How to start your business with your chinese accountant

What are the pain points of a Chinese accountant to a foreign investor?

1. A lack of transparency,
2. A lack of understanding and language capabilities,
3. A lack of communication,
4. A lack of technical skills,
5. Spending more money on less quality compared to our home jurisdiction finance team.

You need to know/determine how much VALUE do you place in your finance team.

What should a Chinese accountant do for you?

The start-up process

• Determine the best business structure for your situation.
• Assisting with the financial analysis in your business plan.
• Providing advice on the type of accounting software you may need.
• Providing advice and assistance on opening a business bank account.
• Making sure your accounting procedures comply with government regulations and requirements.
• Providing advice on how to track expenses during your daily business activities.
• Explaining the importance of keeping personal and business expenses separate.

Regular business operations

• Helping ensure that your independent contractors are classified as such (and not employees)
• Issuing your VAT Sales invoices, following up on the receipt of VAT Sales Invoices from contractors and calculating VAT Payable’s
• Explaining your financial statements so you can understand the ins and outs of your business.
• Overseeing company payroll and payment processes.
• Providing advice on estimated tax payments you should make during the year.
• Closing out your books and create financial reports at the end of the year.
• Compiling and submitting your taxes, financial reports, and all necessary paperwork.

Business growth stage

• Help you determine areas for growth by providing insight on cash flow patterns, inventory management, pricing, and business financing.
• Provide advice on property and equipment leasing and purchase.
• Help you prevent getting audited by the Chinese tax bureau
• Prepare you for and guide you through an audit, if necessary.
• Create financial forecast so you can make better decisions in our business.
• Work with you to create a business budget that will support your business goals.
• Provide advice and resources to assist you with the sale of your business.

What should a Chinese accountant do for you and your business in China?

1. Save time and energy (and your sanity!)
2. Make real-time decisions
3. Plan for the future

Invest in an excellent accountant

How to qualify accountants in China?

1. Up-to-date tax knowledge
2. Business acumen
3. Presentation prowess
4. Technical abilities
5. Emotional intelligence
6. Internal auditing capabilities
7. Management and leadership strength (are they prepared to be the bad guys?!?)
8. Be proactive about gaining new skills
9. Good to excellent communication skills

Steps to start your business with your China accountant.

1. Create a budget for the China business and set KPI targets
2. Choose an accounting software system
3. Implement and provide training for the software system
4. Create your charts of accounts
5. Create 1 set of books or do you need 2 sets of books?
6. Obtain weekly bank information; bank balance, payables and receivables, overseas incoming payments
7. Setup a meeting if something seems strange to you (i.e. you have not approved a payment or you were unaware of a receivable or cash is running low)
8. Receive by a certain deadline the financial management reports
9. Setup a meeting to review the reports line item by line item, review the budget against the actual, review whether targets are achievable
10. Reforecast and amend accordingly and then review once again
11. Create an action plan of next steps to improve efficiencies and handle cost controlling
12. Discuss problem points, communication points, inter-departmental issues, etc.
13. Discuss growth, investment plans, new product lines, new services lines, eliminating costs, adding headcount, etc.

You should be speaking to your accountant daily.

The advantages of outsourcing the work and set up an external review of your in house accounting work

1. Speedy hiring

   While in house recruiting is time consuming, your speed to market can goes up quickly since we can hire and deploy solutions within days instead of an average of 4 weeks when hiring staff in house.

2. Enjoy flexible models

   You can maintain your core in-house staff, whilst taking advantage of an additional workforce in times of expansion or contraction. You can also hire BPO staff for specific projects and specific timeframes, leaving your core staff to continue with their existing tasks.

3. Reduce the turnover of your staff

   Thanks to a dedicated resources working from a fully supervised office, we help our clients to reduce their turnover by almost 70%. By refraining turnover, your company can enjoy knowledge retention and avoid constant training costs.

4. Take advantage of the technical skills needed by your organization

   As Certified Public Accountant, we not only bring unique skills essential to your business, but also we manage resources to ensure the quality of the services provided. We can outsource all of your operations or provide supervision and support to your local teams.

5. Focus on your core business

   Thanks to the outsourcing, you can reduce your operational costs and but also refocus your energy on your core business activities. Money that would otherwise be spent on wages, computer hardware, software, office infrastructure, recruitment, training and so on, can be redirected into growing your business.

With OPKO Finance, our goal is to customize a solution that matches your unique needs, rather than trying to force you into a pre-determined system.  Therefore it’s important for us to learn about the overall objectives you have defined for your business, as well as your specific objectives for your remote staff and how you would like to interact with them.

For any information on how to start your business with your chinese accountant, please contact our team by email at info@opkofinance.com or by phone at +852 2654 8800/+86 187 177 31958