By Jose De Soto
Tax season is over. The dust has settled, the extensions have been filed, and if you’re being honest with yourself right now, you already know the answer to the question no one wants to ask out loud: Was that sustainable?
For a lot of firm owners and managing partners I’ve been talking to lately, the answer is no. And Tax Season 2026 made that clearer than ever.
The Seasonal Hire Problem Is Getting Worse
For years, the playbook was simple. Ramp up in Q1, hire a few seasonal staff to absorb the volume, get through April 15th, and exhale. That playbook doesn’t work anymore.
The onshore talent market for accounting professionals continues to be tight, and it’s not loosening up anytime soon. Bloomberg reports there are 340,000 fewer accountants, and firms are competing for the same limited pool of candidates. Seasonal roles are the hardest sell in that environment. You’re asking someone to uproot their schedule, come on board, and leave a few months later. The candidates who have options aren’t taking that deal.
So, what happens? You either go into the season understaffed, or you patch the gaps with whoever you can find on short notice. Neither is a great outcome.
Inconsistent Output Is a Quality Problem, Not Just a People Problem
When you’re scrambling to fill seats, quality control becomes an afterthought. Seasonal staff who don’t know your workflows, your software stack, or your clients’ histories aren’t going to produce at the same level as someone who’s a full-time team member in your firm. That’s not a knock on the individual. It’s just the reality of onboarding someone into a high-volume, high-pressure environment with a short runway.
The downstream effect is real: partners end up reviewing more, errors get caught later in the process, client experience suffers. And the people who should be focused on advisory work and business development are buried in production.
Partners Shouldn’t Be Doing Tax Production
This one hits close to home for a lot of firms. If your partners spent the first quarter of 2026 deep in return preparation, that’s a capacity problem you need to solve before next January. Your partners are the highest-value resource. Every hour they spend in production is an hour they’re not spending on client relationships, firm growth, or the work that actually justifies their billing rate.
If you found yourself thinking, “We just need to get through this season,” you’ve already identified the gap. The question is what you do about it before it happens again.
Why Outsourced Talent Is the Answer Accounting Firms Are Underestimating
I want to be direct here, because I think there’s still a perception gap in the US accounting market around what remote staffing actually looks like in practice. This isn’t about cutting corners or sending work overseas to save a few dollars. The firms that are winning right now are the ones who’ve figured out how to build a real, integrated global team. Here’s what that looks like.
#1 – A Dedicated Team Member Who’s Actually Part of Your Firm
The biggest shift in thinking that firm owners need to make is this: outsourced doesn’t mean transactional. When you bring on a dedicated, full-time team member through an outsourcing provider, that person is yours. They’re embedded in your workflows, they’re in your project management tools, they’re on your morning standups. They’re not a contractor you call when you need overflow. They’re a member of your team.
That distinction matters enormously when it comes to output quality and institutional knowledge. A team member who has been with your firm for years knows how you like returns structured. They know your clients. They know your software, your review process, and your preferences. That depth of knowledge doesn’t happen with a seasonal hire who’s in the door in January and out in May.
The other upside that firms often underestimate is growth. When you invest in someone full-time, that person can grow with the firm. They can take on more complexity over time, move into more senior responsibilities, and become a genuine contributor to the practice beyond just volume processing. That’s a very different ROI than a seasonal hire.
#2 – Speed and Access to Talent That Doesn’t Exist Onshore
One of the most common objections I hear is: “We needed help two months ago.” Fair point. But here’s what most firm owners don’t know: outsource onboarding timelines with a reliable partner like Cloudstaff run between two and five weeks from search to hire date. That’s fast. Faster than most firms can find, hire, and onboard onshore talent in any market right now.
That speed matters because it gives firm operators something they haven’t had with traditional staffing models: agility. The window I always encourage firm owners to target is right after the Fourth of July. Tax season feels like a distant memory; the team has exhaled, and you still have several months before the January filing push begins. That’s the ideal time to bring someone on, because a new team member who starts in August isn’t walking into the deep end on day one. They have time to get familiar with your systems, your workflows, your clients, and your standards before volume picks up. By the time January arrives, they’re not a new hire anymore. They’re a contributor.
You can also respond to a surge in advisory demand mid-year without waiting six months to find the right local hire. Planning ahead gives you options that last-minute scrambling never will.
Where the Talent Is: Top Three Markets for Accounting Professionals
Below are the top three distinct markets for accounting talent for North American businesses, and each one brings something different to the table depending on what your firm needs.
Colombia: Nearshore Access for the US Market
If proximity and time zone alignment are priorities for your firm, Colombia is a conversation worth having. Bogota is a 3.5-to-5-hour flight from most major cities in the Central and Eastern US. That’s closer than a lot of domestic travel. The team members are bilingual, which opens opportunities to service Spanish-speaking clients in key US markets where that capability is increasingly valuable.
India: The World’s Largest Accounting Talent Pool
The scale of accounting talent in India is hard to overstate. The Big Four alone employ over 140,000 professionals in India. The country has one of the world’s most developed pipelines for accounting and finance education, and the experience working with US GAAP and international accounting standards runs deep. If you’re looking for specialty talent at scale, whether that’s financial analysts, senior tax professionals, or controllers-level support, India’s talent market has the depth to deliver.
Philippines: The Established Market for US Accounting Work
The Philippines has been a home for US accounting work for decades. English is the primary language of business, and cultural familiarity with US norms and working styles is genuinely strong. The depth of experience with US accounting standards, US-based software platforms, and the expectations of US firm clients is well-developed in this market.
The Real Question After Tax Season
If April felt like survival mode, that’s data. It’s telling you something about the structure of your capacity, not just the volume of your workload.
The firms that are going to be in a fundamentally different position next tax season are the ones making decisions not in December or January when the pressure is already building again, but now, while there’s still time to build something intentional.
Best practices for staffing an accounting firm in 2026 involve a hybrid staffing model that balances permanent in-house expertise with flexible external resources. For the firms capitalizing on global staffing, it’s the foundation of a scalable, sustainable practice.
About the Author
Jose De Soto is Vice President of Sales, Americas at Cloudstaff, where he helps accounting firms and growing businesses build high-performance global teams across Colombia, India, and the Philippines. A bilingual (English/Spanish) sales leader with a background spanning global talent strategy, accounting-specific outsourcing, and logistics, Jose brings a uniquely practical lens to workforce planning, having spent years working directly with firm owners across North America to solve their most persistent capacity challenges. He holds a B.A. in International Economics from UC San Diego.
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