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ACCOUNTING ARC

Your AI Agent Should Show Its Work | ARC

Accountants should demand systems that reveal their work, respect boundaries, and produce results humans can verify.

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Optimize Profits, Delight Clients, & Build a Top-Value Firm!

Accounting ARC
With Donny Shimamoto, Liz Mason, and Byron Patrick
Center for Accounting Transformation

Agentic AI does not have to replace an accountant to transform accounting. Its more  practical role may be far less dramatic — and far more useful.

In this episode of Accounting ARC, Donny Shimamoto, CPA.CITP, CGMA; Liz Mason, CPA; and Byron Patrick, CPA.CITP, explore how narrowly focused AI agents can help professionals retrieve information, analyze data, navigate systems, and make better-informed decisions.

MORE Accounting ARC: AI Isn’t Erasing Tax Careers. It’s Rewriting Them. | Accounting Internships Need an Upgrade | The CPA Career Nobody Talks About | Conference Season Exposes Accounting’s Knowledge Gap | The Feedback Mistake That Costs You Your Best People | Is Your Boss Really the Problem? | Most Accountants Are Missing This AI Shift | AI Can Fix Your Workflow—or Break It in Seconds | Efficiency Is the Wrong Goal for AI | Accounting’s Hidden Talent Risk: The Sandwich Generation | Built Fast. Sold Faster. Broken Later? The Truth About Accounting Tech | Recognize When You Need to Recharge Before You Burn Out | Valuing More Than the Balance Sheet

Their conversation challenges one of the dominant narratives surrounding agentic AI: that firms should build autonomous digital employees capable of handling everything a staff accountant does. Instead, the hosts envision specialized agents that operate within structured systems, perform clearly defined tasks, and show users how they reach their conclusions.

“If you have agentic AI that’s built into an architecture that already exists, there’s a whole lot more that has to happen from a training perspective,” says Mason, CEO of High Rock Accounting.

That architecture, she explains, can include multiple agents working together rather than one agent attempting to handle an entire assignment.

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ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

One K-1 Package. Twelve Hundred Pages. Now What?

K1x is betting $175 million that AI can bring order to one of tax’s most stubborn bottlenecks.

Subscribe to CPA Trendlines podcasts anywhere: Apple, Google/YouTube, Spotify, iHeart, Deezer, Amazon Music, Audible, Player FM, Audacy, RSS.

By Seth Fineberg
For CPA Trendlines

K1x is putting $175 million in new investment behind an expansion of its K-1 technology platform, with plans to accelerate product development, broaden its offerings and build a more standardized system for managing partnership tax data.

MORE K1x: K1x Secures $175 Million for Private Markets AI Tax Tech | Private Market Tax Is Heading for a Collision | The 3-Part Framework Firms Are Using to Fix K-1 Chaos | Why the Future of Tax Isn’t Compliance—It’s Timing | How to Turn K1 Problems into Profits with A.I. Automation | Break the K-1 Bottleneck | AI Tax App Crashes Financial Stocks on Wall Street | MORE A.I. | MORE CPA Trendlines Streaming Network

CEO John LaMancuso says the company is pushing beyond automating individual K-1 tasks. K1x wants to connect K-1 creation and aggregation into a unified platform that can move tax data among CPA firms, investment funds and investors with less manual handling.

“Start with the bottleneck, not the technology,” LaMancuso says.

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SPECIAL

New Guide Shows How Firms Build New Sales Tax Service Lines

New CPA Trendlines / Avalara playbook shows accountants don’t need to be SALT specialists before they can help.

Sales tax is getting harder for clients to manage.

By CPA Trendlines
with Avalara

Sales tax used to be easy to leave to somebody else.

That gets harder as clients sell more products and services across more state and local boundaries. The accountant may not consider sales tax part of the engagement. The client may assume it is.

Download the guide: From Generalist to SALT-Savvy: How Accounting Practitioners Can Build Sales Tax Expertise That Wins Clients.

A new guide from CPA Trendlines and Avalara takes aim at the gap.

“From Generalist to SALT-Savvy: How Accounting Practitioners Can Build Sales Tax Expertise That Wins Clients” is now available, with a practical roadmap for accounting firms that want to add sales tax compliance and advisory work without first building a full-fledged state and local tax practice.

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PRO Member Exclusive

Wealth Management: Can You Afford Not to Provide It?

Advisory begins with conversations.

By Seth Fineberg
The Holistic Guide to Wealth Management.

Today we are cresting the biggest waves of change that I’ve seen in my 20-plus years of covering the accounting profession. I’m talking about the need for CPAs to go beyond simply being the trusted tax guy (or girl) for their clients and to help them manage all aspects of their wealth. This movement has been building for the better part of a decade, but only recently has it gone from “I’ll think about it” to “Can I afford not to get on board?”

Not to sound the alarm bells here, but CPAs must soon choose between riding the financial planning wave or being swept under it.
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