In-house accountant or outsourced service? The true cost comparison: VND 12–20 million a month and the line items you forgot

Once a business has steady transaction volume, the classic question arrives: hire an accountant to sit in the office, or outsource? Most owners get the comparison wrong from the first line, because they put "accountant salary: 12 million" next to "service fee: 2 million" — two numbers that are not measured in the same unit. Let us redo the math properly.

The true cost of an in-house accountant

Say you hire a general accountant with 3–5 years of experience in Ho Chi Minh City or Hanoi at VND 12,000,000 gross per month:

Cost item	Per month
Gross salary	VND 12,000,000
Employer insurance + trade union fund (23.5%)	VND 2,820,000
Accounting software, digital signature, e-invoicing, storage	VND 500,000–1,000,000
Tet bonus, annual leave, health checks (amortized)	VND 1,000,000–1,500,000
Recruitment and retraining (amortized; accountants change jobs every 2–3 years on average)	VND 500,000–1,000,000
Desk, equipment, overheads	VND 500,000
True total cost	VND 17,320,000–18,820,000

With a junior accountant (salary VND 8–9 million), the total still lands around VND 12–14 million a month — and you take on operational risk in exchange: a junior has usually never carried a full tax finalization or an inspection alone.

Two more items never appear on the payslip:

• Single-person risk. An accountant resigning mid-finalization is the emergency call we get most often every first quarter. Incomplete handover, a missing digital-signature token, half-finished ledgers — reconstruction typically costs VND 15–30 million.
• Your own management time. Who reviews the accountant's work before you have a chief accountant? In practice: nobody — errors surface only when the tax authority arrives.

Outsourced accounting: paying for output, not a desk

3M's full-service accounting charges a fixed monthly fee scaled to document volume, from VND 1,500,000 per month for low-volume companies. That fee already contains the things the in-house option must add on:

• A team instead of an individual: data entry is done by AI on the Practica platform, review is done by a senior accountant — no annual leave, no mid-year resignation;
• Software, digital signatures and document storage included;
• Contractual liability: errors we cause are ours to remedy under the service commitment — something you cannot demand from an employee who has already left;
• Monthly reports typically within 7–10 working days, faster than the market norm.

A direct comparison: a company with 200–500 documents a month typically pays us VND 4–8 million per month — roughly one third of the true cost of an adequately experienced in-house accountant.

When in-house is the right answer

To be fair, outsourcing is not the answer for everyone. Hire in-house when:

1. Volume is genuinely large: above roughly 1,000 documents a month, or a specialized industry (multi-site construction, manufacturing with complex costing) that needs someone living in the data daily;
2. Physical presence matters: warehouses and factories needing frequent on-site counts and reconciliation;
3. You already have a strong chief accountant and want to build a succession team under them.

The most common pattern among our clients past 50 staff: one in-house accountant handles on-site operations, 3M runs books, tax and payroll behind them, with a periodic financial statement review as an independent control layer.

Still weighing the two options? Send us your monthly document count and current setup — we will model the total cost of ownership of both scenarios for you, free and without obligation.