Precision
Melville, New York · Accounting organized by industry ☎ (631) 349-1661 · [email protected]

Outsourced Accounting Services

Outsourced accounting means handing the finance function to an outside team instead of hiring one. For most businesses between $2M and $50M in revenue, that is the difference between financial statements that arrive in five days and financial statements that arrive in five weeks, if at all.

What you are actually replacing

An in-house finance function is three roles, not one, and most growing businesses only ever hire the first.

  • The bookkeeper records what happened. Bank feeds, bills, invoices, payroll entries, reconciliations.
  • The controller decides whether what was recorded is correct, closes the month, and owns the accuracy of the financial statements.
  • The CFO uses those statements to answer questions about pricing, capacity, cash and risk.

Hiring all three is expensive and, below a certain size, unnecessary. Hiring only a bookkeeper is the common outcome, and it is why so many companies have clean-looking books that nobody senior has ever interrogated. Outsourcing lets you buy the layers you actually need. We break these out as bookkeeping, controller services and CFO advisory, and most clients use some combination of the three.

The part most outsourced accounting firms skip: your industry

Generic outsourced accounting can produce a correct balance sheet and still miss the number that decides whether your business made money.

A contractor’s profitability lives in the work-in-progress schedule, not the profit and loss statement, and it depends on an estimated cost at completion that no bookkeeper is qualified to challenge. A law firm’s trust account has to reconcile three ways every month or the exposure is a disciplinary one, not a financial one. A foreign-owned US entity carries a $25,000 filing penalty that has nothing to do with how much it earned. A commercial landlord’s real risk sits in the CAM reconciliation that a tenant’s attorney will read line by line.

None of that shows up in a standard month-end close. It shows up when someone who has seen the industry before is doing the work. That is the distinction we build around, and it is why our practice is organised by industry rather than by service:

What a typical engagement includes

Scope varies, but the recurring work usually covers transaction processing and coding, bank and credit card reconciliations, accounts payable and receivable, payroll journal entries, sales tax filings where applicable, a real month-end close with supporting schedules, and monthly financial statements with a conversation about what they mean. Industry-specific reporting sits on top: a WIP schedule for contractors, a three-way reconciliation for law firms, a CAM schedule for landlords.

Ongoing monthly accounting and tax planning work better together than apart, because the decisions that reduce a tax bill are usually made during the year, not in March.

What it costs, and how engagements are usually priced

Outsourced accounting is normally priced as a fixed monthly fee based on scope: transaction volume, number of bank and card accounts, payroll complexity, entity count, and whether you need controller or CFO-level involvement. A business that needs clean books and monthly statements sits at one end. A contractor running twenty open jobs who needs a defensible WIP schedule every month sits at the other.

A useful sanity check is whether the fee is less than the fully loaded cost of the equivalent hire, and whether the reporting arrives early enough to act on. If your financials land six weeks after month end, they are a compliance record, not a management tool, and you are paying for the wrong thing either way.

When outsourcing is the wrong answer

It is worth saying plainly. If your transaction volume genuinely requires someone on site every day, if you need same-hour responses to operational questions, or if your business is small enough that a competent bookkeeper and a good tax preparer cover it, outsourcing the whole function is overkill. We would rather tell you that than sell you a monthly retainer you do not need.

Outsourcing tends to make sense when you have outgrown a bookkeeper but cannot justify a controller, when the person doing your books is the same person who cannot answer questions about them, or when a bank, surety or investor has started asking for reporting you cannot produce.

Frequently asked questions

What is included in outsourced accounting services?

Typically transaction processing, reconciliations, accounts payable and receivable, payroll entries, month-end close and monthly financial statements. Higher-tier engagements add controller-level review, cash flow forecasting, budgeting and CFO advisory. Industry-specific reporting is layered on according to what the business actually runs on.

How is outsourced accounting different from bookkeeping?

Bookkeeping records transactions. Outsourced accounting includes bookkeeping but adds the review, close discipline and interpretation that turn a general ledger into financial statements someone can rely on and act upon.

Do you work with businesses outside New York?

Yes. We are based in Melville on Long Island and work with clients across the country. Multi-state issues such as payroll tax registration, prevailing wage rules and sales tax nexus come up regularly and are part of the work.

What software do you work in?

We work in the systems you already use rather than forcing a migration, and we will tell you honestly if the current setup is the thing holding the reporting back.

How quickly can financial statements be delivered after month end?

The goal on a properly structured engagement is a close within the first week or two of the following month. Reporting that arrives later than that stops being useful for decisions and becomes a historical record.

Where to start

Most conversations begin with a look at the last three months of financial statements and a short discussion about what you cannot currently answer. That is usually enough to establish whether the problem is the bookkeeping, the close process, the chart of accounts, or the fact that nobody senior has ever looked at the numbers.

If you are still deciding what an outsourced engagement actually covers, our full services overview lists the individual functions — bookkeeping, monthly close, controller and CFO work, tax planning and preparation — and shows how each is framed for a specific industry.

Talk to an accountant who works in your industry

Precision Accounting & Consulting works with contractors, law firms, medical practices and property owners across the country. Tell us what you are trying to get out of your numbers and we will give you a straight answer about whether we are the right fit.

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