The best accountants aren’t quitting over pay
Typically, when a finance team loses good people, it is almost certain that someone offered them more money. That story is getting harder to tell nowadays.
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I’ve spent over 20 years inside the close, first as an auditor watching teams scramble, then building software meant to fix exactly those issues. I know you cannot hire your way out of a 77% shortage. If the pipeline isn’t there, no amount of recruiting budget can change the math this year. Which means retention now becomes a strategic priority for finance leadership.
Business leaders often treat this as a people problem, or something better management can solve. Or, they treat it as a tool problem and buy another platform promising to “automate the close.” These approaches fall apart for teams that already have talented people and genuinely modern software, because neither one addresses the actual problem.
Using the month-end close as an example, you have teams navigating a dead calm for three weeks, then a five- to seven-day sprint where everything else gets dropped so the close can happen. The stress factor comes from knowing this is happening every single month with no control over how bad it’ll be. That anticipatory anxiety compounds over time. But the work people are drowning in is rarely the core part of the job. We see them chasing colleagues for constant updates, or starting reconciliations from a blank sheet every single month. It’s as if nothing about the process assumes continuity, and even worse, low-risk, repetitive items get the same scrutiny as the ones that actually carry risk because the process is not built to tell them apart. This issue won’t be solved with new hires alone.
Before posting a new job opening or signing a software contract, take a step back and look at where work is actually happening. A lot of what currently gets crammed into the close window doesn’t need to live there. Low-risk, recurring reconciliations (the ones with a stable history and no red flags) can be reviewed and substantially closed out before month-end even starts. There’s no need for these to take up space during the month-end sprint. When you take that out of the crunch, month-end stops being a scramble to produce numbers from scratch and becomes a review, where the team’s attention goes to the handful of items that actually warrant it instead of being spread thin across everything at once.
Buying new software is not the quick answer; you can make these changes with a spreadsheet and a calendar if you’re very disciplined about it. But software can make the redistribution easier to sustain at scale, and that’s exactly where the fix lies.
This redistribution work is neither beneath a controller’s job description nor too operational for leadership to bother with. Plenty of controllers can quote their team’s turnover rate to the decimal without knowing which reconciliations get redone from zero every month versus which ones carry forward from the last cycle. That’s where people burn out unnoticed. To improve retention rates, leaders need to look at the actual mechanics of the close and ask which parts of it truly need to happen inside that five-day window.
Yet, this is not the only answer to a 77% talent shortage. But it’s the part leaders can actually control this year, while the pipeline problem works itself out over time. If your best people are leaving, look hard at what their actual month looks like before you assume it’s about the offer down the street.
