Small Change, Big Results

If you’ve spent the last year feeling like you’re the only firm that hasn’t figured this whole AI thing out, take a breath. You’re not.

Here’s what we found when we asked nearly 500 of your peers how they’re actually using AI:

95% are using it in some form, but only about 1 in 5 can point to a clear, measurable return.

That gap—between “we’re using AI” and “AI is actually paying off”—is at the heart of the brand-new AI edition of Two Cents Magazine, out now. It’s built on that survey of 486 accounting and bookkeeping pros, plus honest conversations with firm owners, operators, admins, and the industry’s sharpest AI voices. No hype, no doom, no “accountants are about to be obsolete.”

A few of the stories waiting for you inside:

• The Adoption Illusion: What the data says about why “trying AI” and “getting value from AI” are two very different things.

• Time Is Not Money: How faster work is pushing firms to rethink hourly billing.

• Trust but Verify: Why keeping a human in the loop is critical to managing AI errors and mitigating data risk.

It’s the rare AI read that respects both your intelligence and your time. We hope you enjoy reading it as much as we enjoyed creating it!

👉 Read the magazine →

Community 🫶

Grow your career and your network with NECPAs

The five state CPA societies of Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont have joined forces as the New England Society of CPAs: one regional home for the accounting community across New England. There’s a way in whichever direction you’re headed: connect by volunteering, sharing your expertise, advocating for the profession, and supporting future CPAs, or prosper through expert-led CPE, conferences, networking events, and member communities built for every stage of your career. If you practice in the region, it’s a natural place to plug into the local relationships and priorities that actually shape your work.

Get involved →

Stop figuring out practice ownership alone with The Accounting Soapbox

Running your own practice can feel lonely, especially when there’s no one down the hall to tell you whether your pricing is off, whether a client request is out of scope, or whether you’re the only one who feels behind. The Accounting Soapbox is a brand-new Canadian community built for exactly that: the same people in the room every month, so you come to know whose judgment you trust and who’s a year ahead of you on the thing you’re stuck on. Founded by Kara Greenwood and Sherie Emini, it runs on real connection, offering monthly Soapbox Live catch-ups, a members-only Break Room peer meetup, and Experts in the Office guest sessions. And it’s built for every stage, whether you’re just thinking about going out on your own or well established and figuring out what’s next.

Learn more →

H🔥t Today

The IRS is retiring the system you use to file 1099s

If your firm e-files 1099s—or any information returns—through the IRS’s FIRE system, that door is closing. FIRE stops accepting returns at 3:00 PM Eastern on November 19, and starting with the 2027 filing season, the modernized IRIS platform is the only way in. The catch that trips people up: your FIRE credentials don’t carry over. You need a separate IRIS Application for a Transmitter Control Code, and the window to update your existing application locks on November 9. The move to make now to avoid a January fire drill: confirm whether you (or your filing software) already transmit through IRIS, and get your TCC squared away before 1099 season is in full swing.

Read the full story →

A fake tax credit is making the rounds: what to watch out for

The IRS just flagged a promoter scheme pushing bogus “Tribal Tax Credits” (also sold as “Native American” or “Sovereign Tribal” credits) that simply don’t exist under federal law, and it’s warning tax professionals not to get pulled into enabling them. The tells are the same ones behind most credit scams: an offer to buy credits for far less than their supposed value, a claim that some special Treasury-and-tribal “agreement” unlocks them, or a creative stretch of a real provision like the New Markets Tax Credit. Clients who claim these can face civil and criminal penalties, and a firm that signs off on one isn’t a bystander. Worth a quick heads-up to any client who’s been pitched a too-good-to-be-true credit this fall.

Read the full story →

Swipe this workflow template

Swipe this My Quarterly Conversation template from Taylor Ammons.

Get more templates from firm owners like you in our community template library.

Meme

Relatable? 😆

Firm Spotl💡ght

How Bookkeeping for Good built a firm that runs without having the owner in every loop

Melissa Miller Furgeson never wanted a big firm. She wanted a good one. In fact, the firm name she chose in 2013 has a triple meaning, because she wanted to do bookkeeping for good organizations (nonprofits and churches around Chicago), do good work, and do it for good (as in, her last job ever). More than a decade later, Bookkeeping for Good has around 25 clients, and she’s kept her roster small on purpose, screening new clients as much for shared values as for fit, and refusing to trade the life she loves for growth she doesn’t want.

For years, though, the whole operation lived in her head: every deadline, every payroll schedule, every client quirk. The forcing function finally came in 2022, when she planned her first real vacation in years: 17 days in Europe with her family. To step away, she had to make the firm runnable for someone else. So, she wrote down every process, adopted project management software, and brought on her first hire.

The payoff wasn’t just an amazing vacation—it was a firm that no longer depended on her being in every single loop. Her advice to any owner just starting out? Write everything down, from the very beginning, instead of waiting until you’re nine years in.

Check out Melissa’s full story →

Events

📍 Financial Cents AI Demo Day — October 7, 2026 (Virtual)

See how Financial Cents is making AI effortless with our new built-in agents. Join the FC team for a live, 30-minute walkthrough where you can watch client uploads get renamed to your firm’s convention the moment they land, see documents checked against the request type and period they were actually sent for, and get a clear look at where your team approves, overrides, and stays in control. Plus, get a sneak-peek at what’s coming next. Free, recorded, and capped off with a live Q&A.

👉 Register here →

📍 Intuit Connect 2026 — October 26–28 (Las Vegas, NV)

Intuit’s flagship gathering returns to Las Vegas for three days of CPE-accredited sessions, hands-on product demos, and big-stage keynotes (this year’s lineup includes Lupita Nyong’o and Grit author Angela Duckworth). It’s built for multi-service firms who want a front-row look at what’s next on the Intuit platform, a chance to shore up their tech stack, and a few thousand peers to compare notes with. Group passes drop the per-seat price if you’re bringing the team, and CPE credits are available throughout.

👉 Register here →

📍Accountex Canada — November 3–4 (Toronto, ON)

Canada’s biggest accounting and finance gathering takes over Toronto for two days of CPD-verified sessions and a packed expo floor where you can actually put your hands on the software, automation, and AI tools reshaping daily workflows. Expect 31 sessions built for the real pressures on Canadian firms, up to 24 CPD credits, and a thousand-plus peers to swap notes with. If you’re north of the border, this is the one to block off.

👉 Register here →

📍 WorkflowCon 2026 — November 9–10 (Virtual & Free)

Our own two-day virtual conference is back, and this year’s theme says it all: Focus is the New Flex. Most accounting conferences are built for firms trying to get bigger. WorkflowCon is built for firms betting on depth: better-fit clients, sharper services, and systems that hold up. Five tracks with 20-plus sessions spanning AI in practice, workflow automation, pricing, client selection, and team operations. Plus, recordings for every registrant. Did we mention it’s 100% free?

👉 Sign up now →

Noteworthy

We built AI that does the file busywork, and it’s free on every plan

If the magazine up top made the case that the hardest part of AI is rolling it out, then this is our answer to the problem. We just launched three AI agents—AI File Renaming, AI File Validator, and AI File Routing—that automatically handle the document grunt work inside your current workflows. No new system, no separate login, no training day. The agents rename client uploads to your firm’s convention the moment they land, catch wrong or mismatched files before they stall your team, and file documents into the right folder automatically—and you decide how much they do on their own versus when they need human review. They’re live now, free on every Financial Cents plan, and you stay in control of any work with your name on it.

See the full announcement →

Last call to nominate a Small & Mighty firm before October 10

The clock’s almost out! Nominations for the Small & Mighty Awards—part of WorkflowCon 2026’s “Focus is the New Flex” programming—close October 10 at 11:59 p.m. ET, and this is exactly the recognition this newsletter was built to celebrate: firms that stayed small on purpose, picked a lane, and got exceptional at it. There are four categories (Rising Voice, Underserved Market Champion, Community Builder, and Efficiency Engineer), any firm size is eligible, you don’t have to be a Financial Cents customer, and you can nominate a peer or yourself. It takes about ten minutes, winners take home $1,000 cash (or $2,000 paid forward to a nonprofit of their choice) plus a slate of prizes, and they’re revealed live on stage at WorkflowCon on November 10.

Know a firm that deserves the spotlight? You know what to do.👇

Submit your nomination →

That’s all for now. See you in two weeks. 💚

Share Get Work Done - a newsletter for accounting firm owners.

Small Change, Big Results

If you’re reading this with one eye still on your extension list, we see you. The September 15 deadline is behind you, October 15 is coming in hot, and somewhere in the middle you’re supposed to be “ramping back up.” So we’ll keep the ask small for this issue (but we promise the payoff is anything but).

We just published The State of AI in Bookkeeping & Accounting in 2026, a data report based on our survey of 486 accounting and bookkeeping professionals across North America. We didn’t want to pump out yet another report full of endless hype about robots doing your reconciliations. We wanted the messy, honest truth about what firms like yours are actually doing with AI.

The big headlines:

• 95% of firms are somewhere on the AI adoption curve, but only 11% are truly “running” with it.

• Only 1 in 5 can point to a measurable return on their investment.

• Most telling of all, the single biggest barrier to getting more value from AI isn’t cost, or fear, or the tech itself. It’s that nobody has an hour to spare. (A square, maybe—an hour, no.)

But buried in the data is the small change that changes everything. The two things most strongly linked to measurable ROI aren’t fancy tools, but structured learning and a written AI policy (which 9 in 10 firms still don’t have 😬).

Firms with a documented policy report clear ROI at more than double the rate of firms without one. Not because a PDF is magic, but because writing it forces a conversation around what tools are approved, what data can go in them, and who reviews what.

Here’s what else you’ll find inside the report:

• Where most firms fall on the “crawling / walking / running” adoption curve

• Which tasks accounting pros refuse to automate

• Why 90% agree human judgment matters more, not less, as AI spreads

One of the biggest conclusions is that you don’t need a massive budget to get ahead with AI. You just need to get intentional with how you’re using it. On that note, here’s your small change for this week: read the data, and jot down a rough draft of your rules.

👉 Read the full report →

Community 🫶

Sharpen your expertise and find your community with NAEA

If you’re chasing the EA credential—or you’ve held it for decades—the National Association of Enrolled Agents (NAEA) is the community built around you. It’s the nation’s leading home for enrolled agents, from folks just starting to study for the exam to seasoned experts, and it exists to advance the tax profession through education, leadership, ethics, and a network of practitioners who actually speak your language. When the work gets lonely or a thorny question needs a second opinion, it’s a good room to be in.

Join the association →

Get expert answers and reliable backup with NATP

The National Association of Tax Professionals (NATP) bills itself as the trusted home for tax professionals, and the “trusted” part is visible in its size alone. Thousands of members lean on this community for expert education, cutting-edge research tools, reliable support when a client question stumps you, and advocacy that carries the profession’s voice where it counts. If you want a well-stocked toolkit and a big, active community at your back heading into another season, this one’s worth a look.

Explore the community →

H🔥t Today

Your 2027 tax-planning conversations can start now (no need to wait on the IRS)

Bloomberg Tax & Accounting just released its projected 2027 tax rates, pointing to a roughly 3.2% inflation adjustment (up from 2.7% a year ago). The wrinkle this year: because the government shutdown delayed a key inflation report, the projections lean on an 11-month average. What does that mean for you? The best planning happens in October, not April. Having credible bracket and threshold projections in hand now means you can run year-end scenarios and start the “here’s what we should do before December 31” conversations with clients while there’s still time to act (instead of scrambling once the final figures drop).

Read the full story →

“No tax on overtime” now comes with homework

On August 6, the IRS released updated guidance (Fact Sheet FS-2026-13) on the new deductions for qualified overtime and tips, and buried in the FAQs is a change that matters for any client with hourly staff. Starting with tax year 2026, employers have to report qualified overtime separately on the W-2 in Box 12 (code TT) and qualified tips with code TP. Additionally, employees can generally only claim the deduction on the amounts the employer actually reports. Translation: if your restaurant, retail, salon, or hospitality clients don’t have payroll set up to track this now, their teams could lose the benefit at filing time. This is a textbook “let’s get ahead of it” conversation to have before year-end.

Read the full story →

Swipe this workflow template

Swipe this Month End Close + template from Dave Kersting.

Get more templates from firm owners like you in our community template library.

Meme

Relatable? 😆 (P.S. Make it happen in your firm with FC’s new AI File Renaming Agent.)

Firm Spotl💡ght

How Strength in Numbers Co. built a 15-person team without a single job ad

Laraine Hutcherson never set out to run a firm. After a phone call turned her family into a household of four kids under five overnight—several with significant disabilities—a traditional nine-to-five simply stopped being possible. So, she started doing bookkeeping on hours that bent around her life, discovered it was the calmest part of her day, and eventually joined forces with two friends navigating the same reality.

Today, Strength in Numbers Co. is a remote-first firm of 15 people serving 80–100 clients, built almost entirely from word-of-mouth referrals: Hutcherson has never once posted a job listing. The hardest part of growing wasn’t finding clients or staff; it was realizing she had systems living only in her head, and learning to let them go. Getting that legacy knowledge documented (e.g., passwords, deliverables, and due dates) is how the firm scaled without breaking, and it’s a big reason they now run much of their operation inside Financial Cents. As Hutcherson puts it: “It is an incredible tool. I can’t imagine not having it.”

Check out Laraine’s full story →

Events

📍CPB IGNITE Conference — September 22–25, 2026 (Montreal, QC)

Certified Professional Bookkeepers of Canada’s premier annual event lands in Montreal this year, bringing bookkeepers, accountants, and finance pros from across the country together for four days of sessions, a bustling trade show floor, and networking that actually leads somewhere. If you’re north of the border and looking for a software-agnostic gathering built specifically for Canadian bookkeeping pros, this is it.

👉 Learn more →

📍 Financial Cents AI Demo Day — October 7, 2026 (Virtual)

See how Financial Cents is making AI effortless with our new built-in agents. Join the FC team for a live, 30-minute walkthrough where you can watch client uploads get renamed to your firm’s convention the moment they land, see documents checked against the request type and period they were actually sent for, and get a clear look at where your team approves, overrides, and stays in control. Plus, get a sneak-peek at what’s coming next. Free, recorded, and capped off with a live Q&A.

👉 Register here →

📍 Intuit Connect 2026 — October 26–28 (Las Vegas, NV)

Intuit’s flagship gathering returns to Las Vegas for three days of CPE-accredited sessions, hands-on product demos, and big-stage keynotes (this year’s lineup includes Lupita Nyong’o and Grit author Angela Duckworth). It’s built for multi-service firms who want a front-row look at what’s next on the Intuit platform, a chance to shore up their tech stack, and a few thousand peers to compare notes with. Group passes drop the per-seat price if you’re bringing the team, and CPE credits are available throughout.

👉 Register here →

Noteworthy

AI in Accounting: 2026 so far, and what your firm should do about it

We’re past the halfway mark of the year AI was supposed to change everything, so the latest episode in our AI Accounting video series sidesteps the hype and gets practical:

• First up: a shortcut that turns “I really should document that process” into an actual SOP in about 30 minutes. (Hint: it starts with a Loom recording and ends with an AI prompt, no blank page required.)

• Then a look at how four small firms are using AI in truly useful, low-cost ways, followed by a cautionary tale from Starbucks about what happens when AI is no match for real-world messiness.

• And finally, the “tokenomics” every firm should understand before the next bill shows up, because on usage-based AI tools, cost can sneak up fast.

It’s 15-ish minutes that’ll leave you with at least one thing to try this week!

Watch the episode →

A few weeks left to nominate a Small & Mighty firm

Nominations for the Small & Mighty Awards—part of WorkflowCon 2026’s “Focus is the New Flex” programming—are still open, but the window closes October 10. They exist to celebrate the firms this newsletter is written for: those that stayed small on purpose, picked a lane, and got exceptional at what they do. Any firm size is eligible, you don’t have to be a Financial Cents customer, and you can nominate a peer or yourself. It takes about ten minutes, and every category winner takes home $1,000 cash (or $2,000 paid forward to a nonprofit of their choice), coaching sessions, and a conference registration.

Know a firm that deserves the spotlight? You know what to do.👇

Submit your nomination →

That’s all for now. See you in two weeks. 💚

Share Get Work Done - a newsletter for accounting firm owners.

Small Change, Big Results

Extension season is bearing down, the summer lull is officially over, and somewhere in your inbox is an unread newsletter insisting that your firm needs an “AI transformation roadmap” by Q4.

Our piping-hot take? 🍵

No, you don’t. (Or at least, you shouldn’t.)

Look, no one who’s actively trying to sell you a complex AI strategy is going to admit you don’t need one. But you can always count on us to give it to you straight, and in this case that means taking all this chatter over AI implementation, transformation, and what-have-you-fication with an extra-large grain of salt.

You already have enough tasks in your to-do pile. Getting your firm AI-ramped shouldn’t come with a whole new laundry list of action items you don’t have time for.

That’s exactly why we built our AI solutions to be totally effortless. Our AI agents take busywork off your plate from day one. They are built seamlessly into the workflows you already use—no rollout, no new system to learn, no additional headaches. And most importantly, your judgment always stays in control.

Here’s a quick rundown of our effortless AI offerings at Financial Cents:

• AI File Renaming: Turns document names like “scan-final(2).pdf” into clean, consistent names the moment a client completes an upload, all based on your firm’s pre-set naming convention.

• AI File Validator: Checks each upload against what you actually requested and flags incorrect ones before your team has to go back to the client again.

• AI checklist templates: Generate a full workflow checklist from a single prompt, then fine-tune it step-by-step.

• AI email drafts: Write client reminders, status updates, and awkward follow-ups in seconds, right where your client work already lives.

That’s what useful AI looks like: less work for your team, right out of the gate (not another project for the pile). You choose how hands-off each agent is, exceptions stay visible, and your team always gets the final say.

The best part? It’s completely free on every Financial Cents plan (including trials), so you can jump in and give it a whirl ASAP.

👉 Learn more about effortless AI →

Want to watch it work in a real firm’s workflow setup? We’re hosting a live AI Demo Day on September 16 where we’ll give a more detailed walkthrough of the agents (with plenty of time for audience Q&A).

👉 Save your seat →

Community 🫶

Grow your career and your confidence with AFWA

Accounting & Financial Women’s Alliance (AFWA) is the kind of network you wish you’d found sooner. It’s a warm, supportive community dedicated to uplifting women in accounting and finance through mentorship, professional growth, and leadership opportunities—offering the connections and encouragement you need to break barriers and reach your full potential, in your career and beyond. If you’ve been looking for peers who truly get it, this is a wonderful place to land.

Join the community →

Start earning what you’re worth with Universal Accounting Center

If you’re great at the work but not sure you’re getting paid what it’s worth, then this one’s for you. Universal Accounting Center has been in the corner of accounting, bookkeeping, and tax pros since 1979, with training, certifications, coaching, and ongoing support built around a simple promise: the confidence and competence to excel in your career—and to actually earn what you’re worth. Whether you’re sharpening your own skills or building up your team’s, it’s a great place to grow.

Explore the training →

H🔥t Today

AI won’t kill accounting, but it might kill the hourly bill

A recent CPA Practice Advisor piece points to Accenture’s brutal one-day stock slide this summer as an early warning shot: buyers have started to balk at hourly pricing for consulting, and time is ticking for firms still billing compliance work by the clock. The argument isn’t that revenue is about to fall off a cliff, but rather that the way firms generate said revenue is due for a revamp. Because in today’s age, the most valuable thing you offer clients is your judgment and guidance around the questions they don’t always know to ask. So if your pricing still rewards hours over outcomes, consider this your nudge to revisit fixed or value-based pricing before your clients bring it up first.

Read the full story →

Your next client might just come from AI

With Forrester finding that roughly 94% of business buyers now lean on AI somewhere in their buying process, CPA Practice Advisor warns firms that don’t surface when someone asks a model for “a bookkeeper who handles X” risk getting cut out of the search altogether, and that industry consolidation is making AI search visibility even harder for smaller firms. The takeaway for you: a well-defined niche, current reviews, and a well-structured web presence are crucial to showing up in AI answers.

Read the full story →

Agents are no match for human expertise

As AI agents take on more data processing work, the demand for human oversight goes up, not down. The author of this CPA Practice Advisory piece calls it the rise of the “Chief Assurance Officer” (a.k.a. the person who cross-checks the machine’s work and gives the final sign-off). To maximize the value of AI, many firms are letting agents handle the lower-level technical and administrative work while humans maintain control of important decisions and judgment calls. (Which, not coincidentally, is exactly how we built our AI agents at Financial Cents.)

Read the full story →

Swipe this workflow template

Swipe this Monthly 1099 and W9 Review template from Aimee Garneau.

Get more templates from firm owners like you in our community template library.

Meme

Relatable? 😆 (Pssst…prevent moments like this in your firm with FC’s new AI File Validator.)

Firm Spotl💡ght

How Envision Business Services finally ended the month-end scramble (and all the client friction that came with it)

When Kristin Thompson started Envision Business Services in 2020, she was a team of one. Today she leads six remote bookkeepers across British Columbia, serving small and mid-sized businesses that want a true partner on their team, not just someone to handle the books.

For years she ran the firm on a DIY Microsoft 365 system she’d built herself, and it worked beautifully right up until she hit the three-employee mark, when chasing missing client info each month turned into an “inquiry inbox” that piled up faster than her team could clear it (and wasn’t much fun on the client’s side either).

That all changed when Kristin and the team at Envision adopted Month-End Close in Financial Cents. Instead of typing out every missing detail, they can code a transaction to a designated account, and the request routes to the client automatically. Multi-entity clients see everything on one screen instead of juggling logins, and batched reminders go out on a set schedule so no one has to painstakingly ping people transaction by transaction. After only two months using this feature, Kristin’s verdict was strong and simple: less manual work on her side, and noticeably less friction for clients.

Check out Kristin’s full story →

Events

📍 IRS Nationwide Tax Forum — September 15–17 (San Diego, CA)

The Tax Forum swings through San Diego later this month at the Town & Country Resort, with the same lineup of federal tax law updates, IRS procedure sessions, and CE credits (up to 18) featured at this summer’s previous tax forum events. Standard registration is $409.

👉 Learn more →

📍 Financial Cents AI Demo Day — September 16, 2026 (Virtual)

See how Financial Cents is making AI effortless with our new built-in agents. Join the FC team for a live, 30-minute walkthrough where you can watch client uploads get renamed to your firm’s convention the moment they land, see documents checked against the request type and period they were actually sent for, and get a clear look at where your team approves, overrides, and stays in control. Plus, get a sneak-peek at what’s coming next. Free, recorded, and capped off with a live Q&A.

👉 Register here →

📍CPB IGNITE Conference — September 22–25, 2026 (Montreal, QC)

Certified Professional Bookkeepers of Canada’s premier annual event lands in Montreal this year, bringing bookkeepers, accountants, and finance pros from across the country together for four days of sessions, a bustling trade show floor, and networking that actually leads somewhere. If you’re north of the border and looking for a software-agnostic gathering built specifically for Canadian bookkeeping pros, this is it.

👉 Learn more →

📍 Intuit Connect 2026 — October 26–28 (Las Vegas, NV)

Intuit’s flagship gathering returns to Las Vegas for three days of CPE-accredited sessions, hands-on product demos, and big-stage keynotes (this year’s lineup includes Lupita Nyong’o and Grit author Angela Duckworth). It’s built for multi-service firms who want a front-row look at what’s next on the Intuit platform, a chance to shore up their tech stack, and a few thousand peers to compare notes with. Group passes drop the per-seat price if you’re bringing the team, and CPE credits are available throughout.

👉 Register here →

Noteworthy

Nominations are open for the inaugural Small & Mighty Awards

Hot off the presses, we’re officially accepting nominations for the very first Small & Mighty Awards recognizing accounting and bookkeeping pros who have stayed small on purpose, led with intention, and gone deep in their industry or speciality. Presented as part of WorkflowCon 2026’s “Focus is the New Flex” theme, the Small & Mighty Awards feature four separate categories: Rising Voice, Underserved Market Champion, Community Builder, and Workflow Innovator.

Any firm size is eligible, you don’t need to be a Financial Cents customer to win, and you can nominate a peer or yourself (both judged the same way). The form takes about 10 minutes to complete, nominations close October 10, and every category winner takes home $1,000 (or $2,000 paid forward to a nonprofit of their choice), coaching sessions, and a complimentary in-person conference registration (with all expenses paid). Winners will be revealed live on stage at WorkflowCon on November 10.

Know someone who deserves it? Do your thing, fam.👇

Submit your nomination →

That’s all for now. See you in two weeks. 💚

Share Get Work Done - a newsletter for accounting firm owners.

Small Change, Big Results

If you’ve ever come back from a few days off to 17 “quick questions” from your team, then your firm probably has a workflow problem. Figuring out what the biggest gap actually is, though, can be a challenge for even the most masterful sleuths.

Sometimes it’s you (a.k.a. the owner or someone else on the leadership team), because no one else is empowered to make decisions. Sometimes it’s a process that lives entirely in someone’s head, so it only works when that one person is at their desk. And sometimes it’s the missing handoff between two people who both assumed the other had it covered.

We built a 2-minute assessment to help you figure out where the ball is dropping.

Answer 12 quick questions about how your firm actually runs (not how you wish it did), and you’ll get:

• an accurate diagnosis of your biggest gap,

• some motivational wisdom from our top Proudly Small featured firm owners, and

• a step-by-step playbook for getting your workflows back on track (designed specifically for small firms, of course).

TBH, every firm probably has all of these gaps to some degree, but this assessment draws out the one costing you the most sleep right now (before it turns into a full-on fire drill in Q4).

👉 Take the Workflow Gap Assessment →

Community 🫶

Embrace your differences with Ovata Collective

If you’re a neurodivergent accountant, tax pro, or student who’s ever felt like you had to mask your way through your day-to-day, Ovata Collective could be a game-changer for you. It’s a warm, peer-led community built specifically for accounting folks who think and work differently, offering monthly roundtables, co-working sessions, accountability buddy groups, and an authentically supportive space to talk shop without pretending to be someone you’re not. No diagnosis required to join.

Learn more →

Plug into Canada’s premiere national network of bookkeepers

For our Canadian readers, CPB Canada is the country’s flagship professional community for bookkeeping leaders: part certification body, part peer network, part advocate for the profession. Members get access to CPD-eligible webinars, a national network of fellow bookkeepers, and a real seat at the table in shaping bookkeeping standards across Canada. It’s a nice way to build community and stay sharp beyond your own firm’s four walls.

Explore the community →

H🔥t Today

BOI reporting requirements go bye-bye

On August 11, the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) finalized a rule permanently ending the Corporate Transparency Act’s beneficial ownership information reporting requirement for U.S. companies and individuals, and the Treasury says it’s also deleting the ownership info already submitted by U.S. entities. Foreign companies still have reporting obligations, but for the vast majority of your small-business clients, this compliance headache is officially over. If BOI reminders have been baked into your onboarding checklists or you’ve been fielding any “do I still need to file this?” emails, you can finally cross it off your list (and it might be worth a quick note letting clients know they’re off the hook).

Read the full story →

Your clients could be leaving Social Security money on the table

At a recent AICPA ENGAGE session, Social Security Advisors co-founder Matthew Allen broke down just how easy it is to miss serious money: married couples face more than 9,000 possible claiming paths, and the wrong one can cost $120,000 over a lifetime. A few flags you might consider passing to clients: surviving spouses can claim starting at age 60 (not 62), the lower earner in a couple should generally claim first, divorced clients married 10+ years may qualify to claim on an ex’s record, and families with a minor child at home can unlock extra monthly benefits. You don’t need to run the math yourself, but flagging this to clients approaching retirement (especially divorced or widowed ones) is an easy way to add advisory value this fall.

Read the full story →

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Swipe this Multiple Month Bookkeeping Clean Up Project template from Chris Potter.

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Firm Spotl💡ght

How Advantage Insights brought Fortune-500 discipline to small business books with Month-End Close in Financial Cents

Before Mary Ferry started Advantage Insights, she spent nearly 35 years in corporate finance at companies like Conagra Foods and Foot Locker. When Conagra planned to move her role to Chicago in 2016, she took the severance instead and opened her own firm the following year, built on a simple idea: small business owners deserve the same financial discipline Fortune-500 teams take for granted.

For years, that discipline still ran on spreadsheets: exported transactions emailed to clients, 1099s tracked in a side file, and no reliable way to confirm reviews were actually happening. Since adopting Month-End Close in Financial Cents, Mary’s nine-person remote team has cut 1099 review time roughly in half across the ~85 entities they close every month, replaced a separate receipt-capture tool entirely, and given reviewers one simple place to confirm the work is done.

Check out Mary’s full story →

Events

📍 IRS Nationwide Tax Forum — September 1–3 (Orlando, FL)

Three days, 40+ seminars, and actual face time with IRS subject-matter experts through the Case Resolution Program (appointment required). Sessions cover the latest federal tax law updates and IRS procedures, and you can earn up to 18 CE credits along the way. Show up Monday for the pre-forum sessions on practice management and work-life balance, courtesy of NAEA, NATP, NSA, and other partner associations. Standard registration ($329) runs through August 18, after which it jumps to $409—so don’t sit on this one too long.

👉 Learn more →

📍 IRS Nationwide Tax Forum — September 15–17 (San Diego, CA)

Can’t make Orlando? The Tax Forum swings through San Diego two weeks later at the Town & Country Resort, with the same lineup of federal tax law updates, IRS procedure sessions, and CE credits (up to 18). Standard registration is $329 through September 1, after which it climbs to $409. And be sure to book your hotel early, since the Tax Forum room block tends to fill up fast.

👉 Learn more →

📍CPB IGNITE Conference — September 22–25 (Montreal, QC)

Certified Professional Bookkeepers of Canada’s premier annual event lands in Montreal this year, bringing bookkeepers, accountants, and finance pros from across the country together for four days of sessions, a bustling trade show floor, and networking that actually leads somewhere. If you’re north of the border and looking for a software-agnostic gathering built specifically for Canadian bookkeeping pros, this is it.

👉 Learn more →

Noteworthy

Financial Cents cracks the prestigious Inc. 5000 list

Cue the party poppers! We’re officially No. 601 on the 2026 Inc. 5000 list of America’s fastest-growing private companies, marking our second consecutive year on the list and our second Inc. recognition this year alone (following our spot on the Inc. Best Workplaces list back in June). Past honorees on this list include names like Microsoft and Patagonia, so we’re pretty darn proud to be in such great company. More than anything, it’s a sign that how we build FC matters just as much to us as what we build.

See the full announcement →

Much ado about nothing (er, we mean, AI)

Okay, maybe it’s not nothing, but we can probably all agree that AI has been pretty overhyped. If you’ve felt whiplash between “AI will replace accountants any day now” and “the AI tool I tried made everything worse,” you’re not alone. Even accountants using this stuff daily can’t always say with certainty that it’s actually helping. This guide (built with input from Jason Staats, Blake Oliver, and Andrew Lassise) skips the buzzwords and gets specific: which AI use cases are definitely paying off right now (things like client emails, workflow templates, document organization, and categorization help), where it still needs a human in the loop, and what we can realistically expect in the near future. If you’ve been on the fence about where to even start, this is a useful roadmap.

Un-hype accounting AI →

That’s all for now. See you in two weeks. 💚

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Small Change, Big Results

If tax season already feels like a distant memory, congrats: you’ve officially made it to systems-building season. This is the stretch where firm owners either create the infrastructure that will carry them through the next crunch, or don’t (and suffer the consequences come April).

Case in point: Alisa McCabe, CEO of First Steps Financial, recently went two weeks without reading a single email. Not “checked her inbox twice a day just in case,” but a real-deal, honest-to-goodness break from the daily grind of reading and responding to messages. She forced herself to remain present during her time off, stayed blissfully unaware of the “urgent” fires that would’ve bubbled up to her in the past, and came home to find that her firm hadn’t just survived—it had actually gotten better.

That was the premise behind “Buddy System: Out of Office Ready,” the third session in our Summer Workflow Camp series, where Alisa walked campers through exactly how she built her airtight out-of-office system. TBH, it has nothing to do with setting the right vacation-mode Slack status, distributing a detailed pre-vacation memo, or drafting the perfect email autoresponder. Instead, it hinges on:

• Choosing the right second-in-command using the GWC test.

• Building a decision matrix so your team can make calls the way you would, without needing to ask you.

• Sorting decisions into three tiers, so everyone knows what to step in and handle immediately, what to loop you in on, and what to treat as a true emergency.

• Following Alisa’s three non-negotiable OOO rules: don’t read email, don’t call to check in, and have faith in your team.

Camp wrapped last week, but the resources from Alisa’s session are still up for grabs. Check out the session recap below, and be sure to download all the free templates and handouts (including Alisa’s full Out-of-Office Checklist, Decision Matrix, client notification templates, and a “fire drill” plan for testing the whole system).

👉 Read the full “Buddy System” recap →

👉 Download the Out-of-Office resources →

Community 🫶

Gain career confidence in the Black Female Accountants Network

BFAN exists to help its members share knowledge and experience, celebrate professional wins, and use real tools and resources to keep growing their careers. Follow along on Instagram for the day-to-day, and if you’re looking for a reason to get out from behind the screen, mark your calendar for their Women in Leadership Summit (WILS) on October 24, 2026: a day built around leading with more confidence in your career, business, and community. Registration is open now.

Follow BFAN on Instagram →

Register for WILS 2026 →

Go beyond the typical water cooler group with Realize

Jason Staats built Realize as the alternative to yet another free “water cooler” community underwritten by a software vendor with an agenda. It’s a paid, high-effort space instead: real mastermind groups, actual paid community managers, advisors in residence, and a running calendar of live events featuring AMAs, book clubs, monthly workshops, and quarterly meetups for tools like Karbon, Keeper, Canopy, TaxDome, and yes, Financial Cents. Realize has already helped 500+ accounting leaders build more confident, sustainable firms, and it might be worth a look if you’ve outgrown Facebook-group energy.

Check out Realize →

H🔥t Today

Last chance to take the AI survey and score $500 (we really mean it this time)

We’re extending our AI-in-accounting survey through the end of this week (August 7) to give all those last-minute stragglers one last chance to share their unfiltered thoughts. Where’s AI actually saving you time? Where’s it falling flat? Where do you think this is all headed? Your answers will be distilled into a public data report that’ll inform the next issue of Two Cents Magazine, and if you complete it before the extended deadline, you’ll be entered to win a $500 gift card.

Take the AI Survey →

The Fed held rates steady (again), but this time the decision wasn’t unanimous

On July 29, the Federal Reserve voted 9–3 to keep its benchmark rate at 3.5%–3.75%, marking the fifth straight meeting without a change. What’s new this time: three regional presidents dissented, pushing for a hike instead, and mortgage rates have already crept toward a one-year high amid geopolitical tension in the Middle East. The “so what” for your clients: borrowing costs aren’t moving anytime soon, and the dissent signals real disagreement inside the Fed about where things should go next. If you haven’t talked cash flow and financing plans with clients recently, this is a good nudge to bring it up.

Read the full story →

The IRS just made penalty relief a lot less painful

Starting this summer, eligible taxpayers will get failure-to-file, failure-to-pay, and failure-to-deposit penalties abated automatically. That means no more manually requesting first-time abatement and hoping whoever picks up the phone knows the Internal Revenue Manual as well as you do. The new “Automatic Exemption from Penalty” program covers tax year 2025 and 2026 returns for taxpayers with a clean three-year compliance history. The Taxpayer Advocate estimates it’ll help roughly 1.5 million taxpayers a year, versus the 220,000ish who got relief under the old manual process. The good news for you? Fewer FTA calls to make on your clients’ behalf. Just know some clients may still get an errant penalty notice during the transition.

Read the full story →

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Swipe this Biweekly Payroll template from Priti Lad

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Firm Spotl💡ght

How Angela Jenkins turned her “chaos to calm” mantra into a successful bookkeeping practice

Angela Jenkins has been turning chaos into order since she was a little girl rolling her dad’s spare change into paper wrappers at her family’s kitchen table in Philadelphia. Nine years ago, she turned her penchant for financial organization into Mindfull Money Matters (yes, the two L’s are intentional), a boutique bookkeeping firm serving almost entirely women and entrepreneurs of color, communities she believes have been historically shut out of financial literacy.

Jenkins built her client list slowly and selectively, mostly through word of mouth, and she isn’t shy about turning away anyone who doesn’t feel like the right fit. The result: a roster of about 15 clients she reviews constantly, a team she trusts completely, and a distinct guiding philosophy: “I’m just telling you what the numbers say; there’s no judgment here.”

After a health scare last year forced her to slow down for a few months, Jenkins came out the other side more committed than ever to building the “audacious” version of her firm: one that layers cash flow projections, hiring timelines, and long-range planning on top of the books.

Check out Angela’s full story in Two Cents Magazine →

Events

📍 Firm Talent Summit — August 12 (Virtual)

Presented by Accounting Today, this half-day virtual summit tackles the workforce reckoning head-on: shrinking graduate pipelines, mid-career departures, and the scramble to find talent through non-traditional channels. Sessions cover expanding your hiring pool, building legitimate upskilling paths for your team, and using outsourcing strategically instead of as a last resort. It’s free, and several sessions are CPE-eligible.

👉 Register now →

📍 IRS Nationwide Tax Forum — September 1–3 (Orlando, FL)

Three days, 40+ seminars, and actual face time with IRS subject-matter experts through the Case Resolution Program (appointment required). Sessions cover the latest federal tax law updates and IRS procedures, and you can earn up to 18 CE credits along the way. Show up Monday for the pre-forum sessions on practice management and work-life balance, courtesy of NAEA, NATP, NSA, and other partner associations. Standard registration ($329) runs through August 18, after which it jumps to $409—so don’t sit on this one too long.

👉 Learn more →

Noteworthy

Your files can finally name themselves

Financial Cents is all about making AI easy and practical, which is why they just launched the new AI File Renaming feature. It’s pretty much exactly what it sounds like: the moment a client uploads a document, the AI reads it, figures out what it is, and renames it according to your firm’s naming convention. You choose whether renaming happens automatically or needs your sign-off first, and any low-confidence rename gets flagged immediately so nothing weird slips through unnoticed. It’s a small thing that kills an outsized number of “wait, which file is this again?” moments, and that can add up to a whole lot of saved time (especially during a busy stretch). It’s included for all Financial Cents users, regardless of package. Peep the quick video walkthrough below if you want to see this feature in action before trying it out. 👀

Watch the walkthrough →

That’s all for now. See you in two weeks. 💚

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Small Change, Big Results

Workflows not, well, working? It’s more common than you think, even if you put a lot of time and thought into designing them the first time around.

The truth is, your firm’s workflows will always be a work in progress. And summer is the perfect season to focus on refreshing and improving them.

But for most of us, when we * finally * block off time to fix our processes, we beeline straight for the biggest, ugliest one in the pile—the “franken-flow” with dozens of steps and a whole roll of duct tape holding it all together. Kellie Parks, CPB, says that’s the wrong approach.

In the second session of our month-long Summer Workflow Camp, Kellie (owner of Calmwaters Cloud Accounting and a self-described “relentless organizer”) walked campers through her formula for an effective workflow reset. Rule numero uno? Start with the minnows, not the marlins.

“It’s nice to get into a cadence or a rhythm and see what works for you with some of the smaller ones before you really pick off some of those huge ones,” she said. Impact, not size, is what should drive your priority list. When deciding what to rebuild first, Kellie asks herself three questions:

• Does it give someone freedom? (That includes firm owners, by the way. If a workflow lets you and your team stop doing work you don’t want to be doing, it’s a great candidate.)

• Does it create a great client experience? (Kellie’s file-review workflow, for example, is often a new client’s first touchpoint with her firm—so it has to feel seamless.)

• Is it critical even if it’s simple? (Kellie illustrated this point with a non-accounting example: the one-page SOP she wrote for locking the front gate in her community. It’s not complicated, but it removed her as the bottleneck.)

The bigger lesson running underneath all of this is that a good workflow is never truly finished.

“I built this thing years ago, and I have been honing it ever since,” Kellie said of the onboarding workflow she walked through during the live session. “You will never be done honing.” So, don’t wait for perfect. Build for today, test it in the wild, plug the holes as real clients surface them, and run it back again.

👉 Read the full “Workflow Reset” recap →

And if this has you itching to dig into your own workflows, camp isn’t over yet. The finale, “The Send-Off,” is happening next Tuesday, July 28. It’s the last session of the series, it’s free, and we have some super-fun surprises in store for live attendees!

👉 Save your spot for the Summer Workflow Camp finale →

Community 🫶

Find your peeps in the Bookkeepers Helping Bookkeepers group

Running a firm can feel lonely, but it doesn’t have to. Bookkeepers Helping Bookkeepers (BHB) is exactly what it sounds like: a no-ego Facebook group where you can ask the “is this a dumb question?” questions and get real answers from people who’ve been there. It’s hosted by the team at Bookkeeper Testing, who are on a mission to raise the bar for the profession through education.

Join the group →

Stay on top of tax changes with NATP

If you do tax work, then the National Association of Tax Professionals (NATP) should definitely be on your radar. As the tax code keeps shifting under your feet, they’ve got your back with professional advocacy, expert guidance on applying the latest federal rules to your clients’ situations, and a community of tax pros to grow alongside. They just wrapped Taxposium, their flagship conference, and next year’s event is already on the calendar for June 21–23, 2027, at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston (registration opens this fall).

Learn more and join →

H🔥t Today

50,000 pennies for your thoughts? Take our quick AI survey to win $500

Everyone’s talking about AI in accounting, but we want to know how it’s actually showing up in your day-to-day: where it’s saving you time, where it’s falling flat, and where you think it’s all headed. Your answers get distilled into a public data report that will shape the next issue of Two Cents Magazine. It takes 10–15 minutes, and if you complete it by July 31, you can enter our drawing for a $500 gift card. 💸

Take the AI survey →

The IRS just put a target on your back (but they gave you a shield, too)

On July 7, the IRS and its Security Summit partners kicked off the 2026 “Protect Your Clients; Protect Yourself” campaign, a five-week series aimed at tax pros. Why the urgency? Firms are prime targets right now, with malware-laden “new client” spear-phishing emails and scammers hunting for your EFIN, PTIN, and CAF numbers. The series walks through phishing defense, building a Written Information Security Plan (which you’re required to have), and vetted tools that can help.

Read the full story →

Why wait times for the IRS phone line feel so out of control

A June TIGTA report put hard numbers on something you’ve probably felt: IRS Taxpayer Services lost more than 11,300 employees, and the agency had to involuntarily reassign nearly 1,200 workers just to get through the 2026 filing season. Translation for your firm: when a client’s notice requires speaking to a human at the IRS, expect delays (and set expectations accordingly). Otherwise, you might be fielding a lot of “why is this taking so long?” emails.

Read the full story →

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Swipe this Revised Client Onboarding Template from Kellie Parks (the one she shared during last week’s Summer Workflow Camp session!)

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Firm Spotl💡ght

How Alisa McCabe grew First Steps Financial 20–40% a year by cutting her client list in half

A few years ago, Alisa McCabe started breaking up with clients, and her team thought she’d completely lost it. “We can’t get rid of clients,” they told her. But Alisa had a theory borrowed from Mike Michalowicz’s The Pumpkin Plan: prune the vine, and the core grows bigger.

So, she trimmed her roster from nearly 100 down to 41, all while growing the firm 20–40% year over year. Today, First Steps Financial is an 11-person, fully remote firm serving clients across the US, Canada, and the UK, built around three niches (including a unique focus on women in life sciences) and one non-negotiable bar: every client has to be growth-minded, collaborative, and treat the work as a partnership. Fewer clients and more annual revenue? It might sound paradoxical until you read the whole story, which you can do below! 👇

Check out Alisa’s full story in Two Cents Magazine →

Events

📍 Summer Workflow Camp: The Send-Off — Camp Talent Show + Stress Test Finals — July 28 (Virtual, 2:00–3:00 PM ET)

Summer Workflow Camp wraps this Tuesday with our most fun session yet: a talent show and a live stress test of the workflows campers have been building all month. It’s free, it’s the series finale, and it’s the perfect way to put everything you’ve learned this month into practice. Whether you show off your workflow or not, come cheer on your peers, get inspired, and help us close out camp with a bang.

👉 Register here →

📍 IRS Nationwide Tax Forum — August 4–6 (New Orleans, LA)

Three days, 40+ seminars, and the latest on federal tax law, IRS procedures, and emerging issues (plus, continuing education credits). If you’ll be in NOLA, come say hi to our crew: Financial Cents will be repping at booth 258. 👋 Stop by to see how firms are cutting the busywork out of their daily operations.

👉 Learn more →

Noteworthy

The month-end close problem every bookkeeping firm has (and how to solve it for good)

Picture this: It’s the fifth business day of the month, and you’re staring at a $4,200 charge to a vendor nobody recognizes. So you export the transactions, start another spreadsheet tab, fire off another email, and wait. It’s not really hard, but that’s why it’s dangerous.

Month-end close is death by a thousand small tasks, and without an automated system, firms burn roughly two hours per client, per month on it. For a 100-client firm at $70/hour, that’s six figures a year in billable capacity you’re giving away. This article lays out the five most common places the close actually breaks down: uncategorized transactions, missing details, the annual 1099 scramble, reconciliation with no audit trail, and questions buried in your inbox. Then, it shows you how Month-End Close in Financial Cents fixes every single one. (By the way, if you tried the Month-End Close feature early on and it didn’t cover your process yet, it’s definitely worth another look: 14 releases have shipped in seven months. 👀)

Read it now →

That’s all for now. See you in two weeks. 💚

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Small Change, Big Results

To be flexible, you’ve gotta have structure. It might sound like an oxymoron, but it’s actually a cardinal rule of firm leadership—one that we tackled in the final session of our Proudly Small webinar series:

Running Lean and Loving It: Operations, Tech, & the Art of Doing More with Less

Four successful firm owners who’ve made flexibility a reality for themselves and their teams sat down with Shahram Zarshenas, CEO of Financial Cents, to talk through how they did it. For them, “flexible” does not mean “loosey-goosey” (the exact opposite, actually).

None of these firm owners work less because they’re winging it. They work less (or work weird hours, or take random Tuesday afternoons off) because they’ve built a strong foundation of delegation, documentation, and automation that makes balance possible:

• Christine Salvatore of In Line Management logs in at 5 a.m. some days so she can be present for her kids in the afternoon, and her team handles 85% of client-facing work because she’s gotten ruthless about handing things off.

• Katie Helle of Scaled Accounting Solutions caps her own hours at 40 a week, even during tax season, because she built the necessary systems on day one instead of “eventually.”

• Angela Jenkins leverages AI thoughtfully to extract processes out of her own head and make them replicable for her team at Mindfull Money Matters.

• Dave Kersting of Capovario makes workflow documentation a team sport to ensure instructions are clear enough for anyone to follow, at any given time, with any client.

And those examples are just the tip of the iceberg. So, if summer is your systems-building season (and we’d argue that it should be), this session recap is basically free consulting. A few things you’ll walk away with:

• Why hiring before you can technically afford it is sometimes the smartest financial move you’ll make

• How to build a tiered delegation system based on client risk

• The one process almost every panelist wishes they’d automated from day one

• A blunt reminder that “protecting your time” is a viable business strategy, not a luxury

Ready to unleash your firm’s efficiency? Peep the panel recap (or watch the full recording) below!

👉 See the recap →

Community 🫶

Snag your copy of the Modern Firm Growth Guide

If your firm feels scattered, overwhelming, or just harder to run than it should be, this one’s for you. Justine Lackey built one of the first virtual bookkeeping firms in the U.S., grew it to 100+ premium clients, and sold it in 2023—and she’s packed 88 of her best tips into a free guide covering the four essentials of firm growth: Systems, Sales, Service, and Skills. It’s a solid roadmap if you’re trying to get organized, serve clients better, and start leading like a CEO instead of doing everything yourself.

Grab the free guide →

Join Roundtable Labs for a free monthly workflow discussion

Looking for people who actually get it? Roundtable Labs is a community where accountants, bookkeepers, CPAs, EAs, and firm owners all sit at the same virtual table—literally, in a round table format built for real conversation, not another webinar you half-watch. Find the round table that fits your firm and your stage of growth. While you’re there, check out the Next Level Firm Roundtable with Dave Kersting and Richard Roppa-Roberts, a free, lively monthly discussion on workflow, strategy, and best practices for running your firm with Financial Cents—held every third Wednesday, 11:00 AM–12:30 PM Pacific.

Explore Roundtable Labs →

H🔥t Today

Consolidation at the top keeps rolling, even while small firms lean into staying small

Top-15 firm EisnerAmper just announced its fourth combination of 2026, adding Silicon Valley restructuring firm Sherwood Partners to its roster. It’s the latest data point in a bigger trend: while giant firms keep rolling up specialty practices, plenty of owners are proving there’s real staying power—and real client loyalty—in remaining independent.

Read the full story →

The burnout epidemic in middle management

A new piece from Boomer Consulting’s Jacqueline Lombardo digs into why middle managers at accounting firms are burning out and walking away: leaders keep piling more clients and initiatives onto the people who handle it best, mistaking their silence for capacity. Sound familiar? For a small firm, “middle manager” might just be your most senior team member—the one you keep leaning on because they never say no. Worth a gut check before they throw in the towel with no warning.

Read the full story →

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Swipe this Extended Office Closure Template from Peter Piluk

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Firm Spotl💡ght

How Katie Helle built Scaled Accounting Solutions to run without her

Katie Helle spent 15 years in a traditional public accounting firm before realizing she’d had enough of measuring her life in billable increments. So in October 2024, she launched Scaled Accounting Solutions—and got hit almost immediately with a wave of referrals far bigger than the slow ramp-up she’d expected.

Rather than white-knuckle her way through it, she spent the next few months building her workflows from scratch inside Financial Cents and documenting every step so her small team—two contractors based in the Philippines and her niece, who handles admin locally in Arizona—could operate without waiting on her. These days, she hasn’t worked more than 40 hours in a single week, even during tax season, and you can regularly find her at a Pilates class in the middle of a random weekday afternoon.

Check out Katie’s full story in Two Cents Magazine →

Events

📍 NATP Taxposium — July 13–15 (Cleveland, OH)

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame city, meet tax nerds. NATP’s in-person conference brings tax pros together for sessions on AI workflows for small firms, multi-entity tax planning, and high-income client strategy (plus CPE credit and a full expo hall of tools built for tax practices).

👉 See the full agenda here →

📍 Summer Workflow Camp: The Workflow Reset — Tuesday, July 14 (Virtual, 2:00–3:00 PM ET)

Bookkeeper and cloud accounting leader Kellie Parks walks through a real before-and-after of how she personally rebuilt her own firm’s workflows; then, you’ll build or update one live workflow of your own during the session, mapped to real gaps in your firm. It’s part of Financial Cents’ free, four-week Summer Workflow Camp, and yes, there are prizes on the table (including a $2,500 team retreat fund for the winning cabin).

👉 Register here →

📍 Tech Stack Demo Day — Thursday, July 16 (Virtual, 11:00 AM–3:00 PM ET)

The only thing you should be tending on vacation is the campfire, not your firm. Tech Stack Demo Day rounds up five live software walkthroughs from tools built to keep your accounting firm productive and profitable while you’re OOO. Plus, real customers from each vendor will share how they assembled a tech stack that lets them truly unplug. Seats are capped at 500, and there are attendee-only savings and prize drawings worth over $5,000 up for grabs!

👉 Save your seat →

📍 Summer Workflow Camp: Out of Office Ready — Tuesday, July 21 (Virtual, 2:00–3:00 PM ET)

Alisa McCabe of First Steps Financial reveals the checklist you need before you can truly disconnect, running through the delegation structure, second-in-command setup, and client communication approach that will keep things humming along while you’re away. Complete the OOO checklist live and walk away with the full Out of Office template bundle.

👉 Register here →

Noteworthy

Get the no-hype scoop on AI in Accounting with our new video series

Our brand-new video series digs into real, practical ways accounting firm owners and staff are using AI right now—offering easy-to-digest overviews of agentic AI, email prompts that save real time, automatic transaction categorization, and where machine learning fits into your existing tech stack. If you’ve been AI-curious but are feeling a bit overwhelmed by all the noise, this is a good, low-commitment place to start.

Watch now →

That’s all for now. See you in two weeks. 💚

Share Get Work Done - a newsletter for accounting firm owners.

Small Change, Big Results

We hear it all the time from firm owners: I know I should be marketing, but I have no idea where to start. So I don’t.

If that’s you, welcome to the club. Now, promptly get out. (Kidding, kidding—but seriously.) To help you find your way to the door, we recently hosted a virtual panel with four small-firm owners who’d rather do almost anything than market themselves, and we asked them to share their best advice for getting over the hump.

The overarching consensus: marketing your firm is way less complicated than all the fancy marketing consultants would have you believe.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the biggest culprit holding firm owners back is—you guessed it—perfectionism. Accountants are wired for it: everything has to tie out to the penny. Panelist Angela Jenkins of Mindfull Money Matters confessed that she’s sitting on a mountain of unpublished social media posts simply because they aren’t 100% flawless.

But that’s about to change, because her new standard is built for shipping: “Is it good? It goes.”

It’s a mantra we can all live by this summer. Your firm doesn’t need a full rebrand or a complex marketing plan with content scheduled weeks in advance. Just do something. Pick the one platform where your clients actually hang out, and start showing up there authentically. As Christine Salvatore (more on her below) advised, volume and consistency are the real keys to success. Her words of wisdom: “Reps over research.”

Done truly beats perfect—and done is the only thing that gives you the data to learn what’s working and what’s not. So if you’ve been waiting until you feel ready, consider this your permission slip to skip that step.

Read the full session recap below and steal the panel’s hard-won, refreshingly un-fancy advice.

👉 See the recap →

Community 🫶

The National Association of Enrolled Agents (NAEA)

The National Association of Enrolled Agents (NAEA) is the nation’s leading community for tax practitioners, from aspiring enrolled agents to experts with decades of experience. NAEA meets you wherever you are on your career path, seeking to protect, promote, and provide for the EA profession throughout the halls of government and beyond—supporting an EA’s right to practice and the taxpayer’s right to representation.

Learn more and join →

Scaling to CEO: A Free NexPath Coaching Community

NexPath Coaching helps accountants, bookkeepers, and tax professionals turn overwhelm into opportunity by strengthening leadership, improving team alignment, and building systems that actually work. Most firm owners think they have a people problem, but what they really have is a leadership and structure problem. Without clear expectations, accountability, and communication, even the best teams struggle. NexPath Coaching’s free Scaling to CEO community offers members weekly trainings designed to help growth-minded bookkeepers and accountants get their businesses under control. Join now and start learning practical strategies you can implement right away to create more clarity, consistency, and trust in your business.

Join the community →

H🔥t Today

The IRS is reshuffling who watches the watchdogs

Starting June 28, the IRS is merging its Return Preparer Office and Office of Professional Responsibility into a single Tax Professional Management Office. The new TPMO will be led by Chris Pleffner, currently director of the Return Preparer Office. But the AICPA has strongly opposed combining the two, arguing it would inappropriately consolidate credentialed and uncredentialed preparers and create confusion among taxpayers. The IRS insists that despite the single entity, each side’s mission will remain separate and independent. It’s a story worth following if you care about how the profession’s guardrails get enforced.

Read the full story →

Summer is the advisory sweet spot; don’t sleep on it

With Q2 estimates behind you and extension season not yet roaring, your business clients are now sitting on roughly six months of real data. That makes mid-summer the perfect time to revisit year-end projections, stress-test estimated tax payments, and surface entity-structure opportunities—exactly the kind of proactive work that moves you from preparer to advisor. Clients are relaxed and reachable right now. Use that to your advantage!

Read the full story →

Economic optimism down since last quarter

Finance leaders are getting nervous about the broader economy: in the latest AICPA & CIMA Economic Outlook Survey, just under a third of the CEOs, CFOs, and controllers surveyed said they were optimistic about the U.S. economy over the next 12 months (down from 39% the prior quarter) and 81% flagged inflation as a concern over the next six months (a sizeable jump from 56% in the first quarter). Perhaps most interestingly, these leaders’ confidence in their own organizations actually ticked up. Translation for your firm: your business clients are uneasy about forces they can’t control, but they still believe in their own footing. That’s precisely when proactive cash-flow conversations and scenario planning land the hardest. Reach out before they come to you!

Read the full story →

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Swipe this Weekly Marketing Tasks Template from Denise Williams

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Relatable? 😆

Firm Spotl💡ght

How Christine Salvatore built a thriving entertainment-niche firm from a hotel side table in Ohio

In the spring of 2021, Christine Salvatore was on a six-week, no-itinerary road trip across America when she opened her laptop in an Ohio hotel room, created an Upwork profile, and started replying to bookkeeping postings. Two clients said yes that same day. As a former production accountant who’d spent years on set, she realized she could speak the language of bookkeepers and film crews alike—a combination so rare almost no one else could do it.

Five years later, In Line Management serves around 25 clients across the entertainment industry (they even handled the production accounting for the new Rory McIlroy documentary) based almost entirely on word-of-mouth. Christine’s story is a candid and inspiring look at what can happen when you take the leap and bet on yourself.

Check out Christine’s full story in Two Cents Magazine →

Events

📍 Summer Workflow Camp — Tuesdays in July (Virtual, 2:00–3:00 PM ET)

Our free four-week live workshop series is built with one goal in mind: creating a firm that runs without you. Each Tuesday in July, firm owners and operators will walk you through real workflows, delegation frameworks, and client-communication systems that ensure nothing falls through the cracks. Plus, you’ll build something tangible and immediately usable in every session. Register your firm’s “cabin” (up to 10 people) or join as a solo camper, compete on a live leaderboard, and walk away with the complete Out of Office template bundle. Heads up: the first 25 cabins to register get a campfire mug with hot cocoa shipped to everyone on the team!

👉 Learn more and register →

📍 IRS Nationwide Tax Forum — Summer 2026 (Multiple Cities)

Registration is open for the IRS’s annual three-day forums built specifically for tax pros, featuring 40+ seminars on federal tax law updates, IRS procedures, and emerging issues, with up to 18 CE credits available.

👉 Register here →

Noteworthy

The hidden six-figure cost of a manual month-end close

One firm owner with 100 clients had never put a dollar figure on the time her team burned every month chasing uncategorized transactions, missing receipts, and stray W-9s. Then she finally sat down and did the math.

At roughly two hours saved per client per month and a $70/hour billing rate, she discovered about $168,000 a year in billable capacity that was silently leaking from her bottom line. This piece walks through where those hours disappear (the spreadsheet ping-pong will feel painfully familiar), why 1099 prep doesn’t have to be a January fire drill, and how automating the most tedious parts of your month-end close process can give you that capacity back—so you can take on more clients without adding more headcount (or just give your team a little more breathing room).

Curious what a smoother month-end close might be worth in your firm? Use the built-in calculator to run your numbers through our formula.

Crunch your numbers →

Happy Fourth of July to all who celebrate! 🎆 See you in two weeks. 💚

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Small Change, Big Results

You made it. Tax season is finally fading from your memory, and you can hear yourself think for the first time in months. So here’s a question to ponder during these precious few months of calm: which of your clients would you not sign again if they walked in today?

We’re betting you already know the answer. It’s probably the one who haggled endlessly over pricing before they’d even seen your work. Or the one whose constant “quick questions” can eat up an entire day. Or maybe the one whose check always clears, but your team can’t stand.

Well, summer is the season when you finally have the time and energy to do something about it.

To get you pumped up, we put together a piece on this exact topic for the debut issue of Two Cents Magazine. (Oh, right, we also launched a magazine—more on that later! 🤓)

This article is bursting with firsthand wisdom from firm owners who’ve been there. A few examples of things they learned the hard way:

• Red flags never disappoint. If something feels off on the discovery call, you can pretty much bet it’ll still be there once the engagement letter is signed.

• The discovery call is a two-way interview. The best firm owners screen prospects as carefully as their prospects screen them—and position themselves as the one doing the choosing.

• Firing a bad client is a strategic decision, not a failure. One owner chose to walk away from $340K in potential revenue to protect his firm’s culture, and he called it one of the best moves he ever made.

• You don’t get better at saying no by avoiding it. You get better by doing it. As one owner put it, the first wrong client took him a year to let go. Eventually he got it down to two weeks.

The throughline? Firms with healthy businesses tend to be picky about who they work with. And the summer lull is the perfect time to run your own “yes, no, and maybe” exercise with your current client roster before the fall rush forces the decision for you.

👉 Read “The Art of Saying No” in Two Cents Magazine →

Community 🫶

Strategic Finance Summit: 2 Days of Training From 9 Top Finance Practitioners

Our friend Josh Aharonoff from Your CFO Guy has been working on this behind the scenes for months, and the details are finally set: on July 14 and 15, he is hosting the Strategic Finance Summit. Two days. Nine speakers. 100% virtual. Completely free. (The amount of value he’s giving away is pretty mindblowing!)

The lineup includes Nicolas Boucher, Paul Barnhurst, Chris Reilly, Christian Wattig, Carl Seidman, Michael King, Mark Proctor, Ben Murray, and Josh himself. Over 2 million combined LinkedIn followers on one stage. Seven disciplines, from financial modeling to board reporting. Every session comes with the actual models, templates, and frameworks you can put to work that same week. We hope to see you there!

Claim your free spot →

The CFO Project: Free CPE-Eligible Advisory Webinar

Your clients have clean books, timely reports, and taxes filed on time. So why are so many of them still stressed about cash flow? Next Thursday, June 18, our partners at The CFO Project are hosting a free 1-hour session: “Lead Your Clients to a Successful Business: Why Better Reports Won’t Get Them There,” hosted by their CEO, Dyanna Salcedo. It’s a practical look at the difference between reporting on cash flow and actively leading a client toward a healthier business—and where advisory work could add recurring revenue to your own practice. NASBA-approved CPE (1.0 hour), live Q&A, and a 48-hour replay if you can’t make it live.

Save your seat →

NSBCPA Annual Day of Giving

The National Society of Black CPAs is running its annual Day of Giving campaign through June 18, raising money for its Future CPA Accelerator Programs—which provide mentorship, accountability, and prep resources for aspiring CPAs working toward the credential, often as the first in their families to do so. With the profession staring down a serious pipeline shortage, the work of widening the door matters to all of us. If you’re able to give or share, it’s a great cause to get behind!

Learn more and donate →

H🔥t Today

New Report: The Future of Accounting is Human-centric

AICPA & CIMA dropped a big new report this week at ENGAGE 2026: Rise2040, built from input across more than 25 countries and 6,000 professionals. The headline takeaway is reassuring: as automation swallows routine compliance work, the human role won’t shrink. In fact, it becomes more important than ever as accounting professionals shift their focus to higher-value services like advisory and scenario planning. The report actually points to institutional inertia—not AI—as the bigger threat to the future of accounting. So, if you want to set your firm up for long-term success, now is the time to start shifting your focus and repositioning your value to clients.

Read the full story →

The Consolidation Wave isn’t Slowing Down

The first week of June alone brought a stack of deals: Ascend picked up Ohio’s William Vaughan Co., Aprio announced its second acquisition of the week with Waldron H. Rand in Massachusetts, and five New England state societies merged into a single regional body. Private-equity-backed roll-ups continue to reshape the mid-market. The “so what” for small firms: as the big players consolidate, your independence and personal client relationships become a key differentiator—provided you’re loud about it.

Read the full story →

AICPA Presses the IRS on a Million-dollar Question

The AICPA has asked the Treasury and the IRS to issue guidance on Section 4960—the provision (amended by the OBBBA) that imposes a 21% excise tax on tax-exempt organizations for compensation above $1 million to covered employees. Among its requests: transition relief for fiscal-year nonprofits. If you serve nonprofit clients, this is one to keep on your radar as guidance develops.

Read the full story →

Swipe this workflow template

Swipe this Client Disengagement Template from Lori Hawkins

Get more templates from firm owners like you in our community template library.

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Relatable? 😆 (But seriously, if you missed last week’s pricing panel, peep the recap here.)

Firm Spotl💡ght

How Tied Out Books Turned Bookkeeping Into a Naval Expedition

Tamra Helton didn’t set out to gamify bookkeeping. But when she launched Tied Out Books in Atascadero, California, she decided that if she was going to build something from scratch, it wasn’t going to be boring. So she created an entire operating system around a nautical theme: her clients are captains, her team members are sailors, the functional areas of bookkeeping are islands, and every engagement is a voyage. Then, she gamified it: sailors earn diamonds (a.k.a. bonuses) for accurate, on-time work. Clients who respond to document requests within two to three business days earn a smooth sailing credit (delivered as a mailed paper check).

A big part of Tamra’s operational story is how she’s leveraged Financial Cents to get her firm’s workflows out of her head. Tired of being the bottleneck, she spent months documenting every workflow, SOP, and process inside Financial Cents—complete with video walkthroughs—so her team doesn’t have to loop her into every decision. “A bad workflow can ruin your business very quickly,” she says. “I wish I would have gotten my processes and workflows set up properly in the right system first.”

Check out Tamra’s full story in Two Cents Magazine →

Events

📍 How We Got Our Name Out There: Marketing for Firms that Hate Marketing — TODAY: Thursday, June 11 (Virtual Webinar, 2:00–3:00 PM ET)

If pricing is the conversation most firm owners avoid, marketing is a close second. Today’s Proudly Small webinar session brings together real firm owners to share how they built their reputation and filled their pipeline without a marketing team or a big budget. There’s still time to register (and even if you can’t make it live, register anyway to get the recording).

👉 Save your spot →

📍 Running Lean and Loving It: Operations, Tech, & the Art of Doing More with Less — Thursday, June 18 (Virtual Webinar, 2:00–3:00 PM ET)

The fourth and final session of our Proudly Small series is all about operating like a much bigger shop without the operations team or IT department to match. Five firm owners get real about what a typical week looks like, the one tool or process change that moved the needle most on their capacity, and what they’d automate first if they were starting over. Moderated by Financial Cents CEO Shahram Zarshenas. Free, recorded, and 60 minutes.

👉 Save your spot →

📍 Scaling New Heights 2026 — June 15–17 (Orlando)

Woodard’s flagship conference for accounting and bookkeeping professionals—heavy on practical workflow, technology, and firm-growth content. Especially good for owners building or scaling QuickBooks-centric firms, with deep tracks on advisory and team development.

👉 Learn more and register →

📍 IRS Nationwide Tax Forum — Summer 2026 (Multiple Cities)

Registration is open for the IRS’s annual three-day forums built specifically for tax pros, featuring 40+ seminars on federal tax law updates, IRS procedures, and emerging issues, with up to 18 CE credits available. The early-bird rate ($275) runs through June 15, so if it’s on your list, now’s the time to lock it in.

👉 Register here →

Noteworthy

Introducing Two Cents: The Only Magazine Made for Small Bookkeeping & Accounting Firms

ICYMI: There’s a new publication in the accounting world, and it was made specifically for firms like yours. Two Cents Magazine is Financial Cents’ new editorial venture dedicated to the stories, strategies, and realities of running a small and growing accounting or bookkeeping firm. The inaugural issue is the Proudly Small edition, featuring 13 in-depth profiles of 13 firm owners—real people, real challenges, real outcomes. This publication is rooted in original storytelling and unbiased reporting—no ads masquerading as news here. Check it out now (but fair warning, these stories might make you a bit misty-eyed 🥹).

Read the magazine →

Happy summer reading! 😎 See you in two weeks. 💚

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Small Change, Big Results

Let’s talk about the can every firm owner has kicked down the road at one point or another: adjusting your prices.

Post-tax season is traditionally when firm owners come up for air—and when they start to have the mental space to contemplate hard questions they’ve been avoiding for months:

• Which clients are taking more than they’re giving?

• What services are you still pricing the same way you did two years ago?

• And when did you last look at your minimum and actually defend it?

Pricing is one of those quandaries that feels like a math problem. But under the surface, it’s often a confidence problem. Sound familiar?

We’re going deep into the pricing problem in our upcoming virtual event, “Charge What You’re Worth: Pricing, Positioning, & Onboarding,” happening next Thursday, June 4 at 2:00 PM Eastern.

Moderator Ron Baker, Co-founder of Threshold, will host three firm-owner panelists who have solved the pricing puzzle through hard-won experience. And now, they’re going to teach you how to do the same.

Join Angela Jenkins, owner of Mindfull Money Matters in Philadelphia; Christine Salvatore, owner of In Line Management in Los Angeles; and Dave Kersting, owner of Capovario in Denver, as they break down the logic, strategy, and psychology of pricing your firm’s bookkeeping, accounting, and consulting services.

Come with your awkward pricing questions. Leave with a floor you’ll actually hold.

👉 Register for the June 4 pricing webinar →

Community 🫶

Roundtable Labs: A Community Where Everyone Counts

Roundtable Labs is a community where everyone counts. Regardless of how long you’ve been in business. No matter how many clients you have. Whatever your revenue. You bring value to the table and the table brings value to you. Roundtable Labs is where accountants, bookkeepers, CPAs, EAs, firm owners, and humans can all find their people. Together, they give and receive support, provide accountability, nurture relationships, and solve real-world problems.

Learn more →

Join the Next Level Firm Roundtable

Hosted by Dave Kersting and Richard Roppa-Roberts, this Roundtable Labs session is a lively discussion on all things workflow. Join the next session on June 17 to gain valuable insights for optimizing your firm’s workflow in Financial Cents.

Register now →

H🔥t today

The Bench Founder Is Back, and He’s Betting on Autonomous AI Bookkeeping

Ian Crosby, whose last venture (Bench Accounting) famously collapsed in 2024, just raised $10 million from Khosla Ventures to try again—this time with zero human bookkeepers in the mix. His new startup, Synthetic, aims to produce accrual-basis financials entirely autonomously for AI and software startups, starting at $49/month.

The kicker? Crosby himself isn’t sure it’s technologically possible yet. “AI is notoriously unreliable,” he told TechCrunch, “And no one wants to entrust their accounting to a system which might get it wrong.” For small firm owners watching this space, it’s worth paying attention—not because Synthetic is coming for your clients tomorrow, but because the conversation about AI-driven bookkeeping is accelerating whether the technology is ready or not. Your value is human judgment, relationships, and accountability. That’s not something Synthetic is building.

Read the full story →

Tax Client Confusion Over CP53E Notices: What to Know

The IRS issued over a million CP53E notices this filing season as part of the federal government’s shift away from paper refund checks. The notice means the IRS approved a refund but can’t issue it electronically—and taxpayers have 30 days to log into their IRS Online Account and add banking information or wait up to six weeks for a paper check. The problem: some notices were issued in error, the QR codes on them are now being spoofed by scammers, and many clients have no idea what they’re looking at. This is a genuine client service opportunity: firms that proactively explain the CP53E situation to their clients right now are earning goodwill in real time. The guidance from the Journal of Accountancy: skip the QR code, go directly to IRS.gov, and update bank info manually.

Read the full story →

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Swipe this Discovery Onboarding Template from Tonya Schulte

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Relatable? 😆 (It’s just adding and subtracting, right??)

Firm Spotl💡ght

How Capovario Ditched the Sticky Notes and Built a Firm That Supports Work-Life Balance

From the moment he launched Capovario, Dave Kersting knew he didn’t want to build a conventional accounting firm. The Denver-based firm—founded in 2020 and fully remote from day one—operates as both an accounting and bookkeeping practice and a concierge consulting firm, connecting business owner clients with whatever they need to solve a business problem, accounting-related or not.

“We want to be the first our clients call when they have even a non-accounting business challenge,” Kersting says. What he didn’t anticipate was how quickly the firm’s growth would expose the limits of the system running underneath it: a multi-level folder, a stack of sticky notes, and 90% of the workflow living in his own head.

The transition to Financial Cents wasn’t a top-down initiative. His team actually led the charge, having worked at other firms that used the software. It wasn’t long before Financial Cents became the operational hub of Capovario: projects generate automatically when a client signs a proposal, task assignments make accountability clear without constant check-ins from Dave, and the team starts and ends every day inside the platform. The payoff has been better client service, tighter deadline management, and a firm structure that truly supports the entire team’s work-life balance.

Continue reading →

Events

📍 Charge What You’re Worth and Keep Clients: Pricing, Positioning, & Onboarding — Thursday, June 4 (Virtual Webinar, 2:00–3:00 PM ET)

This is the next session in Financial Cents’ Proudly Small webinar series, and it’s focused entirely on pricing—the conversation most firm owners avoid until it becomes a crisis. Real firm owners will walk through how they set their rates, what it took to raise them, and how to hold the line when a prospect pushes back.

👉 Save your spot →

📍 From Burnout to Breakthrough: Rethinking Your Tax Workflow — Thursday, June 4 (Virtual Webinar, 3:30–4:30 PM ET)

Tax season may be over, but for many firms the pressure hasn’t let up. Hiring is harder than ever, teams are stretched thin, and inconsistent quality keeps work circling back to you, making it difficult to step away with confidence. In this session, you’ll see how firms are moving from burnout to real control by combining AI-powered document processing and human-reviewed OCR from GruntWorx with structured workflows and collaboration in Financial Cents. More importantly, you’ll see how to turn the time you save into higher-value work, shifting into advisory services, taking on better clients, and growing revenue without adding more hours or headcount.

👉 Save your spot →

📍 How We Got Our Name Out There: Marketing for Firms that Hate Marketing — Thursday, June 11 (Virtual Webinar, 2:00–3:00 PM ET)

If pricing is the conversation most firm owners avoid, marketing is a close second. This upcoming Proudly Small webinar session brings together real firm owners to share how they built their reputation and filled their pipeline without a marketing team or a big budget. It’s part of the same series as the June 4 pricing webinar, and it’s aimed squarely at the firm owners who cringe at the word “brand.”

👉 Save your spot →

📍 AICPA & CIMA ENGAGE — June 8–11 (Las Vegas)

The largest annual event for CPAs and finance pros, with sessions across tax, A&A, advisory, technology, and practice management. Strong CPE opportunity and one of the best networking weeks of the year for firm owners thinking about what’s next! (P.S. Stop by booth 323 to say hi to the Financial Cents crew and enjoy a cup of coffee or tea. ☕)

👉 Check the full schedule →

📍 Scaling New Heights 2026 — June 15–17 (Orlando)

Woodard’s flagship conference for accounting and bookkeeping professionals—heavy on practical workflow, technology, and firm-growth content. Especially good for owners building or scaling QuickBooks-centric firms, with deep tracks on advisory and team development.

👉 Learn more and register →

Noteworthy

Small Firms Deserve to Be Seen: Join the #ProudlySmall Movement

Financial Cents just launched something worth paying attention to: a dedicated campaign celebrating small accounting and bookkeeping firms—not as a stepping stone to something bigger, but as a legitimate and intentional way to build a business. The new Proudly Small hub is worth a read on its own, but the real draw is the Wall of Small Firms: a growing collection of firm owners who’ve made the deliberate choice to stay small, stay focused, and build something worthwhile. If that sounds like you, peep the hub below and add your firm to the wall!

See the Proudly Small hub →

Join 130+ firms on the Wall of Small Firms →

That’s it for now. See you in two weeks. 💚

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Small Change, Big Results

You made it. April is officially in the rearview, you have a reasonable number of unread emails, and you’ve finally remembered what your family looks like in daylight.

But before you slide into full-on summer mode, ask yourself:

Will all those tax clients be back next season?

The easiest client you’ll ever get is the one you’ve already got, and the easiest way to keep them is to actually talk to them between filings.

Turns out, people really appreciate it when you acknowledge their, you know, existence (especially when that outreach happens consistently and isn’t always attached to some kind of sales pitch or action item).

CPA Michelle Arnason hears this feedback constantly from new clients walking in her door. When she asks why they decided to leave their previous accountant, a lot of them point to lack of communication—not price or work quality.

Curious what other “client tea” Michelle has picked up over the years? Well, you’re in luck, because we’re hosting her later today—Thursday, May 14, at 1:00pm ET—for a free 1-hour webinar:

5 Things New Clients Wish Their Accountant Did Differently

Here’s a sampling of what Michelle will dish on:

• What really matters to clients (beyond all the accounting stuff)

• Small touch points between filings that can turn a one-time engagement into a long-term one

• How to make your firm feel less transactional without adding hours to your week

• The trust-building moments most firms accidentally skip—and how to build them into your workflow

It’s free, it’s 100% virtual, and it’s happening in a few hours. If you’re reading this with your morning coffee, you’ve still got time to save your seat! (And even if you can’t make it, go ahead and sign up anyway to get the recording. 😉)

👉 Register for the webinar

Community 🫶

Evolve Boldly with Thriveal

Thriveal is a leadership-driven community for ambitious accounting firm owners committed to intentional growth, accountability, and redefining the future of the profession. Built around values like evolving boldly, leading with empathy, showing up transparently, and disrupting traditional best practices together, Thriveal helps firm owners scale through deep collaboration, mastermind programs, coaching, and entrepreneurial support rooted in confidence over competition.

Learn more →

Get Meaningful Peer Support with The Collaboration Room

The Collaboration Room is a collaborative community for accounting, bookkeeping, and tax professionals focused on practical growth, peer support, and real-world problem solving. Built around the needs of firm owners, the community offers hands-on coaching, live discussions, and actionable resources across topics like tax, bookkeeping, referrals, automation, AI, software, and client management—creating a space where members openly share expertise, tools, and support to help one another grow.

Learn more →

H🔥t today

The Big Four are Making a Fantastic Case for Why Not to Work for Them

KPMG just announced layoffs of 10% of its U.S. audit partners after voluntary retirements fell short. Pension freezes, halved family leave, and gutted family-planning benefits are showing up across the Big Four—all while those same firms have spent at least $9 billion on AI development.

New-grad accounting hiring is reportedly down as much as 29% in recent years. The opportunity here? Smaller firms can offer something the Big Four are shying away from: actual stability, real benefits, and a tech stack that respects your team. The next generation of accountants is paying attention.

Read the full story →

Small Business Owners are Confident, but They’re Not Spending Like It

The U.S. Chamber’s Q1 2026 Small Business Index slipped to 67.0, with only 28% of owners saying the national economy is in good health (down 10 points). 53% now name inflation as their top challenge—the 17th straight quarter it’s ranked #1. The split is fascinating: 69% rate their own business as healthy, but they’re hesitant to hire or invest.

For your clients, this means more questions about cash flow, tighter margins, and a real appetite for advisory conversations. If you’ve been thinking about expanding your consulting service line, now might be a good time to test the waters.

Read the full story →

Swipe this workflow template

Swipe this Bookkeeping Client Offboarding Template from Taylor Ammons

Get more templates from firm owners like you in our community template library.

Meme

Relatable? 😆 (Even after last week’s Tax Wrap Palooza, we are STILL celebrating, and we hope you are too! 🥂)

Firm Spotl💡ght

How Numbers Matter LLC Cut Month-End Close Time in Half with Financial Cents

Steve Libhart has spent his career at the intersection of accounting and the legal industry—running his own law-focused firm in Colorado, teaching law firm accounting for the state bar association, and co-hosting the Accountants Law Pod.

His clients are attorneys who bill in tenths of an hour and have absolutely no patience for administrative drag, which made his old patchwork of Word docs, spreadsheets, ClickUp, and Notion a real liability. Financial reports were going out in week three of every month when they could’ve gone out in week two.

After implementing Financial Cents—and especially after rolling out the new Month-End Close feature—Steve’s firm cut close time in half, compressed 1099 season from a month to a single week, and finally killed the email-chain chaos that was eating his team alive.

Continue reading →

Events

📍 5 Things New Clients Wish Their Accountant Did Differently — Thursday, May 14 (Virtual Webinar, 1:00–2:00 PM ET)

A free 1-hour webinar with CPA Michelle Arnason on the five things new clients say they wish their last accountant had done differently—and how to build those small moments into your firm without adding hours to your week. Happening today at 1pm ET!

👉 Save your spot →

📍 Operational Disorder Creates Security Risks — Thursday, May 21 (Virtual Webinar, 2:00–3:00 PM ET)

Join Jatin Narang, CEO of Verito, and firm owner Steven Moos for a practical conversation on how small accounting firms can turn organization, security, and workflow into a true competitive advantage. In this free virtual session, you’ll walk away with the EDGE Framework, a practical FTC-worthy WISP checklist, and real strategies firms are using to strengthen operations, improve security posture, and move into higher-value advisory work.

👉 Save your spot →

📍 AICPA & CIMA ENGAGE — June 8–11 (Las Vegas)

The largest annual event for CPAs and finance pros, with sessions across tax, A&A, advisory, technology, and practice management. Strong CPE opportunity and one of the best networking weeks of the year for firm owners thinking about what’s next!

👉 Check the full schedule →

📍 Scaling New Heights 2026 — June 15–17 (Orlando)

Woodard’s flagship conference for accounting and bookkeeping professionals—heavy on practical workflow, technology, and firm-growth content. Especially good for owners building or scaling QuickBooks-centric firms, with deep tracks on advisory and team development.

👉 Learn more and register →

Noteworthy

About That Client Disengagement You’ve Been Avoiding…

Every firm has that one client. The chronic late-payer. The scope-creeper. The one whose name in your inbox triggers a small dread response before you’ve even read the email. And every firm has, at some point, hesitated to send the disengagement letter—because what if they push back? What if you do it wrong? What if it all blows up in your face?

Our newest guide walks through the eight elements every accounting client termination letter needs, the four scenarios you’re most likely to face (non-payment, non-cooperation, restructuring, and ethical), and the legal traps that can turn clean breakups into liability problems. Free Word and Google Docs templates included! Save it now; thank yourself later.

Continue reading →

What’s New in Accounting? Episode 1: AI on Tax Returns, 40 Under 40, and What CFOs are Betting on for 2026

We launched a hot new video series, and the first episode is out! In it, our very own Matt Draper walks you through three timely stories:

• The Bipartisan Policy Center’s 2026 tax-filing poll (where 19% of taxpayers reported using AI to help prep their return, and another 34% said they’d consider it),

• CPA Practice Advisor’s just-released 40 Under 40 and 20 Under 40 awards, and

• A Deloitte/Journal of Accountancy survey of 200 CFOs that pegs AI, cash management, and M&A as the three biggest bets for the rest of 2026.

Plus: A fun fact about 7000 BC accounting that we promise you didn’t know!

Watch the episode →

Tired of Delivering Walls of Numbers that Clients Ignore?

What if every client report you sent looked like it came from a $500/hour advisory firm?

Model Wiz is an Excel plugin that connects to QBO and generates beautiful financial dashboards with one click. Cash flow. KPIs. Trend analysis. Comparisons. Anything you need.

The firms running this are delivering in 30 seconds what used to take a week. They’re offering advisory packages they couldn’t offer before. And they’re growing their revenue per client without growing their team.

No more spreadsheet errors, no more hours of formatting, no more clients who see you as a cost center.

You have the expertise. This gives you the presentation layer to match it.

Book a free breakthrough session (only if you use QBO) →

That’s it for now. See you in two weeks. 💚

Share Get Work Done - a newsletter for accounting firm owners.

Small Change, Big Results

We made it, y’all. Busy season is in the rearview mirror, spring is in the air, and we’re all feeling a little more happy-go-lucky than we were at the beginning of the month. (At least we hope that’s the case for you—if not, keep reading, because we’ve got something to turn that frown upside down 😁).

But before you flush every last shred of frustration out of your memory, ask yourself one post-mortem-style question while the pain is still fresh:

Where the heck did all the time go?

Not the billable hours—you can see those. We’re talking about the hours that sneaky-leaked out of your days like air from that one tire that probably has a nail in it.

A few minutes here—a half an hour there. Chasing a client for the bank statement they “definitely already sent.” Copy-pasting data between two tools that should talk to each other, but don’t. Drafting that long, detailed email listing every uncategorized transaction one by one.

None of it is hard, per se—but it does add up. And during busy times like tax season—when your team barely has a moment to eat lunch, let alone dig through email threads—it can seriously drag down morale.

On that note, we just published a piece we think you’ll get a lot out of:

Bookkeeping Automation Examples That Actually Save Time

It walks through 10 specific time-saving automations firms are using right now, including:

• Automated Transaction Categorization

• Automated Bank Reconciliation

• Automated Client Document Requests and Reminders

• Automated Client Communication and Email Reminders

• Time Tracking and Automated Billing

• And more!

If you’re not leveraging automation to the fullest in your firm, then you’re definitely not running as efficiently as you could be. And while that might be fine during your not-so-slammed months, it’s a much bigger deal during the Q1 rush.

Give the article a read for some great ideas on how to set your firm up for a much smoother tax season next year.

👉 Read the full breakdown

Community 🫶

The CFO Project’s Advisory Blueprint: A Free 3-Day Workshop

You’ve heard for years that the future of accounting is advisory. But what does an advisory practice actually look like? How does the work get delivered? And what does it take to build one?

On May 26, 27, and 28, The CFO Project is holding a free 3-session workshop that answers all three of those questions. You’ll walk through the exact systems used by the 1,000+ accounting professionals trained through The CFO Project to launch CFO advisory practices. One hour each day, starting at 12:00 PM ET. NASBA-approved CPE available. 48-hour replays after each session.

Save your seat →

H🔥t today

Kentucky Becomes the Latest State to Adopt a New Pathway to CPA Licensure

Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear signed House Bill 45 into law on April 3, adding Kentucky to the fast-growing list of states offering an alternative route to CPA licensure:

bachelor’s degree (total 120 semester hours) + 2 years of professional experience + passing the exam

This option essentially swaps in a year of experience for the additional credit hours requirement that is part of the traditional pathway to becoming a CPA:

bachelor’s degree + 30 additional semester credits (total 150 semester hours) + 1 year of professional experience + passing the CPA Exam

The new pathway takes effect July 16. Roughly 39 states have now passed or adopted similar reforms in a little over a year, with most of the remaining states actively working on it. The decades-old 150-hour threshold is functionally on its way out, which could help get the hiring pipeline flowing again after years of shortages.

Read the full story →

Is AI Making “Purely Technical” Accountants Less Employable?

CFO Brew’s latest from Vincent Ryan makes a point worth sitting with: the skillsets finance leaders now rank as most important for the next generation of accounting pros aren’t technical. They’re strategic thinking, communication, data storytelling, and cross-functional collaboration.

Technical accounting expertise has slipped further down the list of the most sought-after strengths when evaluating new hires. One partner quoted in the piece puts it bluntly: the deeply technical tax and accounting folks are the ones most likely to become a commodity. The judgment-heavy, advisory-shaped work is where firms will defend their margins. It’s an interesting take on where the wind is blowing, with real numbers behind it (Morning Brew surveyed 352 finance leaders). Worth a read before you plan your next hire or service line!

Read the full story →

Swipe this workflow template

Swipe this Sales Tax template from Kristen Leicht

Get more templates from firm owners like you in our community template library.

Meme

Relatable? 😆 (We can all laugh about it now that it’s over, right?)

Firm Spotl💡ght

How Safe Harbor Bookkeeping Cut Invoicing from a Full Day to 90 Minutes — and Stopped Turning Away Clients

Terri Evans didn’t go to college for accounting—she got her education around the kitchen table, doing the books for her dad’s contracting business starting in high school. By 2023, she was ready to build something of her own, and launched Safe Harbor Bookkeeping with three clients.

Within a year, she had 60+ clients and a team of four part-time bookkeepers. But the operation was stitched together with spreadsheets, ClickUp, Monday.com, Harvest, QuickBooks, and email—none of which talked to each other. Invoicing alone could eat an entire day. After switching to Financial Cents, she’s cut her invoicing process down from 8 hours to 90 minutes, replaced at least five tools with one platform, and this tax season—for the first time—she didn’t have to turn clients away.

Continue reading →

Events

📍 BDO Alliance EVOLVE 2026 — May 3–6 (Fontainebleau Las Vegas)

BDO Alliance USA’s flagship annual conference offers three days of keynotes, 100+ breakout sessions, practice management masterclasses, and a tradeshow with over 100 exhibitors. This year’s keynotes feature Christopher Kauffman on The Last Busy Season? The AI Opportunity in Accounting and Erica Dhawan on The Power of Connectional Intelligence. Heads up: EVOLVE is sold out and open only to BDO Alliance members and invited guests—but if you’re an Alliance firm, check with your EVOLVE contact. For everyone else, keep an eye out for EVOLVE Encore, the virtual follow-up that replays the most popular sessions.

👉 See the full agenda →

📍 Tax Wrap Palooza 2026 — Tuesday, May 5 (Virtual, 2:00–4:00 PM ET)

You survived. Now let’s celebrate! Financial Cents is throwing a virtual post-tax-season party for every accountant, bookkeeper, CPA, and EA who just white-knuckled their way through April. Expect Tax Season Superlatives (Worst Client Email, Latest Night, Best Snack Stash), a mind-bending magic show, a Stump the Tax Expert live Q&A, a prize giveaway, and a DJ dance party to close it all out. Vacation-mode dress code strongly encouraged. First 50 to join get a free lunch on us!

👉 Save your seat →

Noteworthy

Accounting Professionals Just Wanna Have Fun

The week after April 15, our hilarious tax memes article saw a huge surge in traffic that told us exactly what we already suspected: after four months of grinding, the industry is in full “I just need to laugh” mode. The memes are free and the collective exhale is earned. Consider this your reminder that accountants absolutely have a sense of humor—it just tends to go dormant between January and mid-April.

Scroll the memes →

One Minute. One Assessment. One Clear Fix to Your Operational Woes.

If your firm’s tech tools and processes held up beautifully this season, ignore this. If they creaked, wobbled, or outright failed you, then listen up: The Patchwork Personas assessment is a 1-minute diagnostic built to help you see exactly how your operations are holding you back—and how to fix it. It’s free, it takes less time than waiting for Excel to un-freeze, and there are prizes in it for you. Post-tax-season is the perfect time to evaluate what’s holding you back—before you forget the pain.

Take the assessment →

Breathe deep and laugh big. See you in two weeks. 💚

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Small Change, Big Results

Get Work Done is back after a brief hiatus, and TBH, we kinda hope this send triggers a whole lotta out of office replies—not because we don’t want you to read all of the grade-A goodness we’ve packed into this issue, but because we fully recognize that tax season ended just 48 hours ago (in the U.S., anyway—hold strong, Canadian friends, the finish line is in sight 🤩).

So if you’re one of the many accounting professionals enjoying some well-deserved R&R, we hope you’ll take a moment to scroll through this issue once you’re back in action. Because honestly, the collective post-tax-season exhale is the perfect time to start thinking about how things can be better, smoother, and less “hair-on-fire” through the rest of this year and (especially) into the next tax season. (You know as well as we do that it’ll be here again before we know it!)

On that note, we invite you to check out all the recordings from last month’s Bookkeeping Workflow Summit, where we hosted four jam-packed sessions focused on helping bookkeeping and accounting firms move away from scattered systems and into a single, streamlined workflow.

You’ll learn top tips from pros like Roman Villard, Kellie Parks, and Ryan Lazanis, including:

• Why patchwork systems create invisible bottlenecks—and how to diagnose where your firm’s operational patterns are breaking down.

• The root causes of owner bottlenecks in small firms—and the first steps for moving knowledge out of your head and into a system your team can follow without constant check-ins.

• The “Core 5” workflows every small firm needs—and how to document and structure them so your team can execute without you.

• What a patchwork-free, system-led firm actually looks like in practice—from “Human Hub” to real-time visibility without manual status updates.

Throughout the event, our guest speakers dropped tons of “small change” nuggets that have the potential to snowball into big results, but we’ll leave you with one of the most memorable, courtesy of Roman Villard, CPA, Founder of Full Send Accounting:

Remove your phone number from your email signature: While taking calls and solving problems on the spot might feel good in the moment, the reality is that every call or text that bypasses a shared system is a visibility problem. It’s a decision made verbally and off the record—one that your team can’t act on and that you’ll probably forget to log.

🍿 Watch all of the summit session recordings here
🤓 Read the blog recap here

Community 🫶

Counter: The Community for Accounting Firm Revolutionaries

Counter is a community for accounting firm owners who want to build firms that defy traditional public accounting norms, offering relationships, support, and upskilling to help them change their own lives and transform the industry.

Founded by a CPA who needed a scalable way to help others run firms differently, Counter provides members with resources like virtual events, mastermind cohorts, software demos, and referral networks—connecting them with peers, veterans, and experts so small firms can thrive as part of an accounting industry revolution.

Join the community →

Advisory Accountants & Bookkeepers Network

If you’re ready to stop being the best-kept secret in your market and start attracting the premium clients your expertise deserves, this is your community. The Advisory Accountants & Bookkeepers Network is the go-to space for financial professionals who want to build high-value advisory practices—with the strategies, support, and peer relationships to make it real.

And if you want a taste of what group leader Alyssa Ciera brings to the table, she partnered with Financial Cents to create a free 5-day email course—Master the Client Lifecycle—that walks you through streamlining your firm’s entire client journey from onboarding to offboarding. Think: mapping your client journey, turning messy Zoom calls into clean workflows, building onboarding processes your team can actually follow, and creating SOPs from the systems you already have.

Join the community →

Sign up for the free email course →

H🔥t today

Vote for FC in the CPA Practice Advisor Readers’ Choice Awards!

We have a small(ish) favor to ask. Voting is now open for the CPA Practice Advisor Readers’ Choice Awards—and we’d suuuuuuper appreciate your vote for Financial Cents!

This is the annual awards program where readers get to shout out the tools they rely on most to run their firms, and it’s one of the few places where we can really go toe-to-toe with the biggest players in the industry.

We’ve nabbed runner-up honors in the Practice Management Systems and Comprehensive Firm Workflow Solutions categories for a few years running now, and 2026 feels like our year to steal the top spot. But we can’t do it without you!

If Financial Cents has saved you from a chaotic inbox, a missed deadline, or a very stressful tax season (or all of the above), this is your chance to pay it forward.

Voting closes April 20, so drop yours in now!

Cast your vote here →

Revving up Refunds: The Data is in on the 2026 Tax Filing Season

The Bipartisan Policy Center surveyed 1,200 Americans who filed their 2025 taxes, and the results are worth a scan before you close the books on this season.

More than half of respondents reported receiving a federal refund, and of those, 39% said it was larger than last year. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s new deductions—for tips, overtime, auto loan interest, and seniors—were broadly known but unevenly claimed. A majority of filers had at least some awareness of the 2025 law’s tax relief, though more respondents had no awareness at all than “a ton” of awareness.

Perhaps most interesting for your firm’s future: nearly one in five respondents reported using AI this year when preparing their return (11% for the first time), while another 34% said they hadn’t used it yet but would consider it in the future. That’s over half of taxpayers either already experimenting with AI on their taxes or open to it. Food for thought as you map out your advisory strategy for next year.

Read the full story on the BPC website →

Meet the Small Business Owner Using AI as His CFO (Don’t Worry, his CPA Still Gets the Last Word)

Kyle Ray can’t afford a full C-suite for his window cleaning company. So he built one with AI.

“Basically my entire leadership team is AI,” the Geek Window Cleaning founder told Business Insider. At $40/month for Claude and ChatGPT combined, it’s a pretty lean org chart. And this tax season, his “AI CFO” earned its keep.

Ray uses ChatGPT to surface tax strategies he might be missing—things like whether certain sales reps could qualify as 1099 contractors instead of W-2 employees, which can mean real payroll tax savings. He also uses it to prep for conversations with his CPA, asking questions like, “What am I not asking that I should be asking?” (Which is honestly a great question to ask any advisor, human or otherwise.)

He’ll even run his taxes themselves through AI first, then compare the results with his accountant’s work to catch anything that slipped through the cracks.

But he’s not handing over the keys entirely. His CPA still gets final say, and Ray is clear-eyed about AI’s limits: “I wouldn’t trust it 110%.” Because while AI is great for explaining concepts and organizing data, applying that knowledge to a nuanced and specific situation is still a human job.

Read the full story on Business Insider →

Swipe this workflow template

Swipe this 1099 Preparation Template from Jami Doran

Get more templates from firm owners like you in our community template library.

Meme

Relatable? 😆 (if you use FC, we hope not!)

Firm Spotl💡ght

How On Track Accounting Solutions Heads Off 1099 Headaches with Month-End Close in Financial Cents

Greg Scholten founded On Track Accounting Solutions in 2016 with a pretty specific mission: bringing specialized accounting, bookkeeping, and tax services to underserved niches, including adult foster care (AFC) homes and nonprofits.

Running a lean, fully remote team of three, Greg didn’t have room for chaos. But every January, it showed up anyway.

Figuring out which clients needed 1099s, which vendors had crossed the IRS reporting threshold, and whether the right W-9s were even on file—it was the same stressful scramble year after year. Greg knew a basic Excel checklist wasn’t going to cut it forever.

Enter Month-End Close in Financial Cents. By weaving 1099 tracking into his regular monthly workflow, Greg went from last-minute panic to January calm—with all the data already organized and ready to export by the time filing season rolled around. Oh, and he consolidated his tech stack in the process. One portal. No more scrambles.

Here’s how On Track keeps a three-person remote firm running smooth like butter ⬇️

Continue reading →

Events

📍 Jason On Firms LIVE National Tour — May 4–June 26, 2026 (20 Cities Across the U.S.)

If you’ve been waiting for a reason to get out of the office, this is it. Jason Staats is bringing his half-day, CPE-eligible workshop to 20 cities this spring:Columbus, Chicago, Minneapolis, Miami, Nashville, Austin, New York, San Francisco, and more. Expect real talk on firm operations, snacks, a bar, and an optional networking dinner to connect you with local firm owners who get it. With over 1,000 accountants joining the 2025 tour, spots go fast. Check to see if he’s coming to your city and grab your ticket.

👉 Check the full schedule here →

📍 GrowCon — May 4–6, 2026 (Salt Lake City, UT)

Hosted by Universal Accounting Center, GrowCon is built for owners of bookkeeping, accounting, and tax businesses who want to scale—not just survive. You’ll learn how to actually grow your firm, build systems that hold up, and stop being the bottleneck in your own business. Industry leaders and tech partners share the tools and strategies that are working right now. If you’re heading into summer wondering how to level up before Q4 hits, this one’s worth the trip.

👉 Register here →

📍 RightNOW 2026 — May 18–20, 2026 (San Antonio, TX)

Now in its third year, RightNOW has earned a reputation for honest, no-filter conversations about what’s working in modern firms. This mid-year conference is designed for the post-busy-season stretch—when you finally have space to think about automation, capacity, and what you want the next chapter of your firm to look like. Sessions are led by real firm owners, and you’ll walk away with frameworks and templates you can implement immediately. Plus, the Signia by Hilton La Cantera Resort isn’t exactly a bad backdrop for a few days of thinking big.

👉 Check out the agenda →

Noteworthy

We Asked 261 Bookkeeping Firms About Their Tech Stacks, and the Results Were...a Lot

Spoiler: Most firms are using way more tools than they want to—and it’s costing them more than just subscription fees.

We surveyed 261 bookkeeping and accounting professionals to get an honest look at how small firms are managing their software, where things break down, and what they actually wish they had. What we found was a pretty clear disconnect:

• 9 in 10 firms want to run on 4 tools or fewer, but less than half actually do.

• Nearly half aren’t confident that nothing is falling through the cracks.

• And 70% are manually re-entering data between tools multiple times a week.

The culprit? Tool sprawl. It starts innocently enough—one app for proposals, another for task management, another for client documents—and before long you’re spending more time managing your software than actually serving clients.

We broke it all down—the data, the real stories, the dropped balls, and the path forward—in our 2026 Bookkeeping Firm Tech Stack Report. It’s free, it’s packed with insights, and it might just make you feel a little less alone.

Read the full report →

Which Patchwork Persona Is Running Your Firm?

Be honest: Does your firm run on spreadsheets held together with hope? Do you have a tool for everything—and actually use none of them fully? Is there one person on your team whose entire job is basically just...knowing where everything is?

If any of that sounds familiar, your firm probably has a Patchwork Persona.

Born out of the data from our 2026 Bookkeeping Firm Tech Stack Report, the Patchwork Personas are seven distinct patterns that show up again and again in small accounting and bookkeeping firms when systems get fragmented.

There’s the Spreadsheet Stalwart, the Tool Toggler, the Human Router, the Constant Copy-Paster, the Month-End Magician, the Message Miner, and the Apology Artist. Most firms aren’t just one—but there’s usually a dominant pattern running (and occasionally wrecking) the show.

Of course, knowledge is power—because once you know which persona fits your firm, you can actually do something about it. Our free 1-minute assessment will quickly identify your dominant persona as well as personalized strategies for fixing it. Plus, for a limited time, sharing your result enters you to win $500—so there’s that.

Take the assessment →

That’s all for this issue. See ya next time! 👋

Share Get Work Done - a newsletter for accounting firm owners.

Small Change, Big Results

Every new year has this strange quiet moment, right after the noise settles. You are back at your desk, the calendar is clean again, and there is a brief window where things feel possible.

At that moment, the future you is not asking for fewer loose ends and moments where you wonder if something slipped because it lived in the wrong place.

That is why the beginning of the year matters more than we admit.

It's one of the times when switching to a better mode of getting work done doesn’t feel reactive. You're changing workflow systems because you can see where your bookkeeping or accounting firm is headed, and you would rather get there with intention than urgency.

Financial Cents exists specifically for this. It’s not a generic project management tool that you have to bend into shape for accounting work. It’s built for how firms like yours actually operate: recurring deadlines, seasonal surges, client requests that need tracking, and teams that need visibility without constant check-ins.

Maybe your current setup is still semi-functional, but if you’re being honest with yourself, you probably know where the cracks are, and those cracks don’t shrink when you add more clients or hire more people.

The firms making the switch right now don’t want to carry last year’s frustrations into this year, and you shouldn't too.

Also, you won't have to do it alone.

Our consulting team—Ryan, Will, George, Kasey—they've helped hundreds of firms make this exact switch. They'll walk you through a demo tailored to how your firm actually works, help you get set up, and make sure you're not stuck watching tutorial videos at midnight trying to piece things together.

If you’ve been burned by software transitions before, this one’s different.

👉 Make the switch now

Community 🫶

The Bookkeepers’ Guide to Annual Reviews With Nancy McClelland, CPA

The Bookkeepers who run strong monthly closes don’t dread tax season, and they don’t have to rely on year-end heroics.

This one-page (FREE!) Bookkeepers’ Guide to Annual Reviews, created by Nancy McClelland, CPA, gives you a repeatable framework for reviewing client financials in a way that builds trust, surfaces issues early, and makes collaboration with tax professionals easier for everyone involved.

Inside the template, you’ll get a clear technical review structure that helps you catch issues (ideally before year-end), opportunities to turn clean books into confident client discussions, and so much more.

Get it here →

Accelerate 2 Advisor Community By Lisa Campbell

This is a breakthrough community for bookkeepers and accountants who are still deep in the day-to-day work, but ready to step out of the technician role and start building a business that runs like a system, not a scramble.

Inside, they focus on helping you clarify your true value, tap into where your real power comes from, and learn how to call in what you actually want: more time, money, and freedom. It’s about setting intentional goals, taking aligned action, and learning how to present your business in a way that feels right for you.

Join the community →

H🔥t today

IRS IT overhaul set to finish by 2028

After decades of attempts, the modernization of the IRS’s information technology systems will be completed by 2028, according to former Acting IRS Commissioner Michael Faulkender.

Faulkender, who served as deputy Treasury secretary and acting IRS commissioner for several months in 2025, said the modernization of the IRS's IT systems previously focused on translating millions of lines of computer code written in languages like Fortran developed in the 1950s into more modern languages.

In the past year, the focus of modernization shifted to getting systems to talk to each other and to have an overarching [application programming interface (API)] where all of the information was simultaneously available.

There was no mention of the IRS job cuts, which included 2,163 IT staffers, or 25% of that business unit, according to a May 2025 report from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration. In addition, 48 senior IT employees were placed on administrative leave in March 2025 due to reorganization plans.

Continue reading →

CFOs signal crucial role that technology will play in 2026

If you thought technology was already a big deal in finance, 2026 is about to dial things up.

A new report reveals a major shift that tech is no longer just a tool to speed up but a core to how finance leaders plan to compete. Think AI, intelligent automation, and smarter systems that do more than track work. We’re talking predictive tools, faster decisions, and CFOs taking a more strategic seat at the table.

What’s interesting is how many of them are now planning to invest in new tools and rethinking how finance should function entirely.

While the confidence is high, the pressure is real. Faster decisions, fewer errors, and better business alignment are now baseline expectations.

The question is: are you keeping pace with the finance function your peers are building?

Continue reading →

Swipe this workflow template

Swipe this 1099 Preparation Workflow Template by Jami Dorman

Get more templates from firm owners like you in our community template library.

Meme

Relatable?😆

Firm Spotl💡ght

How L&L Bookkeeping Manages More Clients and Delivers Services That Drive Referrals

For Lori Hawkins, what began with helping her entrepreneur husband get cleaner books and clearer insights for smarter business decisions grew into L&L Bookkeeping, LLC in 2018.

Today, the L&L Bookkeeping team assists clients both inside and outside the U.S. with all accounting services except tax returns.

As an outsourced accounting department, they work within their clients’ teams to monitor finances and ensure compliant financial records and quality financial advice.

Managed in an all-in-one practice management tool, the firm has optimized its workflows to meet client deliverables and manage client relationships effectively. This has earned them enough referrals to keep a running list of businesses waiting to use their services.

Continue reading →

Events

📍Profit Machine Live - Free Virtual Summit (January 29, 2026)

Profit Machine Live is a free, one-day virtual summit helping accountants grow beyond tax season.

You'll learn how firms are successfully adding advisory services like Tax Advisory, CAS, IRS Representation, and high-ticket advisory from experts who’ve actually done it.
This is an opportunity to get impactful and actionable insights from thought leaders in the accounting industry, like Dawn Brolin, CPA, CFE, Michelle Weinstein, Eric Green, and more.

P.S.: You can get up to 6.0 CPE credits.

Sign up here

Noteworthy

How Mélyssa Brunet Built a Workflow System That Won Her a Title and a Free Trip to Mexico

When Melyssa Brunet was announced as the 2025 Workflow Champion at WorkflowCon, the applause was immediate.

Her winning workflow, a structured year-end review process, resonated with firm owners who recognized the quiet damage caused by missed deadlines, reactive planning, and processes that live only in people’s heads.

However, Mélyssa’s story is not about a single template.

It reflects how workflows evolve when they are built with intention, tested in real client work, and shaped by the people who use them every day.

In this chat, Mélyssa walks through what pushed her bookkeeping firm to formalize workflows, how she earned team buy-in, where workflows still fall short, and why structure has become one of her firm’s biggest growth levers.

Excerpts

Q: Many firms see workflows and SOPs as efficiency tools. From your experience, what else do they influence?

Mélyssa:
Growth, without question. When we hire someone new, they are assigned files immediately in Financial Cents. They can see exactly what tasks they own, what each task means, and what done looks like. That shortens the time it takes for new hires to feel confident.

Q: You mentioned you have many templates. Why was the year-end review workflow the one you chose to present?

Mélyssa:
We actually have a library of over 50 procedures. The year-end review stood out because….

Continue reading

How to inform your clients about a price increase (plus a free template)

Well, it's 2026, and yesterday's price isn't today's price.

You’re delivering more value than ever, your workload has increased, and it costs more to run your firm today than it did a year ago.

Maybe you’re still hesitating because you’re unsure how clients will react, but the truth is, your firm can’t remain sustainable or profitable if you never update your pricing. Contrary to your concern, most clients will accept the new rates as long as you communicate the change clearly and professionally.

Proper communication is what determines whether clients understand the increase and continue working with you, or whether they feel blindsided and start questioning the relationship.

Continue reading

Till next time,

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Small Change, Big Results

Dearest gentle reader,

Was it not just yesterday that we screamed “Happy New Year!” and promised ourselves this would be the year we got ahead of deadlines, nailed every client deliverable, and took that long-overdue vacation in Q3?

Yet here we are, another year in the books.

2025 asked a lot from you, and somehow, you showed up for your clients, team, and firm. You pulled long nights. You navigated messy handoffs. You reworked client expectations, built new systems (or at least tried to), and still found time to send a reminder email with grace.

But let us ask plainly:
Did you work on your workflow as much as you worked in it?

That’s the question we kept returning to during the EOY Workflow Reset sessions, and it’s the one we believe you must answer before tax season starts, writing the script for your year.

We brought together Justine Lackey, Kellie Parks, CPB, FCPB, and Nick Boscia, CPA, three firm owners who’ve stopped treating burnout as a rite of passage. They’ve each built systems that scale, protect team sanity, and help them lead with clarity.

What you’ll learn in the replays:

• Justine maps out your first 90 days of 2026 so you start strong (and stay that way).

• Kellie shows you how to create scalable systems your team will actually follow.

• Nick shows you how to fix recurring workflow and rebalance work so Q1 doesn’t immediately become a bottleneck.

This is the blueprint for building a firm that runs with intention.

Let 2026 be the year your workflow works harder than you do.

👉 Watch the EOY Reset Series Replay

Community 🫶

Build a Buyer-Ready Practice with Adam Shay, CPA, MBA

It’s time to build a firm so operationally strong that buyers line up. A sellable firm runs on clear workflow, strong processes, and predictable operations.

Most firms run on memory, heroics, and constant reaction. When Adam built his accounting firm, everything ran through him; burnout, bottlenecks, and a team that couldn’t move without him.

Today, he coaches firm owners 1:1 and through group cohorts, helping them build sellable firms with strong operational strategies that support growth.

In this 5-day email course, you’ll learn the core elements of a buyer-ready practice and how to build simple SOPs so work gets done consistently without you.

Sign up here →

Get the Free NSA’s 2024 Profit and Practice Report

The NSA’s 2024 Profit and Practice Report is packed with benchmarking data from accountants and tax preparers across the country. See how firms are pricing services, structuring fees, and building profitability.

With this report, you can compare your fees with national benchmarks, spot opportunities to grow revenue, and gain insights to position your firm competitively.

Get the report here →

H🔥t today

Every CPA Must Triple Their Productivity by 2035 or Face Professional Extinction

David Wurtzbacher shared this projection on an episode of the Earmark Podcast. As the founder and CEO of Ascend, a private equity-backed platform that’s completed over three dozen firm acquisitions in just over two years, Wurtzbacher offers an outsider’s perspective on the profession.

According to him, demand for services continues to climb while the number of people entering the profession each year decreases.

To put this in perspective, a typical well-performing firm today generates around $200,000 in revenue per employee. Wurtzbacher’s projection means that the number needs to approach $600,000 per person within a decade. Even scarier? By 2035, roughly 85% of the profession will consist of people with ten years or less of experience in an industry where most say you can’t even make partner in that timeframe.

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The Accounting Profession’s Status Is Under Review

So, quick accounting tea ☕️

There’s a proposal circulating that would essentially declare accounting no longer a professional degree, and the accounting world collectively responded: absolutely not.

Nine major accounting organizations, led by the AICPA and representing approximately 1.5 million professionals, have joined forces to push back. They sent a letter to the U.S. Department of Education expressing strong opposition to any draft regulation that would exclude accounting programs from a professional degree designation and urging that accounting programs be included as a professional degree in the proposed rule.

At a time when firms are facing staffing shortages, aging practitioner populations, and rising complexity in compliance and advisory work, de-incentivizing formal accounting education sends the wrong message to the next generation. It frames accounting as less rigorous, less essential, and less worthy of institutional support.

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Swipe this Tax Planning Workflow Template by Laura Adams

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Firm Spotl💡ght

How Profit Constructors Run Multi-Firm Projects Without Things Falling Apart

Tonya founded The Profit Constructors after realizing that the traditional corporate environment no longer fit the life she wanted for her family.

With years of experience in construction accounting and a growing desire for a more flexible and remote-friendly work system, she set out to build a firm that operated differently.

After returning from a maternity break and struggling to ease into work, Tonya decided to use her expertise to create a virtual accounting practice that would give her and her team the freedom to work from anywhere.

When the company started, Tonya and her first staff could comfortably rely on their memories to manage projects because they had worked together for about 20 years; they understood themselves and what each client engagement required, even without spelling things out.

However, as they took on more clients and added staff, they now needed a system to document workflows and collaborate effectively, standardizing their processes across the board.

Continue reading →

Events

📍Master the Intuit Bookkeeper Certification - Free Workshop (Today, 7 pm EST)

Margie Remmers-Davis is transforming accounting education by making learning hands-on, practical, engaging, and fun.

During the workshop, you’ll discover:

• What the certification actually is (and what it’s not)

• Who really needs it vs. who’s wasting their time

• The fastest, simplest way to pass without cramming wrong material

• How to use it to stand out to clients and employers

Seats are free, but they won’t last, and the live Q&A is where the real gold happens.

Sign up here

Noteworthy

How Stacey Feldman CPA Makes Sure to Fuel Properly Even with a Busy Schedule

In the thick of client demands, team responsibilities, and firm growth, Stacey Feldman, Partner/COO at Full Send Finance, has built a system for wellness.

What makes her approach unique isn’t the discipline (though there’s plenty of that). It’s how she treats her health as a strategic advantage, instead of something to deal with after the busy season. For Stacey, staying sharp means thinking ahead about everything from food to calendar to bandwidth. It means creating predictability in her day so she can lead with clarity.

If you’ve ever told yourself you’ll rest after this deadline, or wondered how to keep showing up for your team without burning yourself out, Stacey’s story is your reminder that taking care of yourself is a business decision.

Continue reading

15 Proven Accounting Firm Growth Strategies for 2026

Growth in 2026 requires more than new clients.

Clients no longer want you only for year-end cleanups. They seek guidance, clarity, and a trusted advisor who can translate financial data into informed decisions.

Also, remote teams are becoming more common. Talent shortages have made geographical hiring optional. Remote and hybrid teams open doors to stronger hiring, but they also require better systems for collaboration, oversight, and accountability. Firms that build for flexibility are the ones keeping their teams engaged and productive.

Growth right now takes smarter operations, modern software, and systems that can actually keep up. To help you navigate this shifting landscape, this guide outlines 15 practical strategies designed to foster your firm’s growth with confidence and profitability.

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Happy Holidays, Friends 💚,

See you in 2026!

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Small Change, Big Results

Step Into 2026 With Systems That Support You

There comes a time when the status quo no longer feels tolerable.

You know it.

You recognize that something in your accounting firm needs to shift, yet every time you move toward that change, it slips out of reach. The reasons vary: client demands, staffing challenges, shifting priorities, but in the end, the result is the same. Another year passes without the systems you need to grow with intention.

At some point, though, the cycle becomes unsustainable. What once felt manageable begins to strain the limits of your capacity. The interruptions feel heavier, errors are more costly, and pressure is more persistent. The thought of heading into another year with the same gaps and frustrations becomes harder to justify.

That is precisely why the End-of-Year Workflow Reset Series exists.

It offers structured, distraction-free time to evaluate what has worked, what has not, and what must change before 2026. This month, the series is led by three industry experts who understand operational change as lived experience.

Justine Lackey will guide you through structuring your first 90 days of 2026 with intention, resetting your workflows ahead of the busy season, and utilizing real planning frameworks to map out Q1 deliverables.

Nick Bosica, CPA, brings a grounded, strategic perspective shaped by years of building and refining firm operations. His approach is practical, direct, and designed to help owners audit and tighten recurring workflows.

Kellie Parks, CPB, FCPB, is known for making processes accessible, scalable, and sustainable. Her systems-first methodology helps firms standardize their work in a way that supports both the firm owner and the team behind them.

Together, they provide a balanced, real-world framework for the work ahead, one that pairs strategic clarity with operational discipline.

If you feel the tension between where your accounting firm is and where it needs to be, this is your opportunity to bridge that gap. The stability, confidence, and structure you want next year begin with the decisions you make now.

👉 Sign up for the EOY Workflow Reset Series

Community 🫶

The Velocity Retreat With Justine Lackey

If you’re a bookkeeper or accountant who needs a strategic plan for 2026, consider this your official invite to Velocity, Justine Lackey’s half-day (FREE!) virtual planning retreat on December 11th from 12–4:30 pm EST.

Velocity is a community favorite for a reason: in just a few hours, you’ll walk away with:

• A crystal-clear 2026 plan that feels achievable and exciting

• A simple method to break big goals into tiny weekly actions

• A gorgeous 2026 digital planning workbook you’ll use all year

• A mindset reset that gets you out of the weeds and laser-focused on building your #dreamfirm

If you want 2026 to be the year you feel grounded and organized and gain real momentum, register for Velocity today. Your future self will thank you.

Sign up here →

NexPath Coaching

NexPath Coaching helps organizations of every size create cultures where people understand each other, trust each other, and take ownership so that growth, collaboration, and results happen naturally.

They believe communication and leadership aren’t soft skills but the structure that holds everything together.

If you’re an accounting firm owner and want your team to take more ownership and improve collaboration, start here.

Join the coaching community →

H🔥t today

What Will Accounting and Finance Look Like By 2040?

Daniel Burrus has quite a history as a futurist. Over the past 40 years, the New York Times bestselling author has delivered keynote speeches at more than 3,000 conferences worldwide, advised numerous Fortune 500 executives, and foretold scores of technology and business developments.

These predictions have not come via a crystal ball. They are the result of a methodology Burrus developed to identify trends and use those to anticipate what is most likely to happen in the coming years.

His anticipatory business model is a big reason why the Association of International Certified Professional Accountants (AICPA) has teamed with Burrus on Finance and Accounting 2040: Rise to the Future Together, an ambitious attempt to envision what the world might look like in 2040 and what accountants in firms and finance departments may do to guide the profession to continued success over the next 15 years.

The AICPA has twice conducted visioning projects like Rise2040. The 1997 CPA Vision Project gathered more than 3,000 CPAs in 200 focus groups to plot the profession’s path through 2011. That report established a new purpose statement for accounting: “Making sense of a changing and complex world.”

Continue reading →

Why Managed IT Services Make Sense for Accountants

It’s hard to imagine anything an accounting firm does is not tied to technology and processes; however, with so many firms still stretching the limits of dated technology, it is one of many reasons to consider utilizing managed IT services.

Cybercriminals become incredibly sophisticated, and it’s been made clear accounting firms—with all of the sensitive information they potentially have access to—remain a key target. In fact, according to IBM’s 2024 Threat Intelligence Report, professional services, including accounting, ranked among the top five most attacked industries, with an average breach cost of $5.9 million.

Another survey by the AICPA found that 91% of accounting firms experienced at least one attempted cyberattack in the past year. In the middle of this storm, the IRS tightened its own data security requirements.

Under IRS Publication 4557 and the FTC Safeguards Rule, every tax professional must maintain a Written Information Security Plan (WISP) and demonstrate ongoing security controls. This isn’t advisory anymore; it’s mandatory.

Continue reading →

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Swipe this Year End Reporting Workflow Template by Mélyssa Brunet (Workflow Champion 2025)

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Firm Spotl💡ght

How Strategic Tax Planning PLLC Reclaims Time to Serve More Clients

Strategic Tax Planning PLLC was still a side business when Carter Lance began searching for practice management software.

He learned a lesson many accounting firm owners discover too late: Technical accounting skills alone won’t lead to success if your workflow systems are manual and disconnected.

Carter was determined to help businesses create financial plans that met regulatory standards and enabled confident decisions through bookkeeping, tax planning, and fractional CFO services.

However, his search for a suitable workflow software led to an unpleasant realization: most tools were strong in some areas of accounting practice management but lacked in others. He wanted a tool that checked enough boxes and solved enough problems to warrant his financial commitment.

This decision to discontinue the search and continue with manual workflow systems opened the door to some of the worst challenges an accounting firm can face:

Continue reading →

Events

📍Digital CPA 2025 - Dec.7 - 11 (Washington D.C)

Digital CPA (DCPA) is the place where the future of the profession is being shaped in real time. Hosted annually by CPA.com, a subsidiary of the AICPA, DCPA has spent more than a decade bringing together the firms, leaders, and innovators who refuse to settle for outdated ways of working.

If you want to stay ahead of the curve, this is the room you need to be in. You’ll hear directly from industry trailblazers, gain insights that can shift the direction of your firm, and see what’s coming long before everyone else does

Check the agenda →

📍 Ensuring Success 2025 - Dec. 10 - 11 (Virtual)

Ensuring Success is the end-of-year virtual conference that accountants and tax professionals don’t want to miss. Hosted annually by CPA Practice Advisor, this two-day live event brings together some of the most respected voices in the profession right when you need their insights most.

Designed to help you sharpen your expertise and secure those final CPE credits before the year closes, Ensuring Success delivers high-value sessions at no cost. You’ll hear directly from industry leaders on the topics that matter most—practice management, tax updates, accounting technology, workflow efficiency, and more.

Sign up here

Noteworthy

Sarah Won’t Let ADHD Stop Her Bop

If you were at the WorkflowCon 2025 after-party, you can attest to the fact that the jams were fire! All thanks to DJ Sarah Eldridge, an accountant by day and DJ by night.

However, she wasn't always like this.

Rewind three decades, and you’d find a little girl desperately trying to make sense of a brain that worked differently. A child who alphabetized her CD collection while other kids played outside. Who begged for calendars every Christmas and played “school” for fun when she got home from actual school.

One of Sarah’s biggest breakthroughs was understanding how her brain processes focus. Unlike many people who need quiet to concentrate, Sarah discovered she needs lots of noise. She took this discovery even further by learning to DJ and now creates her own mixes of dubstep and drum & bass music. When impostor syndrome strikes or work gets overwhelming, she puts on one of her creations.

Continue reading

The Art of Letting Go (Without Losing Control)

It’s the end of the year, and your accounting firm is buzzing with activity.

Clients are calling non-stop, emails are piling up, and your team is stretched thin trying to meet deadlines. As the firm owner, you find yourself working late nights, meticulously checking every detail, ensuring nothing falls through the cracks. The stress is palpable, and the bottleneck effect is in full force.

Every decision and task needs your direct input, leaving you overwhelmed and exhausted.

According to a study by Gallup, CEOs who delegate effectively generate 33% more revenue than those who don’t​​. This boost in productivity translates to more clients served, faster turnaround times, and, ultimately, higher profits. Consider how much more efficient your firm would be if routine tasks like data entry and initial client communications were handled by junior staff, freeing up senior accountants to focus on complex financial analysis and strategic planning.

Also, when your employees are entrusted with responsibilities, they feel valued and are more engaged. This empowerment leads to higher job satisfaction and retention rates.

Continue reading

Until Next Time,

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Small Change, Big Results

Inside WorkflowCon 2025: How 2,400 Firm leaders & Operators Found Calm

First of all, a standing ovation to y’all who made it to WorkflowCon 2025.

On Nov 12 & 13, 2025, 2,400 accounting and bookkeeping professionals logged in for one reason: they were tired.

Tired of racing against deadlines with broken workflows, of feeling guilty every time they opened their inbox, and pretending that being busy was the same thing as being successful.

WorkflowCon 2025 was built around a simple, uncomfortable question. What if the problem is not that accounting firms need to work harder, but their workflows were never designed to handle the reality they are operating in today?

Watch a replay of all the sessions here

Clear the Chaos. Find Your Calm was not just a tagline, but a filter for every keynote, every panel, every Workflow Champions Live session, and every conversation in chat. This is what actually happened over those two days, what people learned, and why it matters now that everyone has gone back to their client work and deadlines.

👉 Read the full recap

Community 🫶

Akadian by Margie Remmers-Davis

This is a community and a platform that empowers accounting professionals with hands-on education, innovative learning tools, and a supportive community to bridge the gap between theory and on-the-job experience.

Over 20,000 students have used the Akadian Accounting course library to study for and pass the QuickBooks Online ProAdvisor exam and become experts in the bookkeeping field.

If you're looking to become a better bookkeeper and accounting professional, their courses will help you before, during, and after your certification journey.

Join the community →

The National Association of Enrolled Agents

The NAEA is a community for tax practitioners from aspiring enrolled agents to experts with decades of experience. They advance the professional tax practice through leadership, management, community, and ethics.

What makes them stand out is the collective belief that tax work can evolve. They question outdated standards, push for stronger representation, and create learning environments where practitioners sharpen their judgment rather than rely on random facts.

Join the community →

H🔥t today

Artificial Intelligence Has a trust Problem

We've all agreed that AI is here to stay, and it's essential to incorporate it into the work we do, right?

Then it begets this question: Can we trust the algorithms at the core of artificial intelligence’s ability to learn and solve problems?

According to the Journal of Accountancy, this question is becoming increasingly pertinent as businesses rely more heavily on artificial intelligence (AI) to automate tasks such as talent recruitment, market trend prediction, and cybersecurity assessment. But what if businesses could seek an independent third-party assessment of their AI software that can assure the efficacy of their controls?

Robert Seamans, professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, suggested that so-called “AI auditors” could fill this emerging role.

CPAs aren’t the only professionals who could perform these “AI audits.” However, CPAs adhere to professional standards designed to instill trust in the results of assurance engagements, whether to provide confidence to investors that a company’s financial records are accurate and fair or to assure banks that a company complies with loan covenants.

Continue reading →

1,400 IRS employees receive layoff notices, adding to staff losses

The IRS sent layoff notices to almost 1,400 employees, adding to the losses at the agency where 25% of staff had left as of May, according to a court document filed earlier this week in a lawsuit brought by unions against the federal government.

The layoffs are in addition to a workforce reduction of about 25% as of May through some sort of incentive program, such as deferred resignation, according to a report released in July by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration.

The report stated that 25,386 employees had departed as of May through some sort of incentive program, such as a deferred resignation. Another 294 employees received RIF notices but had not been terminated because of a court injunction, as was the case for 3,023 probationary employees. These employees continued to work at the IRS unless they chose to separate or were terminated for reasons other than those stated in the report, it said.

Continue reading →

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Swipe this Client Year-End Document Request List Template by Abhijeet Sangani

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If you missed WorkflowCon 2025, you can catch the replays here.

Firm Spotl💡ght

How Pedante and Company Made Work Visible Enough to Fix Problems Before They Spread

Since 2018, Pedante and Company has built strong relationships with businesses across Chester, Delaware, Montgomery, Bucks, and Philadelphia counties.

For over 22 years, Jenna Rodriguez has worked alongside the firm’s owner, building a successful career and cultivating deep relationships within the local business community.

When the firm’s owner decided it was time to retire, Jenna knew she would have to answer a critical business question: How does the team maintain operational consistency, hand off work seamlessly, and ensure the firm continues delivering the same, if not better, quality of client service?

Continue reading →

Events

📍Digital CPA 2025 - Dec.7 - 11 (Washington D.C)

Digital CPA (DCPA) is an annual accounting conference that has been held for over a decade. CPA.com, formed by the American Institute of CPAs (AICPA), organizes the event, which is for accountants interested in creating a better future for the profession.

The conference will provide you with the opportunity to gain professional insights from industry leaders that will shape your thinking. You should also attend if you are into client advisory services or want to offer this service.

Check the agenda →

📍 Ensuring Success 2025 - Dec. 10 - 11 (Virtual)

Ensuring Success is an annual virtual accounting/tax conference organized by the CPA Practice Advisor at the end of the year.

It is designed to help professionals in the accounting and tax industry learn and earn CPE credits before the end of the year. The free event, which is live-streamed for two days, features an impressive lineup of accounting and tax industry leaders and experts sharing insights on topics like practice management, taxes, accounting technology, and more.

Sign up here

Noteworthy

Erin Pohan on Building an Accounting Firm With Boundaries, Balance, and Boldness

Sometimes, we like to think that Accounting has rules. Unspoken ones.

Keep it serious and play it safe. Don’t be too loud or too bold.

It was only when Erin started her own firm, Upkeeping, that she realized she no longer needed permission to be herself. “I’m a little cheeky. I think I’m fun. But for years, I kept that part of me separate. I didn’t think it belonged in accounting.” But everything changed the moment she started showing up as herself on LinkedIn, in client calls, in community spaces. “You can be anyone you want to be in this industry,” she said. “Your people will find you.”

She was at QuickBooks Connect, in a ballroom full of accountants dancing to Pitbull and Daddy Yankee. “I’m Puerto Rican,” she laughed. “I saw them dancing and thought, wait, we’re allowed to have fun? We can do both?”

She left that night with a new idea: what if there were more spaces where accountants could just be real?

Continue reading

Here's How You Can Build Your Accounting Firm's Tech Stack

The cost of operating in manual systems or disconnected apps is becoming too high, but a well-integrated tech stack helps you avoid spending valuable time on manual tasks.

It minimizes, if not eliminates, tasks like manual data entry, bank feeds, and client reminders to enable your team to focus on understanding and applying their accounting expertise to clients’ financial situations.

Building that kind of tech stack requires clarity on what problem each tool solves, how it integrates with the rest of your workflow, and how it supports the outcomes you want to see in the next few years, not just right now.

To start, assess your firm's pain points and needs. This is a good place to ask your team members where they are struggling and where client complaints are coming from.

Sometimes, you don’t need to buy a tool for a problem. Maybe a task needs to be eliminated or delegated to someone with better capacity to handle it.

Continue reading

What Are Your Thoughts?

Share your POV in the comments.

You can also join the FC Reddit community here.

Until Next Time,

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Small Change, Big Results

 Clear the Chaos, Find Your Calm.

There’s a strange thing that happens when you’re swimming in the ocean.

If a wave hits you and you panic, thrash harder, fight the pull, you sink faster. But if you pause, take a breath, and let yourself float for a second, the ocean actually brings you back up. The calm of the water saves you.

That’s what running a firm often feels like.
You start out swimming with purpose, steady strokes, and clear direction. Then the current changes. Client demands rise like tides. Your team feels stretched. You start working longer hours just to stay above water. You add tools, hire help, patch holes, but somehow it only makes the water choppier.

The lesson is that you can’t outswim chaos. You have to find calm inside it.

That’s the heartbeat of WorkflowCon 2025: a space for accounting firm leaders, operators, and their teams to stop paddling for a day and actually float. To look at the current beneath your work — systems, processes, people — and learn how to build a firm that moves smoothly, not frantically.

Over two days, you’ll learn from experts who’ve been through the storms how to scale without losing your sanity, how to simplify client management, and how to use AI to take back your time.

Here’s the best part: the sessions will help you get your firm back in shape while also moving your career forward. You can earn up to 12 CPE credits while learning how to clear the chaos in your processes, reclaim your time, and find calm in how you work.

It’s a rare kind of maintenance, the kind that doesn’t just get you back on the road, but makes the next stretch smoother, quieter, and faster.

👉 Save your spot

Community 🫶

The 6-Figure Bookkeeper’s Club by Joe Wood and Zoe Whitman

This is a supportive, women-led community that focuses on helping bookkeepers build businesses that fit around their lives. With practical resources, coaching, and a focus on confidence and profitability, it’s designed to empower bookkeepers to charge what they’re worth and succeed on their terms.

Join the community →

The Accountant's Lounge

The Accountant’s Lounge is a community where accountants, bookkeepers, CFOs, and tax professionals have the opportunity to learn, network and scale our businesses together.

Within the group, they talk about ALL the things. From accounting software to taxes, budgeting and goal setting, money mindset, setting prices, outsourcing, workflows, and everything in between.

Join the community →

H🔥t today

The accounting graduate pipeline: Where do things stand?

If you’ve been worried about the accounting talent shortage (and who hasn’t?), the latest update from Journal of Accountancy actually brings a little relief. For the first time in a while, we’re seeing some positive movement in the accounting graduate pipeline.

Yes, the total number of accounting degrees awarded fell again, about 6.6% last year. But here’s the part that caught my attention: enrollment is up more than 12%, the highest since 2020. That means more students are at least starting accounting programs, even if fewer are graduating right now. To me, that’s a hopeful sign that the interest is coming back, and maybe, just maybe, our collective outreach is paying off.

However, fewer master’s grads and a big drop in CPA exam candidates (partly because of the exam overhaul) remains a challenge. Still, roughly three-quarters of firms plan to hire as many or more grads this year, which shows that demand clearly isn’t slowing down.

For firm owners, this is the time to double down on your people strategy. That means making your firm stand out to young talent, through culture, flexibility, growth paths, and technology. The next generation is coming; we just have to meet them where they are and make accounting careers worth choosing.

Continue reading →

Tax Pros Anxiously Await Guidance on New Overtime Deduction

Tax pros are buzzing about a new provision in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, a temporary above-the-line deduction for overtime pay. Right now, qualifying employees can deduct the premium portion of their overtime (that “half” in “time-and-a-half”) from gross income. The cap sits around $12,500 for single filers and $25,000 for joint returns, with phase-outs for higher incomes.

So, why does this matter for firm owners? Two reasons: clients and compliance.
For clients with hourly or overtime-eligible staff, this is a tax-planning opportunity worth preparing for now. On the compliance side, firms (and their clients) will need to ensure payroll systems can separate regular pay from overtime premiums and track qualified hours accurately.

The IRS hasn’t finalized guidance yet, and several questions remain like whether state-level overtime rules or employer-paid bonuses will qualify.

Continue reading →

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Swipe this Client Weekly Accounting Checklist Template by Tonya Schulte

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Well, well, what do we have here?

Events

📍Digital CPA 2025 - Dec.7 - 11 (Washington D.C)

Digital CPA (DCPA) is an annual accounting conference that has been held for over a decade. CPA.com, formed by the American Institute of CPAs (AICPA), organizes the event, which is for accountants interested in creating a better future for the profession.

The conference will offer you a chance to get professional insights from industry leaders that will shape your thinking. You should also attend if you are into client advisory services or want to offer this service.

Check the agenda →

📍 Ensuring Success 2025 - Dec. 10 - 11 (Virtual)

Ensuring Success is an annual virtual accounting/tax conference organized by the CPA Practice Advisor at the end of the year.

It is designed to help professionals in the accounting and tax industry learn and earn CPE credits before the end of the year. The free event, which is live-streamed for two days, features an impressive lineup of accounting and tax industry leaders and experts sharing insights on topics like practice management, taxes, accounting technology, and more.

Sign up here

Firm Spotl💡ght

400+ Projects, 8 People, One Team: Inside Payroll Restoration’s Workflow Machine

When other accounting firms hit a wall with payroll issues, they call Shannon Ballman Theis.

Known as “the accountant’s accountant,” Shannon has built a reputation for solving the kinds of payroll problems most people avoid, the messy, confusing, IRS-letter-triggering kind.

From her home base in Minnesota, Shannon founded Payroll Restoration with a passion for untangling the payroll puzzles no one else could (or wanted to). Her team steps in when businesses receive IRS or state notices and don’t know where to turn. “We help address the payroll issues they’re having,” Shannon explains. “We also do ERC reviews to help businesses that may have gotten the wrong amount of ERC.”

Fast forward 14 years, and the solo shop has evolved into a powerhouse team of eight accountants, all focused on one thing: helping businesses regain payroll compliance.

But with 400+ active projects and a small team, staying organized became mission-critical. That’s where finding the right practice management system made all the difference. Instead of wasting time figuring out what to do next, Shannon’s team now logs in each day knowing exactly what to work on and gets straight to helping clients.

Here’s how Payroll Restoration keeps its lean team running like clockwork ⬇️

Continue reading →

Put Your Phone Away

This CNBC article has made one thing clear: if anxiety levels are high, your phone might be part of the problem.

Constant pings, endless scrolling, and the need to constantly check in keep the brain on alert, making it nearly impossible to unwind truly. Jonathan Haidt, author and professor at the NYU Stern School of Business, says that even brief breaks from screens can reset the nervous system and help restore focus.

Putting your phone down doesn’t mean disconnecting completely, but about creating moments of calm in a world that never stops buzzing. A few minutes of quiet might just be the simplest stress fix out there.

Continue reading

What Are Your Thoughts?

Share your POV in the comments.

You can also join the FC Reddit community here.

Until Next Time,

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Small Change, Big Results

 Your Ticket to Mexico

It’s October 23. Your team’s already talking about Q4 like it’s a medieval siege. The air smells like pumpkin spice and stress (spooky szn, is that you? 👀). Somewhere in the distance, a client just asked for a 7-month backdated financial report in “one simple PDF.”

And you, brave, sleep-deprived accounting firm owner, are clutching your SOP binder like a life raft.

Friend, you need a break. Not a fake break where you half-watch Netflix while replying to “quick question” emails. A real break. A revival. A sunshine-soaked, workflow-taming, margarita-flavored awakening.

Which brings us to the Workflow Showdown, and the truth that built it: sometimes the biggest results come from the smallest changes.

Maybe it was the checklist you finally documented.
Maybe it was the automation that replaced five emails and three status updates.
Maybe it was even ditching a clunky step that no one liked, and suddenly your whole team breathed easier.

Every firm has one of those moments—a small shift that creates calm where there used to be chaos, a micro-move that turns into a macro-win.

We want to see yours.

The Workflow Showdown is your chance to share the system that changed your firm, and possibly earn an all-expense-paid trip to Mexico.

See this as an opportunity to share that positive improvement in your processes. When you give others a glimpse of what’s possible, the impact grows even bigger.

So take five minutes and submit the workflow.

This time, your system could be your ticket to rest, recognition, and a round of drinks on the beach in Mexico.

All on Financial Cents, of course 😉

👉 Submit your workflow

Community 🫶

Advisory Accountants & Bookkeepers Network By Alyssa J Ciera

This community is for accountants, bookkeepers, and financial professionals who are starting to think differently about the way they work. If you’re looking to build a firm that isn’t just busy but intentional, this is the place.

It’s where firm owners like you talk honestly about what it takes to grow without constantly doing more, what it means to move beyond basic compliance work. How to attract clients who value your insight, and what it looks like to offer deeper, more strategic services without overcomplicating things.

You don’t need to have a big plan mapped out. Maybe you’re just exploring what’s next. Maybe you’ve already started making shifts. Either way, you’re not alone in figuring it out.

Join the community →

The Profitable Accountant By Reza Hooda

If you’re worn out from the long hours and not seeing the return you hoped for, you’re not alone. A lot of people feel the same. You had a vision when you started, and maybe it’s drifted. That doesn’t mean it’s too late to get things back on track.

This community is for accountants and firm owners who want to turn their practices into something more profitable and more fulfilling.

This is also a space to talk through the challenges, the roadblocks, and the small wins. To learn from others, share what’s real, and slowly build a firm that works for you, not the other way around.

Join the community →

WorkflowCon 2025 is in 3 Weeks! 🤯

If you’ve been meaning to rethink how your firm operates but haven’t had the time or space to step back and do it, this might be a good place to start.

Over two days, you’ll hear from firm owners, advisors, and workflow specialists who quietly build practices that run more smoothly and sustainably. The sessions are focused, the conversations are practical, and the goal is simple: to help you create systems that support your team, your clients, and your capacity.

If you haven’t registered yet, now’s a good time. Set the time aside. You might come away with a different view of what’s possible.

Don’t let FOMO win!

P.S.: If you’d like to convince your boss for a chance to attend WorkflowCon, here’s an email template you can use to convince them.

H🔥t today

Accounting Could Be STEM’s New Offshoot

According to a recent survey conducted by The Harris Poll on behalf of the American Institute of CPAs (AICPA), three-quarters of Americans (74%) believe accounting courses should be designated as a science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education program.

The AICPA is advocating for legislation to establish the accounting profession as a STEM career pathway and to support long-standing efforts to bring awareness of the opportunities accounting can provide to young people who are considering their future careers.

“The role of an accountant has been significantly transformed by technology, which now goes beyond adopting advanced tools to innovating systems that support clients in making better decisions and enhancing service quality,” said AICPA President & CEO Mark Koziel, CPA, CGMA. “STEM legislation would highlight the clear and logical integration between accounting and technology – emphasizing the value of accounting professionals, including CPAs, as technological leaders.”

Continue reading →

The Exit Wave Is Coming. Who’s Ready to Catch It?

As a growing number of Baby Boomer business owners near retirement, concerns are being raised about what happens next for the small businesses they leave behind. Without a clearer path for ownership transfer, many of these businesses could end up in the hands of large corporations or private investors—not because it’s the best option, but because it’s the only one available.

In Queensland, one accountant decided to act. They launched a petition asking the federal government to consider a loan program similar to what exists in the US—one that makes it easier for everyday buyers to step in and take over profitable small businesses. The petition has already drawn nearly 1,300 signatures.

In the US, the Small Business Administration helps ease the risk for banks by guaranteeing part of a buyer’s loan. It’s a structure that gives more people a shot at business ownership, not just those with deep pockets.

Continue reading →

Swipe this workflow template

Swipe this Quarterly Accounting Checklist Template by Misty Scott

Get more templates from firm owners like you in our community template library.

Meme

The audacity. Relatable?😀

Events

📍Intuit Connect - October 27 -29, 2025 (Las Vegas)

The Intuit Connect conference kicks off next week!

Intuit Connect 2025, which was called QuickBooks Connect until 2024 when it was changed to “emphasize its integrated platform”, is a popular annual event that brings together accounting professionals and Intuit users of all experience levels to learn, grow, and build relationships.

At this conference, you’ll see how other firms across different levels effectively leverage Intuit software like QuickBooks, top speakers that cut across various industries, and Intuit Connect’s Peer-to-peer learning.

Oh, Financial Cents will be there too!

We'll be partying with Woodard in our VIP Suite, and you're invited.

Join us! →

📍 Reframe 2025 - November 2 - 5 (Florida)

This event empowers accounting professionals to master value-driven pricing strategies, communicate their worth with assurance, and elevate their pricing conversations to drive business growth.

Key topics include the psychology of pricing, building client trust through transparent and confident communication, and overcoming objections with ease.

Attendees will delve into strategies to position premium services, implement tiered pricing models, and transition from hourly billing to value-based and subscription models.

If you’re ready to get your money up, don’t miss it.

Sign up here

NoteWorthy

Karl Strube’s On the Hot Seat & Disneyland’s On the Line

In this episode of Who Wants To Be An Accounting Millionaire, we meet Karl Strube, the owner of Strube CPA PC. He’s playing for a $1,000 prize, not for himself, but to take his kids on a trip to Disney World.

Over ten questions, all centered on tax loopholes, Karl has to think fast and stay sharp. The further he goes, the harder it gets. No buzzers or flashing lights, just one accountant, a quiet goal, and a shot at turning tax knowledge into something his kids will remember.

Watch here →

Mark Wickersham’s GenAI Guide for Accounting Firms

Maybe you used to think AI was something only big tech companies played with. Something cool in theory, but not really built for Accounting firms.

But that’s changed.

Tools like Generative AI, yeah, the kind behind ChatGPT, are becoming more accessible, and they’re actually useful. We’ve started seeing how they can help manage workflows, draft client emails, and brainstorm content or processes. Nothing flashy. Just small shifts that save time and make things run a little smoother.

Mark Wickersham, Chartered Accountant, public speaker, and #1 best-selling author, Value Pricing Academy, shares how you can integrate AI into your accounting workflow to save time, improve efficiency, and deliver more value to clients.

In just 5 pages, he’ll show you how to get started.

Get the GenAI guide here

What Are Your Thoughts?

Share your POV in the comments.

You can also join the FC Reddit community here.

Until Next Time,

Share Get Work Done - a newsletter for accounting firm owners.

Small Change, Big Results

You’re Working 10X Harder Than You Need To

It’s a strange reality, isn’t it?

The more your firm grows, the more it feels like you’re sprinting uphill. There are more opportunities, yes, but also more moving parts, expectations, and pressure to deliver value without overextending your team.

Growth has a way of quietly piling on complexity, and some firms respond the only way they know how: by working harder, hiring more, hustling more, and compensating for process gaps with extra hours and good intentions.

But what if working harder isn’t the only path to the results you want to see?

Here’s a perspective worth considering: Firms that grow without burning out tend to look inward before they scale outward. They don’t just add more people to handle more work; they become obsessive about building repeatable workflows.

At this 10X Virtual Bookkeeper’s Bootcamp, you'll unpack some of the practices that help firms like yours operate at 10X efficiency, not by grinding harder, but by getting clearer.

You’ll see:

• The kinds of workflows top-performing firms rely on to eliminate wasted motion.

• How better project tracking can reduce rework, delays, and the nagging feeling that “someone dropped the ball.”

• Why visibility across your team makes your services more consistent and profitable.

• A plug-and-play workflow template that you can start experimenting with.

You started your firm to build something meaningful, to serve your clients well, and to create a business that supports the life you want, not one that consumes it.

This is for anyone who’s tired of feeling like they’re working harder than they should. It’s for firm owners who know there’s a better way but aren’t quite sure where to start. And it’s for teams who are ready to work smarter.

Register here

Community 🫶

The Successful Bookkeeper Community By Michael Palmer

With over 10,000 members and growing, this community is more than just a Facebook group; it’s a space built for bookkeepers, by bookkeepers.

Whether you’re just starting out or scaling your firm, you’ll find support, answers, and inspiration from people who actually get it. Got questions about pricing? Need feedback on your onboarding process? Want to celebrate a win, or vent about a tough client day? This is the room for it.

Join the community →

The Entrepreneurial Accountants by Ben Brown

This community is for self-employed accountants who want more than just clients; they want the right clients. The kind who respect your expertise, value your time, and happily pay for the quality you bring.

Here, you’ll connect with fellow accountants, bookkeepers, and tax professionals who are all working toward the same goal: building highly profitable firms without running themselves into the ground.

You'll learn how to position your services so they stand out, how to communicate your value with confidence, and how to attract clients who see you as a partner, not just a service provider.

Join the community →

Clear the chaos, Find Your Calm at Workflowcon 2025

There’s a moment every firm owner has. Usually around 11:43 p.m. When you’re staring at your laptop, realizing you spent the entire day putting out fires that shouldn’t have existed in the first place.

This is where WorkflowCon 2025 comes in, and it’s definitely not another “you just need to hustle harder” pep talk.

With 20+ sessions and workshops, you and other firm owners will figure out how to stop duct-taping your businesses together and start building systems that work.

Save your spot!

H🔥t today

AICPA Calls For All IRS Employees to Keep Working During Shutdown

You know it’s bad when the AICPA starts raising its voice.

So here’s the tea, according to Accounting Today.

The American Institute of CPAs is urging the federal government to keep all Internal Revenue Service employees working for the duration of the shutdown, pointing to the approaching Oct. 15 deadline for filing C corporation tax returns and for individuals who requested a six-month extension back in April.

The AICPA believes the consequences of a drastically smaller workforce during a tax filing deadline and immediately preceding the start of next year’s tax filing season would be dire.

“Right now, taxpayers, C-corporations, and tax advisors are working hard to meet the October 15th filing deadline — this can be stressful enough,” said Melanie Lauridsen, vice president of tax policy and advocacy with the AICPA, in a statement. “An extended government shutdown during this important filing deadline will compound this anxiety if the IRS is not 100% staffed.”

Continue reading →

Excel's Reign is Experiencing a Paradigm Shift

On Sept. 30, 2025, Microsoft Excel officially hit middle age, celebrating 40 years of being the cornerstone business tool for accountants and other finance professionals in quantitative and qualitative tasks alike.

Excel’s accessibility, versatility, flexibility, simplicity, and sheer ubiquity (1.5 billion users can’t be wrong) have made it the dominant player in the number-crunching workplace. It should be lauded for being the universal go-to tool for accountants. But it is starting to look tired and replaceable as the tool of choice for accountants and decision-makers worldwide.

Excel has been threatened many times before, and although there have been successful competitors, modern, AI-centered solutions are emerging everywhere.

Continue reading →

Swipe this workflow template

Swipe this Withholding Assessment Checklist Template by Eden Badertscher

Get more templates from firm owners like you in our community template library.

Meme

Relatable?😀

Events

📍Intuit Connect - October 26 -29, 2025 (Las Vegas)

Intuit Connect 2025, which was called QuickBooks Connect until 2024 when it was changed to “emphasize its integrated platform”, is a popular annual event that brings together accounting professionals and Intuit users of all experience levels to learn, grow, and build relationships.

At this conference, you’ll see how other firms across different levels effectively leverage Intuit software like QuickBooks, top speakers that cut across various industries, and Intuit Connect’s Peer-to-peer learning.

Oh, Financial Cents will be there too!

We'll be partying with Woodard in our VIP Suite, and you're invited.

Join us! →

📍 Women Who Count Conference - October 21 - 25, 2025 (Arizona)

Women Who Count is an annual conference organized by the Accounting and Financial Women Association (AFWA). For four days, Women Who Count helps female accounting and finance professionals to learn and network across several topics, including tax, finance, leadership, and communications.

This event teaches attendees hard accounting skills and soft skills that will give them a competitive edge in the industry.

If you’re a woman, it’s also a great avenue to connect with other women in the industry.

Sign up here

NoteWorthy

What Happens When Accountants Compete for Glory and $1,000?

Turns out, more than you’d think.

We gave accountants a spotlight, a seat in the hot chair, and one question:
“Final answer?”

Who Wants to Be an Accounting Millionaire is not your average quiz show. It’s where firm owners, tax pros, and CPAs go toe-to-toe for bragging rights and a shot at $1,000.

Over eight episodes, from Nick Boscia, CPA (EP 1) to Amber Thompson (EP 7), we’ve seen close calls, bold plays, quiet panic, and some answers so confident, they were wrong. Gloriously wrong.

If you’re in it for the questions, the competitiveness, or just to see your peers crack under pressure (gently), the full series is now ready for your viewing pleasure.

Binge all 8 episodes here →

7 Figures Later: What Brandon Hall, CPA, Did Differently

Brandon Hall is the Managing Partner at Hall CPA PLLC. A firm he founded in 2016, which has grown to a 7-figure firm.

Hall CPA PLLC, also known as The Real Estate CPA, is a boutique accounting and consulting firm with a sole focus on serving the needs of real estate investors and real estate business owners. They’ve provided candid, intelligent counsel to more than 600 clients.

So what’s the difference between building a solid practice and scaling a 7-figure advisory firm?

According to Brandon, it comes down to two things most accountants tend to overlook: Knowing your advice is worth paying for, and knowing how to say it out loud.

If you don’t believe in the value of your recommendations, your clients won’t either.

Brandon didn’t just offer advisory services; he built his firm around it.
And he’s sharing exactly how he did it.

Get Brandon's Playbook Here

What Are Your Thoughts?

Share your POV in the comments.

You can also join the FC Reddit community here.

Until Next Time,

Share Get Work Done - a newsletter for accounting firm owners.