Large-scale changes are often easier to see in retrospect; the busyness of day-to-day life and work can obscure processes that unfold over the course of months and years. But sometimes you can catch a big shift as it’s happening, spotting some sign of how significant its impact will be.
As we were compiling this year’s edition of our Top 100 Firms and Regional Leaders list, we spotted a sign like that around the growing importance of CAS, one that points to how central that service line is going to be to future accounting firms.
Every year, we ask the participating firms to name all the service offerings where they’re seeing growth, and then we ask them to name their single fastest-growing service offering. For the past five years or so, more and more firms have been reporting CAS as an area where they’re seeing growth, to the point where it now rivals attest as the most commonly cited. That’s impressive, but there are lots of other service lines that are in the same league (state and local tax, for instance, or estate/trust/gift tax planning, or M&A), and have been for years.
The big difference this year was in the number of firms that named CAS as their fastest-growing service: Roughly a quarter of the Top 100 (19 out of the 79 who reported their growth areas), and over a third of all the firms that completed the growth areas questionnaire (75 out of 218). To put it in perspective, the next-most commonly cited service lines were attest (four firms among the Top 100 and 15 overall) and M&A (also four among the Top 100, and 10 overall). What’s more, in the 20 years I’ve been overseeing this survey, no single service line has ever come anywhere close to being the fastest-growing for so many firms.
It’s certainly possible — even likely — that CAS won’t hold that title for long; as these practices mature, firms will likely find their highest rates of growth elsewhere. But I think this year’s numbers are indicative of a larger trend, which is the degree to which CAS is going to become a core service of the profession, much like attest and tax. In fact, I’ll argue that it might even become the core service, as automation and artificial intelligence nibble away at tax compliance, and the characteristics of CAS — a strong focus on advisory, frequent and regular interaction with the client, subscription pricing, and a close reliance on technology — are recognized as being key to the success of all services lines.
As CAS becomes the model and mainstay of how firms serve clients, as it expands from its roots in the transactional to focus on advisory, and as more firms realize the tremendous opportunity it represents, I wouldn’t be surprised if we all looked back in a decade or two and realized that this was the year CAS took over.
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