Please excuse the late posting; I was not near a PC earlier in the day. This proved to be just the right flavour of puzzle for my footloose Friday, not overly challenging or time-consuming but offering a some food for thought. There seems to be a mini-theme going on, with the likes of 1a,9a,20a & 29a playing to the accountancy addicts in the FT gallery.
Incidentally, I notice that Adamant does not feature on Peter B’s freshly updated list of setters (an uber-blogger’s work is never done!), so will flag it with a comment in the appropriate thread.

Across
1 ACCOUNT P,AID
9 PA,YEE (eye)*
10 ECONOMIST (comes into)* - an alternative anagram treatment to oft-cited “I’m one involved with cost” examplar of &lit clues.
11 U,N(TIDI)EST (it I’d)* - A nostalgic surface reading for anyone who’s ever lived in student houseshare (”But we only just did the washing up last month”)
13 E(NLI)VEN - I’ll mention the indirect anagram here (”nothing broken”=NIL*=>NLI) just to provoke the purists.
20 SETTLER - doube def
24 THE,OR,ETIC (cite)rev
26 T(HE’S)AURUS - great surface. My fave of the day.
29 EXPORT TRADE (extra red top) - A “red top” being a literal nickname for a tabloid paper. A quite different beast from our host broadsheet, the pink’un.

Down
1 A,MP,OULES (louse)* - “glass containers” and, incidentally, French for lightbulbs.
2 CRY,STALS (s(on) last)* - I’d liked “taking rocks” as the anagrind, but am possibly in the minority camp.
3 UP,END - as opposed to “Down at the start”.
7 GLITCH - hidden in “HavinG LIT CHristmas”
16 PLETHO,RA (help to)* - The definition (”Too much”) is perfectly fine. I suppose a plethora could be viewed either positively, as an abundance of, or as a surfeit of.
20 SPENSER - double def. The “Elizabethan poet” whose coinages are still represented in Chambers dictionary. Also a “garment” apparently?
21 STATU(-e)S
25 RIVET - hidden in “stRIVE To”

Solving time: 30 minutes, but needed to look up 17ac, made a mistake (4dn) and can’t fathom 18ac.

I found this pretty difficult, and took a long time to work out what ‘5ac 21′ and ‘5dn 21′ were all about, not helped by not knowing the phrase at 21/22dn, PARTI PRIS. 21 is therefore PARTI = ‘Part 1′, indicating the first syllables of the two answers at 5, ‘bear’ and ‘bull’. Whether this theme was inspired by the American Stock Exchange or Chicago’s basketball and american football teams, I’m not sure.

* = anagram, “X” = sounds like ‘X’.