Accounting teams should be intentionally designed around technology, outsourcing, and evolving organizational structures

Gear Up for Growth
with Jean Caragher
for CPA Trendlines

“We're at a time where we have multiple generational changes happening all at the same time," says Calvin Harris Jr., CEO of the New York State Society of CPAs, during a recent episode of Gear Up for Growth, hosted by Jean Caragher, president, Capstone Marketing, and powered by CPA Trendlines.

According to Harris, technology, alternative practice structures, outsourcing and changing workforce expectations are converging to reshape the future of public accounting. Firm leaders must look beyond today's headlines and begin rethinking how their firms operate, develop talent and deliver value to clients.

• MORE Jean Caragher here | Get her best-selling handbook, The 90-Day Marketing Plan for CPA Firms, here | MORE Gear Up for Growth here
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Although artificial intelligence dominates much of today's discussion, Harris believes technology is just one piece of a much larger transformation. "You can't be effective in this work anymore without also being effective in technology,” he says. “You will get lapped in terms of how efficient people can be."

Rather than viewing AI as a standalone initiative, Harris encourages firms to think strategically about how technology supports new business models, enhances advisory services and improves the client experience.

Extraordinary opportunities lie ahead for those who combine accounting knowledge with curiosity, judgment, and business insight.

Accounting Conversations
With Chayton Farlee
Center for Accounting Transformation

Accounting students often feel pressure to choose the perfect career path before they have taken their first professional step. Tony Wilson, CPA, CMA, offers a more forgiving — and practical — approach: Choose a direction, start moving, and learn along the way.

“Sometimes, just choose the thing,” Wilson says. “Just go after it.”

In this episode of the Accounting Conversations Podcast, host Chayton Farlee, an assurance associate at CliftonLarsonAllen, talks with Wilson, founder of Accquip, about building a career that stretches from public accounting and corporate finance to entrepreneurship and fractional CFO services.

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Along the way, Wilson shares candid advice for students and early-career accountants who want to gain meaningful experience, prepare for firm ownership, and understand where they can create value in a profession transformed by technology.

Flexible systems help accounting professionals remain, contribute, and advance when life’s responsibilities change.

MOVE Like This
With Bonnie Buol Ruszczyk
For CPA Trendlines Research

When caregiving responsibilities collide with work, even the most committed professionals can find themselves questioning whether their careers are still sustainable.

In this episode of MOVE Like This, Donny Shimamoto, CPA.CITP, CGMA, managing director of IntrapriseTechKnowlogies and inspiration architect at the Center for Accounting Transformation, joins Bonnie Buol Ruszczyk to discuss what accounting firms can do to better support employees with caregiving responsibilities. Drawing from his own experience as a caregiver and his firm's long-standing flexible work model, Shimamoto explains why supporting caregivers isn't about creating complicated new policies. Instead, it's about building thoughtful systems, training managers, and planning work in ways that recognize employees have lives outside the office.

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Shimamoto shares how becoming a caregiver for his great-aunt changed his own perspective on the issue. While many people associate caregiving with raising young children, his experience highlighted how responsibilities for aging parents, relatives, and others often arrive unexpectedly and affect employees across every stage of their careers. Rather than viewing caregiving as a temporary accommodation for a small group of employees, he believes firms should recognize it as a reality that will affect nearly everyone at some point in their lives.

That shift in thinking changes how organizations design policies, manage workloads, and retain experienced professionals.

Intelligent agents will reshape accounting workflows, pricing models, employee development, and the value firms deliver to clients.

The Disruptors
With Liz Farr
For CPA Trendlines

Kenji Kuramoto says accounting firms will be changing how they work — and even who does the work.

“The future of accounting firms,” Kuramoto says, “is going to be made up of a workforce that has two components. It’ll have people and agents.”

His current company, Basis, where he serves as managing partner in residence, is building those agents. Kuramoto says approximately 30% of the top 25 accounting firms are using them across client accounting services, tax, and audit. The agents perform multistep workflows such as reconciliations, account categorization, and first-pass tax return preparation, including work on complex partnership returns.

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By the end of the year, Kuramoto expects some practice lines to achieve efficiency gains of 60% to 80% by using agents. Within a year, “we should probably be able to see agents working and collaborating together, overall, being directed and architected by people,” he says.

The strategy may be simple, but the execution is not.

The Concierge CPA
With Jackie Meyer

In this episode, Dr. Jackie Meyer, CPA, welcomes Jason Ackerman, CPA, CFP, CGMA, chief financial officer and co-founder of WealthRabbit, to separate practical Roth IRA guidance from the oversimplified advice circulating online.

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Roth IRAs can provide tax-free growth and qualified withdrawals, but eligibility rules, reporting requirements, and conversion mechanics leave plenty of room for costly mistakes. Meyer and Ackerman examine direct contributions, backdoor Roth strategies, the often-misunderstood five-year rules, and the documentation advisers need to implement these strategies correctly.

A central warning: A backdoor Roth is not a product or a one-click transaction. It is a multistep process that requires advisers to examine the client’s existing IRA balances, properly report nondeductible contributions and conversions, and reconcile Form 8606 with Form 1099-R.

“Messing up the backdoor Roth is probably the one that can hurt the most,” Ackerman says.

K1x Is Betting $175 Million on It.

Full show notes here

By Seth Fineberg
For CPA Trendlines

K1x is putting $175 million in new investment behind an expansion of its K-1 technology platform, with plans to accelerate product development, broaden its offerings and build a more standardized system for managing partnership tax data.

MORE K1x: K1x Secures $175 Million for Private Markets AI Tax Tech | Private Market Tax Is Heading for a Collision | The 3-Part Framework Firms Are Using to Fix K-1 Chaos | Why the Future of Tax Isn’t Compliance—It’s Timing | AI Tax App Crashes Financial Stocks on Wall Street | MORE A.I. | MORE CPA Trendlines Streaming Network

CEO John LaMancuso says the company is pushing beyond automating individual K-1 tasks. K1x wants to connect K-1 creation and aggregation into a unified platform that can move tax data among CPA firms, investment funds and investors with less manual handling.

“Start with the bottleneck, not the technology,” LaMancuso says.

MORE > > >

Accountants should demand systems that reveal the work, respect boundaries, and produce results humans can verify.

Accounting ARC
With Donny Shimamoto, Liz Mason, and Byron Patrick
Center for Accounting Transformation

Agentic AI does not have to replace an accountant to transform accounting. Its more practical role may be far less dramatic — and far more useful.

In this episode of the Accounting ARC podcast, Donny Shimamoto, CPA.CITP, CGMA; Liz Mason, CPA; and Byron Patrick, CPA.CITP, explore how narrowly focused AI agents can help professionals retrieve information, analyze data, navigate systems, and make better-informed decisions.

• MORE Accounting ARC: AI Isn't Erasing Tax Careers. It's Rewriting Them. | Accounting Internships Need an Upgrade | The CPA Career Nobody Talks About | Conference Season Exposes Accounting's Knowledge Gap | The Feedback Mistake That Costs You Your Best People | Is Your Boss Really the Problem? | Most Accountants Are Missing This AI Shift | AI Can Fix Your Workflow—or Break It in Seconds | Efficiency Is the Wrong Goal for AI | Accounting’s Hidden Talent Risk: The Sandwich Generation | Built Fast. Sold Faster. Broken Later? The Truth About Accounting Tech | Recognize When You Need to Recharge Before You Burn Out | Valuing More Than the Balance Sheet

Their conversation challenges one of the dominant narratives surrounding agentic AI: that firms should build autonomous digital employees capable of handling everything a staff accountant does. Instead, the hosts envision specialized agents that operate within structured systems, perform clearly defined tasks, and show users how they reach their conclusions.

“If you have agentic AI that’s built into an architecture that already exists, there’s a whole lot more that has to happen from a training perspective,” says Mason, CEO of High Rock Accounting.

That architecture, she explains, can include multiple agents working together rather than one agent attempting to handle an entire assignment.

Firms must build new pathways that develop reviewers, judgment and client-facing skills.

Accounting ARC
With Donny Shimamoto, Liz Mason, and Byron Patrick
Center for Accounting Transformation

Artificial intelligence may not eliminate the entry-level tax professional. But it is dismantling the job that many firms still use to train one.

That's the conversation driving a new episode of the Accounting ARC podcast featuring Donny Shimamoto, CPA.CITP, CGMA, founder and managing director of IntrapriseTechKnowlogies LLC and founder and inspiration architect for the Center for Accounting Transformation; and Liz Mason, CPA, CEO of High Rock Accounting.

The conversation begins with a small tax firm that hires six interns each year and teaches them to prepare returns much as earlier generations learned: working from paper documents, identifying relevant numbers, mapping those figures to tax forms, and entering the data into tax software.

• MORE Accounting ARC: Accounting Internships Need an Upgrade | The CPA Career Nobody Talks About | Conference Season Exposes Accounting's Knowledge Gap | The Feedback Mistake That Costs You Your Best People | Is Your Boss Really the Problem? | Most Accountants Are Missing This AI Shift | AI Can Fix Your Workflow—or Break It in Seconds | Efficiency Is the Wrong Goal for AI | Accounting’s Hidden Talent Risk: The Sandwich Generation | Built Fast. Sold Faster. Broken Later? The Truth About Accounting Tech | Recognize When You Need to Recharge Before You Burn Out

The firm owner sees the process as an apprenticeship that helps students bridge the gap between an individual tax course and real-world preparation. Shimamoto sees value in teaching interns how information moves from source documents to a completed return. Mason agrees with the objective but challenges the method.

“From a holistic learning exploration, sure, yes, that is a way to learn,” Mason says. “From a where-we-are-today perspective, I think that’s a giant disservice to these interns.”