How CPA Firms Are Reinventing Outsourced Accounting Services

Traditional outsourcing worked well for accountants when accounting was viewed primarily as a back-office function. At that time, client expectations were limited, reporting cycles were predictable, and skilled offshore accountants were readily available.

This enabled CPA firms to delegate compliance or bookkeeping tasks to offshore teams and wait for the work to be completed.

Today, clients demand real-time insights, faster turnarounds, and a more collaborative experience. This has exposed the limitations of that traditional outsourcing model.

In this article, we examine how smart CPA firms are turning outsourced accounting services into a major growth driver.

Introduction: A New Era for Outsourced Accounting Services

Traditional outsourcing resulted in inconsistent quality because:

• Growing Security Concerns: As technology advances, so are the chances of financial data falling into the wrong hands.

Accounting and CPA firms now emphasize strict data security practices and compliance with global standards, like ISO 27001, SOC 2, and GDPR. Accounting teams struggle to share financial data with external professionals.

• Limited integration: Under the old system, accounting firms couldn’t tell exactly who handled their tasks. They’d hand it off to the outsourcing company, and the work will be done by whichever employee is available.

This prevented real-time collaboration and review, and delayed the review and correction process.

• Client Demands: Modern accounting clients expect real-time insights that routine compliance services can not provide.

Combined with the shortage of qualified accounting talent, CPA firms have adjusted their recruitment strategies to prioritize flexible, scalable, and customizable outsourcing relationships. This will give them the control and transparency to maintain service quality.

What Is the Accounting Seat Model?

The Accounting Seat model is a subscription-based outsourcing model that provides CPA firms with dedicated accounting experts.

Each seat represents an accountant who is assigned to provide a particular service to the firm’s clients. This allows CPA firms to subscribe to as many seats as they need.

• One subscription, three layers of expertise

Each Accounting Seat subscription is managed at three levels:

1. A Dedicated Account Manager: This accountant handles your daily accounting tasks as an extension of your team.
2. An Engagement Manager: Ensures the engagement meets all targets by overseeing the onboarding process, engagement performance, and ongoing service delivery.
3. Senior Accounting Advisor: Steps in when necessary to guide on complex matters.

• Seamless plug-and-play integration

The Accounting Seat is designed to produce immediate value. The providers are accounting graduates who have a wealth of experience using accounting technology to deliver client services in compliance with international reporting standards (IFRS/GAAP).

Why the Accounting Seat Outperforms Service and People Models

Traditional outsourcing uses the people and service paths. In the people path, you’re getting offshore accountants who handle specific client deliverables. Pricing is task-based, so increased workload multiplies costs. In essence, you’re buying the services (bookkeeping, payroll, tax prep, etc.). More services increase costs.

In the people model, CPA firms hire offshore accountants who work for them. The CPa firm has to train and onboard the accountant, and getting them to become productive can take weeks, if not months. Introduces hiring challenges and administrative overhead, such as background checks and payroll compliance.

With the Accounting Seat Model, CPA firms get Plug-and-Play Accounting Solutions who are already trained in accounting, international reporting standards (GAAP/IFRS), and know the tools you use. All you need to do is walk them through your SOPs and client preferences, and they can start handling client projects immediately.

In the Accounting Seat, your offshore team works directly in your tech stack using your processes. This gives you total control over work quality. The Accounting Seat is a flexible engagement model, which means you can scale your outsourced team up or down as needed.

The 3-Tier Accounting Seat Structure Explained

This structure transforms outsourcing from a transactional engagement into a partnership, where CPA firms benefit from multiple layers of quality assurance.

It combines daily execution, managerial control, and senior-level guidance within one subscription. This includes:

• Dedicated Account Manager (Your day-to-day expert)

This is the primary resource assigned to your team. They handle your day-to-day accounting tasks, working in your tools and collaborating with your team as an extension of your team.

Their focus is on meeting deadlines and ensuring that your clients receive timely and accurate deliverables.

• Engagement Manager (Oversight and delivery success)

The engagement manager oversees the account manager. They provide structure and accountability to ensure smooth onboarding and overall success of the engagement.

Senior Accounting Advisor (Expert guidance when it matters)

The Senior Accounting Advisor is a CPA-level accounting specialist who provides high-level expertise and strategic leadership for every engagement. They step in when the engagement requires complex technical guidance.

Key Advantages of the Finsmart Model

• Instant deployment of trained, certified professionals

Finsmart hires accounting graduates who understand international accounting standards (IFRS/GAAP), accounting technology, and the expectations of CPA firms.

Finsmart also pairs new employees with U.S firms through its Accounting Training Program to gain real-world experience in the U.S. accounting system.

By the time they are assigned, they are ready to start getting work done immediately. This eliminates workflow lag and prevents delays in client deliverables.

• No onboarding delays or hiring headaches

The traditional outsourcing model requires spending months to source candidates, perform background checks, and evaluate their technical skills.

Finsmart handles all of these for CPA firms, providing them with pre-vetted and pretrained staff.

Once you confirm their expertise and cultural fit, you can deploy them immediately. That is why the Finamart onboarding process takes CPA firms one week or less to start assigning tasks and tracking performance.

This operational immediacy enables CPA firms to absorb new clients and projects without interrupting ongoing operations.

• Fully managed by your team and using your systems

The Accounting Seat model integrates your outsourced team into your existing tech stack and operating environment.

Your offshore professionals will work with your timeline using your SOPs, allowing you to assign tasks and track their performance like your in-house team members.

This operational control gives you full visibility into their work and enables them to learn your best practices and clients’ preferences, which translates to consistent service quality.

• Easy resource replacement with no downtime

Changing your assigned resources is quick and easy with Finsmart’s Accounting Seat.

To make this easier, the Finsmart team documents your first onboarding process to save you the trouble of training the next staff you’ll request as a replacement for the first or simply as an addition. Replacing your outsourced team does not attract additional fees.

This enables replacements to step in instantly, ensuring that no client deliverable, tax deadline, or reconciliation cycle is ever delayed.

• English-speaking, tech-savvy, QBO and Xero-certified staff

Headquartered in India, the second-largest English-speaking country in the world, Finsmart hires accountants who are already comfortable communicating in English.

They ensure that their staff are certified in leading software like QBO, Xero, and NetSuite. They are also proficient in the tools accountants work with, such as accounting practice management, email, and instant messaging apps.

This eliminates communication gaps and enhances collaboration in relevant cloud-based tools.

How Accounting Seat Bridges the Outsourcing Gap

• Challenges with service-based outsourcing models

While the service-based outsourcing model enabled CPA firms to pay vendors for specific deliverables, such as monthly bookkeeping, payroll processing, or tax preparation, costs accumulate quite quickly when firms need more services.

This model treated outsourcing more as a transactional relationship than a collaborative partnership. CPA firm owners had limited control over the workflow, resulting in inconsistent work quality.

The scope was also rigid. CPA firms couldn’t customize their services to suit their changing needs. This meant that scaling to meet urgent workload needs during busy seasons required separate contracts and additional financial and administrative costs.

• Limitations of people-based models (FTE hiring)

The people-based model, or the Full-Time Equivalent (FTE) hiring, enabled CPA firms to hire to meet their capacity needs.

While this model offers more control over the outsourced team, the recruitment, training, and onboarding process was slow and expensive.

Sourcing for qualified accountants places more administrative burden on CPA firm owners who have to perform background checks and other managerial tasks that increase non-billable work.

Adding more full-time resources to handle the increased workload is also slow and expensive, often resulting in workflow disruption and missed deadlines.

• Accounting Seat as the hybrid, high-efficiency solution

The Accounting Seat Model bridges these gaps by combining the flexibility of outsourcing with the control and expertise of in-house teams.

With this model, CPA firms have access to a large pool of accounting talent who are already trained for immediate deployment, which enables them to handle sharp increases in workload and ensure business continuity.

Its flat-rate, subscription-based pricing eliminates hidden fees and gives firms the predictability to plan their budgets confidently.

Integrating offshore teams into the CPA firm gives firm owners and managers visibility into who’s doing the work and where the project stands. This transparency enables them to manage capacity more effectively, allowing them to make more time for advisory services.

When to Use Finsmart’s Outsourced Accounting Services

Finsmart’s outsourced accounting services are beneficial everywhere CPA firms need to maintain accuracy, efficiency, and scalability.

Here are three scenarios:

• When scaling operations without increasing overhead

Finsmart’s Accounting Seat model allows you to pay for just the services you need, in addition to exclusive access to accounting experts and complete control over the workflows.

Every Accounting Seat is based on subscription, so you won’t have to worry about hidden fees like recruitment and training costs.

Since your assigned team will work in your workflow systems, they will progressively understand your SOPS, best practices, and what your clients need, which will improve the consistency of your service quality.

• During staff transitions or resource shortages

When your staff leaves for any reason and you’re not able to replace them quickly enough, your workflows get disrupted, deadlines are missed, and team members take on more work than they can consistently deliver.

Finsmart’s outsourced services help CPA firms to manage such situations by providing pre-trained accountants who only need to learn your best practices to hit the ground running.

This helps CPA firms to keep operations running smoothly, preventing backlogs and missed revenue opportunities.

• For month-end close, cleanups, or tech implementation

Firm owners like Susan Cook have had to rely on Finsmart to complete three (3) years’ worth of data cleanup in QuickBooks.

Finsmart assigned dedicated experts to work with to ensure the project was done according to the firm’s standards. Finsmart’s strategy ensured accuracy, transparency, and efficiency throughout the project.

“The Finsmart team was excellent at communicating and ensuring the work was done thoroughly. They provided spreadsheets, followed up diligently, and worked efficiently. If you have a financial project that needs attention, try it. You’ll find they are accommodating and reliable. You can feel confident that you’re in good hands.”

Susan Cook, President, Account Ability Consulting

The Finsmart team also uses its expertise in advanced accounting technology (like QuickBooks, Xero, NetSuite, SAP, Sage, Zoho, etc.) to provide software implementation and workflow optimization that helps CPA firms standardize their systems and ensure quality and consistency across the board.

Why CPA Firms Trust Finsmart with Outsourced Accounting

At Finsmart, we understand that trust is critical in outsourced accounting services. That is why we have structured our services to ensure maximum visibility, consistency, and accountability across engagements.

• Pre-vetted, pre-trained, and platform-certified professionals

Finsmart’s workforce is pre-vetted against international accounting standards, such as GAAP, IFRS, and IRS guidelines.

We ensure adequate training in hard and soft skills, including accounting software, to ensure outsourced professionals understand not only the nuances of accounting standards but also how to automate tasks and collaborate with CPA firms using technology.

Our rigorous training and evaluation process ensures that every accounting resource we assign to clients is capable of working in the firm’s systems with minimal supervision.

• Transparent model with no hidden costs

Each Accounting Seat subscription has a fixed fee and covers staffing, training, and supervision fees.

For example, the Bookkeeping Seat costs $2,600 a month per seat.

There are no hidden fees, which not only keeps costs low, but also enables you to plan your budget predictably and strategically.

• Total flexibility with enterprise-level service delivery

The Accounting Seat model provides the flexibility to adjust to changing client workloads.

We don’t require long-term contracts, so you can end engagements as soon as you no longer need them.

Whether you need help with small business clients or enterprise businesses seeking complex accounting processes like multi-entity consolidations, Finsmart has the expertise to customize your outsourced team to meet your capacity needs.

Combined with the discipline and performance structure that befits enterprise-level businesses, Finamart ensures timely turnaround, multi-layer supervision, and strict data security controls to enable long-term partnerships.

This has been responsible for our average client retention rate of nine (9) years.

Successful CPA Firms are Skipping the Old Models to Build Future-Ready Accounting Teams

The ever-changing nature of the accounting profession renders strategies and systems ineffective quite quickly, requiring accounting and CPA firms to constantly reinvent themselves to stay competitive.

There was a time when offloading tasks to outsourced service providers and waiting to receive the completed versions was sufficient for CPAs to keep clients satisfied.

This traditional approach to outsourcing can no longer cut it. It denies CPA firms the control, flexibility, and scalability they need to stay agile and meet evolving client expectations.

That is why Finsmart developed the Accounting Seat Model to address the limitations of the traditional people and services models by CPA firms to scale their services efficiently and confidently through:

• Trained and platform-certified accounting experts.
• Built-in accountability and quality assurance.
• Subscription-based pricing that ensures predictability and scalability.
• Embedded accounting resources that give you full control of your systems, processes, and data..

This shortens the recruitment cycle, eliminates managerial overhead, and keeps CPA firms profitable.

See how Finsmart’s Accounting Seat Model can streamline operations, cut costs, and unlock advisory growth. Schedule your free consultation with a CPA outsourcing expert today.