by Nathan Musgrove, Founding Partner, C.P.A.

Excelsior Accounting Services

Let’s face it – if you haven’t struggled through your own accounting staffing challenges, you at least know someone who has. The number of nonprofit executives I speak with who are struggling to hire and retain quality accounting staff seems to be growing at an exponential rate. Unfortunately for all of us, the problem is only likely to worsen as the accounting profession confronts growing challenges in perception and appeal to new college graduates.

Many executives confronting these obstacles have turned to an increasingly prevalent alternative – outsourcing all or a portion of their organizations’ accounting work to a third-party service provider. As the owner of a firm that does just that, I am not bashful in saying there are many environments in which outsourced accounting services could represent an optimal solution, yielding improvements in quality or cost of your overall accounting footprint – and sometimes both! An outsourced provider can often offer more robust professional expertise, greater nimbleness to better manage periods of staff transition, and the flexibility to grow or contract with you as your company evolves – often a much more palatable alternative to hiring or terminating in-house employees.