Vendor's guide

Which accounting conferences are worth your money?

There is no shortage of accounting events. There is a serious shortage of honest advice about which ones a software vendor should actually exhibit at. This is our read of the circuit, by market — who's in the room, what each one is good for, and where the money gets wasted.

Plan your event year with us How we run events →

We've deliberately left dates out. They move every year, and a stale calendar helps nobody. Live dates and registration live on The Firm's event directory — our sister publication for the accounting profession — and we've linked each event through to it.

Australia

Xerocon Australia

Flagship
Who's in the room
Xero-aligned practices, from sole practitioners to mid-tier firms. Heavy on practice owners and client managers.
Good for
The single densest concentration of Xero-ecosystem buyers in the market. If your product integrates with Xero and sells to Australian firms, this is the flagship.
Watch out
Expensive, crowded, and every competitor is there. Without pre-booked meetings and existing brand recognition you'll be background noise on a very loud floor.
Dates & registration on The Firm →

Accounting Business Expo (Sydney / Melbourne)

Major
Who's in the room
Broad cross-section of accountants, bookkeepers and finance professionals. Platform-agnostic.
Good for
Volume and breadth. Good for a first Australian presence, for testing messaging against a wide audience, and for reaching firms outside the Xero-first crowd.
Watch out
Breadth cuts both ways — a lot of foot traffic that isn't your buyer. Qualify hard and fast or you'll spend two days on conversations that go nowhere.
Dates & registration on The Firm →

ICB Australian Bookkeepers Summit

Focused
Who's in the room
Bookkeepers in practice, via the Institute of Certified Bookkeepers.
Good for
Reaching bookkeepers directly — a group routinely under-served by vendors despite being the earliest adopters of new software inside most firms.
Watch out
Smaller than the flagships. Judge it on quality of conversation, not scan count, or you'll wrongly conclude it didn't work.
Dates & registration on The Firm →
United Kingdom

Accountex London

Flagship
Who's in the room
The broadest gathering of UK accountants and bookkeepers there is — practices of every size, plus finance teams.
Good for
The default first stop for entering the UK. Enormous reach, and the surrounding week is thick with fringe events, dinners and meetups where the real conversations happen.
Watch out
Scale is the problem as well as the point. Stands blur together. We've had far better results building a tour and side events around Accountex than relying on the floor alone.

Digital Accountancy Show

Major
Who's in the room
Tech-forward UK firms — practices actively evaluating and adopting software rather than browsing.
Good for
Buyer intent. A smaller room than Accountex but a far higher concentration of people who are genuinely in-market for accounting technology.
Watch out
You need a sharp proposition. This audience has seen a lot of demos and will not be impressed by a feature tour.

Xerocon London

Flagship
Who's in the room
Xero-aligned UK practices.
Good for
The UK Xero ecosystem in one place, with Xero's own partner team present — useful for app marketplace relationships as well as end-customer demand.
Watch out
Only worth it if Xero is genuinely central to your product. The UK ledger market is far more mixed than Australia's.
Dates & registration on The Firm →

Finance, Accounting & Bookkeeping Show (Birmingham)

Focused
Who's in the room
Regional UK practices, with a strong bookkeeping contingent.
Good for
Reaching firms outside the London orbit. Regional events consistently punch above their weight for relationship-building.
Watch out
Lower volume. Treat it as a relationship play, not a lead-volume play.
Dates & registration on The Firm →
United States

Intuit Connect

Flagship
Who's in the room
QuickBooks-aligned accountants, bookkeepers and ProAdvisors.
Good for
The QuickBooks ecosystem's flagship. Essential if you're building on QuickBooks and selling into US firms, and the place to build a relationship with Intuit's own partner organisation.
Watch out
Intuit's event, Intuit's rules. Understand what exhibitors can and can't do before you budget for it.
Dates & registration on The Firm →

Scaling New Heights

Major
Who's in the room
Accounting and bookkeeping practitioners focused on practice growth, with a strong consultant and trainer presence.
Good for
Influence. A high concentration of the consultants and trainers other US firms listen to — which makes it disproportionately valuable for the word-of-mouth layer.
Watch out
Education-led. A hard-sell stand presence sits badly with the culture of the event.
Dates & registration on The Firm →

QuickFest

Focused
Who's in the room
QuickBooks-centric practitioners and the wider ProAdvisor community.
Good for
Focused access to an engaged QuickBooks audience without flagship-level cost.
Watch out
Narrow by design. Only relevant if QuickBooks is your platform.
Dates & registration on The Firm →
Global

SuiteWorld

Major
Who's in the room
NetSuite ecosystem — larger finance teams, ERP-scale implementations and their advisors.
Good for
A different buyer entirely: mid-market and enterprise finance rather than public practice. Right if you're moving upmarket.
Watch out
This is not a public-practice audience. If you sell to small and mid-sized accounting firms, it's the wrong room.
Dates & registration on The Firm →

World Congress of Accountants (WCOA)

Major
Who's in the room
The global profession — bodies, regulators, large firms, policy.
Good for
Standing and relationships at the institutional level. Valuable if professional-body partnerships are core to your strategy.
Watch out
Almost no direct pipeline. Go for relationships and positioning, or don't go.
Dates & registration on The Firm →

Running your own event instead? Read why the market doesn't need more of them before you commit the budget.

How we help

We've run these events, not just attended them

We've curated headline speakers for Intuit QuickBooks, led the ACCA UK roadshows for years, consulted on the launch of The Access Group's flagship Australian conference, and run the largest virtual accounting summit end to end — 20,000+ attendees. We also brought AppVentory and FirmCheck into the UK market on a tour around Accountex London.

See how we run events Read the FirmCheck UK launch →

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