In view of Accolti's growing dislike of legal practice, it is not surprising that, immediately after his election, he threw himself entirely into the work of the chancery; it has been seen that the Florentine chancellorship was essentially the office of a professional humanist and so in his work as chancellor Accolti was finally able to devote himself to the field of study and activity for which he had hitherto been able to find little time because of the demands of his legal career. After Poggio's disastrous term of office and the interregnum between September 1456 and April 1458, the chancery was in dire need of an effective head, and Accolti was to prove himself more than able to meet the challenge. In his work of renewal and reform, Accolti had two eminently successful predecessors upon whom he could model himself. Indeed, both Leonardo Bruni and Carlo Marsuppini had been not only his compatriots from Arezzo but also his personal friends and mentors, which made it almost inevitable that Accolti would attempt to carry on the methods and practices which they had established in the chancery. In fact, the striking similarities between Accolti's reforms and those introduced by Bruni and Marsuppini suggest that Accolti not only looked to them as models but also had an ambition to join them in the annals of Florentine history, so creating a third Aretine crown among fifteenth-century chancellors to match the three crowns of fourteenth-century Florence, Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio.

Bruni's ideal of a specialized chancery, it has been seen, had never been realized in his lifetime; only his friend and fellow Aretine, Marsuppini, had achieved an effective separation in the first years of his chancellorship.