Why this page has almost no statistics in it #
Search this question and you will find a great many percentages. Very few of them name a sample, a method or a date, and a striking number appear first on the blog of a company selling something.
We are a consultancy that would benefit from those numbers being true, so the only honest position is to not use them. Everything cited below is a regulator or a government department, with the date it was read at the foot of the page.
If a figure about AI in accountancy matters to a decision you are making, ask three questions of it.
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Who collected it
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How many people answered
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When
Most of the numbers in this category fail the first question.
What has actually changed, and can be checked #
Two changes are documented, dated and specific, and both of them add recurring work to a practice rather than removing it.
Making Tax Digital for Income Tax
HMRC guidance phases qualifying sole traders and landlords in by income: over 50,000 pounds for the 2024 to 2025 tax year from 6 April 2026, over 30,000 pounds for 2025 to 2026 from 6 April 2027, and over 20,000 pounds for 2026 to 2027 from 6 April 2028.
Each qualifying client then sends four quarterly updates a year, on 7 August, 7 November, 7 February and 7 May. That is a per client, per quarter obligation on fixed dates, described in more detail on the MTD workload page.
Identity verification at Companies House
Companies House guidance states that identity verification became a legal requirement on 18 November 2025, covering directors and their equivalents, people with significant control and authorised corporate service providers, with further roles to follow. For a practice with company clients that is a new status to hold and keep current for every director.
Neither of those is an AI story. Both of them explain why practices feel busier in 2026 than in 2024, and why the question that actually matters is not whether software will take the job, but which half of the job is growing.
The split that decides everything #
Inside any accountancy job there are two kinds of work, and they behave completely differently.
Runs on rules
- Working out which client owes what, and when
- Noticing that a document has not arrived
- Carrying the same facts between forms
- Producing the same reminder to a schedule
- Assembling a list of what is outstanding
What a practice has always resented and never charged properly for.
Needs a person
- Deciding what the numbers mean
- Deciding a client’s risk rating
- Judging whether an explanation is credible
- Having the conversation the reminder failed to prompt
- Signing off, and being answerable for it
This column is the practice.
Responsibility does not move #
This is the part that vendor content tends to skip. Supervision under the Money Laundering Regulations sits with the business: HMRC guidance requires written policies, a nominated officer, training and five year record keeping, and those duties are not transferable. Data protection obligations sit with the practice too, and the ICO publishes guidance and a risk toolkit specifically for organisations using AI with personal data.
That is not a reason to avoid automating the mechanical half. It is a reason to be precise about which half you are automating, and to satisfy yourself that the arrangement meets your obligations rather than taking a supplier's word for it. The same question in its sharpest form is on can I put client data into an AI tool.
A more useful question to ask yourself #
Take last week. How many hours went on deciding things only a qualified person could decide, and how many went on establishing the state of a file, writing the third reminder, or typing a client's details into a second system? Practices that do this honestly usually find the ratio uncomfortable, and it has nothing to do with technology.
That ratio is the thing worth changing, and it is measurable today with no software at all. The cost of admin time calculator will get you a rough number, and the free audit counts it properly against a normal week.