Welcome to “Get Work Done,” where we discuss the complexities of efficiently running accounting and bookkeeping firms. This newsletter is brought to you by Financial Cents and delivered to your inbox every 2 weeks.
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.
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.
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.
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).
“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.
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.
📍 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.
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!
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.👇
That’s all for now. See you in two weeks. 💚
The doubled ROI number is the one I would want pulled apart, because it is the kind of finding that changes what a firm does on Monday.
Firms that write a policy are firms that were already organised enough to write one. So the comparison may not be policy versus no policy. It may be a firm that writes things down versus a firm that does not, and writing things down is also what lets you report ROI at all.
Which raises a harder possibility. A firm with no policy may have the same return and simply be unable to see it, because it never wrote down what it was trying to get. If that is what is happening, the finding is measuring visibility rather than returns, and the advice that follows is still right, write the thing down, but for a different reason than the number suggests.
I am one of your nine in ten. We run outsourced accounting operations for 29 clients in Japan and we have no documented AI policy. We published our four control questions and answered no, no, no and partially. That is what the absence looks like from the inside, and it took publishing it to notice.
Does the report separate firms that measured ROI from firms that reported it?