Michael Annichine: Why Women’s Health Belongs in the Career Conversation | MOVE Like This
Are women’s own healthcare needs being heard?
MOVE Like This
With Bonnie Buol Ruszczyk
For CPA Trendlines Research
OUTLOOK & ANALYSIS
National Study Asks Accounting Professionals How Life Outside of Work Impacts Their Careers
Survey now open.
By CPA Trendlines
Staying Isn’t Advancing: 2026 Accounting MOVE Project Finds Caregiving Is Quietly Stalling Accounting Careers
MOVE’s new research examines caregiving’s impact on careers and leadership pipelines and recognizes the 2026 Best Firms for Women and Equity Leadership.
By CPA Trendlines
How Your Skills as an Accountant May be Undermining Your Firm’s Future | Accounting Voices
Technical expertise earns credibility, but the ability to delegate, build trust, and guide people through uncertainty determines how far a businesses can grow.
Accounting Voices
With Rob Brown
Buying AI Is Easy. Rebuilding the Firm Is Hard. | Accounting Voices
Leaders reveal a widening gap between adopting new capabilities and building firms that can use them effectively.
Accounting Voices
With Rob Brown
Intuit, Thomson, Wolters Kluwer: Accountants Question AI Promises
At the big three user conferences, AI is changing the rules… again.
By CPA Trendlines Research
Over the next few weeks, Intuit, Wolters Kluwer and Thomson Reuters will be gathering their users in Las Vegas and Orlando, each bringing software and strategies that accountants fear could encroach on a firm’s client relationships.
Intuit Connect – Oct. 26-28, Aria, Las Vegas. Client books, monthly close, advisory, agents and the accountant relationship. More than 100 breakouts. Up to 12 CPE credits. Learn more
CCH Connections (Wolters Kluwer) – Oct. 25-28, Grande Lakes, Orlando. Tax and audit production, review, migrations and quality management. More than 90 sessions. Up to 19 CPE. Learn more
Thomson Reuters Synergy – Nov. 16-19, Fontainebleau, Las Vegas. Research, preparation, document workflows and engagement evidence. Combined professional audiences; separate general sessions. Learn more
The gap between firms and vendors provides a lens into the season. Intuit Connect, Wolters Kluwer’s CCH Connections and Thomson Reuters Synergy are pairing agentic AI demos with sessions on pricing, review, staffing and leadership. READ MORE →
CPA PE Deal Tracker™: The Next Deal Cycle Comes into View
By CPA Trendlines Research
Going into the fourth quarter of 2026, Wall Street’s buying spree for accounting firms is cooling as platform firms digest a two-year surge of acquisitions and the earliest investors, from three to five years ago, begin to cash out, according to the CPA Trendlines CPA PE Deal Tracker™.
MORE Private Equity: Michael Hoover: Growth Without Discipline Comes at a Cost | Big 4 Transparency | CBIZ Told Grant Thornton No, No, No, Before Saying Yes | PE Already Knows Your Price. Do You? | How Private Equity Turns CPA Loyalty into Legal Risk | Ira Rosenbloom: PE Forces Firms to Pick a Future | The Disruptors | Allan Koltin: What Elite CPA Firms Do Differently | Gear Up for Growth
The October 2026 edition of the CPA PE Deal Tracker™ shows accounting’s private-equity deal flow easing in the third quarter, with 37 acquisitions in the U.S. and Canada, down from 42 a year earlier and a far cry from this year’s first-quarter surge of 58. The Tracker now counts 400 such deals in the U.S. and Canada since its records began in December 2016, plus 87 it has found elsewhere, for 487 worldwide, although its coverage outside North America is not systematic.
Kassi Rushing: Firms that Move First Shape the Future | Gear Up for Growth
AI, talent development, pricing, and advisory services demand action now — even if leaders don’t have all the answers.
Sponsored by Radical Pricing by the Radical CPA, Jody Padar | See Today’s Special Offer
Subscribe to CPA Trendlines podcasts anywhere: Apple, Google/YouTube, Spotify, iHeart, Deezer, Amazon Music, Audible, Player FM, Audacy, RSS.
Gear Up for Growth
with Jean Caragher
for CPA Trendlines
The accounting profession has no shortage of predictions about its future. But RISE2040 is designed to be something different: a future shaped by the profession itself and a practical framework for deciding what to do next.
In this episode of Gear Up for Growth, host Jean Caragher, president of Capstone Marketing, welcomes back Kassi Rushing, CEO and owner of Kassi Rushing Consulting and a member of the RISE2040 project team. Their conversation explores what the initiative reveals about the profession’s direction — and why accounting leaders cannot afford to wait for certainty before acting.
MORE Jean Caragher here | Get her best-selling handbook, The 90-Day Marketing Plan for CPA Firms, here | MORE Gear Up for Growth here
Unlike earlier vision projects built primarily through surveys, focus groups, or the perspectives of a select group of thought leaders, RISE2040 draws from conversations with thousands of professionals across 25 countries. Artificial intelligence makes it possible to synthesize that volume of input while preserving the themes, opportunities, and barriers identified by participants.
Rushing describes the initiative as “written by the profession for the profession.”
That distinction matters. As advisory groups reviewed the findings, the project team remained committed to what professionals actually said, even when reviewers wanted to introduce additional ideas.
“We had to protect the voice of the profession,” Rushing says. “We talked about being defenders of the data.”
Ellison-Taylor: Small Firms’ Fix for Talent Crisis | Gear Up For Growth
They’re not leaving the firm. They’re leaving you.
Originally published Jan. 10, 2025.
Sponsored by MAX: Maximize Productivity, Profitability, and Client Retention by August J. Aquila – See Today’s Special Offer
Subscribe to CPA Trendlines podcasts anywhere: Apple, Google/Youtube, Spotify, iHeart, Deezer, Amazon Music, Audible, Player FM, Audacy, RSS.
Gear Up for Growth
With Jean Caragher
For CPA Trendlines
What’s driving talent out of accounting firms? According to Kimberly Ellison-Taylor, CPA, CGMA, CITP, CISA, everything from outdated leadership to untold success stories is pushing promising professionals away. In this episode of Gear Up for Growth, powered by CPA Trendlines, host Jean Caragher sits down with the powerhouse behind KET Solutions to explore how the profession can—and must—change to attract and retain the next generation.
Gear Up for Growth spotlights the best strategies for smart and efficient growth in today’s competitive landscape. More Gear Up for Growth | More Capstone Conversations with Jean Caragher | More Jean Caragher here | Get her best-selling handbook, The 90-Day Marketing Plan for CPA Firms, here | More CPA Trendlines videos and podcasts here
Ellison-Taylor, former chair of both the AICPA and the Maryland Association of CPAs, started her journey into accounting as a third grader inspired by a career-day presentation. That spark led to decades of leadership—and now, a mission to transform the narrative around what it means to be a CPA.
How Private Equity Turns CPA Loyalty into Legal Risk
Overlapping ownership tests conflict and control. Cue the lawyers.
Rivals in the Loop: Grant Thornton and Wipfli, now stablemates under New Mountain Capital’s billion-dollar investments, seek to maintain separate operations and arm’s-length decision-making. Shown in Chicago: The Grant Thornton Tower on North Clark (left) and Wipfli offices at the Chicago Title building on Wacker (right).
By CPA Trendlines Research
Grant Thornton and Wipfli keep offices barely a half-mile apart in Chicago’s Loop — about a 10-minute walk, or a single stop on the “L.”
Zoom out. After a generation of competitive drive, the rival firms are now part of the same investor’s stable.
MORE Private Equity | What $1 Billion Buys in Today’s CPA Market
Private equity’s push into accounting is making for some strange bedfellows, as some investment firms build out networks of ostensibly independent firms that increasingly overlap in clients, services, acquisitions and talent markets.
With more than 500 deals under study, the CPA PE Deal Tracker™ from CPA Trendlines Research provides a vivid picture of private equity firms quietly adding a new layer of consolidation as they roll up the CPA profession. Sponsors are evolving into holding companies with multiple platforms, built simultaneously on a number of large CPA firms as acquisition engines. At least five sponsors now hold two or more competing platforms at the same time.
“As the Peter Parker principle reminds us, with great power comes great responsibility,” Proskauer Rose LLP, the private-funds legal powerhouse, says in a client playbook. “Sponsors should remember the portfolio company corollary: with greater control comes greater exposure to liability.”