The Hidden Friction Killing CAS Profitability | It’s Not Just the Numbers
CAS success isn’t accidental. It’s engineered.
It’s Not Just the Numbers
With Penny Breslin and Damien Greathead
For CPA Trendlines
PODCAST
The Job Crisis Is a Myth; the Job Remix Is Not | Accounting Voices
Automation deletes tasks, then dares accountants to create new value on purpose.
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Accounting Voices
With Rob Brown
Artificial intelligence is no longer a concept that accountants debate in panels or pilot projects. It is actively reshaping how firms hire, train, and define value.
In this episode of Accounting Voices, host Rob Brown delivers a blunt assessment of what many professionals are already sensing, but few are saying out loud: AI is not coming for your job. It is coming for what your job does.
That distinction changes everything.
Brown frames the moment as an AI talent shock—a structural shift that is quietly altering career paths across public accounting, corporate finance, and advisory work. This is not about fearmongering or futurism. It is about reality on the ground.
Dunn: Time’s the Wrong Growth Metric | Gear Up For Growth
Stop billing. Start thrilling.
Gear Up for Growth
With Jean Caragher
Gallegos: HR1 Is Signed; the Advisory Clock Is Ticking | Big 4 Transparency
Break down the new law, the unanswered questions, and why waiting for certainty is a strategic mistake.
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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Big 4 Transparency
By Dominic Piscopo, CPA
For CPA Trendlines
What does it take to turn dense tax law into business wins? In this episode of the Big 4 Transparency, host Dominic Piscopo sits down with Mark Gallegos, tax partner at Porte Brown, to explore how a self-described “tax geek” became an eminence engine by teaching, writing, and speaking across the country while translating the new HR1 legislation into clear moves for clients.
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Gallegos serves on the AICPA Strategic Tax Reform Advisory Group (“strike force”), where volunteer experts parse bills, surface practitioner pain points, and help shape the letters and asks that go to Treasury, IRS, and Capitol Hill. That inside track, pressure-testing interpretations with national peers, feeds his day job: delivering 50,000-foot explanations that prompt the most valuable question in professional services: “What should we do next?”
Gallegos and Piscopo dive into HR1’s planning levers.
Cannon: Busy Season is Self-Inflicted | The Disruptors
Exhaustion, chaos, and missed lives are the result of design choices—not destiny.
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The Disruptors
With Liz Farr
Brenda Cannon, co-founder of Cannon and Associates, has been pioneering a creative approach for taming tax season madness: every return is scheduled like an appointment. “We know how long it takes us to prepare a tax return. Why could we not control each week and the number of tax returns we prepare each week?” she recalls thinking after hearing Jason Staats introduce the concept on a podcast in 2022.
MORE STREAMING: 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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Over the last three tax seasons, Cannon and her team, which includes her husband and co-founder, Randy Cannon, have been refining the process. Clients choose a date on a calendar on which they will deliver their documents to her office, with the understanding that their return will be ready three weeks after that date.
Dyo: It’s Not a Loophole; It’s a Missed Opportunity | The Concierge CPA
Charitable gift financing has been IRS-validated for decades, yet many still avoid it.
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 Concierge CPA
With Jackie Meyer
For CPA Trendlines
In this episode of the Concierge CPA podcast, host Dr. Jackie Meyer, CPA, puts a spotlight on a charitable tax strategy that sounds suspiciously modern — yet has been sitting in the tax code since 1978.
The strategy is called charitable gift financing, and, according to Meyer’s guest, Aleksander Dyo, founder and managing director of Wealth Excel, it remains largely invisible to many accountants despite decades of IRS validation.
Dyo frames the idea with a blunt comparison: Americans finance homes, cars, equipment — even vacations. So why not charitable giving?
Charitable gift financing allows high-income taxpayers to make significant philanthropic contributions by combining personal funds with borrowed capital, while claiming a charitable deduction for the full amount transferred to charity in the year of the gift.
This isn’t a loophole or a creative interpretation, Dyo says. It’s rooted in long-standing IRS guidance on the deductibility of charitable contributions made with borrowed funds, provided the funds are transferred to the charity in the same tax year.
In practice, that timing is everything.
Grunt Work Is Dead | It’s Not Just the Numbers
…And accounting careers are better for it.
This is a preview. The complete 1-hour video episode, with commentary and transcript, is first available exclusively to PRO Members | Go PRO here
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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.
The Dark Side of AI No Firm Can Ignore | Accounting Voices
Trust remains the profession’s currency, even in an automated future.
Sponsored by The Balanced Millionaire: The Advisor Edition by Dr. Jackie Meyer | See Today’s Special Offer
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Accounting Voices
With Rob Brown
Artificial intelligence is transforming accounting at breakneck speed. It writes reports, summarizes research, drafts client communications, and accelerates analysis. But when AI gets it wrong, it does not whisper. It declares falsehoods with confidence.
That is the warning at the center of a new episode of Accounting Voices, which pulls back the curtain on real-world AI failures that have already shaken the profession — and explains why no firm can afford to treat AI as a neutral back-office tool.
This is not about hypothetical risk. It is about documented failures, public apologies, reputational damage, and a hard truth every leader must confront: Technology does not absolve responsibility.
Grassi: How the Hell Did This Happen? | Gear Up For Growth
Here’s what it takes to grow a CPA firm from zero to the Top 100—without losing your soul.
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Gear Up for Growth
With Jean Caragher
For CPA Trendlines
When Lou Grassi started his firm at age 24, he couldn’t afford to pay himself. There was no client base, no safety net, and no guarantee it would work.
More than four decades later, Grassi is the 56th largest accounting firm in the U.S., with $146.5 million in revenue, seven offices, 58 partners, and more than 560 employees. And yet, as Grassi tells host Jean Caragher on Gear Up for Growth, the most important lessons from that journey have very little to do with size.
They have everything to do with intention.
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In this conversation, Grassi reflects on what it takes to build a firm that grows sustainably, treats people like owners, and stays independent in a profession reshaped by private equity, talent shortages, and rapid change.
Students Redefine “Career Readiness” | ARC – SLC
…And it has less to do with technical skills than firms expect.
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Accounting ARC – Student-Led Conversations
With Arpan Grewal and Harshita Multani
Center for Accounting Transformation
As the accounting profession continues to grapple with talent shortages, shifting expectations, and generational change, one podcast is addressing those challenges from a rarely centered perspective: students themselves.
In an end-of-year episode of Student-Led Conversations, hosts Arpan Grewal and Harshita Multani reflect on a year of interviews alongside Donny Shimamoto, CPA.CITP, CGMA, founder and inspiration architect of the Center for Accounting Transformation. The episode serves as both a retrospective and a case study of what happens when students are entrusted with real platforms and real responsibility.
MORE Accounting ARC: Downgraded: What the DOE Said About Accounting | Savage: Using Your License as a Megaphone | Baker: Interpreting Pricing Psychology | Don’t Get Fired by Your Own Automation | What Amazon Doesn’t Tell You | Royalties, Residuals, and Reality Checks | ARC-SLC | Free Speech Is a Right; Respect Is a Responsibility | Cash Bags, Casinos & Audits: How First Jobs Shape Us | Gen Z Redefines Careers | Bootleggers, Baptitsts & CPAs: Rethinking Licensure
The idea for Student-Led Conversations emerged after Grewal appeared on an episode of Accounting ARC, where she interviewed seasoned professionals about their careers. What surprised her most was not the technical content, but the personal stories.
“I realized accounting isn’t just about numbers,” Grewal says during the episode. “It’s about people.”
That realization became the foundation for a student-hosted series that explores career paths, mental health, failure, advocacy, and professional identity — topics often absent from traditional recruiting or classroom discussions.
Brown: Employer Brands Talk | MOVE Like This
Real employee stories, not polished slogans, are winning the war for talent.
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MOVE Like This
With Bonnie Buol Ruszczyk
For CPA Trendlines
In this episode of MOVE Like This, host Bonnie Ruszczyk sits down with Rob Brown, founder and host of Accounting Voices and previous host of Accounting Influencers, to talk about what’s really driving change in the accounting profession.
Speaking from the UK with deep experience across the U.S. and global markets, Brown shares what he’s seeing in firms of all sizes: pressure from talent shortages, shifting expectations from younger professionals, and the growing importance of a strong employer brand rooted in real stories, not slogans.
MORE MOVE
Brown starts by outlining three major workplace trends.
READ MORE →
Carroll: When One Person Can Break the Firm | The Disruptors
Firms built on heroics instead of systems eventually crack.
This is a preview. The complete episode is first available exclusively to PRO Members | Go PRO here
Sponsored by The Balanced Millionaire: The Advisor Edition by Dr. Jackie Meyer | See Today’s Special Offer
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The Disruptors
With Liz Farr
Ashley Carroll thinks burnout is a design flaw, not a personal failing.
“I’m a big believer that burnout is a business model flaw,” she says. In response, Carroll created Operations House to help founders reduce burnout and “step out of that role as the provider, the doer, the practitioner, and into an ownership level role.”
MORE STREAMING: 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 |
According to Carroll, burnout stems not only from long hours but also from processes that lack four key qualities: reliability, efficiency, integration with existing systems, and psychological safety.
Whitman: New Firm Deals: Flexibility, Culture, and the Rise of “31 Flavors” | Holistic Guide to Wealth Management
Firms that prioritize, listen, and align position themselves for better long-term outcomes.
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By Rory Henry CFP®, BFA™
For CPA Trendlines
Phil Whitman, President and CEO of Whitman Advisory, works with hundreds of CPA firms and more than 230 strategic investors across private equity, family offices, wealth management aggregators, and publicly traded consolidators. He sees a profession undergoing unprecedented transformation, and Whitman has a front-row seat.
In this episode of Holistic Guide to Wealth Management, Whitman shares his observations with me from his unique vantage point.
Whitman points to 2021 as the inflection point for the profession’s transition. That’s when EisnerAmper became the first major CPA firm to accept private equity (PE) investment, followed shortly by Citrin and Cherry Bekaert. Those deals opened the gates for capital providers and ignited a wave of consolidation across firms of all sizes. The profession hasn’t looked back since.
Transaction activity has since accelerated, creating unprecedented competition for deals and pushing accounting firm valuations into territory the profession has never seen before.