Outsourced Bookkeeping vs Hiring In-House

Hiring gets you one person. Outsourcing gets you a team, and almost everything else follows from that single difference. One person takes holidays, gets sick, has a life that occasionally needs attending to, and eventually hands in notice. While any of that is happening the books are not being kept, and the knowledge of how your file actually works is walking around inside somebody who is not at their desk. A team absorbs all of it, because more than one person here knows your file and the work carries on without anybody having to arrange cover. Second, somebody checks the work. A bookkeeper working alone in a small business usually has nobody reviewing what they produce, and an owner is rarely placed to catch an error in their own ledger. Here a partner reviews completed work before it reaches you or a tax authority. That is structural rather than a comment on anybody's ability: one person cannot review themselves. Third is range. Reconciliation, accounts payable and receivable, payroll recorded and reconciled, sales tax, month-end close, reporting, and the specialist files a brokerage or a practice needs. One hire rarely covers all of that well, so most businesses either hire for the largest piece and improvise the rest or end up hiring twice. On a team, the person doing each part is the person who does that part. Then the money, which is where most people start and which is the least interesting of the four. A salary is the floor rather than the total: on top of it sit the statutory employer costs, vacation pay, benefits, software licences, a laptop and a desk. A fee is agreed against a scope before anything starts, it does not move because a month was busy, and there is no employer cost to discover later. And it flexes. Volume that doubles is a conversation about scope rather than a second hire, a second onboarding and a second notice period.

Not here. The work is done by the people named on this site, working remotely across Canada and the United States rather than in your office. Remote and offshore are different things and the word gets used for both, which is why it is worth saying plainly.

That is your decision and not one we push. Plenty of arrangements keep an in-house person doing receipt capture and invoicing while the categorisation, reconciliation and reporting come here, which removes the part that causes the delays without removing anybody.

Onboarding is measured in weeks rather than in the months a hire takes end to end, because there is no posting, no shortlist and no notice period. The work that does take time is the same either way: somebody has to get familiar with your books.