Accounting & finance

The densest recruitment market in the country. That is good news and bad news: there are more agencies genuinely worth registering with than in any other job family, and no way at all to tell them apart from the outside.

Every site below returned HTTP 200 and named accounting or finance work on its own pages. Checked 15 November 2026.

The job titles this family uses

Accounts Assistant
Accounts Payable Clerk
Accounts Receivable Clerk
Finance Assistant
Credit Controller
Payroll Administrator
Bookkeeper
Assistant Accountant
Audit Associate
Management Accountant

The first seven are the volume entry points. Assistant Accountant and Management Accountant are the first two steps up, and both are reachable within three or four years of starting as an Accounts Assistant if you are studying alongside the job. Search all of these titles, not just the one you think you want — the same work gets advertised under four different names depending on who wrote the advert.

The warning for this family: Accounts Assistant is not the same job as Assistant Accountant

Two titles, the same two words, opposite order. They are different jobs, and people waste months applying for the wrong one.

Accounts Assistant is transactional. Processing invoices, matching purchase orders, chasing payments, keying entries, maintaining the ledgers. No qualification needed to start. This is the genuine entry point and there are thousands of them.

Assistant Accountant is part-qualified work. Month-end close, journals, accruals and prepayments, reconciliations, helping produce the management accounts. Adverts usually want AAT Level 3 or 4, or an ACCA or CIMA student with a year or two behind them.

Apply for the second with no study behind you and you get silence, which reads as rejection when it is really a filter. Apply for the first and the wage is lower, but somebody will usually pay for your AAT.

Two smaller traps in the same family. “Finance Manager” means the entire finance department in a small company and a mid-level post in a large one, so read the headcount, not the title. And practice is not industry: an Audit Associate at an accountancy firm works on other companies’ books from the outside, while an accountant in industry works on one company’s from the inside. They want different people and the career ladders diverge early.

How people actually get in

If you are leaving school, or changing career without a relevant degree

AAT is the route, and it is normally free. The Association of Accounting Technicians runs three levels — Level 2 Certificate, Level 3 Diploma, Level 4 Professional Diploma — and employers fund them as apprenticeships, so you earn while you study rather than paying tuition. The matching apprenticeship standards are Accounts or Finance Assistant at Level 2, Assistant Accountant at Level 3, and Professional Accounting Technician at Level 4.

AAT Level 4 on its own qualifies you for Assistant Accountant and Management Accountant roles. It is a real destination, not only a stepping stone. Business, administration and law was the largest apprenticeship subject area in England in 2024/25 at 31.8% of all starts, so these vacancies exist in volume — this is not a scarce niche route.

The part nobody mentions: AAT Level 4 gives you exemptions from the first set of ACCA papers. So the school-leaver route and the graduate route join up. You can reach chartered status having never taken a graduate scheme and never paid for a degree, just three or four years later than someone who did.

If you have a degree

Three qualifications, and the choice between them matters more than the employer does:

ACA (ICAEW) — almost always taken inside an accountancy practice, usually through audit. The traditional route, and the most portable afterwards.
ACCA — the flexible one. Works in practice or in industry, and you can start it without an employer paying, which matters if you are already working somewhere that will not fund you.
CIMA — management accounting, taken in industry rather than practice. If you want to be inside a business rather than auditing them, this one.

Training contracts run about three years. Your degree subject almost never matters — most firms, including the largest, accept any discipline and teach you the accounting, and professional, scientific and technical activities is the single biggest destination industry for business and administration graduates at 16%. If someone has told you that you need a finance degree for this, they were wrong.

Which to chase first. Graduate scheme applications open in the autumn a full year before the job starts, and the large firms fill up early. If you have missed that window, do not wait twelve months — apply for Accounts Assistant roles through the agencies below and get your AAT funded instead. It is the slower route on paper, and it has one real advantage: you will have three years of actual experience by the time that graduate intake qualifies.

The verified agencies

Grouped by what they are for, not by size. The registration column is the one to read if you dislike being emailed: CV drop means you can hand over a CV and be done with it, Alerts means the sign-up on offer is a subscription to job emails.

Start here — the national agencies with the most entry-level volume

Agency	Covers	Perm / temp	Registering
Page Personnel pagepersonnel.co.uk	Accounting and finance at the clerical to mid level. This is the right door, not Michael Page — Page Personnel is the same group’s brand for exactly the roles on this page	Both	CV drop Alerts offered separately
Hays Accountancy & Finance hays.co.uk	Accountancy, finance, payroll and audit, in every region. The largest volume of entry-level finance vacancies of anyone here	Both	CV drop Alerts offered separately
Robert Half roberthalf.com/gb/en	Accounting, finance, credit control and audit. Strong on temporary and interim, which is the fastest way to get a first finance job onto a CV	Both	CV drop Alerts offered separately
Michael Page Finance michaelpage.co.uk	Qualified and senior finance. Worth registering with for later; for a first job use Page Personnel above instead	Both	CV drop
Reed reed.co.uk	Accountancy and finance, nationally. Unusual in being a job board and an agency at once, so the same site carries both direct employers and Reed’s own consultants’ roles	Both	Alerts-led — bookmark and sweep it rather than subscribing

The finance-only specialists

Smaller, do nothing but finance, and their consultants know the difference between the titles above without being told. These are the ones worth a follow-up email.

Agency	Covers	Perm / temp	Registering & contact
Butler Rose butlerrose.com	Finance and procurement specialists. One of very few that names Accounts Assistant and AAT-level work explicitly, rather than only talking about qualified roles	Both	CV drop
Goodman Masson goodmanmasson.com	Finance and accountancy, London-weighted. Names ACA and payroll work on their own pages	Both	CV drop [email protected]
Investigo investigo.co.uk	Accountancy and finance, including management accounting	Both	CV drop [email protected]
Cedar cedarrecruitment.com	Accountancy, finance and audit	Both	CV drop Alerts [email protected] · 020 3002 8050
Marks Sattin markssattin.co.uk	Accounting, finance and audit. Long-established and genuinely specialist	Both	Contact form on site
Morgan McKinley morganmckinley.com/uk	Accounting, finance and audit. Large network, London and the home counties	Both	CV drop [email protected]
Pro-Finance pro-finance.co.uk	Finance and audit, part of Pro-Recruitment Group. Permanent-focused, which is worth knowing if you need permanent specifically	Permanent focus	CV drop [email protected] · 020 4549 9930
Communicate communicate-rs.com	Finance recruitment, ACA level upwards	Both	CV drop Note: this is the working address. Older lists give communicaterecruitment.com, which no longer resolves
Vitae Financial Recruitment vitaefinancialrecruitment.com	Specialist financial jobs — accountancy and finance	Both	CV drop [email protected] Note: use the .com — the .co.uk address no longer resolves

Regional specialists — go here first if you are outside London

A regional agency with twenty local clients will usually beat a national one with a call centre, because the consultant actually knows the finance director.

Agency	Where	Perm / temp	Registering & contact
Sewell Wallis sewellwallis.co.uk	Yorkshire. Accountancy, finance, credit control, payroll and management accounting — the broadest title coverage of anyone on this page	Both	CV drop Alerts [email protected]
Wade Macdonald wademacdonald.com	Thames Valley and Berkshire. Accountancy, finance, credit control, payroll, audit	Both	[email protected]
Trial Balance trialbalance.co.uk	South West and Cornwall. Accountancy, credit control, bookkeeping, audit, ACA-level	Both	01872 464 555

Registering well, in about forty minutes

Registering puts you in a database. A conversation puts you in a consultant’s head. A profile gets keyword-matched by software; a consultant who has spoken to you puts you forward for roles that were never advertised, and in agency recruitment plenty of roles never are.

So do it in two parts. First, register with four or five from the lists above — Page Personnel and Hays for volume, two of the finance-only specialists, and your regional one if you have one. Same CV each time, no cover letter, twenty minutes.

Then follow up with the specialists by email, naming one or two live roles from their own site, and ask where they think you fit. Say plainly what you are: “AAT Level 2, looking for an Accounts Assistant role in Leeds, permanent, available immediately.” Asking “where do you think I fit?” is answerable in one line, it flatters their expertise, and it gets you a specialist’s honest read on your CV. Asking “do you have anything for me?” gets nothing.

Three things to state up front every time, because they save everyone a round trip: permanent or temporary and which you will accept, how far you will travel and whether you drive, and your lowest acceptable salary. Consultants are not offended by a number. They are slowed down by not having one.

The weekly sweep

Ten minutes, one bookmark folder, nothing pushed at you. The reason to sweep rather than subscribe is not only that alert emails are unpleasant — it is that an alert only ever shows you what matched the words you chose on the day you signed up.

pagepersonnel.co.uk and hays.co.uk — the volume, and where a first job most often comes from
reed.co.uk — board and agency together, so it catches direct employers too
Two or three of the finance-only specialists, rotating, so you see different clients each week
Your regional agency, if you are outside London
Indeed and LinkedIn for the employers directly — search accounts assistant and finance assistant, your town, last seven days, filtered to permanent. Agencies do not have every job, and small firms hire direct

Once a fortnight, add the one thing agencies cannot give you: look up the accountancy practices within commuting distance by name and check their own careers pages. Small and mid-tier practices recruit trainees directly, advertise badly, and get far fewer applications than the agencies do.

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