Scottish firm EQ Chartered Accountants, the Scottish hub of Sumer Group, has completed a merger with Innes & Partners, extending its presence into Inverness and Livingston and lifting staff numbers from 290 to 310, a deal that matters broadly because it adds a 20-person team and non-profit client base to a fast-growing regional practice, and matters specifically to accountancy professionals because it shows consolidation increasingly happening in two tiers: national groups expanding by empowering regional hub firms to run their own acquisition programmes, rather than buying every local practice directly.

EQ Chartered Accountants is a Dundee-headquartered practice among Scotland's 20 largest accounting firms, appointed as Sumer Group's Scottish hub in January 2024 and having since merged separately with Douglas Home & Co and McDonald Gordon & Co to extend across Tayside, Fife and Scotland's Central Belt.

Innes & Partners is an Inverness and Livingston-based chartered certified accountancy practice established in 2013, serving private individuals, business owners and non-profit entities including charities, social enterprises and charitable trusts.

EQ chief executive Craig Nicol said Innes & Partners' client relationships perfectly complement our mission to champion SMEs across the practice's expanding footprint.

The deal illustrates how Sumer Group actually grows: rather than acquiring every independent practice centrally, it recruits a small number of regional hub firms, EQ among them, and lets those hubs run their own local merger programmes under the wider group's technology and compliance support.

That structure means EQ has now completed at least two sub-acquisitions of its own since joining Sumer in January 2024, alongside Sumer's parallel deals with firms such as Monahans, Carpenter Box and Simmons Gainsford elsewhere in the UK.

For accountancy professionals, the practical implication is that an approach from a national consolidator may in practice come from a regional hub acting on its own initiative, not head office, changing who firms should expect to negotiate with.

For the sector, the read-across is direct: Sumer's network already includes a Northern Ireland hub, meaning the same federated growth model EQ is running in Scotland is already active on the island.

Source: International Accounting Bulletin / Scottish Financial News / Sumer Group / LeadIQ