Practice management in tax and accounting has not been the easiest nut to crack, often fraught with issues and features accountants don’t necessarily use or can’t sync right with what they need. Some, however, have been able to grow in this space and even regain some trust in PM. Recent investments in platforms such as Canopy and Aiwyn are great examples.
Canopy, which has predominantly been embraced by tax-centric accounting firms, recently closed on a $70 million Series C funding round. Viking Global Investors–a global investment firm with over $51 billion in capital under management–led the round, with continued participation from existing investors Ten Coves Capital, Ankona Capital, Pelion Venture Partners, and Tenaya Capital.
Coming fast on the heels of a $35 million round in May 2024, this funding will be used to further ramp up Canopy’s investment in its platform, with a particular focus on leveraging AI to make medium and large accounting firms more efficient and profitable. The company will also be evaluating opportunities to grow through acquisitions.
In a press release, Canopy CEO Davis Bell said “At Canopy, our mission is to help accountants to focus on what drew them to the profession in the first place: being accountants. They want to apply their expertise to delivering real value to clients—not chasing documents, renaming PDFs, and sending invoices. We were already making these tasks easier, but with AI we’re now automating them away entirely,” said Canopy CEO Davis Bell. “This frees up time and resources and generates insights that help firms better serve clients, increase profitability, and reduce team burnout. As the operating system for accounting firms, Canopy is the natural starting point for the AI transformation of the industry.
For larger firms, there’s also Aiwyn which secured $113M at the end of last year. Their unique approach is to have a payments and collections suite into a comprehensive practice management platform.
Now, the PM market as we know it is considerably crowded at the moment; one may even say it is ripe for consolidation. If VC/PE continue to invest in standout PM systems, we could indeed see some fall by the wayside, while others find their loyal users and remain for the foreseeable future.
I am going to give full credit to Jason Staats for creating the following list of PM systems so you can see how large it currently is. But it also shows that unlike, say, general ledgers, accounting firms are very particular about what they want in a PM. One size, one platform, does not fit all, and none are perfect. This does not make them any less essential to running your practice.
As such, the list, as of this writing, is as follows and is in no particular order:
Uku
XCM(CCH)
Cone
Senta
Levvy
Qount
Accelo
Mango
Keeper
Karbon
TaxTree
Canopy
Xennett
TaxFlow
Acounta
Firm360
TR Onvio
TaxDome
BQE Core
Client Hub
Practice ERP
Elephant CPA
Zoho Practice
Aero Workflow
TR Practice CS
Financial Cents
PracticePro 365
Pascal Workflow
OfficeTools Cloud
Jetpack Workflow
CCH Axcess Practice
Xero Practice Manager
OfficeTools Workspace
TPS Software Cloud Axis
IRIS Practice Management
CCH iFirm Practice Manager
Automated Tax Office Manager
Aiwyn
At the end of the day, whichever you choose, you need to have purpose and, hopefully, some sense of how you want your firm to function prior to selecting any of these. Seeing further investment, such as the likes of Canopy and others on this list, it is encouraging for the accounting space to know there is something that will indeed work for them.