The average accounting firm runs 10 apps. Here is what that costs.

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Ten applications that talk to each other is an ecosystem. Ten that do not is a series of manual handoffs, and a person is standing in every one.

Ten is the average. Intuit's 2026 Accountant Technology Survey asked 725 US accounting and bookkeeping professionals how their firms actually run, and only 41% said their tools are fully integrated. Another 48% said the setup works but stays fragmented.

The same survey prices those handoffs: accountants lose about 5 hours a week moving, re-entering and reconciling information across tools. Most of a working day, every week, spent carrying figures from one screen to another. No return gets reviewed in those hours and no client gets advised.

A separate 2026 report from Progress Software found 61% of accountants are slowed by switching between too many tools. Two samples, two sponsors, one finding.

Why consolidation keeps failing

The standard prescription is to consolidate. One platform, one source of truth. Nobody disputes the logic, which is why it appears in every practice management guide of the last decade. The number barely moves anyway.

The usual explanation, that firms are slow to adopt technology, is wrong. Count where the work actually lives in a firm: documents in SmartVault or SharePoint or Box, often three at once because a partner set one up years ago and nobody migrated. Correspondence in Outlook. Workpapers in Excel. The return in CCH Axcess or Drake or UltraTax. Deadlines in Karbon or Canopy.

Every one of those decisions made sense to somebody on the day they made it. So asking a firm to consolidate is not a licensing conversation. It is asking it to stop working for several weeks and rebuild around a vendor, in a calendar with statutory deadlines and no slack season to do it in. The switching cost is not the subscription. It is fifteen years of knowing where things are, and in the year it happens that usually costs more than the five hours it recovers.

Firms are not being irrational. They are pricing the transition correctly.

Integrate at the workflow level instead

If a firm cannot reasonably move to the software, the software has to move to the firm. That means connecting to the document systems it already pays for, drafting inside the tax software it already licenses, and appearing in the spreadsheet already open. Slower to build, and it never demos as neatly as one dashboard. It is also the only version where a firm gets something new without giving anything up.

Five places, no new destination:

• Documents. Connect SmartVault, SharePoint, Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive or Egnyte and documents arrive on their own, into one auto-built client binder, indexed and cross-referenced against the return.
• The inbox. Connect Outlook or Gmail and our AI drafts the client follow-ups, itemised per client, to review and send from your own address. Write access is off by default.
• Spreadsheets. The Prowork add-in runs in Excel and Google Sheets, so a K-1 workpaper is built in the sheet rather than exported into it, with the source behind every figure.
• Tax software. Our AI drafts the return inside the software you already use, including CCH Axcess, UltraTax, Lacerte, Drake and ProConnect. It enters the figures it is certain of, flags the ones it is not, and links every figure back to the exact box on the source document.
• Your own workflows. The Filed MCP connector makes your workspace reachable from the processes your firm builds in AI assistants, on existing firm permissions. It cannot file a return or sign off work.

The ambition is not a firm running on fewer tools. It is a firm whose existing tools stop costing five hours a week to hold together. You should not have to be in Filed for Filed to be working.

See what Filed connects to.

FAQ

How many apps does the average accounting firm use? About 10, per Intuit's 2026 Accountant Technology Survey of 725 US accounting and bookkeeping professionals. Only 41% call them fully integrated.

How much time do accountants lose to disconnected systems? Around 5 hours per person per week, moving, re-entering or reconciling information across tools.

Why is consolidating a tech stack so hard? Migration means rebuilding a firm's habits and institutional knowledge around a new system, against fixed filing deadlines. Knowing where everything lives is usually worth more than the licence savings.

Does Filed replace our tax software? No. Our AI drafts inside the software you already license, and prep and review continue to run there.

Sources

• Intuit, 2026 Accountant Technology Survey. 725 US professionals, May 2026.
• Progress Software, State of Accounting 2026. 311 US professionals, 12 May 2026.

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