Finance & Accounting Turnover: Why Key Members Leave + What to Do

Key members tend to leave F&A teams when they're overworked and lack the tools to be successful. Third party providers help address the core reasons for F&A turnover and mitigate risk.
Updated: March 12, 2025

All companies face employee turnover in each department at some point. However, turnover in the finance and accounting function can be especially disruptive.

When a key F&A team member leaves, businesses need to be prepared to remedy the fallout.

Why are people leaving F&A teams?

Money is usually the main reason why F&A team members leave their company, but not how you may think.

Many growing businesses only have budget to hire one key member for their F&A team. Or, the department budget is not big enough to hire more members and spread the work evenly.

Given the cost of each new accounting employee’s salary, benefits, and training, companies building their F&A department in-house will try to save money by hiring fewer people.

They end up hoping that the one key member – usually the CFO – can deal with everything. They need them to handle both the tactical and strategic aspects of the business.

Tactical Operations:

  • Optimize technology platform
  • Transactions with low or no error rate
  • Audit readiness
  • Management reporting and KPI’s
  • Real-time forecasts & scenario modeling
  • Acquisitions platform

Strategic Operations:

  • Right hand to the CEO
  • Understand business model and key drivers
  • Growth and funding strategy
  • M&A strategy

There are only so many qualified CFOs that fit that job description, and it’s unlikely a growing company can afford them. The CFO in-seat will be taking on responsibilities with which they don’t have experience, or more responsibilities than they can handle.

Relying on one key F&A team member hurts everyone. The CFOs can’t offer enough insight and advice for the CEOs and other executives to make strategic decisions, and the business’s growth prospects suffer.

CFO’s role is changing

The CFO role has always been challenging, but modern CFOs at growing firms have several additional challenges.

  • They must be both a tactician and a strategist.
  • The board and CEOs expect the CFO to contribute to the company’s growth.
  • Inadequate software designed to assist them in their jobs.

Inadequate financial software creates significant challenges for CFOs and finance and accounting teams. It often fails to meet their needs, making data processing and insightful reporting inefficient and frustrating. Frequent updates add to the expense, and the steep learning curve can lead to poor adoption.

These inefficiencies not only slow down progress compared to competitors but also contribute to burnout and turnover among CFOs and other key team members.

So what is the solution to this turnover?

The outsourced finance and accounting solution

Consero offers a modern solution to the inefficiencies and turnover plaguing F&A departments in industries like SaaS, healthcare, and investment management.

Where traditional in-house finance and accounting teams often fall short, Consero’s Finance as a Service (FaaS) steps in as a trusted partner, providing a tech-enabled platform and expert support to optimize your finance and accounting function, delivering results that in-house teams can’t achieve.

We provide:

  • Top quality F&A services
  • Highly trained and experienced F&A teams that can either assist your existing F&A or completely administer and manage all F&A tasks
  • Constant communication between our teams and yours, to enable smooth cooperation and thus more accessible and faster growth
  • A complete solution for your financial problems – accounting, finance services, controller services, and bookkeeping
  • An advanced cloud software platform called SIMPL that deals with mountains of data and is updated continuously, all to achieve maximum efficiency
  • Support and consulting for the CFO

This highly effective model has been tried, tested, and refined over nearly two decades of serving hundreds of investor-backed companies to effectively reduce the risks of building in-house finance and accounting teams and mitigate the impact of employee turnover.

By addressing the challenges that in-house F&A teams often struggle with in today’s fast-paced business environment, Consero ensures stability, efficiency, and a predictable cost structure.

Rather than worrying what to do if a key team member leaves, you can accelerate your company’s growth trajectory, free from the disruptions of turnover and inefficiencies.

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