While Insightful Accountant never encourages comparing any ProAdvisor participating in the award process against another ProAdvisor, we feel it appropriate to provide you with some 'demographics' we can identify from the information obtained via the Official Applications submitted. The information within this article is summarized from those applications.
For example, approximately 68% of applicants previously participated in the ProAdvisor Awards process prior to 2025. That means that 32% were first-time participants in the awards this year.
Eighty-one percent of applicants categorize themselves as 'female'. Nearly 33% of applicants are between fifty and sixty years of age. Thirty-to-forty-year-old ProAdvisors make up 23.5% of all applicants, and 22.5% are in the forty-to-fifty age bracket.
Fifty percent of applicants met the minimum certification credential by reporting a QuickBooks ProAdvisor certification. Thirty-six percent reported possessing an Advanced QuickBooks ProAdvisor certification, and fourteen percent reported holding a QuickBooks Desktop certification. Note: Intuit implemented their 'Level 1' and 'Level 2' nomenclature too far into the awards process for us to modify the reporting information; however, the new nomenclature will be used in the 2026 awards process.
The vast majority (32%) of ProAdvisors participating hold at least a Bachelor's Degree in Accounting or Business, and 21% possess a Master's Degree in Accounting or Business.
Twenty-two percent of participants are either Certified Public Accountants, Public Accountants, or State-Licensed Accountants. Intuit Certified Bookkeeping Professionals or 'other' Certified Bookkeepers represent 25.8% of participants.
A vast majority of applicants consider themselves 'General Practitioners,' while only twenty-five percent consider the primary focus of their practices to be 'niche' specialized. One noted exception has consistently grown over the life of the ProAdvisor Awards: Nearly forty percent identify 'tax' as either the primary or secondary focus of their practices.
Directly related to the 'G.P' primary focus, 76% of participants specified that their primary focus was on providing accounting and bookkeeping services for multiple types of businesses, instead of focusing on specific business types.
Almost fifty percent of ProAdvisors have a practice based on services to 50 or more clients using QuickBooks. Even so, 18 percent of applicants are sole practitioners. Two and three-employee firms represent 23% of applicants. Even so, 9% of applicants work in firms with ten to fifteen employees.
Applicants report that 'Bookkeeping' accounts for 40% of the work they routinely perform, and tax services account for roughly 18% of the services provided.
Thirty-eight percent of ProAdvisors said their primary priority for 2025 is to "Grow their business." Applicants reported that the single most important area impacting the future of their profession was "Automation of routine functions."
Insightful Accountant is proud to announce that Award Applicants reported their highest recurring continuing education attendance in our QB Talks monthly webinars. Intuit's QBO In-the-Know webinars were the second highest-ranked recurring source of continuing education.
Sixty-five percent of the clients supported by applicant ProAdvisors use QuickBooks Online, and twenty-two percent use QBO-Advanced.
The number one QuickBooks function performed by ProAdvisor applicants is 'Data Clean-up,' representing twenty-three percent of all QuickBooks activities.
Of those QuickBooks ProAdvisors actively supporting clients using QuickBooks Online-Advanced, 'Professional service firms/businesses' represent the single largest type of business supported. 'Consulting firms' were the second-largest business type using QBO-Advanced.
QuickBooks Desktop ProAdvisors reported their practices using Intuit's ProSeries Tax software even more than QuickBooks Desktop software. Apparently, many tax accountants are still using QB-Desktop to support their clients.
Like their QBO ProAdvisor cousins, Desktop ProAdvisors also spend the majority of their time (using QuickBooks) to perform 'Data cleanup'.
Fifty-two percent of ProAdvisor applicants identifying themselves as providing CAS services reported that outsourced bookkeeping was their primary service provided.
Of those applicants who identified themselves as 'Payroll-H.R. Specialists, 47% told us that 100% of their work is' payroll-related. ' Thirty-four percent told us that 80 to 90% of their work is 'payroll,' in contrast to ten to twenty percent H.R. duties.
For the first time in the Awards' history, ProAdvisors identifying as 'educators' spent only 13.5% of their instructional activities within 'Intuit' sponsored events (Webinars, Boot-camps, Intuit Connect, etc.). The vast majority of their instructional activities were involved with 'Non-Intuit' sponsored events. Almost identical findings were reported by educators reporting 'written content contribution.' More than 65% of the content developed was for non-Intuit purposes. These findings most likely resulted from the sunset of Intuit's Trainer-Writer Network just a few months prior to the start of the 2025 Awards process.
Forty-eight percent of participating ProAdvisors ranked 'LinkedIn' as their number one Social Media preference. Thirty-three percent ranked Facebook as their number one preference.
Eighty-six percent of 'Up-n-Coming' ProAdvisors have their own ProAdvisor Practice.
Twenty-five percent of participants reported that their primary source of 'App Awareness' is from having seen the App exhibited at a conference. There was a tie for second place, with twenty percent reporting "recommended by a colleague" or "presented during a webinar" as their source(s) for 'App Awareness.'
However, when it came down to assessing an App, the number one method (35%) was by "asking a colleague what they thought about a specific app."
Stay tuned for more demographics in a future report.
