When the accounting function starts to strain – close taking too long, errors creeping in, the team feeling stretched – the default response is usually to add headcount. Hire another accountant, distribute the load, and the problems should ease.
Sometimes that's exactly right. But often, what looks like a capacity problem is actually a coordination problem. Adding more people to an unmanaged team doesn't fix that; it makes it harder to see.
Additional accounting staff – Staff Accountants, Senior Accountants, AP/AR Specialists – solve a volume problem. If processes are documented, standards are clear, and the bottleneck is genuinely that there's too much work for the current headcount, more accountants is the right answer.
This applies in specific high-transaction-volume scenarios: a fast-scaling company adding hundreds of daily transactions, a business that's onboarded multiple new entities, or a team that's just brought AP/AR in-house. The work is clear; it just needs more hands.
An Accounting Manager solves a coordination and quality problem. They're the layer between individual accounting staff and the Controller or CFO – the person who makes sure work gets done correctly, consistently, and on time without requiring a senior leader to manage the details.
When that layer is missing, several things happen simultaneously. Junior staff work without sufficient review, so errors accumulate and get caught late. The close process lacks a driver, so it expands to fill whatever time is available. Training doesn't happen because no one owns it. The CFO ends up supervising accounting operations directly.
Finance operations benchmarks show that teams with an explicit Accounting Manager ownership layer close an average of three to five business days faster than comparable teams without that coordination function. Adding more accountants into a coordination-deficient environment doesn't compress timelines – it adds more uncoordinated work happening in parallel.
Volume problem: the work is clearly defined, processes exist, the current team knows what they're doing – there's just too much of it. Add accountants.
Coordination problem: close timelines are inconsistent, review quality is variable, the CFO is spending time on accounting supervision, junior staff aren't developing, and no single person is accountable for the function's output. Add an Accounting Manager.
In practice, many growing companies have both – but the coordination problem tends to be more urgent and more costly to leave unresolved.
For most companies where this question comes up, the answer is: an Accounting Manager first, then additional accountants reporting into them. The manager establishes structure, documents processes, and sets quality standards. Staff execute within that framework.
The reverse – building a larger team first and then trying to manage them into a functional structure – is significantly harder. You inherit ingrained habits, inconsistent processes, and a new Accounting Manager who has to remediate before they can build anything.
Accounting Managers placed through MAVI come pre-vetted with five to seven-plus years of experience and at least two years in management roles.
Yes, especially in leaner teams. An Accounting Manager at a growing company often splits time between managing staff and executing accounting tasks directly. The balance shifts toward management as the team grows.
There's no hard rule, but if you have two or more accountants whose work needs coordinating and reviewing, the management layer starts to earn its cost. Many companies bring in an Accounting Manager as their third or fourth finance hire.
US GAAP proficiency, ERP fluency (QuickBooks, Xero, or NetSuite), prior team management experience, and a track record of owning close processes. MAVI Accounting Managers have five to seven-plus years of experience with at least two years in a management capacity.
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