Adfin | The Passenger Princess (Thinks)

My lack of driving skills provided ample opportunity for ‘thinking’ time over the last three weeks on the road. We spoke to more than 50 accounting firms along the way. The conversations went everywhere, but a few themes kept coming back.

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Late payments are a culture problem, not just a cash one

Late payments turned out to be less of a technical problem than a cultural one. Almost nobody has a real handle on how big it is, because most businesses don't report it. An unpaid invoice gets filed away as a personal failure rather than a symptom of something systemic, so it stays quiet, and the scale of it stays invisible.

As Mia Rees, Head of Communications and Engagement at the Office of the Small Business Commissioner, put it: "Companies don't like to talk about it because they're worried that it might make them look like they're not good at financial management. But actually it's a much more common situation than people think."

For a lot of firms, late payment isn't the exception anymore, it's the default, especially when a large company is paying a small one. And that culture doesn't stay contained to one relationship. It travels down the chain.

Multiple accountants gave us the same analogy: walking into a shop, taking food off the shelves, and telling the cashier, "I'll be back to pay next week."

That culture shapes how accountants think about credit control too. Most avoid enforcing terms at all, because nobody wants to be the firm chasing a client they've worked with for a decade.

But the firms willing to sit with that discomfort saw the best results. Automated, impersonal enforcement, late fees, WhatsApp chasers, the works, brought debtor days down. The client relationship damage everyone braced for simply didn't show up.

Accountant shapeshifting

The accountant-client relationship is shifting everywhere we went. Firms are being asked to be outsourced finance teams, HR consultants, coaches, agony aunts, and occasionally therapists, often all in the same week.

At the same time as the job description multiplies, firms are noticing something else: clients who've decided AI has made the accountant optional.

"Well, Claude says you can" came up again and again, clients pushing back on an accountant's advice because a chatbot told them something different.

Sometimes that ends with the client walking. But more often, it's not that accountants are doing more jobs than before, it's that one of the new jobs is damage control: untangling the free, confident, wrong advice a client got from a chatbot before they ever picked up the phone.

The Passenger Princess (Thinks)

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