How F&A Outsourcing Helps Student Housing Providers

As the student housing markets consolidate and mature, the chances of increasing profits through fixed price points like rent increase, management fees, extra charges for add-on amenities, etc. are likely to hit a speed breaker – especially when there’s a higher demand for affordable student accommodation compared to luxury accommodation.

In this scenario, improving the efficiency of back-office processes is a key challenge – and opportunity – for student housing manager and investors. Many student housing providers have already taken proactive steps towards efficiency by optimizing back-end processes and reducing back-office operating costs, while others are yet to begin the journey. From our service to the student housing industry and the experience of our clients, we can say boldly that your student housing business can expect the following benefits by outsourcing accounting and finance functions:

1. Freedom to focus on what’s important

Student housing managers want to spend more time and resources to focus on filling up beds and growing the business. However, it could prove difficult to focus on growing a business when you’re busy running all aspects of it. There are several non-revenue generating elements such as; bookkeeping, accounts receivable management, accounts payable management, financial reporting that could be outsourced to experts, freeing up your time to be used in more productive endeavours. To increase the number of sites you manage and to expand your interests to other geographies, it’s crucial to utilize the expertise of specialists.

An expert partner would understand the unique and multifaceted accounting issues that your student housing business faces. QX offer’s end-to-end accounting services to many of the top ten student housing providers in the UK, and we have in place the effective processes, people and software for delivering efficient finance & accounts (F&A) outsourcing services.

2. Compliance with regulations

Student housing management firms face complex accounting issues that stem from managing thousands of individual lettable properties across dozens of sites. In addition to the difficulty created by the sheer number and types of tenants and unavoidable tenant churn, there are also accounting and taxation laws that witness major changes every year. Keeping on top of all the changes can be a tedious and quite time consuming; nonetheless, it’s a required activity and one that can be outsourced to reduce overhead expenditures and consolidate processes.

A good outsourcing provider can make it so that your business stays on the right side of the constantly evolving regulations while also streamlining the in-house team’s reporting and documentation needs by maintaining accurate records, providing support and assistance during audits and inspections.

3. Smarter decisions through insightful reporting

Accurate and reliable financial information is the foundation for growing your student housing business and for making the correct decisions. Access to detailed, consolidated and precise information in the form of monthly, quarterly and annual reports is not only essential for formulating strategies for business growth, but investors and shareholders also expect to study the reports. However, already overloaded in-house student housing F&A teams often just don’t have the time to focus on labour-intensive management reporting activities.

Our management accounting and reporting services focus on delivering easy-to-digest financial information across a range of management roles. We are flexible and can provide bespoke financial and statistical information reports as per your specification. This information will help you stay on the top of changing compliance landscape, mitigate risks, assess your business’s financial performance, shape business strategy and maximise profits. In many cases, we can even help your team speed up month-end closures by 2-3 days.

4. Extend your team and never worry about staffing issues

With the right outsourcing support, you don’t just outsource accounting to a third party and hope for the best – you essentially extend your own team in an offshore location. We don’t just ‘do’ the accounts for you, we work to make them better, give you feedback and commentary, identify cost savings or better ways of operating. We follow best practices and continually review to ensure ongoing process improvement for your business.
With a reliable outsourcing partner, you have the flexibility to ramp resources up or down on the basis of your changing requirements. Easily add resources when your requirements spike, move beyond SLAs to direct resources to urgent tasks.

Gain the QX advantage!

QX serves some of the biggest players in the student housing industry and we specialize in processing a high volume of transactions. Our property accountants understand and excel at supporting the unique accounting requirements of student housing businesses operating several sites across locations.

Our student housing accountants adhere to best practices & GAAP (Generally accepted accounting principles), introduce process excellence, and drive initiatives for strategic use of technology, enabling your business to cut operating costs while delivering timely and accurate accounting services.

We work with most of the major student housing software systems, and we can work with almost any software that you prefer. In addition, with the help of our in-house IT, we can help you integrate, implement, enhance and build systems and applications to streamline your processes. We also provide a dedicated Purchase Order system which can help your company digitize and automate supplier payments, where this will add value.

Considering to outsource finance & accounting services to India? Learn more about how our team can help you. Call our student accommodation expert Ravi Kurani on 0845 838 2592.

Originally published Oct 02, 2017 09:10:53, updated Jan 15 2025

Topics: Student Housing