The Smart Finance Stack Now Includes People You Don’t Hire

The Performance of the In-House Team

The modern finance department has become a kind of farce. A performance where companies pretend they are running operations, when in truth they are taping together fragments of a system that hasn’t worked in years. The CFO carries too much, the controller has inherited the sins of turnover past, and everyone else is just trying to keep the machine from stalling. There are headcount plans that won’t be met. There are job descriptions that feel more like fiction. And there is a growing acceptance of dysfunction dressed up as grit.

We don’t say this out loud because the idea of the in-house team is sacred. A comforting narrative. People on payroll. Desks with badges. The same faces at every all-hands. But sacred and effective are not the same. The reality is this: the talent isn’t there. The pipeline is broken. The recruiting funnel is stale. You’re not rebuilding. You’re waiting. And no one is showing up.

The Accounting Talent Crisis by the Numbers

Accounting programs are emptying. The CPA exam is gathering dust. Junior staff don’t want in, and senior staff want out. Over 300,000 U.S. accountants left their roles between 2019 and 2023, and the number of people sitting for the CPA exam has hit a 17-year low. The average time to hire for an accounting or finance role has ballooned to over 90 days, assuming you can even find someone remotely qualified. Meanwhile, 51% of finance leaders now say that hiring is their number one operational challenge, ahead of compliance and technology.

Defining the Smart Finance Stack

This is why the "Smart Finance Stack" has emerged. It’s a shift in thinking from who you hire to how you perform. If the labor market won’t give you the people, you stop looking for the people and start looking for the capacity.

The modern stack is no longer just a collection of software like NetSuite, Bill.com, or BlackLine. It is a hybrid of internal strategy and external execution. The smart finance stack now includes people you don’t hire—at least not in the traditional sense. It includes fractional leadership, offshore delivery pods, and managed service providers who own the outcomes, not just the hours.

Moving from Headcount to Capacity

The companies that are winning right now have stopped trying to win the recruiting war. They have moved past the binary choice of "in-house" or "outsourced." Instead, they have built a "Hybrid Finance Function." They keep the high-level strategy and decision-making close—the CFO, the VP of Finance—and they push the repeatable, high-volume work to a partner who can scale without friction.

This isn’t about cutting costs, though that often happens. It’s about building a system that doesn’t break when a senior accountant gives their two weeks’ notice. It’s about ensuring that the audit doesn’t stall because a controller is burnt out. It’s about moving from a fragile, person-dependent model to a resilient, process-dependent one.

Reclaiming Control Through Documentation

There is a fear that moving work outside the walls means losing control. The truth is the opposite. You don’t have control over a department that is understaffed and overwhelmed. You have chaos. Real control is having a system that is documented, visible, and consistent. It’s having a partner who brings their own bench of talent—one that doesn’t quit when you’re already short-staffed. That’s control. That’s leverage. That’s sanity.

Performance Over Hiring

The companies that refuse to shift will keep paying more for less. They will keep waiting. They will keep breaking. The ones who shift now will stop thinking about hiring and start thinking about performance. They will stop pretending that finance is special and start treating it like what it is: a function that must work whether or not the labor market cooperates.

You can keep asking who to hire. Or you can start asking who can do the work well, again and again, without drama, delay, or disruption. That’s not just the better question. It’s the only one that matters now.

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