What to Assess in the First 30 Days After You Hire a Global Accountant

Hiring a global accountant and integrating one are two different problems. The second one is where most teams underinvest, and where most early placements either take root or fail.

The first 30 days aren't a grace period. They're a data-gathering window. You learn whether the candidate's skills hold up under real workload, whether the collaboration model is working, and whether the role scope you defined matches what the work actually requires. If you're paying attention to the right things, you can course-correct early. If you're not, problems that surface at the 90-day mark tend to be more expensive to fix.

Week One: Systems and Access

The first functional checkpoint is simple: does the new hire have everything they need to actually do the work? This sounds obvious, but systems access, ERP credentials, and communication tool setup are commonly delayed, sometimes by a week or more. For a remote accountant, those delays are more costly than they would be for an in-office hire who can figure things out by proximity.

By the end of week one, the new hire should have working access to the accounting system, any relevant dashboards or reporting tools, communication channels, and whatever documentation exists about the close process. If any of those are missing, flag them as operational issues, not performance ones.

Week Two: First Close Cycle Tasks

The real test starts during the first close cycle. The questions to ask aren't 'did they finish?' but 'how did they approach it?' Did they ask clarifying questions before starting, or did they make assumptions? Did their work product require significant revision, or was it close to final on first submission? Did they surface issues proactively, or were problems discovered after the fact?

A new hire who is unfamiliar with your specific chart of accounts or close process will need some guidance in the first cycle. That's expected. What you're evaluating is their accounting judgment and their working style – those don't change with familiarity.

Weeks Two Through Four: Communication and Independence

Remote accounting relationships live and die on communication. A global accountant who is doing strong technical work but requires constant prompting to provide status updates, asks for clarification on things that were already specified, or misses deadlines without flagging them in advance will create management overhead that offsets the value of their output.

What good remote communication looks like is worth being explicit about with a new hire: proactive check-ins on in-progress work, early flags on anything that might affect the close timeline, brief async updates on task completion. If the new hire isn't naturally operating this way by week three, it's worth a direct conversation about expectations before it becomes a pattern.

The 30-Day Evaluation Conversation

By the end of the first month, you have enough data to have a substantive conversation about how the engagement is going. The most useful frame isn't 'how is this person performing?' but 'is the role working the way we designed it?'

Sometimes the first month surfaces scope issues – the role turned out to be 30% more complex than anticipated, or the accounting system integration that was supposed to be handled by IT is now falling on the new accountant. Those are fixable, but they require an honest conversation about what the role actually involves.

A 30-day check-in that's candid on both sides – what's working, what isn't, what either party needs to adjust – sets the tone for a productive long-term engagement. Skipping it, or treating it as a formality, tends to let small friction points compound into bigger ones.

When the First 30 Days Don't Go Well

Not every placement works. Sometimes the skills assessment didn't catch a gap in a specific area. Sometimes the role scope was underspecified. Sometimes the collaboration model doesn't fit the candidate's working style.

The right response at 30 days is a frank assessment: is this a fixable gap – more specific guidance, adjusted scope, different communication structure – or is it a fundamental mismatch? The former is worth investing in. The latter is worth addressing directly rather than hoping it improves.

A trial period exists specifically to provide a decision point. Using it to make a clear-eyed call is better than carrying a suboptimal placement for six months out of reluctance to restart the process.