Building an accounting tool with AI is only the beginning of making it useful, secure, and sustainable.
Innovation Insights
With Donny Shimamoto and Byron Patrick
Center for Accounting Transformation
ARC hosts debate credentials, accountability, and the risks of advice that exceeds a provider’s expertise.
Accounting ARC
With Liz Mason, Donny Shimamoto, and Byron Patrick
Center for Accounting Transformation
A business owner asks for financial reports. A bookkeeper delivers them. For years, the arrangement appears to work — until another accountant examines the numbers and discovers that the reports do not add up.
The owner receives exactly what he requests. What he misses is someone qualified to question the request.
That story, shared by Byron Patrick on the Accounting ARC podcast, captures a problem that reaches beyond bookkeeping: Small-business owners may know they need financial help without knowing how to evaluate the people providing it.
MORE Accounting ARC: Stop Waiting for the Perfect Time to Get Involved | Your AI Agent Should Show Its Work | 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
For accountants, that creates both a responsibility and an opportunity. Explaining professional value requires more than listing credentials or promising accurate books. It means showing owners what an effective accounting relationship can help them understand, decide, and accomplish.
Even a small volunteer commitment can deliver lasting professional and personal returns.
Accounting ARC
With Donny Shimamoto and Byron Patrick
Center for Accounting Transformation
A single meeting changed the trajectory of Byron Patrick’s career.
Early in his career, the owner of Patrick’s firm, who was serving as chair of the Maryland Association of CPAs, invited him to come along to a meeting. Patrick found himself in a room with established leaders discussing the future of the profession.
“I was like, ‘Is it this easy? Can I just show up to this meeting every week and be in this room?’” Patrick recalls. “Because if so, y’all aren’t going to get rid of me.”
Twenty-six years later, Patrick, CPA.CITP, senior product manager for Karbon and founder and part-time educator for TB Academy, can trace much of his professional growth to that invitation.
MORE Accounting ARC: Your AI Agent Should Show Its Work | 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
In this episode of Accounting ARC, Patrick and co-host Donny Shimamoto, CPA.CITP, CGMA, founder and managing director of IntrapriseTechKnowlogies LLC and the founder and inspiration architect for the Center for Accounting Transformation, make the case that involvement in state CPA societies and other professional organizations is not an extracurricular activity. It is an investment in a career, a professional network, and the future of accounting.
Flexible systems help accounting professionals remain, contribute, and advance when life’s responsibilities change.
MOVE Like This
With Bonnie Buol Ruszczyk
For CPA Trendlines Research
When caregiving responsibilities collide with work, even the most committed professionals can find themselves questioning whether their careers are still sustainable.
In this episode of MOVE Like This, Donny Shimamoto, CPA.CITP, CGMA, managing director of IntrapriseTechKnowlogies and inspiration architect at the Center for Accounting Transformation, joins Bonnie Buol Ruszczyk to discuss what accounting firms can do to better support employees with caregiving responsibilities. Drawing from his own experience as a caregiver and his firm’s long-standing flexible work model, Shimamoto explains why supporting caregivers isn’t about creating complicated new policies. Instead, it’s about building thoughtful systems, training managers, and planning work in ways that recognize employees have lives outside the office.
MORE MOVE Like This | MORE CPA Trendlines Streaming Network
Shimamoto shares how becoming a caregiver for his great-aunt changed his own perspective on the issue. While many people associate caregiving with raising young children, his experience highlighted how responsibilities for aging parents, relatives, and others often arrive unexpectedly and affect employees across every stage of their careers. Rather than viewing caregiving as a temporary accommodation for a small group of employees, he believes firms should recognize it as a reality that will affect nearly everyone at some point in their lives.
That shift in thinking changes how organizations design policies, manage workloads, and retain experienced professionals.
Accountants should demand systems that reveal their work, respect boundaries, and produce results humans can verify.
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.