Key points
- A single in-house accountant cannot separate duties, so the arrangement has no internal control by construction.
- The fully loaded cost of a hire is salary plus insurance, leave cover, software, training and the owner’s supervision time.
- A firm is bought by scope, not by hours, and it can be scaled down when a period is quiet.
- A full-time hire becomes cheaper when the volume of daily entry — not the complexity of it — fills a working day.
- The hybrid that works: in-house data entry, external monthly reconciliation, reporting and independent review.
For most small and medium companies the honest answer is neither option on its own. The work splits into two different kinds — daily entry, which benefits from being inside the company, and reconciliation, reporting and review, which benefit from being independent of the person who did the entry.
What does an in-house accountant really cost?
The salary is the smallest part of the decision. The full cost is the salary, social insurance, the cover needed when the person is on leave or resigns, the accounting software licence, training, and the owner’s own time spent supervising work they cannot independently verify.
The last item is the one companies never price. When there is no independent review, the owner becomes the review — and the owner is the most expensive reviewer in the company.
Why is one accountant a control problem, not a staffing one?
With one accountant, the person who records a transaction is also the person who approves it and often the person who holds the cash or the stock. That is not a comment on their integrity: it is a structural condition, and the absence of separated duties is the single most common condition behind undetected error and loss.
A small company cannot always split the roles across people. What it can do is put the recording inside and the review outside, which achieves separation without a second salary.
What are you actually buying from a firm?
From a firm you buy a scope and a set of dated outputs, not a number of hours. That has two practical consequences: the deliverables are defined in writing before the work starts, and the arrangement can be scaled down in a quiet period without a redundancy conversation.
What you do not buy is presence. A firm is not in the building every morning, so anything that depends on being there — issuing a delivery note, receiving a supplier, holding petty cash — still has to belong to someone inside the company.
When does a full-time hire become cheaper?
A full-time hire becomes cheaper when the daily volume of routine entry fills a working day on its own. The trigger is volume, not complexity: complex work that happens twice a year is bought, and simple work that happens every hour is hired.
| Daily document volume | What usually fits | Why |
|---|---|---|
| A few documents a day, one store, one bank account | An external firm only | There is not enough routine work to occupy anyone in house, and reconciliation matters more than presence. |
| Steady daily movement, one or two stores | In-house data entry plus external reconciliation and reporting | Entry needs to happen where the documents are; review needs to be independent. |
| Continuous movement, several branches or stores | An in-house team plus independent oversight | Volume justifies the salaries; the team still needs a second, independent pair of eyes. |
What does the hybrid look like in practice?
The arrangement that works for most SMEs is: one person inside the company issues and files the documents and enters them; an external firm reconciles the banks monthly, closes the period and issues a fixed report set on a fixed date; and the same firm — or a second one — reviews the work independently and reports to the owner.
The question is not who does the accounting. It is who checks it — and whether that person could ever be the same one.
The hybrid also survives the event that breaks every other arrangement: the person doing the entry leaving. Because the reconciliation, the reporting definitions and the closed periods sit outside the company, a replacement is trained into an existing system rather than asked to reconstruct one.
What about a part-time accountant?
A part-time accountant is a reasonable answer to a volume problem and a poor answer to a control problem. It reduces the salary but keeps the single point of failure: the same person still records, approves and reports, and now does so with less time to reconcile.
The arrangement also tends to fail at period end, which is exactly when the work concentrates. If the part-time arrangement is chosen, fix the reporting date in writing and make the reconciliation — not the entry — the deliverable that has to be met.
What should you ask a firm before signing?
Ask for the deliverables and the dates in writing, and ask who specifically will do the work. A proposal that lists activities rather than outputs is a proposal you cannot hold anyone to.
- Which reports do we receive, and on which date each period?
- Who does the work, and who reviews it before it reaches us?
- Whose system do the records live in, and can we export everything if we leave?
- What is explicitly not included, and what is billed separately?
- What happens if our documents arrive late — is the report late too, or reported with exceptions listed?
How do you switch without losing a period?
Switch at a closed period boundary, never mid-period. Before the handover, agree the closing balances for stock, cash, customers, suppliers and loans in writing, and have both sides sign them: those balances become the opening position that everything afterwards is measured from.
Take the records with you in a usable form, not as printouts, and keep the access credentials for whichever system holds them. The most expensive handovers are the ones where the previous arrangement ended before anyone established what the balances were.
Five questions to answer before you decide
- If the person who does the accounting left tomorrow, could someone else close this month?
- Who approves a payment, and is it the same person who records it?
- When was the last month whose bank balances were reconciled against the official statement?
- Can you get stock, profit and receivables in one report, within a day, without asking anyone?
- Who reviews the work — and are they independent of the person who did it?
If the answers point to entry and reporting rather than supervision, the Bookkeeping package is the fit. If the entry already happens and nobody independent is checking it, that is Oversight & Review. The seven-question self-check separates the two in about two minutes.