Illinois CPA Society CEO lays out the three big challenges.
Gear Up for Growth
With Jean Caragher
For CPA Trendlines
CPA Trendlines Deal Tracker: A market drowning in capital but starving for qualified sellers is driving heated concentration.
By CPA Trendlines Research
1,000 Deals Show Where PE Money in Accounting Really Goes.
By CPA Trendlines
Private equity’s expansion into accounting is widely framed as a takeover of public company audits. But new data shows that’s only a myth.
MORE Private Equity | The 7.6x Machine: How Grassroots Firms Are Taking Private Equity for a Ride | Deal Tracker: PE Platforms Accelerate the Grab for CPA Firms | With Apax Sale, CohnReznick Starts Building a National Platform | Unicorns and Funerals: From the Demise of Botkeeper to the Rise of Basis.ai | Jeremy Dubow: Raising the Bar for Talent | Big 4 Transparency | Twelve Great Reasons to Merge In a Smaller Accounting Firm
A close look at almost 1,000 PE deals over the last 10 years shows only about 10% involve firms with assurance practices. The reason is as clear as it is simple: The vast majority of PE and PE-backed deals are for firms too small to play in the audit business.
Fewer than 200 investors triggered almost 900 acquisitions.
By CPA Trendlines Research
A multiplier that has grown fourfold since 2021 reveals a transformation driven not by new private equity entrants, but by platform firms consuming the mid-market at speed.
It belies the notion that PE is taking over the accounting profession. In fact, new global research argues that local and mid-size firms worldwide are taking control of their own futures and using institutional capital to pick up the tab.
MORE Private Equity | Deal Tracker: PE Platforms Accelerate the Grab for CPA Firms | With Apax Sale, CohnReznick Starts Building a National Platform | Unicorns and Funerals: From the Demise of Botkeeper to the Rise of Basis.ai | Jeremy Dubow: Raising the Bar for Talent | Big 4 Transparency | Twelve Great Reasons to Merge In a Smaller Accounting Firm
The numbers that define private equity’s advance into accounting do not look the way most people expect. The headlines feature the big firms and the brand-name investors — TowerBrook Capital and EisnerAmper, New Mountain Capital and Grant Thornton, Ares Management and Baker Tilly. But the actual architecture of the transformation is being built one level below: in the relentless, largely unnoticed roll-up of smaller practices into PE-backed platforms.
How AI Accounting Went From Pioneering to Inevitable in 1 Month and 11 Years.
By CPA Trendlines Research
In a matter of days, AI in accounting produced its most celebrated funding round and its most instructive collapse. Both developments were years in the making. Neither was a surprise to anyone paying close attention.
The leap from Botkeeper’s machine learning to Basis.ai’s agentic AI didn’t just change the technology. It changed which companies survive.
MORE AI | Outlook 2026: Agentic AI Reaches the Tipping Point in Tax and Accounting Firms | Gen AI in Accounting: Epic Transformation, or Overheated Hype? | AI Tax App Crashes Financial Stocks on Wall Street | The $125 Billion Challenge: Intuit’s AI Platform Redraws the Accounting Map | Bot Wars: Wolters Kluwer, Intuit, Thomson Reuters Battle for AI Dominance in CPA Firms | How TaxDome and Juno Just Changed the Tax Tech Game | Meet Basis, the New AI Bookkeeper on the Block
The juxtaposition is not just ironic. It is clarifying.
What happened in February 2026 was not a story about whether AI works in accounting. The research says it does.
It was a story about which business models survive the moment when AI actually arrives — and which ones get caught between the old world and the new one, having spent years and tens of millions of dollars building toward a future that materialized faster, and harder, than anyone expected.