Companies have a life cycle like human beings. They born, grow up and they become mature with time. They need support to stay alive and to continue their story gaining as much strength as they can. The role of accounting and finance teams appear to be crucial in this life cycle. This role can be even more significant in countries like Turkey when there is a strong correlation between accounting and tax functions.

In Turkey, the bookkeeping is still performed mainly for tax purposes, which meansthe books and records of a company are the base data for tax returns, while any wrong entry directly affects the accuracy of tax returns.

Due to this complex nature of bookkeeping activities in Turkey, an authorized Certified Public Accountant may maintain the books, prepare tax returns and submit to tax authority on behalf of  taxpayer.

Just at this stage, we come across the popular word of “outsourcing” for accounting and tax services.

Under this concept, not only small or medium sized entities, but also large scale companies may enjoy various outsourcing services including:

• ​bookkeeping,
• tax return preparation & submission,
• payroll,
• management reporting in compliance with IFRS , USGAAP, German GAAP or
• other special reporting for Ministry of Economy or for Commercial Code purpose etc.

Once a company outsources such services to an external services provider, who certainly must be a Certified Public Accountant, the company management will have the opportunity to focus on main business activity and there would be no need to worry about the following:

• ​to find qualified people to establish accounting & tax teams in a very competitive business environment
• to invest an accounting software which can be quite expensive especially for a start up entity.
• to follow the latest regulations, rules which is quite often the case for a developing country  (like e-invoice, e-ledger etc. )
• the accuracy of the tax returns, books, records etc knowing that everything is performed by experts.

All the abovementioned services can be enjoyed at a startup period or in a mature life time of a company for many reasons. This is a real strategic decision of a company management based on their business targets.

We observe that the tendency to outsource accounting, tax, payroll and reporting services are stronger than it was the past and we assume that this tendency will continue to increase in the following years as well.

One of the main reason for the expected gradual increase in the tendency to outsource is the serious cost advantage of outsourcing such services to a service provider when compared to the establishment cost of an in-house qualified accounting and finance team, as well as the cost of the implementation of an internal accounting software.