the Cost of Temporary Accounting Employees

My company had some 2007 year end accounting that needed to be taken care of. We got really behind and hired two temporary employees to work for 3 weeks helping us updated our books and our year end ledgers. We paid the temporary personnel company $18.00 an hour for each of our employees.

Overall it was a decent experience but I'm not sure if we'd do it again. We obviously saved a lot of cost in not having to advertise and interview. However, we chose to hire two people who didn't have a lot of experience in accounting. They both had some accounting classes and had done general administrative work and passed a test administered by the temp personnel company that showed they were good at basic math skills. The employees were hard working and cared a great deal about doing everything right. However, the amount of time that it took to train them was more than we'd bargained for. We spent about 2 days at the beginning of their assignment explaining a lot of procedures to them. This not only was time we were paying them for and not getting any work out of the for but also time my co-worker and I were unable to bill for our own purposes. I think it would have been more cost effective overall to pay more for people with more experience that would have required less direction.

Consider the time involved in training temporary employees before deciding this is the cheapest and best route to go when extra work arises.