Outsourcing Accounts Receivable frees up time for your Accounting Team
By: Chris O’Brien — FinanceFuel Team
In the entire history of business, there has never been an Accounting or Finance Department that’s said the following sentence:
“We’ve got a lot of spare time right now, what should we work on?”
According to the same Robert Half survey mentioned in Wednesday’s post, here’s a full breakdown of how Accounting/Finance departments spend their time:
- Accounts Payable — 17%
- General Accounting — 16%
- Accounts Receivable — 13%
- Financial Reporting — 11%
- Budgets and analysis — 9%
- Payroll — 8%
- Finance — 7%
- Cost Accounting — 5%
- Credit and Collections — 4%
Others tasks like taxes, treasury, internal controls, international accounting, and the elusive “other” all clocked in between 1–3%.
That’s a lot for a 10-person team to handle, let alone 2–3 people, and definitely too much to be on the plate of a small business owner.
So what happens when you outsource one of these individual items?
Let’s start with payroll as an example. When a company turns payroll over to an outside company, the person who was spending an entire day a week on payroll can now shift their time over to General Accounting or Financial Reporting. They can become more strategic in their role because all of the repetitive tasks are out of the way.
The same thing applies to Accounts Receivable. When a company puts FinanceFuel in charge of their A/R & Invoicing, that 13% time block can now be reappropriated to financial analysis, or budgets and identifying areas that are more impactful. With less time spent manually creating invoices, sending invoices out, following up, your team can spend more time on strategic work like spotting trends. For instance, the person in charge of A/R can meet with the sales team and say, “Based on our data, these industries pay us in 15 days, these ones pay us in 45. Maybe we should put more of our sales efforts into this first industry.”
The Accounting and Finance Team will always be an incredibly important and must-have department. They oversee the cash flow, literally the lifeblood of any business. And while FinanceFuel can’t clear off the plate entirely, we can absolutely step in to handle the Accounts Receivable and invoicing.
Imagine what your team can accomplish with an extra 13% back in their day.
Other insights from FinanceFuel
Why do businesses outsource payroll?
Why do businesses outsource employee benefits?
I’d love to hire someone full-time, but…
FinanceFuel accelerates a business’ cash flow by speeding up Accounts Receivables. You can get started on your report card here. We remove the remedial processing and collection tasks so employees can focus on high-value work driving the business forward. You can learn more about FinanceFuel on our website or, if you’re interested in speaking directly with a member of our customer success team, send us a note (sales@financefuel.co) and we’ll get back to you right away. Thanks for reading the blog, we’ll have regular content up on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.
