Founder of Fuel Accountants and The AI Accountant. With over 15 years in practice management and technology consulting for accounting firms, Peter is passionate about helping accountants embrace AI to transform their businesses.
105 articles
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.
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.
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.
Per-client and per-user app fees levy a decision tax accountants have paid since QuickBooks Desktop gave way to subscriptions. Part 2 of Buy vs. build reads the pricing wrapper the way an accountant should, as a risk contract: who carries the token volatility, who holds the repricing option, and what to watch as usage-based pricing arrives.
Karbon asked clients what should happen to your fee when AI makes the work faster, and 37% said it should come down, which is close to what the IRS told tax practitioners in June. Deliver something they have never had instead and 54% will pay more. Three of the four walls of the pricing vise moved in a single week.
Xero has had a request open since 2017 to let you export bank rules, with 540 votes and still nothing shipped. QuickBooks Online has done it for years. As your firm starts encoding real judgment into AI agents and skills inside vendor platforms, that gap stops being a nuisance and becomes the question that decides whether your build compounds for your firm or evaporates.
June's conferences said buy and build in the same breath, and agreed most accounting apps are LLM wrappers. But the intelligence was never the whole product: every app subscription bundles five layers, and the wrapper critique prices only one. Part 1 of Buy vs. build unbundles what an app actually sells you.
Anthropic shipped two things this week that answer the same question in opposite ways: a feature that turns one screen recording into an editable procedure file, and a model that checks its own work brilliantly and remembers none of it. Meanwhile OpenAI launched a program teaching small-business owners to do their own accounting, and a top-15 firm committed its whole client accounting practice to a firm-trained AI model. The question running under all of it is which of these leaves anything behind.
A returning client chose our cheaper self-service tier, left the integrations broken, and handed us a year-end file so damaged we spent more hours than the full-service fee would have covered — then balked at the bill, took the discount, and left anyway. Every firm runs some version of that inversion: the cleanup, the harder job, is the one we discount. As "my AI does the books" spreads, here's the pricing mechanism that stops it.
Last week the joke was that your client's agent could talk to your firm's agent and clear the busywork overnight. That's right — for the friction. But today your advisory relationship is largely a byproduct of all that transactional contact, and automating it blindly severs the thing advisory grows from. Here's how to tell the contact you should automate from the contact that is the whole business.
Canopy, Drake, and Firm360 shipped AI tax-prep automation on the same day, the largest open-weight model ever released is days from being free to download, and OpenAI's CFO published an AI ROI scorecard with no line for verification. The pattern across the week: everything below the review layer is being absorbed or given away — and the review layer is what's left to charge for.
In one 48-hour stretch this month, AI's price sheet fell again — Meta, GPT-5.6, and Grok all repricing the intelligence behind the $49 close. But the vendors selling that close won't quote a flat price for it, because the thing that varies was never the intelligence — it's the system underneath. Run-time is commoditized; designing that system and standing behind it isn't, and that's where the fee now lives.