The solo CPA's first hire: when, who, and the math nobody shows you

The standard advice is to hire a junior accountant when you can no longer do all the accounting. This is usually wrong, and the reason is arithmetic.

What the solo practitioner actually spends time on

In most solo practices, chargeable technical work is well under half the week. The rest is scheduling, chasing documents, drafting letters, answering status questions, invoicing, and reconstructing where a file got to.

Hiring a junior accountant addresses the smaller half. It also adds review time, which comes out of the principal's chargeable hours — so the first few months often reduce capacity rather than increasing it.

The math

Take a 45-hour week where 18 hours are chargeable. A junior who can take 8 hours of technical work but needs 3 hours of review nets 5 hours — and only after ramp-up. An administrator who takes 12 hours of chasing, scheduling and document handling nets 12 hours immediately, and those hours convert directly to chargeable time.

The junior is the right hire eventually. It is rarely the right hire first.

The signals that say it is time

Capacity signals are more reliable than revenue ones. Watch for these:

• Deadlines are being met, but only by working the weekend before them.
• You are the only person who can answer any client question.
• Onboarding a new client takes more than a week of elapsed time.
• You have declined work you were capable of doing and wanted.

Systems first, where they are cheaper than people

Some of the twelve hours an administrator would absorb do not need a person at all. Deadlines generated from fiscal year-ends, letters priced from a catalogue, and a portal where clients find their own documents remove work rather than reassigning it.

The practical sequence for most solo practices: systematise what is mechanical, hire an administrator for what is not, and hire the junior accountant when technical work is genuinely the constraint.