Outsourcing Your Company’s Small Business Accounting Functions to Family

If you are the owner of a small business, who is interested in saving a portion of your payroll costs,thinking about outsourcing your current accountant or bookkeeper, a family member is out of work, outsourcing to family may make sense for you. Outsourcing your company's accounting functions may result in reduced labor costs or the conversion of fixed costs to variable costs, insurance,benefits and some tax savings, etc. Before you begin outsourcing, you need to invest in a quality scanner or fax machine and maybe even a high volume scanner or fax machine,depending on the volume and frequency of documents to be scanned. Scanning or faxing is necessary because all of the source documents(i.e. bank statements,vendor bills,customer invoices, etc.) have to be sent either by email or fax to the outsourced accountant to record your company's accounting transactions. As an owner of a small business or the person responsible for the accounting or bookkeeping, it's important to establish a process by which to monitor the activities of the outsourcing company or person. Outsourcing may make sense, providing a competent and independent person oversees and monitors the financial results on your behalf. The perception is,that if you outsource your labor costs to a foreign country,your labor costs will be less than what you would ordinarily pay in the United States. Now, when a business owner is facing lost business revenues,increasing costs, this may result in business downsizing, often compounded by family unemployment,then it may make sense to employ the family to help. By employing a family member in your house or outsourcing your accounting function with family in a distant location, rather than outsourcing to another country, may even help the balance of trade in United States by keeping jobs in this country. That's a pretty good idea. This plan should work,if the owners or members of the owner's family are willing to invest the time to learn QuickBooks, or other comparable online accounting programs, and have some basic financial knowledge to undertake this responsibility of entering the financial information into QuickBooks. Given the current economy in the United States, situations exist where family members who have lost their jobs are now available to help and provide an alternative to saving money or earning money from the family business. QuickBooks Online Plus is one of many online accounting softwares available and easy to learn. With training, most people with common sense can handle QuickBooks. If you decide to chose this option, it's important to have a CPA or accountant available to ask questions and to receive timely answers, as well as a mechanism in place to allow for real time or after the fact corrections or adjustments to the accounting records. Under either alternative, outsourcing to a foreign country or outsourcing with a family member, an accountant or CPA is the ideal person to monitor either in real time, or after the fact i.e. monthly or quarterly financial information, and to check that the reconciliation process is working and more importantly,that outsource team or family member,are doing their job. With the proper QuickBooks Online version or any other QuickBooks version with remote access from a desktop PC, the monitoring process can be accomplished for outsourced accounting departments, whether the outsourced department is in another location or is outsourced to family. If you are thinking about outsourcing, it is recommended that you consult with your CPA or accountant to make sure that outsourcing is well suited for your particular small business accounting situation and to help access the skill sets of the person to provide the outsourced service. This concept of outsourcing to one or two family members may not work for a large or mid size business. However, if you own a small business, interested in effectively reducing a portion of your payroll costs, have decided or thinking about outsourcing your current bookkeeper, and someone in your family is unemployed, outsourcing may be right for you. Once again, this will work as long as the outsourced family member is properly supervised and monitored by a CPA or accountant. In the beginning there may be more time required by your CPA or accountant to train and to oversee as compared to time that your accounting professional currently spends each month or quarter. In the long run, the amount of time required by your accounting professional should diminish. Notwithstanding, some time will always be required of your accounting professional to monitor the activities of the outsourced person.

What Lifelock Can Do

Your lifelock is involved each time you accomplish an application form or information sheet, as the case may be, for whatever purpose it may be, whether for school, employment, bank account, credit, loan, mortgage, insurance plan, or any other identifying documents. You are required to indicate your full name, mother's full maiden name (usually for banks and financing institutions), date of birth, social security number, tax identification number, and other sensitive personal information (SPI). Any sensitive personally identifiable information (PII) such as social security number (SNN), alien registration number (A-Number), biometric identifiers, drivers license number, bank account, citizenship or immigration status, and medical data leading to the identity of a person, may end up to ruining your credibility if it falls into wrong hands such as crooked individuals like identity thieves. All these information are data elements, which are created based on certain standards with distinct connotation, values or units. And these are necessary information for identification, particularly for banking use, which would permit access to the customers account. A biometric identifier is something unique in a person that separates him or her from other individuals, like the fingerprints. It is the most unique identifier of a person. No two people in this whole wide world have the same fingerprints not even twins. Take note, however, that not all PII is sensitive, such as those found on a business card or in a public phone directory, because it is intended to be publicized. A lifelock is like a safety lock to your identity, that once it is unlocked, referring to the release of sensitive personal identifiable information, a part of your lifes deepest secret and most treasured entity becomes vulnerable to all the elements surrounding your existence. A stolen identity always leads to a badly beaten, shattered, broken ego which is the hardest thing to repair causing the victim to experience sleepless nights, moral shock, besmirched reputation and deeply wounded feelings that will take some time to heal. Time heals wounded feelings but always leaves a deep scar within the person. Our identity distinguishes us from other people and it makes us what we are. Every person has his or her own trademark in his being and that is referring to that sacred identity which may be stolen anytime, anywhere and will be used for innumerable times without the knowledge of the victim. Apparently, to keep our identity as safe as possible is a primordial consideration, for such to be kept unblemished or untarnished. If you feel you need such protection, just search online for private agencies that specialize in the protection of your identity against identity thieves. To sum it all up, whether the information if sensitive PII or not, all these constitute your Lifelock.