What does an in-house accountant really cost?
Salary is only part of the picture. We add employer Social Security and the costs that never show up on the payslip, and compare it with outsourcing your accounting.
As a small business grows, there comes a point where someone has to own the numbers: hire an accountant or hand the accounting to an outside team. To decide well, you need to compare the real cost of each option, not just the salary in the job ad.
Salary: the starting point
According to salaries published on Indeed, an accountant in Spain earns around €26,700 gross a year on average, and around €29,500 in Barcelona. Experienced or English-speaking profiles easily go above €32,000–35,000.
We'll use €29,500, the Barcelona average, as our example.
Employer Social Security
On top of the salary, the company pays its own Social Security contributions. For a permanent office contract, with the current contribution bases, the total rate is around 32%:
- Common contingencies: 23.60%
- Unemployment: 5.50%
- Vocational training: 0.60%
- Intergenerational Equity Mechanism (MEI): 0.75%
- FOGASA (wage guarantee fund): 0.20%
- Workplace accidents: around 1.50% (depends on the activity)
On a €29,500 salary, that's roughly €9,480 more a year. The annual cost to the company rises to about €38,980, around €3,250 a month.
The costs that don't appear on the payslip
On top of that come costs you won't see on the payslip but the company pays anyway:
- Holidays and public holidays. You pay twelve months but get about eleven months of work. If nobody covers that month, the accounting piles up.
- Sick leave and absences. During sick leave the company still has costs, and work is delayed just as tax deadlines arrive.
- Recruitment and onboarding. Finding the right person takes management time. If you use a recruitment agency, its fee is usually a meaningful percentage of the annual salary. Then come the months of onboarding.
- Workspace and software. Computer, accounting software licences, office space and ongoing training to keep up with tax changes.
- Turnover and key-person risk. If the accountant leaves, they take the knowledge of how the numbers are set up with them, and you start again.
None of these costs is exact, because every company is different, but they all push the real cost above that €38,980.
What if you outsource your accounting?
With an outside service you pay a monthly fee based on the volume of work, with no Social Security contributions, no workspace and no dependence on a single person. The team covers holidays and sick leave, and everything is documented.
For example, a small business with around 50 invoices a month (issued and received) would have an approximate fee of €370 a month + VAT with IntoAction, about €4,440 a year. Compared with €38,980 for an in-house accountant, the difference is over €34,000 a year.
You can run the numbers with your own salary and invoice volume in our staff cost calculator.
When does an in-house accountant make sense?
Outsourcing isn't always the best choice. An in-house accountant makes sense when:
- The volume is very high, thousands of journal entries a month, and justifies a full-time person.
- You need someone in the office for non-accounting tasks: invoicing, chasing payments, dealing with suppliers.
- The company has several entities or very specific internal processes.
There are also hybrid set-ups: an administrative person in-house who handles day-to-day tasks, and an outside team that takes care of the accounting, closings and management control.
In short
- An accountant earning €29,500 costs the company about €38,980 a year in salary and Social Security alone.
- Holidays, sick leave, recruitment, workspace and turnover add to that cost.
- For most small businesses, outsourcing the accounting costs a fraction of that and removes the risk of depending on one person.
If you'd like to know what suits your business, tell us about your case and we'll look at it in a free, no-obligation first meeting.