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4 AI Mistakes Leaders Keep Making | Accounting Voices

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How accounting teams use the time AI frees up could shape their advice and and prepare the next generation of leaders.

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The step-by-step operating guide for CPA firms building, pricing, and scaling advisory services that clients value—and pay for.

Accounting Voices
With Rob Brown

If AI cuts the time it takes to prepare a tax return from five hours to three, an accounting firm has two hours to work with. It could use them to take on another return, talk with the client about a decision they’ve been putting off, or coach a junior accountant through a tricky review.

The software can free up the time. What happens next depends on the firm.

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That distinction runs through this episode of Accounting Voices, part of AI Reality Inside Firms. The episode offers a timely question as firms set their 2027 priorities. Where did the time they saved this year actually go?

Host Rob Brown traces the answer to four decisions firm leaders can easily put off while a rollout is going well. The consequences can surface years later, when a firm is trying to grow its advisory practice, explain its value to a potential investor, or find someone ready to take over a retiring partner’s client relationships.

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Rebecca Burnick: How to Turn Accountants Into Advisors | It’s Not Just the Numbers

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Building an advisory practice takes more than freeing up staff time. It requires a deliberate approach to client relationships, training, scope and technology.

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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

Accounting firm owners have heard the message for years: move beyond transactional work and build higher-value advisory relationships.

Yet the distance between wanting an advisory practice and developing a team capable of delivering one can be considerable. Outsourcing and automation may free up time, but that capacity only becomes valuable when firms have a clear system for putting it to work.

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Rebecca Burnick, owner and CEO of Office Heads, has taken a process-led approach to that challenge. After 15 years working in strategic management consulting, she founded Office Heads and has spent 18 years developing a structured model for serving clients and helping team members grow into advisory roles. Her experience offers a practical lesson: advisory capability is built through intentional processes, repeated practice and clear client expectations, not simply a change in job title.

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Scotty Scarano: Create Your Dream Career – And Make It Fun | Accounting Conversations

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Entrepreneurship, community, and a candid look at firm ownership reveal possibilities many never dream of.

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Accounting Conversations
With Chayton Farlee
Center for Accounting Transformation

Scotty Scarano knows how to get accountants talking about something besides deadlines. Give them a bracket, put their favorite software up against an industry personality, and let the campaigning begin.

The founder of Accounting High turns professional education and networking into something resembling a school community, complete with friendly rivalries. But beneath the jokes is a question with consequences for the profession: How many potential accountants lose interest before they discover what the work can become?

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On Accounting Conversations, host Chayton Farlee joins Scarano to explore the distance between the accounting industry students encounter in class and the careers they can build. Their discussion connects the appeal of entrepreneurship with the harder decisions behind a growing practice, including when an owner’s enthusiasm becomes a bottleneck.

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Anne Napolitano: The Future of Accounting’s in Value, Not Time | The Disruptors

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“The balance sheet is where all the bodies lie.”

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The Disruptors
With Liz Farr
For CPA Trendlines

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

Anne Napolitano used to give advisory-level guidance without charging for it. “I was doing those advisory-type services without really getting compensated for it because I just felt it was what you were supposed to offer to your clients,” she says.  

But after learning about value pricing from various resources, including Ron Baker and Ed Kless, her thinking changed. “The better we got at something, the quicker we were, the less money we were making because we could do things faster,” she says.   

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That realization helped her understand that clients weren’t buying time; rather, they were buying the decades of experience she and her team had as accountants and the value that comes from that experience. And today, she charges a premium for that expertise.  

“We need to value ourselves correctly and appreciate the fact that we’re really doing some great work for our clients, and we should be compensated for that,” she explains.  

Her firm, Anne Napolitano Consulting, landed on its niche specialty of restaurants, bars, breweries, distilleries, and wineries, partly because of Napolitano’s love of cooking. 

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What Do You Have to Show for Implementing AI? | Accounting Voices

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Look at pricing, services, and client relationships to assess whether AI investments are reshaping the business.

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The step-by-step operating guide for CPA firms building, pricing, and scaling advisory services that clients value—and pay for.

Accounting Voices
With Rob Brown

A tax return completed in three hours instead of five gives an accounting firm something valuable: time.

What happens to those two hours may reveal more about the firm’s AI strategy than the technology that saved them.

Does the firm take on more work? Give employees breathing room? Help a client understand an emerging business problem? Reconsider how it prices its services?

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In a solo episode of Accounting Voices, host Rob Brown examines a distinction that can get lost in the enthusiasm surrounding artificial intelligence: Adopting AI and changing a business are different accomplishments.

“Efficiency is not reshaping,” Brown says. “A little bit of doing things faster doesn’t change the model.”

The episode, part of the “AI Reality Inside Firms” series, offers leaders three ways to examine their progress: Look at the economics, consider the client relationship, and assess whether leadership is deliberately shaping the firm’s direction.

Together, those questions move the conversation from what a tool can do to what a firm intends to become.

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Bonnie Buol Ruszczyk: Caregivers Caught in the Middle | The Disruptors

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Accounting firms may offer flexibility, but outdated expectations and missed opportunities can still push experienced professionals out the door.

This is a preview. The complete video episode, with commentary and transcript, is first and always available exclusively to PRO Members | Go PRO here
Sponsored by Radical Pricing: Optimize Profits, Delight Clients, and Build a Top-Value Firm

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The Disruptors
With Liz Farr
For CPA Trendlines

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

Accounting firms have spent years worrying about the front end of the talent pipeline. Bonnie Buol Ruszczyk wants them to look at the other end as well. 

Ruszczyk, owner and research lead of the Accounting MOVE Project, led this year’s MOVE report, Caught in the Middle: How Caregiving Pressures Are Reshaping Women’s Careers in Public Accounting. This new report examines what happens when experienced professionals take on care for children, aging parents, spouses and partners, and whether their firms keep them on the path to leadership. 

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That question matters because of the disparity in women’s representation in leadership at accounting firms.

Firms “tend to be pretty much 50:50 gender parity up until you get to the senior director, almost going to go into partnership,” Ruszczyk says. At MOVE firms, women hold about 42% of partner roles. Across all U.S. firms, that ratio drops to around 34%. For women of color, the drop is even sharper. According to Ruszczyk, about 20% of associates are women of color while only 5% of partners are.   

Caregiving isn’t the only cause for the disparity, but it is “one of the areas where we’re seeing some leaks spring up,” Ruszczyk explains. While caregiving has always been a part of the lives of accountants – men and women – several converging trends are making this a bigger issue today.

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