What's Keeping Business Accountants Up at Night
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You stayed at the office until 10pm last night to clear three returns that should have taken an hour each. Your fees have not moved in 18 months. Your best junior just gave notice to join a bank. And SARS has another round of changes dropping next month. You are not imagining the squeeze. You are in it.
Accounting Today's 2026 Top 100 Firms survey asked the biggest US firm leaders what is keeping them awake. The answers will sound familiar. Strip out the multibillion-dollar private-equity drama, and the five issues below are sitting on the desk of every CIBA member in practice right now.
The pricing squeeze is real, and it is structural
"One of the most significant challenges is pricing pressure driven by low-quality, low-cost providers that commoditize services without fully understanding the rigor, judgment and accountability required in our profession." That is Avani Desai, CEO of Florida firm Schellman. It could just as easily be a CIBA member in Centurion describing what happened to their bookkeeping fees last year.
The shift is structural. Compliance work is being commoditised. AI-assisted bookkeeping platforms can do the data capture for a fraction of what a junior used to charge. Cheap online "tax services" undercut you on the line items, even though they cannot do half of what you can do.
The wrong response is to drop your prices to compete. The right response is to reposition. As CIBA put it in If Clients Haggle You Positioned It Wrong, most accountants are not underpaid, they are under-positioned. Move the work up the value chain. Charge for judgment, governance, advisory, and risk management, not for keystrokes.
The talent drain is not just a US problem
Top 100 firms in the US worry about declining accounting graduates, the 150-credit-hour rule, and competing with banks and tech for graduates. Sound familiar?
South Africa's version is sharper. The SAICA pipeline has been narrowing for years. Small practices cannot match the salaries that banks, large audit firms, and the public sector pay. Bright juniors get poached after three years of training. The really bright ones leave the country.
The CIBA answer has always been to widen the door rather than narrow it. The BAP(SA) and CBAP designations exist exactly because a single licensure pathway is not enough for a country with our shortage of business accountants. If you are a small practice principal, your best moves are:
Hire candidates on the BAP pathway, not just CA pathway hopefuls. They tend to stay longer and serve SMEs better.
Treat their training contract as a real curriculum, not free labour. Document the competencies, sign off the milestones, and graduate them.
Build advisory work into the junior's exposure early. That is how you stop them leaving for a bank the moment they are useful.
The technology bill that never ends
Tim Brackney, CEO of Springline Advisory Group, named the problem precisely. Firms that delayed technology investments are now "caught between expensive modernization costs and the competitive disadvantage of outdated tools".
For an SA small practice, that pressure has an extra edge. Most modern accounting and AI tools are priced in US dollars. The rand has not done you any favours. Your software stack costs more every year, even when your client base stays flat.
There is no escape from this one. Cloud accounting, AI-assisted reconciliation, document capture, secure client portals, and a half-decent practice management tool are no longer optional. They are the cost of staying competitive. As CIBA covered in Smart AI, Smarter Accountants, automated bank reconciliation alone can recover up to 22 hours per client per month, which is real time you can re-bill as advisory work.
The discipline is to choose a small, integrated stack and use it deeply, rather than a sprawling list of subscriptions you barely log into. Audit your tools once a year. Cancel what you do not use. Train your team on what is left.
Clients want one front door, not five
Richard Kopelman, CEO of Georgia firm Aprio, captured this one well. "Clients no longer experience tax, legal, operational and financial challenges in isolation. Firms must move beyond siloed services to deliver coordinated, multidisciplinary guidance that reflects how businesses actually operate."
The SME owner you serve does not separate her VAT problem from her cash flow problem from her staffing problem from her POPIA problem. She wants one trusted person who can hold the whole picture and tell her what to do next. If you cannot be that person, someone else will be.
This is the advisory shift CIBA has been pointing to for years. Why Advisory Services Are the Future of Accounting shows that 85% of firms surveyed plan to grow their advisory work in the next two years, and getting clients to take three or more services from your practice is one of the strongest indicators of growth.
You do not need to bolt legal advice or financial planning onto your offering. You need to be the one who tells the client when to bring in the lawyer or the financial planner, and who keeps the work joined up. That is the integrated front door.
The change-resistance trap
Kerry Roe of Ohio firm Clark, Schaefer, Hackett & Co. named the meta-issue. Accounting is "an inherently risk-averse, conservative ecosystem". That is a feature when it comes to upholding standards. It becomes a liability when it stops firms adapting.
Josh Tyree, CEO of Sorren, added the corrective: firms must be "intentional and strategic with change, rather than reactive".
Translation for a CIBA member. The practices that will struggle most over the next three years are not the ones with the smallest budgets. They are the ones still running 2018's workflow in 2026. No client portal. No automated reconciliation. No fixed-fee model. No advisory service line. No succession plan (see CIBA's Succession Planning for the SME client for why this matters long before retirement).
If any of those describe your practice, the issue is not the macro environment. It is internal inertia. The good news is that internal inertia is the one variable on this whole list that you fully control.
The bottom line
Pricing pressure. Talent drain. Tech costs. Integrated client demand. Resistance to change. Those are the five real pressures on the South African small practice in 2026. They are not unique to you, and they are not going away. But they are all addressable, and they are all addressable by you.
Reposition your fees around judgment, not keystrokes. Recruit on the CBAP pathway. Pick a small tech stack and use it deeply. Be the one trusted front door for your SME clients. And stop waiting for the perfect moment to change anything. There is no perfect moment.
Source Article: Accounting Today