Outsourcing for accountants: the complete UK guide 2026

• Almost every production task in a practice can be outsourced. The review and the client relationship should not be.
• There are four commercial models: per-job, hourly, dedicated FTE and seats. They share risk differently.
• Offshore dedicated staff run from roughly £1,050 to £3,200 a month depending on country and level; a UK hire is £3,500–4,500 all-in.
• Most failures are about handover, review and queries, not about the country the work is done in.
• Start with one category of work and one person. Scale when the first month has gone through review cleanly.

What this guide covers

If you run a UK practice and you are thinking about outsourcing for the first time, or you tried it once and it went badly, this is the plain version. No pitch. We run a production team for practices, so we have an interest, and we will say where we sit. But most of what follows applies whichever provider you end up with.

Outsourcing in accountancy means paying someone outside your payroll to do work that would otherwise be done by your staff. It is not new. Practices have used typists, bureau payroll and contract bookkeepers for decades. What has changed is that the work is now done inside your own software, under your own logins, by people who can be anywhere.

What gets outsourced

Accounts production

Year-end statutory accounts for small companies, the CT600, and the working papers behind them. This is the biggest category by value and the one most practices try first. It suits outsourcing because the inputs are defined (trial balance, bank, last year's file) and the output is checked by a reviewer before it goes anywhere. If you want to see how we handle it, the detail is on our accounts production page.

Bookkeeping and VAT

Transaction coding, bank reconciliation, supplier and customer ledgers, and the quarterly VAT return. Repetitive, high volume, and a drain on a part-qualified's week. It goes offshore well provided the bookkeeper has the client's bank feed and a written rule for the judgement calls.

Payroll

Monthly and weekly runs, RTI submissions, pension uploads, starters and leavers, P11Ds. Payroll outsourcing is mature and very price-sensitive. The market rate per payslip offshore is pennies; the value is in someone owning the calendar so nothing is late.

Admin and onboarding

Engagement letters, AML checks, 64-8s, chasing records, updating the practice management system, client onboarding packs. This is the work nobody in your office wants and it is the easiest to hand over, because it does not need an accountant. It is covered on our back-office page.

Content

Guides, the client newsletter, site updates, social posts. Most practices do none of this because the fee-earners are busy. It can be done by the same production team in the quiet hours. For us, content fills Production-seat hours rather than being a separate product. See the marketing page for what that looks like.

The four models

Per-job

You send a set of accounts, you pay a fixed price for that set. Offshore per-job market rates we see are £120–300 for a small limited company set, £25–60 for a VAT return, £15–40 for a self assessment return, and £0.55–0.70 a payslip plus RTI (our survey of published provider price lists, August 2026). Simple to buy. You carry no utilisation risk. But a different person may do every job, queries are slow because nobody knows the client, and the price per job climbs the moment a set is "complex".

Hourly

You pay for time. Offshore hourly is £8–15; UK-based outsourcers charge £25–45 an hour (same source). Hourly works for backlogs and one-off projects. It is hard to budget, and it rewards the provider for being slow.

Dedicated FTE

You rent a named person full-time, usually on a monthly fee, through a provider who employs them. You get continuity and someone who learns your clients. You carry the utilisation risk: if you have nothing for them in August, you still pay. Most of the larger offshore providers sell this model.

Seats

A seat is a dedicated person or fraction of a person, sold in fixed monthly hours, with the provider responsible for review and for cover when that person is ill or leaves. It is the FTE model with the management layer included. This is what we sell: a Production seat at £1,950 a month for 160 hours, an Accounts seat at £2,650, and a qualified senior seat from £3,400, all rolling monthly. The full breakdown is on the pricing page.

Where the work is delivered

Four places, broadly. Each has a sensible case.

• UK. Contract bookkeepers and UK outsourcing firms. Same time zone, same accent on the phone, and the most expensive option at £25–45 an hour or £3,500–4,500 a month all-in for a hire.
• India. The largest pool of UK-trained offshore accountants. Dedicated accountants run at £1,300–2,000 a month. Time difference of four and a half to five and a half hours depending on the season.
• Philippines. Strong in bookkeeping and back-office. Bookkeepers at £1,500–1,900 a month, qualified staff at £2,150–2,850. Seven to eight hours ahead, so most teams work a UK night shift.
• South Africa. One to two hours ahead of the UK all year, so the whole working day overlaps. Providers charge £1,050–2,150 a month for a bookkeeper and £2,300–3,200 for a qualified accountant.

All FTE figures are from the published rate cards and quotes of providers in each market, August 2026. We wrote a separate guide comparing the three offshore countries if you want the detail: India vs Philippines vs South Africa. Our own team is in our Pretoria office. We employ them directly; they are not subcontractors.

What it costs, model by model

Take a practice with 120 year-ends and 180 self assessment returns a year, plus a modest bookkeeping book. Rough numbers, using the market ranges above:

The UK hire figure uses our working rule of thumb that all-in cost is salary × 1.35, on a £32–38k part-qualified salary (Indeed and PayScale data, 2026). If you want to model your own practice, the capacity calculator takes your client numbers and turns them into hours and seats.

What to ask a provider

1. Who exactly does the work? Employees or subcontractors? Named, or a pool? Can you speak to them?
2. Who reviews it, and where? A UK-qualified reviewer before it reaches you, or does it land raw?
3. Whose software? Work done in your practice software under individual logins leaves you an audit trail and keeps the data where your engagement letter says it is.
4. How are queries handled? A query list per job, sent when? Who chases the client, you or them?
5. What happens when the person leaves? Notice, handover, who trains the replacement, and who pays for the dip.
6. What is the contract term? Rolling monthly or a twelve-month lock-in with a minimum?
7. What do they not do? A provider that claims everything is the one to worry about.

Our answers to all seven are on how it works.

What goes wrong

In our experience, and in the stories practice owners tell us, the failures cluster around the same five things.

• No written process. The practice has never written down how it does a set of accounts, so the outsourcer guesses and the guesses come back as review points.
• Review bottleneck. Work comes back faster than the partner can review it. The backlog moves from production to review, and nothing is delivered sooner.
• Queries die in the inbox. The outsourcer asks, the practice does not answer for three weeks, the job stalls, and everyone blames the outsourcer.
• Wrong first job. The practice sends its hardest client as a test. The test fails. Send the twenty most ordinary sets first.
• Nobody owns it. Outsourcing needs one person in the practice who is the contact, the chaser and the reviewer of the relationship. Without that, it drifts.

How to start small

Do not start with a transformation. Start with one category and one person.

1. Pick the work that is most standard in your practice. Usually small company accounts or bookkeeping.
2. Write a one-page process for it. Where the records come from, what the file should look like, what the reviewer checks.
3. Give the provider twenty ordinary jobs and a deadline a month out.
4. Review the first five yourself, line by line. Feed back in writing.
5. At month end, count: jobs done, review points per job, queries raised, queries answered within two days.
6. If the numbers are fine, add the next category. If not, fix the process before adding volume.

A half seat (80 hours a month) or a part-time seat (40 hours) is built for exactly this. You are not committing to a full person before you know the work flows.

Where to start

Put your client numbers into the capacity calculator. It will tell you how many hours a month your production work actually needs and what that costs as seats. Then get in touch and we will talk through which twenty jobs to send first.

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.