For some, the Accountancy Daily Top 75 league table will be a game of one-upmanship, with partners asking whether their firm has finally overtaken their rivals.

But the movements of multiple practices within the table and detailed segmentation of fees by service line, along with partner numbers, gives us a broader picture of the profession’s direction of travel.

For example, not only can we use several years’ worth of statistics to plot firms’ performance, but the appearance and non-appearance of firms in the dataset can also be used to understand what is happening to the practice market.

There are of course the inevitable mergers and acquisitions. This year we have seen several Moore Stephens’ offices, including London, move in with BDO. The knock-on effect was for Kingston Smith to leave the international network it had helped found, KSi, to join Moore Global.