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
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.
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.
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.
Thomson Reuters surveyed 1,816 professionals and found 78% of corporate clients now call AI-enabled quality improvements essential — while just 6% say their providers deliver them. With 32% of clients reconsidering provider relationships within 12 months, the deadline for your firm's AI strategy is no longer yours to set.
Xero built AI document capture directly into the platform — and said nothing about HubDoc. A Top-30 firm handed its CAS delivery to AI agents most practices can't buy. And the most powerful model on the market came back from a 19-day ban with a meter on it. One question runs through all of it: how much of your stack do you actually control?
Every technology shift before AI asked the same question — who does the work? AI is retiring it. As the books, reconciliations, and first draft of the return increasingly do themselves, the only question left is who's accountable for the work being right.
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.
This week the IRS and Intuit both made a move on the same thing — the savings AI is creating inside your firm — and pulled in opposite directions. Plus Claude goes multiplayer in Slack, AI-faked receipts force a hard question about whose job it is to verify, and Washington quietly starts gating which models you can use.
An AI bookkeeping startup just raised $10 million to close the books for $49 a month — and it's run by the founder whose last cheap-bookkeeping venture went bankrupt. A room of small-firm owners landed on an uncomfortable truth: fee pressure on the monthly close now comes from four directions at once.
In my peer group last week, an owner froze on the eve of her firm's 20th-anniversary meeting — how do you tell your team AI is coming without either lying to them or terrifying them? The first move isn't a training plan; it's a conversation most owners are avoiding. Here's what to actually say.
This week in AI didn't bring a new model — it brought plumbing. Agentic tools that do the work (Suralink, Melio) and the governance layer that decides who connects them (Anthropic's managed MCP auth) all shipped, but none of them solved the problem that matters most to a multi-client firm: keeping one client's data out of another client's answer. The real divide forming in AI tools isn't who has the most connectors — it's who scopes them.
Daniel Susskind told Scaling New Heights this is mass redeployment, not mass unemployment — your people doing different work, not losing their jobs. After four days in Orlando, the profession agrees its staff need to move up two levels. Almost no one onstage explained how — and the how is the part you can't buy in the vendor hall.