News & Updates

The talent shortage in accounting practices isn't about a lack of qualified people. The real problem is that qualified, motivated trainees can't demonstrate they can do the work, because the routes into the profession that used to create work-ready employees no longer reflect how modern practices actually operate.

What the Accountex 2026 talk is about

The core argument is straightforward: your next best hire has never had a job. They're qualified, they're motivated - but they can't prove they can do the work yet.

That's not a personal failing. It's a structural problem. The ways that people traditionally got work-ready in accounting - doing entry-level tasks, learning the rhythms of practice life, building confidence through repetition - are changing because the nature of that entry-level work is changing. The result is a gap between where trainees finish their qualifications and where practices need them to be on day one.

The talk will cover why that gap exists, what it means specifically for small bookkeeping and accountancy practices, and what to do about it.

Why the skills conversation matters more than ever

Practices aren't just looking for technical knowledge anymore. Of course qualifications matter - but the skills that separate a good hire from a great one right now include communication, creative thinking, and the ability to work confidently with technology.

Those aren't skills that show up on a certificate. They're built through doing - through practice, feedback, and real-world experience. And that's exactly what's been missing for a generation of trainees who have qualified without getting the chance to actually do the work.

The practices that figure this out first will be the ones that recruit and retain the best people over the next decade.

Where to find me at Accountex 2026

I'll be speaking at the Bookkeepers Circle Theatre at Accountex 2026 at ExCeL London at 3pm on 13th April.

If you're attending and this is your kind of conversation, come and find me. You'll also find us on the Hey Monika stand. And if you work with trainees studying for AAT, ICB, IAB, or ACCA qualifications - or you're a trainee yourself - Hey Monika is worth a look before the show.

Get 30 days free with code FREEBIE at heymonika.com. 

Mapping Hey Monika to Accounting Syllabuses

One of the most frequent questions we get asked is: which qualification does this scenario or challenge relate to?

We've been working hard to answer that properly. We've gone through the publicly available syllabuses for ICB, AAT, and other professional bodies, broken them down into individual skills, and started mapping those skills against our existing scenarios and challenges. The goal is to make it crystal clear, if you're working towards a specific level of a specific qualification, here's exactly what in Hey Monika will help you practise those skills.

It also shows us where our gaps are, which means we can now go away and build the content we're missing. We'll be making a version of this available on our website soon.

Scenario & Challenge Updates

We've been going back through our existing scenarios and making them better, particularly now that we have Video Mode, which allows us to embed video and voice content directly into questions.

Virtually There (Vanessa's scenario) has been fully updated. There are now voice notes from Vanessa built into the scenario, for example, a message left on your answerphone that you need to listen to and respond to correctly. We've also reworked questions that felt too binary, making the whole experience more interactive and realistic.

Adele's scenario is next in line for a review. A number of you have flagged that the requirement to import 37 sales invoices, and the resulting rounding difference, is causing unnecessary confusion, particularly at beginner level. We're going to streamline this, and we'll be adding video content too.

We also have several new scenarios in development, including one focused on Making Tax Digital, and a few others we're working hard to get across the line.

New Foundational Challenges

Something we've thought carefully about is the experience of someone who is brand new to accountancy. Jumping straight into a complex client scenario isn't always the right starting point, especially if you're a school leaver or you haven't yet had much exposure to the profession.

So we've built a set of foundational challenges designed to give you that grounding before you dive in:

Professional Communication covering how to write emails and handle phone conversations professionally.

The World of Business covering entity types, how businesses generate income, key terminology, and the role of the accountant.

Critical Thinking & AI because knowing how to ask the right questions, and how to evaluate AI-generated information, is one of the most important skills you can have right now.

And coming very soon: Accounting Concepts. We cover the finance team, key financial documents, double entry, the accounting equation, going concern, accruals, as well as anti-money laundering, data protection, and ethics. The essentials that every new trainee needs before they start working with clients.

All of these challenges go through a thorough quality assurance process before they go live, and Accounting Concepts should be available early next week.

Something We're Very Excited About: Voice Calls with Clients

This is the big one.

At the moment, when you need to communicate with a client in a scenario, you use a chat window. It works, but it doesn't reflect how client communication actually happens in practice. In reality, you'd send an email, or you'd pick up the phone.

We've been talking for a long time about building the ability to have a voice conversation with a simulated client. And our development team has now come to us with a way to make it happen.

The idea is simple but powerful: instead of typing in a chat window, you'll see your client on screen, press a button to speak, and have a real back-and-forth conversation. Your client will reply in their own voice. And at the end of the call, Monika, your mentor, will give you feedback on how it went. Did you explain things clearly? Did you get the information you needed? Were you professional in your tone?

We're also thinking about tone and emotion. One of our scenarios features a client called Celena, who is not at all happy about Making Tax Digital. Being able to hear the frustration in her voice, and learn how to respond to an anxious or upset client calmly and professionally, is a completely different skill to typing a polite message. It's the kind of thing you can only really learn by doing.

For those times when speaking isn't practical, you're in a public place, you haven't got headphones, we're planning an email mode too. Rather than defaulting to the chat window, you'd get something that looks like an email client, where you write to your client and they write back. Because professional email communication is also a skill that matters.

This is in development now, and we'll be sharing more as it takes shape.

We're Exhibiting at Accountex

We are going to Accountex, and we couldn't be more excited. We'll have demos ready, and we'd absolutely love to see you. Whether you're already using Hey Monika, thinking about it, or just curious about what we're building, come and find us.

Award Shortlists

We have some news we are proud of.

Hey Monika has been shortlisted at the PQ Awards in the category of Graduate/Apprenticeship Training Programme of the Year. I read PQ Magazine as a trainee, more than twenty years ago, to now be shortlisted by that same publication, and to be in the same category as organisations like Kaplan, it means an enormous amount to us.

Jo Wood and I have also been individually shortlisted for Personality of the Year, and The Bookkeepers Podcast has been shortlisted for Podcast of the Year. We are very much looking forward to celebrating at the awards night.

Closer to home, Hey Monika has been shortlisted at the Cardiff Life Awards in both the Technology and Innovation category and the New Business category. Hey Monika is a product of the Bookkeeper Training Academy, registered in Cardiff, and being recognised locally, outside of the accountancy industry, feels really special.

The 30-Day Training Planner

If you've ever wondered where to start in Hey Monika, or what to focus on next, we've built something to help.

The 30-day training planner is a free assessment at heymonika.com/plan. It asks you a series of questions about your confidence across different skill areas, and then uses AI to work out which of our scenarios and challenges are the best match for what you need to be working on. It gives you a personalised list, and as you complete things, it updates.

You can retake it every 30 days to see how your scores have changed, which is a really useful way to track your own development over time.

Pricing & Team Dashboard

A quick reminder on how to access Hey Monika. A solo licence is £50 per month + VAT, giving you full access to all scenarios, challenges, and features (get a month free with code FREEBIE). A team licence covers up to five trainees for £100 per month, so if you've got two or more people in your team, it's worth going team.

For team licence holders, we're developing a dashboard that will let you see how your trainees are getting on, which scenarios they've attempted, how they scored, and whether they've gone back and tried again. We've got the data; now we're working out the most useful way to present it. If you're a team licence holder, look out for that soon, and we'll be in touch to ask for your feedback.

Stay in Touch

As always, if there's a scenario or challenge you'd love to see, if something isn't working for you, or if you've got ideas for how we can make Hey Monika better, please tell us. Comment on our videos, drop us an email, or connect on LinkedIn. Feedback, positive or critical, is how we build this.

You can also check our status page for any live issues, and our news page for the latest releases and updates.

We'll keep sharing these updates regularly. There's so much happening, and we want you to be part of it.

Thanks for reading, Zoe 
 

Let's start at the beginning. Hey Monika started with posts in The 6FB Facebook community. We have got 36,000 members in there now, and for years we were seeing the same thing coming up again and again: bookkeepers and accountants who had qualified, who could not get work because they had no experience, and who were so desperate to fix that they were offering to work for free. "I will volunteer. I just need to build practical experience." Over and over and over again.

And the more we talked about it, the more we realised this was not just a problem for people going self-employed. This is a problem across the whole profession. Training managers are struggling to get their people ready to hit the ground running. And I think a big part of that comes down to the fact that technology does so much of the work now. You can know all the theory in the world, pass all the exams, and then sit in front of your accounting software with a real client and feel completely underprepared. Because the textbooks have not caught up with the way real work actually looks.

I know this because I lived it. I retrained as a bookkeeper in 2016, having worked as a qualified accountant for about 15 years at that point, and I still felt like I did not know what I was doing when I got into the actual work. That is not a training failure. It is a structural gap in the way we prepare people for this profession. And Hey Monika is our attempt to fix it.

What the platform looks like right now

When you log in to Hey Monika, you get access to two different types of learning experience.

The first is what we call scenarios. These are end-to-end client simulations where you get a profile of a fake client, an introduction video from them, and then you work through a series of stages to complete their accounts. Along the way you are having conversations with the client, asking them for paperwork, downloading documents from the vault, going into Xero to do the actual work, and checking in with Monika (your AI mentor) when you need technical support or guidance. When you finish, you get a pass or fail. It genuinely gives you a feel for what working with a real client looks like, from the first conversation through to getting everything reconciled.

The second is Challenge Mode, and this is where a lot of our recent development has been focused. Challenges are more targeted. They take specific technical tasks, things like completing an accounts payable working paper or reconciling the VAT account, and walk you through them at beginner, intermediate, and advanced levels. The idea is that even if you have never seen a working paper in your life, by the time you have worked through beginner and intermediate and advanced, there should not be much that catches you off guard when your manager puts one in front of you.

What is new right now

We have just released video questions, and I am genuinely excited about this. Rather than text-based questions at each stage, in Challenge Mode, there are videos on screen walking you through what you need to do next, in Scenario Mode this means the client can send you a voicenote or a video message, sometimes to throw a curveball. It makes the whole experience feel much more like an office environment, and it makes the platform look a lot less like a quiz and a lot more like actual training.

We are also building something I am calling our foundation challenges. This came out of a conversation with Karen Kennedy of Kennedy Accountancy up in the Highlands, who told me about the challenges of bringing on an apprentice straight from school. And she is right: if someone has never worked in an office environment before, we need to go further back than "here is how to complete this working paper." We need to cover the fundamentals. What is the difference between a sole trader and a limited company? How do businesses actually make money? What does profit really mean, and how do people take it out of a business? What do different roles in accountancy actually look like, whether you are in practice or working in a finance team?

We are also getting feedback that we need to think about things like how to write a professional email. 

What we are building next

Here is the thing that I am most excited about, and it is a bit further out so bear with me.

At the moment, when you have a conversation with a client inside a scenario, you are typing messages in a chat window. It gets the job done, but let us be honest: it looks a bit like Facebook Messenger and that is not really what client communication looks like. So we are working on two things.

The first is voice calls. I want you to be able to press a button and actually speak to your fake client on the phone. So if you are working through a scenario where your client is resistant to moving over to MTD, she is not going to be pleasant about it, and you are going to have to handle that in real time. With an option to fall back to written chat if you really need it, a bit like the "can not speak right now" button on Duolingo. But the default should be the phone call, because that is what real client work looks like.

The second piece is moving the text-based client communication over to email format. Because that is what you actually do. You write "Hi Heidi, hope you are having a great week, just a reminder that I still need those invoices..." and you sign it off properly. So we are looking at shifting that whole interaction to feel more like drafting real emails.

And alongside both of those things, I want Monica to be able to give you feedback at the end. Not just a pass or fail score, but actual commentary on your communication: things to think about for next time, where you were confident, where you hesitated, whether you were assertive enough. That kind of feedback is what you would normally only get from a really hands-on manager, and most people just never get it.

We will in future work on a team manager dashboard so that practice owners and training managers can see how their team members are getting on, and we are looking at adding deadline tracking so that when you start a scenario, you can set yourself a deadline, see it on your dashboard, and get reminders as it approaches. Because real life is about managing multiple deadlines at once, and we want the platform to reflect that.

And one more thing I am really keen on: mapping all of our challenges and scenarios to the qualification syllabuses. One of the most common questions we get is "is this Level 2 or Level 3?" We want that to be completely clear, and we have got meetings coming up with ICS Learn, Training Link, and AAT to start working on exactly that.

It's an exciting time and if you have ideas, thoughts, feedback, things you want to see, people we should be talking to: come and find me on LinkedIn. We are building this in public and we want to hear from you.

Zoe