The people shortage is structural. Leverage is the way through.
The shortage of accountants is not a rough patch that better recruiting will fix. It is structural, and the numbers are unambiguous. The average Canadian accountant is forty-seven, five years older than the average worker, so retirements will arrive sooner here than almost anywhere else in the economy. Enrolment in accounting programs has been falling for more than a decade, worsened by a parallel shortage of accounting professors. The profession, put plainly, is no longer replacing itself: more practitioners are leaving than arriving. Ninety per cent of Canadian finance and accounting hiring managers have reported trouble filling roles, and in one Robert Half survey forty per cent of managers could not fill positions while a third worried the resulting backlogs were producing errors.
The reflexive response is to pay more and hire harder, and firms have. Across the profession, national median compensation reached $154,000 in 2024, up 7.7 per cent in two years and ahead of inflation, with early-career CPAs at a median of $92,000. Those are all-sector national figures, spanning industry, government, and public practice alike, and they matter to an independent firm not as its own pay scale but as the market it has to compete against. The price of CPA talent has risen across the whole economy, and a small firm now has to match a national market while carrying economics that a national employer does not. A firm cannot pay its way out of a shortage of people who do not exist, and the smaller the firm, the less it can even try.
The three sources of leverage
If a firm cannot hire its way out, the only durable answer is leverage: more output from each person, and fewer people required per file. Leverage comes from three places, and the firms pulling ahead are working all three at once. The first is capacity planning, seeing the hours the firm already has and routing work against them deliberately. The second is systematization, building delivery so that the work does not live in any one person’s head. The third is automation, the agentic layer this publication covered last issue, which lets a smaller team carry a larger volume. None of the three is glamorous. Together they are the whole game.
Capacity planning: managing the hours you already have
Most firms have no accurate picture of who is over capacity and who is under it until the busy season makes the answer painful. Work is routed by habit and proximity rather than by any real view of the firm’s load. A growing category of software exists to fix exactly this. Montreal’s Beeye, among others, makes utilization visible and forecastable across the whole firm, so partners can allocate work by who actually has room rather than by who is nearest. Managing the capacity a firm already owns is faster, cheaper, and more certain than trying to buy more of it in a market where there is none to buy.
“You cannot hire people who do not exist. You can only get more from the people you have, or need fewer of them per file.”
Automation: fewer hands per file
Seen through the lens of capacity, the agentic tools of the last issue are not really about intelligence. They are about labour. If an agent removes hours from a year-end file, the firm needs fewer hands to close the same number of files, which is the definition of leverage. This is worth stating carefully, because it is easily misread as a case for cutting staff. In a structural shortage it is the opposite. Automation is what lets a shorthanded firm keep its promises to clients without burning out the people it managed to keep. The firms deploying it well are not shedding staff. They are refusing to let a hiring market they cannot control set a ceiling on the work they can accept.
Build, borrow, or automate
When hiring is off the table, a firm has three honest levers. It can automate the repeatable. It can borrow capacity, through fractional talent or offshore teams, a route United States firms are already taking at scale as they hire abroad to clear returns. Or it can build leverage into the model from the beginning, so that a given volume of work simply requires fewer partner hours, which is the subject of this issue’s Firm in Focus. The one lever that consistently disappoints is the reflexive one: outbidding the whole market for scarce staff and passing the cost to clients who will eventually notice. The shortage will outlast this cycle. The firms that treat it as a prompt to build leverage will compound an advantage. The firms that treat it as a hiring problem will keep paying more to stand still.