The Accounting Talent Shortage Won't Be Solved by Hiring Another Accountant

Industry commentary now points to a shortfall running into the millions of accountants globally, with Australia and New Zealand facing demand for well over 300,000 accountants and roughly half of firms reporting severe staffing shortages. Local projections put demand at tens of thousands of accounting, audit, and finance positions by the end of the decade, against a graduate pipeline that keeps shrinking.

For a firm feeling this directly, the instinct is to keep trying to hire. That instinct is understandable and increasingly unproductive, since the gap between how much compliance and advisory work needs doing and how many qualified people are available to do it has held steady or widened for several years running, rather than easing as a temporary dip in applicants might. Firms that keep waiting for the hiring market to loosen are competing for a shrinking pool against every other firm doing the same thing.

Why “hire another accountant” stopped working

A decade ago, a firm short on capacity could reasonably expect to fill a role within a few months if the salary was competitive. That assumption no longer holds. Roles sit open for longer, salary expectations have risen faster than fee structures in many firms, and even a successful hire takes months to become genuinely productive on client work.

Meanwhile, the work itself hasn’t gotten any smaller. Compliance deadlines, BAS cycles, and client expectations for turnaround haven’t slowed down to match the shrinking supply of accountants willing and available to do the work.

The tiered model firms are actually moving toward

The firms managing this well have stopped treating “accountant” as a single job and started separating the work into tiers based on what it actually requires.

Advisory work, the strategic conversations, tax planning, and client relationship management that genuinely need a qualified accountant’s judgment, sits at the top. A middle tier handles review-level work: checking and finalising what’s been prepared, catching genuine issues, and making judgment calls on ambiguous items. A foundation tier handles high-volume, process-driven work: data entry, reconciliations, document collection and organisation, and first-pass preparation of routine returns and BAS lodgements.

The shortage bites hardest at the foundation tier, because it’s the highest-volume layer and the one qualified accountants are least suited to spend their time on. It’s also the layer where offshore capacity and workflow automation genuinely work, since the tasks are repeatable and don’t require the judgment that makes an accountant’s time valuable in the first place.

What actually moves to the foundation tier first

Data entry and bank feed reconciliation are usually the first tasks firms move, since they’re high-volume, low-ambiguity, and easiest to check for accuracy once someone else has done them. Document collection and organisation, chasing clients for missing information, filing it against the right job, follows close behind. First-pass preparation of routine BAS lodgements and straightforward returns, reviewed and finalised by a qualified accountant before lodgement, is where firms with more mature managed offshore accounting and bookkeeping roles tend to end up.

The sequencing matters. Firms that try to move review-level judgment calls to the foundation tier too early run into quality problems fast, because the tier was built for volume and consistency, not ambiguity. Firms that keep genuinely repeatable, low-judgment work stuck with qualified accountants, out of habit rather than necessity, simply continue running short-staffed on the work that actually needs their expertise.

Take a twelve-partner practice that moved bank reconciliations and document chasing to a dedicated offshore team over a six-month period. Oversight of the work stayed with the partners throughout. What changed was that accountants stopped spending Monday mornings chasing outstanding client documents and started spending that time on review and advisory work instead, the work the firm was actually short-staffed to deliver.

Making this work without compromising quality

The firms that get this right treat the transition as a documentation project before it’s a staffing project. Chart of accounts conventions, reconciliation standards, reporting templates, and escalation triggers, when does something get flagged up rather than processed automatically, all need to be written down clearly enough that someone new to the firm’s specific client base can follow them consistently. HIPPO’s earlier look at how firms document procedures for a production and review split covers what that documentation actually needs to contain before a foundation-tier hire starts.

Skipping that step is where offshore or automated capacity gets a bad name. A foundation-tier team working from an undocumented, tribal-knowledge process will make the same kind of mistakes a new junior hire would make without training, and for the same reason. A foundation-tier team working from a clearly documented process, with a defined escalation path back to the review tier, tends to perform as reliably as any other part of the practice.

What a realistic transition looks like

Most firms start with one workflow rather than the whole practice: bank reconciliations for a defined client segment, for instance, run in parallel with the existing process for a few weeks before fully transitioning. That gives the firm a chance to catch process gaps while the existing method is still running as a safety net, rather than discovering gaps after the old process has already been retired.

By the time a firm has moved two or three foundation-tier workflows this way, the pattern is usually established enough to extend to the rest of the practice with far less friction than the first transition took.

The alternative, waiting for the hiring market to improve, has a cost that compounds quietly. Every quarter spent with qualified accountants doing foundation-tier work is a quarter of advisory capacity the firm didn’t have, client relationships that got less attention than they could have, and growth the practice turned away because there was no capacity to take it on. That cost doesn’t show up on a single invoice, which is part of why it’s easy for firms to keep absorbing it rather than addressing it directly.

Where to start

Map your practice’s current work into the three tiers, advisory, review, and foundation, honestly, based on what each task actually requires rather than who currently happens to do it. Most partners find the foundation tier is larger than they expected, and the advisory tier, the work only a qualified accountant can genuinely do, is smaller and more valuable than the hours currently spent on it suggest.

If your firm is still trying to hire its way out of a foundation-tier problem, that’s usually the sign it’s worth mapping a tiered model instead. Book a Connect Session