Your provider's real work starts the day your offshore hire does

Once your offshore hire starts, the provider becomes the legal employer. Payroll in the local currency, the statutory contributions, leave accrual, the device, and a personnel file that survives an audit all sit with it. The work stays with you.

So what does a provider actually do once your offshore hire starts? Everything an employer does except the managing.

Outstaffer sells this, so read on as an interested party. The Employer of Record page has the service description rather than the argument.

Why the shortage list does not tell your practice where to hire

Chartered Accountants Australia and New Zealand said on 22 October that taxation accountants and external auditors sit on the 2026 Occupation Shortage List, and that external auditor vacancies take the longest to fill. Damian Ogden, who leads its advocacy, said Australia’s need for specialist accounting expertise continues to outpace supply. General accountants drew a qualified no shortage rating that CA ANZ says its members do not recognise. Oxford Economics Australia, which it commissioned, forecasts a shortfall of almost 18,000 such professionals by 2035.

National shortages are easing. True, and no use to a twenty person firm: the roles coming off the list are not the roles you are short of.

Which accounting roles can actually move offshore?

Not the ones in shortage. A registered agent signs the return and a licensed auditor signs the opinion, and both have to be here. What moves is the work stacked underneath them: workpapers, reconciliations, data entry, chasing the documents clients never send. Who sets the standard for that work does not move at all. It stays with the partner.

What the provider takes on once your offshore hire starts

The list is dull, and the dullness is the point. Registering as an employer in the country. Running payroll on the local cycle. Paying statutory contributions and filing them. Accruing leave against local entitlements. Buying, shipping, securing and recovering the laptop. Keeping an employment record that holds up when somebody asks.

None of it is skilled work and all of it takes hours. We priced what an hour of back office admin actually costs this week, and it came in above the wage.

Outstaffer publishes Employer of Record cover from $250 per employee per month. Two offshore heads is $500 a month, $6,000 a year before salary, and that $6,000 carries the payroll, the contributions, the leave liability, the equipment and the record for both. Set it against the vacancy it replaces. Jobs and Skills Australia put the national vacancy fill rate at 68.2 per cent in its Occupation Shortage Report for March 2026, down over the quarter, so roughly one advertised role in three was still open at the end of it. The $6,000 is what it costs to stop waiting on the third.

Statutory treatment differs by country, so get advice for your own situation.

Who manages the person day to day?

You do. The provider employs, it does not supervise. Nobody at an Employer of Record knows whether a reconciliation is right.

The honest objection: you could run all of this yourself

You could. A payroll bureau in Manila, a courier for the laptop, a template contract and someone in your admin team holding the file is a real arrangement. Plenty of firms run it.

The difference is not the task list. It is which entity is the employer. When the arrangement gets tested, by a local labour claim or a buyer’s adviser, the question is who employed the person, and a bureau that processed a payment is not an answer. If you are buying the task list, $250 is too much. If you are buying the employer, it is the cheapest line in the role.

Related reading

• ASIC Counted The Back Office. Four Firms Had One Person In It.
• ASD Says The Fix Is Not In The Model. It Is In Who Holds The Laptop.

The number to look at is not the monthly fee. It is how long the role has been open. Outstaffer’s pricing is published, so you can run the comparison without talking to anybody.

What a provider does after your offshore hire starts is either the administrative half of an employment relationship your practice already runs badly for the people it has, or $250 a month for a Friday afternoon job. Which one depends on what happens the first time somebody resigns. What would that cost you this quarter?