Before you hire anyone
Do I need an accountant yet, or can I keep doing it myself?
Often the honest answer is not yet. Plenty of businesses are better off leaving this alone for another few months, and anyone who tells you otherwise before asking about your volume is selling.
Three things decide it, and none of them is revenue: whether the work has become recurring rather than occasional, whether a dated obligation has appeared, and whether you can still explain your own numbers when someone asks.
Three questions. Not one of them is how much you earn.
Revenue is the usual trigger and it is close to useless. A business turning over a lot with twelve invoices a year and one bank account has almost no finance work. A smaller business with a hundred small transactions, foreign receipts and a payroll has a great deal. Volume and obligation decide this, not size.
| The test | Ask yourself | What a yes means |
|---|---|---|
| Recurrence | Is this the same work every month, or something occasional? | Occasional work is fine to keep. Recurring execution attached to a founder becomes the constraint on everything else — it never gets smaller, and it always arrives at the worst time. |
| Obligation | Has anything appeared with a date on it? A tax registration, a return, a filing, an audit request from a bank or landlord? | A dated obligation changes the question from preference to consequence. Missing it costs money on a schedule you did not set. |
| Explainability | If someone asked why last month looked different, could you answer without opening anything? | If not, you are already running the business on numbers you cannot defend. That is the expensive state, and it is the one founders normalise fastest. |
When the right answer is nobody, yet.
This page exists on the site of a company that sells this work, so it is worth being blunt about when not to buy it. Hiring or outsourcing too early is a common and avoidable mistake, and it usually happens for one of three reasons.
- The business is pre-revenue or nearly so. There is very little to record and no obligation with a date on it. A spreadsheet and a separate bank account will do more for you than a provider, because the thing you actually need is a habit, not a service.
- The volume is genuinely low. A handful of invoices and a dozen expenses a month is not a finance function. Doing it yourself for another quarter builds an instinct for how money moves through your business that you will never get back once you delegate it.
- What you actually need is a one-off. A single registration, one clean-up, one year-end. That is a piece of work with an end, not a relationship. Buy it as a piece of work.
The cost of waiting too long is real, but it is not catastrophic and it is almost always recoverable. Books can be brought current. What is harder to recover is the habit of not looking, which is why the explainability test matters more than the other two.
You are not buying hours. You are buying obligations carried to closure.
When the answer is yes, most founders shop for the wrong thing. They compare hourly rates, or headline monthly fees, or how quickly someone replies. None of that predicts whether the work will actually be finished.
Almost everything that goes wrong in a small finance operation is one of the same few things. An invoice you issued and nobody chased. A bill you owe that was never scheduled. A filing that became due and was not prepared. A transaction recorded and never explained. Each one is an obligation — something owed, owing or due — and in every case the failure was not the recording. It was that nobody carried it to closure.
So the question to ask anyone you are considering, in-house or outsourced, is not what they will do. It is what they own to completion, and what happens on the day something cannot be finished. A provider who can answer that precisely is selling a different product from one who lists services.
And where it does not.
At Par is built for the founder who has passed two or three of the tests above and does not want to hire a finance team. You send the work the way it already arrives — a photograph of an invoice, a bank screenshot, a forwarded email — and it comes back done: the books closed and reconciled, the obligations tracked until they are finished, the filings prepared.
It is not the right answer for everyone. If you need a statutory audit, that must come from an accredited auditor and At Par does not do it. If you need someone physically in your office, or advice on a transaction, or a registered agent, that is a different purchase. And if you scored zero on the three tests, the honest recommendation is to keep your money and revisit in a quarter.
At Par prepares and hands over. It never moves your money and never files on your behalf — you authorise anything consequential, and a qualified accountant is accountable for the standards the work is done to.
The questions founders ask before they are ready to ask anyone in person.
At what revenue does a business need an accountant? +
There is no revenue figure, and any number quoted as a threshold is invented. Two businesses of identical size can have completely different amounts of finance work — one with a dozen large invoices a year and one bank account has almost none, while one with a hundred small transactions, foreign receipts and a payroll has a great deal. What decides it is whether the work has become recurring, whether a dated obligation has appeared, and whether you can still explain your own numbers. Revenue is a poor proxy for all three.
Can I just do my own bookkeeping? +
For a while, and often you should. When volume is genuinely low, doing it yourself builds a useful instinct for how money actually moves through the business, and that instinct is hard to acquire later. It stops being sensible when the work becomes recurring rather than occasional, because recurring execution attached to a founder becomes the constraint on everything else. The point to watch for is not when it gets hard. It is when it gets repetitive.
What is the difference between a bookkeeper and an accountant? +
In plain terms, a bookkeeper records what happened and an accountant interprets it and prepares what has to be filed. In small businesses the line blurs, and the labels vary by country, which is part of why the question is confusing. A more useful framing is to stop asking what to call the person and ask what work needs to be owned to completion: keeping the books current, chasing what you are owed, preparing what is due, and being able to explain the result. Then find whoever or whatever can own that.
Is it a problem that I have not done any bookkeeping yet? +
It is a problem, but usually a recoverable one. Books can be brought current from bank statements and documents, and businesses reconstruct months or years of history more often than you would think. What makes it worse is a dated obligation passing while the records are incomplete, because the penalty attaches to the date rather than to your intentions. If nothing is overdue, you have time. If something is, that is the thing to deal with first.
Should I hire someone or outsource it? +
Hiring makes sense when the work needs someone present, when it is bound up with operations rather than only with finance, and when there is enough of it to occupy a person properly. Outsourcing makes sense when the work is recurring, rule-shaped and separable — which most bookkeeping, reconciliation, receivables follow-up and filing preparation is. The mistake in both directions is buying capacity you do not need yet, so it is worth being honest about whether you have two or three yeses on the tests above, or only one.
Tell us what your month actually looks like. We’ll tell you if it is too early.
How many invoices you send, how many bills arrive, whether anything has a date on it, and what you currently do yourself. If the honest answer is that you do not need anyone yet, we will say so.
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Reviewed by an ACCA on the At Par team · Last updated 29 July 2026 · This page is written to be used on any provider, including At Par. See what we actually do.