Why Hiring Finance Staff Is Taking Longer and Costing More

For larger UK businesses, the challenge is not always building a finance team from scratch. Often, the team already exists.

There may be someone handling bookkeeping, someone managing payroll, and another person supporting month-end reporting. On paper, the finance function is covered. In practice, it may still feel stretched, expensive, and dependent on too few people.

That is why more businesses are reviewing whether every finance task needs to remain in-house, or whether outsourcing part of the finance function is a better alternative to trying to hire finance staff again.

Why Established Finance Teams Are Under Pressure

A finance team can become harder to scale once the business grows. More transactions, more suppliers, more reporting requirements, and tighter deadlines all add pressure.

The answer is often to recruit again, but that can be slow and expensive. According to Robert Half's 2026 UK Finance and Accounting Salary Guide, 67% of finance and accounting hiring managers are willing to offer higher salaries when there is a scarcity of qualified talent for a role.

Time-to-hire data tells the same story. A UK recruiter survey reported by NatWest Mentor in April 2026 found that banking and financial services roles take an average of 5.9 weeks to fill, compared with 4.9 weeks across industries.

For businesses with an existing finance team, that delay matters. While a vacancy remains open, senior staff often absorb extra work, reporting can slow down, and finance processes become more dependent on manual effort.

The Real Cost Is Not Just Recruitment

Hiring another finance person may solve one capacity issue, but it also adds fixed costs. There are recruitment fees, salary expectations, employer National Insurance, pension contributions, onboarding, software training, and management time. There is also the risk that the new hire only solves part of the problem.

Finance teams are also dealing with more operational drag. Access PaySuite's April 2026 research found that more than 70% of UK SMEs spend between five and 20 hours per week managing failed payments, retries, and related customer queries, showing how routine finance work can quickly absorb capacity.

This extra workload, combined with the Making Tax Digital expansion, has heightened demand for professionals with specific compliance and process knowledge.

A growing finance function often needs different levels of support at different times: transactional bookkeeping, payroll processing, accounts payable, credit control, management accounts, and senior finance oversight. One additional hire rarely covers all of that well.

Why Hiring Finance Staff Costs More Than Outsourcing in the UK

Hiring expands headcount. Outsourcing strengthens the finance function. That is the key difference for established businesses.

Outsourcing does not have to replace the whole team. It can support the existing finance department by taking on routine, process-heavy or time-sensitive work, such as:

• Bookkeeping and reconciliations
• Payroll
• Supplier payments
• Debtor management

It also gives the business access to remote financial controller support where senior oversight is needed, without adding another full-time salary.

This allows the internal team to focus on higher-value work: cash flow, forecasting, commercial decisions, controls, and business planning.

It also gives the business more resilience. If someone is on leave, leaves the company, or workload spikes at month end, the finance function is not dependent on one internal person carrying the pressure.

When Outsourcing Becomes the Smarter Option

Outsourcing is worth considering when the finance team is capable but stretched, when reporting deadlines are slipping, or when hiring again feels like an expensive way to solve a process problem.

Sanay supports businesses that already have finance teams by providing outsourced finance function support, bookkeeping, and operational finance capacity. The aim is not to replace good people, but to give the finance function a better structure, continuity, and room to grow.