Glossary
Why Are Accountants Quitting?
Accountants are quitting because traditional firms burn out juniors with rigid hours, offer almost no leadership training once someone becomes technically competent, and treat professional judgment as something to be managed rather than trusted. It is rarely about disliking the work itself. It is about the environment the work happens in. At Treewalk, we built our operating model around removing the specific frictions that push good accountants out the door.
The real reasons accountants leave, not the ones usually cited
Most explanations for accountant attrition focus on pay or workload. Those matter, but they are symptoms. The deeper driver is entrepreneurial frustration: junior and mid-level staff can see better ways to run a process, and traditional firm hierarchies give them no avenue to say so. People do not quit because the technical work is boring. They quit because they have no agency over how the work gets done.
Add to that a structural gap almost nobody names directly: firms train people to become technical specialists and then hand them a team to lead with zero training in how to actually lead. Someone masters tax or audit mechanics, gets promoted into management, and is expected to run people with no more preparation than “you were good at the technical side.” That gap between technical competence and leadership readiness is a real driver of burnout at the manager level, not just among juniors.
Rigid return-to-office mandates compound both problems. Firms that treat physical presence as a proxy for productivity are telling professionals, implicitly, that their judgment cannot be trusted. For people who already feel under-heard, that lands hard.
Is accounting a declining industry?
No. Demand for accounting, tax, and advisory work is not shrinking, and firms across Canada are still growing. What is declining is the traditional firm’s ability to hold on to the people who do that work. Nobody grows up dreaming of becoming an accountant. It is a profession people stumble into, and roughly seven in ten who train inside public practice eventually move into industry roles. That has always been true. What has changed is how loudly people now say why they left.
Is the number of CPAs declining?
The pool of people pursuing the CPA designation has tightened in recent years, which is a separate issue from firms losing existing staff. A shrinking pipeline into the profession and an attrition problem inside firms are two pressures hitting at once, and firms that treat them as the same problem tend to fix neither. The pipeline issue is a recruiting challenge. The attrition issue is an operating-model problem, and the one firms have the most direct control over.
Are accountants being phased out?
Not the work. Some repetitive, low-judgment tasks are being automated, and that trend will continue. But the judgment calls, client relationships, and the ability to tell a business owner something they do not want to hear are not going anywhere. The firms that struggle are the ones resisting that shift rather than adopting it. The right posture is self-selection, not persuasion: people either want to work differently with the tools available now, or they do not, and no amount of change management convinces the ones who do not.
How we built Treewalk to close these gaps
Treewalk was not built around clients first. It was built around the people doing the work, on the belief that a great client experience is a downstream result of a great team, not a separate initiative.
A few of the operating choices that came out of that:
No return-to-office mandate, ever.
If you hire professionals, the position is that you extend them the judgment to decide where they do their best work.
Staff have veto power over new clients.
If a team says there is no capacity, the firm turns the work away rather than stretching people thin. That mechanism is a direct reason overtime stays under one percent of total hours firmwide.
No HR department, no annual performance reviews.
The reasoning is straightforward: when you hire carefully and do not tolerate bad behavior, most of what an HR function exists to manage never becomes a problem.
High agency, low oversight.
People are more likely to be under-managed than over-managed here. The expectation is that you author your own career rather than wait to be told what is next.
Frequently asked questions
Is public accounting a dying career?
No. The designation and the underlying skill set (financial judgment, tax strategy, assurance literacy) remain in high demand. What is under pressure is the traditional firm structure that trains people and then cannot retain them past the point they become useful.
Do accountants leave for better pay, or something else?
Compensation plays a role, but exit interviews and recruiting conversations consistently surface autonomy, leadership quality, and rigid schedules as bigger factors. Firms that only respond with pay increases tend to see the same attrition patterns persist.
Are accountants no longer considered professionals?
They are. The frustration is not about status, it is about whether that professional judgment gets trusted day to day, in decisions as basic as where and when the work gets done.
Does remote work actually hurt firm culture?
Not inherently. Culture comes from consistent values and behavior, not from shared floor space. A firm can run fully remote and still have a strong rhythm of connection, whether that is scheduled check-ins, team rituals, or optional in-person time for people who want it.
If a firm is struggling to retain staff, where should it start?
Start with the operating choices that create pressure in the first place: capacity management, management training for newly promoted staff, and whether professionals are trusted with basic decisions about their own work. Compensation adjustments without those fixes rarely hold.
Where to next
If you are an accountant or firm leader thinking through why turnover keeps happening and what an operating model built around staff actually looks like in practice, our team is glad to talk through it. Reach out through our careers page or connect with our leadership team directly.
