Hiring

The real cost of your first finance hire (and the option most owners miss)

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The advert says £70k. The true bill is £87,500 to £98,000 before the recruitment fee, it rests on one person, and there is an alternative most owners never price up.

There is a moment in every growing company when the owner realises they have become the finance department. Invoices at lunchtime, payment runs on Sunday, chasing debtors between client calls. The instinct at that point is simple: hire someone.

It is the right instinct and often the wrong maths. Before you write the job ad, it is worth knowing what the hire really costs, what risk you are taking on, and what the alternative looks like. Most owners price the salary. Very few price the rest.

The advert says £70k. The payslip is not the whole bill.

Cost	What it adds
Salary	The £70k you budgeted for.
Employer National Insurance	A meaningful percentage on top of salary, paid by you, not the employee.
Pension contributions	Employer contributions under auto-enrolment, every month.
Recruitment	Agency fees commonly run to a significant slice of first-year salary, plus your time interviewing.
Kit, software and overhead	Laptop, licences, desk, training, benefits.
Ramp-up	Three to six months before a new controller knows your business well enough to be fully productive. You pay full price from day one.

Stack those up and the £70,000 role sits at 1.25 to 1.4 times base salary, so £87,500 to £98,000 in year one, before the recruitment fee. That is not an argument against hiring. It is the number the decision should be made on.

The risk nobody prices: one person, whole function

The first finance hire usually inherits everything: bookkeeping, payroll, VAT, supplier payments, month-end, reporting, cash. That creates two problems.

First, breadth. Someone excellent at transactional work is rarely also strong at management reporting and cash forecasting, and the reverse is just as true. One person cannot be senior and junior at the same time, so parts of the role get done at the wrong level, or not at all.

Second, concentration. If that person is off sick, on holiday or hands in their notice, the finance function stops. Payroll still has to run that Friday. Most owners only discover how exposed they are on the day it happens, and it is an expensive day.

There is also a quieter problem: you are now managing a discipline you have never run. Reviewing the work of your only finance person, without a finance background, is hard. Weak work can look fine for months.

When hiring is the right call

To be clear, sometimes the hire is right. If your volumes are high enough to fill a full-time role at one level, if you have someone senior enough to manage and review the work, and if the business can absorb the concentration risk, an in-house hire builds knowledge that stays in the building. Larger businesses get there eventually, and we help clients make that transition when the time is right.

The question is whether that describes your business today, or the business you hope to have in three years.

The option most owners miss

The alternative is not a cheaper bookkeeper. It is buying the finance function as a service rather than as a person. Here is what that looks like in practice:

1. A team, not an individualTransactional work done at the right level, reviewed by senior people, with cover built in. Nobody’s holiday stops payroll.
2. The full month-end cycleBookkeeping, payroll, VAT, payment runs, reconciliations and a proper close, on a fixed monthly rhythm.
3. Reporting you can decide fromManagement accounts with commentary, cash visibility and KPIs, arriving days after month-end rather than months.
4. Senior input when you need itA finance partner across the numbers who can sit in the decision with you, without paying a full-time senior salary.
5. A cost that flexesFixed monthly fees that scale with volume and complexity, typically below the all-in cost of the equivalent hire, with no recruitment risk and no notice-period cliff edge.

How to decide: three questions

One: is there genuinely a full-time role here, or eighteen hours of mixed-level work being rounded up to forty? Two: who will review this person’s work, and would you know if it was wrong? Three: what happens to payroll and payments in the week they leave?

If those answers make you uncomfortable, run the comparison properly before committing to the hire. It is a spreadsheet exercise, not a leap of faith, and we are happy to run it with you.

Frequently asked questions

Last updated: July 2026. General guidance for UK limited companies, not specific advice. For support scoped to your business, book a 15 minute intro call.