Newly qualified accountants setting up in practice face a number of challenges
What to weigh up before going it alone — updated for 2026
Times are tough, and plenty of newly qualified accountants are weighing up whether to set up on their own. If you’re thinking about starting your own practice, it’s worth taking stock of the real challenges you’re likely to face first.
Practising certificates and professional supervision
If you want to trade as a CCAB-qualified accountant — a full member of one of the six UK accountancy bodies that make up the Consultative Committee of Accountancy Bodies, formed by royal charter — you’ll need a practising certificate. A meaningful proportion of UK accountancy firms operate outside CCAB membership and don’t require one, but if you do need a certificate, the requirements have tightened recently: ICAEW’s rules, effective from January 2025, extended the practising certificate requirement to members acting as principals in regulated financial services firms that also provide accountancy services beyond an incidental level, closing a gap that previously let some of these roles sit outside the usual requirement.
Separately, anti-money-laundering supervision itself is being restructured: HM Treasury confirmed in late 2025 that the FCA will become the single AML/CTF supervisor for accountancy, legal and trust and company service providers, replacing the current mix of professional-body supervisors. The transition is expected to take several years once the enabling legislation is in place, but it’s worth knowing this is coming, since it will eventually change who you register with and how you’re supervised.
Funding and finding the right opportunity
With no track record of running your own practice, it remains notoriously difficult to raise external funding to buy goodwill — whether a whole practice or a block of fees — unless you’ve already identified a specific opportunity, which is itself notoriously difficult to do without help.
Even with funds in hand, it’s unlikely many vendors would choose to sell to a newly qualified accountant unless you can show them, convincingly, how you’d retain their clients. A vendor selling their practice is exposed to a claim under the clawback clause in the sale agreement if clients don’t transfer successfully — any shortfall comes out of their pocket — which is exactly why vendors are so selective about choosing a purchaser most likely to keep those clients on board.
The five-year catch-up — a little easier, not solved
Starting from scratch with no clients can mean a genuinely difficult stretch — often several years — before you match the income you’d have earned staying employed in industry or practice. The instinctive response is to ‘low-ball’: undercut other practices to win clients quickly. That tends to backfire, because the clients you attract this way are often there purely for the cheap service, meaning you end up working very long hours for modest income, without the profit margin to invest in junior staff who could take some of that work off your hands — a genuine Catch-22.
AI-assisted bookkeeping and cloud accounting tools have narrowed this gap slightly since we last wrote about it — a solo practitioner today can get compliance work done faster than a decade ago, which helps with the hours side of the equation. But the tools don’t solve the harder problem: winning clients away from an established relationship in the first place. The catch-up period is a little less brutal than it was, not solved.
Compliance from day one
A new practice today also starts with obligations that simply didn’t exist, or weren’t as pressing, a decade ago. Making Tax Digital for Income Tax Self Assessment became mandatory from April 2026 for sole traders and landlords above £50,000 income (with the £30,000 threshold following in April 2027), which means MTD-compliant systems are a day-one requirement, not something to bolt on later. Professional indemnity insurance and a compliant AML framework need to be in place from the outset too — there’s no grace period for a firm that’s still finding its feet.
The isolation of solo practice
One challenge that rarely gets talked about openly is simply how isolating solo practice can be in the early years. There’s no one down the corridor to sense-check a difficult client conversation, no colleague to cover you when you’re ill, and no one else carrying the weight of a difficult decision. It’s worth going in with your eyes open about this, and building a network — even an informal one of other local practitioners — before you need it rather than after.
What actually helps if you do go it alone
If solo practice is still the route you want, a few things consistently improve the odds:
- A specialism or referral source. Coming with a niche nobody local currently serves, or a network of contacts likely to follow you ethically from a previous role, changes the arithmetic considerably.
- A realistic funding plan. Lenders and, later, vendors both want to see a credible business plan and evidence you understand your own numbers — not just enthusiasm.
- Modern, connected systems from day one. Building on cloud accounting and MTD-ready software from the outset avoids an expensive, disruptive migration later.
- A support network. Whether that’s a mentor, a local practitioner group, or simply someone else who’s done it recently, don’t underestimate how much this softens the early years.
Our advice
Our advice remains what it has always been: rather than starting entirely from scratch, look at joining a carefully chosen practice where the principal or principals are looking for a successor in the coming years. It sidesteps the worst of the funding problem, the clawback problem and the isolation problem all at once, and it’s a route we help people navigate regularly. Our companion piece on buying into an accountancy practice goes into this route in more detail.