Key Questions to Ask When Considering Outsourced Accounting Solutions

The demands placed on medical practice shareholders and business managers are consistently evolving, and they span the gamut. From providing best-in-class patient care, hiring and retaining high-quality staff, managing insurance changes and evolving regulations, ensuring patients are billed properly and payment is collected, it takes a lot to keep a practice running efficiently.

With so many critical demands competing for attention, a practice’s financial data can easily be overlooked to address the next immediate need. If not managed properly, practice financials can quickly become a real problem, impacting day-to-day decisions made to keep the practice functioning efficiently and its long-term plans for growth.

It can be difficult to hire experienced and reliable personnel to fill bookkeeping, accounting and financial advisory roles in the business – one reason that leaders regularly bypass digging into the finances to take care of the next hot item on their to do list. Good, competent people often require a hefty salary and can be challenging to retain.

One way medical practices are creating efficient, specialized and cost-effective accounting teams is through outsourcing.

Each medical practice has its own set of unique needs, strengths and weaknesses in their accounting and financial management functions. Often, a business’s unmet needs vary in function and length; a tailored approach to meeting those needs could be extremely valuable but may not feel realistic. Whether it’s accounts payable and accounts receivable, or higher-level services, such as forecasting and decision-making support, utilizing a single, trustworthy source for all these solutions at a more manageable cost could make the challenge of financial management far less burdensome.

Gaining popularity across the industry due to its flexibility and various service levels, outsourcing can help meet your practice’s individual needs, but how do you know if outsourcing could be a good fit for your business?

Here are some questions to ask when considering outsourcing your practice’s accounting functions:

• Am I getting my financial information timely?
• Is my financial information accurate and reliable?
• Is my accounting staff constantly scrambling to clean up the books for year-end reporting?
• Does the information support high-level strategic planning or financial decision-making?
• Can we improve our budgeting and projection capabilities?
• Is my accounting team doing the job they were hired to do?
  • Is my CFO or controller spending time bookkeeping instead of supporting decision making?
  • Are my accountant(s) struggling to generate high-level management reports needed to manage the business?
• Are my bank accounts reconciled timely and are there proper controls over cash?
• Is there a need for cash flow analysis or projections beyond what I am currently receiving?
• Are there pain-points or inefficiencies in my financial workflows/processes?
• Are my vendors paid timely?
• Do my systems and personnel provide the KPI’s needed to manage the business?
• Is the practice constantly behind on billing for services?
• Are taxes being filed and paid timely and accurately (sales, use, payroll or income)?

Maner Costerisan’s outsourced accounting team is here to fill-in the gaps to support your key initiatives and help you grow your practice.

Our specialized experts provide a one-stop-shop for a medical practice’s range of accounting and financial management needs. From CFO-level solutions to part-time bookkeeping needs, Maner Costerisan can eliminate headaches and pain-points in the financial sector of the business, while providing critical information on a timely basis to help leaders make decisions.