What 904 answers told us about the state of UK accountancy.

Most surveys ask five questions. We collected 904 from 48 UK firms at Accountex London, May 2026 — then went deeper to find what most miss.

What 904 answers told us about the state of UK accountancy

Most surveys ask five questions. At Accountex London in May 2026 we collected 904 answers from 48 UK firms, then went looking for what everyone else misses. The free 16-page report is out now.

The headlines

65% do not know where to start with AI. It was the most-picked problem at the show, ahead of AML, workload and margin. Counter to every assumption, it is the smallest firms who feel most lost: 100% of sole practitioners flagged it, against 36% of firms with 2 to 10 staff.

81% flagged at least one symptom of document fragmentation. Chasing clients for records (42%), a disconnected tech stack (35%), AI that cannot read the firm's own data (31%), document chaos (29%), slow onboarding (27%), files they could not defend (23%).

Six of the most-flagged worries in the whole dataset share one root cause: where client documents live, and who can find them.

43% of founders are eyeing the exit.

Three findings we did not expect

Hiring one person halves your worry list. Sole practitioners listed 11.1 worries on average. Firms with 2 to 10 staff listed 5.9.

Burnout is not a long-hours problem. It travels with month-end (1.92x), not with the longest weeks (1.06x).

The missing middle is real. Firms with 11 to 50 staff flag more operational pain than anyone: too big for the founder to hold it all, too small for real systems.

Inside the 16 pages

The heat map of all 37 problems UK firms named, ranked. Every cut by firm size and role. The four moves worth making in the next 90 days.

Data collected by AutoEvent, the AI event-planning app from Workiro.

Download the report free: https://bit.ly/46vxbmV
Then come and argue with it on our stand at the Digital Accountancy Show.