BPO
Closing the month four days sooner with an outsourced finance back-office
An Edinburgh accountancy firm was losing senior time to manual reconciliations. An outsourced back-office team shortened the close and cleared the backlog.
Results at a glance
- -44%
- Month-end close
- -100%
- Reconciliation backlog
- +31%
- Senior advisory hours
- -38%
- Posting error rate
9 to 5 working days
cleared in Q1
reallocated
The challenge
The firm had grown its client book faster than its finance team, and month-end close had stretched to nine working days. Qualified accountants were spending evenings on bank reconciliations, ledger tidy-ups and supplier statement matching rather than on advisory work that clients actually paid for.
Errors were creeping in under the time pressure, and two large clients had flagged late management accounts. Partners wanted more capacity without adding permanent headcount before they were sure the demand would hold.
Pain points
- Month-end close taking nine working days and slipping later each quarter
- A backlog of unreconciled bank and supplier statements building month on month
- Senior accountants doing routine data entry instead of client advisory work
- Inconsistent working papers making the year-end audit slower and costlier
Our approach
- Built a dedicated finance pod trained on the firm's chart of accounts and its practice software
- Standardised reconciliation working papers so every client file followed the same reviewable format
- Introduced a daily bank-feed routine so reconciliations were kept current rather than left to month-end
- Data handled under UK GDPR with a Data Processing Agreement and role-based access to client ledgers
Results at a glance
The results
- Month-end close came down from nine working days to five, giving clients their management accounts within the first week.
- The reconciliation backlog was cleared inside the first quarter and stayed clear through daily processing.
- Partners redirected recovered senior hours into advisory work and onboarded new clients without new permanent hires.
The close used to run into the second week and swallow our evenings. Now the accounts land in the first week and my team is back on client work.
Common questions
Work is covered by a Data Processing Agreement under UK GDPR, with role-based access limited to the ledgers each team member needs and a full audit trail of postings.
These are representative engagements. Client identities are anonymised and the metrics are illustrative of the type of results this work delivers, not audited figures for a named client.
Tell us what you need to outsource
Share your requirement and model your savings. We reply within six hours with a clear next step.
Six-hour response. UK GDPR compliant. Named UK accountability.