CPA Trendlines Podcasts

Accounting firms may offer flexibility, but outdated expectations and missed opportunities can still push experienced professionals out the door.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

Anne Napolitano used to give advisory-level guidance without charging for it. “I was doing those advisory-type services without really getting compensated for it because I just felt it was what you were supposed to offer to your clients,” she says.

But after learning about value pricing from various resources, including Ron Baker and Ed Kless, her thinking changed. “The better we got at something, the quicker we were, the less money we were making because we could do things faster,” she says.

• MORE Disruptors with Liz Farr | CPA Trendlines Streaming Network

That realization helped her understand that clients weren’t buying time; rather, they were buying the decades of experience she and her team had as accountants and the value that comes from that experience. And today, she charges a premium for that expertise.

“We need to value ourselves correctly and appreciate the fact that we’re really doing some great work for our clients, and we should be compensated for that,” she explains.

Her firm, Anne Napolitano Consulting, landed on its niche specialty ofrestaurants, bars, breweries, distilleries, and wineries, partly because of Napolitano’s love of cooking.

Look at pricing, services, and client relationships to assess whether AI investments are reshaping the business.

Accounting Voices
With Rob Brown

A tax return completed in three hours instead of five gives an accounting firm something valuable: time.

What happens to those two hours may reveal more about the firm’s AI strategy than the technology that saved them.

Does the firm take on more work? Give employees breathing room? Help a client understand an emerging business problem? Reconsider how it prices its services?

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

In a solo episode of Accounting Voices, host Rob Brown examines a distinction that can get lost in the enthusiasm surrounding artificial intelligence: Adopting AI and changing a business are different accomplishments.

“Efficiency is not reshaping,” Brown says. “A little bit of doing things faster doesn’t change the model.”

The episode, part of the "AI Reality Inside Firms" series, offers leaders three ways to examine their progress: Look at the economics, consider the client relationship, and assess whether leadership is deliberately shaping the firm’s direction.

Together, those questions move the conversation from what a tool can do to what a firm intends to become.

State-based plans and a newly available AI platform put software costs and accountants' oversight role in focus.

By Seth Fineberg
For CPA Trendlines

Avalara is making its sales tax pricing easier to see while expanding the work it says artificial intelligence can perform for accounting firms.

Its published Avalara Select plans cover businesses with annual revenue below $50 million. Its Aviator AI platform became generally available Oct. 8. Together, the changes address two pressures Evan Wright, general manager of Avalara's global returns business, describes in an interview with CPA Trendlines: clients need predictable compliance costs, and accountants need to show their value as technology takes on more of the work.

• MORE Avalara: New Guide Shows How Firms Build New Sales Tax Service Lines |
• MORE A.I. | MORE CPA Trendlines Streaming Network

“How do I ensure that my billable hours aren't getting, you know, absolutely eroded in this new world of AI?” Wright says, describing questions he hears from practitioners.

The tension runs through Avalara's strategy. The company is trying to simplify buying and using compliance software while asking accountants to trust it with more complicated tasks.

Context, verified sources, and human review remain essential as teams build AI tools.https://cpatrendlines.com/shop/jp24pri-jody-padar-radical-pricing-how-to-optimize-profits-delight-clients-and-build-a-top-value-firm-jp24pri/

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.

MORE MOVE Like This | MORE Caregiving Research | MORE CPA Trendlines Streaming Network

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

That question matters because of the disparity in women’s representation in leadership at accounting firms.

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 businesses can grow.https://cpatrendlines.com/shop/hp25tru-hitendra-patil-true-advisor-the-definitive-success-guide-for-client-advisory-services/

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

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.

Overlooked client requests and undocumented know-how can distort pricing, strain teams, and limit advisory growth.https://cpatrendlines.com/shop/jp24pri-jody-padar-radical-pricing-how-to-optimize-profits-delight-clients-and-build-a-top-value-firm-jp24pri/

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.https://cpatrendlines.com/shop/jp24pri-jody-padar-radical-pricing-how-to-optimize-profits-delight-clients-and-build-a-top-value-firm-jp24pri/

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.”https://link.improvetheworld.net/cpatrendlines-soho

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 Trendlineshttps://cpatrendlines.com/shop/jp24pri-jody-padar-radical-pricing-how-to-optimize-profits-delight-clients-and-build-a-top-value-firm-jp24pri/

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.

Leaders reveal a widening gap between adopting new capabilities and building firms that can use them effectively.https://cpatrendlines.com/shop/hp25tru-hitendra-patil-true-advisor-the-definitive-success-guide-for-client-advisory-services/

Accounting Voices
With Rob Brown

A firm buys powerful technology, announces ambitious growth plans, and asks an already stretched team to deliver more. The tools change. The way the business operates barely moves.

Accounting Voices explores the strain inside that scenario. Drawing on reflections from 48 firm leaders, consultants, media professionals, technology experts, and other industry voices, it examines what their observations reveal about accounting’s direction.

• MORE Accounting Voices with Rob Brown

In the episode, host Rob Brown identifies a “velocity gap”: the distance between firms talking about change and firms making it part of their daily operations. AI, outside investment, shifting professional identities, and talent pressures all contribute to that gap. Together, they raise a practical question for leaders: Can the organization absorb the change it pursues?

Nontechnical teams can use AI-built scripts to automate repetitive work, reclaim valuable time, and turn an accounting firm’s operational problem into a marketable product.

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

Most accounting firms talk about AI automation in the future tense. They're waiting for the right tool, the right vendor, or the right moment to start using it seriously.

Trent Yesberg didn't wait. As director of Regional Business Services in Townsville, Australia, he started asking Claude and ChatGPT to write scripts that run his firm's internal workflows directly, with no ongoing subscription or per-task cost attached.

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

What began as a way to save his own team a few hours a week turned into Twine Biller, a tool now used by other firms to fix one of accounting's quietest profit leaks: subscription rebilling that slips through the cracks month after month.

His approach cuts against a common assumption, that AI automation in a firm has to mean either building an entire internal platform from scratch or renting one from a big software vendor. There is a middle path, and Yesberg has been living in it for the better part of a year.

Building an accounting tool with AI is only the beginning of making it useful, secure, and sustainable.

Innovation Insights
With Donny Shimamoto and Byron Patrick
Center for Accounting Transformation

An accountant builds a dashboard that pulls information from several systems. A proposal generator turns service selections into a polished PDF. A homemade utility eliminates a tedious step in the monthly close.

Then comes the question that changes everything: How do I let my team use it?

In this episode of Innovation Insights, Donny Shimamoto and Byron Patrick explore the distance between a promising personal tool and software an accounting team can depend on.

• More Donny Shimamoto

AI makes building easier, they say, but sharing, securing, supporting, and maintaining what you build requires a different level of preparation.

For accountants eager to experiment with AI agents and “vibe coding” — using natural-language instructions to have AI generate code — the conversation offers both encouragement and a reality check.

Leaders must align everyday decisions with the flexibility, innovation, and growth they promise employees.

MOVE Like This
With Bonnie Buol Ruszczyk
For CPA Trendlines Research

In this episode of MOVE Like This, Bonnie Buol Ruszczyk sits down with Kassi Rushing, strategist and speaker with Kassi Rushing Consulting, to explore what future-ready accounting firms need from their people strategies, and why culture, caregiving, leadership development, and business performance are increasingly difficult to separate.

Rushing, who has spent 20 years working in and with the accounting profession, says firms have made significant progress in recognizing people as a critical business asset. But understanding that people matter and creating an environment where they can do their best work are two different things, particularly as firms navigate AI, changing workforce expectations, and significant demographic shifts.

• MORE MOVE Like This | MORE CPA Trendlines Streaming Network

One example came from a firm that added a simple question to its employee survey: How many employees identify as caregivers? Leadership expected some but was surprised to learn that more than half of its professionals did. Many weren't simply caring for children; they were simultaneously helping aging parents, stepparents, siblings, or others. The finding prompted the firm to reconsider everything from when it scheduled social events to whether its benefits, training, and leave programs actually reflected employees' lives.

For Rushing, the lesson is simple: firms can't support people they haven't taken the time to understand.

A five-layer “AI trust stack” helps auditors put AI to work while keeping professional judgment at the center.

The Disruptors
With Liz Farr
For CPA Trendlines

As AI takes on more audit work, David Marquis sees professional judgment becoming more valuable.

The Caseware CEO argues that the opportunity extends beyond faster document reviews and automated analysis. Firms can rethink how audits work while strengthening the consistency, accountability, and trust that clients and capital markets depend on.

• MORE Disruptors with Liz Farr | CPA Trendlines Streaming Network

In The Disruptors, Marquis explains why putting AI to work requires more than a powerful model — and why the profession’s human responsibilities remain central to its future.

“They’re not simply knowledge industries, they're actually workflow industries,” he says of audit and accounting.

Following those workflows consistently is how professionals deliver work that clients, regulators, and capital markets can rely on. AI creates an opportunity to redesign that work, “and not just do it faster, but also do it differently and do it better.”

Leaders face growing questions about influence, identity, and professional relevance.https://cpatrendlines.com/shop/hp25tru-hitendra-patil-true-advisor-the-definitive-success-guide-for-client-advisory-services/

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?

• MORE Accounting Voices with Rob Brown

The episode presents accounting’s growing divide as a realignment of power, relevance, and leadership. For firm leaders and professionals preparing to lead, understanding that realignment means looking beneath the most visible changes.

An AI engineer can help accounting teams tackle bottlenecks, streamline workflows, and build capacity.https://cpatrendlines.com/shop/jp24pri-jody-padar-radical-pricing-how-to-optimize-profits-delight-clients-and-build-a-top-value-firm-jp24pri/

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.

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

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.https://cpatrendlines.com/shop/jp24pri-jody-padar-radical-pricing-how-to-optimize-profits-delight-clients-and-build-a-top-value-firm-jp24pri/

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.

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

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.

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

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.