Your revenue is scaling. Is your finance function keeping up? At £3m turnover, the bookkeeper who served you at £500k starts to struggle. You need deeper analysis and tighter cash control, but you don’t necessarily need a full-time CFO.
When complexity hits, the instinct is to hire. But building an in-house team can be slow, rigid, and surprisingly expensive. Before you post that job ad, you need to think about all of the financial implications.
The good news is you can scale up your finance function without making a string of full-time hires, by leveraging outsourced services and smart technology, this approach can give you all the expertise you need with far less overhead.
The £85k mistake: scaling your finance function without the headcount
Hiring internally comes with a host of additional costs and commitments that can weigh on a growing business. The salary is just the deposit. Once you add Employer NI, pension contributions, and recruitment fees, a £60k Finance Manager actually costs your business closer to £85k. Onboarding and training a new employee is another investment, pulling senior leaders away from their duties to get the new hire up to speed.
Beyond direct costs, think about the rigidity that in-house hires introduce. If your needs increase, you face another lengthy hiring process to add capacity. If your needs decrease, you might be left overstaffed, paying people with not enough to do or needing cover when they’re on leave.
In fast-growing companies, workload can be uneven – heavy during audits, fundraising or year-end, lighter at other times. A small internal team will struggle to handle peak periods without burnout, yet may be underutilised in quiet months.
There’s also the question of breadth of expertise. A single hire, no matter how skilled, has a limited range of knowledge. To cover all bases, you might need to hire multiple specialists, which might be overkill and financially unviable at your size.
Financial outsourcing: A flexible, high-impact alternative
This is where outsourcing your finance function shines. By partnering with an external firm, you can get access to a whole finance team on a part-time basis, scaling their involvement up or down as your business demands. It’s a pay-as-you-need model, which means you avoid the burdens of full-time salaries and the associated overheads benefiting in both time and cost savings – you’re not paying for idle hours or dealing with HR issues, and you free up management time that would otherwise go into overseeing an internal team.
With an outsourced model, you don’t get one person: you get a department. You gain access to high-level CFO insights for strategy and efficient bookkeepers for the heavy lifting, scaling up or down as needed. Under a traditional model, a mid-sized business might not afford a full-time Finance Director, but through an outsourced arrangement you can gain director-level financial oversight at a cost to suit your growth ambitions.
In Wilson Partners’ case, clients get exactly that: director level oversight of your accounts without the need to recruit or worry about holiday cover. You’re effectively renting a high-calibre finance brain trust, along with the doers who handle transactions and bookkeeping.
Benefits of an outsourced finance team
When you outsource, you’re not just trading bodies for bodies – you’re typically getting a higher quality of work and wider expertise. Specialist firms have teams who focus exclusively on what they’re good at – whether that’s management accounting, payroll, tax or financial analysis. Because these professionals work with many clients, they bring tried-and-tested best practices to your business. It’s like having a brain trust of financial experts on call. In contrast, an in-house team, especially a small one, might operate in isolation and potentially reinvent the wheel or make suboptimal decisions due to limited exposure.
Another benefit is access to leading technology and systems. Outsourced providers invest in advanced accounting software, automation tools, and secure data backups as part of their service. Wilson Partners’ outsourcing platform is built around Xero and incorporates state-of-the-art technology for reporting, analysis and KPI monitoring.
Financial outsourcing can accelerate your strategic focus. By handing over the heavy lifting of day-to-day finance, management is free to focus on core business activities. As Wilson Partners puts it, by outsourcing non-core functions you maintain a razor sharp focus on growing sales, profit and cash, potentially achieving growth more quickly than otherwise possible.
Founders and executives often discover they can spend more time on strategy, product development, or client relationships when they’re not knee-deep in reconciliations or HR issues related to a finance department. In essence, you’re buying back time – arguably the most precious resource for any founder.
Implementing an outsourced finance function
Transitioning to an outsourced model is straightforward with the right partner. Typically, it starts with an assessment: the provider will review your current processes, software and reports to identify gaps and inefficiencies. They’ll then work with you to design a service scope. This might include transactional services, and higher-level services. The beauty is that the solution can be fully tailored – maybe you need everything, or perhaps you keep an internal bookkeeper and outsource the CFO-level tasks. A highly effective outsourced solution allows you to pick the components you need, confident that experts are handling each piece.
Once up and running, communication is key. You should expect regular touchpoints, just as you would with an in-house team. Many businesses opt for monthly or quarterly reviews with their virtual Finance Director to interpret the numbers and plan ahead. Operationally, modern cloud accounting means the external team works almost as if they were employees – they can access your data remotely, update records in real time, and even integrate with your office systems.
Focus on what matters: growing your business.
The ultimate aim of scaling your finance function in this way is to let you focus on what matters most: growing the business and serving your clients. By not getting bogged down in building an internal finance department, you can allocate resources to growth initiatives and remain nimble. Many Wilson Partners clients are owner-managed businesses who “want the expertise of a finance team whilst managing costs and internal resources”, and they achieve this balance through outsourcing. It’s a model where you get big-company financial capabilities without the big-company overhead.
If you’re considering this route, reflect on your business’s strategic plan. Are there upcoming moves that will demand greater financial insight? If so, having an outsourced finance function in place can be a game-changer. It ensures you have the accurate, timely information needed for decisions, and the advisory support to interpret that information.
Grow without the growing pains
Scaling your finance function without in-house hires allows you to grow without the usual growing pains. You avoid the overhead, inflexibility and narrow bandwidth of a small internal team, and instead gain a powerful, adaptable finance partner. Whether you’re a £2m turnover company aiming for £10m, or a £10m business targeting £50m+, this approach ensures your finance capabilities keep up every step of the way.
Wilson Partners specialises in providing outsourced finance function support to ambitious businesses looking for that next level of service. From bookkeeping and management reporting to Virtual FD strategic insight, we offer as much or as little support as you need, adjusting as your business evolves.
The result is peace of mind that your finances are in expert hands, and freedom for you to concentrate on growth. If you want to explore how outsourcing could work for your company, get in touch for a no-obligation chat. We’re confident that we can deliver a tailored, integrated finance solution that saves you time, controls costs and powers your decisions – all without the headache of hiring.