We have many calls every week with partners and directors of Irish accountancy firms who are looking at strategically implementing an element of outsourcing into their operations.
Profitability is being squeezed with rising costs. Good people are hard to find. Salaries have moved. Deadlines have not. So it is no surprise that more Irish firms are looking again at outsourcing to India.
Most of us have heard a bad outsourcing story. You may have even lived one. Poor quality. Weak communication. No accountability. Files going back and forth. Work needing to be redone. A feeling that control has been handed away.
While those concerns are valid, they are not always fair to the newer model. There is a big difference between sending work to an anonymous outsourced production line and adding a named, dedicated person to your team.
Teams PLUS is built around that second model. It supports Irish businesses by identifying, onboarding and integrating dedicated offshore professionals into your local team, with support in Dublin and Cork.
Here are the top 10 questions we’ve been asked on those calls and the answers to them. If you need to hire, if your team constantly feel stretched or if you’re looking to find capacity to take on more work, then you will find the answers to these questions interesting.
That is a fair concern, especially if you have been burned before. The difference is that you are not hiring blind. Teams PLUS first understands the work you need done, the systems you use and the type of person who will fit your team.
Candidates are then shortlisted based on technical skill, experience, communication ability and fit. You interview and choose who joins your team.
This avoids one of the biggest risks in normal recruitment. If you hire locally and it does not work out, you may have lost time, momentum and a hefty recruitment fee.
With Teams PLUS, there are no recruitment fees. If, after a few months, you feel the fit is wrong, the person can be changed without that sunk cost. That makes it easier to start small and make a sensible decision based on real work.
The underlying question here can often be, will their English be good enough?
The people placed with you are selected for strong English and the experience you need. You also get to interview them. You decide who joins your team. We don’t allocate people to you; you get to choose them.
Communication is difficult when hiring is wrong or the set-up is weak. Good communication is about clarity, expectations and support. Geographical location doesn’t change that.
You will also have a dedicated point of contact in Ireland. If something needs to be discussed, you are not trying to manage everything across time zones and cultural gaps on your own. You have someone in Ireland who can help keep the relationship working properly. Good communication still needs structure. Clear tasks, agreed deadlines, video calls, review notes and regular check-ins. But that is no different from managing remote staff in Ireland.
GDPR is not a reason to avoid remote teams, but it is a reason to be careful about who you work with. You might wonder ‘is India safe?’ Yes is the answer.
However, it is more important to have the right working model in place. Teams PLUS is headquartered in Ireland and operates in full compliance with the EU GDPR. All cloud software and data processing runs on GDPR-compliant servers. The company holds ISO 27001:2022 certification for information security, which is the international standard auditors and regulators look for when assessing how a business manages data risk.
In practical terms, that means your client data is handled under the same legal framework you operate under, with documented procedures for access, retention and breach response. I can give you the certification and the policies in writing for your own audit trail.
It depends on how it is positioned. If it is presented as replacing people, it will create anxiety. If it is presented as adding capacity and taking pressure off the team, it is more likely to be welcomed.
Most Irish teams want to spend more time on advisory, client meetings, and the work they actually trained to do. A good remote team member can take on process-driven work so local staff can spend more time reviewing, advising, training, managing clients and learning new skills. This model is about capacity, not replacement.
Yes! This is not an area for vague reassurance.
Teams PLUS holds ISO 27001 and ISO 9001 certifications. ISO 27001 is focused on information security management, while ISO 9001 is focused on quality management. The Teams PLUS information security framework is designed to protect client and employee information, manage information security risks and support GDPR compliance.
Teams PLUS has layered security measures including firewall protection, secure VPN, centralised anti-virus protection, vulnerability assessment, patch management, biometric restricted entry, CCTV, internal audits, annual surveillance audits, background checks, contracts, NDAs and strict data use and retention procedures.
That is the level of detail you should expect from a supplier. “Trust us” is not enough.
Some might. Most will care more about quality, confidentiality and service. Businesses today are commonly using offshore service/support centres.
The issue is not whether someone outside the office has access to client data. The issue is whether the firm has proper controls over who can access the data, what they can access, how work is reviewed and how the client’s interests are protected.
For sensitive clients, keep the work local if needed. For most recurring work, the right remote team member can support delivery without changing the client relationship. The client still deals with your firm. Your standards still apply.
No. Teams PLUS is the employer of record. We handle HR, hiring, employment administration and compliance.
You’re not hiring an individual abroad. You’re engaging a service. You get the benefit of a dedicated person without becoming the direct employer in India. That is the point of the model.
No. There’s no long-term lock in. The arrangement runs month to month. This puts the onus on Teams PLUS to keep delivering quality people.
The businesses that get the most out of this treat it as a long-term hire, not a temporary arrangement. The longer someone is embedded in your team, the more they learn your clients, your style and your standards. But the flexibility is there if your needs change.
The sensible way to approach remote hiring for accountancy firms is to start small. Start with one or two team members and test the model first. Don’t try to redesign the whole firm. Choose one role or area. Choose work that is regular, repeatable and easy to review.
It’s a fixed monthly fee per person. That’s it. No recruitment fee. No agency commission. No laptop or equipment cost. You pay the monthly fee, the person does the work, and the cost is predictable for budgeting and pricing your own services.
A common frustration with hiring locally is that the real cost is never just salary. There are recruitment fees, employer PRSI, pension/healthcare costs, desk space and equipment. If a local hire does not work out, you can lose maybe €10,000 in recruitment fees before counting the internal time lost. With a fixed-fee extended team model, that upfront risk is reduced.
Cost should never be the only reason to do this. Cheap work that needs to be redone is expensive. The better commercial argument is predictable capacity at a sustainable cost.
No hiring model removes all risk, people are people. However, our business is built on giving you great people.
If you’re not getting the output you expect, then we haven’t delivered. It’s very rare, but it does happen that the person you met, interviewed, had the right experience and skills just doesn’t seem to be working out.
To be fair to the worker, we have a meeting with you and them to understand where expectations and deliveries aren’t aligning. We put a short-term plan in place with you to remedy this and 99% of the time this works. But in those very rare occurrences the person is just not right, we swap them out immediately with another person (again chosen by you).
The downside risk that makes business owners hesitate to hire (what if I pick wrong?) is largely removed. You try someone for a few months, and if it’s not working, you try someone else. Teams PLUS carries the recruitment cost, not you.
It’s also worth noting that our staff retention rate is over 97%, so the more common situation is that the person stays with your firm for years. It’s not likely that you’ll swapping people out.
That changes the decision from “what if this goes badly?” to “can we test this properly without getting burned?”
If you’ve read this far you’ve probably thought about outsourcing for your accountancy firm more than once.
But every time you get close to the decision, the same worries crop up; data security, control, language.
Most of the caution around outsourcing isn’t really about data security or GDPR. Those are solvable with the right provider. The real hesitation is usually “I don’t want to get this wrong.”
Reasonable. So start small. See how it goes for six months. That’s how most of the firms we work with started, and most of them have since added a second, third, or fourth team member.
None of this is to say outsourcing is the right move for every business. It isn’t.
But if you’re turning away work, or everyone on the team is so stretched that client contact is less than ideal, or your senior people get pulled into compliance grind, then outsourcing is a proven way to add capacity at a sustainable cost.
But you’ve got to believe it first.
When you’re ready, or when you’re close to that point, get in touch to talk through the specifics of your business; where you think this could work; the concerns you have for your firm. We’ll help guide you with the knowledge we’ve picked up from how other Irish accountancy firms have made this a success.