There's a LinkedIn group dedicated to people trying to sell software to accountants. Mark Lee runs it. He once posted a comprehensive breakdown of why startups fail when selling to this market, and it should be required reading for every founder who thinks they've built something accountants need. The short version: you haven't earned the right to their attention, and you probably don't understand why.
Accountants don't hate software. They hate being sold to by people who clearly don't understand their work.
The forum tells you everything
Spend a week reading AccountingWEB forums and you'll learn more about what accountants actually think than any market research report will tell you. The dynamics are revealing.
Someone posts about a new AI tool. A reply saying "AI is the next bubble to burst" gets nine likes — more engagement than the original post. Another founder shares a blog post about their product. "100% from ChatGPT" says a commenter, with four likes. Thread over.
These aren't irrational reactions. They're the accumulated scar tissue of a profession that's been promised the future every eighteen months for the past two decades. Cloud computing was going to transform everything. MTD was going to force modernisation. Open banking was going to automate data entry. AI is going to replace the profession entirely (apparently).
The future never arrives. Or rather, it arrives slowly, partially, and usually with a monthly subscription attached.
What founders get wrong
The first mistake is assuming accountants are behind the curve. They're not. Most practitioners have evaluated and rejected more software than the average startup founder has ever heard of. They know what's out there. They've tried Senta, kicked the tyres on Pixie, sat through the IRIS demo, and decided that none of it was worth the migration pain. That's not ignorance — that's experience.
The second mistake is leading with features. "We've got AI-powered document classification!" Great. So did the last three products that shut down after eighteen months when the VC money ran out. Accountants care about whether you'll still be around in five years, whether they can get their data out if you're not, and whether your support team actually picks up the phone.
The third mistake — and this is the big one — is not understanding the cost of switching. Moving a practice from one system to another isn't like switching from Spotify to Apple Music. It's months of data migration, retraining staff, rebuilding workflows, and accepting that things will be worse before they get better. The switching cost is so high that the new product doesn't just need to be better. It needs to be dramatically, obviously, unmistakably better. And it probably needs to be better in ways the firm cares about, not ways the founder thinks are impressive.
The trust economy
The accountancy software market runs on trust, and trust takes years to build. The voices that carry weight on forums have been posting for a decade or more. They've seen products come and go. They remember when Receipt Bank was going to change everything (it changed owners). They remember when FreeAgent was the future (it got acquired by NatWest). They remember when every fintech startup had "disrupt" in their pitch deck and "pivot" in their company history.
Data portability is a litmus test. If a practitioner asks "can I export my data in a standard format?" and you hesitate, you've lost them. Not because they're planning to leave — but because they want to know they can. The firms that got burned by vendor lock-in with legacy systems aren't going to walk into the same trap twice. One well-known community voice has been banging this drum for years, and they're right to.
Sole practitioners are the hardest audience and the most honest. They don't have an IT department to evaluate software for them. They don't have budget to waste on something that doesn't work. When they say "I've been promised this before and it didn't happen," they mean it literally. They tried it. It didn't work. They went back to spreadsheets. And the spreadsheets, at least, are still there.
The PE problem
There's a broader context here that founders ignore at their peril. The accountancy software market has been consolidating for years. Private equity has bought up mid-market products, merged support teams, hiked prices, and squeezed margins. Practitioners watched their trusted tools get acquired, gutted, and re-launched with a new logo and a 30% price increase.
That breeds a specific kind of cynicism toward new entrants. "Are you going to sell to PE in three years?" is a question that sounds paranoid until you realise it's happened to half the products in the market. Founders who dismiss this concern — or worse, who can't answer it honestly — confirm exactly the suspicion they're trying to dispel.
What actually works
The founders who do earn trust in this market tend to share a few traits. They're practitioners themselves, or they've worked alongside practitioners long enough to understand the daily reality of the work. They don't oversell. They ship consistently. They respond to support requests personally. They're transparent about what their product can't do.
They also tend to be in it for the long haul. Not "we'll see if it takes off," but genuinely committed to building for this market over years, not quarters. Accountants can smell a startup that's optimising for acquisition. The pitch is subtly different — more about growth metrics than customer outcomes, more about the platform than the people using it.
At Fortium, we're trying to do this the right way — flat pricing, no per-seat charges, data export from day one, and a focus on the 3-to-30-staff firms that the big vendors ignore and the small vendors can't support properly. Whether we've earned that trust yet is for practitioners to decide, not us.
The uncomfortable truth
The accountancy software market doesn't need more products. It needs fewer, better ones — built by people who understand that a practice management tool isn't a consumer app. It's the backbone of someone's livelihood. When it breaks, people miss deadlines. When it loses data, people lose clients. When it shuts down, people lose years of work.
If you're a founder reading this and thinking about building for accountants, start by listening. Read the forums. Attend the webinars. Talk to practitioners — not to pitch, but to understand. The market will tell you exactly what it wants. It's been saying it for years. Most founders just aren't listening.
And if you're an accountant reading this and thinking "finally, someone gets it" — good. Hold us to it.