Expertise per Task: How a Business Gets a Strong Finance Professional for as Long as It Needs

Every business has two kinds of finance work. The first runs daily: source documents, payments, payroll, reporting. The second comes up a few times a year: a financial model for the bank, a review of a company before buying it, setting up management accounting. It calls for a professional of a different level, and the workload is short.

That raises a practical question. Keep such a professional on staff all year, or bring one in for the task?

In 1937 the economist Ronald Coase explained why firms exist. Using the market is expensive: you have to find a contractor, agree on a price, bring them up to speed, and check the result. A company keeps in-house whatever is cheaper to organize itself. In 1991 Coase received the Nobel Prize for this work.

The heaviest part of those costs is context. An outsider needed months to learn how the business works, where the documents are, and why the books are kept the way they are. Hiring an employee who already knew all of it was simpler.

Context now moves faster. A 1C export, bank statements, contracts and the accounting policy can be assembled into one package within a few days. AI-based tools help the contractor work through that package and get to the core of the task.

Howard Yu, author of the essay "Coase vs. Claude", describes the same shift using fashion. At Zara the unit of work was a collection. At Shein it became a single design decision. The smaller the unit, the easier it is to hand it to whoever does it best. He also cites Haier: about 80,000 employees work within more than 4,000 micro-enterprises, and each person's income depends on the value created for the customer.

In finance the unit of work has shrunk as well. One model. One review. One report for the board.

First, the cost of staff. The calculation uses the rates of Kazakhstan's 2026 Tax Code:

The line-by-line calculation is in our article "Outsourcing vs. In-House Finance". As a market reference, hh.kz vacancies in Astana and Almaty offer a chief accountant between KZT 700,000 and 1,300,000 a month.

Now the cost of tasks. These are JB Solutions prices at the lower bound; the final figure is confirmed after a diagnostic:

It is too early to compare these tables directly. Answer one question first: for how many months a year would a professional of this level be fully loaded in your company? If the answer is "all year", calculate staff. If it is two or three months, calculate tasks.

There is academic support too. In 2025 Duong, Le and Giang surveyed 358 people from 176 small and medium-sized companies in Da Nang, Vietnam. Their finding: outsourced accounting services, both routine and advisory, improve compliance and management decisions, and through them business performance.

The candid answer: in daily work. Nobel laureate Daron Acemoglu gives the example of an X-ray technician who switches between thirty different tasks in a day. A connected role like that needs a person on site. In finance this means source documents, payments, payroll and dealing with the tax authority.

The executive hiring market offers a second reference point: once the need for a finance director exceeds three days a week, a staff position becomes the better deal. A large company also needs a full-time CFO for negotiations with banks and investors.

So the working setup for a small or medium-sized business is usually mixed. Staff run the recurring operations. An external team takes the rare high-level tasks.

This approach has a price: the contractor needs access to your data. Researcher Soren Larson calls context one of the few truly scarce resources a business has, so it deserves to be treated as an asset.

Three practical rules:

Three answers of "rarely, with a clear result, the package can be assembled" mean the task is a sound candidate for an external team.

You can start with the free express diagnostic from JB Solutions: we look at your situation and tell you which tasks are worth keeping in-house and which to bring in for a result.