The number of retirement age entrepreneurs is going to be expected extremely high in the 2010’s. That’s why advisory services of business transfer have become of an essential demand. A role of an accounting office, as a provider of transfer services, has been discussed in numerous researches and seminars of business transfers.

The purpose of this study was to research the accounting office views on the role and challenges to the support in business transfer situations. In addition to this study, the account offices’ interest in developing the ownership skills of generation transfer has been investigated. The study is a qualitative case study with the resources of real research figures. Research material has been collected as a theme of the individual interviews with the professional accounting offices.

As a result of research, the accounting office plays an essential role in supporting the business transfer. An accounting office plays a leading role in inspiring an entrepreneur to plan a transfer process. When a company is getting ready to be transferred, an accounting office is in charge of specific issues as e.g. tax planning and target estimate implementation of a starting business. According to the result of the research, an accounting office is also considered to play the main and important role in tax planning of business generation transfer. While the ownership is being transferred, the role of the accounting office is concentrated on signing the contract documents, and, in addition, mainly on working with a new entrepreneur.

The result of the research shows, that the most essential challenges of an accounting office deal with the discussions with the entrepreneur both on the support of the transfer and company eval-uation. According to the results, an accounting office would like to develop its ownership skills on business generation transfer, which is found to be interesting, but on the other hand, updating of accounting offices’ basic issues on that point requires skills development respectively.

This thesis wasn’t actually an assignment, but the research results could be useful for planning some training courses on skills development and other customer services for accounting offices to be implemented in Upper-Savo Vocational College.