On the face of it, accountants have been having a pretty good time in recent years – once again, the Top 75 accountancy firms have seen a significant hike in fee income, now comfortably reaching more than £24bn for the last financial year, a 14% increase on the previous year.

In fact, you need to go back to 2010 to find a year in which the firms did not report a combined increase in turnover, a reflection largely of the financial crisis that engulfed the business world at that time.