As your company grows past the founder-managing-QuickBooks stage, there's a natural next step that most business leaders take: hiring an internal accountant or controller. t’s the traditional path for maturing businesses—once revenue supports a full-time hire, finance moves in-house. Yet following convention doesn’t always mean following strategy.
Before committing to that job posting and the long-term investment of building an internal accounting department, it’s worth asking a more fundamental question: should you be building this function at all?
When evaluating the cost of an in-house accounting hire, most leaders focus on the salary. Per job site Indeed, a staff accountant commands a salary of anywhere from $48,000 to $87,000 per year, while a controller commands from $83,000 to $171,000. It’s also worth noting that the accounting industry is in something of a talent crunch at the moment. Proven professionals have no shortage of options.
Your internal team’s salaries are just the starting point. The fully loaded cost of an employee includes benefits packages (health insurance, retirement, PTO, payroll taxes, and so on), which typically add 30% on top of the employee’s base compensation. There’s also technology and software subscriptions, office infrastructure, recruitment costs, onboarding time, and ongoing professional development. When you add these elements together, that $75,000 accountant can easily end up costing your business six figures each year – and that’s just for one member of the team.
Beyond direct costs, internal accounting hires carry operational risks that can disrupt your business. The average tenure for accounting staff is declining, and replacing an employee can be painfully expensive when you factor in lost productivity and rehiring expenses.
When your controller takes vacation or leaves the company, coverage gaps create bottlenecks that delay critical financial reporting. And someone needs to manage and review this person's work, which means time pulled away from growing your core business to supervise a function outside your expertise.
Even if you were fine with all of the above and wanted to go ahead with hiring a staff accountant, the reality is that one professional isn’t going to get you very far. Here's the challenge that most growing companies underestimate: modern finance and accounting requires diverse, specialized expertise across multiple domains.
Consider what your finance function actually needs to handle:
When you hire a single accountant or even a controller, you're getting someone with depth in certain areas and significant gaps in others. Your new hire might excel at transaction processing but lack experience with the reporting requirements of your venture capital investors. They may handle bookkeeping well but struggle with the strategic financial modeling your board wants to see.
This expertise gap becomes even more pronounced when industry-specific knowledge matters. SaaS revenue recognition under ASC 606, VC-backed company reporting standards, or life sciences grant accounting all require specialized experience that generalist accountants typically don't possess.
Proper financial controls require segregation of duties: the person who processes payments shouldn't be the same person reconciling the bank accounts. These checks and balances protect against both honest mistakes and intentional fraud.
But when you have just one or two people handling your books, implementing proper segregation of duties becomes nearly impossible. Even your most capable controller can't provide the multiple layers of oversight that proper internal controls require. Small businesses are disproportionately vulnerable to both errors and fraud precisely because of this concentration of financial control in too few hands. An outsourced accounting team naturally provides multiple layers of review, with different team members handling different aspects of your financial operations.
Business growth rarely happens in neat, predictable increments that perfectly match full-time headcount additions.
When you build an in-house accounting department, you scale in discrete jumps. You can't hire "half" an accountant when your transaction volume increases by 40%. You either carry excess capacity (paying for more resources than you currently need) or create bottlenecks (overworking your existing team and delaying critical financial work).
During rapid growth phases, your internal team struggles to keep up. During slower periods, you're stuck with fixed overhead costs you can't easily reduce.
Outsourced accounting services provide a fundamentally different model; one that addresses each of these challenges directly.
For many growing companies, building an internal accounting department is simply what you're "supposed to do" at a certain stage. But when you examine the true costs, expertise limitations, control risks, and scalability challenges, the case for building in-house becomes far less compelling.
The companies best positioned to build internal accounting departments are typically much larger organizations with the volume and complexity to justify multiple full-time roles, proper segregation of duties, and specialized expertise across different functions. For many small to mid-sized businesses and fast-growing startups, that threshold hasn't been reached.
At G-Squared Partners, we've built the complete finance team that growing companies need—experienced professionals with specialized expertise in tech, SaaS, VC-backed firms, and other high-growth sectors. Our clients get the depth and breadth of a full accounting department without the overhead, risk, and management burden of building one themselves.
We provide comprehensive CFO services, accounting and bookkeeping support, audit preparation, and strategic financial guidance through a team approach that ensures continuity, proper controls, and scalable capacity as your business evolves.
Before you commit to building your own accounting department, consider whether that's really the strategic move your business needs. Contact G-Squared Partners to learn how our outsourced CFO and accounting services can deliver the same expertise and controls as an in-house team, without the overhead or risk.