What is finance & accounting BPO?
Finance and accounting BPO — business process outsourcing — means handing over a whole finance function, not just a task, to a team that runs it as an ongoing service.
The difference from hiring a freelancer is ownership. A freelancer takes your hours. An F&A BPO takes the process, the calendar, and the continuity — so the close still happens on the 5th when someone is sick, on holiday, or has moved on.
We’ve been doing it since 2019 from Dhaka, with a US entity in Wyoming and an APAC base in Kuala Lumpur. Around 30 ACCA-trained accountants, 60+ active clients, 100,000+ hours delivered.
What an F&A BPO company takes off your desk
Take the whole stack or start with one layer. Most clients start with the close and add from there.
Transactional finance
Accounts payable, accounts receivable, bank and card reconciliation, expense processing, transaction coding — the daily volume that eats your team's week.
Month-end close
General ledger maintenance, balance sheet reconciliations, accruals and prepayments, intercompany — closed by the 5th, every month, without chasing.
Management reporting
P&L, balance sheet, cash flow, KPI packs, and board reporting — produced on a fixed calendar in the format your stakeholders already expect.
Payroll processing
Multi-country payroll across US, UK, AU and CA — filings, payslips, year-end reporting, handled end-to-end.
Sales tax & VAT compliance
Multi-state US sales tax, UK VAT (MTD-ready), GST and EU VAT-OSS — registered, filed, and reconciled by us. No CPA needed for these.
Finance operations
Vendor and partner management, billing runs, refunds, collections — the operational layer most BPOs won't touch. Ask Lumiere.
Why companies move finance to a BPO
Against the fully-loaded cost of an equivalent in-house team — salary, benefits, software, management time, and the cost of re-hiring when someone leaves.
Our Dhaka team runs shifts aligned to US, UK, Bangladesh and Malaysia business hours. Work moves while you sleep; answers are there when you wake.
Scope up for year-end or a fundraise, scope down after. No recruitment, no redundancy, no re-training. The team is already there.
In-house, enterprise BPO, freelancer, or us
Including where we’re the wrong answer. If you’re an enterprise processing millions of invoices, go with the big firms — that’s what they’re built for.
Five years. 600+ hours a month. One embedded team.
Lumiere Education runs a mentor and partner network at scale — partner onboarding, mentor payments, student refunds, monthly reporting. We’ve been their standing finance and operations team for over five years, structured as a 600-hour-per-month capacity across bookkeeping, operations and reporting. Most months we run at or above it. That is what an F&A BPO engagement actually looks like when it works: same team, same standards, scaled to whatever the calendar throws at them.
Kind Nature grew 20× in three years with our team running their full back office — books, inventory, velocity tracking, purchase-order planning and shipping decisions — while the founder ran the business.
Nothing gets dropped in the handover.
The fear with outsourcing finance is the transition. So we run in parallel until you’re sure. One to two months to steady state.
Scoping call — free, 30 minutes
We map what you do today, what hurts, and what should move. You get an honest answer on whether outsourcing helps you at all, and a flat monthly quote.
Discovery & documentation
We document your current process, chart of accounts, systems and approval flows. Most teams have never had this written down — you keep it either way.
Parallel run
We run alongside your existing setup for a cycle. Nothing gets dropped, and you see our output next to what you had before you commit further.
Full handover, then steady state
We take the function. You get a fixed reporting calendar, a named senior contact, and a monthly rhythm that doesn't depend on any one person staying.
Finance & accounting BPO FAQ
What is finance and accounting BPO?
Finance and accounting BPO (business process outsourcing) means handing a finance function — not just a task — to an external provider who runs it as an ongoing service. That typically covers transactional work (AP, AR, reconciliation), the month-end close, management reporting, payroll, and tax compliance. The distinction from hiring a freelancer is that a BPO takes ownership of the process, the calendar, and the continuity, not just the hours.
What does an F&A BPO company actually do?
Day to day: codes and reconciles your transactions, runs AP and AR, closes the month, produces your management accounts and KPI packs, processes payroll, and files sales tax and VAT. A good one also documents your process, gives you a named senior contact, and maintains a review layer so mistakes are caught internally before they reach you. We additionally take on finance operations — billing runs, partner and vendor management, refunds — which many BPOs decline.
How much does finance and accounting BPO cost?
We charge a flat monthly fee agreed up front, based on the scope and complexity of your finance function — not per hour and not per FTE, so the invoice doesn't move when a month gets busy. Most clients land 40–60% below the fully-loaded cost of an equivalent in-house team once you count salary, benefits, software, management time and re-hiring. We quote on the first call.
How is this different from hiring in-house?
Cost, continuity, and coverage. An in-house hire is $60k–$180k a year plus benefits and management, takes months to recruit, and takes the knowledge with them when they leave. With us you get a team rather than a person, a review layer above the work, four time zones of coverage, and no hiring or redundancy cycles when your needs change. The honest trade-off: we're not sitting in your office, so we invest heavily in documented process and a fixed reporting calendar to compensate.
How long does the transition take?
Typically one to two months to steady state. We document your current process, run in parallel alongside your existing setup for a cycle so nothing is dropped, then take full handover. Businesses with a backlog take longer — we clear the backlog as part of onboarding rather than pretending it isn't there.
Is our financial data secure?
Your data stays yours — all records, reports and working files produced under our engagement remain your property, and are returned or securely destroyed on termination as you direct. We work inside your systems (QuickBooks, Xero, or your ERP) with named user access rather than shared logins, share documents through Google Drive or an agreed secure platform, and are bound by confidentiality that survives the end of the engagement. We're an ACCA Approved Employer (Gold), which carries professional conduct obligations for our staff.
What if we already have a bookkeeper or a finance team?
That's common and it's fine. Plenty of our clients keep an in-house finance lead and outsource the volume underneath them — we handle transactional work and the close, your person owns relationships and decisions. We can also start with one piece (just the close, or just payroll) rather than the whole function.
Do you file our income tax or audit our accounts?
No, and we're direct about this. We are not a CPA firm or an audit firm — we don't file income tax returns and we don't perform statutory audits. We prepare your year-end accounts, working papers and schedules so your CPA can file quickly and cleanly. We do handle sales tax and VAT filings ourselves.