In Australia, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find and retain good accounting staff every year. Research by Victoria University for Jobs and Skills Australia predicts the number of accounting roles in Australia will increase from 201,600 in May 2024 to 234,000 by May 2034, and the local pipeline isn’t keeping up. 

For accounting practices, this shortfall shows up in familiar ways: unfilled roles, senior staff stuck doing junior-level work, and delayed turnaround times. It’s why more and more firms are choosing to outsource accounting services rather than compete for a shrinking pool of local talent.

In this blog, we will talk about what accounting outsourcing services are, which services you can outsource and how to choose a provider you can trust with client work, whether you’re a small practice making your first outsourced hire or a growing firm building a scalable back office. 

What are Accounting Outsourcing Services?

Accounting outsourcing means delegating some of your accounting work (payroll, tax preparation, bookkeeping, etc.) to a team outside your business instead of handling everything in-house.

Your accountants continue to review the work, advise clients, and manage client relationships, while the outsourced accounting services team handles the processing-heavy work behind the scenes. 

You can choose either task-based outsourcing, where you send a BAS lodgement or reconciliation as they come up and pay per task, or dedicated resource outsourcing, where an accounting professional works set hours each week as part of your practice.

What Accounting Work Can Be Outsourced?

Businesses rarely outsource accounting services at once. Most firms start with one task, see how it goes, and build from there. Here are the services accounting businesses can outsource:

Bookkeeping

Bookkeeping is rules-based and repetitive, which makes it easy to standardise across client files. It also happens daily and not occasionally. A dedicated outsourced team working the file regularly catches coding errors early, before they turn into a messy clean-up ahead of BAS time.

Accounts Payable

Accounts payable follows a fixed process, from matching the invoice to coding it correctly and sending it for approval and payment. There’s little judgement involved beyond sign-off, just consistent execution. That predictability is exactly why outsourcing works well, keeping the payables ageing report current without pulling internal staff off client work.

Accounts Receivable

Following up overdue invoices takes time and consistency, not technical accounting skill. A dedicated accounts receivable team can chase payments daily and consistently, which is hard to maintain in-house when it gets squeezed between higher-priority client work.

Payroll

Payroll runs on a fixed cycle with clear rules around award rates, superannuation guarantee contributions and STP reporting. Implementing that structured approach mitigates those risks, allowing a dedicated partner to prevent the compliance errors that come with ad hoc handling.

BAS Preparation Support

GST reconciliation follows a similar method each quarter, with little variation from one BAS to the next. That consistency makes the preparation work easy to standardise and hand off, so your BAS agent reviews finished figures instead of building them from scratch each lodgement cycle.

Tax Preparation Support

Organising source documents and entering data into tax software is procedural, not advisory. The technical judgement happens after preparation, not during it. Outsourcing tax preparation support means your accountants step in only for the calls that actually need their qualification, not the document chasing beforehand.

SMSF Support

SMSF administration is heavily rule-bound under the SIS Act, but it actually involves substantial judgment when dealing with tricky compliance interpretations and fund strategies.  Because SMSFs carry significant accounting risks, doing things on the fly or ad hoc opens the door to costly mistakes. That is why leaning on a dedicated outsourcing provider keeps the process scalable for service providers while reining in those heavy risks for accounting practices handling multiple funds.

Reconciliations

Reconciling bank and credit card statements against the ledger is a checklist task with one right answer: matched or not matched. Because it’s binary and scheduled rather than judgement-based, it’s easy to outsource. Doing it weekly instead of at year-end also keeps discrepancies small and easy to trace.

Data Entry

Data entry is a repetitive task that only requires accurately capturing what’s on the source document. That makes it one of the simplest accounting tasks to outsource, freeing qualified accounting staff from repetitive manual data entry work while a dedicated team focuses entirely on accuracy and volume.

Accounting Outsourcing vs Hiring Locally

Deciding between outsourced accounting services and a local hire usually comes down to cost, speed and how much management time you can spare. The right option depends on the type of work, how quickly you need coverage and how much flexibility your practice needs as workloads change.

Here’s a comparison between accounting outsourcing and hiring locally:

Factors	Accounting Outsourcing	Hiring Locally
Time to onboard	Typically weeks, since the provider already has trained staff ready to work	Usually 30 to 90 days for the recruitment process, and that’s before the new hire is fully up to speed.
Cost	Lower and predictable, with outsourcing typically cutting significant accounting costs compared to an in-house team	Higher, with salary, benefits, office space and on-costs all factored in
Scalability	Easy to scale hours up or down as client volume changes	Harder to scale quickly; downsizing or upsizing means another hiring or redundancy cycle
Hiring and recruitment	No need to interview or hire accounting staff yourself	Requires advertising the role, interviewing, and managing the hiring process
Availability	Some providers offer extended support outside standard business hours, depending on the provider	Usually limited to your employee’s standard working hours
Data access & security	Managed through the provider’s security protocols and access controls	Managed entirely through your firm’s systems and controls

Dedicated Accounting Resource vs Task-Based Outsourcing

Once an accounting firm decides to outsource, the next decision is which model fits. A dedicated resource is a fixed team member working set hours each week as an ongoing part of your practice. Task-based outsourcing means sending individual work, like a BAS lodgement or a set of reconciliations, as it comes up and paying per task or file.

Factors	Dedicated Resource	Task-Based Outsourcing
Pricing	Fixed weekly or monthly rate for set hours	Pay per task or per file completed
Best suited for	Ongoing bookkeeping, accounting, and administrative work	Specific tasks such as BAS lodgements or reconciliations
Familiarity with client files	Builds deep familiarity with your clients and processes over time	Limited familiarity beyond the specific task assigned
Workflow integration	Works inside your systems and team rhythm as an extension of your practice	Operates more like a queue, with jobs sent and returned as completed
Response time on new work	Faster, since the team is already familiar with your files	Tasks are completed based on the provider’s usual turnaround time

When Should an Accounting Practice Outsource?

There’s no exact moment when you know you need to outsource accounting services, but a few things tend to show up together when your firm has outgrown its current setup.

1. Deadlines start slipping – BAS lodgements or reporting that used to go out on time now keep dragging, and it’s not just one bad month; it’s every month.

2. Your senior accountant is doing data entry – If the person you pay the most is stuck reconciling accounts because nobody is around to do it, you need to consider outsourcing.

3. Tax season wrecks you every year – Hiring someone for three busy months a year doesn’t work out, and task-based outsourcing handles exactly that kind of spike without the permanent cost.

4. You’re winning clients faster than you can staff for them – Good accountants are hard to find in Australia right now and outsourcing means you don’t have to slow down growth while a role sits open for months.

5. It costs less than a full-time hire – When you look at the salary, super, leave, and the time spent training someone, outsourcing usually costs less for the work done.

Conclusion

Outsourcing accounting services doesn’t have to mean handing over your whole accounting tasks. For many businesses, it simply means getting help with the work that takes up too much time. Whether that’s bookkeeping, payroll, reconciliations or tax preparation, the right support can take some pressure off your team. Start with the tasks that are slowing you down, put clear processes in place, and build from there.