The firms thinking ten years ahead

Most conversations about technology in accounting are about the present. Which tool solves which problem and what gets executed fastest.

A smaller group of firms are somewhere else. They've stopped debating the tools and started asking what the work itself becomes when the tools change. If juniors aren't doing the calculations by hand anymore, what should they actually be learning? If month-end data lands in days instead of weeks, what is a partner's time for? And how does a firm that's been around for over a century stay relevant for the next one?

These are the firms shaping the future of the profession, and Ryecroft Glenton are one of them.

Meet Ryecroft Glenton

Ryecroft Glenton are an independent advisory firm with close to 130 years of history, seventeen partners, and a national client base served from the North East. They sit in a part of the market that's currently being reshaped by consolidation, and they've chosen, deliberately and emphatically, to stay independent.

Within the firm, the Outsourced FD division, led by partner Dan Cooper, has grown over eight years from an idea with no staff and no clients into one of the firm's most strategically important service lines. Cooper also co-leads the firm's technology and AI committee.

"The pace in which technology's changing, the way in which services are delivered to clients are changing, the services that clients want is changing. We need to make sure that we are at the forefront."

But staying at the forefront, in Cooper's view, isn't about adopting fast. It's about adopting deliberately. "We don't trial instantly. There's so many new suppliers coming to market, and there's also so many failing. We don't want to see something new and flashy come to market and then test it straight away. It takes time, investment, and we're testing it with live client data, which we don't want to put our clients at risk."

The tech solutions RG eventually do partner with go through a long evaluation, including Mimo. And what came out of that evaluation tells you something about what RG were actually looking for.

Beyond the tool: a system for how work gets done

Mimo Associate is a complete system of work for period-close. It brings document collection, coding and reconciliation, prepayments and accruals, and review-ready outputs into a single platform that runs continuously throughout the month so by the time close arrives, most of the work is already done.

For RG, the operational impact landed quickly.

Rachael Loftus, Senior Manager in the Outsourced FD division, saw it first in prepayments, historically one of the most time-consuming and manual parts of close. Mimo flags the prepayment, allocates it, and posts the journals month on month automatically. On jobs with long prepayment schedules, the time saved adds up fast.

What the next generation actually learns

The question that came up in every conversation at RG, unprompted, was the same one: what does this mean for how juniors learn?

It's the right question, and most of the industry isn't asking it carefully enough. The standard worry is that AI will replace junior roles. The sharper worry, the one RG are focused on, is that traditional training is producing accountants who can't keep pace with how the work has changed.

"It's how I trained. It's the basics of accounting, which I believe you still need to have," Cooper said. "But getting the information to advise is coming to us differently now. It's how we gel all of those different bits together."

Rachel Best, who leads digital at the firm, described what that means in practice. "In the past, the preparer analysed the figures and gave them to the reviewer, who analysed the data from a different angle. Now that Mimo has that context within the platform, it allows the preparer to do more analysis themselves, which is the more interesting part of month-end."

Walls, studying for his ACCA exams alongside the day job, felt the shift from the other side.

"It's moved me onto more of a review mindset rather than just the preparer mindset. That's me stepping up a little bit."

This is the version of AI adoption the most thoughtful firms are betting on. Not replacement. Not augmentation in the abstract. A deliberate restructuring of what juniors do, so they can become advisors faster.

What it means for the firm

The capacity that opens up when the manual work is handled doesn't sit idle. At RG, it's already changing what the team can take on.

"For us, it's being able to speed up to service more clients. It's the ability to close out more month-ends, not just close them quicker."

That's the commercial story underneath the operational one. Firms that compress the close has the opportunity to deliver both faster and to more people, with the same capacity in the team. In a market where talent is the binding constraint, that's not a marginal advantage.

And it changes what the partner's job looks like too. "The time-saving could be used to spend more time with clients, talk to them about their business, get a feel for upcoming plans, help them with strategy," Loftus said. "Whereas at the minute, when you're busy, it tends to just be getting the work done and out the door."

The firms shaping what comes next

The firms that will define the next decade of accounting are already asking what becomes possible when their best people aren't stretched across admin. They're asking what their juniors should be learning, not just what software they should be using. They're asking what their firm needs to look like in fifteen years, not just what closes faster next month.

Ryecroft Glenton are one of those firms. In choosing Mimo Associate, they've made a bet not just about a product, but about how serious firms work and what their teams can become when the structural friction lifts.

If your firm is thinking about the same questions, we'd like to show you what that looks like in practice.

Learn more about Mimo Associate.