Ironport Capital Group, a small-business funding service in Logan, Utah, looks at how Cache County accounting and tax practices grow: hiring ahead of deadlines, software that lets the same team serve more clients, new service lines, and buying a retiring accountant's book. Cache County had 83 accounting, tax and payroll firms with employees in 2023 (CBP), most of them small.
The local field
County Business Patterns counted 83 accounting, tax preparation, bookkeeping and payroll establishments with employees in Cache County in 2023, and 63 of them, 75.9%, had fewer than five employees. Nonemployer Statistics counted another 159 such businesses with no paid staff in 2024, a separate program. Professional, scientific and technical services as a whole had 563 employer establishments in the county, the second-largest sector after construction.
For a small practice, that means plenty of potential clients among the county's small businesses, and plenty of other small practices that may one day sell.
How to grow an accounting practice by adding capacity
One low-cost way to grow is serving more clients with the same people. That usually means software, standardized engagement workflows, client portals and, for bookkeeping, moving clients onto systems that reduce manual entry. The costs are subscriptions, setup and training time, which are working capital costs rather than long-term debt.
A practical test: track hours per client for one season before and after a change. If the hours drop, the same staff can take on more work before the next hire.
Hiring ahead of the deadlines
Seasonal preparers and reviewers need training before the busy weeks, which means paying them before their work bills. A line of credit drawn for those weeks and repaid as fees come in matches the cost to the season. A practice that cannot see its own fee pattern clearly should pull monthly fee totals for the last two years before deciding; this site has no local data on filing-season timing, but your records do.
How to grow a CPA firm with a new service line
Payroll processing, advisory work, fractional controller services or entity formation can each add recurring revenue. A new service often needs one hire and some software before it earns, so the funding need is a few months of salary and setup. That is a short working capital question, not a long loan.
CPA firm acquisition financing: the numbers behind a book purchase
Buying another practitioner's book adds clients all at once and carries the biggest upfront price of the three. Illustration only, with invented figures: a Logan, UT firm agrees to buy a book with $180,000 in annual fees for $180,000, paying $120,000 at closing and $60,000 to the seller over two years. The firm's existing staff can absorb about half the new work; the rest needs one new hire at $55,000 a year.
- Fees retained if 85% of clients stay: about $153,000 a year
- New hire: $55,000 a year
- Seller payments: $30,000 a year for two years
- Term loan for $120,000 over 60 months at an assumed 9 percent a year: about $2,490 a month, or $29,900 a year
Fees minus the new hire, the seller payments and the loan leave about $38,000 a year in each of the first two years, before the existing staff's time is counted. Partners commonly use a term loan for this, and they will run similar arithmetic on the seller's records.
Capacity arithmetic before a new hire
Illustration only, with invented figures. A practice with three preparers completes about 1,050 returns a season, roughly 350 each. If software and a client portal save an average of 40 minutes per return, the same team gains about 700 hours across the season.
At an average of three hours per new return, that is room for roughly 230 more returns without a hire. If the practice wants 400 more, it needs both the software and a hire, and the funding question becomes the hire's wages for the months before those clients' fees arrive. Work the numbers from your own time records before deciding which comes first.
Accounting business loans: what partners will ask for
- Two years of monthly fee history
- Client list with annual fees, for a book purchase
- The purchase agreement, including any seller financing
- Firm tax returns and bank statements
More detail is on the accounting firm funding page, and county figures are on the Logan, UT business page. More Cache Valley reading is on the blog.
