Accounting Roll-Ups: Why Tech Integration Now Matters So Much

1 | Deals keep coming, but the easy money has gone

Private-equity funds are still snapping up accountancy practices. In the United States, Blackstone paid more than US $2 billion for a majority stake in Citrin Cooperman earlier this year, at a double-digit EBITDA multiple pe-insights.com.

Across Europe, Azets—backed by Hg and PAI—has swallowed more than 90 local firms since 2020, while Norway’s Visma keeps extending its software portfolio, most recently by buying Austrian pre-accounting specialist Finmatics

France is now catching up: Otium Capital has launched Archipel as a €50 million buying vehicle, and larger networks such as Implid and Mazars are on the hunt for more accounting practices.

2 | Why “profit-multiple arbitrage” no longer works on its own

Five years ago a sponsor could buy a small French practice for six times its EBITDA and exit at ten times+ once it had been merged into a larger group. Today, starting prices in competitive auctions are already eight to twelve times. To meet target returns, investors must raise profit, not just raise price. Two levers matter most:

• Fewer hours per file. Routine data entry must be automated so one accountant can serve many more clients.
• More subscription revenue. Moving services onto software that the client pays for every month lifts “annual recurring revenue” (ARR) and stabilises cash flow.

Subscribed

3 | A simple, shared tech stack

Leading consolidators borrow a lesson from wealth-management roll-ups: pick a small set of mandatory tools (“the spine”) and allow a shortlist of local add-ons (“the ribs”). A typical French-led stack now looks like this:

• Customer-relationship management (CRM) — keeps every prospect, mandate and fee quote in one master record that can feed billing and workflow systems; examples: Salesforce, Cegid CRM.
• Practice & task workflow — allocates work, tracks deadlines, and shows partners which files are on-time or late; examples: Loop, Karbon.
• General ledger / ERP — records every journal entry, VAT return and fixed-asset movement, forming the core accounting book; examples: Cegid, Sage Intacct.
• Payroll engine — calculates gross-to-net pay, taxes and social charges while staying current with local labour law; examples: Silae, PayFit.
• Invoice capture & approval (AP automation) — reads supplier invoices with OCR, matches them to POs, routes them for sign-off and posts them to the ledger; examples: Yooz, Finmatics.
• Payment initiation & reconciliation — batches approved invoices for bank payment and auto-matches the return feed to clear the liability; examples: Libeo, Tipalti.
• Client portal / pre-accounting hub — lets SMEs raise sales invoices, drop receipts and chat with their accountant in one place; examples: Pennylane, Holded.
• Cash-flow forecasting — pulls live bank feeds plus open invoices into rolling liquidity projections for 4- to 13-week horizons; examples: Agicap, Fluidly.
• Business-intelligence dashboards — aggregates data from multiple ledgers and payroll systems to give group-wide KPIs in real time; examples: EMAsphere, Microsoft Power BI.
• Integration & data backbone (iPaaS / data warehouse) — pipes APIs from every acquired firm into a single model and secures single-sign-on; examples: MuleSoft, Snowflake.

Building your own software is rarely sensible: the vendors above release new features every few weeks, and compliance rules change country by country.

4 | Four integration rules

To be able to buy at high speed while quickly integrating, here are a few integration rules inspired from other roll-up models:

1. Survey the landscape before signing.
A lean “technology due-diligence” squad diagrams every application the target relies on and designs the cut-over plan during exclusivity, not after closing.

2. Triage and swap out red flag software.
Any tool that is disconnected, lacks an API, frustrates users or costs too much moves immediately onto the scrap-heap and is replaced with a pre-approved alternative.

3. Stand up a common data and reporting layer.
Even if newly bought firms stay on different front-end systems for a while, a central analytics stack must pull financial and operational data into a single set of group dashboards from day one.

4. Build an integration Playbook
Start with the high-impact fixes (invoice capture, payroll automation), then phase in a tight roster of preferred vendors—leveraging group-wide pricing—over the following quarters.

The integration playbook sets strict targets: no more than three months to bring a small acquisition onto the core stack, and six months for a larger one.

5 | What to watch in 2025-26

• AI helpers are appearing inside every module—from automatic account coding in Yooz to anomaly flags in EMAsphere dashboards.
• Regulation pushes digital. France’s e-invoicing requirement, due in 2026, makes paper accounting uneconomic overnight.

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