Context, verified sources, and human review remain essential as teams build AI tools.

Innovation Insights
With Donny Shimamoto and Liz Mason
Center for Accounting Transformation

A tax firm can build an AI agent to organize documents, flag missing information, and track unfinished returns. The harder assignment is deciding what that agent should never do on its own. That question drives this episode of Innovation Insights, a Center for Accounting Transformation podcast conversation between hosts Donny Shimamoto, CPA.CITP, CGMA, and Liz Mason, CPA.

As smaller firms experiment with building their own tax tools, the two examine what separates a useful automation from a costly lapse in security, accuracy, or professional responsibility.

• More Donny Shimamoto

Shimamoto is founder and managing director of IntrapriseTechKnowlogies LLC and founder and inspiration architect for the Center for Accounting Transformation. Mason is co-founder and CEO of TaxFigure, founder and CEO of High Rock Accounting, a member of Intuit’s Partner Council, a board member of AuditMiner, and CEO and founder of Rebel Rock.

Their message gives firms room to experiment, but it also gives that experimentation a clear starting point: Understand the data, the workflow, and the professional obligations before building.

The 2026 Accounting MOVE Project report examines how caregiving affects women’s careers. A newly released MOVE Like This episode explores another part of that conversation: whether women’s own healthcare needs are being heard.

MOVE Like This
With Bonnie Buol Ruszczyk
For CPA Trendlines Research

Supporting women’s careers requires understanding the lives they lead beyond work.

That connection comes into focus with the release of the 2026 Accounting MOVE Project report, Caught in the Middle: How Caregiving Pressures Are Reshaping Women's Careers in Public Accounting, which examines how caregiving pressures affect advancement in public accounting. Among participating firms, 47% reported seeing caregiving slow progress toward promotion or partnership, and 76% said the career impact falls mostly on women.

Released alongside the report, this episode of MOVE Like This broadens the discussion to women’s health. Host Bonnie Buol Ruszczyk talks with Michael Annichine, CEO of Magee-Womens Research Institute & Foundation at the time of the recording, about gaps in medical research, the importance of listening, and what happens when women’s concerns are dismissed.

The conversation offers a useful perspective for accounting leaders considering the report’s findings: Understanding what people need is only the beginning. Institutions also have to act on what they learn.

Editor’s note: This episode was recorded April 16, 2024. References to the president refer to then-President Joe Biden. Discussion of federal initiatives, research funding, and diversity, equity, and inclusion reflects the context at the time of recording.

Accounting firms may offer flexibility, but outdated expectations and missed opportunities can still push experienced professionals out the door.

The Disruptors
With Liz Farr
For CPA Trendlines

Accounting firms have spent years worrying about the front end of the talent pipeline. Bonnie Buol Ruszczyk wants them to look at the other end as well.

Ruszczyk, owner and research lead of the Accounting MOVE Project, led this year's MOVE report, Caught in the Middle: How Caregiving Pressures Are Reshaping Women's Careers in Public Accounting. This new report examines what happens when experienced professionals take on care for children, aging parents, spouses and partners, and whether their firms keep them on the path to leadership.

• MORE Disruptors with Liz Farr | CPA Trendlines Streaming Network
• MORE MOVE Like This | MORE Caregiving Research

Firms “tend to be pretty much 50:50 gender parity up until you get to the senior director, almost going to go into partnership,” Ruszczyk says. At MOVE firms, women hold about 42% of partner roles. Across all U.S. firms, that ratio drops to around 34%. For women of color, the drop is even sharper. According to Ruszczyk, about 20% of associates are women of color while only 5% of partners are.

Caregiving isn't the only cause for the disparity, but it is “one of the areas where we’re seeing some leaks spring up,” Ruszczyk explains. While caregiving has always been a part of the lives of accountants – men and women – several converging trends are making this a bigger issue today.

Technical expertise earns credibility, but the ability to delegate, build trust, and guide people through uncertainty determines how far a business can grow. Full show notes here

Accounting Voices
With Rob Brown

An accounting firm’s biggest bottleneck may sit at the top.

The leader who reviews every return, answers every technical question, and makes every consequential decision can appear indispensable. But that dependence raises a difficult question: Who is building the business while its leader is busy checking the work?

MORE Accounting Voices with Rob Brown | MORE CPA Trendlines Streaming Network

In this episode of Accounting Voices, insights from conversations with nearly 50 influential voices in the profession highlight a pressing leadership challenge: Technical excellence is the starting point. Leading an enterprise requires a broader set of skills.

The episode calls this tension the “Competency Collision.” The expertise that helps accountants advance does not, by itself, prepare them to build adaptable organizations, develop future leaders, or make difficult decisions about what comes next.

READ MORE > > >

Overlooked client requests and undocumented know-how can distort pricing, strain teams, and limit advisory growth.

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

Most accounting firm owners could tell you their billable hours down to the decimal. Far fewer could tell you where the other 25% to 30% of their team's time goes.

Jeanne Hardy, CEO and founder of the practice management platform Levvy and the CAS firm Creative Business, joins Damien Greathead and Penny Breslin on It's Not Just the Numbers to explain why that invisible work is the real barrier standing between most firms and a healthy advisory practice, and what she built to fix it.

• MORE Penny Breslin and Damien Greathead | MORE Advisory & Consulting
• JOIN From Scorekeeper to Strategist CAS Workshop | BUY "It's Not Just the Numbers"

Hardy has lived this problem from both sides. She has run a CAS firm for 20 years and built software to solve the gaps she kept hitting inside her own practice. That dual perspective runs through the whole conversation.

Recurring revenue, client boundaries, and an entrepreneurial mindset helps shape a career around family.

Accounting Conversations
With Chayton Farlee
Center for Accounting Transformation

Caitlynn Eldridge, CPA, is not trying to win a revenue contest. She is building an accounting practice that leaves room for the rest of her life.

The mother of five describes a business with an intentionally manageable workload: 55 tax returns in the season she discusses, an employee handling bookkeeping and sales taxes, and a schedule she puts at 10 to 15 hours a week. She knows those choices may look modest alongside the growth stories filling social media. For her, they represent a deliberate definition of success.

• MORE Center for Accounting Transformation | MORE CPA Trendlines Streaming Network

“This is purposeful. This is intentional,” Eldridge says.

On Accounting Conversations, she joins host Chayton Farlee to discuss how an accounting career can accommodate changing priorities, why students need to hear more than the public accounting pitch, and what entrepreneurship can offer professionals who want greater control over their work.

“This isn’t a flash in the pan. This is an actual structural change in the profession.”

Big 4 Transparency
By Dominic Piscopo, CPA
For CPA Trendlines

Private equity in public accounting is often reduced to a caricature - buy, cut, flip.

Tim Brackney, CEO of Springline Advisory, says that framing misses what many accounting investments are actually trying to do: fund a growth thesis built around expanded capabilities, talent development, and modernized service delivery. Springline, backed by Trinity Hunt Partners, is a “buy-and-build” platform that has completed nine deals across CPA and advisory firms as it works toward becoming a national and eventually global firm with “all of the capabilities inside our four walls that our clients will need.”

• MORE Dominic Piscopo | MORE Private Equity | MORE Pay & Compensation

Brackney’s path to the CEO seat isn’t the “serial PE operator” stereotype. He started at PwC as an auditor, then moved into advisory and BPO work, and later spent two decades at Resources Global Professionals (RGP), a publicly traded Deloitte spin-out, ultimately serving as president and COO. He describes an 18-month mutual diligence process with Trinity Hunt, emphasizing that the goal wasn’t a quick arbitrage play, it was building an enduring firm, potentially by bringing in future investors over time rather than forcing a rapid exit.

A key early lesson, Brackney says, was that 2023 still required “Private Equity 101” education for many sellers.

Burnout pushed him to rethink growth, rebuild his processes, and make room for a better life.

The Disruptors
With Liz Farr
For CPA Trendlines

When Nick Boscia joined his father's accounting firm in 2013, it was like stepping back in time.

“When I joined, we were still using like the green ledger sheets,” he recalls. “I started in 2013, and it was like it was 1980.” Today, Boscia is known as the Balanced CPA and is co-owner, with his brother Joe, of Boscia and Boscia PC, the firm their father founded in 1975.

Working for his father was difficult.

“He didn't really value going on vacations or taking time off,” Boscia recalls. Adopting new technology was out of the question.

• MORE Disruptors with Liz Farr | CPA Trendlines Streaming Network

“I’ve been doing this for 40 years, and it works, so we’re not changing things,” his father would say. But when Boscia and his brother took over, things changed dramatically.

“My dad was like, we’re not making changes,” he recalls. “I’m like, I want to change everything.”

In just a few years, Nick and Joe transformed a legacy, paper-based practice serving 700 clients into a modern firm that, at its peak, served 1,800 clients.