Two regional accountancy firms with offices in the Bath area are celebrating leaping up the accounting industry’s most prestigious league table.
Bishop Fleming, whose base on Lower Bristol Road is the city’s largest accountants’ office, has broken into the top 30 of leading industry magazine Accountancy Age’s rankings for the first time. 
The firm, which achieved a 12% annual turnover increase to £22.3m through organic growth in the past year, was at number 33 in last year’s table.
Also climbing up the rankings is Old Mill, which has offices in Melksham, Wells, Exeter and Yeovil. It rose five places to 35.
The firm, which looks after more than 5,000 private and business clients, increased fee income by 9% over the past year taking its total fee income to £18.11m.
Accountancy Age’s Top 50+50 table is published each year by Accountancy Age. It is based on fee income and is regarded as one of the definitive lists of the UK’s leading accountancy firms.
Bishop Fleming said its performance this year cemented its position as one of the UK’s fastest-growing advisory firms. It has 29 partners and well over 300 staff in its seven offices across the West Midlands and South West.
It opened its Bath base in 2012 having bought parts of rival firm Target out of administration. It has also recently been ranked 42nd in The Sunday Times 100 Best Companies to Work For and shortlisted in the Large Practice category of AccountingWEB's Practice Excellence Awards.
Partner and head of the Bath office Andrew Sandiford said: “Our ranking as a top 30 firm reflects our strengthening team and is recognition of how we help our clients to achieve their full potential. Our business growth enables us to continually invest in new talent to expand our team even further.
“Despite uncertainty over Brexit, Bishop Fleming has continued to experience rapid growth in demand for our services across all sectors. The firm is set to expand even further with the forthcoming digital tax revolution and other key issues including Big Data analytics.”
Old Mill managing director Ian Carlson said the firm was always striving to offer the best service to its clients and the new ranking in the 50+50 was independent validation that the business was on the right tracks.
“Our business model is actually quite a simple one. We recruit great people, then train and support them and provide them with the tools and technology needed to give our clients outstanding service,” he said.
“If we do this really well, then as a business we can grow – more people will want to work here and more clients will want to be looked after by us.
“Our ability to offer our clients a truly joined-up service really helps us here – they love the fact that they can receive accountancy, financial planning and tax planning advice all under one roof, as well as support in other specialist areas such as payroll, pensions and VAT. We have made significant investments recently to help us with this, particularly in respect of our IT infrastructure in areas such as client portals and cloud accounting.
“This year has also been the first full year for our new food and drink team, which has exceeded expectations in terms of the number of new clients they have brought in, proving that there is a real appetite for a specialist food and drink business adviser in the region.”
Topping the Accountancy Age table are the so-called Big Four firms – PwC, Deloitte, EY and KPMG – which all cover Bath from regional offices in Bristol.
National firm Moore Stephens, which has an office in Bath, appears in 9th place – the same as last year.
