The next mindset shift for accounting firms
At
Ledger Capital Partners, we spend a lot of time talking to accounting partners about mindset shifts, whether that’s moving from income-maximiser to equity-creator, turning a practice into a platform or swapping drawings for dividends. Now AI has added one more mindset shift and how your firm uses it may be the most important of the lot.
Faster but no better off
Almost every firm we sit down with uses AI somewhere in the business, whether that’s client emails going out in half the time, meeting notes that write themselves or working papers moving through review at a pace that was unlikely three years ago.
That’s a start in terms of productivity, but the market doesn’t pay you to save time.
The maths works against you because, if you bill by the hour and use AI to reduce the hours it takes to deliver the work, you’re writing yourself a smaller invoice.
Whatever efficiency the technology delivers is absorbed as a write-off or passed to the client as a discount nobody asked for. And you end up busy with AI while the management accounts refuse to acknowledge that anything has happened.
Investors reached this conclusion well before the profession did, which is why a business that runs its existing model faster attracts no premium for doing so.
What moves a valuation is a change in what the business actually sells. In other words, productivity is the entry fee, but value creation is the prize.
Don’t sell hours. Sell outcomes.
What does this look like for your accounting firm? We see three moves:
1. Acceleration: This is the obvious one, where running the compliance engine harder means the annual financial statements, the tax and the review all arrive sooner. Clients don’t notice, they certainly won’t pay a premium for punctuality, and the firm ends up easier to run without being worth any more than it was.
2. Embedding: The technology stops being back-office plumbing and becomes part of what the client receives. Their dashboard reflects this week rather than last February, cash flow gets modelled forwards and the monitoring runs all year so problems surface while there’s still time to do something about them.
3. Productising: This one shows up in the price and it means building something clients subscribe to in its own right, whether that’s forecasting, scenario planning or whatever else your practice understands that software on its own doesn’t. It carries a monthly fee and belongs to the firm rather than to whichever partner happens to service the account.
The appetite is already there, because South African owner-managed businesses and growing SMEs increasingly want the real-time insight, forward-looking advice and always-on financial visibility. If you don’t sell it to them, someone else will.
The competition doesn’t look like an accounting firm
Venture capital has moved decisively towards businesses that sell the finished work instead of the software that produces it, closing the books and filing the returns for your clients at subscription prices rather than professional fees.
One of the world’s largest venture firms has gone as far as predicting that the next trillion-dollar company will be “a software company masquerading as a services firm”. What this looks like isn’t a company selling accounting software to clients, but one that does the accounting itself.
These businesses can automate the rule-based portion of the work, which is substantial and getting larger every year. What they cannot buy is the partner who reads a technically correct set of numbers and knows immediately that something is off, especially because they’ve watched that client make the same mistake twice before and have earned enough standing to say so while it’s still cheap to fix.
Judgement is what you have to sell and it only holds its value in firms willing to build the offering around it and let the machines do the rest.
You’ve had this argument before
None of this is a new argument, incidentally, so much as it’s the ownership question wearing different clothes. If you’re optimising for what the practice pays out this year, AI is a way of getting home earlier – and that’s a rational response to how you are paid.
The moment you start building something someone else might want to buy, it turns into a service line that keeps earning even when nobody is at the office.
The profession will be reorganised around this regardless of what any individual firm decides, and the only real choice is whether yours ends up owning the new revenue or watching it be sold by someone else to clients you’ve had for 20 years.
If the second option doesn’t appeal, there’s a conversation worth having. You’ll find our investment approach at https://www.ledger.co.za; please reach out directly to chat about numbers, strategy and scale.
Sources:
1. Grant Thornton (2026) ‘Services insights: 2026 AI Impact Survey Report’, Grant Thornton, 21 April. Available at: https://www.grantthornton.com/insights/survey-reports/services/2026/professional-services-2026-ai-impact-survey-report
2. Pulido, A., Yegoryan, H., Bleys, J. and Haas, S. (2026) ‘Beyond productivity: How AI creates value in private equity’, McKinsey & Company, June.
3. Bek, J. (2026) ‘Services: The New Software’, Sequoia Capital, 5 March. Available at: https://sequoiacap.com/article/services-the-new-software/
