Why UK Accounting Firms Are Looking Beyond India for Offshore Support

For a long time, offshoring accounting work meant one thing: India. The decision barely needed a business case. Big talent pool, recognisable names, established processes, and rates that made the numbers look good on paper. For many UK practices it became the default, driven more by familiarity than deliberate evaluation.

That default is now being questioned. Not everywhere, and not all at once. But the conversations happening inside practices today sound noticeably different from five years ago.

What changed

The India offshore model did not collapse. For plenty of firms it still delivers. The problem is that several of its original advantages have quietly eroded, and not all firms noticed until they were already absorbing the cost.

Staff attrition is the one that tends to surface first. WTW's research found that India's voluntary attrition rate remained among the highest across the Asia Pacific region, with projected attrition as high as 24% across key talent segments, prompting firms to budget salary increases of around 10% in 2023 simply to retain staff. For a UK practice that spent months training an offshore team on its specific client base, software preferences, and internal processes, that level of churn is not an abstract figure. It is a recurring operational problem. The replacement cycle never appears in the original business case, but it shows up every year in extra management time, inconsistent output, and re-onboarding costs.

Source: WTW Salary Budget Planning Report, India findings, published at https://www.wtwco.com/en-in/news/2023/03/salaries-in-india-to-increase-by-10-percent-in-2023-wtw-survey-finds

The wage pressure compounds this further. WTW's 2024 outlook found that India's median salary increases are forecasted to continue at around 9.8%, with the actual increase in 2023 landing at 10%, the highest in the Asia Pacific region. The cost gap between offshore and onshore is narrowing, and for some roles it has already closed further than the original outsourcing decision anticipated.

Source: WTW Salary Budget Planning Report 2024, published at https://www.wtwco.com/en-in/news/2023/11/companies-in-india-anticipate-salaries-to-increase-by-9-point-8-percent-in-2024-wtw-survey-finds

And then there is the friction that rarely makes it into a business case: time zone gaps that mean work arrives at the end of your day rather than the beginning, communication overhead that requires constant management attention, and the difficulty of building a working relationship that feels like a genuine extension of the team rather than a vendor processing a queue. None of this is new. But firms are now saying it more openly.

What firms actually want, and rarely get

Strip away the cost conversation and most UK practices want roughly the same things from an offshore partner.

They want output they can trust without a heavy review cycle sitting on top of it. They want people who understand how UK accounting actually works, who know MTD, FRS 102, and the standard filing conventions without needing to be taught from scratch. They want responsive communication during UK hours, not batch delivery at the end of the day. And they want clarity on where client data sits and who has access to it.

The Deloitte Global Outsourcing Survey 2022, which surveyed more than 500 business and technology leaders globally, found that the top qualities executives value in a service provider are transparency (54%), trustworthiness (41%), and genuine understanding of the business (40%). Cost ranked further down. The firms that treat price as the primary selection criterion tend to be the ones that end up retendering within a few years.

Source: Deloitte Global Outsourcing Survey 2022, at https://www.deloitte.com/ce/en/issues/work/global-outsourcing-survey.html

Why Pakistan is getting more serious attention

Pakistan rarely leads the outsourcing conversation in UK accounting circles, partly because it has not marketed itself the way India has, and partly because unfamiliarity tends to breed hesitation. The talent argument, however, is real and worth understanding properly.

The Institute of Chartered Accountants of Pakistan, established under statute in 1961, produces Chartered Accountants trained to International Standards on Auditing and IFRS. The qualification requires three to four years of mandatory supervised practical training before a candidate can qualify, a structure that maps closely to what UK firms expect from accountants joining their teams. This is not a generic finance graduate pool. It is a credentialed profession with rigorous examination requirements and regulated training standards.

Source: ICAP Annual Report 2023, at https://icap.org.pk/files/per/icap/annualreports/AnnualReport2023.pdf

Alongside ICAP, both ACCA and ICAEW operate and maintain a substantial formal presence in Pakistan. The International Federation of Accountants confirms that many professionals in Pakistan hold ACCA or ICAEW membership alongside or independently of the national qualification. This means a meaningful portion of the Pakistan-based accounting talent pool holds credentials that UK firms recognise directly, without any interpretation required.

Source: IFAC Member Country Profile, Pakistan, at https://www.ifac.org/about-ifac/membership/profile/pakistan

The combination of ICAP Chartered Accountants and ACCA or ICAEW-qualified professionals, working within a framework built on IFRS and ISA standards, means the ceiling on task complexity is considerably higher than most UK firms assume when they first look at Pakistan as an option.

On time zones, Pakistan sits at UTC+5. During UK winter hours (GMT) that is a five-hour difference, and during British Summer Time (BST, UTC+1) the gap is four hours. There is genuine overlap in the morning, particularly between 9am and 1pm Pakistan Standard Time, which aligns with the early UK working day. It is not a perfect overlap, but it is considerably closer than the near-total mismatch firms experience with further east locations.

The broader shift

It would be too tidy to say UK firms are leaving India and going somewhere else. The reality is messier. Some are diversifying across multiple providers. Some are replacing one large offshore arrangement with smaller, more accountable relationships. Some are moving toward hybrid models where onshore management coordinates offshore delivery more deliberately.

The consistent finding across industry research is that selecting purely on price tends to produce higher attrition, inconsistent output quality, and repeated retraining cycles. The aggregate cost of those cycles regularly exceeds the savings that low-rate selection appeared to offer at the outset.

The firms navigating this well have shifted the question they are asking. Not "where is cheapest?" but "where can we find people with the right qualifications, who work to a standard we can trust, during hours that allow a real working relationship, and what does the governance model need to look like?" That question has more credible answers than it did ten years ago. Pakistan is one of them.

A note on how to start

Firms that have had frustrating offshore experiences tend to approach any new arrangement with understandable caution. That caution is reasonable. The answer is not to ignore it but to start with something scoped tightly enough to test the quality, the communication, and the working relationship before committing at scale.

Pick a defined task. A handful of clients. A clear handover process. See how it works before building on it.

If you are a UK accounting firm weighing your options, we are happy to have a straightforward conversation about how we work and whether it is a fit. SRR Consultants provides back-office support to UK accounting firms, covering workpaper preparation, bookkeeping, and audit support under white-label arrangements. You can book a call directly at https://calendly.com/rafay-azhar-srrconsultants

SRR Consultants delivers back-office support services through the FinSoul Network.