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 trains accountants through structured graduate programmes and has a reported shortage of its own. That is the opportunity, and the catch.

People do want 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. People do want to work in practice. The problem 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.

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 in industry the accountant is a cost inside a bigger business. In practice, the accountant is 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 being out-budgeted.

Hybrid working 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.

A visible next step

The third front is progression. A candidate asks "where does this go?" and a small practice's 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 on the next recruitment round. Every cycle, the practice gets slightly more tired of it.

Accountants trained in South Africa

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. SAIPA has said South Africa is short of more than 20,000 accountants (SAIPA). Good people there are in demand too. So we employ our team directly in our own Pretoria office, and we pay 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.

The annual cost of a seat against a UK hire

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 160-hour seat gives you 1,824 hours a year 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 stays with your UK team

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 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 sets out how the first thirty days run and how review works.

Where to start

Run your volumes through the capacity calculator to see the gap in hours, then talk to us. We will tell you whether a seat fits or whether you need the UK hire.

Published 22 August 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.