Articles by Peter McCarroll | The AI Accountant

Weekly AI Roundup for Accountants: The $60 ledger is changing hands

Puzzle, the $60 AI-native ledger we priced against QuickBooks two weeks ago, is selling its firm-facing business to Accrual and will stop marketing software directly to CPA firms. Also this week: OpenAI launched GPT-6 with a financial-statement tie-out as its lead customer story, Docusign is opening its connector to every AI agent on September 30, and a services firm priced an agent-led assurance engagement 30 to 50% below its own rate card.

Peter McCarrollSeptember 7, 2026

Building AI Workflows

Right answer, wrong data: the AI review procedure your accounting firm needs

An AI agent was asked to attach a spreadsheet to an email. It couldn't reach the folder, so it found a file with the same name in an old email, attached that, and reported the job done. In a CAS practice the same failure looks like a flawless margin analysis built on the pre-adjustment trial balance, and none of the checks your team was trained to run will catch it.

Peter McCarrollSeptember 4, 2026

The Advisory Edge

Build vs buy your accounting AI stack: part 4, the market answered

BILL is repricing AI-agent work from seats to consumption, Xero says one in five ecosystem connections is now a custom-built app, and frontier model prices dropped again. Part 4 of Buy vs. build re-runs the series' five-layer framework against a month of on-the-record evidence, and the question has moved: not whether firms will build, but what's bounded enough to own.

Peter McCarrollSeptember 2, 2026

Weekly AI Roundup

Weekly AI Roundup for Accountants: Intuit blinked on price

Intuit told shareholders it will deliberately earn less per DIY tax customer next year rather than keep losing them to cheaper software. That decision, plus a free QuickBooks tier with no accountant seat, is the clearest signal yet of what happens to the price-sensitive end of a professional services market. Also this week: Singapore started training half its accountancy profession, agents learned to log into websites, and OpenAI published a postmortem showing its monitoring system was switched off while 1,200 agents broke into someone else's servers.

Peter McCarrollAugust 31, 2026

Weekly AI Roundup

Weekly AI Roundup for Accountants: What I saw at Xerocon Denver

I spent last week on the floor at Xerocon Denver, and I watched two movements happen at once: the platforms assembling and repricing the whole stack from above, and the firms quietly building their own software from below. Add BILL's pivot from seats to consumption pricing and OpenAI's answer to the client-data question, and the week's message is clear: the gap between falling AI prices and rising platform prices is where your next margin decision lives.

Peter McCarrollAugust 24, 2026

Leading AI Adoption

Your AI disclosure position just got decided for you

In four weeks, AI disclosure went from ethics debate to infrastructure: Substack scans it, LinkedIn flags it, the EU legislates it, and Anthropic watermarks everything Claude writes. Your firm almost certainly faces no legal risk, but your work product now carries flags you can't remove. The only question left is whether the story that arrives with the flag is one you wrote.

Peter McCarrollAugust 21, 2026

What's Getting Automated

AI transaction categorization reads everything except your instructions

Xero's AI has coded 100 million transactions, and practitioners trust exactly one of its four methods: the one built from written rules. Every coding engine on the market infers your client's intent from history. Not one of them will read it, even though you could write it down today.

Peter McCarrollAugust 19, 2026

Weekly AI Roundup

Weekly AI Roundup for Accountants: Intuit just put a bookkeeper in your client's file

Intuit is bundling its own human bookkeepers into QBO Advanced, one toggle away in your client's settings. The same week, a CPA-graded benchmark scored AI models higher for disclosing uncertainty than for being right, and the EU wrote human editorial responsibility into law. Disclosure just became the product, and the record of who stood behind the number is what's left to charge for.

Peter McCarrollAugust 17, 2026

Leading AI Adoption

If it doesn't show up in busy season, did anything change?

I have had the conversion moment twice. In 2024 I saw exactly what AI was going to do to this profession, spent six months learning it, and trained my team. Busy season came and everything went back to how it was. In early 2026 I did it again, with the same result. Here is what those two failures taught me about the only test of transformation that cannot be gamed.

Peter McCarrollAugust 14, 2026

The Advisory Edge

Buy vs. build, part 3: The thing no vendor can sell you

Whether your firm should build or buy was never about the app. It's about whether you can supply the harness and the janitor yourselves. Part 3 of Buy vs. build closes the series with the build-readiness test, the packaging premium, and one question per layer to ask before any renewal.

Peter McCarrollAugust 12, 2026

Weekly AI Roundup

Weekly AI Roundup for Accountants: The work got cheaper. The signature didn't.

Basis says it takes responsibility for the first pass of your clients' tax returns. OpenAI, four days earlier, refused to claim authorship of work its own model did and took responsibility only for its correctness. Both sentences are about who is answerable, and only one of them means it.

Peter McCarrollAugust 10, 2026

The Advisory Edge

The return showed up. It just wasn't in hours.

In the late 1990s I helped build a global audit platform for a Big Six firm. The capability let us do some old things faster, and start doing things we should always have been doing and never could. Quality went up. The clock never moved. Leadership was watching the clock, saw nothing, and cut the budget. If you are measuring AI in hours saved, you are about to read the same zero.

Peter McCarrollAugust 7, 2026