What if the companies trying to disrupt accounting simply aren’t patient enough to change it?
Accountants understand something that accounting startup culture often doesn’t: relationships that look unproductive today can become adoption a year from now.
I know, I spend a lot of time talking about how slowly accountants adopt technology. They want to see what everyone else is doing before they’re willing to try something new. Sometimes they’ll complain about a problem for three years, build an absolutely unhinged Excel workaround for it, and still need six more months before they’re ready to buy the thing that solves it.
I think we’ve gotten so used to blaming accountants for moving slowly that we’ve stopped asking whether the startups trying to change accounting are actually giving the profession enough time to change.
Accounting Runs on a Different Clock
It takes roughly two years to sell into accounting firms. That’s an eternity in startup land.
Someone hears about your company today. Six months later, they see you at a conference. Then someone they trust mentions your product. They start seeing your name more often. Maybe they have a conversation with you. Maybe they don’t. Then busy season happens. Then budget becomes an issue. Then another implementation takes priority.
Eventually, a year or two after they first heard your name, the problem, timing and trust all line up and they buy.
Trust takes time and I don’t think most accounting technology companies are built to wait for it.
Maybe Accountants Know Something Startups Don’t
Maybe that’s part of why I’m so interested in seeing accountants build technology for accountants. They already understand things about this market that outsiders can spend years trying to learn.
They know January is a terrible time to ask a firm to implement something. They know a conversation that doesn’t end in a demo isn’t necessarily a failure. The person who has been answering questions without trying to sell you something matters. The accountant who tells five other accountants, “I actually use this and it works,” matters even more.
The ROI Might Show Up Later
I recently saw the long-tail results of work I did with an accounting technology company. A year later, that influence is on track to produce the equivalent of roughly a 3.4% increase in active users.
At 30 days, there probably wasn’t much to show. At 90 days, probably still not enough. Six months in, someone could have looked at the numbers and reasonably decided it wasn’t working.
Except it was working. We just couldn’t see it yet.
What If You Just Stopped Too Soon?
That’s where I think startup culture and accounting culture collide.
A company can spend months showing up, creating useful content, building relationships and becoming trusted in the profession without having enough immediate revenue to prove that any of it is working.
And startups aren’t famous for waiting around.
So the strategy changes. Leadership changes. Messaging changes. Partnerships change. The people accountants were starting to recognize disappear. A year of relationship-building gets filed under “we tried that,” and everyone moves on.
But did you try it? Or did you stop before the accountants you were trying to reach had enough time to respond?
It Takes Patience
That’s what I think we miss when we talk about accounting being slow to innovate. We assume the timeline itself is evidence of a problem. Sometimes it is. There are absolutely firms using “we’ve always done it this way” as an excuse to avoid making decisions they should have made five years ago.
But taking time to trust a technology company isn’t inherently anti-innovation. Especially when accountants have watched plenty of companies enter the profession loudly, promise to change everything, and disappear a few years later.
If you’re asking a firm to move important parts of its business onto your technology, sticking around long enough to become trusted seems like a reasonable part of the deal.
Maybe the accountants aren’t moving too slowly. Maybe startups are moving on before they’re ready to move with you.
