SOC 2 Type II certified. IRS §7216 compliant.
Dedicated staff from $8 to $35 per hour, all-inclusive by role. Your first 40 hours are free.
Illinois CPA firms are not losing accountants to a hiring boom. They are losing them to turnover.
The Illinois Department of Employment Security projects 7,550 average annual openings for accountants and auditors between 2024 and 2034. Almost none of that is growth.
Roughly 95 percent is replacement demand, as people leave the occupation or move to another one. The work does not shrink when they go, and the recruiting clock resets every time.
A Chicago client puts your firm on a four-layer filing stack: the IRS, the Illinois Department of Revenue, Cook County, and the City of Chicago, which runs its own returns and its own department of finance.
That is jurisdiction-specific compliance no software abstracts away, and it consumes the hours of the licensed people you can least afford to lose:
IRS
Federal
Illinois DOR
State
Cook County
County
City of Chicago
Its own returns + Dept. of Finance
That is the gap accounting outsourcing closes. Acculink places dedicated offshore accounting staff with Illinois CPA firms at 60 to 70 percent below local market rates, working your hours, in your systems, under your review. Firms that move to outsourced accounting keep the capacity and drop the payroll risk that comes with it. Our team of 300+ professionals includes CPAs, Enrolled Agents, Chartered Accountants, and Big-4 alumni.
The most common way Illinois CPA firms work with Acculink is the dedicated staffing model. You hire a professional who works exclusively for your firm, on your schedule, under your direct supervision. This is not a shared service or an outsourced task queue. It is your person, doing your firm's work.
Illinois CPA firms hire through Acculink for:
You meet the professional before the engagement starts, set the tasks, and review the output. Two engagement models are available: a dedicated full-time hire (one professional working exclusively for your firm) and a managed team for practices that need broader coverage across multiple roles.
Build a dedicated offshore team matched to your firm's work, from entry-level support to senior oversight.
Daily transaction entry, reconciliations, and ledger upkeep.
Accounts receivable, payable, and billing management.
General ledger, month-end close, and financial statements.
Individual, corporate, and pass-through return preparation.
End-to-end payroll, Illinois withholding, and unemployment insurance filings.
Workpapers and documentation for reviews and compilations.
Cash flow forecasting, budgeting, and management reporting.
From daily bookkeeping to Illinois-specific tax workpapers, your dedicated team works across the platforms your clients already use.
Illinois forms handled
Illinois Industries
You know your client base. The question is whether our staff can work it. Here is what they handle across the sectors Illinois CPA firms serve most.
Multi-entity consolidations, intercompany reconciliations, and multistate apportionment. Illinois ranks seventh nationally for headquarters establishments but third for headquarters employment, so the ones here are unusually large.
Partnership accounting, trader tax treatment, investment income schedules, and multistate returns for the trading, clearing, and proprietary firms clustered around CME Group and Cboe Global Markets.
Inventory and cost accounting, percentage-of-completion methods, equipment depreciation schedules, and the Illinois addbacks that no longer track the federal return, for the base anchored by Archer-Daniels-Midland, Deere & Company, and Illinois Tool Works.
Multistate nexus schedules, apportionment, and fixed-asset work for the freight, warehousing, and third-party logistics companies built around the Chicago rail interchange.
Revenue recognition, cost reporting, and multi-entity payroll for the physician groups, device suppliers, and ancillary companies around Abbott, AbbVie, and Baxter International.
A generic offshore team is not the same as one that has done your clients' work before. Acculink's dedicated professionals are matched to your firm based on your clients' specific industries.
The salary figure is only part of the story. Here is how the true cost of an Illinois hire compares to a dedicated Acculink team.
For a Chicago, Naperville, or Springfield firm carrying two or three accounting positions, the cost comparison between in-house and offshore is the most important number in the practice.
| In-House Hire (Illinois) | Acculink Offshore | |
|---|---|---|
| Staff accountant pay | $60,000–$78,000 / year (Chicago, staff level) | $8–$35 / hour, all-inclusive by role |
| Employer payroll taxes and benefits | On top of salary | None |
| Office overhead | On top of salary | None |
| Recruiting and placement | Per hire | None |
| Training | Firm's cost | Included |
| Time to productive | 3–5 months | 2–3 weeks |
| SOC 2 Type II coverage | Firm's responsibility | Included |
| Turnover risk | High | Low |
At $8 to $35 an hour, all-inclusive, Acculink staff cut the fully loaded cost of those seats by 60 to 70 percent. The gap widens once employer taxes, benefits, overhead, recruiting, and turnover are added to the in-house side, and in a market where roughly 95 percent of annual openings are replacement rather than growth, those costs recur.
Illinois moved a lot of rules in the last eighteen months, and much of the published guidance has not caught up. Three of them create recurring work, and one is reported wrong almost everywhere you look. Your Acculink team handles the production work behind all three, alongside the replacement tax computation that rides on every Illinois business return.
Illinois, at a glance
Chicago's combined sales tax rises 10.25% → 10.50% on August 1, 2026 — confirm the rate against the effective date before each filing.
The Illinois pass-through entity tax election was drafted to expire for tax years beginning on or after January 1, 2026. Public Act 104-0453, signed December 12, 2025, removed the expiration date. A large body of commentary written before that date still describes the election as sunsetting, and the vehicle bill carried the short title "PROP TX-AFFORDABLE HOUSING," so the change is easy to miss.
Two things follow. The election is permanent, computed at 4.95%, made annually on the IL-1065 or IL-1120-ST, and irrevocable once the extended due date passes. And for tax years ending on or after December 31, 2026, Public Act 104-0468 gives partnerships a choice between two calculation methods, which turns the election from a checkbox into a modeling decision on every partnership return. Your Acculink team prepares the computation and the Schedule K-1-P credits for your review.
Chicago is a separate taxing authority with its own department of finance and its own returns, and two of its numbers have moved inside twelve months. One moves again in weeks.
The Personal Property Lease Transaction Tax reached 15% of receipts on January 1, 2026, up from 11% during 2025 and 9% before that. Under the city's Ruling #12 it applies to non-possessory computer leases, defined to include cloud computing, hosted environments, and software as a service, and the ruling's own list of taxable uses names tax preparation and spreadsheet preparation. Use is presumed at each user's principal office, so clients with staff across multiple offices apportion, and those with ten or more seats may register to self-remit. Chicago also became the first jurisdiction in the country to tax social media on January 1, 2026, at 50 cents per Chicago consumer per month above 100,000 consumers.
Effective August 1, 2026, the transit tax across Cook, DuPage, Kane, Lake, McHenry, and Will counties rises 0.25 percentage points and the authority is renamed from the Regional Transportation Authority to the Northern Illinois Transit Authority. Chicago's combined rate on general merchandise moves from 10.25% to 10.50% that day, and every jurisdiction in those six counties re-rates with it. Your Acculink team tracks these and prepares the filings on the schedule your firm sets.
A 2019 law put the Illinois franchise tax on a phase-out toward repeal. Public Act 102-16, effective June 17, 2021, repealed the phase-out. The tax is live, levied on paid-in capital rather than income, and filed with the Secretary of State rather than the Department of Revenue, with the first $10,000 of liability exempt since January 1, 2025. For most small corporate clients that means no tax due and an annual report still required, on a separate calendar with a separate authority. Repeal bills have been introduced and have not passed, and their text is what surfaces in most searches.
Illinois has also stopped following the federal return in two places. Public Act 104-0453 decoupled Illinois from 100% bonus depreciation under IRC Section 168(n) for tax years beginning on or after January 1, 2026, with the addback on Form IL-4562, and Public Act 104-0468 decoupled from the qualified small business stock exclusion under IRC Section 1202 for tax years ending on or after December 31, 2026. Any client with QSBS or heavy fixed-asset activity now needs a state computation that diverges from the federal one.
Illinois law does not only regulate your firm when you hand client data to an outside provider. It regulates the provider too, and it dictates what has to be in the contract between you. Acculink is built to operate inside those rules.
Section 7216 requires written client consent before tax return information is disclosed to a preparer located outside the United States. That holds even though your Acculink professional works as your own staff under your supervision: 26 CFR 301.7216-2(c)(2) is explicit, and the exception that lets one US preparer share with another without consent is limited to preparers located in the United States. No engagement structure removes it, and a provider who tells you otherwise is worth a second look.
We do not ask you to work around it. We make it easy to meet. For 1040-series returns, the taxpayer's Social Security number must be masked before the return information goes offshore, unless the engagement meets the adequate data protection safeguard standard and your firm verifies that in the consent request. Your Acculink team works to your firm's consent and masking procedures, and your firm keeps ownership of client data and review of all output.
Illinois reaches outsourcing more directly than most state data laws, and it works in your favour. Section 45(b) of the Personal Information Protection Act (815 ILCS 530) requires that a contract disclosing personal information about an Illinois resident must include a provision requiring the recipient to implement and maintain reasonable security measures. Illinois legislates the contract clause itself, so the protection is a line item in the agreement you sign, not an abstract duty.
Section 45(a) applies the same obligation to a provider that maintains or stores those records without owning them, so Acculink carries its own statutory duty here rather than sitting outside the statute. Section 10(b) then requires that provider to notify you of any breach immediately following discovery and to cooperate on the details — stricter than most states, and a promise we make to you.
A CPA firm that prepares income tax returns is a financial institution under the FTC Safeguards Rule, and 16 CFR 314.4(f) is the clause that governs an offshore engagement: select providers capable of maintaining appropriate safeguards, require those safeguards by contract, and periodically assess the provider. Read it alongside the state rule: Section 45(d) of the Illinois Act routes a firm complying with the federal Gramm-Leach-Bliley standard to that standard instead. Both roads arrive at the same place — a contractual security commitment from the provider and a diligence record you can produce. The Illinois breach-notification duty under Section 10 has no federal safe harbor and applies regardless.
You already delegate production work to unlicensed staff, and Illinois says so expressly. Section 11 of the Public Accounting Act (225 ILCS 450) provides that the Act does not prohibit any person from keeping books, making trial balances or statements, or preparing tax and information returns. The condition attached is the important part: that person must not indicate or in any manner imply that the work was prepared or examined by a CPA, or that it represents a CPA's independent opinion. Attest stays with licensees under Section 8.05. Illinois also adopts the AICPA Code of Professional Conduct by rule, under which your firm should inform the client before disclosing confidential information to a third-party provider, and then either contract with that provider for confidentiality or obtain specific client consent. The contract is an alternative to consent, not an addition to it. Your firm signs the work and owns the engagement.
| Certification | What It Covers |
|---|---|
| SOC 2 Type II | Security, availability, and confidentiality controls, independently audited over time |
| ISO 27001:2013 | Information security management system, independently certified |
| IRS §7216 | Structured compliance for tax return data handling |
| GDPR | Data handling standards for international client data |
Most Illinois CPA firms are fully operational within a few weeks. The steps below describe onboarding for the dedicated staffing model.
You describe your firm's needs: role, software platforms, practice areas, and client industries. Acculink identifies candidates from its bench of 300+ professionals. You review profiles and meet candidates before making any commitment.
You select your professional and confirm the engagement terms: start date, hours, rate, and scope. No setup fee. No lock-in contract.
Your Acculink professional receives access to your software and workflow documentation. The first two to three weeks are a supervised ramp-up period. Most professionals reach full productivity within 30 days.
Your Acculink team member works on your schedule, in your systems, under your direct supervision. You set the work. You review the output. You own the client relationship.
US GAAP, IRS requirements, and Illinois-specific work including the Personal Property Replacement Tax, the pass-through entity election, Chicago's separate city filings, and the Illinois addbacks that no longer follow the federal return.
SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001:2013 certifications with the contractual security terms Section 45(b) requires your firm to obtain.
Dedicated full-time staff or a managed team, depending on your firm's volume and growth stage.
Compared to in-house accounting staff at Illinois market rates.
In a market where roughly 95 percent of annual accounting openings come from replacement rather than growth.
Your Acculink professional reports to you, not to a project manager or queue system.
No setup fee, and no long-term lock-in.
CPAs, Enrolled Agents, Chartered Accountants, and Big-4 alumni.
Illinois firms are not short of accounting work. They are short of the people to do it, and the seats keep emptying. Acculink gives your firm experienced, certified accounting staff at 60 to 70 percent below what an in-house hire in the Chicago area would cost, with the replacement tax, city filings, and Illinois addbacks handled under your review.
