Today's Features
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

 Busy Season 2026: Clients, Pricing, Staffing… CRUNCH

CPA Trendlines Busy Season Barometer: Modest Gains, Mixed Outlook, Cautious Tech Upgrades Ahead

Top concerns: “The returns aren’t harder—they’re just later.” (CPA Trendlines Busy Season Barometer)
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By CPA Trendlines Research

The 2026 tax season shows some gradual improvement for certain firms, but most practitioners report conditions that remain largely unchanged from a year ago, according to the latest data from the CPA Trendlines Busy Season Barometer.

For More Busy Season Trends and Strategies: Join the survey. Get the results.

MORE Tax Season 2026

The good news is: 2026 hasn’t turned into the disaster some were expecting with a new tax law and diminished IRS. The bad news is: 2026 is turning into a relatively routine year — without the advances in workflow or the better margins from higher-value services that some were hoping for.

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ABOUT US

Bissett Bullet: What Is the Return on Their Investment?

Today’s Bissett Bullet: “Very few business owners highly value compliance work. It is often viewed as a necessary evil and as such, the decision to change accountants for this sort of work will, more often than not, be driven by price.”

By Martin Bissett

Quantify, in monetary terms, what they earned during the time you freed up for them by completing that compliance work, however, and compliance suddenly becomes valuable.

What sales have your clients made in the time that you have saved them over the last 12 months? Justify your fee in terms of their return on investment and help them to understand why they need to change to your firm as a matter of urgency.

Today’s To-Do:

Who are you meeting to discuss compliance work? Find a client of a similar size and have the figure that you saved them at the ready.

See more Bissett Bullets here

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PRICING, FEES & BILLING RATES

Shift Focus Away from Price

Three ways to set yourself apart.

By Sandi Leyva
The Complete Guide to Marketing for Tax & Accounting Firms

I hear more accountants grumbling every day about how price-sensitive their prospects and clients have gotten. And they are right, to a degree. The economy has caused even the rich to count their pennies, and the percentage of people who look at a price tag before they buy has increased over the last five years.

MORE by Sandi Leyva
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Yet studies show that roughly 54 percent of buyers are NOT price-sensitive, and I would be willing to bet even more are selectively price-impervious depending on what they buy: women’s shoes, men’s cars, personal services, jewelry, vacations, cosmetics and hair, to name a few exceptions.
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ABOUT US

How AI Upends CPA Firm Pay Structures: Bloomberg Talks with Piscopo

Big 4 Transparency founder Dominic Piscopo makes featured appearance on Bloomberg.

By CPA Trendlines

Accounting firms are being forced to rebalance compensation structures—shifting pay and incentives away from entry-level staff and toward managers and reviewers—as artificial intelligence reshapes how work gets done, according to Dominic Piscopo, host of Big 4 Transparency on the CPA Trendlines Streaming Network.

MORE Dominic Piscopo and Big 4 Transparency | MORE CPA Trendlines Streaming Network

Piscopo’s full discussion on AI, compensation trends, and the future of accounting talent is available on Bloomberg Tax’s Talking Tax podcast. His ongoing analysis of salary data and workforce trends is featured on the Big 4 Transparency show, streaming on CPA Trendlines.

“Having transparency in those models and being willing to talk about it with people —not just have this very kind of cold process where a number is thrown out—can make all the difference, even if the number is exactly the same,” Piscopo tells Bloomberg Tax reporter Jorja Siemons.

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ACCOUNTING ARC

Students Who Get Ahead Don’t Wait for Graduation | SLC

Internships, leadership roles, and networking accelerate success for accounting students.

Sponsored by True Advisor: The Definitive Success Guide for Client Advisory Services by Hitendra Patil |
See Today’s Special Offer
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The step-by-step operating guide for firms building, pricing, and scaling advisory services that clients value—and pay for.

Student-Led Conversations
With Chayton Farlee
Center for Accounting Transformation

What if the difference between a “typical” accounting student and a standout future professional isn’t GPA, but initiative?

That’s the underlying theme of this episode of Student-Led Conversations, where host Chayton Farlee sits down with fellow accounting student Noah Brabble for a candid, high-energy discussion on leadership, internships, and what it actually takes to build a career before graduation.

MORE SLC: Will AI Make Students Better Learners — or Just Faster Workers? | Why the Next Generation May Be Accounting’s Greatest Competitive Advantage | Students Redefine Career Readiness | Savage: Using Your License as a Megaphone |  Baker: Interpreting Pricing Psychology | Royalties, Residuals, and Reality Checks | ARC-SLC 

This isn’t a conversation about theory. It’s a real-time look at what today’s students are doing—and what others should be doing—to get ahead.

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