HMRC has an ambitious vision for the future of tax administration.

Making Tax Digital, AI, automation, e-invoicing and digital services all feature heavily in its plans for the years ahead.

At the same time, Sage‘s The Hidden Hours of Accountancy research highlights a profession already dealing with growing operational pressure, much of it driven by work that sits outside traditional accounting services.

The question is whether HMRC’s roadmap will reduce that burden—or simply change where the hidden hours appear.

Accountex 2026: A quick summary

At Accountex 2026, the loudest conversations weren’t really about AI.

They were about pressure.

You could hear it underneath almost every session and conversation—MTD deadlines, workflow overload, pricing strain, scope creep, client expectations that keep expanding regardless of what’s in the engagement letter. Even talks and discussions framed around modernisation and digital transformation kept drifting back toward the same operational reality: firms that feel like they are permanently on.

Then Jonathan Athow, Director General of Strategy and Policy at HMRC, reminded a crowd of accountants and bookkeepers about MTD timelines. Not AI slides. Timelines. Quarterly updates spread across the year, rolling onboarding waves, expanding thresholds, continuous digital interactions replacing periodic reporting cycles.

Athow described HMRC’s ambition clearly: a trusted, modern tax collection organisation, with 90% of customer interactions through digital channels by 2030. More automation, more self-service, more real-time interaction between taxpayers, software, agents, and HMRC itself. The organisation is trying to modernise fragmented systems, reduce friction, improve customer experience and close the tax gap. The direction of travel is rational.

But for many in the room, the timelines quietly confirmed something they were already feeling in practice. HMRC’s modernisation doesn’t reduce the operational burden on firms. It redistributes it. The profession isn’t simply becoming more digital. It’s becoming more continuous—and much of what that continuity requires remains invisible, uncharged, and unacknowledged.

That’s what Sage’s The Hidden Hours of Accountancy research, released around Accountex, set out to quantify.

The shape of a modern working week

Sage surveyed 1,000 UK-based accountants and bookkeepers and asked them to account for their own time.

The results are striking.

Accountants now spend just 44% of their working week on core accounting and compliance work, down from 50% a year ago. The remaining 56% is split across advisory and technology work, running the practice, and a growing category that the research describes as “beyond-the-brief” client support—work that rarely appears on an invoice and almost never featured in anyone’s job description when they entered the profession.

That beyond-the-brief category is the one to watch. It has grown by nearly 50% in a single year, from 9% of the working week to 13%, faster than any other category. With only 8% of practitioners saying they do none of this kind of work, it is now effectively a universal feature of the profession.

The work itself is wide-ranging. Business mentoring on non-financial matters and acting as an emotional support resource for clients are both reported by 52% of practitioners—the two commonest types of beyond-the-brief work. Among practices whose primary clients are sole traders, 82% say they regularly act as a therapist for clients. That figure drops to 35% among those focused on limited companies, but it doesn’t disappear.

Hard work, rarely charged

What makes The Hidden Hours of Accountancy data uncomfortable is not the breadth of the work. It’s what happens to it financially.

Only 19% of accountants say they charge for most or all of their beyond-the-brief work. When out-of-scope work arises, the commonest outcome is simply absorbing it—44% say it’s completed without any additional charge. Meanwhile, 70% say their fees don’t reflect the full range of support they provide, and 81% regularly take on tasks outside their agreed scope of work. This is not just operational pressure—it’s margin compression hiding in plain sight.

This is not a story about accountants and bookkeepers occasionally going the extra mile. It describes a structural pricing gap at the centre of the profession—one that has been widening quietly for years and is now accelerating.

What MTD does to the rhythm of work

The significance of MTD for Income Tax isn’t simply that it creates more filings. It’s that it changes the cadence of the job entirely.

Under older self-assessment cycles, pressure accumulated around a handful of major deadlines. Firms experienced intense seasonal peaks, but there were genuine quieter periods between them. MTD distributes that pressure continuously across the year—quarterly updates, ongoing bookkeeping expectations, rolling onboarding waves as thresholds expand, overlapping compliance cycles with fewer real recovery windows.

That’s why so many firms describe the profession as feeling always on, even as software becomes more automated. The hidden burden isn’t usually the submission itself. It’s the coordination work around it—the chasing, the checking, the corrections, the client education, the exceptions that don’t fit neatly into any system.

The Hidden Hours of Accountancy research found that 67% of accountants expect MTD obligations to increase workload over the next two years. That expectation sits alongside a present reality in which 62% already say they spend too much time managing the practice, and 58% say they’re spending too much time on beyond-the-brief work right now.

The automation paradox

One of the more interesting contradictions running through Accountex was this: the profession is becoming more automated, yet many people still feel overwhelmed.

Part of the explanation is that automation tends to remove transaction work while expanding coordination work. AI can accelerate categorisation and drafting. Software can automate submissions. Digital systems can streamline standardised tasks. But somebody still must validate the outputs, resolve exceptions, onboard clients, explain nudges and notifications, and maintain continuity across increasingly connected environments.

Among accountants already using AI, 54% say they regularly need to review or adjust AI-generated outputs before using them. Among regular AI users, that figure rises to 91%. The work doesn’t disappear. It shifts—and often becomes harder to see, measure, or charge for.

The cost to the people doing the job

The Hidden Hours of Accountancy research is careful not to frame this purely as a business model problem. It’s also a people problem.

More than half of practitioners say they are satisfied with their job—but that figure is falling. Over the past three years, 44% say their satisfaction has declined, against only 19% who say it has improved. Among the consequences: 80% say beyond-scope work makes their working life more stressful, 72% say it makes it harder to do their actual job effectively, and 42% say the reality of the role is worse than they expected when they entered the profession.

Perhaps most significantly for the profession’s future: 13% of accountants say they are likely to leave within the next three years. Among the next generation of practitioners—those who will be shaping the profession for the next two decades—that figure is 18%. And among those considering leaving, almost half point to spending too much time on non-accounting work as a key driver.

The work that practitioners value most, the research found, is being crowded out by the work they find most draining.

Final thoughts: What comes next

The Hidden Hours of Accountancy research is the beginning of a longer conversation, not a summary of one. Over the coming months, we will be releasing new data and analysis covering fees and practice profitability, mental health, the future shape of the profession, and what firms are doing—or could be doing—to redesign around this reality.

HMRC’s modernisation goals are coherent. Cleaner data, better compliance, reduced friction, more connected systems—these benefit the profession as well as the tax authority. The question isn’t whether digital transformation is the right direction. It’s where the operational weight of that transformation lands in practice.

The Hidden Hours of Accountancy research suggests it’s landing inside firms, in hours that are difficult to see, measure, or price. As compliance becomes more continuous, as systems become more connected, and as client expectations keep expanding, that weight is only likely to grow.

The firms that navigate this well won’t simply be the ones that use more AI or file more efficiently. They’ll be the ones that make the hidden hours visible—and build a business model that accounts for them.

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