Capacity in UK practices
Qualified staff are hard to hire in the UK, salaries have risen, and the January self-assessment deadline comes round every year. Offshoring separates production (working papers, bookkeeping, VAT, payroll runs, SATR prep) from client work (judgement, review, advice, relationships). The production moves to an offshore team, and your UK staff keep the client work.
Why South Africa specifically
Timezone. South Africa sits within an hour or two of the UK all year. Your team and your offshore team are online together for the whole working day, so queries are answered on Teams within minutes. In India or the Philippines, a query sent in the UK afternoon is answered the next day.
English. Our Pretoria team writes and speaks English fluently. Your reviewers read file notes written in fluent English, and your managers join calls without an interpreter.
Talent. South Africa trains accounting graduates in large numbers.
Cost. Costs are substantially below UK salary costs for equivalent output. Some locations charge less per hour, so compare costs after rework, query delays and staff turnover.
How the work is set up
The offshore team works in your systems (your accounting software, your document management system and your access controls, with data kept in your environment), to your file standards, with everything passing through your review and sign-off. Your clients deal only with your firm.
Running a pilot
Start with three to five real jobs — a couple of straightforward year-ends, a VAT quarter, a batch of SATRs — and judge the output on the file: working paper quality, the quality of queries, turnaround, how much rework your reviewer does. Buzz offers UK firms a pilot of three real jobs in their own systems before they commit.
Questions to ask a provider
Who reviews the work before it reaches my reviewer? Which software do your people use every day? What's your staff turnover? Where does my client data physically sit? Do you run a practice of your own? We do. Our Pretoria team produces the work for Buzz Accounting's UK offices, so our own clients' filings depend on it. See how our outsourcing works.