Journey of a multi-millionaire 27 year old CPA who runs a 100% virtual accounting firm

From selling chocolates and candies on the streets of Accra, Ghana as a five year old to becoming an entrepreneur in the United States; the life of one of our clients, Jeff Badu, has been a success story in itself. Jeff Badu, CPA, is the owner of Badu Tax Services LLC which is a part of his multinational conglomerate Badu Enterprises LLC.

Jeff Badu is a parallel entrepreneur and a wealth multiplier. He’s a Licensed Certified Public Accountant (CPA) from the state of Illinois whose marquee company Badu Tax Services, LLC, is a CPA firm that specializes in tax preparation, tax planning, and tax representation for individuals and businesses. Another key company is Badu Investments, LLC, which is primarily a real estate investment company that acquires residential and commercial real estate properties in areas such as the South Side of Chicago in efforts to restore traditionally underserved areas.

At 27, Jeff is a millionaire, but the situation has not been the same since the beginning. He moved to the United States when he was eight years old. Attended Uplift Community High School in Uptown and was headed down the wrong path in his teens. In the want to belong to the local community and a badly yearned camaraderie, he joined a gang. He recalls, “I had been a bad kid who surrounded myself with the wrong things, and I had almost been put in handcuffs, and I knew that had to change.”

A major turning point in his life came during a summer visit to his native Ghana in 2008, it changed everything for him. Jeff saw how people were living in Ghana, how so many were homeless, including a few of his own family members. Further, a conversation with his aunt would reset his path and he realized he just couldn’t have a life like that. From then, Jeff started going to church, and his goal became to help an infinite amount of people who have a profound desire to do better in life. Some of his friends who weren’t lucky enough to have an uncle or aunt to redirect their lives have ended up dead or in prison.

“I knew it had to start with me. I had to change my lifestyle,” Jeff jetted back to the United States re-energized and with a fresh perspective, determined to be successful. “From then, I started going to church, and my goal became to help an infinite amount of people who have a profound desire to do better in life. “I had been a bad kid who surrounded myself with the wrong things, and I had almost been put in handcuffs, and I knew that had to change,” he adds.

After severing ties with the gang, Jeff paid particular attention to his education and that reflected in the improvement of his grades. He made everyone in his community proud of his achievement when he became the first student in the history of Uplift Community High School in Uptown, to enrol into the University of Illinois, Urbana, Champaigne. Jeff started his first business plan as an 18-year-old during his freshman year at the University of Illinois, where he has bachelors and master’s degrees in accounting from the Gies College of Business. He formed a client base by volunteering to do taxes for family and friends while he went to school and built that base to 100 people by the time he was 24 years old working at PwC.

When he hit his 100th client, Jeff quit his full-time corporate job to officially start Badu Tax Services, LLC in September 2016. What sparked his interest in launching these companies is his passion for helping people minimize their tax liability and ultimately multiplying their money by investing it and building multi-generational wealth.

Jeff’s company serves 1,500 clients in all 50 states and in Canada, China, Russia, Liberia and India, and now he has 21 independent tax preparers working as contractors under his firm’s umbrella. His goal is to have 50 contractors and an office in the United Kingdom within the next 12 months. Jeff says,“I was born to be an entrepreneur and learned from my parents’ examples” he said. “It’s very hard to find a job in Ghana, and if you really want to start to make money, you have to be an entrepreneur.”

He became a millionaire in 2018, while he was just 25, and his mission in life is to have financial freedom to change lives in the philanthropic world. Apart from his profession and philanthropic passion, Jeff is fond of reading and writing poetry. His radio segments on financial topics can be heard on WGHC 98.3 FM in Chicago. He has also been conferred with Lester H. McKeever Jr. Emerging Leader in Advancing Diversity Award by Illinois CPA Society in 2018.

We feel privileged to have Jeff as our esteemed client who has achieved so much in so less time. Jeff has hired 2 full time Tax staff from Entigrity some time ago and speaks highly of them. The reason why Jeff hired Entigrity was because he found us meeting the three main criteria he had in mind to hire an offshore staff. Entigrity works exclusively with accounting firms, provided competent and good quality people who were experts in accounting and most important of all highly maintains data security. Very generously he speaks,” I was evaluating a few companies as I was doing more research and Entigrity would definitely score just about a hundred on a scale of a hundred and the next best option would probably would score only twenty.” In a recent conversation with him, he went on to say that he would want to stay associated with Entigrity for the entire existence of his firm. Here is the video with the excerpts.

Infrastructure and Security in Remote Staffing for Accounting Firms

Hundreds of small and mid-sized accounting firms of America have found it very convenient to hire remote staff to cope up with the staffing challenges and also were able to save enormous and add value to their practice in the way. For small and mid-sized accounting firms, it is critical to have solid staff & accounting systems in place, so you can focus more on growing respective practices. A number of CPAs and Accounting firms outsource their work to third-party vendors to save time and cost to an in-house employee. But again that is like taking a chance with the quality of work to be delivered. Sometimes it works, sometimes not, but more on that in some other article.

In today’s competitive marketplace, hiring and retaining quality staff is one thing, but when remote staff is in a picture a bigger concern a lot of our clients have shown are related to the infrastructure of the workplace and security of their client data. Being a responsible remote staffing vendor we always have to make sure that the work is always carried out seamlessly and everything is secured. After all trust and credibility are the driving forces behind any organization’s business growth and success.

First and foremost required things for a remote staff are ‘up to date’ computers and seamless internet connection as these are the backbones of doing work as well as communication between a client and a remote staff.

While a remote staff may work from anywhere in the world, in our case offshore locations, therefore we make it very sure that they work under a supervised environment where all systems are working fine. Remote staffing includes on-premise infrastructure and support, and secure private, public and hybrid Cloud platform operations.

Infrastructure and Security provided by remote staffing for accounting firms

A high standard operating system with the dual desktop set up.
Performance Monitoring, Management, and Resolution.
IT engineers for Quick Desk Support
High standard security camera for staff monitoring.
24 hours power backup infrastructure
Ongoing support includes troubleshooting, management, and support of the storage infrastructure.
Security and firewall administration
In-house training center & highly experienced trainers
Monitoring and scheduling of backups and system event logs
Hardware and Software Firewall and VPN server administration
Audio – Video and screen sharing tools for smooth communication
Secure remote access to your software network for fast response

When you hire remote staff for your accounting firm, you enable your in-house marketing staff to focus on your business strategy and leave the nuts and bolts of accounting & tax related operations to us. With remote staffing, you will have direct access to a resource under high-security Infrastructure and act like in-house resource working at the offshore office.

When remote staffing agency provides their own workstation and technology, the cost savings for businesses can be significant. CPAs can maintain their business in smaller office—or even without an office at all—cutting off on rent and equipment costs. Remote work can also reduce your IT budget, as you may not need to secure and manage as many computers, software’s, hardware etc.

Read E-Book: HOW SMALL ACCOUNTING FIRMS CAN COLLABORATE ONLINE TO BUILD GLOBAL TEAMS

How Accounting firms Changing Its Hiring Process?

Out of the top 10 issues faced by accounting firms especially in US, are related Human Resources. May it be as above.

High Salary Expenses.
High Benefits and Compliances in Payroll.
High Attrition.
Low Productivity.
Work Load Pressure.
High Infrastructure and Operational Costs.
Succession Crisis

Keeping in mind the end goal to moderate all the above issues, numerous U.S. firms have started hiring Off-Site Dedicated remote staff from India, Philippines, and South Africa etc. A number of top firms have established their dedicated accounting center in India. Many small and midsize accounting firms from US have hired dedicated remote staff from Indian Offshore staffing company like Entigrity Remote Staffing. It is estimated that by 2020 U.S. accounting firms would enlist more than 100,000 Remote Employees off-shore with emerging technologies like remote access, cloud and network computing etc. Similar forces are opening new markets and geographies for accounting firms with all procedures in light of Clouds and all representatives based remotely.

Are you Thinking, Hiring Off-site/Remote Staff is only based on the Cost benefits? Here are some more key benefits:

COST DOES MATTER

With hiring Remote Staff from India, you can get the best talent and reduce your employee payroll budget by more than 75%! Remote staffing agency allows you to take Interview & handpick YOUR resources, having full access to their practice, experience, and skill set close by. Obviously, it accompanies different difficulties of correspondence and knows how on approaches of firms however if accurately handled having a right service provider, accounting firms can cut down Payroll and Overheads by over 75% through this adaptable employing model.

EXPAND YOUR BANDWIDTH

After all, accounting is individuals’ business so having greater data will always help in conveying the work in in the most legitimate way. With moderate assets accessible, bookkeeping firms will dependably want to grow and put resources into the transfer speed so they can extend the administrations portfolio.

100% Remote Access Control

With this model of hiring remote employees, accounting firms have broad control over quality standards and fundamental communications required for effective tasks. Also, the service provider manages, supervise and review the function on your behalf, so it can supplement your current administrative capacity as well. Also, with the latest time tracking and project management tools each and every progress can be tracked and made right from the comfort for you. Remote Staffing agency provides a better way to coordinate with your staff using different communication tools. The remote employee will direct report to you and manage timesheet based on daily task done by them.

Offers an Escape from Time and Financial Cost of Compliance

Working with a remote staff you can spare money related cost and Compliance. Remote staffing models enable bookkeeping firms to grow transfer speed and in the meantime evade all the finance and HR related oppressive legislation and expenses related with the same. This not just has an incredible effect on the total productivity yet, in addition, spare time and allows extraordinary mental peace.

Control Fixed Costs.

Remote Staffing simplifies your management responsibilities and enables you to focus more energies towards “rainmaking” and client retention. In other words, an accounting firm that hires remote staff, and focuses on core marketing and adds more services to the list. Using remote staff, it can help you focus on client acquisition, processing the work and client retention. Keep it simple and your clients will refer more business to your accounting practice.

CPAs can hire offshore part-time or seasonal tax accountants, bookkeeper, Sr. Accountant etc.

Over some undefined time frame, CPAs have realized that hiring full-time tax assistants result in expanding their expenses as far as in terms of having paid for sitting idle during a non-tax season. They neglect to use their abilities and time which turns into an extraordinary misfortune to them. As a better workaround, they have started look around offshore part-time or seasonal remote staff. The biggest benefit that CPAs get is they have to pay only when there is an overload of work. Seasonal remote staff help meet customer demands, increase revenue and maintain the company’s reputation.

Read E-Book: 10 BEST PRACTICES OF WORKING WITH REMOTE STAFF

If Going Paperless is Your firm’s New Year Objective

Any technology driven organization is primarily dependent on computing devices with a host of peripherals and software options, which complement the basic functions of a business. Digital medium has reduced our dependencies on a lot of unnecessary clutter, usually seen in an organization. Right from having ‘tiny post it’ notes to small hand written memos, which were used for office communication about a decade ago, to having important documents or files now available in digital form, received in email instantly! There’s a gradual but inevitable shift to a paperless with each passing day. Increasing business firms are now going the paperless way. Environmental concerns aside, having a paperless office has its own benefits over old school methodologies. Moreover, relying on less paper means, reduced consumables expenses for your organization. Furthermore, reduced space requirements for using and storing paper documents translate into lesser floor space requirements for any firm.

The Myth

However, paperless doesn’t mean any organization ‘Will not need’ any paper-based documents or ‘can operate without’ any paper in their office premises. That’s the primary myth associated with the term — “paperless office”. Any office needs paper for daily functioning of important tasks and chores. What needs to be understood here is, no matter the nature of your organization, there are some basic functions or business processes, which cannot do without any paperwork. For example, accounting, inventory, legal, logistics, etc. All these need the very basis of paperwork because of the scope of the work they address and manage. In all these business functions, the need for proofs and records necessitates the use of paper-based documents at every step, and every day. For such purposes and functions, no business can ever avoid using any papers at all!

Physical to Digital

However, there are many other opportunities where you can cut down on or eliminate using any papers at all. For starters, once you have all paperwork signed and filed away, you can using document scanners to convert the physical paper form of all such important documents into digital copies of their original physical versions. This goes a long way, as digital copies aren’t as affected by physical environmental changes as physical versions of documents are easily affected over time. Moreover, physical suffer damage due to mishandling and incorrect storage, often due to repeated retrieval procedures. It makes more sense to have documents such as bills, receipts, contracts and business cards digitally scanned and converted into editable documents using the latest OCR technology.

Storage & Security

It makes easier to store and retrieve digital copies in a logical format much convenient whilst increasing the security of any and all such confidential documents. Furthermore, you can restrict the access to each document in that repository to select employees in your organization. Moreover, there can always be a track of when anyone accessed it. This ensures that there isn’t any unauthorized access to even a single document without permission from the management hierarchy. Furthermore, in lines with digitization of all physical documents, you can and rather should pursue requesting paperless documents such as statements, reports, etc. from financial institutions to begin with. This makes provisions beforehand without having to convert physical copies into digital ones. It serves multiple purposes such as reducing the time taken in transmission of documents, safety & security of handling and storage, and restricted access permissions for only those entitled access to such documents.

Cloud Storage

Alternatively, you can go for cloud storage solutions for document management. Although digitization has far more advantages over maintaining physical copies of your documents, it has a few concerns that need to be addressed. Since you are storing your documents on a local computer or file server, there could be hardware failure, or security lapses if the protocols weren’t set stringent enough. Moreover, it is tedious and time-consuming process to send/receive any digital documents, frequently. These are rare but not entirely avoidable issues, which can be solved with structured planning and implementation of policies.

However, to mitigate such issues, Cloud Storage technologies have evolved a lot in the past few years, becoming cost-efficient along with being conveniently accessible from anywhere, including mobile devices! It can be said that cloud technology is the future, given its increased reliability, security, accessibility, and economical costs for setting up and using it daily. There are scores of options available nowadays, free and paid with various plans suitable as per your requirements.

Taking Notes

Consecutively, cloud technologies have crossed the bridge, going beyond offering storage services. For many business firms, taking notes, memos, To-Do or Tasks lists, etc. are daily occurrences on the work floor. In order to have a paperless, these activities would also need their digital counterparts just like storage options. From having Windows built-in Notepad and Sticky Notes, to dedicated Notes-taking applications such as EverNote, Wunderlist, Google Keep, etc. are some of the few popular options leading the pack today.

End Note:

Considering the above issues and solutions, it makes more than necessary to begin digitization of physical documents, and implementing digital replacements of traditional avenues of daily business operations, which required use of paper. Furthermore, migrating to cloud technology would increase the efficiency as well as grant greater security to your digital documents from day one.

How to find the Right Tax Accountant for Accounting firm

For any business, whether small or big sized firm, everyone needs tax accountant for routine financial operations, records and tax planning.

In the event that somebody reveals to you that he contracted a tax accountant to do his accounting and tax-related tasks, you may think that his tax situation must be difficult. But, it’s not like that. Many organizations can get maximum benefits from hiring a tax accountant, and a lot do. But before that, you should take some right steps while hiring an accountant or tax preparer for your business.

Understand Why You Need a Tax Accountant

first of all, you need to identify what exactly you expect from an accountant. Here are some common causes for why you need one.

Preparing tax return is time-consuming, hectic or confusing.
You want to make sure your tax return is accurate.
Organize and update the company’s tax database
Prepare necessary paperwork for tax payments and returns
Identify tax savings and suggest ways to increase profits
Complete quarterly and annual tax reports
Estimate and track tax returns

Finding a Tax Accountant

Here are some tips for finding a tax professional with the specialized skill you need. Remember one thing, not the accountant, are ultimately responsible for the info involved in your tax return.

Referrals are usually the best way to find a trustworthy accountant. Ask your friends and family members, if there any reference they have in their contact. It can be helpful to ask someone who has a tax situation that’s like to your own.
Determine your business needs: Do you want an accountant to just handle the books and file your taxes, or someone who can give advice for business grows? It’s also important to ask if the accountant has the authorizations to sign financial statements and do legal compliance work.
Areas of Expertise & Services Delivered: Many CPAs have their own areas of expertise and provide specific services to clients. If you are looking for tax planning, business entity choice, or IRS representation, make sure the accountant you hire to work with has the essential skills and practice to do the job done.
Many Local firms specialized in tax preparing for individuals and small businesses but ask if the firm has the expertise to manage your taxes if there’s anything unique situation.

Questions To Ask Before You Hire Remote Tax Accountant

When you shorting your list of potential accountants, schedule a time to speak to each one of them and ask some basic questions. Here are a few questions to get you started:

How much-experienced Person will you have?
Require Accounting software knowledge
What kind of tools will be used for communication
Remote access to staff
Are you providing Daily Report?
What if my staff member is on leave?
Where will you Keep work files and other required stuff?

Remote staffing: The best and cost-effective way to hire a right tax accountant. Experts at a specialized staffing agency help you focus your search for Tax professionals with industry experience, quickly and successfully. You can hire a remote employee from a staffing agency and gain learning curve benefits. A staffing firm also helps save you money because it can handle all aspects of the staffing process: personal interviews, technical skills evaluations, soft skills reviews and determination of the suitability of a candidate’s fit with your work environment and all.

A staffing agency can give advice on what mix of workers you need, including full-time, part-time or temporary staff. It will save your cost up to 75% compared to an in-house staff.

Accountant vs. Bookkeeper: What Do They Do for Your Business?

To begin, accountants and bookkeepers are involved at various phases of the financial cycle, with a bookkeeper tending to adhere to the day-to-day procedures and an accountant serving an additional different role at reporting, tax filing, and analysis. Let’s take a look at the roles of an accountant and a bookkeeper to have a clearer comprehension of what each expert can improve the situation of your business.

Functions of a Bookkeeper generally DO

Bookkeeping requires at the prior phases of the financial cycle. A bookkeeper’s job is to oversee and log the day by day financial transactions of a business, which include sales, buys, and payments, receipts. Be that as it may, a bookkeeper can also be liable for other tasks, such as completing payroll and checking accounts receivables and working with supervisors and controllers to ample monthly financial closings.

The role of a bookkeeper is frequently subject to the extent of the business and the number of transactions the business makes day-to-day. A bookkeeper’s tasks are likely to increase as a business grows and as the company’s financials get more difficult.

There are a various Enterprise-level bookkeeping software is able to generate the custom reports or complete financial documents that previously fell under the obligations of an accountant. This converging of the two professions means a business that doesn’t have confounded financials can make do with utilizing bookkeeping services most of the time and only hire an accountant when it’s time to auditing and tax preparing.

Functions of an Accountant vs. a Controller

Accounting majorly deals with interpreting the data generated by appropriate bookkeeping. The essential functions of an accountant incorporate analyzing financial statements, completing income tax returns, and helping entrepreneurs and business owners understand all the tax and budgetary controls that apply to their organization.

Controllers likewise help business owners have a superior comprehension of their business’s financial health. Controllers convert a bookkeeper’s data into different financial reports that detail the organization’s financial standing, including its benefit and income. Entrepreneurs likewise depend on their controllers for financial estimating and also planning and examination.

Which Financial Professional Is Best for Your Business?

The choice to utilize an accountant, bookkeeper or both is resolute by the size of your organization, the difficulty of your activities and financials, and the demands of your business. If you’re CPA or Accounting firm and need to hire remote working bookkeeper or accountant when it is time to file taxes or generate end-of-the-year financial reports may be all the accounting help your business needs. Companies like Entigrity can help you to find the best resource depends on your needs and save up to 75% compared to hire in-house resource.

To get more info about remote staffing for accounting and bookkeeping needs. Feel free to visit our website www.entigrity.com or email us your staffing needs on info@entigrity.com