Inside the Numbers: What FY26 Really Looked Like for 250+ Firms

Trent McLaren: Otherwise, the main event for today is Inside the Numbers. We're breaking down what FY26 actually looks like for 250-plus firms, joined by Ryan Richardson. Ryan, how are you, mate?

Ryan Richardson: Thanks, Trent. Doing really well and really excited about today's session. I think it's a great event that you're putting on across two days, Trent, obviously you and all the team. So, great to be a part of it, and look forward to the session today.

Trent McLaren: Okay, awesome. Well, I'm going to let you share your screen. I'll let you take us away.

Ryan Richardson: Fantastic. All right. So today we're getting inside the numbers: what FY26 really looked like for over 250 Australian accounting firms. So firstly, a couple of introductions. I'm Ryan Richardson, for those of you who have not yet met me, founder of Dashboard Insights and partner of Valera Advisory, which is an accounting firm in Melbourne. Dashboard Insights, a little bit about us. We are a data analytics business at our core, but ultimately we are here to help accounting and bookkeeping practices run better businesses. So it's not just about the data, it is about the insights for those practices. And the reality is that we're focused in a number of different areas, so things like client service, things like assisting the team to drive better outcomes and those sorts of things. But ultimately, we're here to help accounting and bookkeeping practices run better businesses.

Ryan Richardson: So that's a little bit about us. We connect into all sorts of different practice management platforms, as well as broader accounting and general ledger type products.

Ryan Richardson: All right. So let's get into it. What firms achieved in FY26: billing, productivity, workflow, lockup, profit. We're going to get through all of these key metrics across these 250 or so accounting and bookkeeping practices that contributed to our report. So every year, what we do is we bring together all of the data around these professional services businesses and we create a benchmarking report, which is available at our website, www.dashboardinsights.com. You can jump onto the website and download the benchmarking report each and every year. It is a lot of work that goes into this report, and predominantly it is based on quantitative data. So it does come from your practice management systems, and from the general ledger data of the firms contributing to the report. There is also a survey that we complete in July of each year, to help us paint the picture a little bit more about how firms are feeling about their performance and what firms are looking to achieve.

Ryan Richardson: It takes a lot of time, but we hope the industry gets a lot of value out of it. We really enjoy doing it. So we're going to showcase a few of the numbers that come out of that report. So what did the numbers actually say for FY26? A couple of headline numbers here. So 6% was the revenue growth number on average across the collective profession for the FY26 Australian year. Now, when I do look at FY26, it is the Australian financial year that we're looking at, and 250 or so Australian firms contributed to the report. So 2% was the productivity growth year on year. So last year was 60%, 62% is where the industry got to this year. Recoverability growth, and we're going to touch on this a little bit as we go throughout the session today.

Ryan Richardson: But I think this 4% differential, so firms going from 87% recoverability on average to 91%, I think that's a substantial shift. It's not just a one or two point style of shift. That's a 4% shift in recoverability year on year, so I think that's interesting to pick up as well. A couple of other headline numbers. Headcount change. Okay, so headcounts actually declined on average over that period of time. So revenue growth went up, but year on year headcount went down by 3%. I will put a caveat on it and say that that was predominantly driven by the largest practices that contributed to the benchmarking report. But what I will say is that all cohorts grew slower by way of their headcount: either the growth really halted, or growth actually slipped into the negative, which is what on average the industry achieved here. So negative 3% was the headcount change there.

Ryan Richardson: And I think one of the most interesting things as well, and we'll touch on this again shortly, but less than 1% was the billing rate growth. Okay, so the average billed hourly rate, a couple of different ways to put that, but less than 1% was the billing rate growth as well, which again is a significant shift year on year, and certainly a significant shift when we look several years prior. So, there are a couple of the headline numbers, and what we're going to get into now is a little bit more of the detail.

Ryan Richardson: So, what firms wanted in FY26. I'm going to cast your minds all the way back to July 2025. We sent out a questionnaire at that point, when we were doing our 2025 benchmarking report. So this is some 18 months ago, but on this left-hand side here are a couple of the headline numbers in terms of what firms were looking to achieve in the upcoming year. So, about 40% of firms aimed to grow by more than 10% by way of revenue. I shared a moment ago that 6.3% was the revenue growth for the industry. So 6.3% growth, 40% of firms wanted to grow by 10% or more. But when we asked our firms in July 2026, did you meet your targets, 60% of firms said that they actually did. So 6% was the industry revenue growth.

Ryan Richardson: From a service expansion perspective, in July 2025 the majority of firms, and it was 57%, wanted to expand their existing service offerings. Now, what we saw is that there were more services being offered to existing clients, and the average client group value actually rose in FY26. So you could see that in the service offering as well. 26% of firms were focused on firm optimisation areas, specifically productivity and recoverability. And of course, we saw that, but recoverability was absolutely a substantial shift. Now, the surprising thing for me is that that was only a 26% number there in the questionnaire, specifically around productivity and recoverability. I was surprised by that number, despite these outcomes in what we saw.

Ryan Richardson: Price increase. Price increase is always one of those really interesting ones when we ask in July of each year. The majority cohort of the respondents, which was 54%, planned to increase hourly rates by 1 to 5%. And I think what's interesting is that what the industry actually achieved was a 0.9% price increase, effectively, so increase in billed hourly rate. So essentially a 1% increase in billed hourly rate. Most firms wanted to increase hourly rates by 1 to 5%. Now, that's a significant shift from the year prior, where most firms wanted to increase their hourly rates by 6 to 10%. And the growth of the industry in the year prior was really driven by that price increase. It wasn't so much driven by operational improvement, whereas I think FY26 really came down to operational improvement rather than price increases to drive that growth. So I think that's a positive thing for the profession. But I still think that there's potentially room to move with respect to price.

Ryan Richardson: And certainly by way of team size growth: 70% of firms in July 2025 were still looking to grow their headcount, which was pointing to a continued recruitment drive, which we'd seen for several years prior to that. But team size ended up being down. So headcount growth was 3.3% up in FY25, and then in FY26 it inverted and went to 3.1%. And I don't think it'd be a surprise to say that productivity increased at the same time as headcount went down. So maybe fewer people doing a little bit more work over that particular financial year. So it was the first year that we'd seen a headcount growth in approximately 5 years that we've been doing this report. So it's an interesting outcome there.

Ryan Richardson: Okay, so that's again a little bit of the headline numbers. But let's jump into a couple of key things here. This year, and I've already prefaced this a little bit, growth came from operational improvement, not from price increases. So you can see the average hourly rate here from FY23 to FY24, starting at $209 an hour, getting to FY25 at $229 for the average billed hour in the industry. And then you can see only a minor difference, so 229 to 231 in FY26. Now, that's not to say that a good firm has a higher billed hourly rate and a bad firm has a lower billed hourly rate or anything like that. But what it is to say is that I do think it's interesting: the rate of growth absolutely kept up with inflation in the years gone by, and probably outstripped it a fraction. But then for FY26, despite a 1% increase, it probably didn't even keep up with inflation for that particular financial year. So I do see that as a little bit of a shift in the way that the industry is pricing their work, ultimately. So we'll jump into shortly what we feel is driving that.

Trent McLaren: I think I said this morning as well, but I think it's been said ever since we started doing desktop software, like, we're going back 20, 30 years, and there's a new thing every decade. Cloud accounting and automation was one. AI is obviously the new one. So yeah, a long time. Hasn't happened though.

Ryan Richardson: Absolutely. And so for FY26, we were partially expecting this trend to start eliminating some of this compliance work. But the reality is, when we look at the industry as a whole, it hasn't changed in terms of the proportion. So it was 67% last year, it's 67% this year of the industry's revenue that is billed from compliance, okay? So I don't think that that's a big shift. What has shifted, though, is the client group value, okay? So more services and more work, even compliance work, has increased on a client group by client group basis. So the average client group value has increased. And certainly the Pareto principle, or the 80-20 rule, for those of you familiar with the 80-20 rule, is strong in accounting practices. So when we start to look at share of revenue and profit by client tier, and when we talk about tiers, we're looking at billing values,

Ryan Richardson: okay, so the top 5% of clients contribute about 40%, or 39%, of revenue and 41% of profit. The next 20% contribute 38% of revenue and profit. So the reality is the top 25% of clients by billing value contribute more than 75% of revenue and almost 80% of profit. Okay, so I don't think that's a surprise to many firms. But a couple of things to take from this: compliance doesn't seem to be going anywhere fast, okay, certainly not yet. And most certainly the top clients for most practices represent a substantial amount of the billing and profit numbers as well.

Ryan Richardson: For those practices, as you'll see, and I won't touch on these too much, but throughout these slides here, you will see some winning moves. So we'll get to a point throughout the presentation where, you know, these are just simple suggestions, where what we hope is that you can take something back to your firm, look at your own data, see whether or not you can take something from that data and make a small tweak or a minor change within your practice to drive a better outcome within your organisation. So that's what we hope you get out of those winning moves. All right, you surprised by the percentages there, Trent?

Trent McLaren: I've been thinking and trying to listen about how much of this is impacted by, like, poor economy, new AI, all the drama. And when you were talking about growth and how that's dipping, whether some of those things are all… how much of this is impacted by that. Do you have a view on that, I guess, compared to last year? Everything feels a bit more heightened this year compared to last year, in the country and the economy and the politics side of things.

Ryan Richardson: Yeah, look, I think largely it depends on where you are as well, okay, but different states I think are in different cycles at the moment, or stages in the cycle, let's say. But I do think from a client perspective, firms are experiencing a lot more urgency in a lot of the requests from clients. So there's a lot more shorter, sharper interactions, and the responsiveness needs to really be there, and I think that's something that firms are experiencing. I do think, obviously, the rate of change in terms of business is faster than ever. So firms have got to keep up with their own rate of change, but also the rate of change that's happening within the client businesses that they're supporting.

Trent McLaren: 100%.

Ryan Richardson: I do think that the amount of compliance work is still holding proportionately, because the reality is that government agencies are still getting better and better with reviews and all those sorts of things. They're looking at data and all of that sort of stuff as well. So maybe the level of inquiry across a broad range of taxes, from your payroll taxes and various other state taxes and so on, I think that's happening more and more. So that's probably just my feel of it, Trent.

Trent McLaren: Yeah, I mean, I think the government's trying to find even more ways to tax everyone all the time. That's how it kind of feels at the moment. So I think if you're responsible for helping them do that, then starting an accounting firm still seems like a profitable venture. A highly stressful one, but a profitable one. I think the other side of this, when I think about revenue being compliance heavy: that whole advisory angle, I think, is still one thing that everyone has, if you don't have the skills, the personality, the know-how of how to actually implement and deliver advisory services. I think you break them down, it's consulting, it's getting into the nitty gritty with your client and helping them on all things around strategy, including the numbers, as well as all the tax obligations. But I think that's also the biggest gap when I see this stuff. I think more people would do advisory if they felt capable and had the confidence to do so, but for most people, the compliance route just comes in everyone's door so easily that it's easy to just keep doing all the compliance work. I don't know, how do you feel about that?

Ryan Richardson: Yeah. Yeah, look, I think there is a gap in that advisory skill set, potentially, but I think advisory looks different for every single firm that you walk into as well. So I don't think you can broad brush and say, okay, well, the tax return is a tax return, and advisory is advisory. You can't really do that, whereas you might be able to for a large component of the tax compliance piece. But yeah, I do think that there's maybe a skill gap, but also a confidence gap in the industry, in the ability to have those conversations, and the right conversations, with clients. So I think that's the biggest thing.

Trent McLaren: Confidence gap is my new favourite term, I think. I feel like that's the real key. Mate, you're really good at these. I've got WIP Wednesdays, which is the one of yours that I always riff off to everyone, and now it's the confidence gap.

Ryan Richardson: Fair enough, fair enough. All right, well, let's carry on. But yeah, I think the Pareto principle's strong, compliance work's not going anywhere fast, and maybe there's more of it in the short term, before things settle down a little bit. Alright, so that is from, I guess, a client and billing perspective. Billing rates didn't go up very much, headcounts came down a little bit, and we're doing more for clients over the journey, because their average client group value is going up.

Ryan Richardson: But I think one of the most interesting things that came from the data in FY26 was actually this step change that we achieved in recoverability. So recoverability is essentially the inverse of write-offs, I guess, or write-ons and write-offs. If you're 91% recoverable in your firm, you are essentially writing off 9% of your WIP, so 9% of your billable time you are writing off. So you can see from FY23, there's essentially a 1% increase to FY24, a 1% increase again to FY25, to 87%. And all of a sudden you can see in FY26 a step change here from 87% to 91%, so a 4 percentage point increase in recoverability. Now, one of the key things that drives recoverability is the first 30 days. When I talk about the first 30 days and why they matter: if you are not billing your WIP in the first 30 days, you are significantly less recoverable than if you are.

Ryan Richardson: Okay, so bill your WIP within the first 30 days and you will drive your recoverability up. There is an absolutely strong correlation. It is almost a perfect correlation between recoverability and job turnaround time. So if I had an issue with respect to recoverability in my practice, I would be looking at job turnaround time and focusing on bringing that down to under 30 days, and I'd almost suggest that that would be guaranteed to solve your recoverability issues, if you did in fact have them. So your efficiency rate, or your recoverability, drops past 30 days, and in many respects, between the first 30 days and, say, leaving the job hanging around for 2 to 3 months, you will have something like a 37 or 38% difference, depending on the cohort that you are in in terms of size of firm. You will have something as drastic as that between recoverability rates from jobs completed in the first 30 days to jobs that maybe hang around two or three months. So it's definitely a substantial thing.

Ryan Richardson: But that was a substantial step change as well, 4%, so going from 87 to 91% in one financial year is a significant change. Now, from a lockup point of view, I think it's one of the things that the industry, generally speaking, doesn't do well. You don't get a lot of credit from businesses out there, but average lockup days was 112 days for FY26. As a reference point, 113 days was the lockup for FY25, so we're one day better. But the reality is that it's still a lot of lockup hanging around in many practices. The majority of that, though, sits in the WIP days. So 83 days of WIP and 29 days of debtors to make up the 112 days of lockup. So the reality is the bottleneck mostly sits before the invoice, okay? That's not to say that 30 days is an appropriate number of days in terms of debtors, but from an 83 WIP day perspective, I think there's some low-hanging fruit there. If, again, job turnaround time helps you to control your WIP and then helps you to improve your recoverability, I think firm performance is winning at that point.

Ryan Richardson: So focus on that bottleneck, which mostly sits before you generate that invoice. Okay. Now, profitability. I talk a lot about deliberate decisions in accounting practices. Now, one of those, Trent, is WIP Wednesday, that creates consistency. So consistency drives profit margin, and it's the deliberate decisions to do things like assess your WIP every Wednesday. It doesn't have to be every line item of WIP, doesn't have to be an extensive review. It might be just a portion of your WIP, maybe WIP on completed jobs, or WIP that's over $5,000 on a job, or something along those lines. But create consistency in your business, and that is the one thing that we see in the data that drives profit margins within practices. It is not having a perfect recipe of high hourly rates and high productivity and high recoverability and all these sorts of things. It is not that that drives profitability necessarily. That would be great, but that is a very unusual firm, to achieve high values in all of those key areas.

Ryan Richardson: But one of the things that we see in the data is, when there are deliberate decisions to create consistency across the business, so there is a nice consistent rhythm to what happens, usually that is where you start to see the high profit margins. So what you can see here is different sizes of firms, and when you look at these P25 and P75, those are the different quartiles. So P50 is the median, P25 is the lowest quartile, and P75 is the highest quartile. So to be in the top 25% of firms, if you've got 30 to 65 staff, you've got to generate a profit margin after partner salaries of 35% or more. So if you're trying to drive profit margin, have a look at some of the inconsistencies in your practice, and try and address those appropriately by using deliberate decisions.

Ryan Richardson: All right, so that's a little bit about profitability, Trent. And what I want to start to do now is shift and consider the impact of, I guess, AI with respect to data. Now, actually, I don't want to get there just yet. I want to talk about the winning move. So in Dashboard Insights, there's a couple of different dashboards to help you increase your firm performance. So, having a look at your different client groups to understand which client groups are supporting firm revenue and profitability. This client group analysis dashboard shows you all your fees, shows you the different client groups, what cohorts they sit within, where your fees sit, under $500 per client, or over $10,000, and so on. Understanding the composition of your fee base is what this client group analysis dashboard does.

Ryan Richardson: And again, this is about creating those consistent decisions. Where are you going to play? What clients are you working with, and how are you going to service them adequately? We've also got other dashboards that show you profitability in much the same sense, on a client group basis, to be able to drive profitability within your practice. Job status dashboards: these are the sorts of things that help your jobs move through the production line of your firm. So where do the jobs sit by way of statuses? Are they being worked on? Are they out with the clients? Are they in finalisation, or with an auditor, or whatever it may be? So, different job statuses within your own practice management system. This sort of dashboard would help you drive your workflow meetings and create that consistent rhythm within your business.

Ryan Richardson: And then the aged WIP dashboard. So if you're trying to control things like lockup, start to benchmark internally, not just against your external benchmarking reports. Have an understanding of where the client managers are that carry a lot of WIP, understand where your aging WIP is, understand where your WIP is at this year compared to last year, and these sorts of things. So there's a lot of benefit that comes from visualising the data within your practice in dashboards, to then be able to make those deliberate decisions and ultimately run better practices. So there's a couple of examples of the Dashboard Insights dashboards, which we believe our customers get a lot of value from when it comes to making those deliberate decisions and driving firm performance.

Ryan Richardson: So we're going to get through a little bit of AI-focused content now, Trent. I think that's on brand for the two-day session. But obviously AI is changing a lot of how firms run, what we're doing for clients. Maybe it is contributing to that fast-paced nature of many accounting practices at the moment. But what we're trying to do is cut through the noise. Everyone reads the headlines, everyone talks about AI replacing all of our jobs and all those sorts of things. But what I want to understand in the first instance is, I want to run a bit of a questionnaire. Okay. So if everyone's got a smartphone, I want you to get out your smartphone and scan a QR code. I've got three questions. What's top of mind in your firm right now? What's your biggest challenge, and what's your biggest opportunity? So scan that QR code if you can. I'll leave that up on screen in a moment. I didn't tell you about that one, Trent, I don't think.

Trent McLaren: It's fine. We've had a lot of QR codes today. So we encourage them.

Ryan Richardson: All right, very good. So that QR code's still up on screen. It will continue to be here as I go and ask the questions. But the first question: what is top of mind in your firm right now? So jump in there and tell us what's top of mind. And obviously we're on an AI summit at the moment, Trent, so I'm not surprised that AI was the first response there. But we asked these three questions as we did the benchmarking roadshow around the country as well, so I'll start to talk about this also.

Trent McLaren: Oh, this is fun. I like this. This is great.

Ryan Richardson: Yeah, so AI is top of mind, staffing, cash flow, interesting, yeah, efficiency. Improving AI, optimal tech stack of the future. All right, interesting. So AI, staff, cash flow. Yeah, all right, cool.

Trent McLaren: I threw a red herring in there. I don't know if you can see it.

Ryan Richardson: Coffee, yes. Okay. Yeah, no, no surprise there from you, Trent. Yeah, no, very good, very good. All right, so AI, staff, cash flow, and compliance thrown in there for good measure. So I think that's pretty consistent. A lot of firms have some fairly consistent themes top of mind. Tell us what your biggest challenge is. Now, it is a safe place, okay? It is an anonymised response type environment. All right, so staff, productivity, recruitment, time. Yes, time. AI governance, okay, interesting one, good one. Staff attitude. Being paid on time from our clients, yes. All right, recruitment, time constraints to do everything. All right. Awesome. So biggest challenges, and again, fairly consistent themes, and we'll start to unpack that in a moment. But staff, time, recruitment, all that sort of stuff. Too many software options.

Trent McLaren: Agreed.

Ryan Richardson: Fair enough. I'm guilty, guilty. But yeah, okay, so that's good. So there's some big challenges, but what we can all take from that is we're probably all in the same boat, right? So in many respects, we can probably share a lot of these challenges. We're all in the same industry and probably facing a lot of these challenges together as well. Now, talk to us about the biggest opportunities that we've got in practice. So, accounting firms: AI, the first one, of course. Yep, more AI, okay, AI everywhere, by the sounds of it. Anyone got any other ideas? Leaving the industry. Okay, is that you, Trent?

Trent McLaren: No, it wasn't, but it's good though. I like it.

Ryan Richardson: Yeah, time savings, efficiency, tech, yeah, efficiency with automation is a good one.

Trent McLaren: Not the first time I've heard that today. I think some people are feeling the overwhelm of, like, do I really want to do this for another 10 years? I'm like, I get it. There's a lot going on. I didn't have a choice. I'm going to be here for at least another 20, but some of you are closer to being out of here than I am.

Ryan Richardson: That's good. So, biggest opportunity: AI, automation. I think automation's a great one there as well. Advisory, efficiency, those sorts of things. Tax changes is the biggest opportunity, heard that a number of times off the back of the budget, of course. And AI helping with the staff shortage as well. So obviously one of the challenges of the industry, but most certainly an opportunity there as well. So, thank you all for participating there. And many of these themes are going to be pretty consistent with what you will see in the next slide. So we asked these same questions right around the country as we did our benchmarking roadshow across the month of August, when we were talking about FY26 data. Now, these are the responses across all seven locations that we ran. So AI and efficiency, growth and automation, etc.

Ryan Richardson: So you can see here all of the responses are categorised there. But AI and software adoption were the top focus. No surprise there, but also workflow management and automation seem to be an extension of that AI-driven approach. And still, compliance makes up 67% of revenue, so no surprise that things like AML and compliance seem to be top of mind within most practices as well. If we keep going through: what's your biggest challenge? People and staff management. So we heard that loud and clear today. So people is the number one challenge, but the reality is we're still in professional services. We do still provide services through people, and that might be supported by AI and technology and those sorts of things, but they are still our challenges. And the opportunity as well: AI and automation, revenue growth, advisory services, which came through in our questionnaire a moment ago as well.

Ryan Richardson: So all of these 3 questions, being what's top of mind, the challenge and the opportunity, I think what we can take from today is that we're all feeling similar things and we're in the same boat. But what we can gather from that is that we can share ideas and help each other as well. And there is certainly big opportunity in this industry at the moment. So there was a slight difference, I guess, depending on the location. So Melbourne was staff, AI adoption and succession. Brisbane was staff retention and recruitment. Adelaide was very, very tech focused, so AI, automation and efficiency. They were probably the most tech-focused audience that we encountered. Perth was people, training and workflows. Sydney was team training and outsourcing, so there seemed to be a big theme in the room on the day around outsourcing or offshoring. And in Hobart, staff recruitment and AI was loud and clear, some of the responses that we heard across the various locations around the country.

Ryan Richardson: So the angle of concerns are different, but the reality is, generally speaking, we're all in the same boat. AI is a constant theme, but the focus still seems to be on business improvement, and in particular servicing clients. So at our core, we are businesses that look after our clients, and we're businesses that use various tools to do so. Obviously we've endured change in years gone by: bank feeds, online accounting and all those sorts of things. And now we're just embracing a different level of change, with AI and automation really front and top of mind for many practices. So when we start to get really AI focused and start to talk about data and how this impacts accounting practices: we ran a survey in July 2026, asking firms whether or not, or how, they're using AI.

Ryan Richardson: 62% of respondents at that time were telling us they were still experimenting with AI. At that time, 30% of firms were saying it is absolutely changing how they work, and 8% were saying, hey, we're just watching from the sidelines. Okay, so we're just waiting and seeing. So that was what firms were telling us. And what we wanted to see is, okay, well, based on these respondents, let's go and look at the data of these different cohorts and see how the operational data is actually being affected by AI use. So what did we do? After we surveyed the market, 90% were using it in some capacity, but we didn't really focus on the 92%. What we focused on was the firms who said that AI was absolutely changing the way they worked, which was 30% of the industry, and all others, so that's the other 70%. Now, there's about 100 firms, or 108 firms or something like that, that went into these results, okay? And what we were trying to do was pick up the shift, so the change in key metrics.

Ryan Richardson: We looked at about 18 different key metrics. We focused on these 6 key metrics here, which I'll talk to in a moment. So, the impact of AI on firms. Average minutes per timesheet: that talks about how long you are spending on each task, or each timesheet entry that you're putting in. Now, we've split this up between July to December 2025 and January to June 2026, so the two six months within the financial year. Firms actively using AI are on the left-hand side here, and on the right-hand side are all others. So that's about 30% of respondents and 70% of respondents here. And we're looking at the rate of change between July and December 2024 and 2025. Okay, so you can see here, overwhelmingly, the average minutes per timesheet is coming down. So there's shorter, sharper tasks on average being completed. But the reality is it's coming down, I guess, proportionately for both cohorts of firms.

Ryan Richardson: Okay, average billing rate was going up for the cohort that responded to this questionnaire. I mentioned before the average industry billing rate was up by 0.9%. This is just a different cohort, okay, so it's a smaller portion of the industry, about 100 firms. So plus 7%, plus 6%, plus 5, plus 2. So if you're actively using AI, your average billing rate will typically be going up based on this data, but the same thing with all others as well, across these 2 time series. Okay, so steady decline over two financial years for average minutes per timesheet, steady increase for all firms with respect to average billing rate. Recoverability and productivity, very similar trends once more, okay? And in fact, in recoverability, firms not using AI between January and June this year had a bigger rate of change in their recoverability number. Obviously, that is a subsection of the industry, it's not reflective of everyone. But the reality is that recoverability was increasing for all firms across those 2 six-month windows.

Ryan Richardson: Productivity is exactly the same, very similar trend, very similar shape in terms of the rate of change. And the final thing is fee per team member and fee per client. Again, steadily increasing. There's widespread growth in fees. These were probably the two that leaned most heavily in favour of the impact that AI is having on firms, but it doesn't necessarily show up in different rates of change for these 2 metrics. So, impact of AI on firms? The reality is that what we saw in the data, and this is from a purely data analytics perspective, is that AI adoption showed no material performance edge for the 2026 financial year. When we split up those two cohorts, we were trying to see a better increase, or a more significant increase, in the January to June period in these key metrics than we saw in the July to December period. That wasn't really present at that point, okay?

Ryan Richardson: So there are signs of change, though. There are signs of change in the most recent period. The difference between firms using AI versus those who are not, there wasn't really a big difference last financial year, with different metrics favouring different cohorts. But the reality is we're starting to see change now. If we start to look at some key metrics over the last three or four months, billing rate, productivity, recoverability, these 3 metrics are starting to move. Not necessarily because of AI, we can't tell why yet, but we will get that intel as months go on. But these are starting to move, and in particular for some firms. So again, we will be interested to see how that happens. What I will say is that at a firm-by-firm level, the key is to measure your key metrics and identify the trend within your practice. Okay, so identify your key metrics, measure them, identify the trend, benchmark appropriately, and set your targets too, so you've got something to work towards as well.

Ryan Richardson: What's in focus for the industry: growing revenue once more, upselling and expanding new service lines, increasing clients, improving margins, which has come through probably for the first time since we've been running the benchmarking report. Increasing pricing, okay, so 62% of firms still plan to increase pricing. That seems to be a low number this year compared to years gone by, maybe because of the uncertainty in the market and so on. But 23% were responding that undercharging was their biggest obstacle. So I'm surprised that this is only 62% of firms planning to increase prices. So ultimately, following today's session, what I'd really love for firms attending to do is work out what metrics matter to you. Understand what your current performance is for these metrics, determine your target performance, and determine the strategy to close the gap. Okay, so that is about making those deliberate decisions to close the gap between your current and your target performance. But firstly, you've got to understand what matters for you as a practice.

Ryan Richardson: So work out what's in focus for your firm and make the appropriate change. So a couple of key takeouts. AI, of course, is a constant theme. Focus still seems to be on clients and business improvement. It's still evolving and still an opportunity. And identify what is in focus for your firm as well. Okay, so know the current performance in your metrics and set the targets appropriately, okay?

Trent McLaren: I've not seen that Menti thing before. I thought that was great. Lots of people engaging and diving into that, which is good. That was awesome. Thank you so much. We appreciate your time, your effort, your energy, and giving us all the information. Audience, feel free to jump on that react button and just show Ryan some love for the intel. There isn't anywhere else you're going to get that level of data on the profession right now. So I hope you've all enjoyed that and you've taken some insight out of it. Ryan, anything else you want to add before we wrap up today's session?

Ryan Richardson: I think that's it, Trent, but always enjoyed working with you, mate. And yeah, great two days. I think it's right on point, right in what people want to know about, which was clear from some of those Menti responses as well, Trent. I hope people got something out of today, and look forward to doing it again with you soon.