Firms that wait until a partner is ready to retire have already waited too long, plus 19 more key takeaways.The DisruptorsWith Liz FarrErin Daiber, founder and CEO of Well Balanced Accountants, keeps seeing the same issue in firm after firm. A partner announces their intention to retire within a year or two, and the firm suddenly realizes no one is ready to take over. “Firms are not starting that conversation soon enough,” Daiber says.MORE STREAMING: Cannon: Busy Season is Self-Inflicted | Carroll: When One Person Can Break the Firm |  Rampe: Build a Roadmap Even When the Road's Not There | Chang: Killing SALY, One Agent at a Time | Vanover: 5-Star Firms Don't Bill by the Hour | Kless: Profit Is a Result. Flourishing Is the Purpose | Whitman: Build Culture on 'Progress,' Not Change | Shein: No PE? No M&A? No Problem | Hood and Weber: Time to RISE | Proctor: Turn Dumb Ideas into Brilliant Solutions | Carter-Gray: How 1 Poor Review Strengthened the Firm | Hartman: Upwork to “40 Under 40” in 3 Years “They’re not thinking about succession planning as a strategy,” she explains. Instead of treating succession as an ongoing process, firms see it as simply the point in time when a partner exits the firm. According to Daiber, succession planning should ideally begin with hiring decisions and culture building so that firms can be confident that they won’t lose clients or staff due to uncertainty about what might happen as partners get older.  When succession planning fails, firms lose key employees before they even reach partnership consideration. “We're losing them much sooner than that, which creates a big hole in the pipeline,” Daiber notes. She identifies an inability to have difficult conversations as the root cause, particularly when dealing with founders who view the firm as their legacy. 

A former IRS agent breaks down the red flags, revenue thresholds, and compliance work that advisors can’t ignore.The Concierge CPAWith Jackie MeyerFor CPA TrendlinesThe Concierge CPA hosts a deep dive into captive insurance planning this week, as host Dr. Jackie Meyer, CPA, and guest Vardan Pogosian, CPA, unpack both the risk-management foundations and tax-planning implications of small captive insurance companies. The episode clarifies a strategy that many tax professionals find complex or intimidating, with actionable guidance on identifying suitable clients and avoiding compliance risks.More Jackie MeyerCaptive insurance — typically formed under Internal Revenue Code Section 831(b) — allows businesses to establish their own insurance company to cover risks that may be difficult or costly to insure through commercial carriers. Under the provision, small qualifying captives can elect alternative tax treatment, in which premiums paid into the captive are tax-deductible to the operating business but not immediately recognized as income by the captive. Tax is generally deferred until the captive is dissolved, at which point capital gains tax applies.

Transparency, empowered administration, and intentional tech design separate advisory leaders from firms stuck in task work.It's Not Just the NumbersWith Penny Breslin and Damien GreatheadFor CPA TrendlinesClient Accounting Services (CAS) has moved well beyond bookkeeping. For firms serious about advisory, CAS is now a fundamentally different operating model, one that demands new roles, new systems, and a far higher level of internal transparency than traditional tax or audit practices ever required. In this episode of It’s Not Just the Numbers, Damien Greathead and Penny Breslin draw on more than two decades of shared experience to unpack what actually makes a modern CAS practice work in the real world. Their discussion goes beyond theory and into the structural, cultural, and operational decisions firms must confront if they want CAS to be scalable, profitable, and sustainable . MORE Penny Breslin and Damien Greathead | MORE Advisory & Consulting | BUY "It's Not Just the Numbers"Traditional accounting firms are built around specialization and hierarchy: junior and senior accountants, bookkeepers, managers, and partners, each working essentially in isolation on their own client list. That structure works for compliance, but it breaks down in a CAS environment. “CAS requires the team to approach the client holistically,” Breslin explains. “You can’t have people operating in silos. Everyone needs to understand the client’s goals, not just their individual task.” 

The Big Four pull ahead by treating AI as a system, not a shortcut.Accounting VoicesWith Rob BrownArtificial intelligence is no longer a side project in accounting. It is the main event.The largest firms are moving aggressively, clients are asking sharper questions, and expectations around speed, accuracy, and insight continue to rise. In the latest episode of Accounting Voices, the focus shifts past headlines and hype to examine what the Big Four are actually doing with AI—and why their moves matter far beyond the global giants.MORE Accounting Influencers with Rob BrownBrown does not chase flashy demos or speculative tech. Instead, he breaks down how AI is being operationalized in audit, tax, and advisory work—and how firms without billion-dollar budgets can compete by doing fewer things better.

It accelerates advisory work, but only if firms rethink pricing and risk.Gear Up for GrowthWith Jean CaragherFor CPA TrendlinesOn this episode of Gear Up for Growth, host Jean Caragher sits down with John Higgins, founder and CEO of Higgins Advisory, to explore how ChatGPT and generative AI are reshaping advisory services, pricing models, and the way CPAs work.Higgins is blunt about the opportunity—and the risk. “AI and ChatGPT-type tools can become your advisory services assistant,” he says. “They help CPAs communicate better as advisors and focus on what matters most for each client. But you can’t let them turn into a way of giving away your time.”Gear Up for Growth spotlights the best strategies for smart and effficient growth in today's competitive landscape. More Gear Up for Growth every Friday here.| More Capstone Conversations with Jean Caragher every Monday | More Jean Caragher here | Get her best-selling handbook, The 90-Day Marketing Plan for CPA Firms, here | More CPA Trendlines videos and podcasts hereFor decades, CPAs have been told they need to “become more advisory.” The challenge hasn’t been belief—it’s been execution. Many practitioners equate advisory with answering questions accurately, rather than proactively guiding decisions.Generative AI changes that equation.

Less legacy infrastructure could mean faster adoption and outsized opportunity.Accounting ARCWith Liz Mason, Byron Patrick, and Donny ShimamotoCenter for Accounting TransformationIn their New Year’s episode, the hosts of Accounting ARC do something many industry commentators avoid: they revisit last year’s predictions, mark what proved accurate, and adjust what did not. Donny Shimamoto, CPA.CITP, CGMA — founder and managing director of IntrapriseTechKnowlogies and founder and inspiration architect of the Center for Accounting Transformation— joins Liz Mason, CPA, CEO and founder of High Rock Accounting, and Byron Patrick, CPA.CITP, CGMA, senior product manager for Karbon, and co-founder and educator for TB Academy, to grade last year's predictions and discuss what's to come in 2026. MORE Accounting ARC: Downgraded: What the DOE Said About Accounting | Savage: Using Your License as a Megaphone |  Baker: Interpreting Pricing Psychology | Don’t Get Fired by Your Own Automation | What Amazon Doesn't Tell You | Royalties, Residuals, and Reality Checks | ARC-SLC | Free Speech Is a Right; Respect Is a Responsibility | Cash Bags, Casinos & Audits: How First Jobs Shape Us | Gen Z Redefines Careers | Bootleggers, Baptitsts & CPAs: Rethinking LicensureThe episode blends reflective scorekeeping with forward-looking speculation, centering on three forces that continue to reshape accounting: alternative licensure pathways, the pace of AI adoption, and the role of culture in firm competitiveness.

Firms that treat communication as strategy—not admin—move faster, scale smarter, and keep trust intact.MOVE Like ThisWith Bonnie Buol RuszczykFor CPA TrendlinesOn this episode of MOVE Like This, host Bonnie Buol Ruszczyk explores a deceptively simple question with Alice Grey Harrison, founder of AGH Consulting: Why do so many firm transformations stall—not because of strategy, but because of communication?With more than 30 years of experience in strategic communications and change management within the accounting profession, Harrison has seen firms navigate mergers, private equity investments, leadership transitions, system implementations, and cultural shifts.The difference between momentum and misery, she argues, is rarely technical. It’s human.MORE MOVEHer core insight is that culture becomes a growth engine only when people understand how their work connects to the firm’s mission, vision, and values. That clarity unlocks what she calls “discretionary energy”—the extra effort people put in when they believe in the firm's direction.

SALY isn’t useless—but it shouldn’t be lazy.The DisruptorsWith Liz FarrAudit has spent decades digitizing the past—paper binders moved to the cloud, workflows wrapped in prettier software, and manual testing dressed up as “innovation.” According to Jin Chang, that’s not transformation. It’s inertia.Chang knows because he lived it.Early in his career as an auditor, he found himself doing exactly what generations before him had done: matching evidence to samples, racing against the clock, and wondering why a four-year degree was being spent on work that machines should have mastered long ago.MORE STREAMING: Cannon: Busy Season is Self-Inflicted | Carroll: When One Person Can Break the Firm |  Rampe: Build a Roadmap Even When the Road's Not There | Chang: Killing SALY, One Agent at a Time | Vanover: 5-Star Firms Don't Bill by the Hour | Kless: Profit Is a Result. Flourishing Is the Purpose | Whitman: Build Culture on 'Progress,' Not Change | Shein: No PE? No M&A? No Problem | Hood and Weber: Time to RISE | Proctor: Turn Dumb Ideas into Brilliant Solutions | Carter-Gray: How 1 Poor Review Strengthened the Firm | Hartman: Upwork to “40 Under 40” in 3 Years | “Why aren’t computers doing this better and faster?” he remembers thinking.That question became the seed for Fieldguide—the audit platform Chang says he wished he’d had, powered by AI agents designed to work alongside auditors rather than replace them.

New repayment rules and borrowing caps are forcing a rethink of long-term planning.By Rory Henry CFP®, BFA™For CPA TrendlinesStudent loan debt has quietly outgrown its stereotype.What was once viewed as a challenge for early-career professionals is now showing up in family balance sheets, tax returns, and retirement plans. Parents nearing retirement—and retirees themselves—are increasingly carrying education debt, often on behalf of their children. For CPAs and financial advisors, student loans are no longer a niche planning issue. They’re a multigenerational one.MORE Rory Henry and The Holistic Guide to Wealth ManagementBUY the Holistic Guide to Wealth ManagementWith more than $1.8 trillion in federal student loan debt spread across 42.5 million borrowers, the scale alone demands attention. But it’s the shifting who—not just the how much—that makes this moment critical for advisors.That shift is the focus of this episode of Holistic Guide to Wealth Management, featuring Alex Bottom, CEO of Finology, and Ryan Galiotto, CFP®, CSLP®, founder of the Student Loan Help Network. Their conversation unpacks how legislation, demographics, and delayed life milestones are reshaping student loan planning—and why advisors can’t afford to sit this one out.

CAS success isn’t accidental. It’s engineered.It's Not Just the NumbersWith Penny Breslin and Damien GreatheadFor CPA TrendlinesClient Advisory Services (CAS) continue to outperform every other service line in accounting. But firms that treat CAS as “enhanced bookkeeping” quickly hit a ceiling. The firms that scale profitably make harder—and smarter—choices: who they serve, how they staff, how they price, and how they explain their value in a world obsessed with automation.MORE Penny Breslin and Damien Greathead | MORE Advisory & Consulting | BUY "It's Not Just the Numbers"In this episode of It’s Not Just the Numbers, co-hosts Penny Breslin and Damien Greathead get refreshingly practical about what actually drives CAS success. Their message is clear: strong CAS practices are built intentionally, not incrementally.One question cuts straight to the tension many firm owners feel: Should teams see profitability numbers?Breslin and Greathead don’t argue for radical openness—or secrecy. Instead, they advocate for profit literacy.Teams don’t need to know margins by client. They do need to understand three things...

Automation deletes tasks, then dares accountants to create new value on purpose.Accounting VoicesWith Rob BrownArtificial intelligence is no longer a concept that accountants debate in panels or pilot projects. It is actively reshaping how firms hire, train, and define value.In this episode of Accounting Voices, host Rob Brown delivers a blunt assessment of what many professionals are already sensing, but few are saying out loud: AI is not coming for your job. It is coming for what your job does.MORE Accounting Influencers with Rob BrownThat distinction changes everything.Brown frames the moment as an AI talent shock—a structural shift that is quietly altering career paths across public accounting, corporate finance, and advisory work. This is not about fearmongering or futurism. It is about reality on the ground.

Stop billing. Start thrilling.Gear Up for Growth With Jean CaragherFor CPA Trendlines In a re-energizing episode of Gear Up for Growth, Paul Dunn makes the case that the billable hour isn’t just outdated—it’s holding firms back. The four-time TEDx speaker and cofounder of B1G1 challenges accounting leaders to rethink how success is measured and to lead with purpose, not punch clocks. Gear Up for Growth spotlights the best strategies for smart and efficient growth in today's competitive landscape. More Gear Up for Growth here | More Jean Caragher here | Get her best-selling handbook, The 90-Day Marketing Plan for CPA Firms, here | More CPA Trendlines videos and podcasts hereTalking with host Jean Caragher, Dunn reframes the profession’s obsession with time as a distraction from what clients actually value. “It’s not about the inputs,” he says. “It’s about the outcomes.” When firms anchor their work to results—and to the human impact behind those results—growth follows naturally.More than two decades after coauthoring "The Firm of the Future," Dunn remains a vocal critic of six-minute increments. While some firms are inching toward value pricing and advisory-led models, he argues the real shift requires courage. Measuring work by time, he notes, is “the opposite of human flourishing.” Measuring by impact, on the other hand, elevates both clients and teams.Originally published May 2025

Break down the new law, the unanswered questions, and why waiting for certainty is a strategic mistake.Big 4 TransparencyBy Dominic Piscopo, CPAFor CPA TrendlinesWhat does it take to turn dense tax law into business wins? In this episode of the Big 4 Transparency, host Dominic Piscopo sits down with Mark Gallegos, tax partner at Porte Brown, to explore how a self-described “tax geek” became an eminence engine by teaching, writing, and speaking across the country while translating the new HR1 legislation into clear moves for clients. MORE Dominic Piscopo | MORE Private Equity | MORE Pay & CompensationGallegos serves on the AICPA Strategic Tax Reform Advisory Group (“strike force”), where volunteer experts parse bills, surface practitioner pain points, and help shape the letters and asks that go to Treasury, IRS, and Capitol Hill. That inside track, pressure-testing interpretations with national peers, feeds his day job: delivering 50,000-foot explanations that prompt the most valuable question in professional services: “What should we do next?” Gallegos and Piscopo dive into HR1’s planning levers. 

Exhaustion, chaos, and missed lives are the result of design choices—not destiny.The DisruptorsWith Liz FarrBrenda Cannon, co-founder of Cannon and Associates, has been pioneering a creative approach for taming tax season madness: every return is scheduled like an appointment. “We know how long it takes us to prepare a tax return. Why could we not control each week and the number of tax returns we prepare each week?” she recalls thinking after hearing Jason Staats introduce the concept on a podcast in 2022.  MORE STREAMING: Carroll: When One Person Can Break the Firm |  Rampe: Build a Roadmap Even When the Road's Not There | Chang: Killing SALY, One Agent at a Time | Vanover: 5-Star Firms Don't Bill by the Hour | Kless: Profit Is a Result. Flourishing Is the Purpose | Whitman: Build Culture on 'Progress,' Not Change | Shein: No PE? No M&A? No Problem | Hood and Weber: Time to RISE | Proctor: Turn Dumb Ideas into Brilliant Solutions | Carter-Gray: How 1 Poor Review Strengthened the Firm | Hartman: Upwork to “40 Under 40” in 3 Years Over the last three tax seasons, Cannon and her team, which includes her husband and co-founder, Randy Cannon, have been refining the process. Clients choose a date on a calendar on which they will deliver their documents to her office, with the understanding that their return will be ready three weeks after that date.  

Charitable gift financing has been IRS-validated for decades, yet many still avoid it.The Concierge CPAWith Jackie MeyerFor CPA TrendlinesIn this episode of the Concierge CPA podcast, host Dr. Jackie Meyer, CPA, puts a spotlight on a charitable tax strategy that sounds suspiciously modern — yet has been sitting in the tax code since 1978.The strategy is called charitable gift financing, and, according to Meyer’s guest, Aleksander Dyo, founder and managing director of Wealth Excel, it remains largely invisible to many accountants despite decades of IRS validation.More Jackie MeyerDyo frames the idea with a blunt comparison: Americans finance homes, cars, equipment — even vacations. So why not charitable giving?Charitable gift financing allows high-income taxpayers to make significant philanthropic contributions by combining personal funds with borrowed capital, while claiming a charitable deduction for the full amount transferred to charity in the year of the gift.This isn’t a loophole or a creative interpretation, Dyo says. It’s rooted in long-standing IRS guidance on the deductibility of charitable contributions made with borrowed funds, provided the funds are transferred to the charity in the same tax year.In practice, that timing is everything.

...And accounting careers are better for it.It's Not Just the NumbersWith Penny Breslin and Damien GreatheadFor CPA TrendlinesFor decades, accounting careers followed a familiar script: grind through repetitive work, earn your stripes, and maybe—eventually—get to the interesting stuff.That script is officially broken.In this episode of It’s Not Just the Numbers, hosts Penny Breslin and Damien Greathead tackled one of the most misunderstood shifts in the profession: how artificial intelligence and outsourcing are reshaping early-career accounting work—and why that’s actually good news for graduates and firm leaders.MORE Penny Breslin and Damien Greathead | MORE Advisory & Consulting | BUY "It's Not Just the Numbers"The big question isn’t whether AI and outsourcing are here to stay. They are. The real question is whether firms will use them to strip away opportunity—or to finally fix a broken talent model.Let’s be honest: repetitive data entry, reconciliations, and manual cleanup were never great learning tools. They were time-consuming, error-prone, and often disconnected from how firms actually create value.Yet for years, they were treated as a rite of passage.

Trust remains the profession’s currency, even in an automated future.Accounting VoicesWith Rob BrownArtificial intelligence is transforming accounting at breakneck speed. It writes reports, summarizes research, drafts client communications, and accelerates analysis. But when AI gets it wrong, it does not whisper. It declares falsehoods with confidence.That is the warning at the center of a new episode of Accounting Voices, which pulls back the curtain on real-world AI failures that have already shaken the profession — and explains why no firm can afford to treat AI as a neutral back-office tool.MORE Accounting Influencers with Rob BrownThis is not about hypothetical risk. It is about documented failures, public apologies, reputational damage, and a hard truth every leader must confront: Technology does not absolve responsibility.

The question is: Do you know what it’s doing?It's Not Just the NumbersWith Penny Breslin and Damien GreatheadFor CPA TrendlinesArtificial intelligence has arrived in accounting, but not in the way many expected. It’s not a single app or a single process. It’s everywhere, embedded in workflows, changing how firms scope engagements, price cleanup work, and train their people. MORE Penny Breslin and Damien GreatheadMORE Advisory & ConsultingBUY "It's Not Just the Numbers"In the latest episode of It’s Not Just the Numbers, co-hosts Damien Greathead and Penny Breslin explore how AI reshapes the day-to-day work of accounting firms. Their conversation moves beyond theory to real-world examples of how AI is being used in client engagements, what it means for team development, and why critical thinking, not coding, is the skill every firm must cultivate next. 

Here's what it takes to grow a CPA firm from zero to the Top 100—without losing your soul.Gear Up for GrowthWith Jean CaragherFor CPA TrendlinesWhen Lou Grassi started his firm at age 24, he couldn’t afford to pay himself. There was no client base, no safety net, and no guarantee it would work.More than four decades later, Grassi is the 56th largest accounting firm in the U.S., with $146.5 million in revenue, seven offices, 58 partners, and more than 560 employees. And yet, as Grassi tells host Jean Caragher on Gear Up for Growth, the most important lessons from that journey have very little to do with size.They have everything to do with intention.More Jean Caragher here | Get her best-selling handbook, The 90-Day Marketing Plan for CPA Firms, here | More Gear Up for GrowthMore CPA Trendlines videos and podcasts hereIn this conversation, Grassi reflects on what it takes to build a firm that grows sustainably, treats people like owners, and stays independent in a profession reshaped by private equity, talent shortages, and rapid change.

...And it has less to do with technical skills than firms expect.Accounting ARC - Student-Led ConversationsWith Arpan Grewal and Harshita MultaniCenter for Accounting TransformationAs the accounting profession continues to grapple with talent shortages, shifting expectations, and generational change, one podcast is addressing those challenges from a rarely centered perspective: students themselves.In an end-of-year episode of Student-Led Conversations, hosts Arpan Grewal and Harshita Multani reflect on a year of interviews alongside Donny Shimamoto, CPA.CITP, CGMA, founder and inspiration architect of the Center for Accounting Transformation. The episode serves as both a retrospective and a case study of what happens when students are entrusted with real platforms and real responsibility.MORE Accounting ARC: Downgraded: What the DOE Said About Accounting | Savage: Using Your License as a Megaphone |  Baker: Interpreting Pricing Psychology | Don’t Get Fired by Your Own Automation | What Amazon Doesn't Tell You | Royalties, Residuals, and Reality Checks | ARC-SLC | Free Speech Is a Right; Respect Is a Responsibility | Cash Bags, Casinos & Audits: How First Jobs Shape Us | Gen Z Redefines Careers | Bootleggers, Baptitsts & CPAs: Rethinking LicensureThe idea for Student-Led Conversations emerged after Grewal appeared on an episode of Accounting ARC, where she interviewed seasoned professionals about their careers. What surprised her most was not the technical content, but the personal stories.“I realized accounting isn’t just about numbers,” Grewal says during the episode. “It’s about people.”That realization became the foundation for a student-hosted series that explores career paths, mental health, failure, advocacy, and professional identity — topics often absent from traditional recruiting or classroom discussions.