The 300,000-Person Exodus: How to Run Your Firm When You Cannot Hire

It was January 3rd. Lisa Chen’s phone buzzed at 6:14 AM with a resignation email from her senior accountant — her second resignation in four months. This one hit different. Tax season started in twelve days. Her firm had 340 individual returns, 85 business returns, and a growing advisory practice that she’d been building for three years. She now had herself, one mid-level staff accountant, and a part-time bookkeeper to handle all of it.

She called me that morning, and I could hear the edge in her voice. “I’ve been interviewing for five months. I’ve had two candidates. One wanted $30K more than I can pay, the other took an offer somewhere else before I could schedule a second interview. I don’t know how we get through April.”

Lisa’s situation isn’t unusual. It’s the new baseline. Every firm I’ve consulted with since 2022 has some version of this story. The details change — sometimes it’s a retirement instead of a resignation, sometimes it’s three departures instead of two — but the math is always the same: more work, fewer people, and a hiring market that offers no relief.

The Scale of the Problem

Let me put those numbers into operational terms. If your firm needs a senior accountant and you start recruiting today, you’re looking at nearly two and a half months before someone walks through the door — assuming you find anyone at all. During that 73-day gap, the work doesn’t pause. Client deadlines don’t shift. IRS penalties don’t care about your HR challenges.

And here’s what the pipeline numbers tell us about the future: this isn’t a temporary disruption. With CPA candidates declining 27% over a decade, the supply of qualified accountants is structurally shrinking. The 300,000 who left aren’t coming back. The replacements aren’t materializing. The firms that survive this era will be the ones that learn to do more work with fewer people — not by grinding their remaining staff into the ground, but by fundamentally changing what human beings spend their time on.

Why “Just Hire” Is No Longer a Strategy

For twenty years, the answer to capacity problems in accounting was simple: hire. Post on job boards, recruit from universities, offer a signing bonus if the market is tight. That playbook is broken, and the firms still running it are burning time and money they don’t have.

The economics have shifted underneath us. Starting salaries for CPAs have risen 15-20% in two years, which sounds like it should attract people — except that competing professions in tech, finance, and consulting have risen faster. A computer science graduate with comparable quantitative skills starts at $20-40K more than a new CPA. The 150-credit-hour requirement to sit for the exam means accounting students invest more in education than most business peers, for a lower starting return.

Even when firms do hire, retention is fragile. The same burnout and workload pressures that drove 300,000 people out of the profession are still present. I’ve watched firms spend six months recruiting a staff accountant only to lose them within eighteen months to the same overwork conditions that opened the position in the first place.

The firms that are thriving right now — and there are plenty of them — have stopped treating hiring as their primary capacity lever. They still recruit when they find good people. But they’ve built their operations so that hiring is a bonus, not a requirement.

What Departing Staff Actually Did

Before you can automate anything, you need to understand where departed staff capacity was actually spent. In every engagement I’ve run, the time audit reveals a consistent pattern:

The critical insight: 60-70% of what your departed staff did every day was mechanical. Data entry, document chasing, status tracking, report formatting — these tasks require attention and reliability, but they don’t require a CPA license or professional judgment. They require a system.

When a senior accountant leaves, firms panic because they lose all five categories at once. But the real challenge is categories one through four. Category five — professional judgment — is what your remaining senior people are already qualified to do. The problem is they can’t get to it because they’re buried in categories one through four.

Building a Capacity System, Not Filling a Chair

Here’s the approach I walked Lisa through that January, and it’s the same framework I use with every understaffed firm. The goal isn’t to replicate a human — it’s to build a system that handles the mechanical 65% so your remaining humans can focus on the judgment-heavy 35%.

Layer 1: Automated Client Communication

The single biggest time sink after a staff departure is client communication. Your remaining team inherits a communication load they weren’t handling before, on top of their existing work. Emails pile up. Document requests go unsent. Clients who used to get same-day responses start waiting three days.

In TaxDome or Karbon, you build automated sequences for every recurring communication pattern. Tax season document requests go out on a schedule with automatic reminders at day 3, day 7, and day 14. Monthly bookkeeping check-ins send automatically. Engagement letter renewals trigger 60 days before expiration. Status updates generate from workflow progress — the client gets notified when their return moves to review without anyone writing an email.

The firms I work with typically recover 8-12 hours per week from communication automation alone. That’s not a rounding error — that’s a full day of capacity returned to actual accounting work.

Layer 2: Transaction Processing Automation

If you’re still manually categorizing bank transactions for bookkeeping clients, you’re burning your most constrained resource — human attention — on work that QuickBooks and Xero have been designed to handle.

Bank feed auto-categorization in Xero and QBO is accurate for 70-85% of recurring transactions. Pair that with receipt capture through Dext or Hubdoc, and you’ve eliminated the bulk of data entry. Your staff reviews exception reports — the 15-30% of transactions the system couldn’t categorize confidently — rather than processing every line item manually.

For a firm with 30 bookkeeping clients averaging 200 transactions per month, that’s 6,000 transactions. At 70% auto-categorization, your staff handles 1,800 exceptions instead of 6,000 entries. The math is obvious, but I’m amazed how many firms haven’t fully turned on the automation they’re already paying for in their existing subscriptions.

Layer 3: Workflow Orchestration

This is where Karbon earns its keep. Instead of a senior manager mentally tracking which returns are in progress, which are waiting on documents, which are ready for review, and which need to go out — the workflow system tracks it all.

Every work item has a status, a deadline, an assignee, and a defined next action. When a tax return moves from preparation to review, the reviewer gets notified. When a client uploads the last missing document, the preparer gets notified. When a deadline is approaching and work hasn’t started, the manager gets alerted.

This isn’t project management overhead — it’s the elimination of project management overhead. The 10-15% of time your staff spent tracking status, asking “where are we on the Johnson return,” and maintaining spreadsheet trackers disappears. The system knows where everything is, and it tells the right person what to do next.

Layer 4: Intelligent Triage and Routing

When you have a full staff, you can afford to let work distribute somewhat organically. People pick up tasks, managers assign based on who seems available, and it roughly works out. With a skeleton crew, you cannot afford unbalanced workloads or misrouted work.

The Numbers After Automation

Lisa’s firm made it through tax season. Not comfortably — there were late nights and weekends in March — but they filed every return on time and didn’t lose a single client. Here’s what the numbers looked like:

Before the departures, Lisa’s firm had three professional staff handling 340 individual returns, 85 business returns, and 25 monthly bookkeeping clients. After losing two staff members and implementing automation over a frantic two-week sprint, Lisa and her one remaining staff accountant handled the same volume. They brought in a seasonal contractor for six weeks during peak filing, but the permanent headcount went from four to two.

The operating profit for the year actually increased, despite the salary costs of the seasonal contractor. Two salaries plus benefits came off the books. Automation subscription costs — Karbon, TaxDome, Dext — totaled roughly $800/month. The math works overwhelmingly in favor of the automated approach, but that’s not the part that matters most.

What matters is that Lisa stopped being terrified of the next resignation. Her firm’s operations no longer depend on specific people being present. The system holds the process. Humans bring the judgment. If someone leaves, the system keeps running while you figure out the human side.

The New Operating Model

The staffing crisis has forced a philosophical shift that many firm owners resist but eventually embrace: your firm is not a collection of people who do accounting. Your firm is a system that produces accounting outcomes, operated by people who provide judgment and client relationships.

In the old model, you scaled by adding people. Each person was a self-contained unit who managed their own clients, tracked their own work, and communicated on their own schedule. When they left, everything about those clients left with them. Institutional knowledge walked out the door.

In the new model, the system manages the work. Client communication follows defined sequences. Document collection is automated. Transaction processing runs through rules engines. Status tracking is real-time and visible to everyone. When a person leaves, the system keeps running. You redistribute the judgment calls — the reviews, the client advisory sessions, the complex tax positions — to remaining staff. The mechanical work never depended on that person in the first place.

The Burnout Dimension

I need to address the 66% number — two-thirds of accountants feeling overwhelmed at least weekly. That statistic isn’t just a wellbeing concern; it’s a leading indicator of future departures. Every overwhelmed staff member is a flight risk, and every departure increases the load on remaining staff, who become more overwhelmed, who become higher flight risks. It’s a vicious cycle that automation is uniquely positioned to break.

When I audit how overwhelmed staff spend their time, the pattern is consistent. They’re not overwhelmed by the tax research. They’re not overwhelmed by the advisory conversations with clients. They’re overwhelmed by the volume of mechanical tasks that feel endless and unrewarding — the 200 uncategorized transactions, the 30 unreturned document requests, the inbox with 150 messages that each need a response.

Automation targets exactly the work that drives burnout. You can’t automate the professional judgment, and you shouldn’t — that’s the fulfilling part of the job. But you can automate the mechanical repetition that makes your staff dread Monday mornings.

Getting Started This Week

If you’re reading this because your firm is already understaffed, here’s the immediate triage I recommend:

Day 1-2: Audit your existing automation. QuickBooks Online and Xero both have bank feed rules and auto-categorization that many firms have partially configured but never fully tuned. Spend two hours refining your categorization rules. This is the fastest capacity recovery available.

Day 3-5: Set up automated client communication for your highest-volume service. If that’s tax, build a document request sequence that sends automatically and follows up without staff intervention. If it’s bookkeeping, automate the monthly check-in and document collection email. TaxDome handles both elegantly.

Week 2: Implement workflow tracking if you don’t have it. Karbon is my recommendation for firms that do both tax and advisory. Every work item gets a status and a deadline. Stop tracking progress in spreadsheets and heads — let the system do it.

Week 3-4: Build your triage and routing rules. Define what work goes where based on type, complexity, and current staff capacity. This is where the day-to-day operational load starts to feel genuinely lighter.

You’re not going to solve the accounting profession’s structural staffing shortage. Neither am I. What you can solve is your firm’s relationship to that shortage — by building operations that depend less on headcount and more on systems. The firms that figure this out won’t just survive the exodus. They’ll be better, more profitable, and more sustainable than they were when they had a full roster.

Lisa told me last month that she’s stopped actively recruiting. Not because she wouldn’t hire the right person — she would in a heartbeat. But because her firm no longer needs to hire to survive. That shift, from desperation to optionality, is the real goal of capacity automation.