In Van Nuys, Calif., Steve Glick came up with a new concern: “Now the software companies—TurboTax, Intuit, etc.—are competing against their customers by preparing tax returns.”
Gretl Siler, at Succentrix Business Advisors, in Panama City, Fla., has the problem everyone wishes they had, plus the one everyone wishes they didn’t. She says, “Note that I am not having any problem with increasing prices or with competitors. The problem is too many new clients and staffing… plus the IRS is still terrible.”
To be sure, there’s Bob Langworthy, the founder of southern Maine’s Management Accounting. He couldn’t name a single concern. “None!” he says. “We served 1,000 clients last year and already have more than 200 committed new clients this season.”
For 2023, the CPA Trendlines Busy Season Barometer expanded the list of possible concerns, 24 in all, plus an “other” option. It’s our longest list ever, and accountants checked off each and every possible worry.
By CPA Trendlines via The Center for Transformation
Finding qualified talent has long plagued the accounting profession. However, with COVID-19 and remote work, the past three years have ushered in a new age of attrition and burnout.
A July 2022 article in Accountancy Age explored a survey that showed 99% of accountants suffer from burnout, with 24% reporting medium-high to high levels of burnout. Further, that burnout is generally listed as why many CPAs leave public accounting.
The survey, conducted by FloQast, a provider of accounting workflow automation software, and the University of Georgia, used the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI)—the leading measure of burnout and validated by more than 35 years of research—in an accounting setting for the first time. Using a 100-point scale, the survey covered three major areas of burnout: Emotional Exhaustion (EE), Depersonalization (DP), and low sense of Personal Accomplishment (PA).
Pricing at CPA firms has been growing for the past six months, according to a new CPA Trendlines study, and the numbers are worth noting. August was the first year-over-year hike of over 5 percent, at 5.1 percent. From there, it hopped to 5.5 percent in September, 6.3 percent in October and 6.5 percent in November.
Financial auditing at CPA firms was slightly behind, with annual differences of 4.9 percent in September, 5.5 percent in October and 5.9 percent in November. READ MORE →
The silver lining of the pandemic is that it forced accountants to move to the cloud and to develop distributed labor models, changes that are here to stay, Hitendra Patil, author of Client Accounting Services: The Definitive Success Guide, tells CPA Trendines in the latest episode of The Disruptors.
Except for payroll services, all tax and accounting sectors are seeing higher earnings year over year. Overall pay was up 6.7 percent, with CPA firm staff pay close behind at 6.6 percent. CPA firms beat the national 7.7 percent inflation rate, increasing hourly earnings by a heady 9.2 percent. READ MORE →
Accounting leaders say these are the issues firms must face.
By CPA Trendlines Research
As Gale Crosley of Crosley+Consulting notes in the 2022 Rosenberg Survey, we are in the midst of “an unusual year of high uncertainty, unpredictability and sapped energy among our profession’s leaders.”
Yes, indeed. The profession, once characterized as staid and stable, has been hit by a confluence of what Crosley calls “four major thunderbolts,” to wit:
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