Pros and cons of hiring part time employees for your small accountancy firm

In today's video, I'm going to look at the pros and cons of hiring part-time employees.

Now, when you're growing a small accountancy firm and, maybe, you're looking for your first hire, part-time employees are brilliant.

Pros of hiring part time employees

Now, what are the pros of them?

The first of them is they are not as expensive as full-time.

This is because you're not using as many hours, and actually. There's another reason that they may often be slightly less expensive. It could be maybe they're under the threshold for some of the NI contributions, in terms of their hours.

Maybe, you'll find very often with part-time employees that they're willing to take a hit on their pay, in order to get the flexibility to work part-time, and so, they often can be genuinely cheaper but without a knock-on in quality.

What is another pro?

Part-time employees are often easier to find because a lot of firms are just not looking for them.

You know, can you make the role work within school hours, within term time? And actually, most of us can and you'll be amazed how many people will want part-time hours. They will come to you because of that, and you can go into, talent pools that you've never normally had. You'll be amazed that once you've got one part-time employee is how many of them will know other people that want part-time work.

They're actually often over-qualified but are really pleased. And so what you do is you get an employee, who is often incredibly loyal, because they know it's not easy to get part-time hours. The flex around the family and the more flexible you can be.

Do they have to come into the office?

The easier it will be to find and to keep them, and in the club, whenever we've found people offering part-time hours and being really clear that they've got a lot of flexibility. They get a huge amount of people coming in that they may not have seen before or even had a chance to find.

The other thing is with part-time employees, as you grow, they may be able to grow with you so they may be able to take on more hours. Maybe their kids go to school or maybe their aged parent that was the reason why they needed part-time hours. Then, it could be that the problem has changed so they might want more hours and happy to do so.

Cons of hiring part time employees

But let's look at some of the downsides, the cons, because this is about the pros and the cons of hiring part-time employees for your accountancy firm.

Let's look at some of the cons.

Well, the first thing is you're going to need more communication.

Because they're not physically with you across the desk every single day, you're going to have to think a lot more about the communication.

So, how do you keep them involved when they're not in the office that day?

But it's not just about communication to them. It's also about how do we make sure that clients are being communicated. It's absolutely clear when they're there and when they're not there.

The next thing, of course, is there might be an extra cost. For example, if you've got two part-timers doing the equivalent of one, there might be a little bit of a hand over time. So it'll be more like 1.1, 1.2 to do one person's job.

The other thing is you may need two desks for one person's job.

You may need two licenses. And so, there may be some extra costs because a lot of software solutions, they do it on a user basis. So, if you've got three part-timers doing the equivalent of one and a half, you got three licenses when maybe you only maybe needed two.

How, you may find, actually, that you just got to ask the software companies. One of our members has done this because he had a lot of part-timers. He spoke to the software company and said, "Look, I'm going to need users for all of this but they're part time. Can you give me a discount?",

And you know what? They did.

You know, sometimes you've just got to ask the questions.

So, to sum up, what are the pros and cons of having part-time employees for your accountancy firm?

1. They're often loyal.
2. You're often getting a great member of staff at a price you wouldn't be able to afford if they were full-time.
3. They can grow with you

But the cons are of course;

1. That you may need extra space.
2. You may need extra desk space.
3. You may need extra licenses for them

But in our experience, when you're trying to grow, particularly in those days of taking on your first, second, third employee, that part-time, and looking for part-timers, is definitely the way to go.