Busy season is over. Budgets are set. For most finance leaders, this is the quiet stretch when the team finally exhales. It is also when your best people sit down and decide whether they are staying.
Senior accountants, analysts, managers and controllers tend to run their own mid-year review in their heads. If you have not run yours first, you are guessing about who is at risk.
Here are the questions worth asking about your own team now.
1. Has anyone's job actually grown in 12 months?
A strong accountant who does the same close, the same reconciliations and the same reports for a second year is not being developed. They are being used. Some will accept that. The ones you most want to keep usually will not.
Growth does not need a new title. It can be:
- Presenting variance analysis to operations rather than just sending it
- Owning a system implementation or a process rebuild
- Training a junior hire
- Sitting in on budget or pricing decisions
Look at each person and ask what they do today that they did not do a year ago. If the answer is nothing, that is a retention risk you can fix cheaply.
2. Is pay still close to the market?
Most employers check salary bands when they are hiring, not when they are retaining. That is backwards. A replacement almost always costs more than the raise that would have kept the person, once you add recruiting time, ramp-up and the work that goes undone during the gap.
Check three things:
- When each person last received a meaningful increase
- Whether their scope has expanded without pay following
- What you would have to offer a new hire for the same seat today
If the third number is higher than what you pay the person doing the job now, expect that person to find out. Candidates talk to recruiters, and recruiters talk about numbers.
Public wage data from Job Bank in Canada and the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the US is a reasonable starting point. It will not replace a live read on your local market, but it keeps you honest.
3. Who gets exposure beyond the ledger?
The people you want to promote into manager and controller roles need to show they can work with the business, not just the books. If your team is stuck in transactional work, you are not building a bench. You are renting one.
Give your next-level people a seat where decisions are made. Let them explain the numbers, not just produce them. It builds your succession plan and it gives them a reason to stay.
4. Is the workload a temporary spike or the new normal?
Many finance teams have run lean for years. The high performers absorb the extra work because they are reliable, and nobody adjusts headcount, support or pay to match.
Watch for these signs:
- The same two people cover every gap
- Overtime that continues well after year-end or quarter-end
- Vacation requests that get pushed or cancelled
- Quality slips in work that used to be clean
Burnout builds slowly and shows up suddenly, usually as a resignation. If the workload has not come back down since busy season, the fix is more capacity. That might be a contract accountant for a defined stretch, a part-time resource or a permanent hire.
5. Are the skills on your team the ones you will need in three years?
Automation is taking over more of the manual close and reporting work. The value is moving to judgment, communication and business partnering. A team full of people who are excellent at tasks that are shrinking is a risk, even if everyone is performing today.
Ask where each person's skills will be useful in the next few years. Then decide where to train, where to hire and where to restructure the work.
What the check usually turns up
Once you have been through the list, most teams fall into one of three groups.
| Situation | Likely sign | Action |
|---|---|---|
| Stable and growing | Expanding scope, fair pay | Keep investing |
| Stable but stalled | Same work, flat pay | Add scope and review pay |
| Stretched | Overtime, gaps covered by few | Add capacity |
The stalled and stretched groups are where resignations come from.
Why summer matters
Hiring slows over July and August, but the best candidates still take calls. If a competitor is recruiting your senior accountant, they will often do it in the weeks after busy season ends. Acting now, with a conversation and a pay review, costs far less than a search in September.
What to do next
Sit down with each person on your finance team this month and have a direct conversation about scope, pay and workload. Write down what you can change and by when. If the check shows you are short on capacity or missing a skill, start that search before you are forced to. A Traverse recruiter can help you with the market read, the contract cover or the permanent hire.