Source - (July, 2000 CFO Magazine) 

Smaller firms are just as capable of outsourcing their financial functions as the big corporations are. Until recently, a company like Re'Nu probably wouldn't have been able to secure a business process outsourcing contract at all. Such contracts are usually large and long term (10+ Years), with the company's existing staff and relevant equipment assets absorbed by the outsourcer, and with the client billed on a cost-plus basis. In addition, the primary financial BP outsourcers have been the Big Five accounting firms, which, until recently, wouldn't even look at a client unless it had sales of more than $1 billion.
But a convergence of several factors has made it easier for clients like Re'Nu to find financial business process outsourcing (BPO) on a small scale. The Internet and the availability of bandwidth, for example, have allowed a new genre of outsourcers to arrive on the scene. Called "growthsourcers" by some, these financial outsourcing boutiques are springing up all over the country and delivering their services via the Web, which allows them to target a smaller market by centralizing their operations into shared services centers that serve multiple clients.
For their part, companies have grown increasingly comfortable with handing off processing functions of all types. And a hot job market argues in favor of that trend. Although no size estimates are available for this new market area, today startups, dot-coms, and small and midsize firms are just as capable of outsourcing their financial functions as the big corporations are. In fact, says Frank Casale, executive director of the Outsourcing Institute, an outsourcing research, consulting, and marketing firm, "in the last three years, we've been overwhelmed with requests for information and help from small companies that want to use outsourcing across the board."

ONE-TWO PUNCH
One of the drivers of this growthsourcing trend is the combined BPO/ASP capability that outsourcing companies are offering. Some observers point to this one-two combination as particularly beneficial for companies that cringe at investing in large, powerful accounting programs as well as at the demands of staffing up and running a finance department. And nowhere is this paired offering more attractive than in the dot-com startup world.
Randy Schwed, controller of Epoch Partners, a pre-revenue dot-com financial-services startup based in San Francisco, points to this as a key factor in his decision to outsource his financial processes. "We're developing a lot of proprietary applications that are core to our business model," Schwed says. "We'd rather have [IT personnel] doing that than working on financial systems, which are boring and don't make the company any money.