May 17, 2024
Editorial GuidelinesYi-Jane is a writer for SideHustles.com. In addition to her writing and reporting work, she also has 3+ years of experience as...
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Virtual CFO ServicesIf you’re an accountant looking for a side hustle to supplement your income or fill your free time, you’ve come to the right place.
Your career has equipped you with a set of valuable skills, and there are lots of part-time gigs that will take advantage of them. We’ve listed the highlights here—check them out to see if any of them interests you.
Earning potential: $30–$100 per hour
This is probably the most obvious side hustle for accountants to pursue. You already know the ins and outs of this job, so your main challenge will be finding clients.
When you’re just starting out, you can look for work on freelancing sites, such as:
You can post your services on these platforms and apply for suitable job openings. Of course, you also shouldn’t discount the value of word of mouth. Don’t be shy about letting people in your personal network know about your services and asking them to recommend you to their friends and colleagues.
Earning potential: $15–$25 per hour
If you practice tax accounting or are familiar with preparing and filing taxes, why not put your skills to work and make some extra money? Many people dread tax season and need help, whether it’s with their individual returns or more complicated issues related to the tax court or audits.
You’ll need to apply for a preparer tax identification number (PTIN) if you don’t already have one. 1 Additionally, make sure you have access to tax preparation and filing software before taking on clients.
Ask your friends and family to spread the word about your services. More people around you may need a tax preparer than you realize. Of course, you can always look for clients on the large freelancing platforms we mentioned above, such as Upwork and Fiverr.
Earning potential: $20–$40 per hour
Some accountants’ responsibilities include bookkeeping, which consists of recording day-to-day financial transactions, invoicing, and payroll processing.
Even if bookkeeping isn’t within the purview of your day job, you should be able to pick it up fairly quickly. Most accounting-related skills are transferable to this gig; you’re certainly already familiar with keeping track of financial data, and have probably been trained in the requisite software.
Earning potential: $50–$150 per hour
Accountants often form trusting relationships with their clients. This puts you in a good position if you decide to expand your services and provide them with advice and guidance on other aspects of their operations than their finances.
Your responsibility as a consultant or advisor will be to create strategies to help businesses grow and operate more smoothly. Here are some of the most common tasks you may have to perform:
This side hustle is best suited for mid- and late-career accountants who have built up strong reputations. Find work by approaching your clients directly or putting out feelers on your professional network.
Earning potential: $45+ per hour
Financial planners help individuals and businesses manage and improve their financial situations. They typically do this by creating tailored financial plans for them to follow.
As an accountant, you obviously have the know-how to do this, and here again, you have a significant advantage in that you already have a base of clients who trust you. You may be able to convince some of them to spring for your financial planning services, or get them to recommend you to their friends.
Depending on each client’s needs, you may have to teach them about budgeting, investing, taxes, insurance, and even estate planning. To do this job well, fluency with finance isn’t enough—you’ll need to be a strong communicator as well.
Earning potential: $125+ per hour
A chief financial officer (CFO) oversees an organization’s major financial decisions and strategizes ways to strengthen its financial situation.
Smaller companies are occasionally willing to hire CFOs on a virtual, part-time basis. If you’re a skilled and experienced accountant with a good reputation, you’re a strong candidate for a job like this.
As a CFO, you’ll typically need a degree in accounting or finance, as well as other formal qualifications, such as the Certified Public Accountant (CPA) or Certified Management Accountant (CMA) certification. This means you may already meet the basic qualifications to land a gig like this.
That said, this is a challenging role, and to excel, you have to develop your management skills and be familiar with areas other than accounting. Depending on the company you want to work for, this may include human resources (HR), information technology (IT), operations, and supply chain management.
Earning potential: $15–$60 per hour
If you’re a CPA, particularly if you have a fair amount of experience, you can make extra money by becoming a CPA exam tutor. There are lots of would-be accountants who are looking for a leg up when it comes to preparing for the most important professional test of their careers.
You can focus on either teaching just one section of the exam or all four of them. To find in-person students, try putting up flyers or contacting accounting professors at local universities. To find online students, consider creating an account on one of these tutoring websites, all of which accept accounting tutors:
Earning potential: Varies depending on the popularity of your content
If you like the idea of passing on your knowledge but want to reach a larger audience than you can as a tutor, you can create and sell online courses about accounting.
First, decide what you want to teach, whether it’s preparing for the CPA exam, using accounting software, or something else. Then, figure out how to educate people about that in a clear and concise manner that’s easy for them to digest.
There’s a multitude of platforms that you can sell your courses. Below, we’ve listed several for your consideration:
Earning potential: Varies depending on the popularity of your content
If you’re more of a writer than a lecturer, you can create and sell e-books instead of multimedia courses. This is, if anything, even easier than the previous side hustle; all you need is a word processor, an idea, and a bit of writing talent.
Note that you don’t need to limit yourself to writing educational content about accounting (although that’s certainly an option). You can also write about the state of the industry, or just share stories from your job. Write whatever you find interesting—with any luck, other people will agree.
You can sell e-books on all of the following platforms:
Earning potential: Varies depending on the popularity of your content
We’ve listed several ways of sharing your knowledge with the world, but there are many others. If you’re the creative sort, you can pick another medium—a blog, a podcast, or YouTube—to publish content on.
The options here are nearly endless. You can post accounting tips on a blog, upload interviews with other accountants on a podcast, or make software tutorials for a YouTube channel. The choice is yours.
Be aware that all content creation side hustles are quite competitive, and most creators don’t make much money. If you decide to pursue this, be prepared to stick with it for a long time before you see much material benefit from it. If you need cash quickly, it’d be better to go with a different side hustle.
Earning potential: $20–$50 per hour
Freelance writing is another highly competitive field, but there are opportunities out there if you’re willing to give it a shot.
The most obvious topic for accountants to write about is finance, which—happily—is one of the more profitable freelance writing niches. That said, as long as you’re skilled at researching and writing, you can write about any topic you set your mind to.
If you give this a go, you can find work on all the usual freelance marketplaces, including Upwork. You can also try approaching clients directly. If you’ve worked with a business in the past and think the copy on their website could use some touching up, they might be receptive to a pitch.
Earning potential: Varies depending on product type and volume
Online arbitrage is the practice of buying a product at a low price from a website and then reselling it at a higher price elsewhere. The key is to find discounted products that are in high demand and have correspondingly high profit margins. Usually, this means buying in bulk.
As an accountant, you presumably have a good head for numbers, and you may have a lot of the administrative skills required to keep track of an inventory, making this a decent fit.
You can resell your products on marketplaces like Amazon, eBay, Etsy, or Facebook Marketplace.
Notably, Amazon has a Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) program that can streamline the process by helping you store, package, label, and deliver your products. The way it works is that, once you’ve signed up as an Amazon seller, you can create a listing and ship your products to an Amazon center for storage. Whenever an item sells, you’ll receive a notification from Amazon, which will handle the order from there.
Earning potential: Varies depending on the type of investment (and how much you invest)
If you want to generate passive income, investing is one way to go.
This isn’t a side hustle in the traditional sense of the term. It’s an aspect of managing your financial health, and one that you should probably do even if you end up picking another option on this list as your main side gig.
You’re almost certainly familiar with the world of investing already, so you know that regardless of what you want to invest in—stocks, real estate, or something else—you need to do extensive research beforehand.
Investing always involves an element of risk, so only use money you won’t need in the near future, and never touch your emergency funds. Even if you’re a highly skilled and knowledgeable finance professional, there are no guarantees where the market is concerned.
Earning potential: $15–$20 per hour
Accounting can be a mentally draining job. If you’d like a side hustle that leverages some of the same skills but doesn’t require you to think as much (and that isn’t as risky or stressful as investing), consider data entry.
This gig entails transferring data from one source to another. Often, this means entering it into a spreadsheet or a database program.
You’ll need to be able to type quickly and pay attention to details. Employers will often test your typing skills during the application process and may require you to be proficient in using Microsoft Excel and Access or a similar software suite.
As a finance professional, that shouldn’t be a problem for you. Even if you don’t use those programs for your day job, you’ll be able to pick them up very quickly.
Earning potential: $15–$25 per hour
Similarly, working as a virtual assistant will draw on your experience as an accountant without requiring you to shoulder as much responsibility as some of the other jobs on this list.
As a virtual assistant, you’ll perform tasks remotely for an individual or business to help their operations run smoothly. In many cases, these will consist of administrative and communication-related tasks (e.g., managing calendars and answering emails or phone calls), but you may also dip into research, sales and marketing, or project management.
In addition to freelance marketplaces, look for work on these remote-friendly job boards:
You can work for anyone you like, but you’ll have a leg up if you go to work for another accountant, as you’ll be familiar with most of the aspects of their business and won’t require much additional training.
As a professional accountant, choosing a related side hustle is a safe choice, but there are also good reasons to pick other ideas beyond your profession.
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