The real reason practices can't hire (what the numbers say)

• A part-qualified at £32–38k costs a practice roughly £43–51k all-in. Industry pays more for the same person.
• Candidates want hybrid and a visible next step. Most small practices can offer one or neither.
• Eighteen months in, they leave, and the recruitment cost starts again.
• South Africa has a structured graduate pipeline and a reported shortage of its own. That is the opportunity, and the catch.

It is not that nobody wants the job

Every practice owner we talk to says the same thing: "we just can't get people". The advert runs for two months. Three CVs arrive. One is unqualified, one wants double the salary, one takes the job and leaves after a year and a half.

We run a practice. We have lived this. And we think the diagnosis is usually wrong. It is not that nobody wants to work in practice. It is that a small practice is competing for the same people as industry, the Big Four and the mid-tier, and losing on three fronts at once.

Front one: the salary you cannot match

Start with what people are paid. In 2026 the going rates look roughly like this: bookkeeper £27–32k, part-qualified £32–38k, qualified £42–50k (Indeed, PayScale and recruiter adverts, 2026).

That is the advertised salary. It is not what it costs you. Our working rule of thumb is salary times about 1.35 once you add employer NI, pension, software, a desk and the recruitment fee spread over the time they stay. So:

• A bookkeeper at £27–32k costs roughly £36–43k a year all-in.
• A part-qualified at £32–38k costs roughly £43–51k.
• A qualified at £42–50k costs roughly £57–68k.

Now look at it from the candidate's side. A part-qualified with two years of practice experience is exactly the person a finance team in industry wants. They can offer more salary, because the accountant is a cost centre inside a bigger business rather than a fee-earner whose rate has to be recovered from clients. The practice is charging, say, £500–1,500 for a set of small company accounts (what we see in the market; our estimate). There is a ceiling on what that work can pay, and industry does not have the same ceiling.

You are not being out-recruited. You are being out-budgeted.

Front two: hybrid and hours

The second front is how people want to work. Candidates now ask about hybrid in the first conversation. They want to know how many days are in the office, whether hours are flexible, whether the firm trusts them to work from the kitchen table on a Friday.

A large firm can say yes to all of it and has the systems to make it work. A five-person practice often cannot. The files are on a server in the back office. The partner likes to see people. Client post arrives on paper. None of that is unreasonable, but it is a reason to pick the other offer.

Front three: the next step

The third front is progression. A candidate asks "where does this go?" and a small practice's honest answer is "you get better at this job". There is no manager role coming up. The partner is not retiring. The firm is not opening a second office.

Big firms sell a ladder. Industry sells a route to financial controller. A small practice sells a good job with a ceiling, and good people can see the ceiling from the interview room.

The eighteen-month churn

Put the three together and you get the pattern every practice owner recognises. You hire. You train for six months. They are useful for a year. Then they move, either to industry for the salary or to a bigger firm for the ladder. Eighteen months is our estimate from running a practice; your number may differ, but it will not be ten years.

The cost of that churn is not just the recruiter fee. It is the six months of training that walked out of the door, the client knowledge that went with it, and the partner's time spent re-recruiting rather than fee-earning. Every cycle, the practice gets slightly more tired of it.

A different pipeline

Here is where we think differently. The UK labour market for practice accountants is what it is. You cannot fix it from inside a small firm. But it is not the only labour market.

South Africa trains accountants through structured professional programmes. SAIPA and SAICA both run trainee schemes where graduates complete supervised practical training before qualifying. The output is people who have done real accounts production, under review, for years before they qualify. English is the working language of the profession. The time zone is one to two hours ahead of the UK all year.

There is a catch, and we should be honest about it. SAIPA has said South Africa is short of more than 20,000 accountants (SAIPA). Good people there are in demand too. That is why we employ our team directly in our own Pretoria office rather than subcontracting, and why we pay properly against local benchmarks (bookkeeper R15–25k a month, accountant R25–42k, senior R33–50k; Indeed and PayScale 2026). People stay when they are employed well. That applies in Pretoria as much as in Preston.

What that does to the arithmetic

A full Accounts seat, which is a qualified or part-qualified accountant doing year-end accounts, CT600s and self assessment under UK review, is £31,800 a year. The UK equivalent hire is £44–52k all-in. A full Production seat for bookkeeping, VAT and payroll is £23,400 a year against £36–44k. The full table is on our pricing page.

The gap is real but it is not the main point. The main point is the hours. A UK employee gives you roughly 1,500 productive hours a year once holidays, sickness, training and the slow Friday are taken out. A full seat gives you 1,824 hours of attendance on your work, and seat hours are productive hours; we do not deduct planning or status calls. You get a person who is there, every month, without the advert and the three-month wait.

What this does not fix

It does not fix the partner bottleneck. Somebody in the UK still reviews and signs. It does not replace the person who sits with a client and talks them through their first year of trading. It does not fix a practice whose files are a mess; it will find the mess faster. And it does not mean you never hire in the UK again. It means the hires you make are the ones you actually need: the reviewer, the client-facing manager, the next partner.

What it does fix is the production gap, which is the thing the job advert was trying to fix all along. How it works covers the onboarding and review loop.

Where to start

Run your volumes through the capacity calculator to see what the gap actually looks like in hours, then talk to us. We will tell you honestly whether a seat fits or whether you really do need that UK hire.

Published 22 August 2026. Tax rules and rates change — check current figures on gov.uk before relying on anything here. This is general information for practice owners, not advice.