Accounting Attrition

Accountants are leaving the profession, and quickly. For the 12 months to September 2022, attrition at Big Four and non-Big Four accounting firms reached 39% and 49% respectively, up sharply from 24% and 31% in the previous period. Not everyone stays in one career for life, but a jump of that size is hard to ignore. Professional bodies such as ISCA in Singapore and AICPA & CIMA internationally have flagged talent and retention pressures across the profession.

What is accounting attrition, and why does it matter?

Accounting attrition is the rate at which accountants leave a firm or the profession over a set period. When it rises, firms lose experienced people faster than they can train replacements. That means lost institutional knowledge, heavier workloads for those who remain, and higher recruitment costs, which in turn feed back into the very pressures that push people out.

Retention, then, is not a side issue. Set against a wider accounting talent shortage, every experienced accountant who walks out is harder to replace than the last. And the heavier workloads left behind are precisely the conditions that breed burnout, which is what turns a one-off resignation into a pattern.

Why are accountants leaving the profession?

In our experience, the answer is time. Accounting can be extremely demanding, and not simply in hours logged, but in hours spent genuinely alert and focused. That kind of concentration is costly to sustain, month after month, through every reporting deadline.

When the personal sacrifice starts to outweigh the reward, people move on. The rising attrition figures suggest that, for a growing number of accountants, the balance has tipped.

Is it really about the money?

The demand on time applies market pressure to what counts as satisfactory pay. Firms raise remuneration to keep people at the desk late into the night. But money sometimes cannot compensate for time lost, and people leave regardless. Time, not salary, is often the deciding factor.

That is an uncomfortable conclusion for a profession used to solving retention problems with pay rises. If the real currency is time, the solution has to give time back.

How can automation reduce accountant attrition?

Backbone believes a lot of that time can be reclaimed through automation. Data entry, invoice processing and month-end close are all repetitive, rules-based tasks, and repetitive rules-based tasks lend themselves to automation.

The point is not to replace accountants. It is to remove the manual arranging of data so that skilled people spend their hours on work that actually needs them. The table below shows the split.

Work suited to automation	Work that needs the accountant
Data entry	Interpreting the numbers
Invoice processing	Exercising professional judgement
Month-end close routines	Analysing trends and risks
Reformatting and arranging data	Advising stakeholders

What does automation free accountants to do?

Removing the burden of manually arranging data leaves more time to interpret it, and to offer more valuable financial insight to stakeholders with less effort. Far from making accountants redundant, technology lets them do the more engaging analysis and judgement that drew many of them to the profession in the first place. This is the same shift explored in the changing role of accountants and their future: away from processing, and toward insight.

Where does automation leave the profession?

Efficiency changes the economics. When routine work no longer eats the day, three things shift at once:

• Less pressure to pay for late nights. Firms no longer have to buy back time lost to manual processing, so remuneration can reward skill rather than endurance.
• Room to charge for judgement. Time freed from data handling can be sold as genuinely sophisticated advisory work, which commands a better rate than reformatting spreadsheets.
• More time to stop and think. Everyone, from junior to partner, gets a little more room to breathe, and a job that leaves room to breathe is a job people stay in.

Automation is, quite simply, more value for the same effort.

For accountants weighing whether to stay, that matters. The profession does not need people to work harder; it needs the work itself to become more sustainable. A retention problem framed as a pay problem will keep recurring, because pay was never the thing in shortest supply. Time was. Give the time back, and the reason to leave weakens at its source.

For those deciding how to adapt, it is worth getting ready for the future of accounting rather than waiting for the pressure to ease on its own. The firms that treat automation as a way to protect their people, and not merely as a way to cut cost, are the ones most likely to keep experienced accountants at the desk, and keep the value that walks out of the door every time one of them resigns.