Think outside the square on the accounting skills shortage

This article was current at the time of publication.

Accountants in public practice were feeling the talent squeeze well before COVID-19. For John Zerella FCPA, founder and managing director of AFM Services in Adelaide, just advertising for employees wasn’t delivering the quality of candidates his clients required. He knew it was time to think outside the square.

“Finding people with some reasonable public practice experience has been just about impossible over the past few years, so we’ve adopted a policy to grow our own talent and draw on our experienced people to mentor them,” Zerella explains. 

Zerella is one of a growing number of accountants taking a creative approach to countering the skills shortage. While Zerella’s strategy at AFM focuses on traineeships for undergraduates, others are exploring solutions like outsourcing and leveraging technology that serves as an extra pair of virtual hands.

Short supplies

In this tough market, it’s not only accountants in short supply. Zerella says administration staff are also hard to come by.

“Over the past 12 months, trying to source a receptionist was very challenging because of the shortage of people and because the role is no longer seen as exciting, or one that may potentially provide some sort of future development.”

Shabnam Amirbeaggi FCPA, managing partner, of Crouch Amirbeaggi in Sydney, has also struggled to recruit admin staff, even junior admin staff. 

“I think COVID-19 may have contributed to the skills shortage and there’s a lot in the media about the Great Resignation and the Big Shuffle, but, at the end of the day, I think it comes down to a changed attitude toward life,” adds Amirbeaggi, whose firm employs eight staff. 

“People now pick the job based on what is important to them right now. Forget asking where they want to be in five years. They may not be sure where they want to be in 12 months.”

Training fills the gap

Frustrated with the workforce shortage, Zerella developed a traineeship program at AFM Services about three years ago. 

“It involves engaging undergraduates and talking to members of our own families and groups of friends whose kids might be studying commerce and want to pursue some part-time work.”

AFM Services currently employs 31 people, with four undergraduates in its traineeship program.

“They’re at various stages of their study and we give them an opportunity for part-time work and to see how they operate in the organisation,” says Zerella. 

New Zealand’s Auctus Advisory has taken a similar approach to countering the skills shortage in its Hamilton office. Located close to Waikato University and its supply of accounting students, the office has been recruiting undergraduates into bookkeeping roles for the past two years.

“They start out as bookkeepers and we make sure they get a lot of exposure to clients, because our job is really about helping people and that’s where the real satisfaction comes from,” says Gina Brighouse CPA, associate at Auctus Advisory.

Auctus, which employs 45 to 50 people across five offices, has had eight accounting students join its training program as bookkeepers and two are now employed as junior accountants.

“We have two more who are about to move up to junior accounts,” says Brighouse. “They’ve finished their university studies and are transitioning to doing their CPA studies.”

Auctus has a manager who oversees the overall program and Brighouse says the bookkeepers are also mentored by those who have stepped up to junior accountant roles.

“We try to move them up to junior accountants quickly, but it often depends on how much time they’ve spent with the business. Some of them are still students, so may only be able to work part time because of study commitments. But the two who have moved up to junior accountant roles have been with us for about a year and a half.”

Outsourcing solutions

While firms like AFM and Auctus are seeking to bring juniors into their ranks, Crouch Amirbeaggi is looking further afield to fill the skills gap.

Amirbeaggi has been exploring opportunities for outsourcing and says lower salaries present an immediate advantage.

“Another benefit with the company that we’re looking at is that they continue to train the staff,” she says. “That’s attractive to us now, because staff retention is hard.” 

“In the past we would generally hire people with no insolvency background and provide training and watch them grow, like family,” she adds. 

“They’d stay for five or six years and then go out into the big world and hopefully become liquidators and trustees. But that’s changed now because we just can’t find enough people, and they don’t stay. 

“The hiring and the training has lost some of its family feel for us as a smaller firm and has become more transactional.”

Leveraging technology

Outsourcing is part of the solution for Knight Partners in Sydney. Peter Knight FCPA says the firm began outsourcing compliance work before the pandemic.

“I’d been against outsourcing for years, but we got to a point where we couldn’t find enough people,” he says. 

Along with outsourcing, Knight leverages technology for tasks like bookkeeping. He sees it as an “essential business driver”.

A simple piece of technology Knight recommends is called Dext (formerly Receipt Bank), which is an app that uses optical character recognition technology. 

“It takes photos of your receipts, reads the details, even breaks out the GST,” says Knight, who employs a team of six. 

“It links to cloud platforms like Xero. All the data that a bookkeeper would traditionally need to input is done by the app, but we still review the data, to be sure it’s clean.”  

Although there may be some client training to utilise technology, Knight adds, “We ask all of our clients to use it, because it’s a huge time saver. When this kind of work is automated, we can spend more time talking with clients about their business, rather than fussing over which account code to post the entries to.”

For accountants like Zerella, tackling the skills shortage requires a structured approach.

“It’s been a long-term project for us,” he says.  “You need to formalise a structure for things like traineeships so that it doesn't adversely impact your office. 

“We don’t have all trainees working at the same time, because someone needs to be able to sit with them and provide guidance and mentoring and training,” adds Zerella. 

“Hopefully, when they come to the end of their studies, we will have qualified people who can hit the ground running in a full-time capacity.”