Staffing for CPA firms and accounting practices

Where the capacity actually goes

A firm sells expertise and pays for it in salaries. A return or a financial statement package starts as document chasing, data entry, tie-outs and reconciliations. Real work, billable work, done by people you hired for judgment. Realization slides, write-offs follow, and the due date list does not care.

Hiring locally to absorb it is expensive and slow, and the salary that work commands is more than the compliance fee will carry. So it stays where it is, spread across seniors and managers. We place one person into that gap: engaged as a contractor through us, working your firm's account and no one else's, reporting to the manager who owns the queue.

How the seat works, and what has to be signed first

The contractor sits in your reporting line and takes work from the manager or partner in charge, inside the environment you already run. Preparation goes in, workpapers and a draft return come out into your review queue. Your licensed professional reviews the file, signs it and owns it. That line is written into the scope before the search opens, not discovered in April.

Before any of it starts, your client has to agree in writing that their tax information can go to someone outside the United States. That consent is your firm's to obtain, because only your firm can ask your client for it, and it is a condition of the placement rather than a recommendation. We do not open access for a seat that will touch tax return information until you confirm the consent is signed. That covers intake work too: no seat opens a client document before the consent is signed, not only the seat building the return. Putting the person inside your systems, under your supervision, does not remove the requirement.

Confidentiality does not stop where the return does. A bookkeeping seat or a workpaper rollforward involves no return at all, and your client's confidential information is just as protected there. What your clients have to be told for that work, and what your state board asks on top, is for your firm and its advisors to settle. Our half is simpler: the seat does not open until you tell us the consent those rules require has been signed.

What the seat costs, and where the work happens

Tax, accounting and practice administration seats are quoted per role. A document intake seat and a seat building pass-through returns are different jobs, and scope moves the number more than the title does. An international contractor costs a fraction of a comparable US hire, and that is the obvious part. What matters more is reach. The same budget opens a search across the Philippines and Southeast Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe and South Africa. The model works on the gap between labor markets, not on paying anyone poorly, and what a contractor earns in one of these seats is a strong, competitive income where they live.

There is one optional add-on, priced separately from the seat. The secure remote workstation puts the contractor inside a US hosted virtual desktop, so client files stay on US infrastructure rather than a machine abroad. Access is central and cut off the day the engagement ends, the endpoint is managed, and activity monitoring is disclosed to the contractor in writing. It is a real security control, and it does not move the boundary: the person is still outside the United States, so we still require the consent before the seat opens. It is not a substitute for your own security program either.

Where this is the wrong answer for a firm

Busy season cover is the wrong shape for this. A February to April 15 seat does not work here. The commitment when a contractor starts is 90 days of fees and nothing longer is signed, but the model is built for seats you expect to keep filled a year or more. A two month cleanup has the same problem. And if your real constraint is review time rather than preparation capacity, more drafts only queue in front of the same partner.

Anything needing hands in the office is out: opening mail, handling paper checks, the file room, in-person meetings. So is anything reserved to a licensed professional. No seat signs a return as paid preparer, issues an audit, review or compilation report, represents your client in an examination, or is held out to your clients as a CPA. We do not staff issuer audits. Where the end client is also an attest client of your firm, no seat takes on management responsibility for that client. That is a condition of the placement, not a judgment call. Whether an arrangement affects your independence is your firm's analysis to run. The boundary is ours, and it does not move.

If your clients will not sign the consent, or you would rather they never knew, we are the wrong call. The disclosure is a precondition, not a formality. The same goes for a firm with no hosted environment, no MFA and no written security program: there is nothing secure to plug a remote seat into. We are also slower at the front than a firm that forwards resumes, on purpose. Every candidate goes through five gates before you meet them, and we will not quote a time to shortlist. The way in is small: a $500 deposit opens the search and comes straight back off your first month's invoice.