eThesis - School of Business electronic theses

RESEARCH OBJECTIVES The main research question in this research project is: what are the most appropriate and easy to monitor quality indicators for the finance and accounting services in the partnership between Company A and Company B? This research project focuses on such areas as service quality, performance measurement and quality indicators in outsourcing relationships.

RESEARCH APPROACH The theoretical review concentrated on finance and accounting outsourcing and some of the most popular tools developed for performance management and service quality assessment. The empirical part of the research project concentrated on a case study of two companies that have established an outsourcing relationship in order to handle the finance and accounting services.

RESEARCH METHODOLOGY In this research project, qualitative case study research method was utilized. The data for the case study was gathered by arranging a preliminary questionnaire survey, semi-structured interviews and conducting a questionnaire survey.

MAIN FINDINGS The business case analyzes showed that it is possible to create quality indicators for outsourced finance and accounting services by conducting SERVQUAL questionnaire survey and semi-structured interviews, and building a strategy map and utilizing Balanced Scorecard (BSC).