Offshore accounting:what moves and what stays.

Offshore accounting fails in two ways: the wrong work is sent, or the right work is sent without a clear hand-off. Both are avoidable, and both are decided before the first month.

The principle

Send the work that follows rules. Keep the work that needs judgement, relationships or professional responsibility. Then write down, for every task, who prepares, who reviews, who decides, and when.

What moves well

Work travels well when it is high-volume, repeatable, and can be checked against a source document or a rule:

• Ledger processing: purchase and sales invoices, receipts, expense claims, coding to the chart of accounts.
• Reconciliations: bank, credit card, supplier statements, customer accounts, intercompany balances.
• Recurring journals: accruals, prepayments, depreciation, payroll journals from a payroll report.
• Registers and schedules: fixed-asset registers, lease and loan schedules, prepayment and accrual schedules.
• First drafts: management accounts packs, KPI tables, variance lists for your commentary.
• Year-end preparation: lead schedules and supporting analyses for the person who signs.

What stays with you

• The client relationship. Your client talks to you. The offshore team works through you.
• Judgement. Accounting policies, estimates, provisions, going-concern questions, anything that needs an opinion.
• Tax positions. Treatment decisions, and any filing that carries a signature.
• Authority over money. Approving and releasing payments.
• Professional responsibility. Anything that your professional body or law reserves to a licensed person stays with that person.

Setting the hand-offs

A one-page responsibility table, agreed before the first month, prevents most problems:

Add three agreements alongside it: the cut-off (by when documents must arrive to be in the month), the query route (one log, not scattered emails), and the materiality threshold below which the offshore team may post without asking.

A month-end across two clocks

In winter, New Delhi is five and a half hours ahead of London and ten and a half ahead of New York. That is an advantage if the close is planned around it:

1. Working day −1 (your evening): last documents and bank statements sent.
2. Working day 1 (our day): bank reconciliations, invoice processing and cut-off checks done before your morning.
3. Working days 2–3: accruals, prepayments and recurring journals prepared; queries batched for the overlap window in the Indian afternoon.
4. Working day 4: second-person review in India; open-items list finalised.
5. Working day 5 (your morning): management pack and open items in your inbox for review.

Data protection on both sides

Accounting data contains personal data: employee pay, supplier and customer details. Two sets of rules apply.

Your side. Your own law governs the transfer out of your country:

• UK: transfers to a country without UK adequacy regulations, such as India, need an appropriate safeguard, usually the International Data Transfer Agreement or the UK Addendum to the EU standard contractual clauses, with a transfer risk assessment.
• US: there is no single federal privacy law, but sector rules apply. For tax return information, Treasury Regulations under section 7216 require the taxpayer's consent before it is disclosed to a preparer outside the United States.
• UAE: the Personal Data Protection Law (Federal Decree-Law No. 45 of 2021) sets conditions for cross-border transfer; the DIFC and ADGM financial centres have their own data-protection laws.

India's side. The Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 applies in India, with the DPDP Rules notified in November 2025 and most obligations phased in over the following eighteen months. Section 17(1)(d) exempts most of the Act's provisions where personal data of people outside India is processed in India under a contract with a person outside India. Security and contractual obligations still matter: your contract should set them out.

Starting small

Begin with one process that is frequent and well documented, usually bank reconciliations or purchase ledger. Run one month in parallel and compare. Measure three things from the start: days to close, age of open items, and review points per pack. When all three are stable, add the next process.