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.

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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.”

Sustainable growth comes from cultivating trust over time—not collecting contacts, memorizing sales scripts or forcing professionals into uncomfortable networking routines.

MOVE Like This
With Bonnie Buol Ruszczyk
For CPA Trendlines Research

In this episode of MOVE Like This, Bonnie Buol Ruszczyk sits down with Lea Yoneda, founder and CEO of Golden Ginkgo Group, to explore why so many talented accounting professionals struggle with business development and why the problem often has less to do with personality than with how firms define, teach, and reward growth.

Yoneda argues that firms frequently wait until professionals are on the doorstep of partnership before introducing business development, then expect them to master an entirely different skill set with little guidance or support.

• MORE MOVE Like This | MORE CPA Trendlines Streaming Network

Rather than treating relationship building as a long-term professional competency, many firms reduce it to a one-time training session or a list of networking tactics. She believes this approach sets professionals up for unnecessary stress and overlooks the fact that meaningful business development takes years to develop.

A significant portion of the conversation focuses on introversion and the misconceptions surrounding it.

Connect with your clients: "You're an entrepreneur, I'm an entrepreneur."
Full show notes here

The Disruptors
With Liz Farr

Erin Pohan’s firm, Upkeeping, is on a mission “to make accounting relevant and understandable” to all its clients. Pohan describes Upkeeping as “a tax-ready firm” that does everything but tax prep, which they hand off to the clients’ tax professionals. But their hand-off doesn’t stop with providing the tax pro with the information needed for the tax return.

MORE Liz Farr | CPA Trendlines Streaming Network

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FICPA CEO Shelly Weir says the profession survived its most serious deregulation fight yet. The threat isn’t confined to Florida. Full show notes here

Gear Up for Growth
With Jean Caragher
For CPA Trendlines

Florida CPAs came closer than many realized to losing the regulatory structure behind the CPA license, as a sweeping deregulation drive threatened the state Board of Accountancy and raised the possibility of a credential weakened to the point that “anybody could put those letters behind their name,” according to Shelly Weir, president and CEO of the Florida Institute of CPAs.

MORE Jean Caragher here | Get her best-selling handbook, The 90-Day Marketing Plan for CPA Firms, here | MORE Gear Up for Growth here | MORE CPA Trendlines Streaming Network here

“The elimination of the CPA license altogether – or having a license so degraded and devalued that anybody could put those letters behind their name – I don’t know what terrifies me more,” Weir tells Jean Caragher in this episode of Gear Up for Growth.

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PwC consultant and CPA exam coach says success depends less on being the smartest person in the room and more on managing time, building effective habits, and continuing after setbacks.

Accounting Conversations
With Chayton Farlee
Center for Accounting Transformation

The greatest obstacle standing between most CPA candidates and their licenses is not intelligence. It is time. That distinction matters, says Blake Carroll, CPA, a deployment consultant with PwC who helps aspiring CPAs develop the plans, habits, and mindsets they need to pass the exam.

“I truly believe anyone can pass it,” Carroll tells host Chayton Farlee on the Accounting Conversations podcast. “It’s not a test of intelligence. It is a test of endurance.”

• MORE CPA Trendlines Streaming Network

In the episode, Carroll and Farlee, an assurance associate at CliftonLarsonAllen, explore what makes the exam so difficult — and why the skills candidates develop while preparing for it can continue serving them long after they earn their licenses.

Carroll knows candidates must master a large volume of technical material, often while working full time, attending school, or managing family responsibilities. They must sustain that effort for months and sometimes longer, without the frequent deadlines and feedback that help structure a college course. The resulting pressure can lead candidates to question whether they are smart enough, moving quickly enough, or studying the right way.

“Anxiety can kill more CPA dreams than the difficulty of the material,” Carroll says.

Solo 401(k)s let you think beyond retirement.
Full show notes here.

The Concierge CPA
With Jackie Meyer

In this episode of The Concierge CPA, Dr. Jackie Meyer welcomes back David Podell, founder of Business Benefits Consultants, to unravel the evolving world of retirement planning and its strategic value for business owners.

MORE Jackie Meyer and The Concierge CPA | MORE CPA Trendlines Streaming Network

Podell explains the solo 401(k)’s advantages over simpler plans like SEPs or SIMPLEs, dives into common mistakes business owners make, and shares how smart structuring — including leveraging Roth contributions and defined benefit add-ons — can elevate retirement planning from compliance to strategy.

“Putting money in these retirement plans pulls money out of the business and creates a personal net worth," Podell says.

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