Q&A icon

Startup Q&A

Back to questions

When to Hire an in-House Accounting/Finance Team: the Cost Benefit Break Down

Vanessa Kruze Kruze Consulting

Vanessa Kruze

CEO and Founder of Kruze Consulting

Table of contents

Congrats! You raised your Series B :) You scraped to find Product/Market fit in your Seed Stage, then came market penetration in your Series A.

Now you’re thinking about scaling up and hiring a ton of people. Great! Just make sure that you hire the right people: those that are core to your product. 90% of the time you really don’t need to hire in-house accountants, but I have seen exceptions. The most common pitfall that we see is hiring a “VP of Finance”, “Controller” or “CFO” way too early.

The ideal accounting/finance team should have 3 levels:

  • Staff Accountant ($60K pp salary)

    • Bookkeeping

    • Payroll

    • Benefits

  • Controller ($120-150K pp salary)

    • VC/Board Financials

    • Tax Compliance

    • System Infrastructure

  • CFO/CPA ($200K pp salary)

    • Advisory & Expertise

    • Valuation

    • Financial Modeling

You have two options:

1. HIRE AN ENTIRE ACCOUNTING/FINANCE TEAM

Pros:

  • Achieves Breadth & Depth of service

  • Accountability: Multiple levels of review

Cons:

  • It’s expensive!!!: $400K per year

  • Poor utilization: people will be sitting idle.

2. HIRE JUST A CONTROLLER OR STAFF ACCOUNTANT… maybe a CFO later?

You’re next thought might be to hire just one of those levels :)

Pros:

  • Uh, none.

Cons:

  • You wont get the breadth and depth of service that you need.

  • Poor quality work / that person will be overworked.

  • Its deceptively cheap: you’ll still need to outsource for tax or CFO advisory.

In sum, don’t bring accounting/finance in-house until your Outsourced Accounting/Finance team bills you more that $33K per month ($400K/12 months).

We have a number of outsourced CFOs who help our clients with recurring finance tasks, and our accounting team is comprised of leaders in the finance as a service industry. Talk to us about helping you scale your business! 

Categories:

Human Resources

READY TO CONNECT FOR A FREE CONSULTATION?

We are the experts at helping seed/VC-backed Delaware C-Corps with their accounting and finances!


Talk with a real accountant, not a generic salesperson!

 Kruze Consulting
Scott Orn
 Kruze Consulting
Alex Janeck
 Kruze Consulting
Edith Silva

Help us get in touch

Enter your name
Enter Company name
Enter Phone number
Enter Email
Enter Message
   
  Talk to a leading startup CPA