The cost you budget for
Most firms already track the obvious line items: a recruiter fee or job board spend, a few weeks of interviews pulling a partner or manager off billable work, and the new hire's ramp-up salary before they're producing at full value. For an accounting technician or admin role, that alone typically runs 20–30% of the position's annual salary. It's real money, and it's the number firms budget for.
The cost you don't
What doesn't show up on that line item is the six to twelve weeks it takes a new hire to actually know your firm's SOPs — which client gets routed where, which exceptions get escalated, which reports go out on which day. During that window, error rates are higher, senior staff get pulled in to check work, and the tasks that used to run quietly now need supervision. That supervision time rarely gets tracked against the hire's cost, but it's real capacity pulled from billable work.
A departure doesn't just cost you a salary gap. It costs you the ramp time again — from zero — the next time you hire.
The compounding cost
Every SOP that lives only in one person's head is a single point of failure. When that person leaves, the knowledge doesn't transfer cleanly — it gets reconstructed, imperfectly, by whoever inherits the role and whatever partial documentation exists. Each cycle loses a little more fidelity. Firms with high admin turnover aren't just paying repeated ramp costs; they're running a slowly degrading version of their own process every time it gets rebuilt.
Running the math
Take a firm with 25 staff and two admin-track roles that turn over on an 18-month average tenure — not unusual for detail-heavy, repetitive back-office work. That's more than one full replacement cycle a year, each one carrying recruiting cost, ramp-time productivity loss, and supervision overhead. Multiply that by the number of admin-adjacent roles in the firm and the annual cost of "just hiring for it" becomes a lot larger than the salary line suggests.
The alternative
The work that's most vulnerable to this cycle — document intake, routing, status notifications, report assembly — is also the work most precisely defined by an SOP in the first place. That's exactly the kind of work that doesn't need to be re-taught to a new hire every eighteen months, because it can run as a system instead of living in one person's memory.
Related: Why admin roles at accounting firms are so hard to fill →