Hi guys,
My firm has reached the level where I need to take on a new staff accountant/bookkeeper. I was looking for any advice from you guys on what I need to look out for or any general tips.
I have a partner and we are both remote for the next few weeks/months due to Omicron. We have 3 employees in the office doing admin work but nothing related to accounting or bookkeeping. Is it reasonable to hire a part-time CPA to basically do bookkeeping, sales tax filings but no tax preparation? Would it be wise to utilize that person to do tax prep? My partner and I can pretty much handle the tax prep on our own, but having someone to do the bookkeeping would free up a lot of my time.
How do you manage their hours and know if the person isn't slacking off when remote? Where do I look at payrates for fully remote in SoCal? I was thinking $25 to $30 an hour around 35 hours a week with no overtime/busy season as a draw. My main concern is if I pay hourly knowing how many hours they actually worked. Also, do you just share all the QuickBooks files with the new hire? My idea was to send them the QuickBooks file via a separate Dropbox and have them work on it then send it back to my Dropbox. This seems cumbersome, but I don't want someone new to have full access to our internal office Dropbox.
Any tips for remote hires would be greatly appreciated. I already have a new laptop with Microsoft Teams for communication and QuickBooks ready for them. Lastly, I'd like to give them a laptop with no WIFI and a sample QuickBooks file to see how they do on downloading transactions, reconciling the account, and updating the monthly workpapers.