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Archives for June 2025

These Two Finance Teams Are Already Using AI While You’re Still Debating It

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Picture two finance teams: One is drowning in expense reports, manually checking every receipt, and spending hours on data entry. The other analyzes spending patterns, negotiates better vendor deals, and helps business units make smarter decisions. The difference isn’t budget or team size. It’s whether they’ve embraced artificial intelligence (AI) tools.

This became clear during a recent crossover episode of The Accounting Podcast and Beyond Spend, recorded live at Emburse in Motion in Nashville. Host Blake Oliver, CPA, spoke with Adriana Carpenter, CFO of Emburse, and Olga Pavlova-Grebliauske from PizzaExpress—two finance leaders who have moved beyond talking about AI’s potential to using it daily.

While much of the accounting profession continues to debate what AI might do someday, these teams already use smart automation to eliminate tedious tasks. They’re moving from being compliance enforcers to business enablers who guide spending decisions and drive real value through data insights.

Stop Looking at Things That Don’t Need Attention

The change starts with a mental shift: finance teams no longer need to review every transaction. 

For Olga at PizzaExpress, it’s not an option. She manages financial operations for a restaurant chain with over 350 locations across the UK, Ireland, Hong Kong, the UAE, and beyond. She deals with massive transaction volumes that would overwhelm any team doing manual reviews.

“Just stop looking at something that doesn’t need to be looked at,” Olga explains.

Consider PizzaExpress’s approach to VAT compliance. Previously, finance staff had to manually check every receipt to find and separate tips and service charges from product items. This is critical because VAT treatment differs for these components. Miss a service charge buried at the bottom of a long receipt, and the company risks over-reimbursing itself on VAT.

Now, AI-powered keyword detection automatically flags receipts containing terms like “tips,” “service charges,” or specific alcohol brands. The system doesn’t skip human oversight. Instead, it surfaces just the transactions that need attention. A receipt with a clearly separated tip gets processed automatically, while one with a service charge in a long itemized bill gets flagged for review.

Finding Hidden Insights in Your Own Data

When finance teams don’t have to look at every transaction, they can use this time to discover insights hiding in their own data. Adriana’s experience at Emburse shows how AI-powered analytics transforms routine spend management into business intelligence that drives real improvements and cost savings.

The transformation began with unlocking insights in their data through the power of Emburse Analytics, which combines spending data to reveal patterns. Rather than just processing reimbursements, the platform analyzes spending across departments, vendors, and categories.

Adrianna shares an example where the system identified vendor spend flowing through the wrong channels. Employees were buying SaaS subscriptions and processing them through expense reports rather than the company’s preferred procure-to-pay process. This created multiple problems: lost visibility into software subscriptions, missed security assessments, no volume discounts, and risk of buying duplicate solutions.

The system found scattered Adobe and DocuSign subscriptions—twelve individual Adobe licenses buried in expense reports, plus one enterprise license in accounts payable. Similar patterns appeared across other software vendors.

Armed with this intelligence, the finance team took strategic action. They consolidated the scattered Adobe licenses into a single enterprise agreement, negotiated better per-seat pricing, eliminated redundant subscriptions, and established clearer procurement protocols. The result wasn’t just cost reduction—it was better software governance, improved security oversight, and stronger vendor relationships.

The Future: Finance as Business Enablers

Adriana’s vision for the future shows how smart automation can change the relationship between finance teams and the broader organization, shifting from gatekeepers to enablers.

This future isn’t theoretical—it’s “quarters away, not years away,” according to Adriana. She describes a comprehensive AI-powered system that integrates calendar data, location tracking, emails, and receipt capture to pre-populate expense reports with minimal employee effort.

Adriana envisions AI as a central agent for all travel spending decisions—a single interface where employees interact with compliant travel booking options through conversation rather than hunting through policy documents.

Let’s say you want to book a business trip. You’ll open the Emburse app, and the AI will ask, “Tell me where you want to go. Tell me what it’s for,” Adrianna describes. The system will present only policy-compliant options and handle approval routing automatically.

“You’re helping the employee be compliant,” Adriana explains. Rather than catching policy violations after they happen, the system prevents violations by making compliance the easiest path. Employees get what they need efficiently, while finance teams gain better visibility and control.

Emburse is already working on technology to make this vision a reality. Their upcoming AI-powered hotel and car rental folio capabilities will accurately extract detailed folio data and itemize everything automatically. “It’s basically going to be able to look at very detailed receipts and truly go in and read it all and itemize,” Adriana says. This detailed data layer becomes the foundation for more advanced AI that can make decisions automatically.

Getting Started: Don’t Wait for Perfect Conditions

For organizations hesitant about this transformation, both leaders stress starting now rather than waiting.

Adriana recommends education as the foundation. “Educate yourself, educate your team,” she says. “We have a CFO organization that I’m a part of, and I get ideas from that. I get ideas from others in the industry. I get ideas from my CTO.”

She also suggests finding partners actively investing in AI development. “Look for partners that are investing in leading in these areas because they can also make it easier as a finance org to adopt and then continue to iterate.”

Olga adds that organizations should identify their most repetitive tasks first and remember that automation systems need ongoing human oversight. It’s also critical to get input from the people actually doing the work.

The Time to Act is Now

While many in the profession continue debating AI’s theoretical implications, forward-thinking teams are already getting real benefits from smart automation. 

Finance professionals who embrace these tools are positioning themselves as strategic partners who guide spending decisions and enable business growth through data insights. The choice facing accounting professionals today isn’t whether to eventually adopt AI—it’s whether to lead this transformation or be dragged along by it.

For finance leaders ready to make this leap, the path forward is clear: identify your most repetitive tasks, educate yourself and your team, and partner with vendors actively investing in AI. Most importantly, don’t let fear of imperfection prevent progress.

Technology isn’t just changing how we work—it’s redefining what it means to be a finance professional. Those who seize this opportunity will discover that AI doesn’t threaten their careers; it elevates them to roles they never imagined possible.

Women in Accounting Are Finally Done Pretending They Have It All Figured Out

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“Can we be friends?”

It was a simple message sent through a professional Slack channel—the direct approach that might work perfectly in elementary school but feels surprisingly vulnerable in the polished accounting world. Questian Telka had been watching Nancy McClelland’s posts in their Bookkeeping Buds community, thinking she seemed smart and funny, and decided to reach out.

Nancy’s response was swift and brutally honest: “No, I don’t have time for that.”

Looking back, Nancy admits she still can’t believe she said that. But it was a perfectly professional answer, the kind that protects busy women behind walls of efficiency. Yet it also captured something deeper about how women in accounting often navigate their careers, maintaining protective barriers even when craving authentic connections.

That initial rejection might have ended the story there, but Questian’s persistence paid off. Their eventual friendship became the foundation for “She Counts,” a new podcast where Nancy and Questian create the space they both desperately needed when starting their accounting careers. 

In their inaugural episode, they share how two very different paths through the accounting world led to the same realization: the conversations they needed most were the ones no one was having.

Two Different Paths, Same Destination

While both women ended up in accounting, their journeys couldn’t have been more different.

Nancy’s path was anything but traditional. With an undergraduate degree in music education from the University of Michigan, she started teaching music theory and managing finances at the Ann Arbor School for the Performing Arts. They were using Quicken—not even QuickBooks—to run their finances, and Nancy discovered a stack of uncashed checks in a drawer that had been sitting there for an entire semester.

“I found this big stack of uncashed undeposited checks in the drawer when I first started, and they just decided they would collect checks for the whole semester and then deposit them at the end of the semester,” Nancy recalls with a laugh.

From there, she worked at a world-famous violin-making studio, where she met Teresa Briggs, a tax preparer who became an unexpected mentor. “That woman saw in me what I had no idea about, which was that I needed to become a tax professional,” Nancy explains. Teresa gave her a CCH Master Tax Guide as a going-away gift—a moment that completely changed Nancy’s career trajectory.

After moving to Chicago, Nancy accidentally started her firm while trying to temp during wedding planning and caring for her mother, who had been diagnosed with breast cancer. Twenty-five years later, she runs The Dancing Accountant, focusing on hyper-local small businesses in her neighborhood.

Questian’s journey was marked by persistence and significant life challenges. It took her three attempts to finish college—something she struggled to share because of the shame she felt around it. “It took me three attempts to finish school before I finally graduated, and it’s not because I was a bad student because I actually had really good grades,” she explains. “But life kept getting in the way, and at the time I also had undiagnosed ADHD.”

She eventually worked in a non-client-facing role at a Big Four firm for ten years, then moved to a nonprofit as director of finance and accounting. But everything changed when her second son was born with a rare chromosomal abnormality. After six weeks in the NICU and eight surgeries before age two, Questian realized she needed the flexibility to be present for her family.

“When he was born, I expected we would see negative things. People would stare or say negative things. But what I really saw was the good in people,” she reflects. “It completely changed my view and made me want to lean more into nonprofit work and specifically disability advocacy.”

That experience also opened her up to having deeper conversations with other women, eventually leading to her recognition that so many women in accounting were struggling with similar challenges.

The Masks We All Wear

Despite their different backgrounds, both women discovered they were dealing with the same fundamental issue: professional isolation. But it showed up differently for each of them.

When Questian started her firm five years ago, she had “no accounting colleagues or friends” to turn to when challenges came up. “There were several times where I had problems that I needed to solve, and I didn’t have anyone to ask. And so then I started questioning, do I really have enough knowledge to be doing this? Do I have what it takes to run this business?”

Nancy’s experience was shaped by what she calls “loads of displaced confidence”—raised by parents who told her she could do anything. But underneath that confidence was a different kind of struggle. “I knew that I was just stabbing in the dark at a lot of it, and I didn’t have anyone to talk to about the fact that I was just making it up as I went along.”

She knew some people in accounting, but they were mostly men, and some were “really judgy and self-important,” which made her feel small, wrong, angry, and defensive. So she did what many women do: “I just put a mask on and pretended that I had it all figured out. And wearing that mask, it was actually really isolating.”

Both had breakthroughs when they found community. For Questian, it was joining Bookkeeping Buds, where she could finally connect with other women who understood her challenges. “It wasn’t until I found community that I finally began to find my stride,” she says.

The Invisible Challenges No One Talks About

Through their friendship and conversations with other women in accounting, Nancy and Questian realized that women face challenges often invisible to their male colleagues.

“Women really have some specific challenges that, quite honestly, men don’t have to deal with. And for the most part, don’t necessarily understand what those challenges are that we’re facing,” Questian explains.

These challenges can feel invisible sometimes. Nancy mentions one many women will recognize: “It turns out that having a favorite place to cry in the office is a thing, and men are shocked when they find out that we all had our safe place to go when we had to cry in the office. It’s real.”

“It’s not about excluding men,” Questian clarifies. “It’s about making space where women can stop filtering and just be themselves.”

Creating the Conversations We Need

Their vision for “She Counts” came from recognizing that the needed conversations were already happening in scattered, private moments. “It’s like a parallel to our WhatsApp groups and our Slack groups of female colleagues that we’ve met along the way, or the conversations that we have when getting together at conferences or meeting for coffee,” Nancy explains.

What makes their approach different is their commitment to authenticity over expertise. “We are not going to be preaching,” Nancy emphasizes. “This is not about that because we are not pretending that we’ve got it all figured out.”

Their approach deliberately avoids toxic positivity. “The good and the bad, they coexist, right? They don’t cancel each other out,” Nancy explains. “If you’re acknowledging the good in your life and you’re acknowledging the bad in your life, then you start to recognize, oh gosh, we’re just humans trying to figure this out.”

They’ve already identified over 50 topics they want to cover, including “Start with No” (about learning to say no before convincing yourself to say yes), “How to make business happen when life happens,” “Do it anyway” (about facing fear), and “I engage in too much negative self-talk like a stupid idiot” (yes, that’s the actual title—see what they did there?).

The podcast won’t feature guests every episode. Instead, it’s topic-driven; they want listener input on what to discuss. “We really want to hear from all of you what ideas you have, what topics you would like to discuss,” Questian says.

Building Community Beyond Individual Success

What they’re creating goes beyond just another professional development resource. It’s about shifting from isolation to community, from pretending to have it all figured out to admitting we are all work in progress.

Nancy captures this perfectly when describing a conversation with a colleague: “I’m not happy that you’re struggling with this, too, but I’m also glad that it’s not just me.” That sentiment—wishing others didn’t have to struggle while finding relief in shared experience—is exactly why authentic professional community matters.

Their philosophy, borrowed from friend Shirley Koss, is “go where you’re celebrated, not where you’re tolerated.” Rather than enduring professional environments that don’t support them, they encourage women to actively seek and create spaces where authenticity is valued.

“If you’ve ever felt like you’re the only one, you’re not. And you shouldn’t have to figure this all out alone,” Questian states. This isn’t just their tagline—it’s their mission.

The podcast is supported by sponsors who understand this mission: Forwardly, Ignition, and Keeper. Nancy gives special recognition to Ignition, where she was a Top 50 Women in Accounting awardee. Their new grant program for past awardees helped make this podcast possible.

Where We Go From Here

Nancy and Questian’s journey from that initial “No, I don’t have time for that” to launching “She Counts” proves something important: the conversations women in accounting need most aren’t happening in formal training sessions or networking events. They’re happening in coffee shops, text messages, and Zoom calls between women who understand each other’s reality.

Now, they’re making those conversations accessible to everyone who needs them. Their next episode is called “She Believed in Me Before I Did,” and it’s about mentorship and the people who see potential in us before we see it ourselves.

“It’s not just you count or I count. It’s “She Counts.” It’s like the voices of women in accounting, working together to try to figure it out and to try to be better than we already are,” Nancy explains.

For women in accounting who have felt alone in their professional struggles, this podcast represents both validation and hope. It’s proof that the challenges are real, shared, and manageable when approached with community support and honest conversation.

The question now isn’t whether you have time for authentic professional community—it’s whether you can afford not to make time for it. Because, as Nancy and Questian discovered, the right conversations don’t just change individual careers. They transform entire professions.

Ready to join the conversation? Follow She Counts on LinkedIn, subscribe to the podcast, and help them brainstorm topics for future episodes. After all, this isn’t just their podcast—it belongs to every woman in accounting who’s ready to stop figuring it out alone.