Leaders face growing questions about influence, identity, and professional relevance.

Accounting Voices
With Rob Brown

An accounting firm can keep its clients, meet its deadlines, and remain profitable while the people inside it quietly wonder whether they still belong in its future.

As technology, ownership models, and expectations reshape the profession, Accounting Voices examines the questions that software demonstrations and strategic plans often leave unanswered: Who gets to make decisions? Whose expertise still carries weight? And what happens when the career someone works toward becomes a career they no longer want?

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An AI engineer can help accounting teams tackle bottlenecks, streamline workflows, and build capacity.

It's Not Just the Numbers
With Penny Breslin and Damien Greathead
For CPA Trendlines

For years, accounting firm owners have treated the "next hire" question as a simple one: bring on another accountant. However, that assumption is starting to cost firms real time and money.

In this recent case study, MoneyPenny, LLC shares what happened when their newest hire wasn't an accountant at all. She was a recent graduate with a degree in AI, and within her first weeks, she had built a tool that solved a problem the whole team had been living with for years.

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She graduated in the first AI cohort to come through her university and joined the firm knowing nothing about accounting. What she did know was how to watch a process and ask why it worked the way it did.

Practical experience, thoughtful questions, and strong communication help students build careers that reach beyond the classroom.

Accounting Conversations
With Chayton Farlee
Center for Accounting Transformation

A perfect GPA can open a door. It cannot explain a client’s financial story, replace practical experience, or demonstrate how someone responds when there is no answer key.

For accounting students eager to distinguish themselves, that difference matters.

On Accounting Conversations, host Chayton Farlee welcomes Hannah Hood and Joey Kinney, co-hosts of The Young CPA Success Show, for a candid discussion about preparing for an accounting career. Drawing on their work in virtual CFO services with Summit Virtual CFO by Anders, the guests challenge students to look beyond familiar recruiting paths and consider what makes an accountant valuable to the people they serve.

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Their advice starts with a seemingly modest assignment: Get close to the books.

Students may picture their future in consulting, financial leadership, audit, or tax. Hood and Kinney argue that those ambitions make understanding everyday accounting more essential.

Employees lose stability and firms lose money through churn

Big 4 Transparency
By Dominic Piscopo, CPA
For CPA Trendlines

A growing body of compensation data suggests that accounting firms may be unintentionally penalizing their most loyal employees.

In a recent solo episode of the Big 4 Transparency, founder Dominic Piscopo unpacks what he calls the “loyalty tax” — the pay gap between internally promoted employees and externally hired peers performing the same role. Drawing on 2024–2025 compensation data from thousands of U.S. and Canadian professionals, Piscopo outlines how this structural imbalance is reshaping career incentives across the profession.

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The loyalty tax, as defined in the episode, is the percentage difference in pay where externally hired employees earn more than internally promoted employees at the same level. According to the data, that gap is far from trivial. In the U.S., first-year senior associates hired externally earn roughly 6.3% more than internally promoted seniors, while first-year managers see an 8.9% premium. Even at the senior manager level, the gap persists. Canadian data shows a similar pattern, with especially pronounced spreads at the senior and senior manager levels.

The disparity is even more striking in consulting and advisory roles.

Curiosity, problem-solving, and creative habits help strengthen marketing, improve client experiences, and bring more humanity to an AI-driven profession.

The Disruptors
With Liz Farr
For CPA Trendlines

Karen Reyburn, managing director of We Are PF and author of the new book Accountants, You Are Creative, wants accountants to embrace their innate creativity.

Reyburn's first book, The Accountant Marketer, laid out the building blocks of marketing for accounting firms based on what worked for the firms that she and PF worked with. She noticed that just having a playbook and structure for marketing wasn’t enough. “The accountants who were seeing the greatest success, the greatest transformation for themselves and their clients, were the ones that either knew that they were creative human beings, they knew they had creativity within them, or at least they were open and curious about what that looked like, and willing to try,” she explains.

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As she watched AI’s rapid advancements over the last few months, she nearly shelved the manuscript. “Is this even relevant anymore? With all this stuff about AI, does anyone care about this mindset of creativity?” she wondered. But as she thought about AI and talked to accountants, she realized she was seeing a “both, and” moment. “You're seeing leaning into AI to help you with tasks and repetition, and you're seeing people want more humanity, more opportunity to trust you, more case studies, more in-person events,” she explains.

Technology, consolidation, and changing expectations expose weaknesses in business strategies.

Accounting Voices
With Rob Brown

Accountants help clients plan for growth, manage risk, and prepare for uncertainty. But what happens when they turn that same scrutiny on their own firms?

The answers may be uncomfortable.

In this episode of Accounting Voices, reflections from 48 interviews conducted in late 2025 reveal a recurring concern: The profession’s ability to solve other people’s business problems does not always translate into a willingness to confront its own.

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The discussion centers on a deceptively simple question: What changes your thinking about accounting? Across conversations with firm leaders, technology specialists, coaches, consultants, and others, familiar assumptions begin to unravel — about who should run a firm, what makes advisory services valuable, and how much protection technical expertise actually provides.

One challenge, attributed in the episode to leadership and organizational development specialist Alice Gray Harrison, brings the issue into sharp focus: If your firm were your client, would you fire yourself for lacking a five-year strategic plan?

It is a question that makes the episode less a reflection on the past than a test of what leaders are willing to change now.

The expectation that tax preparation can happen instantly is creating real pressure.

It's Not Just the Numbers
With Penny Breslin and Damien Greathead
For CPA Trendlines

Tax season is supposed to be predictable. The work comes in, the work goes out, the deadlines hold. But this year, something broke for accounting firms across the board — and it wasn't the tax code.

The culprit wasn't client volume or staffing shortages. It was prioritization and communication, specifically, the gap between where priorities were being set and where the people doing the work were actually looking.

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If your firm made it through but felt like you were always reacting, always chasing, always a step behind — this breakdown is for you.

ARC hosts debate credentials, accountability, and the risks of advice that exceeds a provider’s expertise.

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

A business owner asks for financial reports. A bookkeeper delivers them. For years, the arrangement appears to work — until another accountant examines the numbers and discovers that the reports do not add up.

The owner receives exactly what he requests. What he misses is someone qualified to question the request.

That story, shared by Byron Patrick on the Accounting ARC podcast, captures a problem that reaches beyond bookkeeping: Small-business owners may know they need financial help without knowing how to evaluate the people providing it.

• MORE Accounting ARC: Stop Waiting for the Perfect Time to Get Involved | Your AI Agent Should Show Its Work | 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

For accountants, that creates both a responsibility and an opportunity. Explaining professional value requires more than listing credentials or promising accurate books. It means showing owners what an effective accounting relationship can help them understand, decide, and accomplish.