I recently had the great opportunity to select and hire a new accounting team overseas - based in India. This was a very interesting experience as we are offshoring a very important piece of our company operations and there were so many things that could compromise the success of this change.

My company had been working with the same accounting team in the USA for over 3 years. They were a good partner, but we had the need to reduce some costs and to have a few processes transferred to this new vendor. In order to find the perfect partner overseas, I created a very complete wishlist including a few responsibilities that our previous accounting team performed well and added a few others that were not part of their contract.

I reached out to several companies and talked with approximately 7 different accounting teams in India, the Philippines, and Pakistan. I also ran a selection process including deep questions and an assessment in order to understand the capabilities of the companies I was talking to. Within 45 days, I selected a company that has been great at communicating, taking ownership of their work, and going above and beyond to complete our requests. It has been 8 months we have been working together, during this period time:

• We reduced accounting-related costs by approximately $60k annually.
• We transferred 5-7 SOPs that were performed by our US-based employees to this new accounting team.
• We improved several SOPs to make it lean and easier to be followed.