The short answer
Below roughly $5M in revenue, outsourced almost always wins on cost, and it is not close. Between $5M and $20M it depends on transaction volume and how much of the work is judgment rather than processing. Above $20M, a hybrid usually wins: someone in-house who owns the relationship, with processing and technical work outsourced underneath them.
The reason has little to do with hourly rates. A finance function needs four different skill levels, and an in-house hire forces you to buy one salary and hope it covers all four.
What an in-house hire actually costs
A staff accountant at $75,000 does not cost $75,000. Add employer payroll taxes, benefits, software seats, recruiting, equipment and a desk, and the loaded number lands closer to $100,000 or $110,000 depending on your state and benefits package.
- Employer payroll taxes, typically 8 to 10 percent of salary
- Health, dental and retirement match, often 15 to 25 percent
- Recruiting, whether a fee or your own time running the search
- Software seats: the accounting system, the bill pay tool, the expense tool
- Coverage during vacation, illness, and the gap after they resign
- Your time managing them, which for most founders is the expensive one
The single-point-of-failure cost
One in-house accountant means one person who knows how your books work. When they leave, the knowledge leaves too, and the next hire spends a quarter reverse-engineering decisions nobody wrote down. That never shows up in a salary comparison.
What outsourced actually costs
Published outsourced pricing runs from about $1,500 a month for managed bookkeeping through roughly $7,500 a month for a package including controller and CFO oversight, plus a one-time implementation fee covering cleanup and system setup.
That range buys a team rather than a person: someone coding transactions, someone reviewing the close, and someone senior reading the output. You are not paying CFO rates for reconciliation work, which is the structural reason the cost lands where it does.
- Tax preparation and filing, which is a separate CPA engagement
- Audit fieldwork, though clean accounting makes the audit cheaper
- One-off projects like a system migration or a diligence sprint, usually scoped separately
The comparison at three stages
Figures below are all-in annual cost, not salary.
- Under $3M revenue: in-house bookkeeper $65K to $85K all-in against outsourced $18K to $40K. Outsourced wins clearly.
- $3M to $10M: in-house accountant plus part-time controller $150K to $200K against outsourced $40K to $90K. Outsourced still wins and usually closes faster.
- $10M to $25M: in-house team of two or three $250K to $400K against outsourced $90K to $150K plus more of your own oversight. This is where the honest answer becomes it depends.
- Above $25M: an in-house VP Finance earns their keep. Keep processing outsourced underneath if volume does not justify a full team.
Where in-house genuinely wins
We would rather say this plainly than pretend outsourcing is always the answer.
- Your accounting is genuinely unusual, takes months to learn, and you expect to keep it that way
- You need someone physically present, which is rare in finance but real in some construction and manufacturing settings
- Transaction volume is high enough that per-transaction outsourced pricing crosses over a salary
- Finance is a core competitive capability rather than a support function, as it is for lenders and some fintechs