Here’s what you’re looking for: Penny Breslin

ADVISORY & CONSULTING

Jeane Hardy: Work You Don’t Track Could Be Holding You Back | It’s Not Just the Numbers

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

This is a preview. The complete video episode, with commentary and transcript, is first available exclusively to PRO Members | Go PRO here
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The Break-Through Blueprint for Revolutionizing the CPA Firm Business Model

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

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

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

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

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ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Trent Yesberg: How AI Re-Builds Accounting Firms | It’s Not Just the Numbers

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

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The Break-Through Blueprint for Revolutionizing the CPA Firm Business Model

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

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

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

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

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

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ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Your Next Hire Might Not Be an Accountant | It’s Not Just the Numbers

An AI engineer can help accounting teams tackle bottlenecks, streamline workflows, and build capacity.

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The Break-Through Blueprint for Revolutionizing the CPA Firm Business Model

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

For years, accounting firm owners have treated the “next hire” question as a simple one: bring on another accountant. However, that assumption is starting to cost firms real time and money.

In this recent case study, MoneyPenny, LLC shares what happened  when their newest hire wasn’t an accountant at all. She was a recent graduate with a degree in AI, and within her first weeks, she had built a tool that solved a problem the whole team had been living with for years.

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She graduated in the first AI cohort to come through her university and joined the firm knowing nothing about accounting. What she did know was how to watch a process and ask why it worked the way it did.

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ADVISORY & CONSULTING

How to Survive Tax Season Without Burning Out Your Teams | It’s Not Just the Numbers

The expectation that tax preparation can happen instantly is creating real pressure.

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The Break-Through Blueprint for Revolutionizing the CPA Firm Business Model

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

Tax season is supposed to be predictable. The work comes in, the work goes out, the deadlines hold. But this year, something broke for accounting firms across the board — and it wasn’t the tax code.

The culprit wasn’t client volume or staffing shortages. It was prioritization and communication, specifically, the gap between where priorities were being set and where the people doing the work were actually looking.

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If your firm made it through but felt like you were always reacting, always chasing, always a step behind — this breakdown is for you.

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ADVISORY & CONSULTING

“Set It and Forget It” Is Not an AI Strategy | It’s Not Just the Numbers

Accounting teams must ensure their people can recognize anomalies, challenge outputs, and apply sound judgment.

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The Break-Through Blueprint for Revolutionizing the CPA Firm Business Model

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

AI is everywhere in accounting right now.

It’s in your inbox, on the Super Bowl, and probably inside at least one tool your firm uses for tax prep. But there’s a conversation happening inside serious accounting firms, the ones processing thousands of returns, managing global teams, and serving clients who expect more than a spreadsheet, that the vendor demos don’t cover.

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That conversation is about critical thinking.

It may be the most important skill your firm could be developing right now, precisely because AI is making it easier to stop using it.

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CLIENT ACCOUNTING SERVICES

Why Most CAS Practices Stall | It’s Not Just the Numbers

…And what the successful ones do differently.

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Build a 7-figure firm in just 4 hours a week!

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

Client Accounting Services (CAS) has moved well beyond bookkeeping. For firms serious about advisory, CAS is now a fundamentally different operating model, one that demands new roles, new systems, and a far higher level of internal transparency than traditional tax or audit practices ever required. 

In this episode of It’s Not Just the Numbers, Damien Greathead and Penny Breslin draw on more than two decades of shared experience to unpack what actually makes a modern CAS practice work in the real world. Their discussion goes beyond theory and into the structural, cultural, and operational decisions firms must confront if they want CAS to be scalable, profitable, and sustainable . 

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Traditional accounting firms are built around specialization and hierarchy: junior and senior accountants, bookkeepers, managers, and partners, each working essentially in isolation on their own client list. That structure works for compliance, but it breaks down in a CAS environment. 

“CAS requires the team to approach the client holistically,” Breslin explains. “You can’t have people operating in silos. Everyone needs to understand the client’s goals, not just their individual task.” 

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CLIENT ACCOUNTING SERVICES

The Hidden Friction Killing CAS Profitability | It’s Not Just the Numbers

CAS success isn’t accidental. It’s engineered.

Originally published November 2025
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Build a 7-figure firm in just 4 hours a week!

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

Client Advisory Services (CAS) continue to outperform every other service line in accounting. But firms that treat CAS as “enhanced bookkeeping” quickly hit a ceiling. The firms that scale profitably make harder—and smarter—choices: who they serve, how they staff, how they price, and how they explain their value in a world obsessed with automation.

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In this episode of It’s Not Just the Numbers, co-hosts Penny Breslin and Damien Greathead get refreshingly practical about what actually drives CAS success. Their message is clear: strong CAS practices are built intentionally, not incrementally.

One question cuts straight to the tension many firm owners feel: Should teams see profitability numbers?

Breslin and Greathead don’t argue for radical openness—or secrecy. Instead, they advocate for profit literacy.

Teams don’t need to know margins by client. They do need to understand three things:

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PRO Member Exclusive

Grunt Work Is Dead | It’s Not Just the Numbers

…And accounting careers are better for it. 

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Poe Group Advisors consistently excels in helping our clients find the right accounting practice sales opportunity.

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

For decades, accounting careers followed a familiar script: grind through repetitive work, earn your stripes, and maybe—eventually—get to the interesting stuff.

That script is officially broken.

In this episode of It’s Not Just the Numbers, hosts Penny Breslin and Damien Greathead tackled one of the most misunderstood shifts in the profession: how artificial intelligence and outsourcing are reshaping early-career accounting work—and why that’s actually good news for graduates and firm leaders.

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The big question isn’t whether AI and outsourcing are here to stay. They are. The real question is whether firms will use them to strip away opportunity—or to finally fix a broken talent model.

Let’s be honest: repetitive data entry, reconciliations, and manual cleanup were never great learning tools. They were time-consuming, error-prone, and often disconnected from how firms actually create value.

Yet for years, they were treated as a rite of passage.

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CLIENT ACCOUNTING SERVICES

AI’s Already in Your Workflow…| It’s Not Just the Numbers

The question is: Do you know what it’s doing?

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

Build a 7-figure firm in just 4 hours a week!

Artificial intelligence has arrived in accounting, but not in the way many expected. It’s not a single app or a single process. It’s everywhere, embedded in workflows, changing how firms scope engagements, price cleanup work, and train their people. 

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In the latest episode of It’s Not Just the Numbers, co-hosts Damien Greathead and Penny Breslin explore how AI reshapes the day-to-day work of accounting firms. Their conversation moves beyond theory to real-world examples of how AI is being used in client engagements, what it means for team development, and why critical thinking, not coding, is the skill every firm must cultivate next. 

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GROWTH STRATEGIES

The “LBD” of Tech: Simplicity & Standardization Still Win | It’s Not Just the Numbers

“If you don’t have accountability, you can never reach your ambition.” 

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

If there’s one topic that never gets old in accounting, it’s technology. New apps promise smoother workflows, faster reconciliations, and smarter insights every year. Yet, despite all the innovation, many firms still struggle with the same problem: too many tools, too little strategy. 

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In the latest episode of It’s Not Just the Numbers, hosts Penny Breslin and Damien Greathead revisit a metaphor that’s as timeless as it is practical, the “little black dress” of technology. The conversation digs into what every firm owner should understand about building a tech stack that actually fits their ambition, not just their app wish list. 

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