Blog/Authors
Peter McCarroll

Peter McCarroll

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.

98 articles

Weekly AI Roundup for Accountants: A better answer is not a better firm
Weekly AI Roundup

Weekly AI Roundup for Accountants: A better answer is not a better firm

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.

Peter McCarroll
Cleaning up after AI should cost more than the bookkeeping did
The Advisory Edge

Cleaning up after AI should cost more than the bookkeeping did

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.

Peter McCarroll
The agents could run the meeting. Should they?
The Advisory Edge

The agents could run the meeting. Should they?

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.

Peter McCarroll
Weekly AI Roundup for Accountants: The AI tax-prep wars just began
Weekly AI Roundup

Weekly AI Roundup for Accountants: The AI tax-prep wars just began

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.

Peter McCarroll
The $49 close assumes a system that hasn't yet been built
The Advisory Edge

The $49 close assumes a system that hasn't yet been built

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.

Peter McCarroll
Your client's agent can reach their bank. It can't reach you.
The Advisory Edge

Your client's agent can reach their bank. It can't reach you.

Every system in your client's business is becoming something their AI can reach and act on — their bank, their payroll, their card processor. Every one except the firm that's supposed to be the most intelligent of the lot. Here's what it looks like when an accounting firm designs for the agent, not just the person — and why you start with the contact nobody enjoyed anyway.

Peter McCarroll
Weekly AI Roundup for Accountants: Every vendor wants to be your only vendor
Weekly AI Roundup

Weekly AI Roundup for Accountants: Every vendor wants to be your only vendor

OpenAI and Anthropic just shipped the same product — an agentic workspace built to hold your firm's entire workflow — while Xero staged a keynote around an ecosystem you never leave. Meanwhile, Grok 4.5 beat Opus 4.8 on the vendor's own headline coding benchmark at $2 per million tokens: a price signal you can only capture if you're still free to switch. This week's roundup is about that tension.

Peter McCarroll
Stop selling compliance on its own
The Advisory Edge

Stop selling compliance on its own

AI is making compliance cheap to deliver — and that's exactly what makes advisory affordable to clients for the first time. When the cost of producing the books or the return falls, the freed capacity funds the advisory, so it folds into a price the client already absorbs instead of a premium they refuse. The catch: you can pass those savings through as a lower fee or use them to fund advisory — not both.

Peter McCarroll
Intuit Stopped Competing With You
The Advisory Edge

Intuit Stopped Competing With You

At its June 23 Connect ON event, Intuit told accountants it will stop marketing bookkeeping to their clients — "full stop" — while quietly raising prices "to reflect the value" of AI and sunsetting QuickBooks Online Accountant by the end of 2026. The retreat is real, but it's the tell: Intuit makes more money owning the platform than competing with you on the books. Here's what the warm language is actually buying — and the one thing you shouldn't hand the platform.

Peter McCarroll