How working with a payroll bureau can make your accounting firm more profitable

As you run an accountancy firm you will already be familiar with the idea of outsourcing certain business functions. After all, that’s why your own clients use your services – because you can do it more accurately and efficiently than they can if they were to do it themselves in house.

 

But what about outsourcing entire profit centres? Well, that can make sense too. If you can partner with the right company, you can offer new services, or free up team members to do more profitable things.

 

Payroll is an excellent example of this. By taking an entire function off your plate, a payroll bureau can free up your team’s time to focus on more valuable work. It also allows you to offer more to your clients without expanding your team or premises.

 

Benefits of partnering with a payroll bureau

Many clients will want you to provide payroll services, as in their mind it is all lumped in with the accountancy function. 

 

But you’ll know that it requires specialist knowledge and skills, is highly compliance-based, and comes with no small element of risk. 

 

There are many attractions to outsourcing this function:

 

Meeting a client’s needs – We’re sure you like to put your clients first, and provide the services that they need. So if you don’t already offer a payroll service, collaborating with a specialist firm allows you to offer this service on a white-label basis without ever having to hire or allocate your own staff to deliver it.

 

Free yourself from distraction – Running payroll for many clients every month is no small undertaking. If you have people off sick or on annual leave in an in-house team it can be a major disruption, distracting you from other operations. Outsourcing to a payroll bureau means this problem shifts to someone else who has better specialist resources to deal with it. Better for you and your clients!

 

Don’t get caught out by the legislation – As with many areas of accounting, rules affecting payroll are constantly changing. From furlough to IR35, auto-enrolment to employee benefits, it takes time to keep up-to-date and make sure the rules are being applied correctly. Again, relying on specialists instead means you can breathe easy that this is all being done in the background without any effort from you.

 

Grow your firm – Of course, the ultimate reason for introducing new services or extra resources is to grow your firm and your profits. If payroll is a brand new service to you, a good collaboration with a payroll bureau can allow you to do this quickly and profitably. If you already do payroll but are attracted by the thought of outsourcing, you can free up team members to work on more valuable services within your firm. 

 

Find out more

If you’d like to explore how working with a payroll bureau could help your firm grow, get in touch.