Median firm realization falls from 92.7% to 87.5% as a firm grows through $10M in fees, and the work causing it is not client work. We build and run the internal systems that take it off your partners, inside the tools your firm already owns.
Realization and utilization fall as a firm grows, and they keep falling through the $5M and $10M fee bands. Nothing about the client work changed. The firm got harder to run, and the cost of running it came out of the same fees.
Median realization across the $1.5M to $5M, $5M to $10M and $10M-plus bands. Eight and a half points of fees earned and not collected, given up on the way up.
Chargeable time as a share of available time, across the same three bands. Every point is capacity the firm is already paying for and not selling.
Expenses as a share of net collected fees, smallest band against largest. The overhead of running a bigger firm arrives before the margin does.
Turnover quadruples across the same growth. Replacing people is the most expensive way there is to buy back capacity.
Source: AICPA MAP 2025 (n=1,073), medians, FY2024. Corroborated on both level and slope by Rosenberg 2025 (n=296).
Top-performing firms run their partners at 52.9% chargeable, not 58.1%.
That is the top-performer median against the all-firm median in the same survey, and the direction is the point. The firms that earn the most keep their partners less chargeable, not more. In the $5M to $10M band the top-quartile gap is roughly $180,000 per partner per year. Partner hours come out of delivery and out of coordination, and income goes up.
Firms are not unconvinced and they are not short of budget. 41% name lack of time to explore or implement as the single biggest barrier to new technology; only 6% cite staff resistance. 55% have already bought workflow software and 27% believe it worked, with 34% saying teams slipped back into the old way. The gap is implementation capacity, not software and not conviction.
One scoping call. We agree one workflow, one input, one output, and the single number that decides whether it worked.
1 hourWe sit with whoever does the work today, read the current number out of your own system, and get access.
day oneInstrumented, traced, and built inside the tools your firm already owns. No new platform for your team to adopt.
days two to eightWe watch your team use it, fix what that reveals, and report the number against the baseline we took on day one.
days nine and tenFixed price, agreed before we start, sized to the workflow rather than the other way round. If it does not hit the number we agreed on day one, you do not pay. If you would rather start smaller, the Signal session is free: 30 to 60 minutes with our team, and a shortlist you keep whether or not you hire us.
These are internal systems. They touch no client return, no audit file and no client data, so one person can authorize the pilot, we have data on day one, and no partner has to vote on risk before anything can be built.
Missing and mis-coded time gets chased and escalated on a schedule, so WIP, billing and realization all report off data that is actually there. It is the cheapest fix in the firm and everything downstream depends on it.
Work in progress ages because the decision to bill is a partner judgment call that is nobody's scheduled job, so it loses to chargeable work by default. We schedule it and attach the numbers to it.
Most chase sequences stall at the second rung, where escalation needs the partner who owns the relationship. We run the cadence, route the escalation, and a person approves every send.
The pack your administrator rebuilds by hand every month, assembled from the same systems, on the same day, in the same shape. It is also the instrument that measures everything else we do for you.
A working session with our team, prepared by a short intake beforehand. You leave with a read of your firm and two to three prioritized opportunities, including one you can act on with us or without.
One internal workflow, built and running inside the systems you already own, measured against a number we agree in writing before anything starts. If it does not hit that number, you do not pay.
We sit with the people doing the work and write down how the firm actually runs, including what happens when it goes wrong, then redraw it. Every step comes back marked automate, approve, or leave alone, with a fixed price to build it.
We ship what the Blueprint prioritized. Custom build, off-the-shelf integration, or a mix, additive to your practice-management, ledger and tax stack. Production-grade, with a human-approval gate where it matters.
We operate what we built. Hosted infrastructure, monitoring, evaluation, monthly tuning, and a quarterly review against measurable outcomes. So it still works on the Monday of busy season.
The first thing we build touches no client return, no audit file and no client data. It runs on your own operating data, which is why one person can authorize it, why we can have what we need on day one, and why it can be running in a fortnight instead of after a risk review.
We build inside the tools your firm already owns. Around 30% of firms still on spreadsheets name app overwhelm as the reason they have not adopted workflow software, so arriving with another platform is arriving as the problem. If a workflow can only be fixed by adopting new software, we will say so, and that is a different engagement.
When the work does reach client-facing ground, every system we ship has a defined point where a qualified person approves before anything becomes a return, a memo, a close, or a client-facing answer. We build AI that extracts, reconciles, drafts and flags. We do not build AI that forms tax positions, gives written tax advice, or reaches audit conclusions; that stays with the professionals who sign their names. We scope every engagement to Circular 230, IRS section 7216, and auditor independence, in plain terms.
We never train on your data. We sign a data-processing agreement and offer a Canadian data-residency option. Every decision is traced and logged, so when a partner asks why a number is what it is, you can show the trail.
We ship the demo and the five things that keep it running. That is the difference between a workflow that works on a Tuesday and one your firm can still rely on in April.
Client-work automation is where the larger returns are, and it is not where we start. It needs a partner conversation about risk, and that conversation goes better once something we built is already running in your firm.
Extract from source documents and populate workpapers, with a preparer confirming the numbers before they enter the file. We never auto-file a position.
Request lists generated and outstanding items chased, with live visibility into what is missing. Always subordinate to the auditor's judgment and to independence rules.
Categorize, reconcile and assemble the close under sign-off. Under fixed-fee CAS every saved hour is margin, and standardization is what lets the service scale.
Consolidate data, draft reporting and narrate variances off a foundation tied back to source. The advisor owns the judgment and the client-facing call.
A sample, not a menu. What we build for your firm is decided in a Signal session and a Blueprint against your own numbers.
Fixed price agreed up front · no fee if it misses · or book the free Signal session first