Strengthen cybersecurity by testing how approvals, access, and recovery plans work when routine business takes an unexpected turn.
Transformation Trends
By Donny Shimamoto
Center for Accounting Transformation
Context, verified sources, and human review remain essential as teams build AI tools.
Innovation Insights
With Donny Shimamoto and Liz Mason
Center for Accounting Transformation
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
An accountant builds a dashboard that pulls information from several systems. A proposal generator turns service selections into a polished PDF. A homemade utility eliminates a tedious step in the monthly close.
Then comes the question that changes everything: How do I let my team use it?
In this episode of Innovation Insights, Donny Shimamoto and Byron Patrick explore the distance between a promising personal tool and software an accounting team can depend on.
AI makes building easier, they say, but sharing, securing, supporting, and maintaining what you build requires a different level of preparation.
For accountants eager to experiment with AI agents and “vibe coding” — using natural-language instructions to have AI generate code — the conversation offers both encouragement and a reality check.
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.
Firms must build new pathways that develop reviewers, judgment and client-facing skills.
Accounting ARC
With Donny Shimamoto, Liz Mason, and Byron Patrick
Center for Accounting Transformation
Artificial intelligence may not eliminate the entry-level tax professional. But it is dismantling the job that many firms still use to train one.
That’s the conversation driving a new episode of the Accounting ARC podcast featuring Donny Shimamoto, CPA.CITP, CGMA, founder and managing director of IntrapriseTechKnowlogies LLC and founder and inspiration architect for the Center for Accounting Transformation; and Liz Mason, CPA, CEO of High Rock Accounting.
The conversation begins with a small tax firm that hires six interns each year and teaches them to prepare returns much as earlier generations learned: working from paper documents, identifying relevant numbers, mapping those figures to tax forms, and entering the data into tax software.
MORE Accounting ARC: 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
The firm owner sees the process as an apprenticeship that helps students bridge the gap between an individual tax course and real-world preparation. Shimamoto sees value in teaching interns how information moves from source documents to a completed return. Mason agrees with the objective but challenges the method.
“From a holistic learning exploration, sure, yes, that is a way to learn,” Mason says. “From a where-we-are-today perspective, I think that’s a giant disservice to these interns.”
As workplace language evolves, effective professionals know their audience and adapt their message.
Accounting ARC
With Byron Patrick, Donny Shimamoto and Liz Mason
Center for Accounting Transformation
Every generation enters the workplace speaking a slightly different language.
For Generation Z, that language may include phrases such as “delulu,” “mid” and “fire.” For earlier generations, the dated vocabulary might sound different, but the underlying challenge remains familiar: How do people bring their authentic voices to work while still communicating professionally?
MORE Accounting ARC: 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 the Accounting ARC podcast, Donny Shimamoto, CPA.CITP, CGMA; Byron Patrick, CPA.CITP; and Liz Mason, CPA, examine the supposed language barrier separating Generation Z and baby boomers — and question whether it is really as new or insurmountable as some portray it.
Their conclusion is less about memorizing the latest slang and more about developing an essential power skill: adaptability.
As AI handles more routine work, how do young accountants develop judgment, communication and leadership?
Accounting ARC
With Donny Shimamoto and Liz Mason
Center for Accounting Transformation
The accounting internship is due for an upgrade.
For decades, internships often give aspiring accountants their first real taste of the profession by dropping them into the work: Learn the process, complete the assignment, survive busy season and figure out the unwritten rules along the way.
But as artificial intelligence takes over more of the entry-level work traditionally assigned to new accountants, Donny Shimamoto, CPA.CITP, CGMA, and Liz Mason, CPA, argue the profession needs to reconsider what an internship is actually supposed to teach.
MORE Accounting ARC: 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 the Accounting ARC podcast, Shimamoto, founder and managing director of IntrapriseTechKnowlogies LLC and founder and inspiration architect for the Center for Accounting Transformation, and Mason, CEO of High Rock Accounting, explore why tomorrow’s accountants need more than technical proficiency.
They need what Shimamoto calls “power skills.”
The next generation is blending entrepreneurship, AI, and advisory into careers that barely existed a few years ago.
Accounting ARC
With Donny Shimamoto
Center for Accounting Transformation
For decades, the accounting profession has followed a familiar script: earn a CPA license, join a firm, climb the ladder and perhaps become a partner.
Rachel Farris, CPA, MBA, is proving there is another way.
After building a highly specialized tax advisory practice serving U.S. citizens relocating to Puerto Rico, Farris launches Tax Stack AI, a company that helps accounting firms implement artificial intelligence securely and strategically.
MORE Accounting ARC: 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
She has since sold her CPA practice to focus on AI consulting and education, demonstrating that today’s accounting professionals can create careers far beyond traditional public accounting.
In this episode of Accounting ARC, Donny Shimamoto, CPA.CITP, CGMA, founder and managing director of IntrapriseTechKnowlogies LLC and founder and inspiration architect for the Center for Accounting Transformation, sits down with Farris to explore entrepreneurship, AI, networking and the expanding possibilities available to CPAs willing to embrace change.
Their conversation becomes less about one accountant’s journey and more about the profession’s future.