When most people hear the term outsourcing, they might think of calling customer service representatives that sound like they are nowhere near their home country. While hiring people in other countries (usually as a way to pay employees less money) is one form of outsourcing, it is not the only way. In fact, there are many ways that you can hire locals while still outsourcing. Below are two of the best ways outsourcing can be done in small businesses.

Hire an Accountant

It is not likely that a small business will need to hire an in-house accountant. This is especially true when considering that business owners can take care of many work-related expenses without consulting a professional. However, there are times when even the most skilled businessperson might need to hire an accountant, especially during tax season.

To outsource accounting work, all a business owner needs to do is contract a freelance accountant or hiring an accounting business to help. Either one of these counts as outsourcing work; this is because you will be hiring someone outside of your business to do the work. This is a great solution for any business that only needs accounting work done occasionally.

Ship Through a Service

Many businesses that are good-based (rather than service-based) will often sell items online. This can work for both shops that run entirely online and shops that have a physical storefront as well. With selling things online comes shipping things. Setting up items to be shipped can be time-consuming and tedious. Since it is such a repetitive task, hiring a shipping service to take care of this for you can help to save time.

There are a few ways that business owners can do this. If a business owner is selling items strictly online, they may be able to have the order fulfilled by a third-party business, such as having customers buy products that are fulfilled by Amazon. Another way is to use an online shipping service that allows you to print stamps or address labels from home. With this option, you will still need to ship items yourself, but you can save a trip to the post office (and maybe some money too).

Basically, it is best for small businesses to outsource work that either is highly skilled but not needed very often or work that is needed often but requires little to no skill. An accounting and shipping service are both great examples, but there are many other great options out there.