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Section 7216: What tax professionals must know before sharing client information

Grady has hit capacity. He runs Lighthouse Accounting LLC, a solo firm that provides tax preparation, planning, representation, bookkeeping, payroll, and some attestation work. To grow, he could hire seasonal preparers, outsource work to a contractor, or merge into a colleague’s firm. Those staffing and business decisions are also federal…

Should your firm move everything into the Intuit Accountant Suite yet?

An accountant was poking around in a new dashboard, or “playing with his data,” as Intuit’s Director of Product Management, Karla Uribe, put it, when something jumped out. A client’s cash on hand had dropped sharply. He wasn’t looking for it. But there it was, so he called the client…

The country that existed only on paper

Seventy Scottish settlers reached Central America in November 1822, expecting to begin new lives in a thriving country. They’d been promised paved streets, government buildings, a cathedral, an opera house, and farmland that could produce three corn harvests a year. Gold supposedly filled the nearby rivers. Instead, as Caleb Newquist…

Vulnerability, Curiosity, and the Messy Middle of Leadership

At Nancy McClelland’s “Vulnerability as a Strength” panel at Scaling New Heights, the session opened with a word cloud. The question on screen was, “How does it make you feel when you think you’re the only one who doesn’t have it together?” Almost every answer was some version of “poopy”…

How to build a bench of accounting talent in 15 minutes a day

A team member resigns during a demanding season. You post the job that afternoon, refresh your inbox for a week, and feel relieved when a résumé with the right title finally appears. Under pressure, it’s easy to let urgency decide for you. Fletcher Wimbush says the posting isn’t the real…

How a “secret menu” tax service protects capacity and creates value

One of Rachel and Marcus Dillon’s tax services is missing from their firm’s website. That is not an oversight. It is a capacity strategy. In a summer 2026 episode of Who’s Really the BOSS?, Rachel and Marcus explain how they built the Tax Advisory Plan (TAP). Their firm stopped accepting…

Four ways out of a partnership and the hot assets waiting in each one

Jessica wants out of Lighthouse LLC. After several years of losses, her partner Seth remains committed, but she is done. If Seth pays her $10,000 for her interest, the transaction may look small, but it isn’t. The transaction also relieves Jessica of her $40,000 share of partnership liabilities. For tax…

Take a step instead of a leap when you’re ready to begin again

You can build a client forecast, test three scenarios, and explain risk down to the dollar. Then you close the laptop and leave the spreadsheet about your own future unopened for years. Fear rarely introduces itself by name. It can look like a business plan you never write, a job…

Is your audit evidence sufficient and appropriate, or just abundant?

Early in her audit career, Meredith Mednick, CPA, CA, received an assignment that sounded simple. She was auditing a midsize manufacturing company and needed evidence that its accounts payable balance was complete. If the company owed money at year-end, the liability needed to be on the books. Meredith asked the…

What Happens When Cash, Real Estate, and Sweat Equity Walk Into an LLC

Three people start a business: Lighthouse LLC, a multi-member LLC treated by default as a partnership. Jessica writes a $500,000 check. Seth hands over real estate valued at $500,000, although his adjusted basis is only $200,000. And Grady rolls up his sleeves and agrees to run the place. They shake…

Grant Thornton’s CBIZ Deal Tests Accounting’s Guardrails

Grant Thornton plans to spend about $5 billion to acquire CBIZ in what David Leary called “the largest accounting deal in over 25 years.” The combination would create the fifth-largest accounting firm in the U.S. Yet its expected $7.5 billion in global revenue would still be far below KPMG, the…

How a Solo CPA Turned a Seven-Hour Tax Workpaper Into a One-Hour Job

“Anybody who says they’ve built autonomous AI in accounting or finance is full of crap. Nobody has figured out how to do that yet.” That’s how Blake Oliver opens Episode 497 of The Accounting Podcast, and it sets the tone for the whole show. Blake and co-host David Leary spend…

What Women in Accounting Learn When They Stop Scaling and Start Choosing

Erin Pohan remembers exactly how it felt the first time she walked into Bridging the Gap and saw accountants laughing in hallways and clustering around tables like they’d known each other for years. “How do they do that?” she wondered. “Don’t they sit at their desks all day like I…

The colleague who masters AI will surpass you (not the machine)

In 2015, at her second QuickBooks Connect, Alicia Katz Pollock spent an entire conference hunting for one woman. She’d just published her first book, QuickBooks Online from Setup to Tax Time, and she wanted into the Intuit Trainer Writer Network. Seth David and Eric Greenspan had given her Alison Ball’s…

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