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What Tax-Season-Buried Accountants Need to Know About Intuit Accountant Suite Before May

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Intuit recently dropped a surprise on accountants: pricing for its new Accelerate and Books Close features begins May 1, 2026, not at the end of the year as many practitioners understood. For professionals buried in tax season, the window to test these tools before paying just got smaller.

In Episode 130 of The Unofficial QuickBooks Accountants Podcast, co-hosts Alicia Katz Pollock and Dan DeLong dig into what these features actually deliver and whether they’re worth your money come May.

The Pricing Timeline Confusion

“When I signed up for it, they asked for my credit card information, and I was pretty darn sure it said it’s going to be free until the end of the year,” Alicia explains. But Dan sees it differently. “I took it as it’ll be free until it’s not. It’s kind of like the stock market, it will continue to go up until it doesn’t.”

This confusion stems from Intuit’s original announcement at QuickBooks Connect, which Dan diplomatically describes as having “a lot of opportunity for improvement.” Now practitioners have just three months to decide whether these tools deserve a spot in their tech stack.

What Stays Free vs. What Costs Money

Your ProAdvisor account, the portal where you manage clients, complete trainings and certifications, switch between files, and access accountant tools, will still be free.

“If it’s not, somebody from Intuit needs to tell me ASAP,” Alicia emphasizes.

What’s new (and will cost money) are two add-on tools:

Intuit Accountant Suite Accelerate

($149/month for your entire firm)

This unlocks the client insights feature, giving you a dashboard where you can view Balance Sheet or P&L data for all clients in a single grid. There are no per-user fees; one price covers your whole team.

“For a solo practitioner, $149 is maybe kind of expensive,” Alicia notes. “But if you’re running a firm with five or ten team members, and especially when you scale up, that’s actually really, really cheap.”

Books Close

($8/client/month, dropping to $6 after 50 clients)

This per-client tool lets you manage monthly closes without entering individual QuickBooks files. You only pay for clients you actually onboard to the feature, not your entire client list.

Even without these paid features, the free Intuit Accountant Suite now includes a dashboard with widgets that show which clients need bank feed reconnections or have integration issues. As Dan explains, “Instead of your home screen being your client list, it’s now a dashboard with customizable widgets.”

Books Close: The Feature That Surprised Alicia

During Dan’s live demonstration, Books Close’s capabilities genuinely impressed Alicia, including reconciliations.

“Wow. So it’s a straight-up reconciliation, but it’s from here and it lists all the balance sheet accounts so that I can actually run down the list,” she says, seeing the feature for the first time.

Workflow Management Built for Real Firms

Books Close includes three workflow roles (Preparer, Reviewer, and Approver) that you can rename to match your firm’s terms. Solo practitioners can turn off the multi-role structure entirely. For teams, you can assign different segments to different people and track progress as work moves through the pipeline.

The status options go beyond simple “To Do” and “Completed.” You can customize statuses like “In Progress,” “Waiting on Client,” or “Blocked.” Templates let you create different task lists for different engagement types. Your full-service clients get one checklist while lighter engagements get another.

Transaction Review That Catches Problems

The transaction review section offers visibility into issues that typically require hunting through client files:

  • Transactions without payees (critical for 1099 tracking)
  • Expenses without attachments (with customizable dollar thresholds)
  • Transactions auto-added by bank rules
  • Unapplied payments
  • Manually created transactions

Alicia shared why the bank rule review matters. “I was working with somebody who had a bank rule for Apple, putting everything in software. But then they had a vendor with Apple in their name, and it started classifying those transactions as software expense.”

Each review category lets you set thresholds and exclusions. If you don’t need receipts for certain expense categories, you can exclude them. If you have vendors that always code correctly, you can skip reviewing them.

The W-9/1099 Management Feature (Finally)

The W-9/1099 management just went live, unfortunately after 1099 season ended. “It would have been nice to know the W-9/1099 management was not coming soon,” Dan observed.

The feature shows vendor lists with EINs, 1099 eligibility, and year-to-date amounts. But Alicia immediately spotted a gap, as entity type shows only “Individual” or “Business.”

“I would like to see whether it’s an S-Corp or an LLC,” she points out, since that determines 1099 eligibility.

A Critical Limitation

Dan discovered a major problem after spending two hours with Intuit support: you cannot remove clients from Books Close once you add them.

“You can onboard a client, but you cannot offboard them,” he explains.

This creates multiple problems:

  • Clients who leave your practice still cost $8/month
  • You can’t remove Books Close while keeping other services
  • Testing the feature means potentially paying for test clients indefinitely

Intuit support offered two workarounds:

  1. Remove the client from your list entirely (useless if you still provide other services)
  2. Cancel Books Close completely, lose all customizations, then restart and re-add only the clients you want

“They have essentially three months to figure this out,” Dan notes. Both hosts urge listeners to submit feedback requesting offboarding functionality. Feature requests from within the beta may get higher priority.

Who Should Consider These Tools?

The value proposition varies dramatically by practice type.

  • Already using third-party tools. As Dan notes, “If you are already using something that does a lot of these features, you are probably not going to see the value.” Tools like Keeper, Financial Cents, or Double provide similar capabilities. Alicia admits she’s “kind of embedded with Double” and faces the switching-cost dilemma many practitioners will encounter.
  • Building a new practice. “Anytime Intuit creates something new, it’s not for existing users,” Dan says. “A new accountant coming in today doesn’t know any different.” When they need close management tools, they’ll see a built-in feature rather than evaluating alternatives.
  • Looking for one-off use. Alicia sees potential. “I would onboard somebody just to do a cleanup and then offboard them when I’m done. I would pay eight bucks for this for a job.” Unfortunately, without offboarding capability, this use case doesn’t work yet.

The Bottom Line

Intuit’s push into practice management shows promise, but the accelerated timeline puts pressure on practitioners during tax season—exactly when they have no bandwidth for evaluation.

If you’re testing these tools, submit feedback now, especially about the offboarding problem. Beta periods exist to surface these issues, but only if users speak up.

For firms with teams, the math likely works: $149 for unlimited users plus manageable per-client fees delivers real workflow improvements. For solo practitioners, the value depends on how much you value not switching between files.

Most importantly, if you’re considering adoption, test it with real client work. Theory doesn’t reveal whether the interface fits your thinking; only hands-on experience does.

Listen to the full episode for Dan’s complete screen demonstration. Seeing the interface in action reveals details that descriptions can’t capture, and might be the difference between a confident decision and an expensive guess.

Alicia Katz Pollock’s Royalwise OWLS (On-Demand Web-based Learning Solutions) is the industry’s premier portal for top-notch QuickBooks Online training with CPE for accounting firms, bookkeepers, and small business owners. Visit Royalwise OWLS, where learning QBO is a HOOT!

From Frustrated Firm Owner to Tech Founder Without Writing a Single Line of Code

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Thirty-three percent. That’s how much time Judie McCarthy’s bookkeeping firm was spending chasing clients for information instead of doing accounting or advising on business decisions. Just sending requests, following up, and tracking down the same documents week after week.

The breaking point came on a Friday afternoon when one of Judie’s biggest clients called, furious. “The bookkeeper is harassing me for the same information over and over again,” she said, demanding a new bookkeeper. Judie talked her off the ledge that afternoon, promising to investigate Monday morning.

But when she reviewed the email thread with her team, the problem wasn’t the bookkeeper. It was the system, or rather, the lack of one. They were sending emails with multiple questions each week. Clients would respond but never answer everything, starting the cycle all over again.

When Judie called the client back to explain what she’d found, the phone went silent. “I thought, oh, she’s hung up on me,” Judie recalls. “And I realized she was crying.” The client, a high-powered woman running two businesses, wasn’t angry anymore. She was overwhelmed. “It is so hard to keep up with everything,” she said through tears.

That conversation changed everything. This wasn’t a difficult client; it was a horrible client experience and none of the existing tools were solving it.

In this episode of She Counts, hosts Nancy McClelland and Questian Telka sit down with Judie, co-founder of Client Hub, a company that notably doesn’t use titles, reflecting their values of collaboration over hierarchy. After 25 years running a successful bookkeeping practice and a previous career in automotive management, Judie built the practice management software she wished existed. And her experience offers a roadmap for any woman in accounting who’s ever thought, “There has to be a better way.”

The Problem Nobody Wanted to Name

The idea for Client Hub didn’t start with Judie at all. It came from her lead bookkeeper during a regular team meeting.

“We were always trying to be really productive, looking for ways to increase productivity and deliver better client experience,” Judie recalls. “We’re going around the room and my lead bookkeeper said our biggest challenge is getting the information we need from our clients to do the work.”

The statement hit hard. Everyone knew it was true, but hearing it said out loud changed something. Judie’s team decided to measure the problem. Their mini research study revealed that staggering 33% figure. A full third of their time was going to administrative chase-downs rather than actual accounting work.

“There are lots of great internal workflow tools on the market,” Judie explains. “But our internal workflow wasn’t the biggest challenge. It was that external workflow.”

After that crying phone call with her client, they tried to solve it together. The client suggested sending one email for everything. Judie knew that wouldn’t work. They’d just have the same conversation about too many emails. So they created a shared Google Sheet where the client could answer all questions weekly.

“That didn’t last two weeks,” Judie says. “This was when I thought there has to be a better way. And there really weren’t any good tools on the market at that time.”

From Frustrated User to Unlikely Founder

The jump from identifying a problem to building software isn’t obvious, especially for someone without recent coding experience. Judie had been a software developer in the 1980s, but as she jokes, “Code is much different now. We’re working on Windows now, not DOS systems. I couldn’t write code to save my life right now.”

What she did have was connections and a clear understanding of the problem. Through a mutual friend, she met her future business partner, an experienced product manager who wasn’t necessarily looking to build accounting software either.

“We were talking about different software projects,” Judie says. “It just came to fruition that we were really well aligned on this idea.”

For four months, they just talked. Judie created a PowerPoint presentation outlining her vision. They compared notes, did market research with their networks, asking the crucial question: “If we build it, will they buy it?”

“It probably wasn’t until six, seven, eight months in that we said, hey, let’s make this a business,” Judie recalls. “We didn’t have to do it all up front.”

When they were ready to build, fortune smiled again. Her partner found two developers looking for work. Those developers are still with Client Hub today, eight years later. That kind of team stability is almost unheard of in tech startups.

The Hardest Part: Letting Go of What You Built

For two years, Judie juggled both businesses, running her practice while building Client Hub. But eventually, something had to give.

“It finally took me about two years to really wrap my head around the idea of selling my practice,” Judie admits. The hesitation wasn’t just about steady income versus startup uncertainty. “Many of my clients had been with me for over 20 years. A lot of them were almost like family.”

Nancy and Questian immediately understood this tension. When they faced emotional paralysis making decisions about the podcast, Questian told Nancy, “We just have to think like a man.” The comment was partly joking, but it pointed to something real about how women often consider relationship impacts in business decisions.

“As women, because we’re often caretakers, relationships are so important to us,” Judie observes. “A man selling a practice probably wouldn’t think so much about that. They’re like, ‘I’m going to get rid of this practice, take the biggest payout, and go.’”

When Judie finally decided to sell, she approached it with characteristic attention to relationships. The broker’s initial ad copy was “absolutely horrendous—typical accounting, all about the numbers, nothing about what the practice was.” She rewrote it herself to attract tech-forward firms that valued client experience.

The response was overwhelming. She received 20 offers at or above asking price within 24 hours. But after interviewing several candidates, Judie chose the lowest bidder.

“Within ten minutes of the start of that conversation, I knew he was the one,” she says of the Texas firm owner who bought her practice. “Everything about the offer and the transition planning and how he ran his firm, it felt more like a family firm.”

The transition showed just how embedded Client Hub had become in her clients’ workflows. When Judie and the buyer announced the sale together via Zoom, her lead bookkeeper of eight years went quiet, then asked, “I don’t have to give up using Client Hub, do I?”

“I said, we’ve been together eight years and you’re worried about giving up your tech, not losing me?” Judie laughs. One of her clients asked the same question during their meeting.

The Surprisingly Simple Path to Building Something New

For anyone sitting on an idea, Judie offers practical and decidedly non-technical advice.

Write Everything Down Immediately

“I have a whiteboard on my desk,” Judie says. “Whenever something comes to mind, I jot it down because otherwise I’ll forget it in about five minutes.”

Questian laughed in recognition, “As soon as you walk through a doorway, it just goes poof out of my mind.”

Stop Worrying About Idea Theft

“Don’t be afraid that somebody’s going to steal your idea,” Judie emphasizes. “Chances are somebody’s not going to steal it and run. I’ve never heard of that happening.”

Instead, she encourages talking to everyone. “Firm owners reach out to me all the time saying, ‘Hey, I have an idea. Would you mind if I bounce it off you?’”

Launch Before You’re Ready

When Client Hub was approaching release, Judie kept hesitating. “It’s not ready, it’s not ready.”

Then Laura Redmond from Aero Workflow gave her the advice that changed everything: “It will never be ready.”

“Thank you, Laura,” Judie says now. She’s internalized this so deeply that she sometimes pushes her product team to release features before they feel complete. “Let’s let our customers tell us what more it needs instead of us building what we think it needs.”

You Don’t Need What You Think You Need

“People think you need investors and a marketing company to build a software company,” Judie says. “You don’t. It is a big investment because you’re going to be paying developers eventually, but just get started.”

Client Hub has grown organically, without outside funding, staying true to its original vision while evolving from a simple portal to a full practice management solution with internal workflow, file management, and integrations with QuickBooks, Xero, Anchor, and more.

Breaking Through the Real Barriers

When asked about obstacles she faced as a woman entering tech, Judie’s answer surprised even the hosts.

“I never saw barriers in anything I did,” she says. “I never walked into a room full of men and thought, ‘Oh, I’m the only woman here.’ I’m an equal.”

She credits this mindset to her mother, who passed when Judie was just 22. “She was my greatest champion. She always told me there were no limits to what I could do or who I could become.”

This outlook carried Judie through careers in automotive management, bookkeeping, and now technology—all traditionally male-dominated fields. But she’s quick to acknowledge reality. “I know a lot of women do experience barriers. I don’t want people to think I’m saying there aren’t barriers, because there are. You just need to find your way around them, just like a traffic jam.”

The tech ecosystem has been surprisingly welcoming. “I’ve never met any of my male counterparts in this profession that I didn’t feel had respect for me as an equal,” she says. “They want talent. It doesn’t matter if you’re male, female, black, white, Asian, gay, straight. People nowadays, especially in technology, we are just very welcoming.”

Perhaps most importantly, Judie operates from a different fear calculation than most. “I’m the kind of person who is never afraid to try because the thought of regret or what-would-have-been really scares me,” she explains. “I don’t ever want to regret that I did or did not do anything in my life.”

And through it all, she maintains perspective with humor. “I don’t know why I wasn’t voted class clown,” she jokes. “Maybe don’t take yourself so seriously. Roll with it.”

This philosophy extends to Client Hub’s company culture, from their no-titles policy to their biweekly “happy hours” where customers gather informally to network, laugh, and share feedback that shapes product development.

The Legacy of Solving Your Own Problem

Today, Client Hub is more than the simple portal Judie first envisioned. But it stays true to its original mission: helping firms get work done without friction.

“People ask us to implement something like time and billing,” Judie explains. “For us, it was the perfect opportunity to partner with somebody.” They integrated with Anchor rather than building their own billing solution. “We need to keep it simple.”

This focus means saying no to features that don’t serve the core vision, even if they might be profitable. It means listening more than talking, a skill Judie learned in automotive management training decades ago. “The most important communication skill you have is listening.”

When asked what she hopes her presence as a female tech founder represents, Judie’s answer was immediate. “I hope my presence shows the next generation that their passions, ideas, and creativity belong here.”

The message applies to any woman considering a significant professional leap. Don’t let anything or anyone hold you back—not parents, partners, or that one person who says it’s not a great idea.

Your Problem Is Someone Else’s Too

Judie’s story proves that the best solutions come from problems you live with daily. A bookkeeper frustrated by wasted time became a tech founder because she couldn’t ignore the problem anymore.

Listen to the full episode, which Nancy closed with a quote from Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, developer of the first compiler for computer programming: “Humans are allergic to change. They love to say we’ve always done it this way. I try to fight that.”

Women like Judie show us we don’t have to bend ourselves around broken systems. We can build better ones instead.

Sometimes, we have to create the tools we need. So write down that idea, share it with someone, and start before you’re ready.

Join the conversation: Have you ever come up with an idea for a new app? What has prevented you from pursuing it? Or if you have pursued it, share that with us too. Follow the She Counts Podcast LinkedIn page and share your story under this episode.

From Ticking and Tying to Selling Out Arenas: How One Auditor Became EDM Royalty

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A former Big Four auditor traded spreadsheets for turntables and now commands 11.8 million monthly Spotify listeners, sells out Madison Square Garden, and has racked up over two billion career streams. His name is John Summit, and he might just be the most famous accountant in the world.

On a recent episode of The Accounting Podcast, hosts Blake Oliver and David Leary dove into John’s remarkable transformation from EY auditor to global EDM superstar. His career change story captures something profound happening in the accounting profession right now.

From Audit Room to Arena Stage

“If you’re into electronic music, then you know who John Summit is,” Blake explained to David during the episode. 

The numbers tell an incredible story. John—born John Walter Schuster in Naperville, Illinois—followed the traditional accounting path at first. He earned his undergraduate and master’s degrees in accounting from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. From 2018 to 2019, he worked as an auditor at EY in Chicago, starting at $65,000 a year while DJing on weekends.

Blake even pulled up John’s CPA license during the show. “I went to the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation, and I looked him up by his original name,” he said. The license was active in 2018 and expired in 2022, right around the time John’s music career went stratospheric.

Today, John’s success metrics are staggering. His debut album “Comfort in Chaos” hit number two on the Billboard Top Dance/Electronic Albums chart and cracked the Billboard 200’s top 40. He headlines festivals like Coachella and Tomorrowland, and his own festival, Experts Only, draws 50,000 attendees.

Leaning Into the Accounting Story

What makes John unique is how he’s embraced his accounting past. His new album “CTRL Escape” drops on April 15th, Tax Day, and the cover art shows him sitting atop office ceiling tiles, the corporate world below giving way to open sky above.

“He’s dropping one track from the album every Wednesday,” Blake noted. “And the reason he’s doing it on Wednesday is that he remembers Hump day being the toughest day in the office.”

The album’s merchandise had David cracking up. “Crappy accounting firm swag. This is great,” he said, looking at the offerings. “It’s a backpack that says Summit CPAs, a pen that says Summit CPAs. This is so great he’s leaning into it like that.”

The music video for “Lights Go Out” drives the theme home. John appears in an oversized tan suit at “Summit CPAs,” working at an old green-screen computer before leading his fellow office workers in what Blake described as “basically like an accounting firm turning into a rave.”

The Profession John Left Is Disappearing

Blake and David’s conversation takes a darker turn when they discuss Botkeeper. One of the original “AI bookkeeping” startups announced it was shutting down after 11 years.

“They did the typical tech company ‘fake it ‘til you make it,’” David explained. Botkeeper promised AI-powered bookkeeping but was actually using offshore accountants in the Philippines. When real AI technology finally arrived through companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, investors weren’t interested in funding a company that had burned through capital on the false promise.

It wasn’t just Botkeeper. Jenesys, a UK-based AI bookkeeping startup, also entered a formal sales process after key investors pulled out. Clearly, the old model of pretending to have AI while using human workers is dead.

Meanwhile, companies with actual AI capabilities are thriving. Tax AI startup Accrual raised $75 million, Audit AI startup Fieldguide raised $75 million, and Pilot announced what it called an “AI accountant,” a fully autonomous system capable of running end-to-end bookkeeping with “zero need for human intervention” in typical cases.

Why Tax and Audit AI Are Different

Blake explained why investors are pouring money into tax and audit AI while bookkeeping AI companies struggle.

“When we moved to cloud bookkeeping and accounting, we were able to set up rules-based systems,” he said. “You can still automate 80% of bookkeeping work today with just the old tech.”

But tax and audit are different beasts. “Those areas of accounting were not automatable with rules-based tech, because there are too many gray areas, there’s too much complexity. But AI is starting to handle it really, really, really well.”

To illustrate the point, Blake shared his own experience with Claude, Anthropic’s AI assistant. He gave it access to a folder of scanned documents that his scanner had poorly named and asked it to organize them.

“It created a whole logical folder structure. Different types of files, receipts, legal documents, statements,” he said. “And then it put all the documents into those folders and renamed all the documents based on the content of the PDFs. And it did this in minutes.”

“You can get that if you’re a pro subscriber for like $20 a month. It’s incredible.”

The Entry-Level Jobs Are Vanishing

This AI revolution is having a profound impact on accounting careers. Technology is automating routine tasks that once defined entry-level positions at breakneck speed.

“We’re seeing reductions in entry-level jobs, not reductions in mid-career or later-stage career positions,” Blake observed. “It’s really, really hard to find a tax manager. Nobody can find a tax manager for their public accounting firm.”

The work being automated reads like a first-year auditor’s job description. “Requesting documents from clients, receiving and organizing them, rolling forward prior year workpapers, ticking and tying. AI is starting to do all of that stuff.”

As a result, “it’s really hard to get a job as a staff accountant because nobody wants to train you and they don’t have work to give you to justify the cost of training you for several years.”

Even the Big Four Feel the Pressure

In an ironic twist, even KPMG International is feeling the AI pressure. The firm recently pushed its own auditor, Grant Thornton UK, to lower its audit fee by 14%, arguing that AI-driven efficiencies should reduce costs.

“The negotiations reportedly included pressure tactics, where KPMG threatened to switch auditors if Grant Thornton didn’t agree to a significant reduction,” Blake said, citing Financial Times reporting.

The fee went from $416,000 in 2024 to $357,000 in 2025. As Blake wryly noted: “I think KPMG ought to watch out, because now clients are going to ask for the same fee reduction.”

The Pyramid Is Crumbling

This pressure on fees creates a domino effect. Lower fees mean less money for staff. Fewer entry-level positions mean the traditional pyramid model of public accounting, where large numbers of junior staff support a small number of managers and partners, is collapsing.

“The whole model is going to have to shift,” Blake said. “The pyramid model of accounting is going away. And that’s going to fundamentally change our profession, because that’s been the way everyone got into accounting for a hundred years.”

Blake predicted that within five to ten years, timesheets and time-based billing will disappear entirely. The firms that survive will abandon the old model of counting hours and bodies.

There is a silver lining for those who adapt. Blake shared his own experience. “I saw a 5x increase in my revenue just as a freelancer” after embracing cloud technology. His effective hourly rate went from $20 to $100, and his workload actually decreased.

The Escape Route Is Closing

John Summit celebrates his escape from accounting through music that resonates with millions who understand the cubicle grind. He drops tracks on Wednesdays because that was the hardest day to push through. He releases albums on Tax Day. He sells fake accounting firm swag as merchandise.

But the entry-level accounting experience he’s immortalizing—the fluorescent lights, the routine tasks, the path that led him from college to Big Four—is rapidly disappearing. Future accountants may never know that particular grind because the jobs simply won’t exist.

Accounting will likely survive with higher earnings for those who remain and adapt. But the traditional path into the profession will evolve.

As David suggested during the show, if you’re Summit CPAs—a real accounting firm that happens to share the name—you might want to figure out how to capitalize on all the traffic coming your way. Because in a profession being reshaped by AI, you need to grab opportunities wherever you find them.

For the complete discussion of John’s journey, the AI transformation of accounting, and what it means for the profession’s future, listen to the full episode of The Accounting Podcast.

Your Most Trusted Employee Is Your Biggest Fraud Risk

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If you’re an accountant cramming in your last CPE credits while reading this, Caleb Newquist has a message for you: “Have fun. You’re in for something.”

The host of Oh My Fraud just wrapped up 2025 with 26 episodes of financial fraud stories that share one depressing pattern: they were completely preventable. In episode 101, Caleb and co-producer Zach Frank sat down to recap a year that started with co-host Greg Kyte’s departure and continued with tales of embezzlement, gambling addictions, and presidential pardons.

The biggest takeaway? The person most likely to steal from you isn’t some sophisticated hacker. It’s the assistant who sets up your bank accounts, the business manager you’ve trusted for years, or the administrator who’s been ordering computers for decades.

When Your Interpreter Controls Your Bank Account

The year’s most talked-about fraud case involved baseball superstar Shohei Ohtani and his interpreter, Ippei Mizuhara. The setup was almost embarrassingly simple. Ippei handled everything when setting up Ohtani’s bank account during spring training in Arizona: the setup, the passcodes, and the access. Ohtani himself couldn’t access his own money. Neither could his business manager.

“Don’t let your assistant set up your account for you,” Zach emphasized during the recap. The only person who could touch that money was the interpreter who eventually stole from it.

The DOJ charging documents revealed desperate text messages between Ippei and his bookie. When the bookie suggested Ippei might be covering for Ohtani, Ippei insisted, “No, this was all me.” He made phone calls to the bank pretending to be Ohtani, claiming he was buying cars while actually funneling money to cover massive gambling debts.

Ippei is now serving time at Allenwood in Pennsylvania, after which he’ll be deported. Lionsgate TV and Stars are developing a series about the scandal, because apparently financial disasters go great with a side of popcorn.

The Business Manager Who Managed Beyoncé (Before the Fraud)

Episode 81 was the podcast’s most popular of the year, featuring an interview with Jonathan Todd Schwartz. Before stealing $7 million from Alanis Morissette, Schwartz managed finances for Beyoncé and Gwyneth Paltrow, back before they became the cultural forces they are today.

“Everyone loves hearing from the person who committed the crime and hearing why and how they committed the crime,” Zach noted. Schwartz’s story connected directly to another recurring theme of 2025: the devastating combination of gambling and drug addictions creating pressure that makes theft seem like the only solution.

Both the Ohtani and Morissette cases featured one person with total financial control and zero independent oversight. They’re failures of basic internal controls that any first-year accounting student could spot.

When Yale Lost $40 Million in Computers (And Nobody Noticed)

If celebrity cases seem distant from everyday fraud risk, consider Yale Medical School. An administrator within the finance function stole approximately $40 million in computer equipment over several years by simply keeping purchases under $10,000 to avoid triggering review thresholds.

“Forty million dollars should replace every computer at that entire school,” Zach pointed out. “Not just the medical school, like all of Yale.”

The university’s multi-billion dollar endowment meant these losses barely registered as statistical noise. As Caleb noted, Yale wasn’t exactly a sympathetic victim, “but that doesn’t mean you should steal $40 million worth of computers and sell them on the black market.”

The solution was painfully obvious. Omri from Routable (the podcast’s sponsor) summed it up in an earlier bonus episode: “A procurement process probably solves that problem.” Not revolutionary thinking; just basic purchasing controls that require someone other than the person ordering equipment to also receive and verify it.

The Columbus Zoo Plays Hardball

The Columbus Zoo case from episode 79 showed what happens when organizations decide to fight back. After executives were convicted of misspending and stealing funds, the zoo didn’t stop at criminal prosecution. They sued three executives to foreclose on their homes, determined to recover restitution.

The case came to light thanks to investigative reporting by the Columbus Dispatch, a reminder that journalism often serves as the last line of defense when internal controls fail. It’s a pattern that repeated throughout 2025: local reporters doing the unglamorous work of following paper trails and asking tough questions.

The Mental Gymnastics Olympics

Understanding how fraud happens mechanically is one thing. Understanding why people convince themselves it’s okay is another entirely.

Carlos Watson’s Ozy Media case pushed rationalization to its limits. Watson, who was convicted of fraud but subsequently pardoned by President Trump (with his restitution expunged), reportedly did “whatever it took” to make his business succeed. The SEC decided not to pursue further civil litigation after the pardon.

“The mental gymnastics that guy must have been going through in order to rationalize what he was doing,” Caleb observed. “Weird, but impressive.”

The Spotify streaming fraud case included another common justification: “Who am I really stealing from?” Perpetrators faking streams saw themselves taking from faceless tech giants rather than individual artists. The same logic appeared in cases involving fake invoices to Google and Facebook.

Where Are They Now? The 2025 Updates

Beyond the new cases, the year brought updates on ongoing sagas:

  • Mair Smyth, the con artist featured in Johnathan Walton’s episode was sentenced to four years in UK prison for mortgage fraud. Walton helped Northern Ireland authorities locate her. He flew to the UK for the trial but remains frustrated by what he sees as a light sentence for a career criminal.
  • First NBC Bank. A listener from New Orleans shared a local rumor that the bank’s massive Directors & Officers insurance policy allowed CEO Ashton Ryan to draw out his legal proceedings for seven years before finally being sentenced. He’s now in a prison infirmary.
  • Miriam Baer, the podcast’s first guest of 2025, left Brooklyn Law School to become Dean and President at California Western School of Law in San Diego.
  • The Rare Book Find. Caleb tracked down a copy of Australian con man Johann Friedrich Hohenberger’s ghost-written autobiography at a Maryland rare book store. When he apologized for taking months to complete the purchase, the seller reassured him, “In the rare books business, this was actually fast.”

What 2025 Taught Us (Again)

The year’s cases delivered a maddeningly consistent message: basic controls work, but only if you actually use them. Whether it’s a baseball star’s interpreter, a rock legend’s business manager, or a university administrator, the pattern never changes.

“The classics constantly get covered because people are going to constantly fall for them and commit those crimes,” Zach summarized. Ponzi schemes, embezzlement, and wire fraud are not going anywhere.

For accounting professionals, it’s crucial to maintain skepticism about single-person financial control. It’s not paranoia; it’s professional responsibility. Those boring internal controls you learned about in school are boring because they work.

Want the full conversation, including discussions about whether crypto is just one giant Ponzi scheme, why procurement departments exist, and how the hosts feel about having to do it all over again in 2026, listen to episode 101 of Oh My Fraud.

Because if you’re going to learn about fraud, you might as well learn from people who can make you laugh about it, even if the punchline involves prison sentences and presidential pardons.

Inside the Innovation Circle: Three Days of Conversations at Intuit Connect

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After three days of walking around the Innovation Circle at Intuit Connect and filling 27 pages of Field Notes, it’s clear that QuickBooks is transforming from accounting software into a complete business operating system.

That’s the takeaway from a recent episode of The Unofficial QuickBooks Accountants Podcast, where hosts Alicia Katz Pollock, MAT, and Dan DeLong wrap up their three-part series covering Intuit Connect, where Alicia skipped the workshops to spend her time talking directly with developers in the Innovation Circle.

Keep in mind that these conversations occurred three months before the episode aired. So Alicia notes, “A lot of the things they said are coming soon might have already been released. So the timelines are kind of vague on a lot of these.”

What isn’t vague is where Intuit is heading. From AI-powered construction project management to sophisticated bill-approval workflows, the platform is expanding across every corner of business operations. For accounting professionals, understanding this evolution is the difference between being a bookkeeper and becoming a strategic business advisor.

Construction Gets Industry-Specific Tools in Enterprise Suite

Alicia’s conversation with Uttam Ramamurthy, Principal Engineer – AI Builder at Intuit, revealed how Intuit Enterprise Suite is tackling construction accounting, one of their key mid-market targets. They’re building specialized tools that actually understand construction workflows.

The familiar project list with profitability stripes is becoming a full dashboard designed for construction companies. You can set default margin goals, such as 25% profit on all projects, and the system alerts you when profitability falls below your threshold. As Alicia explained, “If you fall below your profit margin settings, it alerts you and gives you a heads up when your profitability is too low.”

The AI capabilities show real promise. Upload your project notes, and the system auto-populates project details and phases. It pulls from your documentation and uses what Intuit calls “AI product knowledge from similar projects” to suggest project structure.

Other construction features in development include:

  • Upload spreadsheets directly into project budgets (finally bridging the gap between estimating spreadsheets and QuickBooks)
  • Create product and service lists with quantities and unit costs, grouped by phases and cost groups
  • Show collapsible estimate views where customers see clean phase summaries while you keep line-item detail
  • Build graphic proposals with text blocks, photos, before/after images, and testimonials
  • Take deposits from estimates with proper liability accounting

That deposit feature comes with a warning. Alicia tested it three times during a recent class. It worked once but failed twice to properly subtract the deposit when converting to invoices. “I’m not sure if it’s still in development or not working, or if it’s just my cookies on my computer preventing it from working,” she admitted.

The platform now supports AIA progress billing, addressing a major gap for firms with architect and government contracts. As Dan observed, “The devil is always in the details as far as how it actually looks, but they understand those workflows.”

You can even mark project phases as complete via text message to automatically generate invoices. When projects close, Intuit Enterprise Suite creates a summary with lessons learned, profitability reports, and outstanding transactions, essentially a built-in project post-mortem.

For construction companies with multiple entities (common with separate LLCs for different projects), Intuit Enterprise Suite offers consolidated views across companies with shared charts of accounts, vendors, dimensions, and customers. You can create entity groups and filter views to specific business segments.

Mailchimp Integration Powers Marketing from Your Financial Data

The Mailchimp integration shows how seriously Intuit takes the connection between accounting and marketing. After all, your QuickBooks already knows who your customers are and what they buy. So why not use that for targeted marketing?

Alicia shared an example from her own business. When Intuit announces price increases, she needs to notify clients on wholesale QuickBooks plans where she pays for their subscriptions. She creates a Mailchimp segment where “product or service equals wholesale QuickBooks,” finds everyone affected, and sends targeted emails, all driven by her accounting data.

Stephen Yu, CPA and Product Manager at Intuit, walked Alicia through upcoming enhancements that will connect additional platforms. Soon, you’ll see email campaign success alongside data from Shopify, Stripe, PayPal, Square, and Wix on a single dashboard.

Other Mailchimp features coming soon include:

  • Click maps showing where recipients engage in your emails
  • Audience dashboards tracking growth by channel (Meta, Google, website forms, manual imports)
  • Revenue attribution connecting sales to specific campaigns
  • Journey tracking from page views through cart additions to checkout
  • Send time optimization revealing best days and times
  • AI-generated performance digests with recommended actions
  • Drag-and-drop templates that auto-generate newsletters from blog content (targeted for 2026)

ProAdvisors get Mailchimp discounts based on their tier level. The higher your tier, the better the pricing. Though Dan noted these discounts do expire.

What impressed Dan was Intuit’s patient approach to integration. “They’re not taking Mailchimp things and putting them in QuickBooks or taking QuickBooks things and putting them in Mailchimp. They are truly putting them on the same level. It’s a lot more polished than what we’ve seen in the past.”

The platform is also adding SMS messaging capabilities and, potentially, WhatsApp integration, expanding beyond email to meet customers where they communicate.

Customer Hub Becomes a Real CRM System

Christina Stansbury, Principal Product Marketer at Intuit, showed Alicia how the Customer Hub is evolving into a true customer relationship management system. Alicia already covered this development extensively in a previous episode, Customer Leads Hubba-Hubba.

You can now embed contact forms directly on your website and route inquiries into QuickBooks. The AI “customer agent” scans your Gmail to surface inquiries about your services and automatically convert them into leads.

The lead management system offers both list and Kanban views that visualize your pipeline from inquiry through discovery, negotiation, and closing. The system suggests next steps: draft an email, create an estimate, or book a site visit.

Other communication features built into Customer Hub include:

  • Emails sent through your Gmail (appearing completely natural to recipients)
  • Calendar integration for appointment scheduling
  • Self-scheduling links for customers
  • Video calls with automatic transcription (no recording, but searchable transcripts)
  • Mobile app integration for site visits with voice recordings, images, and notes

The mobile app deserves special mention. Dan highlighted how Intuit overhauled it to mirror the desktop experience. “The terminology changes on the web version found their way pretty quickly to the mobile app, which I appreciate.”

Coming soon: a proposal builder that pulls from your lead notes, emails, and conversations to generate polished documents connected to customer data. As with Intuit Enterprise Suite proposals, professionals can collect signatures and deposits directly from the proposal.

Bill Pay Gets Enterprise-Level Sophistication

The bill pay evolution addresses both processing efficiency and compliance requirements. You can email bills to a custom intuit.com email address or drag multiple documents into the business feed.

The current limitation is line-item detail. As Alicia explained to Abby Chu, Staff Marketing Manager at Intuit, the system reliably captures vendor names and dates but struggles with individual line items. Intuit is building machine learning to address this. Eventually, it will prompt you to create rules.

This creates what Alicia called a chicken-and-egg problem. “If it doesn’t work, people can’t use it. But if we don’t use it, then they can’t build the AI generator to make it work.”

Fees vary by payment speed:

  • Standard: 3 days (free)
  • Faster: 1 day ($10)
  • Instant: Minutes (1% fee, $100 maximum)

That instant option with the capped fee is noteworthy because you can pay a large urgent bill for just $100.

Bill Pay Elite introduces sophisticated approval workflows with full segregation of duties. You must have different people as bill clerk, approver, and payer—no overlap allowed. Approval conditions can stack up to seven levels deep, with complex if/then logic based on vendor, amount, and products.

Future enhancements include group approvals (any team member can approve), delegation for out-of-office situations, and audit history tracking workflow changes.

For bookkeepers managing multiple clients, Intuit Accountant Suite provides an eagle-eye view of bills across your entire client base. You’ll soon see available cash balances to prevent bounced payments.

But Alicia offered an important caveat about high-level views. During year-end cleanup, she discovered a client paying both personal and business electricity bills from the company card—something only visible at the transaction level. “There are some times when the eagle eyes still don’t give us the details on the ground view,” she noted.

Lending Services Leverage Your Financial Data

QuickBooks now incorporates Credit Karma’s embedded lending capabilities. Think of it like LendingTree built into your accounting software.

For loans under $250,000, Intuit offers direct lending. Above that, they connect you with third-party lenders. The system evaluates your credit score and business history to provide terms with no origination fees or prepayment penalties, although interest rates vary based on creditworthiness.

For customers, there’s a toggle in settings (currently defaulted on) that offers financing on large estimates. As Alicia explained, “If one of your potential customers turns down your bid because they have cash flow issues, then you may be able to win the engagement by offering them financing.”

On the collections side, you can now require auto-pay for recurring invoices. Looking ahead, customers will have their own dashboard to manage payments across all QuickBooks-using vendors. Update a credit card once, and it applies everywhere.

The Platform Evolution Continues

After three episodes covering Intuit Connect, Alicia concludes, “Intuit is really true to their mantra of powering prosperity around the world. They’re trying to help us increase revenue and improve cash flow. Having the data and insights to see what’s happening beyond just running a P&L and balance sheet is really super helpful.”

The challenge for accounting professionals is keeping up. Even Intuit’s own sales teams struggle to understand the full platform. Dan shared his frustration with telesales agents who don’t realize what Intuit Enterprise Suite offers, requiring multiple handoffs to get clients the right information.

But the opportunities are substantial for those who embrace the platform’s evolution. You can offer advisory services around marketing analytics, design approval workflows, guide construction clients through industry-specific tools, and advise on embedded lending options.

QuickBooks will continue transforming. Will you be the advisor helping clients navigate these new capabilities or the one still explaining why they need separate software for everything?

Listen to the full episode to learn more. And remember, as Dan and Alicia noted, they’re “almost ready for the next Intuit Connect to do this all again.”

Alicia Katz Pollock’s Royalwise OWLS (On-Demand Web-based Learning Solutions) is the industry’s premier portal for top-notch QuickBooks Online training with CPE for accounting firms, bookkeepers, and small business owners. Visit Royalwise OWLS, where learning QBO is a HOOT!