At the same time, breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (AI) promise to revolutionize workforce planning and decision-making. New generations of resource management software are empowering data-driven allocation of staff.
Furthermore, emerging technologies and evolving firm structures are prompting leaders to reconsider traditional partnership models in favor of more centralized, tech-enabled governance.
Those trends add to the pressure already felt by accounting firms' resource managers, who must cope with the shortage of accounting talents, with less CPAs joining the workforce than ever and experienced accountants retiring or leaving. In fact, 17% of U.S. accountants left the profession between 2019 and 2022 and there is no sign of the trend reversing.
To be future proof, firms must do more with fewer people. As a result, resource managers must optimize how staff time is allocated, leverage external resources wisely, and harness technology to amplify productivity.
The Future of Remote Work
The blending of on-site, remote, and offshore teams presents new complexity in resource management. Managers must coordinate work across time zones and cultures, ensure knowledge transfer, and maintain quality standards regardless of a team member’s location.
In global and mostly remote working environment, communication protocols become critical. For example, scheduling virtual meetings that accommodate different time zones, or using collaboration platforms to keep everyone aligned on project status. On the positive side, a global staffing approach gives firms access to a “follow the sun” model, where work can be handed off between teams in different geographies to accelerate turnaround. It also provides flexibility to scale up for busy seasons by utilizing offshore contractors without permanent headcount increases.
By 2030, many U.S. accounting firms may operate with a global bench of professionals, a mix of full-time domestic employees, nearshore teams located in less populated areas, and offshore support in talent hubs like India or the Philippines.
The Rise of the Home Office
The COVID-19 pandemic catalyzed a permanent shift in work models. According to CPA Practice Advisor, roughly two-thirds of accounting firms offer remote or hybrid work options, and over a third plan to expand these flexible arrangements in the future.
The implications for resource managers are profound, particularly in audit, where traditional in-person engagements have historically required physical presence at client sites. Many auditors now work from home when not on-site with clients, requiring scheduling that considers both remote and on-site work dynamics.
Unlike tax or advisory professionals who can often work entirely remotely, auditors still need to conduct physical inspections, inventory counts, and certain client interactions in person. This means that for engagements requiring on-site work, resource managers must take auditors’ home locations into account when assigning staff to clients. Geographic proximity has become a key factor in scheduling, as firms seek to minimize unnecessary travel time and expenses.
At the same time, with remote work becoming widely adopted across industries and digital recordkeeping reducing the reliance on physical documents, more audits are shifting toward fully remote execution. Increasingly, audit firms are leveraging secure client portals, data analytics tools, and real-time collaboration software to conduct audits without setting foot in a client’s office. This trend enables greater workforce flexibility and opens the door for nearshoring audit professionals.
Outsourcing & Offshoring
In parallel with remote work, accounting firms are increasingly turning to global talent strategies to address skill shortages and cost pressures. What was relatively uncommon five years ago is now mainstream. In fact, nearly 50% of firms surveyed by Inside Public Accounting are already offshoring or outsourcing some work to other countries. Even many smaller firms have started outsourcing specialized tasks, and larger firms are expanding offshore centers for functions like tax preparation and audit support.
This push abroad is largely driven by a domestic talent crunch and rising wages; firms unable to hire enough U.S. staff are tapping into qualified accountants overseas. According to the same Inside Public Accounting survey, 91% of firms already outsourcing plan to maintain or boost their use of offshore resources, with only 9% planning to pull back. Moreover, among firms not yet outsourcing, about 30% intended to start within the next year.
Nearshoring
Many firms are adopting nearshoring to reduce costs while maintaining real-time collaboration. This can mean hiring accountants in lower-cost U.S. cities instead of expensive hubs like New York, San Francisco, or Seattle. Cities such as Milwaukee, Omaha, and Little Rock offer skilled professionals at lower salaries without the complications of offshore outsourcing.
Nearshoring also includes expanding into nearby countries. Canada provides accountants with training closely aligned to U.S. standards, while Mexico and Central American countries like Costa Rica and Guatemala offer cost-effective, English-speaking professionals in similar time zones. Unlike offshore teams in Asia, nearshore teams can collaborate in real time, making them ideal for interactive work such as client consulting and advisory services.
By 2035, many firms will use a mix of onshore, nearshore, and offshore talent. Resource managers will need to allocate work based on cost, expertise, and time zone efficiency. Firms that build a well-balanced workforce across these regions will gain an edge in both cost control and client service.
The Future of AI Agents in Accounting Firms
In a 2024 industry survey, 80% of accounting firms anticipated using more AI in the near future. While this often means embracing AI-powered software, AI agents are increasingly in demand. These AI-driven assistants can perform complex tasks without constant human input, reshaping how firms manage resources and deliver services.
In this emerging paradigm, resource managers will need to treat AI agents as a new category of staff, deciding along with other stakeholders what tasks to assign them and ensuring proper human oversight. New performance metrics blending human and AI contributions will be needed. Managers will also need to upskill teams to collaborate effectively with AI and implement appropriate governance policies.
Autonomous Scheduling
One promising application is automating audit and engagement scheduling. AI scheduling agents can communicate with clients to propose dates, integrate with calendars to book slots, and dynamically adjust staff assignments as project needs change. Over time, these agents learn firm and client preferences to optimize scheduling. Early examples, like KPMG's AI agent prototypes, show the potential to free up significant manager time.
AI-Powered Reconciliation
AI is also streamlining financial reconciliation by automatically cross-matching transactions, detecting anomalies, and generating audit-ready reports. Microsoft and others have developed AI reconciliation agents that can reconcile thousands of line items in seconds with greater accuracy than humans. Case studies show AI enabling firms to increase transaction review volumes by orders of magnitude while focusing human effort on investigating flagged exceptions.
Generative AI for Tax Planning
In tax planning, generative AI tools can now analyze client data and tax laws to draft personalized strategy letters and communications. They can explain complex tax situations in plain language and proactively alert clients to savings opportunities or compliance issues. Thomson Reuters and others are even developing AI that can perform tax research within certain parameters and recently acquired Materia, a start-up building autonomous AI agents for tax and audit professionals. This will eventually shifts tax professionals to a reviewer role, enabling more clients to receive timely, tailored advice.
Fraud Detection and Compliance Monitoring
In fraud detection and compliance monitoring, AI pattern recognition is proving transformative. Tools like MindBridge AI Auditor can scan 100% of a company's transactions to spot subtle anomalies that could signal fraud. AI can also provide real-time regulatory compliance tracking, immediately alerting firms to changes that impact their clients. Some AI systems can even trigger investigatory audits autonomously if risk scores exceed defined thresholds. This 24/7 monitoring enables a more proactive and comprehensive defense against financial crime and reporting errors.
The Future of Resource Management Softwares
To harness both the remote work trend and AI capabilities discussed, accounting firms are investing in modern resource management software. These tools have become the backbone for organizing work in complex firms, far outstripping the old mix of spreadsheets and ad-hoc systems. A range of specialized platforms (e.g., Beeye) as well as modules within broader practice management suites are now available to help firms optimize workforce allocation. Unlike generic project management tools, these systems are tailored to professional services and accounting workflows, handling staff schedules, client engagement planning, skills tracking, and often integrating with time and billing or ERP systems. In the coming decade, such software will be a critical asset for resource managers tasked with doing more with less.
The Shift to Centralized Scheduling Systems
Many mid-to-large accounting firms historically operated in silos, with each office or practice group managing its own scheduling. This is changing rapidly as firms seek a firm-wide view of their talent pool and, as a result, are getting away from specialized resource management software that works only for audit teams or only handles schedules, but not task management. At Beeye, an increasing proportion of our new clients come to us to replace multiple specialized software solutions in order to have a firm-wide view of their resources. By unifying resource management, firms can deploy their people more flexibly across locations and service lines. By 2035, most firms will likely have a centralized resource management platform acting as a single source of truth for staffing, accessible to all resource managers and practice leaders.
Modern Resource Management Tools
Today’s resource management software goes beyond simple scheduling charts. They increasingly incorporate AI and analytics to support the functions described earlier. For instance, at Beeye, we often present our AI-powered staff sheduling software as a “smart personal assistant” for allocating staff, using up-to-date data and predictive algorithms to help assign the right staff to the right task at the right time. In practice, this means platforms like Beeye can automatically recommend staffing assignments based on criteria set by the firm (such as matching industry experience or balancing workload). Another key feature is skills and availability databases. Managers can query who is free during a given week and filter by specific skills or certifications, something that is impractical to maintain manually for a large firm.Integration is also a hallmark of these solutions. Leading platforms, including Beeye, integrate with practice management or ERP systems to pull in data on project budgets, timelines, and even employees’ recorded hours.
Optimizing Utilization and Profitability
Resource management software also plays a direct role in optimizing firm economics. By analyzing how staff time is allocated, these tools can highlight underutilization or bottlenecks. For example, they might reveal that certain teams consistently have capacity left unused, prompting management to redistribute work or reduce hiring in those areas, while other teams are overextended and need reinforcement. Some platforms provide reports and dashboards that correlate scheduling data with financial outcomes – such as utilization rates or project profitability – giving resource managers a more strategic view. With reliable data, resource managers become partners to firm executives in driving operational efficiency and profitability.
Practice Management Suites & Integrated Solutions
Resource management functionality comes either from specialized vendors (like Beeye) or as part of comprehensive practice management suites offered by Wolters Kluwer, Thomson Reuters, and others. These suites traditionally handle time tracking, billing, client information, and workflow management, with many now expanding into resource scheduling to provide all-in-one solutions. While integrated suites offer seamless data flow across project details, budgets, staffing, and work status, specialized resource management tools often provide more sophisticated scheduling intelligence and AI capabilities. Although standalone solutions like Beeye will likely maintain their edge by dedicating all their development efforts to resource management, practice management platforms are recognizing resource management's strategic importance and improving their offerings. The future is clear: all systems will need to communicate with each other, enabling firms to make staffing decisions with complete visibility across billing, client data, schedules, and skills.
The Future of Tech-Enabled Accounting Firms
Amid these technological and workforce changes, accounting firms are also rethinking their organizational structures. The traditional partnership model, where the firm is owned and managed by its senior practitioners, has been the dominant structure for over a century. However, a tech-driven future that demands agility, significant investment, and centralized decision-making is testing the viability of this model.
Centralized Decision-Making
The partnership model, where major decisions require consensus among many partners, is increasingly seen as too slow for today's rapid technological change. Many firms are moving toward corporate-style governance with empowered CEOs and small executive committees making most decisions. This shift enables faster implementation of firm-wide technology platforms and standardized processes. For resource managers, this means greater authority to implement firm-wide scheduling policies without needing buy-in from individual partners, and the ability to move talent across offices and service lines more freely. It also enables coordinated management of nearshore and offshore delivery centers, which would be difficult under decentralized partnership structures.
Value-Based Pricing Models
As AI and automation dramatically improve accountant productivity, the traditional billable hour model may become obsolete. When AI can complete in minutes what once took hours, firms need new pricing and compensation structures. This could lead to value-based pricing models or subscription services, fundamentally changing how firms generate revenue and compensate their professionals. Resource managers will need new metrics beyond utilization rates to measure productivity and allocate staff. They'll need to consider factors like AI expertise, advisory capabilities, and client relationship skills when matching talent to projects.
The Rise of Specialist Firms
We may see more specialization as technology enables firms to focus on specific industries or services. Some firms might become technology-first organizations that happen to provide accounting services, while others might focus on high-touch advisory work. This specialization will require resource managers to develop new staffing models – technology-focused firms will need systems to match highly specialized technical skills to projects, while advisory-focused firms will need ways to evaluate and assign soft skills and industry expertise. Resource managers may also need to manage a more diverse workforce, from AI specialists to industry experts to client relationship managers.
The Hybrid Future
By 2035, the accounting firm landscape will likely be diverse. While some firms will maintain traditional partnership structures, many will adopt hybrid models that combine aspects of partnerships and corporations. These might include PE-backed firms operating through alternative practice structures, employee-owned firms, or partnerships that behave like corporations in practice. Resource managers will need to adapt their approaches based on their firm's chosen structure, from managing globally distributed teams in corporate-style firms to balancing local partner autonomy with firm-wide efficiency in hybrid models. The most successful will be those who can align resource management with their firm's specific combination of ownership, governance, and service delivery models.
The Road Ahead
The decade ahead will redefine resource management in accounting firms. The growing use of AI agents, nearshoring strategies, and centralized governance will make workforce planning more complex but also more strategic. Resource managers will no longer simply assign staff to projects; they will oversee a hybrid workforce of human professionals and AI-powered assistants, ensuring that the right mix of talent and technology is deployed for maximum efficiency. The shift away from the billable hour model will require new ways of measuring productivity, moving beyond utilization rates to assess value creation, advisory expertise, and technological adaptability. With firms increasingly operating across multiple locations and time zones, resource managers will play a critical role in ensuring seamless collaboration across geographies, business units, and service lines.
Keeping pace with technological advancements will be essential. The firms that thrive will be those that fully integrate AI-driven resource planning, real-time scheduling, and predictive analytics into their operations by implementing a software like Beeye. Resource managers must be proactive in adopting and optimizing these tools, shifting their focus from administrative scheduling to data-driven decision-making and workforce strategy. They will need to develop expertise in managing both human and digital talent, overseeing AI scheduling systems, automated compliance agents, and reconciliation bots alongside accountants and consultants. With technology reshaping job roles and firm structures, resource managers will be at the forefront of designing talent pipelines and professional development programs to ensure their firms remain competitive.
This is an exciting time to be a resource manager in accounting. The role is evolving from an operational function to a strategic leadership position, shaping how firms attract, develop, and deploy talent in an increasingly digital and globalized industry. With greater autonomy to implement firm-wide policies, access to advanced technology, and a more dynamic workforce to oversee, resource managers will have unprecedented opportunities to drive efficiency, innovation, and profitability. As firms navigate rapid change, resource managers will be essential in ensuring that people—and AI—are working in harmony to deliver exceptional client service. Those who embrace this transformation will not only future-proof their firms but will also elevate their own careers, positioning themselves as indispensable architects of the accounting workforce of the future.
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