Still Using Software From 2015? 5 Signs Your Firm Has Outgrown Its Tech

Quick question: how old is the software your firm runs on?

If you picked your practice management system before your newest hire finished university, that’s worth thinking about. Technology should make your firm faster. When it doesn’t — when it actually slows you down — the cost isn’t just frustration. It’s missed revenue, lost clients, and good people leaving for firms that don’t make them fight their tools every day.

Here are five signs we see again and again in firms that have outgrown their stack.

1. Your staff spend more time re-keying data than advising clients

Bank transactions copied into spreadsheets. Client details entered into three different systems. The same invoice typed twice because two tools don’t talk to each other.

Sound familiar? One firm we worked with had two senior accountants spending 12 hours a week on data entry alone. After connecting their bank feeds, CRM, and practice management platform through API integrations, that dropped to under two hours. Those ten hours went straight back into client advisory — the work that actually grows revenue.

2. Client onboarding takes days instead of hours

Think about what happens when you win a new client. You email an engagement letter as a Word doc. They print it, sign it, scan it, and email it back. Meanwhile, someone on your team is manually creating folders, setting up user accounts, and configuring permissions across half a dozen tools.

That’s three to five days before the client sees any value from your firm. Modern onboarding workflows — digital signatures, automated folder creation, self-serve portals — compress that to under an hour. First impressions matter. A slick onboarding tells new clients they picked the right firm.

3. Nobody trusts the numbers about your own firm

Here’s an ironic one. You help clients make better decisions with their numbers — but can you answer these about your own firm?

What’s your average revenue per client? Which service lines are most profitable? How many hours went to compliance versus advisory last quarter?

If the honest answer is "I’d need to pull data from three systems and spend a morning in Excel," your reporting infrastructure is holding you back. A connected tech stack puts these answers on a dashboard you can check over your morning coffee.

4. Working from home feels like a punishment

Your team needs a VPN to access files. Two people can’t edit the same document at once. Certain software only runs on the office desktop — the one that’s still running Windows 10.

Remote working shouldn’t feel like using the internet through a straw. Cloud-native tools don’t just enable remote work — they make everyone faster, whether they’re at home, at the office, or at a client site. If your infrastructure punishes people for not being in the building, you’ll lose talent to firms that don’t.

5. Software updates make your stomach drop

A vendor announces an update. Your first thought isn’t "great, new features." It’s "what’s going to break this time?"

If updates mean weekend downtime, broken integrations, and emergency calls to an IT contractor, you’re propping up legacy architecture. Modern SaaS tools update themselves in the background. You shouldn’t even notice. If "update day" is a concept at your firm, that tells you something.

Recognised your firm in two or more of these?

The good news: you don’t need to rip everything out and start again. That’s almost never the right move. What works is an honest audit of what you have, identifying the two or three changes that would make the biggest difference, and building a roadmap that fits your budget and your team’s appetite for change.

That’s what we do at NerdNumbers. We help accounting firms work out where technology can make the biggest difference — then we make it happen. No jargon, no unnecessary complexity. Just practical changes your team will actually use.

Want to find out where your firm stands? Book a free 30-minute tech audit call — no obligation, no sales pitch. We’ll tell you what’s working, what isn’t, and where to focus first.