The offshore quality argument is out of date

• Around 2016, the quality worry about offshore accounting was fair: slow software, an email handover, and little public information about who was doing the work.
• KPMG UK has run its India delivery centre since 2002, and about a quarter of its UK audit staff now sit there.
• 62% of UK accounting firms told ACCA in 2024 they plan to increase their reliance on outsourced services, and over 60% already send work overseas for extra capacity.
• Cloud accounting software gives same-day access to the file itself, so the old complaint about a black-box handover does not hold the way it did a decade ago.
• The useful question has moved from where the work is done to who reviews it, who signs it off, and what happens if that person leaves.

Where the worry came from

A decade ago, sending accounting work abroad meant a zip file leaving the practice at five o'clock and a finished version landing back the next morning. The practice could not see the work while it was happening. Qualifications held overseas were unfamiliar and hard to check from a desk in the UK. Review, if it happened at all, was whatever the provider chose to do before sending the file back. Every one of those objections had a real cause behind it, and a practice that refused to touch offshore work in 2016 was making a reasonable call on the evidence it had.

That is the picture a lot of partners are still working from when the subject comes up at a partners' meeting now.

The scale moved first

KPMG UK's India delivery centre, KPMG Global Services, started life in 2002 through an acquisition and has run continuously since. KPMG UK and KPMG US later bought full ownership of it in a $210m deal, and around a quarter of KPMG UK's audit professionals now sit offshore (The Finance Story, 2026). PwC, Deloitte and EY run comparable India centres covering general ledger work, payroll, tax compliance and audit support for their UK and US member firms.

That is 24 years of a Big Four firm running offshore delivery at scale, under the same audit regulation the rest of the profession answers to. The Financial Reporting Council has pushed back on where the Big Four place audit judgement work specifically (The Finance Story, 2026), and that distinction is worth keeping: the regulator's concern sits with judgement calls on a statutory audit, not with the much larger volume of processing, bookkeeping and accounts preparation that offshore and nearshore teams across the profession handle every month.

The survey numbers moved too

ACCA's 2024 survey found 62% of UK accounting firms intend to increase their reliance on outsourced services over the next three years, citing cost and access to specialised skills as the main reasons. The Accounting Talent Index 2025 put the number already outsourcing work overseas for extra capacity at over 60% of UK and Australian practices, with 48% of practitioners saying the talent shortage has worsened over the three years before (ICAEW, Evolution of Mid-Tier Accountancy Firms, 2026). ICAEW's own 2026 survey of mid-tier firms with 11 to 249 principals found 40% expect their offshoring to increase and 29% expect their outsourcing to increase over the next few years. None of that is a handful of early adopters. It is most of a profession that has already made the move, or is about to.

Cloud software closed the other half of the complaint

The second half of the old objection was never about where the preparer sat. It was about not being able to see the work until it landed back in the inbox, finished or not. Cloud accounting software removed that. A bookkeeper working in Xero, QuickBooks or Sage logs in under their own name, on the practice's own subscription, and every entry is visible to the reviewer as it is made, not three days later in an email thread. Queries sit against the transaction itself, inside the file, instead of in a separate chain that somebody has to match up afterwards.

Say a practice has a management accounts deadline on the 15th, for illustration. On the 3rd, the bookkeeper finds a £1,800 receipt with no invoice attached and leaves a query against that line in the ledger. The client answers from their phone on the 4th. The entry is coded on the 5th, and the UK reviewer signs it off before the 15th with ten days spare, because every step happened inside the file the practice could already see.

What to check instead of where the work sits

Geography was always a proxy for questions a practice can ask directly. The useful list runs:

• Does the person doing the work log into your own software under their own name, or does the file travel back and forth by email?
• Who reviews the work before it reaches your client, and are they UK-qualified?
• Which professional body did the preparer train with, and does that body run supervised practical training before qualification?
• What happens to the work and the client's history if that named person leaves next month?

Those four questions tell a practice more about the quality it will get than the country on the provider's letterhead. A UK-based provider can fail all four. An overseas one can pass all four.

Where this leaves a practice weighing it up

At Muckin a seat is one named person, working in the practice's own software under their own login, in our own Pretoria office, with accounts and tax work reviewed by our own UK practice before it reaches the client. That is the structure the checklist above is asking about, and it is the same structure a practice should ask any provider for, offshore, nearshore or down the road. The time zone point is a separate one, covered in why offshore is the wrong word for Pretoria, and the staffing question is covered in what happens when a provider's staff turn over. Pricing for a seat sized to the work is on the pricing page, and the day-to-day loop is on how it works.

Where to start

Put the practice's own volumes into the capacity calculator to see what a seat would take off the desk, then talk to us about the structure behind it.

Published 27 October 2026. Tax rules and rates change, so check current figures on gov.uk before relying on anything here. This is general information for practice owners and is not advice.