2022/23 – The year for transitioning your firm

Richard Brewin • February 28, 2022

From an individual and a business perspective, we’ve all been through an awful lot in 2020 and 2021. It is a period of time that has changed our priorities, our plans and our businesses. In some respects we’ve made progress, with changes being implemented to meet the demands of the time. Flexible working and the digitalisation and systemisation of firms represent the sort of changes that were driven by the pandemic but that were on the agenda for many firms in any case before it hit. The demands of working in the pandemic accelerated the need for change.


Conversely, we were forced to change many plans and re-prioritise our actions. Lots of things that maybe should have happened during the last two years didn’t. Yet, the conditions and reasons for those actions didn’t stop. For the accounting profession, the competition and digitalisation juggernauts inexorably rolled on regardless. In some respects we’ve lost two years in the longer term plans that we may have had in 2019.


I believe that the next 12 to 18 months are critical for accounting firms. We have come out of the pandemic and, rather than finding ourselves in the ‘new normal’ that was so much vaunted in the early stages of the 2020 lockdowns, we find ourselves facing a period of transition.


Put the pandemic to one side for a moment. For 500 years, an accounting firm occupied itself and made its money from turning the clients’ incomplete records into compliant returns. Fundamentally, that was the business model. 


As we look at role of the accountant today, all the talk is legitimately around how that role has and will change. Compliance remains part of the model, in my view, but not as the single core product it once was. The accountant’s ability to support and advise their clients, to widen and commercialise these service lines and to demonstrate their greater value and expertise is vital to the security and growth of our firms. Competition and digitalisation erodes (but doesn’t remove) our compliance role and we need to replace it by educating the market on our wider expertise.


Now reintroduce the time lost in 2020 and 2021. It almost feels like we entered the pandemic essentially still as more the traditional accountant and now exit it into a world that quickly needs the new style to come to the fore. I’m not saying we weren’t changing or digitalising as a profession before, simply that as a result of two lost years, the need for change is now far more pressing.


2022/23 is, I believe, the transitional peak for accountants. By 2024 we need to be fully embedded in our new ways. We won’t address every challenge in 2022 but, if we accept that transition is now then we need to clarify what our plans are for meeting those challenges.


My advice is this:


  1. Recognise that the next 18 months are critical for the transition of your firm
  2. Ensure that your vision for 2024 and beyond is clear and communicated to your team
  3. Restate your firm’s action plan for 2022/23 in line with your vision
  4. Identify the key challenges and actions for the next 18 months
  5. Embrace change, set your targets and standards of performance and engage your team in the thought of 18 BIG months.


Good luck!

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