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PODCAST

Doug Slaybaugh: How to Define “Values in Motion” | The Disruptors

Are your firm’s stated values consistent with its behavior?

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The Disruptors
With Liz Farr
For CPA Trendlines

How does your firm define culture? Is your culture consistent with the values posted on the breakroom wall? Doug Slaybaugh, founder of CPA Coach, defines culture as “values in motion.” According to this definition, a firm’s stated values must be evident in the ways a firm actually behaves.

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A firm with the value of philanthropy, for example, should give team members the ability to volunteer or sponsor nonprofit events. “There should be evidence,” Slaybaugh explains. “Otherwise, there’s no evidence of that value. It’s really not your culture.”

Slaybaugh’s previous firm had the often-clichéd value of “people first,” but actually executed on that. Team members were offered the option to buy an additional month of PTO, prorated from their salaries, resulting in an 11-month year with nearly two months of vacation.

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GROWTH STRATEGIES

Nancy McClelland: Bookkeepers Need a Safe Space to Collaborate | The Disruptors

Bookkeepers often feel less empowered than tax professionals.

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The Disruptors
With Liz Farr
For CPA Trendlines

Nancy McClelland wants to do more than just run her firm, The Dancing Accountant. She has two big passion projects that are creating the conversations and collaborations this profession desperately needs. Her community, Ask a CPA, aims to bridge the gap between bookkeepers and tax professionals. She also co-hosts a podcast with Questian Telka, She Counts, which provides a safe space for women in accounting to discuss real issues.

MORE STREAMING: Cannon: Busy Season is Self-Inflicted | Carroll: When One Person Can Break the Firm |  Rampe: Build a Roadmap Even When the Road’s Not There | Chang: Killing SALY, One Agent at a Time | Vanover: 5-Star Firms Don’t Bill by the Hour | Kless: Profit Is a Result. Flourishing Is the Purpose | Whitman: Build Culture on ‘Progress,’ Not Change | Shein: No PE? No M&A? No Problem | Hood and Weber: Time to RISE | Proctor: Turn Dumb Ideas into Brilliant Solutions | Carter-Gray: How 1 Poor Review Strengthened the Firm | Hartman: Upwork to “40 Under 40” in 3 Years |

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McClelland started the Ask a CPA Community when she noticed “this big gap that wasn’t about technical knowledge. It was about permission, about permission to collaborate.” While “bookkeepers are often the closest person to the financial truth of a business,” historically, “they’ve been positioned as subordinate to tax preparers, just sort of expected to hand off things and hope that they did it right,” McClelland explains.

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PODCAST

Chase Damiano: Good Operations Means Defining How the Hand-Offs Happen | The Disruptors

When leaders neglect to delegate, chaos reigns.

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The Disrupters
With Liz Farr
For CPA Trendlines

Chase Damiano, founder of Human at Scale, says that operations are the missing piece for many firms. “It’s sort of this bridge or glue that allows a business and a team to function well together,” he says. “I see it as the intersection of people and process and technology and culture.” What that looks like in practice, he said, is a firm where the team is happy, clients are satisfied, work is delivered on time and at high quality, and the owner has the freedom to focus on strategy and growth and has the time to spend on non-work things like family.   

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While many consulting firms “might just drop in the deliverables and then leave it up to the team to integrate that on their own,” Human at Scale has a different approach. “We actually embed within the accounting firm, we implement, and we execute alongside of the CEO and their team,” Damiano explains.   READ MORE →

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Jeff Seibert: Digits Software Moves Toward Real-Time Accounting | The Disruptors

Dovetailing finance and product engineering can transform accounting.
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The Disruptors
With Liz Farr
For CPA Trendlines 

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When Jeff Seibert, CEO and founder of Digits, was at Twitter, he was astonished by the difference in data quality and timeliness between the product engineering and the finance sides of the business.

On the product engineering side, testing tools, dashboards, and analytic tools provided real-time data on “exactly what your users are clicking on, what your servers are doing every second.” At the same time, “I was waiting two to three weeks for our accountant to give me a black and white P&L,” he recalls, even with “100 people in corporate finance.”

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That experience led him to start Digits in 2018, an AI-native accounting platform, which is going “head to head with QuickBooks and Xero.”

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ACCOUNTING VOICES

Tyler Anderson: Audit Transformation Is a Mindset, Not a Destination | The Disruptors

“Audit” and “transformation” shouldn’t contradict each other.

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The Disruptors
With Liz Farr
For CPA Trendlines

The words “audit” and “transformation” don’t often appear together. Some might say they contradict each other. But for Tyler Anderson, Director of A&A Innovation at Accountability Plus, audit transformation is something that has been needed for many years.

MORE Tyler Anderson on Re-Inventing Accounting

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Anderson, along with his colleagues Corey Schmidt and Alan Anderson from Accountability Plus, served as subject matter experts for the 2025 Audit Benchmark Survey conducted by CPA.com, which sought to understand the current state of audit transformation. The CPA.com team included Emily Remington (Director of Audit Product Management), Amy Bridges (Senior Manager of Practice Development), and survey methodologist Katherine Blackburn. The resulting report, The Audit Transformation Report, was released at Digital CPA in December 2025. Liz Farr, host of The Disruptors, served as the report writer. 

Audit transformation is often misunderstood as a destination or a future state reserved for large firms with deep pockets and advanced technology. But according to Anderson, transformation is far more practical and accessible. “I see it as the process, not really like it’s an end state or anything, but it’s really the evolution of audit,” he explains.    READ MORE →