Research · Lead
The U.S. accounting-services market earned $198.9B in 2022, with CPA offices at $132.2B. Bookkeeping was $9.2B, and clerk jobs may fall 6% by 2034.
From the newsroom
Research
How Americans file: paid preparers handle 52.9% of e-filed returns, 864,569 PTIN holders are active, and TurboTax and H&R Block dominate self-prep.
Research
IRS collection activity: federal tax liens rose 36% to 214,099 in FY2025, Offer-in-Compromise acceptance fell to 14.1%, and IRS-CI won 1,611 convictions.
Research
Complying with the U.S. tax code took about 6.93B hours and $477B+ for TY2025, roughly 1.8% of GDP. Form 1099-B alone accounts for 2.18B…
Research
2026 federal income tax: the top 37% rate starts at $640,600 for singles, the top 1% pay 38.4% of income tax, and the top…
The Seven Desks
Software Shootout
The four practice management platforms most CPA firms shortlist in 2026. We ran 30-day trials on real client engagements: workflow fit, mobile reliability, e-sign integration, billing accuracy, and the hidden-cost line items that surface at year two. Pricing ranges from $39 to $129 per user per month.
2026 Comparison
Original Research
We publish original datasets on the accounting profession because the trade press reuses the same numbers from the same sources for years at a time. The PE Roll-Up Tracker catalogues every recapitalization of a CPA firm since 2021 with deal terms. The Audit Firm Rotation Index covers 1,140 SEC registrant auditor changes. The Crypto CPA Market Sizing report estimates $2.4 billion in 2026 fees across 380 firms. Methodology is disclosed on every dataset. Anyone can cite us with attribution.
42
CPA firm PE recapitalizations tracked since 2021
1,140
SEC registrant auditor changes catalogued since 2020
$2.4B
Estimated 2026 crypto CPA market size (380 firms)
From the archive
“The STR may be regarded as a combination of a ledger with some encryption and communication scripts. Or you might regard it as a ledger with an http or email daemon bolted onto it.”
— Todd Boyle, Shared Transaction Repository, 2003
Restored 2026
Twenty-seven essays and software specifications on general ledger architecture and distributed accounting, written between 1997 and 2010. Cited by the Nakamoto Institute, Ian Grigg's iang.org, the Apache Confluence wiki, and the Financial Cryptography blog. Restored at their original URLs to preserve the citation chain that runs from double-entry accounting through triple-entry accounting to Bitcoin.