Full-time bookkeeper, part-time controller, or outsource it all?

By the time a company is doing $4M, nobody is asking whether the owner should be doing the books. That got settled years ago, somewhere around the sixth employee.

The harder question shows up later. You have a bookkeeper who has been with you since you were doing $400k. Your CPA still makes the same adjusting entries every March. Nobody in the building can tell you what your gross margin was on the Henderson job. The question is: what replaces that setup?

Your bookkeeper is probably not the problem

Owners arrive at this decision feeling guilty, and they shouldn't. The person you hired at $400k is doing the job you hired them for. Coding transactions, running payroll, reconciling the bank. They're doing it just fine.

What changed is that the job description no longer covers all of your needs. A $4M company with 25 employees needs someone who owns the close and can defend what the numbers say. That's a different skill and a different pay grade than transaction processing. Both jobs are necessary, and one person rarely does both well. Asking a good bookkeeper to become a controller because the company grew is how you lose a good bookkeeper.

You've crossed the line if any of these are true:

• Your close takes more than fifteen days, or nobody can say when it's finished

• Your CPA makes the same adjusting entries every year

• You can't get margin by job, location, or product line without someone building a spreadsheet

• There are balance sheet accounts nobody can explain

• You learned about a cash problem from your bank instead of from your books

What the in-house version costs

Most owners price this as one hire. It's two. A controller doesn't do transaction processing, so if you hire one at $110,000 and let the bookkeeper go, you're paying $110,000 for data entry and you'll lose the controller inside a year. The realistic version is a controller plus a bookkeeper, or a controller plus outsourced processing underneath.

Run these against your own market, because a controller in Honolulu and a controller in Des Moines are not the same number:

Controller, year one:

Base salary $110,000

Employer payroll taxes $8,800

Health insurance and benefits $16,000

Retirement match $4,400

Software seat, CPE, training $3,000

Ongoing annual $142,200

Add a bookkeeper underneath at $55,000 plus burden, call it $70,000, and a full in-house accounting function runs about $212,000 a year.

Some costs don't fit in that table. Your controller takes three weeks of PTO a year, and at least one of those weeks lands during a close, so the close waits. And they leave eventually. In my experience finance hires stay two to three years, which gets you a 90-day search, an empty seat, and whatever documentation they left behind, usually a spreadsheet on their desktop.

What outsourcing costs

Our Full Service Accounting engagement runs $3,000 a month, or $36,000 a year. The Accounting & Advisory level runs $5,000, or $60,000. No payroll taxes, no benefits load, no recruiting fee, no gap when someone quits, and the close doesn't stop because one person is on vacation.

The tradeoff is presence. We're not in your building. We don't walk out to the shop floor to ask why a PO doesn't match the packing slip, sit in your Monday operations meeting, or sign a check at 4pm because a supplier is holding a delivery. If your accounting needs someone physically there every day, outsourcing is the wrong answer no matter what it costs.

When hiring in-house is the right call

At some point the economics flip, and we'd rather tell you than have you work it out on your own. Bring it in-house when:

• Transaction volume needs someone on it daily, on site

• You're past roughly $10M to $15M, where a full finance team starts to make more sense than a fractional one

• You're running multiple entities with constant intercompany activity

• You want someone in operations meetings pushing back on decisions before they're made

• You're planning a sale in the next two or three years and want the finance function internal before diligence starts

When you get there, we'll say so, and we'll help you write the job description, interview, and train the person you hire.

Where to start

Look at your last three months of financials and ask whether you'd hand them to a lender as is. If the answer is no, the problem is that nobody owns the answer, and neither hiring model fixes that by itself.

Book a discovery call and we'll walk through your last three closes and talk through your options. Sometimes the best option is hiring us, sometimes it's a $60,000 hire and upgrading your processes, and we'll say so either way.