Andover Commtech

Many small and medium businesses are cropping-up every day all over the world. Only a few of them remain profitable, while over 70% are shutdown during the first three years of their operation. A primary reason is that they spend a great deal more of time and resources on their day-to-day operational activities and down the line lose focus on their core business. This brings down the profitability curve as the back-office tasks keep on gulping more and more resources. An easier way out is to outsource portions of your work to people who have expertise in those respective domains.

Your business can also utilize tax preparation services and tax processing services offered by professional service providers to file your taxes and returns accurately and on time. Here are the top three reasons why you should outsource your company’s tax preparation:

#1: Save up to 60% of your cost through offshore outsourcing

The math is simple. If you employ full-time resources who have ample experience to take care of your taxes efficiently, then you would end-up investing in their salaries, training, office space, workstations, benefits, software license, and a lot more. While if you outsource the work to an offshore company that handles tax processing services and already has a team of qualified and trained professionals then you would spend up to 60% less.

#2: Gain from the expertise of the tax preparation services provider

Companies that provide tax preparation services, tax processing services, VAT return services, income tax computation service, income tax return filing services, etc., have already invested in a solid infrastructure and their staff members have expertise in top-of-the-line tax computation tools like Intuit’s Lacerte, Creative Solutions’ Ultra-Tax, Intuit’s ProSeries, ATX, Drake, and many other popular financial software. Therefore, you won’t have to spend time in learning these tools. Moreover, the service provider’s staff would work at a faster turnaround and with greater accuracy.

#3: Easy to ramp-up and ramp-down resources to manage load

Typically, the finance team in small businesses (if at all they have one) takes care of the taxation part too. Throughout the year, the workload is constant but at the end of the quarter or year when the tax has to be calculated or during the time when your company takes critical expansion steps; it puts additional pressure on the finance team. If you outsource your accounting and tax preparation work, you can take advantage of a flexible team, wherein you can increase or decrease the team size whenever you want and get any amount of work done without hassles.

Through tax preparation outsourcing, you can remove yourself from the trouble to managing tax files and free-up your in-house resources to do more lucrative business development tasks.

Studies show that businesses lose as much as $70 million per day to a combination of internal and external theft. The retail industry is extremely vulnerable to shoplifting and employee theft. Some thirty to forty percent of inventory losses are attributed to employee theft, and more is lost to employee fraud. Commercial security systems offer various services to curb such losses among retail businesses in Tampa, Clearwater and St. Petersburg.

How exactly do these commercial security systems protect your retail business in Tampa, Clearwater and St. Petersburg?

Many retail stores use radio frequency identification (RFID) tags on their merchandise. If any of such merchandise is brought out of the store unpaid, it will trigger alarms and alert the guards. This is one of the most effective deterrents against shoplifters.

Retailers should train their personnel well, though, to ensure that RFID tags are always removed before merchandise that has been paid for is wrapped at the counter. If a paying customer triggers the alarm while going out the shop because of employee negligence, this will create a negative backlash on the store. The customer will be humiliated and will, understandably, be very furious. Other customers in the shop will surely sympathize with the victim. In extreme cases this could even lead to a boycott. Security should not be implemented at the expense of customer service and relationships.

For insider theft, access control is provided to identify and record everyone entering and leaving the company premises at any time. This is used for employee entrances and exits. Access control prevents employees from entering the premises beyond their work hours. It also prevents other unauthorized entry. If any theft occurs overnight, for example, records from access control will show who went in and out of the premises between certain time periods.

Digital video surveillance will provide even more protection. With multiple digital surveillance cameras positioned strategically throughout the store and backend areas, you can have full 24 hour coverage and monitoring. All footages are recorded and archived. You can also monitor all cameras any time from anywhere in the world through a laptop with an internet connection.

All footages from digital video surveillance should be saved even if there seems to be nothing interesting going on. Seemingly routine scenarios may later prove to be valuable in establishing certain facts or patterns. Video documentation is extremely valuable.

Surveillance cameras focused on points of sale will catch instances of employee cash register theft and fraud. Surveillance cameras throughout the store will catch shoplifters. In the backroom, round the clock digital video surveillance will record inventory theft and pilferage. Digital video surveillance will positively identify the persons involved in the crime, whether employees or outsiders.

Sometimes the mere knowledge of the presence of digital video surveillance in a store and its backend areas is in itself enough of a deterrent for criminals.

All the security features mentioned are designed to work together in a comprehensive structure that is also linked to a 24 hour emergency response system. It can also be made to integrate with all other systems used in the store, such as temperature control, smoke alarms and fire alarms. This further strengthens the protection for your business.

There are so many commercial security systems to choose from. In deciding which company to hire, check for references among other retail establishments and businesses in Tampa, Clearwater and St. Petersburg. Establishments with high security needs like the 24-hour Anytime Fitness franchise, for example, would hire only the best commercial security system available. It might be a good idea to go with what has already been proven to be reliable and cost effective.

The recent buyer survey of market research agencies from various international markets released by ValueNotes finds close to two-thirds of the research agencies are already offshoring to companies in India, Eastern Europe and Latin America. While the large multi-national research agencies have always been outsourcing, the smaller firms with revenues typically less than USD 10m are fast adopting offshoring. The survey reveals that with greater competition, research agencies, especially the smaller ones are increasingly using offshoring to gain competitive advantage.

The MRO buyer survey is a continuation of the research published by the ValueNotes Outsourcing Practice in January 2008 on the Indian MRO vendor landscape. The report estimates that MRO revenues are slated to grow from $148 million for FY07 to reach $800 million by FY12 at CAGR of 47%. Corroborating the earlier research, this “Buyer” survey reveals that, currently, offshoring is largely limited to activities lower down the value chain like data collection, data processing and panel services. According to Monali Singhvi, Analyst, ValueNotes “While there is greater adoption of offshoring by market research agencies, overall penetration is very low with a majority of the agencies offshoring less than 10% of their total work.”

While cost arbitrage has been a primary driver for offshoring, the survey brings to light that research agencies rate other factors like faster turnaround time, better quality of work etc. as equally important. Quality of work and client confidentiality issues have emerged as key concerns towards offshoring. While the offshoring drivers and concerns remain similar across key markets like US and Europe, these markets differ significantly in the choice of offshoring destination. “A majority of research agencies offshoring to India are primarily form the US, while those offshoring to Eastern Europe are from EU”, says Pranav Dixit, Analyst at ValueNotes Outsourcing Practice.

The MRO vendor landscape ranges from the captives of large research agencies to Pure-play MRO vendors, full service research firms, KPOs and large and medium BPO service providers. The survey shows a clear inclination by research agencies towards using multiple options in offshoring. The larger research agencies have greater inclination to set up captives or employ specialized MRO service providers. Mid sized agencies prefer to work with Full service research agencies while smaller firms are most comfortable with service providers of comparable size.

According to Arun Jethmalani, CEO, ValueNotes, “With a majority of research agencies planning an increase in offshoring volumes, significant growth opportunities exist in both high volume low value activities as well as select high value services like report writing data analysis and analytics.”

The ValueNotes report: “Market Research Outsourcing: Buyer Survey” provides by in-depth in-sights and analysis of the offshoring awareness, and concerns and challenges faced by market research agencies in various markets. The survey brings out the current perceptions towards risks and rewards of offshoring in the market research industry.