CPAmerica ADVANTAGE

July 2023

IN THIS ISSUE:

► Saving time and money through outsourcing staff

► Preferred Provider Spotlight - SurePrep

► Tax Conference & Leading Partners Retreat

► Member News

► CPAmerica Insights - Grace Horvath

Interview with Bridget Fee, Processes Manager, Haefele Flanagan

As firms continue to adjust their services and operating processes for their clients, outsourcing staff may be a viable option. At Haefele Flanagan (HF) located in Maple Shade, New Jersey, they have found that utilizing third-party outsourcing services has helped streamline their tax and audit departments.

We spoke with HF processes manager, Bridget Fee, about how they have made these arrangements work for their team and clients. Fee manages all processes for the firm, ensuring everything is running smoothly and implementing necessary tweaks along the way.

With more than 55 employees, the HF team elected to outsource some work through services such as SurePrep and Paro. Both offer different arrangements for outsourcing and were set up in their own ways.

Fee’s more than 13 years with HF have included experience in marketing, information technology, administration and more, helping her to have a 360-degree view of the firm and allowing her to create processes that run the most efficiently. To lay the outsourcing groundwork, Fee also worked with HF tax partner, Andrew Ryzner and audit partner, Erica Peterson, to provide additional support and guidance.

The HF team has partnered with SurePrep for the last three tax seasons, expanding their agreement with them this year to include outsourcing returns. SurePrep is a CPAmerica Preferred Provider and offers a wide range of outsourcing services which help you expand your firm’s bandwidth without the burden of hiring and training personnel, allowing your team to concentrate on reviewing returns and providing other important value-added services to your clients.

They have also utilized the third-party services offered through Paro for more than two years. With Paro, your firm has the ability to interview and work with a specific person for a contracted period of time. You can also work with each new individual during a trial period to ensure they are a good fit for your team. Through their contract, HF is guaranteed for this individual to work a certain number of hours during tax season.

Aside from the obvious benefits of saving time and decreasing employee workloads, there was an unexpected benefit that arose through their SurePrep partnership.

“When we receive the materials back from SurePrep, someone needs to review everything before it goes to a manager for approval. So we actually had our second-year interns help check all the returns, follow up with the clients for any missing documents and prepare it all for the manager’s review. We found that because of this system, we were actually creating ‘baby checkers’ in our staff,” explained Fee.

Integrating these outsourcing tools was not a complicated process, however Fee shared that it may not operate perfectly at first. Noting that their team needed to make a few adjustments regarding things like how they shared engagement letters with their clients, what technology was available to the outsourced employees, and educating individuals in other states on local laws.

“Once we had all of our processes in place and we could see the quality of the work being produced, we had no concerns about outsourcing. Plus, it freed up people to be able to complete

See Outsourcing, continued on page 2