The work you are turning away is work you could keep.
Irish practices of two to twenty people cannot hire at any grade this year, so they refuse new clients and let the low-fee ones go. dploy.ai runs a structured assessment of how compliance work actually moves through your practice and shows where AI takes the drafting and the first pass, so your qualified people review and advise, and the work you are shedding becomes work you can keep. Fixed price, agreed before we start, delivered within ten working days.
Nobody cheaper to give it to, so the client goes instead.
A newly qualified accountant in Ireland now costs a practice an average package of €65,538, and the recruiters who compiled that figure with Chartered Accountants Ireland in September 2026 call the first five years after qualification a difficult space for employers, with people moving two or three times before they settle. For a practice of two to twenty people, the person drafting a set of audit-exempt accounts, preparing a CT1 or doing the first read of a client's records is often the same person who should be on the phone to that client. There is nobody cheaper in the building to hand it to.
So the practice does what it can. It stops taking new clients it cannot service. It lets go of the ones whose fee never covered the hours, usually quietly, at renewal. And it works the September and October crunch on the people it has, with corporation tax due on 23 September for December year-ends and income tax on 31 October. Every one of those decisions is revenue the practice chose not to have, and none of them was about the quality of the work.
Since 16 July 2025, a company that files its annual return late twice in five years loses its audit exemption for the following two years. More than 16,000 companies paid late filing fees in 2024, averaging €603 each, according to the Companies Registration Office. The five-year window now has to be tracked per client, from each late return. It lands on the practices least able to absorb it, on exactly the client who leaves when they feel unattended.
The fee is not the problem and neither are the people. The qualified time in the practice is going on the part of the work that returns least.
AI Operations Assessment for Accountancy Practices
A structured assessment of how compliance work moves through your practice: who touches each engagement, at which stage, for how long, and what it returns. We look at accounts preparation, the first review, tax computations and returns, the filing calendar and the client queries around them. You get a prioritised roadmap with costs and timelines, and a straight answer on which work you could take back on.
We take an assessment on only when we are confident the opportunities it finds will be worth many multiples of the fee. If we do not believe that after the first call, we will say so plainly, and the call costs nothing.
No obligation, no hard sell.
We review processes. We do not access client files, PPS numbers or tax records. Everything stays in your environment.
How it works
Questions from accountancy practices
No. The practices this page is written for cannot hire the people they want, so the constraint is capacity you do not have rather than people you would remove. The point is to take the first draft and the first pass off your qualified people so they can review, advise and take on the work you are currently refusing. The same people do more of the work clients stay for.
You are, exactly as now. An accounts-preparation or compilation engagement stays the practice's engagement, and the professional-body standards that govern it do not change. AI produces a draft and a first pass. A qualified person in your practice reviews, adjusts and signs, and every recommendation we make keeps that review in place. We build for regulated and professional-services firms and we treat the review as the design, never a step to be skipped.
The tools most Irish practices already run sell capture, deadline tracking, client chasing and job profitability, and they do those jobs well. We do not sell software. We look at the drafting and the first review that happen between those tools, which is where the qualified hours go, and we are independent of every vendor. Sometimes the answer is to use what you already own better. Sometimes it is a small build. Sometimes it is to stop doing a step at all.
During the assessment we review processes and workflows, not client files. We do not extract or store client data, and we do not need access to PPS numbers, tax records or accounting files to do the work. Every engagement is covered by a formal service agreement. If you go on to ask us to build something, that work may involve real client data, and it is covered by a separate data processing agreement that sets out what we can do with it, where it is processed, and when it is deleted. You remain the data controller throughout. Our own position on data is set out in full on our security page.
We take an assessment on only when we are confident the opportunities it finds will be worth many multiples of the fee. That is what the free call is for. For a practice that has turned work away in the last twelve months, or let a client go because the fee did not cover the hours, the opportunities are usually visible within the first hour of discovery.
Irish practices of roughly two to twenty people whose work is mostly audit-exempt compliance: accounts preparation, corporation tax, income tax and company office filings for owner-managed businesses. A sole practitioner with a client base they cannot grow, and a larger firm with an exemption-heavy department, both fit. If your practice is mainly audit, the assessment still applies but the opportunities sit in different places, and we will say so on the call.
The roadmap includes estimated costs and timelines for each recommendation. Some practices implement independently. Others ask us to build the solutions. Implementation projects are priced on the deliverable, and scoped from the assessment findings. There is no obligation either way.
Keep the work. Keep the client.
If your practice has turned work away this year, or let a client go because the fee never covered the hours, the assessment will show you which of that work you could take back and what it would take. We have run finance functions in regulated businesses. We understand what a signed set of accounts carries. And we build for professional firms with the review step designed in.
Currently booking assessments for September 2026.