Beyond "We Can't Hire": How Accounting Firms Are Restructuring Around the Talent Shortage

Accounting firms have been trying to solve a hiring problem with hiring for a while now, and it isn’t working. Job ads sit open for months. Graduates are scarce. Experienced staff are being poached faster than they can be replaced. Some firms have stopped waiting for the shortage to ease and started redesigning how the work gets done instead.

The Shortage Isn’t Closing on Its Own

Projections point to Australia needing well over 330,000 accountants, with a shortfall running into the tens of thousands. Tax accountants and external auditors have been added to the national skills shortage list, which reflects what firms have been experiencing directly: fewer qualified candidates applying, longer vacancies, and higher salary expectations for the people who are available.

A better recruitment campaign won’t correct this on its own. The pipeline of new accounting graduates has been shrinking for years, and firms competing for the same shrinking pool of experienced staff are mostly just moving talent between each other rather than growing the total supply.

What “Alternative Workforce Structure” Actually Means in Practice

Some firms are now openly structuring their teams around a mix of onshore advisory staff and offshore compliance and processing staff, with roughly a third of the total workload sitting offshore in some models. That figure varies by firm, but the underlying logic is consistent: the work that requires local qualification, client relationship judgement, and regulatory sign-off stays with a smaller, more senior onshore team. The work that’s process-driven and high-volume moves to a dedicated offshore team working under that team’s direction.

This is a deliberate restructure that firms plan for. Firms doing it well have mapped their workflow before making the change, rather than handing over whatever tasks happen to be backlogged in a busy week.

A firm running this model typically has a smaller onshore team than it would have had five years ago, but that team is entirely made up of qualified accountants doing qualified accountant work. The offshore team, working under documented procedures and reporting into the same senior staff, handles the volume that used to consume a disproportionate share of those qualified hours. The total headcount often ends up similar. What changes is which parts of the business each person is spending their day on.

What Moves Offshore Without Touching Advisory Quality

BAS preparation, bank reconciliations, workpaper assembly, data entry from source documents, standard AML/KYC document collection for firms now captured under Tranche 2, and first-pass review of routine returns before a senior accountant signs off: all of this is process work with a defined standard of correctness. A trained offshore accounting specialist working from documented procedures can own it completely, which frees the qualified accountant’s time for the client conversations, judgement calls, and complex work that actually requires their qualification.

In a firm running a hybrid model well, a typical offshore role might combine three or four of these functions into one position: an accounting support specialist who handles workpaper preparation for a set of client files, runs the initial bank reconciliation, and flags variances for the reviewing accountant to check before sign-off. That’s a genuinely full role built around real, recurring volume, not a scattered set of leftover tasks assigned because no one else wanted them.

What Stays Onshore

Client advisory conversations, tax position judgement calls, final review and sign-off on lodgements, and anything requiring a registered tax agent or a specific professional designation stay exactly where they are. The restructure keeps the same number of qualified people the firm needs and changes what those people spend their day doing.

What Changes for the Local Team

The most immediate effect firms report is that senior accountants stop spending Friday afternoons on data entry and start spending it on the client work the firm actually needs from them. That shift matters for retention too. Experienced accountants who feel like they’re doing the job they trained for are less likely to be the ones a competitor poaches next.

Where to Start

The starting point is mapping the current workload against who’s actually doing each task today, then separating what requires qualification from what requires accuracy and consistency. Firms that skip this step and hire offshore staff into an undefined role end up with a specialist who’s underused and a senior team that’s still buried, because nothing about the work actually changed hands cleanly.

If your firm has been trying to solve a growing workload with local hiring that isn’t landing, that mapping exercise is the more productive place to start.

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