What I'm looking for at Accountex Manchester

At Accountex London earlier this year, Hidden Hours was the language.

The research put numbers around something accountants and bookkeepers already recognised: a large part of modern practice work sits outside the neat boundaries we use to describe the job. Client chasing. Extra support. Rework. Interpretation. Follow-up. Work that matters, but is easy to underestimate because it is distributed across the day rather than appearing as one obvious task.

I wrote after London that this was where the research met the profession it described. Now I’m heading to Accountex Manchester, and I’ve noticed something interesting before I’ve even arrived: the language is changing.

In Sage’s public build-up to the event, the problem is being described as “hidden admin” consuming time across practices, alongside the question of how AI and better-connected workflows can free capacity for higher-value work.

The same structure is also appearing through individual Sage voices. Chris Downing, one of Sage’s accountant-facing figures, describes the capacity challenge as something that is not solved simply by adding more technology. His framing connects removing hidden admin, joining workflows properly and using AI where it genuinely helps.

It is not the Hidden Hours label, but it is very recognisably the Hidden Hours argument. That distinction matters because a strong narrative should not depend on everyone repeating the same campaign phrase forever. If it has done its job, the underlying idea starts travelling on its own.

Hidden Hours can become hidden admin.

The label changes for the audience, channel, speaker and moment. The underlying problem survives, and that is one of the things I’ll be looking for in Manchester.

When the name disappears but the idea remains

There is a temptation in content and campaign work to treat consistency as repetition. We make a narrative, then keep using the same headline, terminology and proof points because that makes the connection visible. Sometimes that is necessary, but there is another form of consistency that is more interesting: conceptual consistency.

The words can move while the argument remains intact. In this case, the argument is roughly:

invisible work consumes capacity → that capacity has commercial and human consequences → technology and workflow change should reduce the burden → the time released needs somewhere more valuable to go.

That can appear in a research programme, a campaign, an event session, an article, a product conversation or a practitioner interview without every asset having to announce itself as part of the same thing. The Hidden Hours narrative is useful precisely because it provides a durable structure underneath those different expressions.

You know a narrative is starting to travel when people no longer need to use its name for you to recognise it. Manchester gives me a chance to see what happens next.

The channels are starting to connect

One reason I’m noticing this is that my own role sits across some of these boundaries. I work in a social content and customer stories team, while much of my day-to-day work has traditionally been rooted in written editorial.

That means the same underlying idea can appear very differently depending on where I encounter it. On social, Hidden Hours can become the more immediate language of hidden admin. In a practitioner interview, it might appear as chasing records or correcting client mistakes. In a longer article, it can become an argument about capacity and operating models. In video, it might be a 30-second answer from an accountant. And in GEO, the question becomes whether those answers are clear, authoritative and useful enough to surface when somebody asks an AI system for help.

I’m increasingly less interested in treating those as separate content jobs. The more useful question is whether the same evidence and narrative can move through all of them without being flattened into identical messaging.

That is a different kind of consistency. It is not asking every channel to say the same thing. It is asking whether the organisation is building from the same underlying knowledge while allowing the expression to change.

MTD is where the argument gets specific

The other reason I’m interested in this event is Making Tax Digital.

MTD is often discussed as a compliance programme, a deadline or a software-readiness problem. Those things matter, but they can hide the more useful editorial question: what does the change actually do to the operating rhythm of a practice?

That takes us straight back to Hidden Hours. Quarterly updates are not just a change in submission frequency. They potentially change when work happens, how often clients need chasing, how practices collect and check information, what gets reviewed during the year and what still has to be resolved at Final Declaration.

Then there are clients with multiple sources of income. That sounds like a technical category until you start asking what it means operationally: different information arriving at different times, incomplete records, more client communication, more judgement, and more opportunities for work to spill beyond the obvious task.

Those are the conversations I want to have at Accountex North. Not simply “Are you ready for MTD?”, but questions that expose where the work actually moves:

• What changes between quarterly updates and Final Declaration in real practice?
• Where does the additional work actually appear?
• Which parts are automated, and which parts still depend on human checking, interpretation or chasing?
• What happens when a client has several income sources rather than one clean stream?
• Does software remove work, or does some of the work simply move somewhere less visible?

That last question feels particularly important. AI and automation can compress execution time, but that does not automatically mean the surrounding responsibility disappears. Review, validation, exception handling, client communication and accountability can remain even when the original task becomes faster.

So the useful question is not whether technology saves time in the abstract. It is where the time goes.

I’m going to look for evidence, not just content

That changes what I think an event is for.

The standard content-marketing question is: what can we make while we’re there? Video clips, social posts, interviews, event recaps and quotes are all useful, but I’m increasingly interested in another question: what don’t we know yet that the people in this room could answer?

That is where my recent thinking about GEO and editorial work comes in. Search and AI systems are useful not only because they show us what language to optimise around. They also expose where the available answers are weak, generic, repetitive or unsupported, and that can become an editorial reporting brief.

If people are asking a question about quarterly updates and the existing answers are vague, the response should not always be another rewrite of what we already know. Sometimes the right move is to find a practitioner and ask the missing question, then follow it with the example, edge case or complication that reveals where the neat narrative breaks.

The useful chain starts to look something like this:

GEO can show me the question → the event can help me acquire the missing evidence → written content can establish the fuller answer → video can provide a direct practitioner voice → social can carry the most useful part of the argument into the audience’s everyday conversation.

That is the logic behind treating an event as part of an evidence engine, rather than just a production moment. The evidence can strengthen an article, a video, a FAQ, an AI answer, a campaign argument or the next interview itself. More importantly, those are no longer separate outputs competing for attention. They are different expressions of the same underlying evidence.

So my experiment in Manchester is not really content capture. It is evidence capture — and then seeing how intelligently that evidence can travel.

What I’ll be watching for

There are three things I want to test at the event:

• whether the Hidden Hours argument continues to appear in practitioner conversations even when nobody uses the phrase Hidden Hours
• whether MTD gives us a more concrete view of where hidden administrative work is actually being created, removed or redistributed
• whether going into an event with known evidence gaps produces better editorial material than arriving with a generic instruction to “get some content”

That final point matters beyond accounting. Events are one of the rare moments when an organisation has customers, experts, practitioners, internal specialists and live industry discussion concentrated in the same place. Treating that only as a distribution opportunity wastes part of the value because an event is also a temporary research environment.

The job is not simply to broadcast what the organisation already thinks. It is to use the room to make what the organisation knows better.

So if you’re at Accountex Manchester, look out for the Hidden Hours argument — even when nobody calls it Hidden Hours. I’ll be listening for it in the MTD conversations, the workflow conversations and the arguments about AI and capacity, then I’ll see whether the narrative survives contact with the evidence.