Restructuring and Insolvency Roles in Accounting Firms: The Tech Advantage
When a company goes into liquidation, accountants leap beyond ledgers. They run legal processes, negotiate with lenders, and try to salvage value. The restructuring and insolvency roles in accounting firms sit at the junction of finance, law, and crisis management. These roles are charged with assessing solvency, preserving assets, and steering firms either toward rescue or an orderly wind down. In the UK, this work has become more urgent. There were 23,872 registered company insolvencies in 2024. This figure underscores why accounting firms are investing in digital tools to speed and secure the work.
The Tightrope Walk of Insolvency Practitioners
The job is practical and exacting. Practitioners must assemble an accurate balance sheet on short notice, map creditor claims, judge the viability of trading on, and design legally compliant restructuring plans such as administrations, CVAs or negotiated creditor compromises. They act as project managers for complex stakeholder processes, liaising with boards, counsel, lenders, landlords and regulators while guarding against fraud and phoenixing. Professional bodies and trade groups note that the pressures on IPs are rising with both corporate and personal insolvencies fluctuating sharply in recent years.
From Filing Cabinets to Virtual Data Rooms
Accounting firms now treat document management and collaboration as mission critical for restructuring and insolvency cases. Large files of contracts, payroll records, tax returns and creditor claims must be collated, indexed and shared with strict access controls. Virtual data rooms, often used in M&A, have become a standard in complex insolvency cases because they offer auditable access logs, fine grained permissions and automated indexing, which together reduce the time required for due diligence and creditor reporting. Firms such as Epiq and Intralinks publish case notes showing how VDRs compress weeks of paperwork into days, while offering the audit trail courts and creditors require.
Mid-Tier Firms Lag Behind in Technology Adoption
But the shift is not uniform. Surveys of mid-tier accounting practices show document management, client onboarding and practice management software remain underdeveloped relative to need, leaving many teams reliant on ad hoc file shares and email for documents that should be under strict version control. That gap explains why some firms still struggle to meet creditor expectations for transparency or to close a CVL or administration more swiftly.
Efficiency, Accuracy, and Faster Recoveries
Practical benefits are immediate and measurable. A centralised document management system reduces time spent searching for files, shortens the lifecycle of statutory reports, and lowers the risk of misfiled creditor claims. For teams working across time zones, cloud platforms combine co-authoring of witness statements, simultaneous review of asset schedules and instant distribution of payout forecasts. The result is fewer clerical errors, quicker creditor meetings, and, in some cases, a higher recoverable yield for unsecured creditors.
Artificial intelligence and automation are now nudging the practice further. According to official surveys, only a minority of UK firms used AI in 2023, but adoption was projected to rise through 2024, reflecting growing use cases in document tagging, anomaly detection and automated extraction of contract terms. For restructuring teams, AI can auto-extract key clauses from thousands of supplier contracts, flag unusual vendor payments for forensic review and prioritise claims that matter most to recovery modelling.
Security Isn’t Optional
Security and compliance remain the hard constraints that shape any technology choice. Insolvency work touches personal data, tax filings and bank details, so data encryption, two factor authentication and granular permissioning are non negotiable. Document systems that integrate with a firm’s records retention policy and provide immutable audit trails supply the evidence that courts and regulators demand. In short, technology is valuable only if it is demonstrably secure and auditable.
Collaboration Tools Change the Game
Collaboration tooling changes the rhythm of the role. Where once practitioners drove to creditor meetings and handed paper schedules to solicitors, now secure portals allow creditors to submit claims, vote on CVAs and inspect progress dashboards. That transparency de-escalates disputes and makes votes more representative of economic reality. For partners, dashboards give a live view of case economics so decision points such as trading on, closing, or seeking a buyer are data led rather than intuitive.
Why Some Firms Still Resist
Adoption still faces barriers. Legacy systems, the cost of enterprise VDRs, and cultural resistance within some firms slow uptake. Regulators and professional bodies therefore emphasise training and standards, arguing that better digital practice is part of professional competence. For accounting firms looking to scale their restructuring offering, investment in document management, VDRs and selective AI tools is no longer optional; it is a competitive requirement.
When Tech and Expertise Align
The combination of skilled practitioners and reliable technology changes outcomes. Where sound document control, secure collaboration and rapid data extraction exist, administrations close faster, CVAs are negotiated with cleaner creditor input, and recoveries can improve. For accounting firms the question is not whether to adopt technology, but how to integrate it so that practitioners can focus on judgement, negotiation and legal process rather than on chasing paperwork.
Future Outlook
Restructuring and insolvency roles in accounting firms have always mixed technical finance and human negotiation. Technology has transformed the operational side of the work, enabling faster, safer and more transparent outcomes. As insolvency volumes and case complexity move with macroeconomic cycles, the firms that combine experienced IPs with robust document management and collaboration systems will be best placed to preserve value for creditors and, where possible, rescue businesses.
