Do you have experience of outsourcing to India?

I would like to understand why practices outsource and what the positives and negatives are

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Please be advised that I now have my own operation in India that offers outsourced Bookkeeping to Accountants in the UK. I would welcome any comments from those that are already outsourcing as to the positives and negatives. I will use the comments as part of my research in how to best market my services.

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RLI
By lionofludesch
09th Apr 2021 12:22

Thanks for being so honest.

I'm afraid I've never used outsourcing so can't help much.

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By sarahg
09th Apr 2021 12:49

I worked for a company that outsourced to India once.

Positives were
- price
- dedicated team / person working for you
- they worked UK hours

Negatives
- not reading queries properly, which meant a lot of toing and froing
- not listening to feedback and learning from it

Good luck

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Replying to sarahg:
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By Hugo Fair
09th Apr 2021 13:14

In other words:
* Service (offering) = excellent;
* Service (delivery) = less so.

Not entirely surprising - given that the former is put together by the bosses, but the latter is dependent on the 'uninvested' cannon-fodder often found within delivery.

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By meadowsaw227
09th Apr 2021 13:54

Dishonest, unless you told your clients upfront that their accounts work was being carried out in India.

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By ireallyshouldknowthisbut
09th Apr 2021 15:23

Try not sending spam emails out

I get about 2-3 a week of them offering to do all my accounts work for tuppence.

I must admit to struggle to understand why you would outsource your core competency.

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By Cheshire
09th Apr 2021 15:55

Joined today.

Just an advert.

Cynic- moi!

Experiences of such outsourcing in various other roles, Hugo hit the nail on the head, although Ive added my experience to his quote
* Service (offering) = excellent;
* Service (delivery) = less so / appalling to the point it was all brought back to UK shores.

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By jantill
09th Apr 2021 18:54

Sharing information with UK colleagues I understand that in India newly qualified software graduates will work in India for a couple of years. The best will then leave to work in the US. The second best will leave to work in Europe. The third tier will stay in India.
Indian graduates also expect a career path where after a (very) few years they expect to be managers. Whereas in the UK there are highly experienced older software engineers writing code, software coding in India will usually be written by those who have limited experience.
Companies have for years outsourced and off-shored their core software to the likes of Infosys and Wipro. The prices are really good. Quality, function and usability may be more interesting.
Twenty years ago it was being quoted that a cost saving up to 10% could be made by outsourcing provided that the projects were closely managed by staff from the UK. If projects were not managed then there was unlikely to be a successful delivery and there would be excess costs (but by then the IT director pushing the outsourcing would have collected his bonuses and moved on before failure was evident). Meanwhile the UK staff with all their experience would have been lost.
I can't speak for your outsourced bookkeepers but in life you usually get what you have paid for. Buy cheap, buy twice (if you are lucky) .

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By User deleted
10th Apr 2021 09:02

Outsourcing is a bad idea, to India or anywhere. It's what clients pay you to do and it's already profitable enough

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By Michael Beaver
12th Apr 2021 15:25

I looked at this for a while about 6 years ago when I had grown my practice almost to my capacity but not quite enough to support another staff member.

The problem resolved itself by me landing a very large client which fully paid for a part time staff member.

At the time I was uncomfortable outsourcing work to India, as I could imagine my clients' reactions. I spoke to one of my clients who is also a good friend and talked about it hypothetically. The chief concern was about the privacy of their personal information.

It also comes across as 'cheap' when what they are paying for is my time, attention and expertise.

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