Senior RPA & automation talent and rates in Accounting & CPA Firms
Senior RPA & automation engineers serving accounting & cpa firms run roughly $110–$165/hr. Stack realities for this combination: QBO/Xero + Drake/Lacerte + Karbon + DocuSign — common integrations: QuickBooks Online + Xero + Sage Intacct, Drake + Lacerte + ProConnect tax, Karbon + Canopy practice management. Bookkeeping reconciliation; client-document chase; e-file routing
What RPA & automation actually requires in 2026
2026 RPA: UiPath, Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism remain market leaders. AI-augmented: UiPath AI Center, Microsoft Power Automate (now AI-flow). Open-source: Robocorp, TagUI. The trend: RPA + LLM is replacing pure RPA for unstructured-document tasks. RPA developers must understand the underlying business processes — automating a broken process scales the brokenness. Senior RPA engineers do process-discovery (UiPath Task Mining, Celonis) before building bots; junior teams build bots first and discover the process is wrong in production.