If you own a European bookkeeping or tax practice and you're starting to think about what comes next (succession, capacity, what happens to the team), this page is the long read. It walks through what changes under Reccon, what stays the same, what the deal structure actually looks like, and how the process runs.
Most acquisition pitches to accounting firm owners are some version of the same story: we'll grow your firm, you'll keep running it, here's the number. Then close happens, the staff get re-badged, the clients are re-allocated, and the brand quietly disappears within eighteen months.
We can't blame owners who have learned to read those pitches with suspicion. Our model is structurally different. We're after the craft, not the corporate shell. We learn how the work actually gets done (the workflows, the judgment, the edge cases that live in your seniors' heads) and keep it inside the firm that built it. That changes the deal on both sides.
Indicative ranges on multiples and earn-out triggers vary firm to firm. Those belong in a first call, not on a public page. What follows is the frame we don't move. Read the protections before the equity terms; the equity terms only make sense inside them.
Three commitments come before equity. Compensation does not decrease under Reccon. The brand and local leadership stay. There is no restructuring against the staff to hit synergy targets. All three are written into the share-purchase agreement as conditions of close, not as side letters, not as marketing.
Majority stake, inside those guardrails. Reccon acquires a controlling equity stake in the firm. The protections above are the reason that's safe for the seller; they convert the deal from a conventional buyout into a structured handover. Without them, a majority stake is what owners are right to fear. With them in writing, it's the mechanism that makes the engineering investment possible.
Day-one liquidity. The majority of cash consideration is paid at close. You don't have to wait years to access value you've already built.
Ongoing role optional. Stay involved as managing partner, senior advisor, or board observer, as long as you want, and step back when you're ready. We don't force a handover timetable.
What we generally avoid. Earn-out-heavy structures designed to claw back at close, rebranding the firm under someone else's identity, and reductions in force to hit synergy targets aren't how we typically structure transactions.
This is the part most acquirers gloss over. For a Reccon transaction, the 100 days after close are the most important phase: they determine whether the firm gets faster, or just gets bigger. Here is what each phase looks like.
Legal close. All-hands with the team: what's changing, what isn't, what to expect from Reccon engineers walking around the office. No restructuring, no immediate process changes.
Engineers shadow practitioners across every role. We document workflows: how onboarding works, where bottlenecks live, what tools the team actually uses, and the institutional knowledge that only lives in people's heads.
The clearest, lowest-risk workflows get rebuilt: receipt intake, transaction categorisation, document collection chasers. Engineers ship inside the firm's existing tools, not a new platform that the team has to learn.
The first measurable capacity gains show up, typically in time-per-client and time-to-close. We share these openly with the team, because they're the people who delivered them.
We're being specific about fit because vague criteria waste everyone's time. If you're outside these boundaries we may still be interested. Write to us anyway. If you're inside them, we'd particularly like to hear from you.
Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, UK, and the Nordics.
Bookkeeping and tax-focused practices serving SMB clients. Annual accounts, VAT/BTW filings, corporate tax, payroll all in scope. Audit-focused practices are not our wedge.
€0.5M–€5M annual revenue, 100–1,000 active client relationships. Larger and smaller firms welcome to engage; this is where we're focused for first acquisitions.
Modern cloud accounting platforms preferred: Exact Online, Twinfield, Yuki, Xero. We can work with on-prem incumbents but the AI capture is faster on cloud-native stacks.
Owners thinking about succession over the next 1–5 years. Sole partners and partner groups both fit. We're equally happy with owners who want to stay on, and owners ready to step back.
Care about the team and the clients more than the headline price. If you're optimising purely for highest bid, we are probably not the right buyer. We won't outbid a strategic.
Thirty minutes, video or in person if you're in the Netherlands. We listen more than we talk: what the firm looks like today, what's working, what isn't, what you'd want for the team and clients in the deal. We share indicative ranges, walk through the process, and answer whatever's on your mind. There's no obligation on either side.