The accountant shortage is a workflow problem, not just a hiring problem

Most firm owners don't need a report to know hiring is hard. Experienced preparers are expensive and scarce, entry-level pipelines are thin, and busy season burns out the people you do have. The data backs it up: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics figures, as reported by The Wall Street Journal in December 2022, showed more than 300,000 accountants and auditors leaving their jobs over the previous two years, a 17% decline, and the AICPA's 2023 Trends Report recorded a 7.8% drop in accounting bachelor's degree completions in the 2021–22 academic year.

There's no quick fix for the supply of accountants. But there is something firms control directly: how many hours each return, engagement, and client actually requires.

Where the hours actually go

When we map a firm's workflows, the pattern is remarkably consistent. A meaningful share of staff time goes to work that requires no accounting judgment at all:

• Requesting, chasing, renaming, and filing documents
• Keying numbers from PDFs into tax or accounting software
• Answering status questions by email and phone
• Updating spreadsheets and pipelines by hand
• Preparing engagement letters and invoices from scratch

These tasks are necessary, but they don't need a credentialed professional. When they're automated, the same team can handle more clients, or the same clients with fewer late nights.

Hiring scales cost. Workflow scales capacity.

Hiring adds capacity in a straight line: one more person, one person's worth of hours, plus recruiting, onboarding, and management overhead. Automation works differently. A document-reminder system handles 50 clients or 2,000 with roughly the same effort. An extraction workflow doesn't get tired in April.

That doesn't make people less important. It makes them more valuable, because their time shifts toward review, client relationships, and advisory work, which is the part of the job clients pay a premium for and the part most accountants actually enjoy.

A better job is a retention strategy

Burnout is one of the main reasons people leave public accounting. Removing the most tedious parts of the job (the re-keying, the chasing, the copy-paste emails) makes the remaining work more meaningful and the season more survivable. In a tight labor market, "we've automated the busywork" is a recruiting pitch.

The competitive gap is opening now

Thomson Reuters' 2024 Future of Professionals Report, based on a survey of more than 2,200 professionals, found that professionals expect AI to free up around 12 hours per week within five years. Firms that capture that time early will be able to offer faster turnaround and more competitive pricing, and to take on clients that other firms turn away. Firms that wait will find themselves competing against those advantages.

Where to start

1. Map one full client lifecycle, from first contact to final invoice, and mark every manual handoff.
2. Estimate the hours each step consumes across a season.
3. Automate the highest-volume, lowest-judgment step first.
4. Measure, then move to the next one.