Sometimes the answer is yes, and if it is you should hire one. This page is about working out which situation you are in, and what it actually costs either way.
I have an obvious interest in the answer, so let me be straight about where the line falls. If your finance problem is volume — invoices to raise, suppliers to pay, payroll to run, customers to chase — you need a person, and probably a full-time one. Nothing on this page argues otherwise.
If your finance problem is that nobody tells you how the business is doing, that is a few days a month of skilled work, and hiring somebody full time to do it is an expensive way to solve it.
The salary is roughly three quarters of it. Indicative figures — check a current Irish salary survey for your county and sector.
| Role | Salary | Ongoing, fully loaded | Year one, including hiring |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bookkeeper | €40,000 | €46,460 | €55,460 |
| Assistant accountant | €45,000 | €52,268 | €62,142 |
| Management accountant | €62,000 | €72,013 | €84,863 |
| Financial controller | €78,000 | €90,597 | €106,247 |
Ongoing cost adds employer PRSI at around 11% and a 5% pension contribution. Year one adds a recruitment fee of about 17.5% of salary and roughly €2,000 for a laptop, software licences and a desk. None of it includes the two to four months the role sits empty while you recruit, or your own time interviewing.
For comparison, this practice runs from €6,000 to €17,400 a year — so the top tier is around 19% of a controller's ongoing cost. But that comparison is only honest with the next section attached.
A cost comparison on its own is misleading. These are not the same thing.
| Full-time controller | Outsourced, monthly | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost, ongoing | About €90,000 | €6,000–€17,400 |
| Availability | Every day, on site, in the room when something happens | Agreed days, plus a call |
| Transactional work | Invoicing, credit control, payroll, supplier payments | None of it |
| Knows the business | Daily, including what is not written down | Monthly, from the figures and the call |
| Can manage a team | Yes | No |
| Holiday and sick cover | You absorb it | Built into the fee |
| Recruitment risk | A bad senior hire in a small business is expensive and slow to undo | One month's notice |
| Key person risk | Everything in one head, which walks out the door | Documented process, you keep the files |
Read that honestly and the full-time hire wins on four of the eight rows, including two that matter a great deal. If you need somebody in the building every day, no monthly arrangement substitutes for that.
Finance support in a growing business usually goes in this order. The mistake is jumping from one to three.
Invoices in and out, bank reconciliations, VAT returns, payroll. Essential, and either a part-time person or an outsourced service. Most businesses get here early and correctly.
Accruals, prepayments, stock and work in progress, then accounts that mean something, margin analysis and a cash forecast. This is a different skill from bookkeeping and it is a few days a month, not a full-time role. This is the rung that gets skipped.
Justified when the transactional volume needs managing daily, when there is a finance team to run, or when the business is complex enough that part-time attention genuinely is not enough. Broadly, when finance is a function rather than a report.
Strategy, funding, board level. A different job again, and a long way from most owner-managed businesses.
The common sequence failure is having a good bookkeeper, feeling that something is still missing, and concluding that the answer is to hire a controller. Often the actual gap is rung two — and a bookkeeper is not failing at it, because recording transactions and closing a month are not the same job. One tells you what happened. The other tells you what it means.
Sometimes, and if your bookkeeper can close a month properly you are in a good position. But recording transactions and closing a month are different skills. Closing means accruing what has not been invoiced, moving stock and work in progress, splitting out what belongs to the period, and then explaining what the result means. A bookkeeper who has not done that work is not failing at their job — it is a different job.
A perfectly good option, and for some businesses the right one. You get someone in the building for an agreed day or two a week. The trade-offs are availability on the other three days, and that holiday and illness are still yours to absorb. Worth pricing alongside everything else.
Yes, and that is the correct observation. A controller at €90,000 fully loaded across roughly 1,800 productive hours is about €50 an hour, which is less than any outsourced rate. The question is whether you need 1,800 hours of it. If you need 200, buying 1,800 is not a saving.
Common, and rarely the individual's fault. A single finance hire in a small business has nobody to learn from, nobody to check their work, and an owner who often cannot technically supervise them. It is a hard role to succeed in alone, which is worth weighing before trying again.
Then you hire, and that is a good outcome. The month is already closing on a documented process, the reporting exists, and the files are yours — so a new controller inherits something working instead of starting from a shoebox. I would rather hand over cleanly than hold on to a client who has outgrown the arrangement.
Write down what you actually want someone to do, hour by hour, for a month. If it fills a week, hire. If it fills three days, you have your answer — and you have just written the scope for whoever does it.
Twenty minutes on the phone, no charge. Tell me what you want the role to do and I will tell you honestly whether it is a hire or a few days a month. If it is a hire, I will say so and you will have lost nothing but the call.