Why the Best Finance Teams of the Future May Not Sit In-House

Ask most founders what their finance function looks like in five years and they’ll describe a bigger version of what they have now: more headcount, a proper finance director, maybe a dedicated payroll hire. Ask the ones who’ve actually scaled past £5m in revenue, and you tend to get a different answer entirely. That difference comes down to arithmetic more than ambition. A single finance manager in the UK now costs upwards of £4,000 a month before pensions, National Insurance, recruitment fees, or covering a holiday. Build out a proper department, bookkeeper, credit controller, management accountant, and you’re looking at £9,000 to £10,000 a month before anyone senior is even in the room.

The Hiring Market Isn’t Making This Easier

It isn’t just cost. Businesses are also finding it harder to hire well in the first place. Research from Enterprise Nation found that 62% of its small business members seek direction on when and how to hire and retain staff, long before cost even enters the conversation. Even businesses that are optimistic about growth admit they don’t always know when a finance hire is genuinely needed, versus when it’s just the default next step because that’s what growing companies are supposed to do.

That combination, rising cost and a thinner hiring pipeline, is exactly why more finance leaders are asking a different question altogether: does this function need to sit inside the building at all?

What’s Actually Driving the Shift

According to Parseq’s State of UK Back-Office Outsourcing report, accounting and finance is set to see the strongest growth of any outsourced business function in the UK, with around a fifth of companies planning to start or expand it. That points to real momentum: this is the single sector expected to gain the most new business from outsourcing over the next year.

Three things tend to sit behind that shift:

• Cost. An outsourced finance function typically runs 30-40% cheaper than the in-house equivalent, once salaries, NI, pensions and recruitment are all accounted for.
• Resilience. A single in-house hire is a single point of failure. A team is not, and a business doesn’t grind to a halt every time someone’s on holiday or off sick.
• Access to seniority. Outsourcing gives smaller businesses access to finance director-level input without the finance director-level salary, at a stage in their growth when they need that judgement most but can least afford to pay for it full-time.

Rather than cutting corners, this looks more like businesses recognising that the shape of a finance function doesn’t need to mirror the shape of the org chart everyone assumed it would.

So What Does This Actually Look Like Day to Day?

Does outsourcing mean losing control? Not really, in the way most founders picture it. It typically means bookkeeping, payroll, credit control and management reporting are handled by an outside team, while the strategic decisions stay firmly with the business owner.

Is it only for businesses in trouble? No. Some of the fastest-growing UK SMEs use outsourced finance precisely because it scales, without needing a fresh hiring round every time the business grows into a new bracket.

What does a provider actually bring to the table? Firms such as Accounts and Legal offer this kind of outsourced finance function directly, covering everything from day-to-day bookkeeping through to FD-level strategic support, priced as a fixed monthly fee rather than a growing headcount line.

The Real Question for Founders

The finance teams that end up winning over the next few years probably won’t look like smaller versions of a traditional in-house department. They’ll look like a mix: a lean internal team focused on judgement and decision-making, backed by an outsourced partner handling the volume work that used to require three or four full-time hires.

For founders still budgeting for their next finance hire, the more useful question is often not who to hire next, but whether that role needs to sit in the building at all. The businesses getting this right in 2026 have worked out that headcount and capability were never quite the same thing, and they’re building their finance function around that distinction rather than around a growing org chart.