The strategic trade-off behind co-building accounting tech

Accounting firms are built around a simple economic truth: time is what they sell.

It determines how work is scoped, priced and evaluated. It is the unit of recovery, the measure of efficiency and often the source of pressure inside delivery teams. Against that backdrop, choosing to invest time in co-building technology, with uncertain outcomes and no guaranteed payoff, can appear counter-intuitive.

And yet, firms like PM+M and Green & Purple are doing exactly that. Not passively, but by committing senior attention to shaping tools alongside vendors. The reason becomes clearer when you look at where time is actually being spent, and what that time is crowding out.

The current state of month-end

Month-end is often described as a defined, repeatable process. In practice, it is a set of overlapping obligations shaped by client context, reporting requirements and human dependency.

As Jill Morris, Partner at PM+M, put it, month-end is not a single deadline but many:

“Month end means different types of delivery for different clients, all slightly tailored to their own needs.”

Firms can plan around this structure, but what they cannot fully plan is what Jill described as “the bit that happens in between;” missing information, late inputs and changes in the business itself. When that middle stretches, a disproportionate amount of time is spent getting the numbers to line up, making advisory conversations harder to prioritise.

As Lee Maughan, CEO at Green & Purple, explained:

“A finance team isn’t about running up to a month end and then falling over… it should be a continuous stream. But it isn’t.”

From the client’s perspective, little of this effort is visible. When reporting arrives on time, it can appear rushed. When it arrives late, it feels unjustified.

As Jill explains, delays make it “difficult to give a quality advisory product at the end,” and when work lands right on the deadline, clients rarely see the extent of the effort that went into getting there. The result is a familiar frustration: substantial work completed, but limited appreciation of its value.

This tension is not the result of firms resisting technology. Both PM+M and Green & Purple are highly tool-literate, and precisely because of that, they are acutely aware of where automation reaches its limits.

Automation works best where work is predictable, yet month-end is often shaped by exception. Jill explains:

“Automation is great as long as there’s someone there to interpret it and fix the anomalies.”

That “someone” is usually a client manager, but over time, client-specific knowledge accumulates in people rather than systems. This is a fragility Jill acknowledged directly:

“There’s so many nuances to a client that unless you’re working with that client, you don’t always appreciate.”

The result is time spent resolving exceptions rather than developing insight, and when that knowledge does not travel well, handovers slow everything down. What firms are increasingly asking for, then, is not more automation, but more intelligent automation that can learn client context and reduce dependency on individuals.

Why co-building makes sense

When asked what they would do if month-end absorbed less time, neither Jill nor Lee talked first about fees.

Lee was clear that greater efficiency would not mean delivering less. Instead, it would mean reinvesting that time to “provide more in-depth, closer advice” and to work closer to the commercial reality of clients.

That response is telling. It highlights a tension many firms recognise but rarely articulate: even under fixed fees, time remains the fundamental constraint. Clients may not be billed by the hour, but delivery is still bounded by it, and when month-end absorbs more hours than a fee can sustain, recovery rates suffer and advisory depth is often the first thing to be squeezed.

This is why investing time outside of direct delivery, particularly on something as uncertain as co-building technology, can feel hard to justify. It does not immediately generate revenue, and it competes with work that is already under pressure.

But that is also why the investment matters. If technology can shorten the path to clarity and insight, reducing the hours required to reach the outcomes clients actually value, then time is not lost, but released.

Seen in this light, investing time in co-building is less paradoxical than it appears.

Yes, it involves risk. Jill acknowledged that openly when contrasting co-building with traditional vendor relationships:

“Often the roadmap doesn’t stay on track… I’ve promised something to a client because it’s roadmapped and I’ve still not delivered yet.”

Firms effectively resell technology through recommendation and implementation. When tools fail to evolve, the credibility gap lands with them.

But co-building changes that dynamic. It brings firms closer to the tools they depend on, allows solutions to be shaped around real delivery constraints rather than abstract assumptions and creates confidence that what is being built will genuinely support how firms operate day to day.

The cost of waiting

Ultimately, co-building is not about novelty or experimentation for its own sake. It is a signal about how a firm sees its future.

It reflects an understanding that month-end underpins advisory work rather than sitting apart from it. That time is something to be invested strategically, not just recovered, and that systems, service quality and client trust are deeply connected.

But there is also a cost to inaction. As Lee put it:

“Trying to change the pace of technology is not going to happen.”

Waiting does not slow change; it only increases the distance firms must later make up. In that context, investing time now, deliberately and alongside partners, may be the more conservative choice.

For firms that sell time, deciding where to invest it may be the most strategic decision they make.