An in-house accountant does not cost you their salary

Ask an owner what their accountant costs and you get the salary. It is the only figure that appears anywhere in one piece, so it becomes the figure people reason with. It is not the cost.

Add it up properly

Start with salary. Then the residence visa and the Emirates ID, which the employer pays and renews. Then health insurance, also employer paid and mandatory.

Then gratuity, which is the one people forget because nothing leaves the bank account until somebody resigns. It accrues at 21 days of basic pay for each of the first five years of service and 30 days a year after that. It is a liability building quietly every month you employ someone, and it is real money whether or not you have provided for it.

Then a desk, a chair and the square metres underneath them, at whatever your office costs per square metre. Then a software seat. Then the weeks they are on annual leave, when the close still has to happen and somebody covers it or it slips.

Add those, divide by twelve, and compare it with the salary you started from. The gap is usually between a third and a half again, and none of it is optional.

Then put the alternative beside it

A monthly management pack from us is AED 3,500. That covers the close, the reporting and a review call. No visa. No gratuity accruing. No desk. No gap when somebody travels.

We are not telling you to let anyone go, and this is not the argument it looks like. Most businesses between AED 5 million and AED 50 million of revenue need the person and the function, both. The mistake is asking one accountant to be both at once.

What the person is for, and what the function is for

The person handles what needs to be in the building: the questions from operations, the supplier who calls, the invoice that has to go out today, the thing that is wrong and has to be right by Thursday. That work is local, constant and badly suited to an outside firm.

The function is the close running to a calendar, the reporting pack that says the same thing in the same format every month, the forecast that updates from actuals, the tax positions being right before anybody asks. That work is periodic, technical and very well suited to an outside firm, because it benefits from having been done a hundred times.

Where it goes wrong is hiring one competent accountant and expecting both. They will choose the urgent work every time, because the urgent work has a person standing next to it asking. The close slips, the reporting gets thinner, and eighteen months later nobody can say which product makes money.

Run your own number this week

Salary, plus visa and Emirates ID, plus insurance, plus gratuity accruing, plus space, plus software, plus leave cover. Divided by twelve.

Whatever you conclude, you will be making the decision against the real figure instead of the one on the offer letter. If you want a second pair of eyes on the arithmetic, twenty minutes is free.