Accounting & Bookkeeping Solutions

Here is a number that should make every accounting firm owner stop and recalculate: ninety-seven percent.

That is the proportion of accounting firms that say they are not using technology efficiently. Not ninety-seven percent who lack technology. Ninety-seven percent who have it and still cannot make it work. The average firm juggles eight different software platforms, and forty-three percent say those platforms are creating more manual work, not less.

I spent a decade at a Big Four firm before going independent, and the gap between how accounting firms buy technology and how they actually use it remains the most expensive problem in the profession. A small firm might run Xero or QuickBooks for the ledger, Karbon or TaxDome for workflow, Ignition for proposals, Dext for receipt capture, Gmail for client communication, and Google Calendar for scheduling. Six platforms, six logins, six sets of notifications, and exactly zero connections between them.

The result is a practice that looks modern on the tech page of its website but runs on copy-paste, memory, and the heroics of one or two people who know where everything is.

The Numbers Nobody Wants to Talk About

The accounting profession lost over 300,000 practitioners in the past five years. CPA candidates have dropped twenty-seven percent in a decade. The firms that remain are stretched thin, and the response from the industry has been to work longer hours and hope next year will be different. During busy season, accountants routinely log fifty to eighty hours a week. Partners and senior staff report pushing past a hundred.

Meanwhile, the chasing never stops. Financial Cents surveyed 132 firm owners and found that chasing clients for documents was the second most challenging part of running an accounting team. If your firm has a thousand clients and you spend five minutes following up with each one, that is eighty-three hours of pure overhead. Every quarter. All non-billable.

Then there is scope creep. One firm I worked with discovered they were performing $6,000 per month in out-of-scope work for clients on fixed-fee engagements. That is $72,000 a year in labour they never billed for, delivered by staff who were already burning out from workload they were paid to handle.

What Gets Lost in the Gaps

Every practice management vendor will tell you they solve these problems. Karbon will tell you their automators end the client chase. TaxDome will tell you their all-in-one platform replaces your entire stack. Ignition will tell you automated engagement letters save weeks.

They are all partially right. Each tool solves one slice of the problem within its own walls. But accounting is not one tool. It is a chain of processes that spans six to ten platforms, and the breakdowns happen at the handoffs: the gap between a signed engagement letter and the first document request. The gap between a completed tax return and the invoice that should follow it. The gap between a BAS lodgement reminder and the client who still has not sent their bank statements.

These gaps are where time disappears, deadlines get missed, clients get frustrated, and staff lose their will to stay in the profession. And no single practice management tool can close them, because no single tool controls the entire chain.

The Connective Tissue Your Practice Is Missing

What I have seen work across dozens of firms is not replacing your tools. It is connecting them. The firms that have reclaimed hours from their week did not abandon Xero for a better ledger or swap Karbon for a cheaper workflow system. They built bridges between the systems they already have, so that information flows and decisions happen without a person manually pushing data from one screen to the next.

This is what meaningful automation looks like for a small accounting firm. Not AI writing your tax opinions. Not robots categorising receipts. It is the unglamorous, repeatable processes that consume your team: sending document requests that escalate automatically when clients ignore them. Creating time entries when calendar events end. Triggering month-end checklists when bank feeds reconcile. Notifying the partner when a fixed-fee engagement is trending over budget.

The articles below address the specific operational problems I encounter most often in small to mid-size firms and solo practices. Each one is written from the perspective of someone who has sat across the table from firm owners explaining why their practice feels harder every year despite spending more on software than ever before. The answers are specific, the numbers are real, and the solutions do not require you to rip out your existing stack and start over.