The global body for professional accountants

Sectors, industries and roles

What is shared services & outsourcing in finance?

Help businesses, governments and individuals with a wide range of financial and business issues.

What is shared services and outsourcing?

Many organisations have moved away from the traditional model of a core offering supported by distinct finance, human resources and IT functions. This helps to achieve economies of scale and drive business process improvements. It has also created some exceptional opportunities for accountancy-qualified professionals:

  • Shared services: In a shared services model, the finance, human resources and IT teams are united into a single department. Sometimes called ‘global business services’, this lets accountancy professionals broaden the scope of their role and even move into other fields.
  • Outsourcing: Some organisations downsize or remove their own in-house support functions in order to engage external service-providers. And because these providers tend to outsource for a number of organisations, working for one gives you access to a huge amount of variety. It’s also an excellent model on which many accountancy professionals build their own business.

Roles in this sector

Read about some of the roles you could undertake:

  • Credit control manager
  • General ledger
  • Fixed assets - general ledger 
  • Accounts payable
  • Accounts receivable

By All Accounts...

‘Is accountancy boring?’

Join us for our brand new podcast series to explore this and other topics.

By All Accounts logo

Shared services lets accountancy professionals broaden the scope of their role and even move into other fields.

Ready to begin your career journey?

Person smiling in urban setting looking skywards

Direct to your inbox

Stay up to date with our industry newsletter