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For most accountancy firms, growth isn’t the problem. It’s capacity. You win new clients, but your teams are at capacity. You bring in more work, but margins don’t reflect it. You want to scale, but hiring, training, and retaining staff in today’s market feels like trying to fill a leaking bucket.
Outsourcing, when done right, doesn’t just fix short-term resourcing gaps. It can be the backbone of long-term, strategic firm growth. The kind of growth that strengthens your top line, not just fix your bottom line.
Here’s what scaling with outsourced accounting can look like year by year.
Focus: Reclaiming capacity and building delivery resilience
Most firms start outsourcing reactively. A busy tax season. An unexpected resignation. A sudden influx of year-end work. But firms that scale treat outsourcing as a strategic capability, not just an emergency solution.
Key Actions:
Impact:
This year is about building confidence in the model – testing delivery, learning how to communicate across time zones, and laying the groundwork for future scale.
Focus: Dedicated teams, structured pods, and deeper integration
By now, your firm has a rhythm with its offshore team. Instead of assigning ad hoc tasks, you start thinking in pods – structured teams of accountants or auditors working across your core service lines, delivering flexible accounting support.
Key Actions:
Impact:
This is when outsourcing begins to mirror your in-house delivery function. You start seeing it not as external help but as an extension of your firm.
Focus: Hybrid teams, global capability, and margin-led growth
You’re no longer outsourcing. You’ve built a hybrid delivery engine. Your onshore team is lean, strategic, and client-facing. Your offshore pods are skilled, consistent, and deeply embedded in your processes. You’re no longer constrained by geography when you think about scale.
Key Actions:
Impact:
At this stage, outsourcing is no longer just a cost decision; it’s a growth engine. You’ve decoupled delivery scale from local talent availability, and you’re operating with the agility of a Top 100 firm, without the overheads.
Background:
XYZ Corporation, a mid-sized London accounting firm with 35 staff, was growing fast post-COVID. But hiring couldn’t keep up with client demand. Margins were thinning. Partners were stuck in the weeds.
Year 1:
They started small: two offshore accountants helping with VAT returns and bookkeeping work, and also embraced cloud-based accounting. Within 6 months, the UK team had freed up 20+ hours per week.
Year 2:
Impressed by the results, they created dedicated pods for year-end and audit. This allowed them to scale delivery without any local hiring. They also moved one UK senior manager into a full-time BD role resulting in a 15% increase in revenue.
Year 3:
The firm set up a GCC in India: 12 full-time offshore staff working under the XYZ Corporation brand. With this capacity, they added a new revenue stream – outsourced FD services for start-ups and scale-ups. In three years, they had grown revenue by 60%, with partner margins up by 22%.
Whether you’re a 10-person boutique firm or a 100-person regional player, the growth roadmap looks similar:
Most firms underestimate how much they can achieve in three years. Especially when they stop seeing outsourcing as a stopgap and start treating it as infrastructure.
The firms that scale are the ones that stop asking, “Should we outsource?” and start asking, “What should we build with it?”
The first step doesn’t need to be big. But it needs to be intentional.
Mustufa is a Chartered Accountant with 10 years of progressive experience across Indian, Canadian, and UK accounting domains. He has a proven track record of leading high-performing teams of 60+ members, managing multi-client portfolios, and driving operational excellence with measurable profitability improvements.
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