In-house vs outsourced accounting for small business

Compare total cost, not salary against fee

The usual comparison puts a bookkeeper's salary next to a firm's annual fee, and the salary looks competitive. It is not the same number. An employee costs salary plus the employer's share of payroll taxes, paid time off, benefits, software licences, training, equipment, recruitment, and your own time managing them. A firm's fee covers all of it, including the CPA review the in-house role would still need at year-end.

The continuity problem is the one that bites

A single in-house bookkeeper is a single point of failure. When they are on vacation, remittances still have deadlines. When they resign, the knowledge leaves with them, and it usually leaves mid-cycle. Businesses discover this at the worst possible time — during a sales-tax audit, a financing round, or a year-end when nobody can explain the prior year's entries. A firm carries the same knowledge across a team.

When in-house genuinely wins

• Transaction volume needs daily attention rather than weekly batches
• The work requires constant judgment calls only someone inside the business can make
• You need someone physically present for cash handling or inventory
• You are large enough to hire more than one person, which restores segregation of duties

The hybrid most growing businesses land on

An in-house person handles day-to-day recording, invoicing and payments, and a CPA firm handles month-end review, sales tax, payroll compliance and year-end filings. That gets the responsiveness of an employee and the expertise range and review of a firm, and it fixes the segregation-of-duties problem — the person recording transactions is not the person reviewing them.