Your first 90 days with an offshore bookkeeper: a checklist

The bookkeepers we recruit have been screened by a recruiter and have passed a technical test reviewed by a qualified accountant. Good onboarding is what turns a strong candidate into a productive member of your team. Use this checklist for the first 90 days, which is also the period our guarantee covers: free replacement within 90 days of their start date.

Before day one: access and accounts

• Confirm the start date and the agreed working hours.
• Check the NDA and confidentiality agreement are signed.
• Create a named user account in each system they will use. No shared logins.
• Set role-based access: only the clients and functions the role needs.
• Turn on multi-factor authentication wherever your systems support it.
• Agree that work stays inside your cloud software, with no client data stored locally.
• Put your International Data Transfer Agreement and transfer risk assessment on file. Our security page explains what we support you with.

Before day one: software seats

• List every tool the role touches: bookkeeping software, receipt capture, practice management, email and chat.
• Set up a user seat in each, just as you would for any new team member.
• Share your process notes, checklists and working-paper templates in one place.

Week 1: first tasks

• Hold a welcome call: introduce the team, the clients and how work flows through the practice.
• Start with two or three straightforward clients with clean bank feeds.
• Begin with bank reconciliations and transaction coding.
• Agree a daily handover: what was done, what is waiting, what needs a decision.
• Name one person in your firm as their manager and reviewer.

Weeks 2 to 4: build a review routine

• Review all work at first, and give feedback the same day where you can.
• Keep a simple log of review points per job.
• Add clients each week as quality holds.
• Introduce purchase and sales ledgers once reconciliations are consistently right.

Month 2: widen the work

• Move on to VAT return preparation for your review, if the role includes it.
• Reduce review to sampling on clients where review points have dropped.
• Ask your bookkeeper to suggest improvements to your checklists. Fresh eyes often spot gaps.

Month 3: settle in and decide

• Compare review points per job with week one. They should be clearly lower.
• Agree the steady-state workload and the clients they own.
• If something isn’t working, raise it now. Free replacement within 90 days of their start date.

Throughout: monthly check-ins with us

With recruitment plus staffing, we check in with you and with your bookkeeper every month and act early if something isn’t working. Use those calls to flag anything you’d like to change, from hours to scope.

Final review, sign-off and HMRC submissions stay with your firm’s qualified professionals throughout.

Where to go next

See how we recruit from briefing call to aftercare, or read more about DigiHyre.

Before day one, see what an offshore bookkeeper does and costs and the access and data controls we put in place. If the first weeks raise doubts, our replacement guarantee explains what happens next, and our pricing page sets out every term.