Right-shoring: how to beat overwhelm and burnout in your accountancy firm

Overwhelm and burnout are worryingly common in the accountancy sector.

CABA reports that 56% of accountants are suffering from stress and overwhelm, compared to 41% across other professions. It also says 43% of accountants have “constantly or often experienced indicators of burnout” in the course of a year.

The problem you have is that, in such a busy sector, it’s hard to identify the causes and what to do about them.

In essence, burnout in accountancy is driven by chronic overwork; high-volume, low-yield tasks; and regulatory changes like Making Tax Digital that pull experts away from high-value work. Quick fixes such as overtime, pay rises, or hard-to-find hires don’t address root causes. But a right-shoring strategy for accountancy can help. It allocates work intelligently – in-house for high-value tasks, nearshore/offshore for scalable support, and outsourcing for routine work.

This guide explains task allocation and best practices to protect staff wellbeing while sustaining quality and efficiency.

How staff can quickly suffer overwhelm and burnout in accountancy

How do accountants get overwhelmed and eventually become burned out? It often starts with smiles and celebrations: the promise of new work. It could be a new client, for example.

Unfortunately, the client might not realise how much high-volume, low-yield work needs doing – work such as bookkeeping and payroll.

Then there’s the introduction of new legislation. Updates like Making Tax Digital (MTD) and its quarterly reporting can add complexity overnight. Suddenly, every client you have needs more help, and you have the same number of staff.

When this happens, your expert team gets pulled away from high-value work and buried in admin.

The essential link – how overwork becomes accounting firm burnout

Overwork is a driver of accountant burnout. That’s because in this profession, chronic workload, role ambiguity, and performance pressure can become real problems. When accountants consistently push beyond healthy limits, their ability to recover dwindles. This leads to chronic exhaustion, reduced motivation, and emotional detachment from their work.

Over time, this cycle of overwork not only harms individual wellbeing but also the quality of work, making burnout a persistent risk within the profession.

Why quick fixes fail managers

When leaders underestimate the seriousness of a growing workload, the danger is that they react instead of strategising.

The instinct is to push harder, to ask for longer hours and give staff more money. But these don’t solve the problem. Overworked, tired staff are unhappy staff, and burnout doesn’t disappear with a salary increase or paid overtime.

Hiring more professionals is tempting and sounds like a logical route. Unfortunately, the news isn’t good for many accounting firms. The recruitment market is tough, and vacancies are still below pre-pandemic levels. Even if you could hire easily, bringing in highly qualified people to handle repetitive tasks is expensive and demotivating for them. As such, it’s simply not sustainable.

The smarter way to beat overwhelm and burnout: right-shoring

The real solution is strategic: matching the right tasks to the right people while applying the right controls. This approach is known as right-shoring. It helps firms manage workload intelligently. Instead of expecting your core team to do everything, you divide responsibilities based on complexity and value.

Your immediate team keeps high-value work in-house, such as tax planning, client advisory, and strategic decisions.

Nearshoring moves tasks to nearby countries with similar time zones and business practices for lower costs and easy collaboration.

Offshoring delegates scalable tasks to distant locations for cost efficiency and access to specialised talent. You keep control over these staff.

Outsourcing contracts external providers for routine or niche tasks like bookkeeping, tax returns, and payroll outsourcing.

Right-shoring for accounting firms: who should do what tasks?

Now you have an idea of what your workforce looks like. Right-shoring gives you options and helps you use your people wisely. Your best talent should focus on work that adds value, builds relationships, and grows your business. Everything else? There are smarter ways to get it done.

With this in mind, here is how you might want to allocate tasks:

Who should do high-prestige work?

Big client deals and strategic moments belong to senior leaders – partners and directors.

Who should do high-value work?

Tax planning and critical business advice should be handled by experienced professionals within your immediate team.

Who needs to concentrate on compliance tasks?

End-of-year duties and onboarding require qualified staff, possibly supported by nearshore or offshore resources.

Who are the best staff to concentrate on more routine and niche tasks?

Bookkeeping, tax returns, and quarterly MTD reports are prime candidates for outsourcing.

Which staff should handle high-volume work?

Payroll is a classic example here. Unless you have a dedicated team for complex cases, outsourcing is usually the most efficient option.

A word on automation

One important element still needs to be addressed: automation. It’s essential to integrate automation into your processes, but the objective should be to empower your staff and external partners, not to replace them. Every core team member ought to prioritise high-value tasks. Giving recently qualified accountants a place in significant meetings – even just to observe – is important, since they represent the future of the firm.

The ideal solution is software that assists clients throughout their journey, reduces repetitive data entry by sharing information, follows up with clients who forget to respond to emails, and offers many other advantages.

Read the full guide to right-shoring, and put an end to overwork and burnout

Designed for accountancy practices facing the strain of high-volume, low-yield tasks, our guide explores right-shoring as a practical strategy for distributing work intelligently.

• Protect your staff from burnout and disengagement
• Keep high-value work in the hands of your most experienced people
• Streamline daily, repetitive, or high-volume work through outsourcing or remote teams
• Uncover best practices for managing outsourced and remote teams

Who wrote the guide

Our guide brings together the expertise of two seasoned professionals:

Eva Mrazikova is a Senior Product Marketing and Digital Transformation leader with 20+ years of experience across accounting, marketing, and technology. As a Senior Director for PMM and wider ACC strategy at IRIS Software Group, she leads go-to-market strategy, product positioning, and customer engagement. Eva is also an accountant herself, and therefore, she blends financial expertise with a passion for innovation and technology.

Jon Cooper is a Senior Product Marketing Partner at IRIS, where he helps connect software and services to the real needs of accountancy firms. Having spent 10 years in practice running a team of accountants and bookkeepers, he knows first-hand the pressures firms face, and he is passionate about making their lives easier through more innovative technology and resources.

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FAQ: Right-shoring and burnout in accounting firms

What is right-shoring in an accountancy firm?

Right-shoring is a strategic approach to staff and work allocation. It helps accounting firms manage their workloads in a way that can prioritise what your core team works on, while using other solutions for everything else. Work is divided among solutions based on complexity and value. Here are these right-shoring solutions and the types of work they should do:

Your immediate team holds onto high-value work, doing it in-house. Such work will include advisory. tax planning, and strategic decisions.

Nearshoring is when you move some less lucrative but important tasks to nearby countries. These countries have similar time zones and business practices to help enable easy collaboration at a better cost.

Offshoring sees you delegate tasks you can scale to distant locations, but you maintain control over the staff. When you do this, it might be to save money, access specialised talent, or both.

Outsourcing makes use of external providers. This is great for niche or routine work, including payroll, bookkeeping and tax returns.

How does right-shoring reduce burnout for accountants?

Right-shoring reduces burnout for accountants by reducing overload, keeping your expert team focused on high-value work and removing administrative burden.

Which tasks should accounting firms outsource first?

As an accountant, consider outsourcing things like bookkeeping, tax returns, MTD quarterly reports and payroll.

What should stay in-house in a right-shoring model?

Hold onto high-value work that requires your insight as accountants, including tax planning, advisory and strategic decisions.

Is right-shoring the same as offshoring?

No. Offshoring is one component of the strategy. Think of right-shoring as a strategy for sharing out work among different teams, including third-party organisations. Offshoring is one of the solutions you might use as part of your right-shoring plan.