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98% of ProAdvisors Miss the Features They’re Paying For

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Picture a packed ballroom at Intuit Connect. An Intuit vice president wraps up his keynote and drops a bombshell, saying, “The ProAdvisor program is going away at the end of the year.” Then he walks off stage.

The room freezes. Attendees turn to each other, stunned. As Margie Remmers-Davis remembers it, “We all looked at each other and said, wait, what?”

Within minutes, panic spread to the vendor hall. Margie walked straight to an Intuit booth labeled “ProAdvisor” and said, “Well, I guess this booth is going away.” Then she learned that the moment those words left the VP’s mouth, Jaclyn Anku, Intuit’s ProAdvisor Program Leader, had texted her entire team: ProAdvisor is not going away. He misspoke.

The room could breathe again. The program wasn’t dying. It was transforming.

In Episode 150 of The Unofficial QuickBooks Accountants Podcast, host Alicia Katz Pollock sits down with Margie Remmers-Davis, Founder and CEO of Akadian Accounting Education. They unpack what they call “the ProPartner paradox,” or the rebranding of ProAdvisor into the ProPartner program, launching January 2027.

From Advisor to Partner: What’s in a Name?

For the past decade, Intuit pushed bookkeepers to evolve. Stop just doing data entry. Start advising clients. Look forward, not backward. Help businesses understand what their numbers mean.

As Alicia puts it, “We’ve finally grown into the name that they gave us 30 years ago.” Just as the industry embraces advisory work, Intuit switches the name to “partner.”

The evolution shows in Intuit’s flagship conference. Ten years ago, QuickBooks Connect was mostly product training. You learned what was on the certification test, then took it right there. Over time, it shifted to advisory: interpreting numbers and helping clients succeed. Now, as Intuit Connect, it focuses on firm growth, the hiring crisis, and AI adoption.

So why “partner” now? Alicia sees two meanings, and both make sense.

First, it signals renewed commitment. After a challenging year of interface changes that slowed everyone down, Intuit wants to make amends. They now view accountants “as a customer,” meaning they’ll listen and build what practitioners actually need.

Second, it’s transactional. In the vendor world, “partner” means affiliate, someone earning residuals for referrals. With three-year revenue sharing at the program’s core, this interpretation also fits.

But what worries Margie’s students is ProAdvisor’s complete disappearance.

It won’t. At least, not exactly. Margie believes the ProAdvisor name will stay for certifications and learning. You’ll still be a Certified ProAdvisor. The ProAdvisor Academy continues. What changes are the benefits and tiers. Gold, elite, and platinum become Member, Partner, Preferred Partner, Premier Partner, and Elite Partner.

Still, when Margie checked Intuit’s FAQ, it says: “The ProAdvisor name and tier designations will sunset and will be replaced by the name ProPartner.” The exact details remain fuzzy.

Real Benefits Worth Having

Whatever you call it, the new program delivers concrete value. Let’s break down what matters most.

Five New Tiers

The bottom two tiers set a low bar to entry. Members just created an account, maybe to fix their own books. Partners passed Level 1 certification and have one client. That’s it.

Three-Year Revenue Share

This is the headline change. Revenue share extends from 12 months to three full years:

  • Partner: 10%
  • Preferred: 15%
  • Premier: 20%
  • Elite: 25%

As Alicia says, “25% revenue share for three years doesn’t suck.” Though she admits loyalty to her QuickBooks Solutions Provider means weighing what to run through them versus capturing residuals herself.

Free Premium Tools

It is widely rumored that at Premier and Elite levels, the $149 Intuit Accountants Suite Accelerate will come free. This matters for firms with many clients who need dashboard oversight, or for teams using ProAdvisor Academy. Solo practitioners without big rosters probably don’t need it anyway.

Expanded Support Hours

For anyone working nights and weekends, ProAdvisor support now includes staff with actual accounting experience, not just software troubleshooting. Call (888) 333-3451 and follow the prompts.

Silver-level hours:

  • Monday-Friday: 5 a.m. to 6 p.m. Pacific
  • Saturday: 6 a.m. to 3 p.m. Pacific

Gold, Platinum, Elite hours:

  • Monday-Friday: 4 a.m. to 8 p.m. Pacific
  • Saturday: 6 a.m. to 3 p.m. Pacific
  • Sunday: 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. Pacific

“I can’t tell you how many times it’s been 5 p.m. on Friday when I need to talk to them,” Alicia says. Weekend support isn’t a luxury; it’s reality.

The Directory Problem

The Find-a-Pro directory brought accountants frustration and hope. Currently, you need 500 points to get listed for gold status. That’s Level 1 certification plus clients, or Level 2 plus payroll certifications.

Nine months ago, Intuit killed the lead-capture form. That form generated real clients because business owners could fill it out, and you’d get notified to book consultations.

Intuit killed it because of scammers. Both hosts laughed at the recurring characters, including the “casting director” needing QuickBooks training for $5,000 a day and the father with three daughters (always three) starting businesses. Spam overwhelmed the system.

The directory still exists, but prospects work harder to reach you now. They need to visit your website or call directly.

Future improvements sound promising. Instead of just ZIP code searches, clients will find firms by practice areas and skills. Firm-level listings replace individual-only profiles. As Alicia notes, “ZIP code doesn’t matter anymore.”

But Margie’s students face a catch-22. Many get certified specifically to land in the directory and win first clients. But if listing requires clients you don’t have, you’re stuck. You can’t get clients without the directory, and you can’t get in the directory without clients.

The Real Value

What should really worry Intuit is they’re delivering more value than anyone realizes.

The problem crystallized at Scaling New Heights. Xero invited Alicia for a head-to-head comparison with QuickBooks. When the pricing slide appeared, the room erupted. Xero’s top tier is $90. QuickBooks’ is $275 to $340.

But Alicia knew something the attendees didn’t. That $340 includes $90 of bill pay (now free), workforce enhancements, and built-in AI. Factor in the $20 monthly that practitioners already pay for Claude or ChatGPT, and the math changes.

Then she demonstrated contract signing inside QuickBooks. Upload a contract to the customer hub. Mark where they initial, sign, and date. Send it off. The signed document lives in their customer details. It replaces DocuSign.

“How many people have heard of this?” she asked the room of 100 professionals. No hands went up.

“How many have explored the new AI features?” Two or three hands, including hers. That’s little to no awareness of the features justifying the price increase.

As Alicia puts it, Intuit “put the cart before the horse.” They raised prices before anyone knew what they were paying for. Instead of thinking “Look what I’m getting,” practitioners thought, “You aggravated me all year, and now I pay 20% more?”

Margie says this offers job security for people like her and Alicia. There’s so much to teach because there’s so much practitioners don’t know exists. Alicia’s planning dedicated classes just for overlooked features like AI agents, customer hub, and workforce management. Her 600-page QuickBooks book, once complete, is now just “fundamentals.” There’s enough new material for a second book.

What November Means

Margie explains why November matters at Intuit. The certification season runs November 1 through October 31. When one season ends, Intuit previews what’s next.

This November, expect to see your current points and new tier equivalent. You have the rest of 2026 to position yourself before the January 2027 launch.

Two more programs require at least Partner level:

  • Career pipeline: Intuit’s training one million students to build an onshore talent pool
  • Awards program: Recognition for Pro Partners

The Bottom Line

The ProPartner rebrand is an industry mid-pivot. Just as bookkeepers embrace advisory work, Intuit reframes them as partners and paying customers.

The concrete benefits are real, including three-year revenue shares up to 25%, free Accelerate at higher tiers, weekend support, and a smarter directory. These are overdue recognition of the small firms who built Intuit’s empire.

But value only matters if practitioners understand it. Those staying “heads down” in daily work miss the features that justify higher prices.

As Margie says about the rise of AI doing transactional work, AI is “confidently wrong.” You need deep knowledge to be confidently right. You can’t correct a machine you don’t understand. Advisory is survival.

Much remains unknown, including how you’ll earn points, which tier unlocks the directory, and whether certifications change. Intuit promises more details this fall.

Want the complete conversation? Listen to episode 150 of The Unofficial QuickBooks Accountants Podcast. Get ahead of the changes before Pro Partner launches in January 2027.

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!

The Seven-Part Framework That Turned a Bottlenecked Firm Into a Director-Led One

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Rachel and Marcus Dillon were in the middle of pricing out a closet remodel when the numbers stopped making sense. Rachel was thinking maybe $5,000—and even that felt steep for organizing a space that already had decent storage. Marcus had mentally prepared for $10,000. Then the custom closet consultant dropped an estimate for $30,000.

“She equated it to a trip to Europe that may cost $20,000 to $30,000. And that’s just one trip. You use your closet daily,” Marcus recalled on a recent episode of Who’s Really the BOSS? “And I’m like, lady, I’m not spending 30 grand to go to Europe either.”

The disconnect was almost comical. But Marcus quickly flipped it into a lesson for accounting firm owners. “You could spend $30,000 on a closet. Why don’t you spend $30,000 a year on a really good accountant and know where your business is at any given time?”

That conversation about value sets up the bigger story. Because just like that closet consultant needed to find her ideal customer, Marcus and Rachel had to figure out who should truly own each piece of their growing accounting firm.

When the Owner Becomes the Bottleneck

In the beginning, Marcus was everything at his accounting firm. Business development started with him. Some preparation work landed on his desk. And he reviewed every single deliverable before it went out the door.

“You were the beginning, the middle and the end,” Rachel told him during the episode. “And there was help in between those things.”

That worked fine when the firm was smaller. But Dillon Business Advisors (DBA) is now a $5 million-plus CPA firm with about 24 team members. At that size, having one person as the center of every decision is impossible.

The first breakthrough came when they built what they call the “team of three,” a pod structure that created capacity for quality service delivery and allowed them to scale. They could keep bringing on new clients because the pods could handle them. But even with that structure and Rachel’s help, Marcus remained the person everyone ultimately answered to.

“Your org chart and responsibilities have to look a lot different than they did at one, two, or three million,” Marcus explained. The question that forced their hand was uncomfortable but necessary: What in the firm still waits on the owner?

Why Summer Is the Time to Fix It

The Dillons tackled this restructuring during what they call “improvement season,” which runs from roughly April 15 to August 15. It’s after tax season but before extension deadlines heat up. Since most firms in their network run both tax and client accounting services, summer is when they have breathing room to experiment.

“We like to do our refinements, improvements, and sometimes experiments during the times we’re not in a deadline crunch,” Rachel explained. The timing is deliberate. They implement changes in summer, practice them during the lighter extension season in September and October, then refine them once more before year-end. By January, when the volume returns, the new way of working is second nature.

“That’s really a gift to our team,” Rachel added, “to not pull a software and change it or completely rework a whole process in the middle of tax season.”

This particular improvement season, Amy McCarty, DBA’s Director of Operations and People, led the charge to formalize director roles. But before they could put people in seats, they had to define what those seats actually were. They’d learned that lesson the hard way with a director of business development hire that didn’t work out, largely because the role lacked clear definition.

The Seven Parts Every Director Role Needs

The word “ownership” does heavy lifting in this conversation, and Rachel made the distinction crystal clear by referencing an episode of The Double Win podcast. Real ownership means handling something from conception through planning to execution, at an agreed-upon standard.

“It’s fine for a spouse to say, ‘Can I go to the store for you?'” Rachel explained. “But it’s another thing for that spouse to know we need things for the weekend, to make that list, go to the store, and unload the groceries. They need to own the whole process.”

Until someone owns the entire function, the mental load stays with the original person. They’re still wondering, “Do they know what they’re supposed to do? Will it get done to the standard I expect?”

DBA built its director roles around seven specific components:

  1. Primary Focus: A one-sentence statement that captures the role’s core purpose. “If you can’t say it in a sentence, then the role isn’t clear,” Marcus said.
  2. Owns: What they’re specifically accountable for. “Not aspirational, but concrete.”
  3. Measured By: The outcomes that prove it’s working. “That’s where ownership gets teeth,” Marcus noted.
  4. Not Responsible For: Marcus called this “the most underrated section” in the whole framework. In small firms where everyone wears multiple hats, explicitly naming what’s not someone’s job gives them “freedom, a breath of fresh air.”
  5. The One-Liner: The soul of the role. For example, the Director of Technology and AI “builds the machine, but doesn’t run it.” The Director of Sales and Marketing “brings in the right work, doesn’t execute it.”
  6. KPIs: The numbers that prove success.
  7. Weekly Question: A single recurring question that keeps the role honest. For operations, it’s “Where are we overloaded or at risk of missing a deadline?” For sales, it’s “Do we have enough right-fit opportunities coming in?”

Rachel, drawing on her background as an elementary teacher, explained why the “not responsible for” section is so powerful. “Our brain is forming pathways, right? And trying to connect to something that we already know. You help your brain out by saying it is not this.”

The Five Director Roles at DBA

With the framework built, DBA mapped out five director positions. Each deliberately combines two related areas. This is a design choice that works at their current size but anticipates future growth.

“At a $5 million company, the directors can handle those two areas,” Rachel explained. But at $10 or $15 million, those roles might split. Sales and marketing could become two separate directors. Technology and AI might divide.

Here’s how the roles break down today:

  • Director of Tax and Financial Planning: The technical authority who ensures everything the firm delivers is correct, sound, and within the firm’s risk tolerance. He doesn’t own workflow enforcement (that’s operations) or sales (that’s marketing).
  • Director of Accounting and Advisory: Focuses on client experience and ongoing advisory value. “It’s not just accurate financials,” Marcus explained. “It’s the perceived insight and the conversations that you have with clients.”
  • Director of Operations and People: Runs the machine and the people inside it, owning execution capacity and accountability. “She runs the thing, essentially,” Marcus joked.
  • Director of Technology and AI: Builds the systems and automation layer. After 18 months on the team, DBA’s Director of Technology and AI, Angel Sabino, has moved from playing with AI tools to actually deploying them across the firm.
  • Director of Sales and Marketing: Brings in the right work without executing it, working closely with operations to pair new clients with teams that have both capacity and expertise.

The process of defining these roles surfaced some surprising overlaps. Rachel’s previous title was “Firm Administrator.” It was a catch-all that mostly meant she didn’t do tax or technical accounting. When they formalized the director structure, they discovered that Rachel, Amy, and Marcus were all holding pieces of the “people” function.

“When we did this, we really created a clear divide,” Rachel said. “Amy’s really going to own people. Can I help her? Can you help her? Yes, but she owns it.”

Making It Stick Through Scorecards and Trust

Defining roles is necessary but not sufficient. “If you never review this again, if you only bring it up at someone’s annual review, this is not going to be successful,” Marcus warned.

DBA’s accountability lives in a spreadsheet. Each director has a tab to log their KPIs, which feed into a color-coded dashboard showing whether each area is on track, at risk, or off track. Directors update metrics weekly and rate their KPIs monthly.

But the magic isn’t in the spreadsheet. It’s the question they ask when something goes red. Instead of “What went wrong?” or “Why didn’t you hit your number?” they ask, “What do you need from this room?”

Rachel gave an example. If sales and marketing show zero right-fit leads, she might tell the other directors she needs educational materials or downloadable resources, something technical that makes the firm attractive to prospects. “That’s something where they could help me, since I’m not an accountant,” she said.

This only works with genuine trust. “If you have people that are not there to really ask what you need from this room, and they’re okay with either you failing or wanting you to fail, that’s an awful situation,” Marcus said bluntly.

The owner also has to resist the rescue instinct. If Marcus jumps in too quickly when someone struggles, “you’re always going to be the person picking up the pieces and quote unquote rescuing that person. And they never fully own anything.”

The Payoff Is A Firm That Can Scale Without the Owner

The shift from owner-led to director-led reduces Marcus’s workload while creating real opportunities for talented team members. These are the kinds of opportunities that, when missing, send good people out the door to create their own.

It also positions the firm to scale differently. “With the director levels plus new technology, we’ll be able to grow and scale a little bit more without adding the same number of team members,” Marcus explained. They can contemplate growing to $10 million without doubling their headcount, especially as AI and automation reshape what capacity means.

Marcus offered a simple example of how it works now. Someone forwarded a news article about COVID-related penalty and interest clawbacks. Instead of Marcus making a snap decision, three directors evaluated it together. Sales assessed the opportunity, operations checked capacity and tax confirmed feasibility. They made a collective, informed decision with no bottleneck.

“The minutes that exist here in improvement season are maybe more important than the minutes that exist during busy season,” Marcus reflected. “Because here’s where we’re planting the seeds to harvest later on.”

For firms still centered on the owner, the Dillons’ journey offers a warning and a roadmap. The warning is that growth will eventually make the owner-as-bottleneck model impossible. The roadmap is clear role definitions, genuine ownership transfer, and the trust to let capable people either succeed or occasionally fail.

DBA is sharing its complete director role framework with members of the Collective by DBA community. To learn more about joining, listen to the full episode.

Rachel and Marcus Dillon, CPA, own a national, remote client accounting and advisory services firm, Dillon Business Advisors, with a team of 25 professionals. Their latest organization, Collective by DBA, supports and guides accounting firm owners and leaders with firm resources, education, and operational strategy through community, groups, and one-on-one advisory. 

Growth and rest aren’t opposites when you build the machine that makes both possible

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When someone tells Rachel Dillon they landed 20 new clients in six months, her first thought is chaos. Overworked staff. Missed deadlines. A firm running on caffeine and adrenaline. So when the team at Dillon Business Advisors gathered for its mid-year retreat this summer, Rachel noticed that her firm celebrated not just new-client wins but also paid time off taken. More clients and more rest, in the same six months.

On Who’s Really the BOSS?, hosts Marcus and Rachel Dillon walk through the numbers behind their first half of 2026. They measure those results against the goals they set at their November 2025 team retreat. The numbers prove fast growth and a healthier team aren’t competing goals; they’re two outputs of the same well-built system. DBA landed 20 new client accounting services (CAS) clients (five more than its annual target) at an average of $1,965 in monthly recurring revenue. Meanwhile, the team took 75% more paid time off than the year before. It turns out sustainable scaling is a system.

In this episode, Marcus and Rachel look at the numbers behind the growth, the team structure that absorbed it, the PTO shift that proves it didn’t come at the team’s expense, and where the clients actually came from.

The numbers tell the real story

Back in November 2025, DBA set a goal of adding 15 new monthly client or family-group relationships in 2026. These are small businesses or complex families that need income and expenses tracked year-round, at roughly $2,000 in monthly recurring revenue each. Annualized, that’s about $30,000 in MRR. The firm built the goal around what it could capably deliver, because its teams of three are structured to serve exactly this kind of work.

The results beat the target. Through June, DBA accepted and onboarded 20 CAS clients. At DBA, base CAS work includes monthly bookkeeping, tax returns, two tax projections per year, and at least one advisory meeting, plus payroll or sales tax when applicable. As Rachel points out, most of these clients are on an annual advisory touchpoint rather than quarterly or monthly meetings. That’s how the team scales without drowning. Fees ranged from a $500 Schedule C add-on to a $3,000-per-month engagement. On top of the 20, the firm added two monthly tax advisory plan (TAP) clients at $800 and $500 per month. That’s recurring revenue even from clients who aren’t business owners.

Then there’s the revenue from onboarding fees. Standard onboarding starts at $7,500, and across those 20 engagements, DBA charged $101,415 in total, averaging over $5,000 per engagement. The charges ranged from $2,500 for a well-known client setting up a simple new entity to $10,000 for a complex engagement with lots of moving pieces and a tax return.

The reason DBA charges onboarding fees is straightforward. In Marcus’s words, “position it to where you’re coming out of the gate showing value and getting paid for the value you bring from the very beginning.” Both the monthly service and the onboarding begin the day the client signs the engagement letter. No delayed starts, no prorating headaches. The signing date is the anniversary and charge date.

Why 20 onboardings didn’t create chaos

Big numbers only stay healthy if you engineer the work behind them. DBA’s clearest proof that growth is a system is its onboarding engine.

There’s no single “onboarding person.” New clients are spread across teams of three. The firm started 2026 with five teams that could accept work and grew to about seven by mid-year. That meant more homes for incoming clients. Every month, Marcus meets with Lezlie Reeves, CPA, DBA’s Director of Accounting & Advisory, and Amy McCarty, Director of Operations, to review client exits, the pipeline, and each team’s workload, all of which DBA tracks in Excel.

DBA clearly defines roles within each onboarding so no one drowns. 

  • Tax admin: sets up projects, folders, and client communication
  • Client service manager: builds the QuickBooks Online file, chart of accounts, reports, and workflows
  • Controller: reviews the compliance work, moves it into the tax software, and issues the first set of financials
  • CFO: supports the team, fields early advisory questions, and starts building rapport

They document the whole process in Canopy, beginning with a kickoff call, and an insights report tracks how many days each onboarding takes.

They complete most onboardings in 13 to 14 days. Only two ran past two weeks, and those were a three-entity family group at 29 days, and another at 21 days due to complexity and the client being out of town. Incentives keep the rhythm going. DBA pays onboarding bonuses after the first financial statements go out, and the bonus shrinks each week past the two-week mark. Just as important, the same team that onboarded a client serves them long term. That eliminates the hand-off friction Marcus has seen at firms where one person onboards and then tosses the work over the wall.

Celebrating time off as a growth metric

A system that spreads out the work also makes rest possible. In 2026, DBA moved from a designated, accrual-based PTO model to flexible, “unlimited” PTO with guardrails.

The firm tackled the obvious fear head-on. At the year-end retreat, a team member raised the well-known concern that unlimited PTO can lead people to take less time off. So DBA kept tracking it. They confirmed PTO taken was up 75% compared to the same period in 2025, even during tax season and 20 onboardings. Marcus offers an honest caveat, noting past tracking might be imperfect because some of that time was always being taken. But better data now means a stronger foundation either way.

The change built on years of evolution. DBA started with tenure-based weeks that included three weeks of PTO, plus a fourth after five years of service. Then it moved to a year-of-service payout model that extended benefits to part-timers by establishing a reliable base workweek, such as a committed 24 hours. Flexible PTO now has the same base: 24 hours per week, 52 weeks per year, guaranteed comp, with pay for anything above it.

The real goal was removing uncertainty. When employees have doctor’s appointments, they don’t have to wonder whether they need to make up hours or use PTO. That system kept people tethered to their phones instead of disconnecting, and often meant time simply went untracked. Flexible PTO lets a team member “turn messages off and go do what they need to do.” And there are no blackout periods, even during tax season, because, as Marcus puts it, “people probably need to take more time off during tax season than any other time.” Coverage is handled inside the team of three.

Key lessons:

  • Track what you value, even after you make it “unlimited”
  • Guarantee a reliable base so time off feels safe, not risky
  • Cover the work inside the team instead of imposing blackout dates

The growth came from relationships, not ad spend

Systems for onboarding and rest explain how DBA absorbed the growth. But where did the growth itself come from? Not $100,000 in paid ads, a lead-gen company, or an in-house social media team. The firm invested in its website about 18 months ago to fix schema and technical SEO to regain visibility and search ranking. But that wasn’t the engine.

Eighty-five percent of new wins came from existing clients or referrals:

  • 10 (50%) came from existing clients expanding into new businesses, acquisitions, or new entities. In one case, a client left a W-2 job to open their own practice and upgraded from a TAP to a CAS plan. Simply adding more advisory meetings does not count as a new client. Only a new entity or client ID does.
  • 7 (35%) came from referrals.
  • 1 came from website or search (Google or an LLM). More prospects entered through search, but they didn’t convert.

The tactics behind that are low-tech. Tell your best clients you have capacity. “Don’t send this to your worst client,” Marcus warns. Push back on the reflexive “I know you’re busy” culture that stops clients from asking for more. Talk naturally about your team and services in everyday settings. Marcus points to cars-and-coffee conversations and a morning workout, during which his trainer asked for 1099 help. And help people even when they aren’t a fit. “Leave people you know better than you found them,” Marcus says. In this case, he pointed his trainer toward simpler tools rather than selling him a service he didn’t need.

Marcus also cautions against taking on annual, tax-only clients, hoping to convert them to CAS later. If you already deliver great annual service, clients have little reason to pay more for monthly work. You’ll end up with a pile of tax clients and no base to build teams around. Meanwhile, an emerging trend fuels onboarding demand. Businesses are migrating from QuickBooks Desktop to QuickBooks Online as longtime staff retire. Marcus cites a large oral surgeon group whose office manager, after decades in QuickBooks Desktop, was nearing retirement. These conversions justify onboarding fees precisely because the firm gets to build the systems right from the start.

Build the machine, then let it run

Landing 20 clients in six months wasn’t luck or hustle. It was the payoff of intentional systems. Defined pricing everyone can articulate, a separate onboarding fee that funds the real setup work, onboarding shared across teams of three, monthly capacity reviews, and people-first flexible PTO. Growth and a healthier team came out of the same machine.

For firm owners, spouses, and accounting professionals, that reframes the classic trade-off. You don’t have to choose between scaling revenue and protecting your people. But you do have to build the infrastructure that lets both happen. Rest and growth stop being opposites when you design capacity rather than hoping for it.

Here are Rachel’s practical things you can do today:

  • Assess your pricing: define service plans and base pricing that your team and clients can all articulate
  • Charge an onboarding fee: it funds the real setup work and lets you reward the team
  • Define and delegate your onboarding process: never one person doing it all, since shared responsibility prevents bottlenecks when clients flood in
  • Communicate capacity to your best clients and referral sources

For the deeper numbers, the full onboarding-role breakdown, and the evolution of DBA’s PTO models, listen to the full episode of Who’s Really the BOSS? And don’t miss the follow-up episode on the firm’s tax advisory plan (TAP) clients.

Rachel and Marcus Dillon, CPA, own a national, remote client accounting and advisory services firm, Dillon Business Advisors, with a team of 26 professionals. Their latest organization, Collective by DBA, supports and guides accounting firm owners and leaders with firm resources, education, and operational strategy through community, groups, and one-on-one advisory.

Everyone’s a Builder Now, and That’s Exactly What Should Worry the Accounting Profession

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“One day, the board is going to ask the CEO, ‘I see you spent all that on tokens. What was the result?’ And they’re not gonna be able to answer it.” That’s David Leary on Episode 496 of The Accounting Podcast, and in one line he captures the tension running under nearly every story he and co-host Blake Oliver covered this week.

Here’s the big idea that ties all of this episode’s stories together is that, as AI lowers the barrier to building software, automating audits, and streamlining everything from month-end close to CPE reporting, the accounting profession’s real value shifts away from doing the work and toward overseeing it. That’s because every advance comes bundled with a hidden cost or risk. The real professionals know exactly where the practical controls, real costs, and actual risks live.

Xero Arms the “Builder Class,” but It’s Still Very Early Days

Xero turned 20 this year, and at Xerocon London the company used that milestone to lean into what CEO Sukhinder Cassidy calls a “builder class” movement. The builder class includes accountants, bookkeepers, and business users who can create automations and software-like tools without being traditional developers. As David noted, this connects directly to Xero’s recent developer-channel push, and its Is Everyone a Developer Now? YouTube channel that once seemed puzzling but now reads as strategy.

The centerpiece is XeroForce, an invite-only, alpha-stage, no-code AI agent builder. David compared it to Zapier because you connect your apps, describe a workflow in plain language (“every time an email like this comes in, pull the PDF attachment and post it as a bill”), and it builds the automation for you. It’s part of Xero’s broader play, alongside the new mid-market Xero Ultra product, to keep customers on its full stack as they grow rather than losing them to a Sage Intacct or Oracle NetSuite.

Since Xero started connecting Claude and other agents in January 2026, its API usage jumped 400%, and 2,000 customers connected Xero to Claude in the first 60 days after the announcement. That sounds impressive until you do the math. Against roughly 5 million Xero businesses, 2,000 is about 0.04%. “We’re so early still,” Blake said. 

David’s advice was blunt: “Don’t get FOMO, because the number of people actually doing it is so, so teeny, teeny, teeny.” He also flagged the missing “database layer.” Accountants can vibe-code an app, but there’s often nowhere for it to live and no easy way to host and maintain it. That’s the practical control problem hiding behind the promise.

Vibe Coding: Real Six-Figure Savings, Real Key-Person Risk

If Xero arms accountants to build, some firms aren’t waiting for a vendor at all. As one listener put it, “Small firms can now develop their own software for less than the cost of buying software.” For example, at HoganTaylor, Randy Nail’s team needed a financial reporting tool for a new audit method. A vendor quote came in around $200,000 a year. Instead, they built it themselves in Excel with AI. Blake says that’s the smart way to do it: build in a familiar tool you already own, not a standalone app “living somewhere on a server” you don’t fully understand. Mike DeKock of MJD Advisors went further, replacing $300,000-a-year audit software with a build in Claude and Retool for under $30,000 annually. Even Starbucks is chasing the same impulse at enterprise scale, trying to trim its roughly $400 million software spend by building more in-house.

The catch in DeKock’s case is that he’s the only one who knows how it works. That’s key-person risk. Blake and David have lived it. Earmark’s AI course generator runs on about 75 Zapier steps Blake built years ago, and when it broke recently, only Blake could fix it. It’s the same problem as the notoriously complex financial model that only one person understands, where everyone else is afraid to click the wrong cell.

David pushed back, and fairly. AI coding tools document their own work well. It includes comments in the code and plain-English summaries, so it may be less of a problem than it first appears. And vendors aren’t a guaranteed safety net either. He recounted a Streamyard support headache: “If I have to use an AI bot to get support for your product, I might as well just chat with a different AI bot and have it build me a replacement.” Still, Blake summarizes, “You’re saving money now, but you’re creating risk potentially in the future.” Build where you’re comfortable, and keep a backup.

Checkbox Compliance vs. Real Protection

That same tradeoff between what looks safe on paper and what actually holds up runs straight through this episode’s audit and security stories. MindBridge submitted formal comments urging the PCAOB to clarify how auditors should document, assess, and defend AI-assisted work, especially now that software can test an entire population of transactions instead of a sample. The existing standards were built around sampling. They simply don’t address risk scores, investigation thresholds, or what counts as “sufficient evidence” in full-population testing. Firms run the new AI-assisted procedures alongside the old manual tests because, as David put it, they “need the check box” to pass inspection.

Meanwhile, the PCAOB voted unanimously to seek comment on easing parts of QC 1000, the 2024 quality-control standard. The changes could remove the external quality-control function for firms that audit more than 100 issuers, and relieve registered firms that don’t actually perform PCAOB engagements. The hosts recognize the need to modernize but question whether simply rolling back standards is the answer. Blake framed the core issue as an inputs-based approach to regulation, not an outcomes-based one. “Having a system doesn’t necessarily mean that your audit is going to be quality.”

David’s parallel nailed it. A cybersecurity audit of 275 Australian accounting firms found 76% had no protection against email spoofing, yet nearly all almost certainly have a required written information security plan (WISP). “You don’t have to be secure,” David said. “You just have to have a plan.” Or, more pointedly, “You must spend time building this document about your security plan instead of investing that time and resources into actually being secure.”

The Token Problem: Usage-Based Pricing and a New Kind of Cost Accounting

If compliance is about knowing where the real controls live, the next challenge is knowing where the real costs live. AI is rewriting software economics, from predictable, per-user subscriptions to variable, usage-based token spend. Tools like Claude Cowork can do far more now, but they cost more too. You ask an agent to do one thing, and it chugs away in the background, burning tokens and blowing past your allotment fast.

A KPMG survey of over 2,000 senior leaders across 20 countries put numbers to the pain. Only 29% feel they understand operating costs as they scale enterprise AI. Roughly a third cite limited understanding of AI economics as a barrier to deploying agents. And nearly half of organizations have re-phased AI deployments when costs exceeded expected value. Blake noted this could be “the next great area of cost accounting,” measuring where tokens get burned and proving where they deliver results.

Part of the answer is matching the model to the task. Lower-cost, high-fidelity models were the fastest-growing influence on AI strategy, up seven points from the prior quarter. Think Claude Opus versus Sonnet versus Haiku. Pick the right one not just per workflow, but per step within a workflow. Emerging “routers” now automatically direct each task to the most cost-effective model because, as David said, “you don’t need to blow $100 for a $0.02 answer.”

The Accountability Layer

Pull the threads together, and the pattern is unmistakable. Xero’s builder class and XeroForce, vibe-coded software, AI-assisted audits, token economics. Every advance in this episode came paired with a counterweight. Adoption is still a rounding error. Custom builds create key-person risk. Modernized standards risk hollowing out real oversight. And usage-based pricing makes costs genuinely hard to forecast.

Even the episode’s feel-good story carries a caution. One listener used Claude Cowork to handle Florida’s tedious CPE reporting, consolidating roughly 80 certificates into an Excel list, entering them in the state portal, and even catching and fixing its own duplicate entries and combining PDFs into a single upload. It was a “relatively low-risk” win, done with his own data while he caught up on Severance. But David’s cautioned listeners to check the portal’s terms of service, since older, pre-AI site terms may prohibit bots. 

The need for judgment is the through-line. As AI collapses the barrier to building and automating, doing the work stops being where accountants create their edge. The durable value moves to oversight. You need to know where the practical controls, real costs, and actual risks live. The tension is always between innovation and accountability, and accountants are uniquely positioned as the accountability layer. So start experimenting, but build where you’re comfortable (Excel is fine), keep a backup for anyone building custom tools, and start measuring your AI spend now.

There’s plenty more in episode 496, including Lionel Messi’s roughly $28 million potential U.S. tax bill and FIFA’s tax-exempt status, the activist-investor fight over CBIZ’s acquisition strategy, and the full World Cup betting-tax breakdown. Listen to the whole back-and-forth on The Accounting Podcast, and don’t forget you can earn free NASBA CPE for the episode through Earmark.

AICPA Puts a Deadline on the Work Most Accountants Do Today

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The accounting profession’s own leadership just put a timeline on when most of what accountants do today will be done by machines, and it’s sooner than you might think.

In this week’s episode of The Accounting Podcast, hosts Blake Oliver and David Leary returned from AICPA Engage in Las Vegas with some eye-opening news. The AICPA released a major report declaring that by 2040, routine compliance work like tax returns, audits, and bookkeeping (which make up about 80% of what accounting firms do) will be largely automated. Some industry leaders think it’ll happen even faster, maybe by 2030.

But that’s just one of the big changes coming. Private equity firms are pouring billions into accounting firms, and David has a theory about why that should worry everyone. Plus, Blake scored an exclusive interview with Shelly Weir from the Florida Institute of CPAs, who spent two years fighting legislation that would have eliminated their Board of Accountancy. She hadn’t talked to any media about it until now.

 

The Clock Is Ticking on Compliance Work

The AICPA report, Rise 2040: Shaping the Future of Finance and Accounting, surveyed thousands of accountants worldwide and concluded the bread-and-butter work of the profession has maybe 15 years left in its current form.

“Some timelines are even more aggressive,” Blake noted during the episode. “Allan Koltin recently said it’s by 2030.”

So what happens when machines take over compliance? According to Tom Hood from AICPA and CIMA, accountants will shift to four main roles: strategic guidance, AI oversight, data translation, and human-centered advisory. Basically, we’ll supervise the robots instead of doing the work ourselves.

David pushed back on the human advisory part. “I completely disagree,” he said. “I think the clients themselves would rather just chat it out with a bot. They don’t want to talk to the human.”

But Blake raised an important point. “If you don’t have the knowledge about what that AI is talking to you about, how do you know when it’s right and when it’s wrong?”

He’s got a point. Tax professionals are already finding major errors in AI-prepared returns. The analysis looks perfect, but the AI uses the wrong tax brackets or dates. It’s convincingly wrong, which might be worse than obviously wrong.

AI in Accounting Just Crossed a Major Threshold

David met up with three AI accounting founders at Engage: Jeff Seibert from Digits, Sasha Orloff from Puzzle, and Agree Ahmed from Flowglad. They’re all doing something David calls “hidden vibe coding.”

“You chat with these tools, and on the back end, they’re basically building code that’s custom to you and your workflows,” David explained. “Even though you’re not ‘vibe coding,’ you’re vibe coding an app under the covers and don’t even know it.”

The key difference is these tools run the same way every time, unlike chatbots that give different answers to the same question. Blake called this shift from probabilistic to deterministic outputs a game-changer for a profession built on accuracy.

The proof is already out there. OpenAI’s finance team runs with just 200 people. For a company that size, that’s tiny. Sarah Friar, OpenAI’s CFO, called it “really lean.” Industry benchmarks suggest they’d normally need 500 to 1,000 people. Zapier is even more extreme, with seven humans managing nearly 200 AI agents for internal accounting.

So why isn’t everyone jumping on board? The Rise 2040 report is brutally honest: 93% of participants said the biggest barrier to progress is the profession itself. We’re resistant to change. Yet 80% are optimistic about the future, which suggests accountants know change needs to happen even if they’re dragging their feet.

David offered a helpful reframe. “Everybody just got a silent promotion. You’re now being promoted to be a mid-level accounting manager, and you’re going to manage some AI employees.”

Private Equity’s Real Game

While AI is changing what accountants do, private equity is changing who owns the firms, and David has an interesting theory about it.

Take Crowe’s new $3 billion investment from KKR. That’s huge money, but what caught David’s attention is KKR owns companies in ERP systems, IT automation, cybersecurity, healthcare payments (WebMD), and healthcare staffing. And Crowe’s strongest vertical is healthcare.

“They’re not buying accounting firms because they think the accounting firms will make them money,” David argued. “They’re making money because the accounting firms are going to move their other product offerings.”

He compared it to Red Lobster’s bankruptcy. The PE firm that owned Red Lobster also owned shrimp boats and forced the restaurant to buy overpriced shrimp from those boats. The PE firm made money on shrimp; Red Lobster went under. Now, Red Lobster’s new owners, through a complex chain that traces back to Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund, which has made massive AI investments, want to make it “the most AI-forward restaurant that exists.”

The pattern shows up elsewhere. Sikich got PE funding from Madison Dearborn Partners, which has big investments in construction and real estate. Those are exactly the niches where Sikich is strong. David envisions accounting firms doing CFO work encountering a client problem and “just happening” to have a sister portfolio company that provides the exact solution needed.

CPAs aren’t blind to this. A recent survey found 57% think PE threatens the CPA brand. And yet many would still take the money if offered.

Florida’s Two-Year Battle to Save the CPA License

Perhaps the biggest threat is deregulation. For two years, Florida fought legislation that would have eliminated its Board of Accountancy, wiped out CPE requirements, and paved the way for the dismantling of CPA licensure.

Shelly Weir, who led the fight, gave Blake her first media interview about it. The bill was massive, with 550 pages targeting CPAs, architects, engineers, veterinarians, realtors, and several other professions. It flew through the House in just 18 days.

“We were literally physically pulling senators off the floor,” Shelly recalled about the final day of the 2025 session, which went until midnight. “I’m like, if there’s one lifeboat, I’m getting on it. Good luck to you people.”

Florida deployed serious resources, including nine lobbyists, public affairs firms, and polling projects. But their smartest move was personal. They found CPAs who knew legislators personally, like college roommates, church friends, and siblings, and had them make the case directly.

Their winning arguments were clever. First, they showed how eliminating the Board would actually create more red tape by breaking the interstate mobility system CPAs have built. Second, instead of just saying no, they developed their own modernization proposals.

“We were the only profession in this particular bill that had taken a moment to self-reflect,” Shelly said.

They beat the bill twice, but Shelly doesn’t think it’s over. “I do not think the issue of deregulation is going away,” she warned.

What Keeps Firms Up at Night

The AICPA also surveyed firms about their top concerns for 2026, and the results show a clear divide by firm size.

Small firms (solos and 2-10-person shops) worry most about keeping up with tax law changes but aren’t concerned about technology adoption or staff workload. Bigger firms have the opposite problem. They can handle tax changes but struggle to retain staff and implement technology.

“I’m wondering if the smaller firms, because they’re capable of adopting technology better, have less workload on their staff,” David observed.

Mid-size firms (11-100 people) are most worried about finding staff. They’re stuck in the middle: too big to be nimble, too small to have big-firm resources.

Only the largest firms (500+) worry about retaining staff, likely because they have many people nearing retirement.

Signs of Hope Amid the Chaos

Despite all these challenges, there are positive signals. Accounting enrollment jumped 8.9% this spring, way above the 1.3% growth for all majors. That’s impressive given the “accounting is dying because of AI” headlines.

The AICPA launched its “Trusted CPA” campaign at Engage, complete with a national TV commercial. David wondered whether this was a legal hack, since some states restrict how CPAs may use the designation. “You can’t put CPA on your LinkedIn page, but you can use the hashtag #TrustedCPA?”

More importantly, 43 states have now passed alternative pathway legislation, and Vermont, Missouri, and Louisiana just joined them. After years of tension between state societies and the AICPA over the 150-hour rule, there’s finally alignment.

“It feels like maybe they’re marching in an aligned point of view,” David observed. “Elevate the CPA brand, don’t let it get deregulated by states.”

Oh, and Someone Stole $7,000 Cash from a Brooklyn Accounting Firm

In lighter news, David shared a bizarre story that had him scratching his head. Police are looking for someone who walked into an accounting firm in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and stole $7,000 in cash right off an employee’s desk.

“First off, what accounting firm has $7,000 just sitting on a desk?” David asked. “What does this accounting firm do that they have this cash lying around? Something doesn’t add up.”

Blake’s take is, “It’s an indication of how much of the profession is still operating 20 years in the past.”

The accounting profession faces three simultaneous pressures from the automation of core work, private equity ownership with potential conflicts, and deregulation threats to the license itself. But the profession is responding. Enrollment is up. States are modernizing pathways. AI tools are getting good enough to actually trust.

Treat this moment as a chance to redefine your value. Don’t wait for someone else to dictate the changes, or you might find there’s nothing left to save.

Want to hear the full discussion, including more details about AI developments and Shelly’s complete interview? Listen to Episode 492 of The Accounting Podcast.