Most practices that are turning work away are not short of people so much as short of usable hours from the people they have. Recruitment is a nine-to-twelve month answer at best, and the roles in shortest supply — senior, assistant manager, manager — are exactly the ones that cannot be hired quickly. Before adding salary, measure three things: time lost to rework, time lost to chasing records, and time the owner spends on work somebody else could do. In most practices those three together are worth more than the next hire, and they arrive faster.
The shape of the problem
Practices in this position usually describe it as a hiring problem, and it presents as one. The work is there, the people are not, the ads are out, the agency is expensive and the shortlists are thin.
The reason it does not resolve is that the scarce roles are the middle ones — senior, assistant manager, manager. Those are people with enough experience to review work and hold a client relationship without supervision, and there is no way to conjure one. You can hire a trainee in six weeks. You cannot hire five years of judgement.
So a practice that is short at the middle and tries to recruit its way out spends nine months and a fee to arrive at the same place, minus the fee. Which is why the useful question is not how do we hire faster but where are the hours we already have going.
Where the hours actually go
Three places, in roughly this order, in almost every practice that has grown past the owner's ability to see all of it.
1. Rework
Work that comes back. A file that reaches review and is returned, a return amended after submission, a set of accounts redone because the wrong trial balance was used. Every one of those costs the preparation time twice and the review time twice.
Nobody records it, because there is no code for it and no incentive to use one. Which means that in most practices the single largest source of lost capacity is completely invisible on every report the owner looks at.
Measure it for one month. A single field on the job: did this come back, and why. You do not need precision; you need the order of magnitude, and the order of magnitude is usually a shock. The cause is almost always the same — an unwritten standard for what “ready for review” means, so preparers guess and reviewers correct.
2. Chasing
The hours spent making clients produce things. Records, queries answered, approvals signed, invoices paid.
This is the work that scales worst, because it grows with client count rather than with fee, and it is about to get substantially worse: MTD for Income Tax takes the number of occasions on which you must extract records from a client from one a year to five.
The practices that have fixed this did not get better at chasing. They removed the need for it — bank feeds connected so the records arrive on their own, a standing monthly date instead of an annual ask, and a written rule about what happens when a client misses it that is actually applied.
3. The owner doing work somebody else could do
The most expensive hours in the practice, spent on the things that reach the owner because the route to them was never closed. Fee queries, exceptions, technical questions, approvals, anything unusual.
Two weeks of rough half-day tracking answers this, and almost nobody guesses it correctly in advance. The gap between where an owner thinks their time goes and where it goes is the single most useful number in this whole exercise. It is covered properly in what to delegate first, and the short version is that the problem is authority, not capability — work bounces back to the owner when somebody was given a task but not the right to decide.
The arithmetic that makes this worth doing
Take a team of eight. If rework, chasing and misrouted owner time account for even 10% of their available hours — a conservative figure in a practice that has never measured it — that is most of a full-time person, already on the payroll, currently invisible.
A hire adds salary, employer's costs, recruitment fees, and several months of supervision before it adds net capacity — supervision drawn from the very managers who are already the bottleneck. Recovering existing hours adds capacity within a quarter and adds no cost at all.
This is not an argument against hiring. It is an argument for doing the measurement first, because the measurement changes what you hire and when — and because a practice that hires into a broken workflow gets a more expensive version of the same problem.
What to do in the next ninety days
- Measure rework for one month. One field, one question, no analysis. Then look at the reasons and fix the biggest one, which will be the preparation-to-review handover.
- Write down what “ready for review” means and stop accepting work that is not. This single thing recovers more hours than any other intervention on this page, and it costs a meeting.
- Pick your largest client segment and remove the chase. Connected feeds, a standing date, a written escalation. One segment properly, not all of them badly.
- Track the owner's time for two weeks in half-days, then close the three routes that account for the most of it — by naming who decides instead, and telling the team the rule exists.
- Only then decide what to hire. You will have a better answer, a smaller number, and a job that a new person can actually succeed in.
The part that is genuinely hard
None of this is complicated and all of it is difficult, for one reason: it has to be done by the people who are already too busy, during the period in which they are too busy, and it produces nothing in the first fortnight.
That is why it does not happen on its own, and why it usually needs somebody whose job it is — not more effort from people who are already at capacity. A practice can get there by protecting half a day a week and refusing to give it up, which is unglamorous and entirely possible. What does not work is intending to do it after the current busy period, because in an accountancy practice there is no after.
Common questions
Is it really true that most practices are turning work away?
It is one of the more consistent findings in recent UK profession surveys, and it is reported as severe rather than marginal — firms declining new clients specifically because they lack the staff to deliver. Worth treating as context rather than as a number to quote at your own team: the useful version is your own figure for how much work you declined last quarter and why, which most practices do not record and could.
Why can't we just recruit?
You probably can at trainee level. The shortage bites at senior, assistant manager and manager — people with enough experience to review work and own a client relationship. Those are the roles a stretched practice most needs and the ones with the longest lead time, so recruitment is a real answer on a nine-to-twelve month horizon and not an answer at all to this year's capacity.
How do we measure rework without upsetting the team?
Frame it as a process question, which is what it is, and never attach a name to it. One field on the job recording whether it came back and why, reviewed in aggregate. If people think it is a performance measure they will under-record and you will get a flattering, useless number. The reasons matter far more than the count.
Would outsourcing solve it?
It solves volume, not sequencing. Outsourced production adds preparation capacity quickly and genuinely, and it is a reasonable answer when the bottleneck is hands. It does not help when the bottleneck is review, because the reviewed work still lands on the same scarce managers — and it does not help with chasing, which depends on the client relationship. Fix the handover standard first or you will outsource your rework too.
How long before this shows up as real capacity?
Expect a quarter before it is visible and two before it is reliable. Rework reduction shows first because the effect is immediate once the standard is agreed. Removing the chase takes longer because clients have to change habits. Owner time is the slowest, because it is the only one that requires the owner to stop doing something they are good at.
What if we do the measurement and the hours are not there?
Then you have a genuine hiring case, made with evidence, and you will write a much better job description for having done the work. That is a good outcome rather than a wasted month. It is rare, though — in practices that have never measured rework and chasing, the hours are almost always there.
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