The slowdown, while modest, signals that the post-pandemic boom driven by mergers, tax complexity and advisory demand is giving way to a more mature phase marked by tighter margins, higher costs and the growing influence of private equity, according to the 2025 Rosenberg Survey, the accounting profession’s leading management benchmark.
Key Players in Tax Planning: Clockwise from top left, Meyer, Beastrom, Argue, Alarie, Ali, Costanz
Once an add-on service for high-net-worth clients, tax planning is moving to center stage, powered by artificial intelligence and the profession’s accelerating shift to advisory from compliance.
Fresh evidence comes from TaxPlanIQ’s new partnerships with Liberty Tax and Elite Resource Team, which extend TaxPlanIQ’s reach from boutique firms to thousands of retail outlets and nationwide advisory networks. The deals show artificial intelligence transforming accountants’ handling of tax planning, strategy, and client communication.
“I can’t imagine a better thing to do than support accountants in that endeavor,” says Jackie Meyer, founder of TaxPlanIQ and CPA Trendlines contributor, positioning her company’s mission personally. TaxPlanIQ’s pitches ease of use. Just upload a 1040, surface strategies, and deliver a branded proposal that quantifies return on investment.
With Liberty Tax, the reach is in the mass market. With ERT, the audience is higher-value clients served by coordinated advisory teams. TaxPlanIQ claims $5 billion saved by clients identified through its system. More than 1,200 firms already use the platform, before the new partnerships,
Reaching for a $2.5 billion prize
The promise of the next evolution of tax planning is enticing, and the field is becoming more competitive by the month. The tax planning software market is projected to grow at a rate of 8% to 13% annually from 2026 to 2033, with the total market size expected to surpass $2.5 billion globally and $25 billion for the broader online tax software segment.
For years, advisory services have been positioned as the future of the CPA profession. Conferences are filled with “moving up the value chain” sessions, and firm leaders are under growing pressure to make the shift. But here’s the hard truth: most firms are still trying to deliver tomorrow’s services using yesterday’s methods.
Long discovery meetings. Manual analysis. Generic PowerPoint decks. Pricing models built on billable hours instead of business outcomes. These are the hallmarks of the old world of advisory—time-intensive, inconsistent, and hard to scale.
And they simply don’t hold up anymore. Today’s business owners are moving faster, expecting more, and looking to their advisors for real-time, relevant, and actionable guidance. But most firms are still operating with a rearview mirror—offering valuable insights that often arrive too late to act.
TaxDome and Juno Founders launch integrated end-to-end tax workflow.
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In the increasingly crowded and fast-evolving world of practice management software, two upstarts tell CPA Trendlines’ Rick Telberg they’ve found a way to change the game.
“Clients demand a unified experience — they don’t want multiple portals and logins,” says Ilya Radzinsky, TaxDome’s co-founder, in an interview for CPA Trendlines. “At the same time, firms need complete tax workflows that actually work end to end. This launch delivers both: one seamless client experience paired with AI-powered tax preparation that removes manual data entry and increases firm productivity.”
Hiring in the management consulting sector slows, but remains positive. Tax & accounting sector shrinks workforce.
By CPA Trendlines Research
The professional services industry is accelerating a quiet but consequential reshaping toward higher-end advisory services and away from low-end compliance work.
Consulting firms have added more than 27,000 jobs over the past 12 months, pushing total headcount to 1.56 million. In contrast, the accounting, bookkeeping, and payroll sector remains stuck near 1.155 million employees, a plateau that has persisted for much of the past three years, according to a new analysis by CPA Trendlines Research.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has issued a fresh warning: Some jobs are just going to go away. “Totally, totally gone,” as reported by Techspot. Altman was discussing the effect of artificial intelligence on customer support roles and indicated that entire categories of work could be under threat.
AI eliminating middle-class jobs immediately raises severe concerns. But what does it mean for accountants? While AI automation clearly targets customer support, accounting professionals should naturally wonder if their work is next.
Lisa Griffith, Alexion.ai CEO and co-founderAI Advisors: Clockwise from top right, Boomer, Smith, Casas
By CPA Trendlines Research
Alexion.ai is making its market debut with an ambitious goal: to decentralize, fortify and humanize artificial intelligence in tax and accounting firms by preserving the institutional knowledge firms lose when key people leave.
The company is positioning itself as connective tissue for accounting practices, normalizing unstructured data, reconciling fragmented context and building AI-powered memory infrastructure. The platform, the company says, enables firm-specific agents to operate with trust, traceability and nuance.
In 1994, in a small hotel meeting room in Colorado Springs, 50 accounting firms were up in arms when the presenter mentioned QuickBooks. They shouted angry comments: “QuickBooks is destroying my business.” “They want to take my clients.” “They are giving people a false sense of security with their commercials that say, ‘If you can write a check, you can do QuickBooks.’”
The presenter was nervous and asked me what he was to do. I said I use QuickBooks for your company, and I have no idea what I am doing, and I could use an accountant to teach me.
TaxDome unveils AI-driven workflow to Challenge Aiwyn, Canopy, Karbon.
Workflow warriors: Juno’s Haase, left, and TaxDome’s Radzinsky
By CPA Trendlines Research
TaxDome and Juno are launching the accounting industry’s first fully integrated, end-to-end tax workflow solution, an automation-powered platform uniting proposal to payment under a single login.
The rollout lands at a pivotal moment in a fiercely competitive practice management software market, where venture capital, artificial intelligence and consolidation are redrawing the digital map for tax and accounting firms.
AI and India Replace U.S. Staff in CPA Industry Shakeup.
The great restructuring: After the pandemic rebound, hiring gradually slows, finally going negative this year.
By CPA Trendlines Research
The nation’s tax and accounting firms are cutting job rosters even as they’re aggressively raising wages, signifying a structural retrenchment redefining how firms produce and deliver services, according to a new study by CPA Trendlines Research.
U.S. firms are scaling back staff-level roles, favoring automation and offshore operations. Generative AI and cloud platforms now perform tasks once handled by entry-level staff, including reconciliations, bookkeeping, and basic tax prep. Simultaneously, more firms are offloading transactional services to overseas teams, particularly in India, in response to domestic labor shortages and cost containment efforts.
Unity Advisory, a London-based firm launched by former EY UK chair Steve Varley and ex-PwC UK managing partner Marissa Thomas, is taking direct aim at the CFO suite with a venture capital mindset, AI at its core, and no legacy constraints.
Public accounting has long had a reputation for being slow to change, but in the world of audit, that pace has been glacial. Chris Vanover, CPA, founder and president of CPAClub (formerly AuditClub), is here to challenge that status quo. In this episode of The Disruptors, Vanover shares how he’s rebuilding audit from the ground up—ditching billable hours, crushing burnout, and making accounting cool (and flexible) again.
And the transformation doesn’t stop with audit. CPAClub has expanded into tax and advisory, now offering a broader array of subscription-based solutions for CPA firms.
Just a day or two after Xero shook the accounting world with its $3 billion acquisition of B2B payments platform Melio, Intuit is launching its strategic salvo: A new suite of generative AI agents built into QuickBooks.
The agents promise to automate payment reminders, reconcile bank transactions, forecast cash flow, and even draft client emails — all without human intervention.
The initiative is pivotal in the escalating arms race among accounting tech giants to dominate the general ledger. The general ledger is no longer just a recordkeeper in this rapidly transforming space. It’s becoming the operating system for every small business financial decision — and the battleground on which legacy players and startups are staking their futures.
Hiring in the management consulting sector slows, but remains positive. Tax & accounting sector shrinks workforce.
By CPA Trendlines Research
