on we have a fully fledged offshore operation. Okay for our firm supporting our clients here in the UK. And Guggen, how's it going?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it's a huge success actually. Obviously, we anticipated a lot of the challenges we might face because of the experience we've had with other providers. We already had systems and processes designed and mapped out how we wanted the team to function, but all in all, it's gone really, really well. In fact, all our work is predominantly sort of processing work is all being done in India at the moment and with our training and development program we've seen a big rise in the quality and the confidence that the team possesses now compared to sort of when they joined Samira sort of some time ago. So, yeah, I think overall it's been hugely successful for us as a model and we continue to grow every day. We are constantly hiring more team members, we're upskilling existing team members and it's gone really well, so I'm very pleased about it.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, me too, definitely. So, as someone who, when we talked about it last year, we walked away, I think, from a countess thinking, should we do it or not? And we decided, you know what we're going to do it and we jumped in with two feet and we did it. So if we look at the real kind of core successes, or maybe the top three things we've succeeded in doing in the last year with the new Guggen, with this, what would you say there would be?

Speaker 2:

So I think one of the key things that's really happened is that it's helped us control our cost and also at the same time we've managed to sort of find a solution to the resource problem we were actually having in the UK to find sort of the right skill set to service certain segments of the business. That was becoming increasingly difficult to find in the UK and it was sort of obviously quite expensive having that set up in UK. So I think that those are one of the key benefits that's happened is that we've helped us control our cost and also to find the right sort of resource.

Speaker 1:

The second thing that's… Can I just add it?

Speaker 1:

Actually, gogan, I think just to highlight to everybody else and I've heard this from other people is that we use recruitment consultants here in the UK hired people. It was like a revolving door. The quality of people that we were getting through recruiters here in the UK was, firstly, not great, secondly, very expensive, plus the recruitment fee on it, and that was kind of the impetus to say you know what, we've got to do something different. And so if anyone's going through that situation similar to that, that was the big driver for us to say you know, I've had enough of this, I can't keep paying recruiter fees of I don't know five figures to people and then realised six months down the line they're doing a terrible job or they're leaving or whatever. It was just very, very costly. So we had to do something different and that was a real pain point for me as the kind of principle of the firm. So that was kind of, as Gogan highlighted, it's really, really alleviated that issue of finding good people and who can support our business here in the UK.

Speaker 2:

Yes, especially as we were growing, it made it more and more difficult to sort of find the right people and to sort of retain them really, or to retain the sort of quality of the work. So I guess that's really the sort of. The second success that we've had is that through training and development, the quality of the work has increasingly got better and improved. And you know we see that in the client. So we're very, very happy. We constantly get emails from the clients to tell us thank you so much for telling us around quickly, thank you so much for doing this efficiently. You know, with the speed of response and the quality of the work has really sort of shot through the roof, which is really great to hear when you get an email from a client who appreciates what they've received.

Speaker 1:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

I agree, I think if.

Speaker 1:

I look at it, I think from many accountants including myself, even though I've got Indian connections it always people have this hesitancy or should I be outsourcing and should I be sending it overseas?

Speaker 1:

And what will I tell my clients here in the UK? And when we and when we used to use a third party, we sold some clients but not all clients. But now it's very, very clear to all clients who are coming on board new clients coming board we're saying we have our team in India and this is what they do. You'll be liaising with some of these team members in India and with some of our team members here in the UK, but that's a key part of it really, and if you don't like that, well, you're probably not the right type of client for our firm as well, because we see the team members in India as 100% part of the wholesome era of business, and so it's important that, whether it's someone sitting in India or someone sitting in the UK, where we're doing the right thing and developing our team and helping them all achieve their goals not just the people here in the UK, but the team in India as well.

Speaker 2:

Absolutely, absolutely. And I guess hybrid working or remote working has been sort of on the rise since COVID and outsourcing has existed for 10 or years and it may have not existed on the face of it, but it was always there behind the scenes and it wasn't sort of very well known. But obviously it's more apparent now than it was before.

Speaker 1:

So I think yeah, no, I agree, I agree, sorry, carry on.

Speaker 2:

So I think the third thing that's really come out of this whole exercise it's really helped us scale.

Speaker 2:

So, as and when we get new clients on boarded at the speed of which we need to onboard them, service their needs.

Speaker 2:

If we need more resource, we've been very fortunate to have a pipeline of really good candidates that we've screened and we've been able to sort of bring them on board and service our client needs at the pace we would not have been able to do so in the UK, which is one of the main reasons we really sort of had some struggles prior to setting up our outsourcing function, a lot of which is now a distant memory, and that's a really positive step for us. So, as a growing firm, having something like that to fall back on and, on demand, to be able to increase the capacity in the team as we get new clients, is absolutely imperative, because we can't have the quality of the work suffering or the speed at which we deliver the work suffering in any way, and the clients obviously appreciate that. So it's for us, the quality is always on top of the agenda and that's helps us deliver the quality at the speed that we wish to deliver. So that's one of the really positive steps that come out of setting up our own outsourcing function.

Speaker 1:

Absolutely, and I think it's what is highlighted to me. The world is a really, really small place and we're all shrunk with technology. We can all communicate. Our team in India work UK hours and we've stipulated that from day one so they all got secure access to our server based here in the UK. So it's all kind of compliant. They're all on teams so we can do video calls when we need to with them and so, whether they're sitting in Delhi or Chandigarh or wherever it could be the equivalent of a team member sitting in Bristol or Bath or Leeds they're working side by side, albeit virtually sitting on our machine.

Speaker 1:

But increasingly what we're trying to do is also get the team members to meet our team here in the UK. So I've been lucky enough to go recently. Gug and I know is going soon to India to meet with them and my colleague another colleague Natasha is going soon. So it's an exciting time and it's highlighting that we can create and build a global workforce in this marketplace to support clients here in the UK. And I think that's the real message here is that we don't just need to look insular with it in our four walls or in our little world.

Speaker 1:

If we can't find people. You can set up an operation elsewhere, whether it's and we've chosen India and because we know India very well, particularly my idea, and I know Gaggen does as well. But I know other people have set up operations in places like South Africa or in the Philippines, and I don't think the problem of staff or not finding good stuff in the UK is gonna go away. This problem is gonna rise. It's not gonna fall away. Our aging population is a massive issue here in the UK and less and less people are qualifying as accountants or joining accountants you've found here in the UK. So what is the alternative? Yes, I hear you're gonna say AI might help and that might help to some extent, but we still need good people. We still need good accountants and places in Asia certainly have a dearth of them if you kind of look for them and hunt them out and managed it to seek them out.

Speaker 2:

So yeah, it's been a. I was actually amazed.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2:

So to follow up on that, I was actually amazed at the quality and the skill set and that's available in India, especially for accountants as outsourcing, because there's quite a vast variety of skill set, because I think the outsourcing function doesn't only serve UK, but US, canada, australia, various other countries around the world, and so as a result and this has been going on for almost a decade now so there's a massive skill set in the UK sorry in India for the accountancy function.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I agree, and I think what's happened, though, gogan, interestingly, I know, when we started off outsourcing to a third party almost 20 years ago, the skill set wasn't there, the quality wasn't as good and there weren't that many accountants.

Speaker 1:

What's obviously happened in the last 20 years is, if you think about it, 70% of the population of India is now under 30, which is huge. 70% of the population is under 30, of a population of about 1.5 billion people. Now, therefore, a lot of people have gone into training or learn and educate themselves as accountants because they see there's a job opportunity and then they can develop their careers. And that's what we've seen, probably in the last five to 10 years so many young guys training to become accountants or qualifying or doing the basic Bcom, then maybe doing ACCA or the equivalent. And it's these institutes like the ACCA which are increasingly supporting client or accountants in India to get the qualification, so then they can become a global accountant. Maybe they may well be sitting in India, but their qualification counts here in the UK or in the US or wherever it may be. So the quality is improving and I think it's improving every day, every year now, which is only a good thing for the industry.

Speaker 2:

And it's actually great from a technology point of view the amount of control you have over data to comply with GDPR rules, compared to maybe five or 10 years ago. We have our own secure servers, we control the environment they operate in. The data never leaves the UK. It's amazing the amount of control you can have with the right IT setup for the sort of sensitive information which obviously, to my knowledge, didn't exist maybe 10 years ago.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, you're right, and I think I remember the days when I had to, I had a permanent person in my team who would scan documents on a scanner and then that would go to an FTP server sitting here in India and then and there was no OCR or things like Dex or HubDoc or anything like that and then some man in India would then try and plug it into a file and then onto a QuickBooks file on our server and then we'd try and replicate and send the QuickBooks file back to the UK and it was just like so laborious and it was so costly and time consuming to do.

Speaker 1:

But now the technology is so developed and so quick and I can see things with AI will probably enhance it even quicker and better now. So it's been a really exciting journey over the last 12 months and I think we've learned a lot. There've been some challenges as well. That's the pardon parcel of it. Dealing with India certainly has its challenges, but everything is surmountable and achievable. But on those challenges, guggen, then what would you say are a couple of the challenges that we've faced and how did we address them?

Speaker 2:

So I guess some of the key challenges we faced first and foremost was maybe around sort of the finding the white people for our organization. So, although there's, you know, lots and lots of people out there were looking sort of for the right opportunity to grow and develop, they may not have the necessary skill set. In some case you may have the right skill set and those who don't have the right skill set, they might have the right attitude and they may be the right sort of person or they might have the right cultural awareness to be the right person in your organization, in which case you might want to sort of upscale them and develop them into the role that you want them to grow in. So it's worked out quite well for us. You know, we found a lot of people who had the right sort of foundation and those that didn't have the right sort of skill set and the roles that we wanted them to be in. We discussed the role with them. We explained to them that this is what we were looking to achieve after this role is that something of interest to them? And then we designed a specific training and development program for them and that was one of the best investments we made in our team and we continue to do so pretty much all the time, really Every time every year we have a review of these training and development programs.

Speaker 2:

So we had a few people join, for example, as bookkeepers. They're going to learn accounts finalization. So we introduced them to accounts finalization. They've gone on to become managers in accounts finalization in short space of time. We had some people who never had done tax returns. They're now completing tax returns, all it being reviewed and finalized by senior members of the team, either in India or in the UK. But all of the individuals who came in who didn't have the skill set, they've now acquired these skills. But finding the right person with the right attitude and the skill set initially did take a little bit of time, a filtering process, and that also meant that we reviewed our recruitment policies and procedures and, as we you know, tailored and adapted to the market. We realized what is the best strategy when you're actually doing the recruitment, how you should go about it, what to look for in a skill set. So that took a little bit of learning on our part.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, no, we did that. Yeah, and we're still learning. To be honest with you. We don't have all the answers, but I think what we've done is built a great network in India as well to support what we're trying to do. What about things like communication? What's the communication skills? What do you think with the people in India, with the team in India, what's that like?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, as you know, in English is very widely spoken in India, across all states. So in terms of basic communication skills, a lot of the professionals have good communication skills, but there will always be a gap between communication being done on a professional level in India and in UK, not necessarily at sort of a senior level, but maybe when you're sort of coming in at a mid, senior or a junior level, you'll have that gap in communication. But I guess we would start using training through emails, having actual training courses specifically towards communication, doing team building exercises, doing role plays, and we've seen a big difference in how somebody approaches and constructs a sentence now than what they were doing maybe sort of when they joined, and also how we then go back and forth in terms of communication, in terms of when we write an email, how they read it and how they write an email and how we read it. That's much more aligned now in terms of understanding rather than what it was maybe sort of nine months ago or a year ago.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, okay no, no, it's good to hear and when I speak to everyone, I think the communication is actually pretty good. I think it's confidence. I think usually the issue is the issue, as opposed to communication, that they may not be speaking English so often. So now for now, they're speaking English on a day to day basis and they have that and they know it and they've learned it and they can speak it, but they lack the confidence. So it's our job here in the UK team is to help them build their confidence to feel comfortable speaking English day to day, writing English day to day, which is all very doable and we've seen a marked difference over the last few months as people gain confidence and when people feel confident, they feel good about themselves, they do a better job and ultimately, we get a better result in the business as well. So that's been really really good. It's been a great kind of 12 months. In summary, Really really yeah.

Speaker 2:

You know, quite a few people come back and actually thank us for the time we spent in their sort of development, especially when it comes to communication or team building exercises we've done. I've often had very good feedback. People coming back and I want to one conversation say that this exercise was really fruitful and as a result of it they feel more happier, they feel like they can achieve more and, yeah, it's obviously resulted in better quality of the work for them and they're more open to sharing that knowledge with everybody else. So it's actually it's sort of spreading. That sort of confidence doesn't sort of stay with one person in the team because they then spread it across with everybody else, so it multiplies the effect as it sort of wedges into the rest of the team.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so, in summary, I think it's been a great 12 months. I think there's still a long way to go, but the hardest step is taking that first step in doing it. And we did it and we've done it successfully. We're still there to tell the tale and it's only, as Guggen mentioned earlier, it's given us a real opportunity to scale, to scale quickly. Any last comments from your side, guggen, on this podcast today.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, if anybody is thinking about this entire outsourcing structure and or concerned about resourcing UK with the right skillset, or even the cost of it all, I think it sort of appears very daunting at step one to think how is this gonna work? I've got these questions, how is this gonna work? And it's useful to then have a conversation. I welcome them to sort of reach out to somebody who has done it and sort of clear their thoughts and take the first step. We're really definitely encouraged to take the first steps. The sooner you do it, the sooner you will find that step one was the hardest step and step two comes in naturally once you've taken step one and then, before you know it, you're well into your journey and you make the success out of it. But yeah, definitely the hardest thing is to take one step one. So I encourage anybody who's listening and wants to get into this to take step one.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, agreed, agreed, I think. So, just to end today, I think, if anyone is looking to set up their own offshore center or not sure what to do or how to do it, just give me a shout. All my details are on this podcast. Or come to samarraglobalcom and you'll find all the details there. Okay, well, thank you, guggen. Today Brilliant to chat to you and we look forward. No worries, and we look forward to the next podcast, sharing our knowledge and experience. Thank you, thank you, bye.