Dutch accounting firms are increasingly looking beyond their own borders for accounting talent – nearshore, offshore, wherever the right people are. Junior roles aren’t exactly easy to fill either these days, but the real question firms are asking is different: can that talent, once brought on, eventually be trusted with the senior work – the full year-end file, the one that ends with an auditor’s sign-off?

Based on what we’ve seen at Gapstars Finance, the answer is yes – and faster than most firms plan for. Here’s the case, with Rafath, one of our placements with a mid-sized Dutch accounting firm, as the proof point.

Does the language barrier affect offshore accountants working with Dutch firms?

Firms often assume the language barrier is fixed – that a Dutch-speaking market always requires a heavy translation layer. In practice, it narrows quickly. Yes, every new engagement starts with translating the general ledger from Dutch into English; for Rafath, that meant more than 50 entities in his first stretch with the client. 

However, a year in, he no longer translates from scratch. He’s absorbed the recurring terminology that shows up file after file, so translation has gone from a heavy first step to a light check. The barrier doesn’t disappear, but it shrinks well within a single placement.

Does international accounting experience transfer to Dutch bookkeeping?

The instinct to trust offshore accountants with senior work often hinges on one question: does experience gained elsewhere actually apply here? Rafath’s background suggests it does. Before this placement, he had six to seven years of accounting and audit experience, including time at KPMG, where Big Four firms rotate staff across companies and industries to build a habit of tracing a number back to why it moved – a habit that isn’t country-specific. 

He’d also worked at a UK-based BPO in a highly standardised, process-driven environment. Different environments ask for different things, but the core discipline of getting the numbers right, and catching quickly when they’re wrong, travelled with him intact.

What do offshore accountants bring besides basic bookkeeping support?

Firms hiring offshore accountants sometimes plan for added headcount, not added value. That undersells what experienced hires bring. A few months into his placement, Rafath noticed several entities were still having bank statements entered manually, transaction by transaction. He’d solved the same bottleneck in a past role, so he proposed a fix he’d already tested elsewhere. 

It’s been running for a year and still saves the team real time every month, and it’s one of several changes he’s introduced that started as proven solutions rather than new experiments.

Can offshore accountants meet Dutch accounting standards for precision?

Dutch accounting culture places real weight on a file being clean, not just correct – formatting, documentation, and the small details around a transaction all matter as much as the numbers. That standard is learnable, and it tends to get adopted quickly rather than requiring constant correction. Within his first year, Rafath built that level of precision into his own process by default. VAT rules and Dutch-only client communication remain areas where local colleagues still lead, but the broader standard is now his own.

Does hiring an offshore accountant mean a weaker working relationship?

A common hesitation is that remote placements feel thin – distant colleagues, weaker working relationships. The Gapstars model works against that by design: structured onboarding (Rafath’s client flew him in-person training early in the engagement), daily contact between placements and client teams, and a built-in community on the Sri Lanka side, from gym access to regular team sports and events. It’s common for a placement to grow closest to colleagues they’ve never actually met – the relationship builds through daily contact instead of physical proximity.”

Can offshore accountants take on senior-level Dutch accounting work?

This is the part that matters most to firms asking the original question. Rafath is now training on CaseWare, the platform used to prepare full annual accounts – planning, execution, documentation, and the final sign-off from an auditor.

He’s already rolling forward prior-year files, pulling in statements, and checking balances independently. What’s left is running the full file end-to-end, including supporting schedules and written conclusions – work that the Dutch colleagues still lead today, but not for much longer. The process itself isn’t fundamentally different from year-end work in Sri Lanka; what closes the remaining distance is exposure, not a steep learning curve, and that gap is closing quickly.

The takeaway

The real question isn’t whether offshore accountants can process transactions – most firms already know that answer is yes. It’s whether that talent can eventually own the work a manager does today. The evidence from placements like Rafath’s suggests the accounting itself was never the real barrier. What takes deliberate investment is the layer on top: local language, local rules, and the exact standard a specific market expects. Given the right onboarding and enough runway, that gap closes faster than most firms plan for.