Podcasts

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

Earmark Team · August 10, 2026 ·

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 do?”

Then she spotted Nancy McClelland, Jennifer Dymond, and Roman Villard at a table. She walked up and said simply, “I follow you guys on LinkedIn. It’s so nice to meet you.”

“They all turned their entire body to me and looked me in the eye and wanted to know who I was,” Erin recalled during the live recording of She Counts at the Women in Accounting & Finance Visionaries & Entrepreneurs (WAVE) Seattle event. “In that moment I felt seen.”

She refused to wait another year to feel that way again. So she brought it home to Seattle.

From Conference Afterglow to WAVE-Seattle

After experiencing that connection at Bridging the Gap, Erin didn’t want to hop on planes to Las Vegas or Florida to find community again. She threw an evening WAVE event to test the waters. The momentum was so strong that she posted on LinkedIn to gauge wider interest.

“We had women from ten different states and Canada who were like, yes, sign me up. I want community,” Erin shared with the live audience. “They don’t care where they have to go. They just wanted to have the conversations that we all need to have.”

This was WAVE’s second year, and women flew in from Florida, Chicago, Boston, DC, and Baltimore. What started as Erin’s attempt to recreate her conference afterglow became a space where women in accounting could have the conversations that rarely happen out-loud.

The Success Definitions That Were Never Yours

Nancy has run The Dancing Accountant for 25 years. “Fewer than half of those years have been rosy in any way, shape or form,” she admitted to the audience.

The turning point came from a single crushing conversation. Early in her career, a vendor representative asked about her business model. When Nancy explained she wanted to work in the business, not on it, i.e., no staff, managing schedules, or deliverables, he called her stupid.

“You’re avoiding scaling and you’re leaving money on the table,” he’d said.

Nancy was younger then. She absorbed it the way many of us absorb criticism from someone who sounds authoritative. She believed him.

“At age 54, I can tell you I don’t want to scale. I don’t like scaling. I’m not good at managing a team,” Nancy said. “I’m really, really good at meeting with clients. I’m really good at preparing tax-ready books and teaching people how to do that. So why would I scale?”

She concluded, “I am leaving money on the table. The table can keep it.”

But that vendor’s casual insult cost her ten years. “It took me over a decade to dig out from the mess that I made by listening to what he had to say.”

Co-host Questian Telka’s story is more recent but equally familiar. She’d absorbed the same industry gospel of scale, scale, scale.

“If you don’t have a team of 20, then you’re not really a firm,” she said, mimicking the voices. “You have a job. It’s not a business.”

Nancy cut in, “I think that’s just a shit thing to say.”

“I disagree with it entirely,” Questian shared.

Over the past year, Questian has completely restructured her firm. She let go of her team, offboarded most clients, and pivoted to nonprofit CFO work exclusively. “It’s given me the ability to make a lot more money with a lot fewer clients and a lot less time,” she explained. “Most profit with the least amount of work. I want to enjoy the work I’m doing.”

Why You Need a Board of Directors

Finding courage to rewrite the rules rarely happens alone. That’s where your personal board of directors comes in.

“If you’re the CEO of your own life, who’s your chairman? And who else sits around that table?” Erin asked, sharing the framework that had lit her up after an entrepreneur session.

For Nancy, the chairman is her husband. He’s a software developer who processes her verbal torrents and spots patterns she can’t see. Questian calls him “Nancy’s personal large language model.”

“He is the best large language model ever,” Nancy laughed. “A little less talky than ChatGPT, to be sure.”

The value became clear in one memorable story. Nancy had a famously difficult client. When the client’s lawyer fired Nancy during a dispute, Nancy started arguing to keep the client. Her husband grabbed her arm and whispered, “Nancy, this is freedom. Run!”

“He’d heard all the times I vented,” Nancy explained.

The rest of Nancy’s board includes her “bestie” Melissa Miller Furgeson and her therapist, whom she found in the most accountant way possible.

“I made a spreadsheet of all of the therapists in Chicago,” Nancy confessed. “I kept not choosing one because I was overwhelmed by all of the information.” Finally, she pulled up Google Maps, typed “therapist,” and picked the closest one who wasn’t already her client.

Questian’s board centers on her partner, who pushes her past her comfort zone. At one point, she texted Nancy, “I just borrowed my boyfriend’s balls” to find courage for a business risk.

But your board must have diversity.

“I actually really don’t like the term ‘like-minded people,'” Erin admitted. She values different perspectives, even from something as simple as a LinkedIn poll about a botched swag order. The range of responses helped recalibrate her own reaction.

The Women Still Doing It Alone

When Erin asked what mindset shift the hosts hoped attendees would carry forward, Nancy had her answer: You don’t have to do this alone.

Then she spent the day at WAVE and realized, “You already know you don’t have to do this alone because you’re in this room.” Some attendees had flown across the country to be there.

So Nancy pivoted, “You have other people in your life that need to be taught that they don’t have to do it alone.”

The challenge was direct. When you return to your office, think of one person who needs permission to stop grinding in silence. Reach out to them.

For those ready to find community, the panel offered specific recommendations. Bridging the Gap topped Nancy’s list. It’s where she learned from Nayo Carter-Gray how to take a vacation during tax season. (“I literally live in Mexico for four months during tax season,” Nancy shared.) Local one-day events like WAVE and Advisory Amplified help you meet nearby practitioners who become real connections.

But what if you’re terrified of networking?

“When I first started going to conferences, I couldn’t even talk to anyone. I was too scared,” Questian admitted.

The extroverts will help. Nancy and Sharrin Fuller have a standing offer. If you spot them at any conference, come up and they’ll make sure you meet people. Andrea MacDonald posted online that she’d be “lurking in the corner” as an introvert at WAVE, asking people to find her. That willingness to be vulnerable matters.

There’s also the Accounting Cornerstone Foundation, which provides scholarships for conference attendance. A December fundraiser that Jason Staats matched dollar-for-dollar helped six people attend conferences they couldn’t otherwise afford.

“Give without expecting to receive anything in return,” Questian said, summing up the philosophy underneath it all.

Write Your Own Rules

One moment during the Q&A captured the energy perfectly. When an audience member expressed interest in selling her firm, Erin asked if anyone might want to buy a firm or clients, and hands shot up across the room. “Somebody take a picture of this!” Nancy shouted, as attendees scrambled to capture all the raised hands. Less than two months later, a deal was closed.

These are the conversations and connections that happen when women in accounting gather to talk honestly about burning out and rebuilding, throwing traditional rules out the window, and creating your own path.

“Figure out your why,” Questian urged. “Define what success is to you and don’t listen to or look at what anyone else is doing.”

After everything shared in this episode, they left the audience and listeners with one question: “What’s one definition of success you’ve personally outgrown?”

Listen to the full episode above for the complete conversation, including rapid-fire Q&A about finding therapists, leadership coaches, and more. Then follow the She Counts podcast on LinkedIn to join the conversation.

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

Earmark Team · August 5, 2026 ·

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 name. So Alicia asked everyone. Where is she? Who is she? No luck.

Then she sat down at a main stage session and noticed the woman in the row in front of her, tweeting furiously about everything happening on stage. Alicia glanced at the screen, saw the name “Alison Ball,” and realized her quarry had been right in front of her the whole time. One tap on the shoulder launched a friendship that’s now a decade deep.

That story is the whole thesis in miniature. On Episode 151 of The Unofficial QuickBooks Accountants Podcast, Alicia sat down with the longtime Intuit veteran, now of B dot All Consulting, to trace a career that spans nearly 16 years inside Intuit, three job transitions, and a front-row seat to the AI wave. The through-line is how practitioners respond when the ground shifts beneath them. Relationships (not software) open the doors that matter. The tools worth embracing solve real problems, grow out of communities where accountants “learn, teach, learn,” and eventually fade into invisible infrastructure, as email and cloud computing already have. The blunt takeaway is that AI won’t make you obsolete, but colleagues who use it well will surpass those who refuse to start using it.

Here we’ll walk through four threads from that conversation, including how a community built careers, how relationships rescued Alison through upheaval, how technology should be built and adopted, and what the near future holds for apps and tax prep.

The network that built careers

The Intuit Trainer Writer Network was never really about content. It was connective tissue. Alison and Al Polizzi started it in late 2004 by gathering QuickBooks experts who could teach, speak, write training materials, and answer users’ questions online. Joe Woodard was TWN member number one. It began Desktop-focused and evolved alongside QuickBooks Online, the cloud, and every product that followed.

The bar was high. You had to know the product, but you also had to teach and speak, or credibly create beautiful training materials. Alicia was, in Alison’s words, a “triple threat” who could do all three, which is why she skipped the usual audition and simply handed over her book. Over time, existing members ran auditions at the major conferences, because Alison had learned the best judges of a TWN member were other TWN members.

What made the network matter wasn’t just career-building. When Intuit shipped a change, TWN members supplied the why. “Nobody likes change,” Alicia noted. “It’s instantly frustrating.” But give people the background and the bigger picture, and they could get their heads around it. Members dispelled false information and corrected misunderstandings that spread when people react without the full picture.

Both hosts still mourn its disbanding. “I will go on record saying I don’t understand why Intuit did that,” Alison said. Alicia believes Intuit may not have grasped the network’s impact on public perception. These were the cheerleaders and influencers. The people who smoothed the learning curve.

“If it wasn’t for the Intuit Trainer Writer Network,” Alicia said, “I don’t know that I would be doing what I’m doing.” “You would,” Alison says. “You’d just be doing it very differently. It would just be a different path.”

When the ground shifts

The network helped build Alison’s career, but it also caught her when her career was upended.

In 2020, after almost 16 years, Alison was laid off from Intuit. She’s blunt that Intuit does these transitions humanely. Where other tech companies had walked her out the same day, unable to even fill a prescription, Intuit gave her two months. The first month was “pitcher-catcher.” She handed TWN off to Mindy King, making sure Mindy knew where everything lived. The second month kept her on salary while she interviewed internally or externally.

She had internal options. But after almost 16 years, she wanted to know what else was out there. Joe introduced her to Chris Farrell at Liscio, and she “fell in love with the problem” of helping firms give clients a great experience and move documents faster. Three years later, she left for Bookkeep because she fell in love with that problem. When a reorg at Bookkeep laid her off again, she made a lifestyle move back to Canada and started independent consulting. “This is again,” she said, “the power of the network.”

That’s the lesson under the résumé. The doors opened through people, from an introduction here to a relationship built over years there. Intuit’s more recent 3,000-person layoff came with generous severance packages, but severance doesn’t open the next door; relationships do. Build them before you need them.

Building and adopting tech around the real problem

Those same relationships shape how technology should be built and where founders go wrong.

Alison’s number-one critique of accounting tech companies is they don’t involve accountants and bookkeepers early enough. Founders fall in love with a solution before they deeply understand the customer’s problem, then assume that if they build it, users will come. She invokes Einstein’s advice when you have an hour, spend 55 minutes understanding the problem and 5 on the solution.

The practitioner’s reality makes this urgent. There’s a proliferation of apps and only so many hours in a day.

Enter Blake Oliver’s framework, delivered as a keynote at a Client Hub summit. Don’t point AI at getting data in faster first, Blake argues. Faster data just slams into a downstream bottleneck and you throw more stuff at the jam without clearing it. Point AI at the bottleneck itself. “But the bottleneck is me,” Alicia said. Alison recommended she “peel the onion.” How many decisions land on your desk, and do they need to? She points to Terrell Turner’s decision-list idea: define which decisions must reach you, route everything else to others, and you create autonomy instead of a pile-up at your door.

Her last tip is pointedly relevant to podcast listeners: use conferences with intention. Clear your calendar. Do zero client work that week. Go in with specific questions and specific things to solve, and learn from peers about what actually works.

Learn, teach, learn

Solving bottlenecks is technical. But AI can’t replace human connection.

Is the profession getting more collaborative or more fragmented? Alison thinks the jury’s out. She firmly believes a solo practitioner could silo behind a stack of AI agents and run the whole show alone, “but I don’t think that would meet that person’s human needs.”

Alicia’s own community proves the point. When she built Royalwise OWLS, it was content, content, content. She offered as much deep QuickBooks training as she could deliver. Then she listened to members, and what they valued most wasn’t access to training but access to each other. So, in her “Ask Alicia Anything” sessions, she now deliberately sits back and lets members answer each other’s questions, shifting the focus from content to community. That listen-and-shift approach helped Royalwise earn a BDO Alliance Growth Strategy award.

There’s a reason she does it. “The best way of learning something yourself is to teach it,” Alicia said. “And by sharing your knowledge, I’m elevating everybody in the group.” Alison recognized the pattern instantly. “There’s actual science behind that. At Intuit, we used to call it learn, teach, learn.” You learn something, you teach it, and in teaching it you learn it better. It lifts the whole group.

She sees the same openness across markets. She says Canadian accounting pros are “incredibly open,” helpful, inclusive, and collaborative. Different tax structure, same instinct to help. Connection is central everywhere.

The future is invisible

If community is what endures, what happens to the tools? Alison sees them disappearing.

The winning ones will fade into invisible infrastructure. Remember how miraculous email felt? Alicia does. She was building a database at Santa Fe Community College, wishing she could just “shoot a note” to a colleague across the building instead of having to hoof it across campus, and two weeks later she heard the announcement about “this new thing called email.” The cloud went the same way. Now you only notice it when the Wi-Fi drops.

Alison predicts the apps that fail will be the ones that never understood their customers’ problem. Watch for the tell-tale pivot, or the sudden “we’re not doing this anymore, we’re doing that.” But the real transformation is how practitioners organize workflows to focus on value-adding work instead of manual entry. She’s been chasing this since her early Intuit days and the “never enter data twice” (NED) principle. Back then she was one of the tiny voices asking why we had to enter data at all. The bank already knew. Now, of course, bank feeds do exactly that.

Tax is next. Alicia cited a chart pegging the cost of processing U.S. taxes at $300 to $500 billion a year. We prepare everything, submit it, and the government tells us we were off by $42. If they already knew, why do it at all? The UK answered that in 2011 with Making Tax Digital and PAYE. Most wage earners never file a return; the government sends a simple year-end calculation and a small, accurate refund. The U.S. can’t replicate that quickly because of massive tech debt. Fall into the cracks at the IRS and you wait months, sometimes years. But basic 1040-style prep will likely head the UK’s direction, while complex, cross-border, business, and specialized work stays firmly human.

The only barrier is willingness

So here’s the blunt warning that closes the conversation. Accountants and bookkeepers won’t become obsolete. But professionals who refuse to adopt AI will be eclipsed by those who use it well. “There will be people that are using AI, and they will eclipse you.”

Alison’s advice for getting started is to first, name your feelings. If you’re anxious, burned out, or overwhelmed, say it out loud, and know you’re not alone. Technology is moving at a hurtling speed none of us has seen before. Then isolate one bottleneck, lean on trusted peers and thought leaders instead of trying to master every tool alone, and start. And if you think age is your excuse, consider Alison’s godmother. In her 80s, she’s using ChatGPT to write her family’s history, right down to traveling with reindeer. If she can jump right in, the barrier isn’t age or aptitude. It’s willingness.

A few takeaways to carry into your own practice:

Build your professional network before you need it. It’s what opens doors when the ground shifts.
Point AI at your downstream bottleneck, not at faster data intake. Faster data just hits the jam.
Use conferences with intention. Clear the calendar, do no client work, bring specific questions.
Teach what you learn. It deepens your own expertise and lifts your whole community.
Don’t try to master every tool alone. Find your trusted guides and start small.

Listen to the full episode for Alison’s complete career arc, Blake’s bottleneck framework, and the reindeer story in her own words.

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!

QuickBooks Online Accountant Retires December 31. Are You Ready to Make the Switch?

Earmark Team · August 5, 2026 ·

There’s a countdown clock ticking, and most accounting professionals haven’t looked up at it yet.

In Episode 149 of The Unofficial QuickBooks Accountants Podcast, host Alicia Katz Pollock and guest host Dan DeLong break down the June 17th ProAdvisor In the Know session hosted by Arti Patel Martinez. Two different accountants at Scaling New Heights told Alicia these recaps are their favorites. It’s like getting the CliffsNotes version plus expert commentary on what matters for your firm.

Highlights from the session included:

The retirement of QuickBooks Online Accountant on December 31, 2026
The reports engine you’ve used for a decade is being rebuilt from scratch
The 30-year-old ProAdvisor program is transforming into something entirely new

This is no routine update. It’s a complete foundation replacement while we’re all still working in the building.

Before diving into the changes, Alicia announced that Intuit now sponsors The Unofficial QuickBooks Accountants Podcast. As she emphasized, she remains fiercely independent. Intuit won’t review her content. But after listening for two and a half years, Intuit considers her the “ProAdvisor whisperer,” translating between their intentions and what practitioners actually think.

Your Familiar Interface Goes Away in 18 Months

The first issue to clear up is that the ProAdvisor program isn’t disappearing. QuickBooks Online Accountant (that familiar black bar on the left side of your screen) is going away as of December 31, 2026.

Its replacement is Intuit Accountant Suite (IAS), which already has all the same tools. Plus, it matches what your clients see, and that’s where Intuit loads every new feature. You can switch right now through the gear icon. As Dan pointed out, don’t wait until the last day of the year and force yourself to learn under pressure. “Give yourself that runway so you and your team can get familiar with where everything moved.”

The pricing stays simple. IAS Core, where you switch between clients, is still free. IAS Accelerate, the $149 tier for teams, helps you manage staff and clients through dashboards. That pricing kicks in around July or August. Intuit developed seven ProAdvisor Academy courses to walk you through everything.

Modern Reports

Subhanan Sahoo, Intuit’s Senior Staff Product Manager, has worked extensively on reports. He opened with a revealing poll: only 18% use Modern Reports “almost always.” Another 38% switch between modern and classic depending on the task. A full 29% still use only the classic version, and 13% don’t even notice which version they’re using.

So why force the change? Classic Reports was built on what Subhanan called “monolithic” technology. One outage could break reports for every customer at once. After 10-plus years of data accumulation, performance started failing. Large transaction volumes would bog down or break completely. The static tables blocked any chance of dashboards, pivot tables, or custom formulas. Even small changes took months of engineering work to ship.

“If you’ve ever had to print out a general ledger for the entire year, you’ve seen the ‘load more… load more… can’t load more’ at the bottom,” Dan said, capturing the pain perfectly. That’s exactly what Modern Reports fixes. And the kicker is, QuickBooks Online never deletes old data. Alicia has clients with 25 years of transactions because they never condensed before migrating from desktop.

As of June 15th, all standard reports became modern-only. Between June 15th and August 15th, your saved custom reports will open in modern by default, but you can still switch back. After August 15th, everything goes modern-only with no rollback option.

Some Fixes You Might Have Missed

Alicia recommends that if you tested something months ago and decided it didn’t work, go back and check it again. “Things that didn’t work, they fix. But if you don’t actually go back and try it again, you never know that it’s actually working.”

The fixes already shipped are substantial:

Choose whether the company name or the report name appears on top
Toggle dashes on or off for blank cells
New “Apply Changes” button to make multiple customizations without constant refreshing
Add banded rows, grid lines and even column colors
Auto-refresh when you edit a transaction from within a report
Balance sheet discrepancies between modern and classic are fixed
New collapse levels for subcategories
Exports now include formulas, not static numbers
Accountants can share custom reports within their firm only
Right-click and control-click support added
Transaction IDs are now available in the detailed reports

As Dan noted, he appreciates that Intuit makes these changes optional. “If you like the dashes, you can keep the dashes. They’re not just eliminating them because someone complained.”

Your feedback mechanism is quickbooks.canny.io. The developers actually respond, asking for company IDs, screenshots, and videos. You can upvote issues others have raised. It’s community-based, and it works.

Enterprise Suite Tackles the Complex Stuff

Likith Lanka presented complex consolidations, a topic so dense that both hosts said you need to watch the recording to fully grasp it. When asked about their most complex consolidation use cases, 48% handle simple one-level hierarchies, 15% work with multi-level hierarchies and consolidations, and 23% deal with eliminations.

Enterprise Suite now offers transactional eliminations and three consolidation methods, each with granular controls. You get options for intercompany journal entries, allocations, sales, and cross-company bill payments. Alicia highlighted one standout feature: a “smart complete” button that auto-fills all the due-to/due-from entries across companies based on your initial entry.

The Early Access program lets you beta-test features like manufacturing and assemblies, cross-company bill payments, and recurring intercompany transactions. This prompted Dan to wonder hopefully if QuickBooks Labs might make a comeback.

Alicia’s own experience validates the platform. “I just moved one of my clients onto Enterprise Suite, and they are so excited,” Alicia said. After nearly two years, IES has “come into its own” as a legitimate solution for growing, complex businesses.

The ProAdvisor Program Gets a 30-Year Overhaul

Jaclyn Anku, who leads the new Pro Partner Accountants program, didn’t mince words about why change is needed. ProAdvisors are overwhelmed by AI adoption, talent shortages, and the push toward advisory services. The 30-year-old partner program simply wasn’t built for today’s challenges.

The new program launches in 2027, but preparation starts now. It’s open to everyone from solo practitioners to top-100 firms. You keep your existing benefits, including 30% ProAdvisor preferred pricing on QuickBooks Workforce (the new name for payroll and time), Bill Pay, and the client discount for 12 months. You still get QBO Advanced with Bill Pay Elite, plus free payroll and time tracking through My Books.

What’s new addresses existing pain points. Customer support expands to Saturdays, with Sunday hours at higher tiers. More importantly, support staff will have actual accounting knowledge.

The revenue share math requires careful calculation. It stretches from one to three years, but scales from 10% to 25% based on your tier. Compare that to today’s flat 30% for one year. Both hosts emphasized it’s essential to do the math. Dan also warned about a hidden penalty. If clients don’t enter billing info within one day of assignment, they’re kicked out of revenue share, and you get nothing.

The big carrot is that when you reach the highest tier, IAS Accelerate is free. That’s $149 in monthly value.

Five Tiers and Your Path Forward

The tiers are straightforward:

Member: Just sign up
Partner: Pass one certification, have one client
Preferred, Premier, Elite: Criteria coming fall 2026

New educational offerings include CAS (Client Advisory Services) training to turn data into recommendations and AI for Accountants courses co-written by Jan Haugo. A training manager lets you track your team’s certifications and assign courses.

Intuit’s also tackling the talent shortage with a five-year goal to upskill one million accounting students, connecting them to firms through mentorship programs. Alicia’s already received an invitation to mentor, a natural fit given her new bookkeeping incubator program with five interns.

The closing poll was sobering. Forty percent of attendees haven’t transitioned to IAS or gotten certified yet. As Alicia said, seeing that “only 60% have even touched IAS and certifications” was a wake-up call. “We still have work to do.”

Your Move-Now Action List

Intuit is rebuilding every system you touch daily, and deadlines are set. Here’s what to do:

Switch to Intuit Accountant Suite today via the gear icon. Don’t learn under pressure on December 31st
Test Modern Reports monthly and submit feedback at quickbooks.canny.io. Features get fixed constantly
Check your certification status and consolidate multiple logins (now called “consoles,” not “realms”)
Calculate the revenue share math before assuming three years at lower percentages beat one year at 30%
Register Enterprise Suite clients by July 1st for the 30% revenue share
Explore the free training in CAS and AI to build advisory skills

For the complete breakdown with all the details, poll results, and candid commentary from Alicia and Dan, listen to the full episode. These changes affect every accountant using QuickBooks, so don’t let the deadlines sneak up on you.

What Intuit’s $3.3 Billion QuickBooks Quarter Really Means for Your Practice

Earmark Team · August 4, 2026 ·

In a room of 100 accounting professionals at the Scaling New Heights conference, host Alicia Katz Pollock asked, ‘How many of you have actually explored the new QuickBooks features you’re now paying more for? Have you uploaded a contract and sent it for signature? Did you use the customer hub to build a pipeline? Tried the anomaly detection to spot errors in your data?’

Three hands went up. One of them was hers.

The gap between what Intuit is building and what practitioners are actually using speaks volumes about the tension at the heart of Intuit’s latest earnings report. The company is pouring billions into AI, mid-market expansion, and payments infrastructure. But if the people who use QuickBooks every day haven’t caught up with what’s already there, every price increase feels less like added value and more like a shakedown.

In Episode 148 of The Unofficial QuickBooks Accountants Podcast, Alicia flew solo to break down Intuit’s Q3 fiscal year earnings report. She delivered a line-by-line translation of Wall Street numbers into plain English for the people who actually live inside QuickBooks every day.

The numbers show Intuit is transforming QuickBooks from bookkeeping software into what Alicia calls “an AI-powered financial operating system for businesses.” The revenue figures, growth rates, and strategic shifts show where QuickBooks is heading and what accounting professionals need to prepare for right now.

Where Intuit’s Money Comes From

Before diving into QuickBooks specifics, it helps to see the whole landscape. Intuit reported total revenue of $6.6 billion for the quarter, up 10% year over year. Operating income hit $4.7 billion, up from $4.3 billion last year. Those are healthy numbers, but the prior quarter grew by 17%, so growth slowed.

When growth slows at a company this size, management tends to double down on what’s working. And in this report, what’s working is QuickBooks.

Intuit even raised its full-year revenue guidance to $21.3-21.4 billion, expecting 13-14% growth. That tells us that even with weak spots in DIY TurboTax and MailChimp, management sees enough strength elsewhere to raise expectations. QuickBooks is carrying the load.

QuickBooks: The $3.3 Billion Growth Engine

The Global Business Solutions segment, which covers QuickBooks Online, payments, payroll, MailChimp, and desktop, generated $3.3 billion in revenue, up 15% year over year. But strip out MailChimp, and the segment grew 17%. As Alicia noted, “MailChimp is pulling the segment average down. Without MailChimp, the core QuickBooks-related businesses look stronger.”

Intuit raised full-year guidance for this segment to 16% growth, up from 14-15%. When management raises guidance, they’re telling investors they’re more confident than before. Clearly, QuickBooks is one of Intuit’s most important growth engines.

QuickBooks Online alone generated $2.5 billion in one quarter, up 19% year over year. Exclude MailChimp, and QBO revenue grew 22%. As Alicia emphasized, “QBO is no longer simply the online version of QuickBooks. It’s the center of Intuit’s small business strategy.”

At this size, 22% growth is remarkable. It means Intuit isn’t treating QBO as a mature product to maintain. They’re treating it as a growth platform to expand.

The growth did slow slightly from 21% to 19% quarter over quarter. Part of the reason is more new customers start on lower-end plans like Simple Start, and Intuit offered bigger discounts through accountant wholesale billing. For ProAdvisors, that’s worth watching. Your pricing arrangements clearly affect Intuit’s revenue calculations.

The Real Money Is in Payments and Payroll

The subscription fees are just the beginning. QBO accounting revenue was $1.28 billion, up 22% year over year. That growth came from higher prices, more customers, and people upgrading to better plans. The annual price increases are working (at least from Intuit’s perspective).

But the bigger story is QBO services revenue, which includes payments, payroll, and MailChimp. It hit $1.22 billion, up 15%. Strip out MailChimp, and services grew 22%. QuickBooks payments and bill pay volume grew 30% year over year.

“That’s one of the most important numbers in this entire report,” Alicia said. “That’s not just revenue, that’s volume.” It measures actual money flowing through QuickBooks, such as payments received through merchant services and payments sent through bill pay.

When QuickBooks becomes the place where money moves, not just where it’s recorded, everything changes. Payment links, bill-pay fees, merchant services, financing, lending, and cash-flow tools all become natural parts of the platform. For bookkeepers, this means clients will see more financial products offered directly inside QBO.

Payroll tells a similar story. Growth came from more customers using payroll, existing customers upgrading to better offerings, and higher prices across the board. Intuit also launched QuickBooks Workforce, an integrated Human Capital Management suite.

Meanwhile, desktop revenue was $788 million, up 6%. It’s still meaningful, but growth slowed from 10% last quarter. Desktop remains financially important, especially for existing users, but it’s clearly not where Intuit’s putting its energy. The future is online.

Mid-Market and Enterprise Show The Fastest Growth

The most telling number in the entire report is revenue from QBO Advanced and Intuit Enterprise Suite grew 38% year over year. That’s the fastest growth in the entire QuickBooks ecosystem. Enterprise Suite contract volume grew 37% quarter over quarter, and Intuit is scaling its sales capacity by 30%.

“Intuit is moving upmarket,” Alicia explained. “The fastest growth is coming from larger, more complex businesses, not just microbusinesses or brand new startups.”

For ProAdvisors and consultants, this is a major opportunity. If your practice supports growing businesses, expect more demand for implementation, cleanup, reporting, workflow design, app advisory, and internal controls. But watch out: Intuit’s expanded sales teams might approach your clients directly about upgrading. Have those conversations first.

AI Is Already Here and Processing 50 Million Transactions Weekly

The AI conversation isn’t theoretical anymore. Intuit’s accounting AI agent already powers recommendations for more than 50 million transactions every week. That includes categorization, anomaly detection, review workflows, and cleanup assistance.

“That does not mean bookkeepers disappear,” Alicia emphasized. “It means the work changes. The value may shift away from entering and categorizing transactions towards reviewing, correcting, advising, training the systems, and interpreting the results.”

The strongest AI adoption comes from QBO Advanced and Plus customers. That’s one reason those tiers see the biggest price increases. Intuit also plans to introduce consumption-based pricing for AI, so the more AI work you ask the system to do, the more you pay.

The August Pricing Reality Check

Starting in August, Intuit is restructuring its entire product lineup. New plan names (Free, Lite), redistributed features, and significant price increases weighted toward upper tiers. Essentials goes up $10. Plus jumps from $115 to $140. Advanced leaps from $275 to $340.

This brings us back to Alicia’s Scaling New Heights story. She was presenting a QBO-Xero comparison the morning the pricing email dropped. Her slide was instantly wrong. The room erupted, especially when attendees saw Xero at $90 next to QBO Advanced at $340.

“No wonder everybody was up in arms about the price increase,” she said, “because you’re actually getting more for your buck. But if you haven’t tried and implemented all the new features, you just feel like you’re getting price gouged.”

Her advice is to “look around at all the different features in there and press buttons you haven’t pressed before.” She thinks Intuit “put the cart before the horse” by raising prices before users adopted the features those prices supposedly pay for.

What’s Happening Beyond QuickBooks

The broader Intuit ecosystem tells us where QuickBooks is heading, too.

TurboTax is undergoing a dramatic shift. Consumer tax revenue was $5.3 billion, up just 8%, slower than expected. About two million expected DIY filers didn’t file. Low-end filers earning under $50,000 proved especially price-sensitive.

But TurboTax Live grew 38% in customers and 36% in revenue. Assisted tax now accounts for 53% of TurboTax’s total revenue. As Alicia noted, “Customers still pay for human expertise even in a world with better software and AI. That’s encouraging for accountants and bookkeepers.”

Credit Karma generated $631 million, up 15%, with guidance raised to 19% growth. Customers using both Credit Karma and TurboTax generate 30% more revenue than TurboTax-only users. The same financial services strategy appears in QuickBooks: estimate funding, buy-now-pay-later, and payment plans. “Even though you hate the pop-ups,” Alicia said bluntly, “this is a major revenue stream for Intuit.”

MailChimp revenue dipped slightly year over year. It’s struggling with small business churn and weak customer acquisition. Ironically, in the same SMB market where QuickBooks thrives. Alicia likes the MailChimp-QuickBooks integration for targeted customer emails, but adoption is low. “If you haven’t used it,” she said, “that’s exactly why MailChimp is struggling.”

ProTax revenue was $278 million, flat year over year. Professional tax is stable but not exciting. The real tax growth story is TurboTax Live.

Finally, Intuit cut 17% of its workforce (about 1,800 employees) to flatten management layers and eliminate duplicate roles. The restructuring costs $300 million now, with expected savings later. The question for practitioners is, will a leaner Intuit mean faster development or weaker support?

The Bottom Line for Your Practice

When you put all these numbers together, the story, as Alicia summarized it, is “QuickBooks is healthy. MailChimp is weak. Do-it-yourself TurboTax is under pressure. Assisted tax is strong. Payments and payroll are becoming major growth engines. Mid-market QuickBooks is growing fastest. AI is already operating at scale. And Intuit is preparing to charge more for higher-end QuickBooks and AI usage.”

“Intuit is not just building bookkeeping software anymore. It’s building an AI-powered financial operating system for businesses, accountants, payments, payroll, tax, lending, and advisory services.”

Whether we love it, hate it, or feel both ways, these numbers tell us where QuickBooks is going next. Start exploring those features you haven’t tried yet. Build your mid-market consulting capabilities. Embrace AI tools as capacity multipliers. And prepare your clients for the August changes before they arrive.

Listen to the full episode for Alicia’s complete breakdown of every earnings metric.

Meet the Man Who Turned Insurance Forgery Into an Assembly Line

Earmark Team · August 3, 2026 ·

It’s December 1971, in a comfortable living room in Toluca Lake, Los Angeles. Two men sit on a couch, sharing some Scotch and maybe a Quaalude. One is Art Lewis, a 28-year-old executive. The other is Alan Green, a 21-year-old actuary who’s been working at Equity Funding for over a year while finishing his senior year at UCLA. They’d become friendly. Alan and his wife had even gone skinny-dipping in Art’s pool on a previous visit. This wasn’t a smoke-filled backroom of hardened criminals plotting a heist. It was a casual evening between a young employee and his boss.

It ended with Alan agreeing to help fabricate tens of thousands of fake insurance policies.

On this episode of Oh My Fraud, host Caleb Newquist, joined by co-producer Zach Frank, sits down with Alan, an actual insider from the Equity Funding scandal of the early 1970s. Alan wasn’t just another participant. He automated and scaled the creation of phony insurance policies at the center of one of the largest financial frauds in American history. (If you’re not familiar with the Equity Funding case, listen to Episode 66, The Case of Equity Funding Corporation of America. You’ll need the full backstory to understand the magnitude of what Alan is describing.)

What makes Alan’s account so unsettling is that he wasn’t a criminal mastermind. He was a talented kid who said “yes” because being chosen felt good. When Art revealed the scheme and asked for help, Alan didn’t hesitate. He felt “special.” His story shows the most devastating schemes aren’t built by obvious villains. They’re built by ordinary, capable people who are seduced by a sense of belonging and reassured that no one’s really getting hurt.

The Price of Belonging

The line between an honest employee and a convicted conspirator often has nothing to do with greed. For Alan, it was about something far more ordinary: the human need to belong.

Alan was exactly the kind of hire any company would want. The son of a pension consultant, he’d discovered his gift for numbers early. At UCLA, he took a computer programming course in Fortran, aced it, and switched his major to the brand-new field of math computer science. When he started working afternoons at Equity Funding in 1969, he was newly married and still finishing school.

His first day at the small Beverly Hills office felt “like walking into a party.” The entire actuarial department worked in one room, everyone young and friendly. “All my future friends were there,” Alan recalled. “It really was family.”

For over a year, Alan did normal actuarial work, like calculating insurance premiums using massive paper spreadsheets and projecting income and expenses. He had no idea that Mike Keller, working in the office next door, was creating fake insurance policies.

Then Mike quit at the worst possible time. It was December 1971, year-end was approaching, and Equity Funding needed certain numbers on the books. That’s when Art invited Alan to his house.

Sitting on Art’s couch, both men feeling good from drinks and drugs, Art revealed the scheme, or at least the part he wanted Alan to know about. The company had been creating fraudulent insurance policies and selling them to reinsurance companies for cash. They needed Alan’s programming skills to continue the work.

“How did you feel?” Caleb asks Alan about that moment.

“Special,” Alan answers. He said yes immediately. No negotiation or agonizing. Art valued his abilities, and that recognition was everything.

Decades later, Alan still wrestles with that moment. “Why did I say yes? Why was I so flattered?” The answer he’s found has little to do with money. Art offered membership in what Alan privately called “the fellowship,” his name for the scheme, borrowed from Tolkien. “We want you to be in our group,” is how Alan describes the appeal. “We’re inviting you to have a secret family.”

How Talent Became a Weapon

Once Alan said yes, his professional instincts took over, and that’s when a crude fraud became an industrial operation.

The numbers tell the story. When Mike left at the end of 1971, about 10,000 phony policies existed. By the end of 1972, after Alan’s improvements, that number had exploded to between 64,000 and 66,000.

Nobody told Alan to automate the fraud. “That was just my inclination,” he said. He did what any good programmer would do. He streamlined the process, built flowcharts, wrote programs, and documented everything so clearly that “it could easily be handed to the next person.”

The mechanics were sophisticated. Equity Funding sold the fake policies to reinsurance companies for cash. To keep the books consistent, Alan had to weave the fraudulent data through multiple systems. Fake policies required fake commissions. The computer even determined when fake policyholders would “die” so the company could collect death benefits. A $50,000 payout then equals about $500,000 today, Alan notes.

Most cleverly, Alan embedded hidden codes in each fake policy. They were markers only he could read. This let him mix real and fake policies so seamlessly that “you can’t tell the difference when looking at a listing.” When investigators later tried to separate legitimate from fraudulent policies, they discovered Alan was “the only one who could do that.”

The lesson is chilling. The same qualities that make employees valuable, like initiative, systematic thinking, and technical skill, can scale a fraud beyond anyone’s imagination. Alan turned forgery into an assembly line, complete with documentation for the next shift.

The Architecture of Denial

How did twenty-five people participate in this fraud for years without anyone stopping it? The answer lies in how Equity Funding compartmentalized the conspiracy and delayed the victims’ appearance.

Alan’s isolation was nearly complete. In his entire time at Equity Funding, he never once met CEO Stanley Goldblum. “Never saw him,” he emphasizes. He barely knew President Fred Levin or executive Lloyd Eaton beyond glimpsing them at parties. When asked about the accounting department that was cooking the books at the corporate level, Alan says he was “completely” isolated from them.

He knew nothing about the other frauds happening simultaneously, like the forged bond certificates, the gold-plated bricks placed in the vault to fool auditors, or the bugging of the conference room where auditors worked. As Alan learned later, “the higher up they were, the more they knew.” Everyone else saw only their piece.

The culture helped maintain the illusion of normalcy. Alan tells a story about Fred calling down from the 28th floor one night because he’d received a delivery of cannabis but didn’t know how to roll joints. Could anyone in the actuarial department help? Alan could and did, keeping a little for himself. “He had a lot better stuff than we could afford,” Alan notes. In his telling, drugs were “an equalizer” that dissolved hierarchy and made the company feel like a family rather than a criminal enterprise.

Even the fraud itself felt routine. The infamous “signing parties” gathered department heads around a conference table to forge signatures on fake policies—doctors approving medical exams, agents closing sales. Ordinary managers, sitting together, manufacturing fraud like it was paperwork.

Most importantly, while the scheme ran, there were no visible victims. “When it’s going on, there are no victims,” Alan explained. “The victims come at the end.” The stock kept climbing. Reinsurance companies collected their premiums (funded by selling more fake policies to other reinsurers). Everyone was “getting what they expected to get.”

There was also a comforting story that this was temporary. Art told Alan they wanted to wind it down. According to Art’s later recollection, executives even pleaded with Stanley Goldblum to pause the scheme for just one year. Stanley refused. Earnings per share had to rise from $1.80 to $2.00 to $2.25, no exceptions. “Growth at all costs,” as Caleb puts it.

When the Music Stopped

Alan left Equity Funding in January 1973, not from guilt, but from wanderlust. “My lifestyle was really turning very bohemian,” he explains. “I really needed to cut free and go explore the world.” Art wanted him to stay but didn’t push hard. Alan suspects Art’s first thought was, “Are you going to talk to anybody?”

Alan didn’t talk. But three months later, in April 1973, another employee named Ron Secrest did. When the scandal broke, Alan got a call from a friend still at Equity Funding warning him to cooperate now, and there might be immunity. Alan immediately agreed to help.

The investigators couldn’t tell which policies were fake. Alan was the only one who could identify them, thanks to his hidden codes. He returned on a contract basis, spent about a week reversing his own work, and gave investigators the evidence they needed.

The meeting location shows how serious things had become. Investigators first met Alan on a golf course road where “you can see anyone coming.” They knew it might be dangerous.

When sentences came down in October 1974, Alan got the lightest, with three months at minimum-security Lompoc. He brought his own box of books and played bridge nightly with three fellow conspirators: Attorney Jim Banks, head of policy service Bill Symonds, and Larry Collins, the head of underwriting. They never discussed the fraud.

Stanley Goldblum got eight years, served four, and paid a $10,000 fine, pocket change for a fraud this size. He kept his Beverly Hills house and later got caught in a 1990s workers’ comp scheme. In his seventies, he was arrested again for trying to get a bank loan with fraudulent information.

The real victims appeared when the company collapsed. Shareholders lost everything when the stock went to zero. Legitimate insurance agents lost their careers. Alan tells one story that haunts him. A friend’s father, an agent who’d been advised to hold the company stock, lost everything when it crashed. He had a heart attack and died.

Lessons from the Fellowship

Alan’s story isn’t about a criminal mastermind. He was a talented young programmer who wanted to belong, said yes to feel special, and automated a fraud because that’s what good programmers do—they make things efficient.

The warning signs aren’t always in the numbers. Watch for cultures where forgery becomes routine, departments are so isolated that no one sees the full picture, and growth targets are so sacred that leadership won’t pause even for a year. Watch for the quiet seduction of the inner circle, the promise of belonging to something special.

Most unsettling of all, watch your best young hires. The same talents that make them valuable, like systematic thinking, technical skill, and the drive to improve processes, can transform a small deception into an industrial fraud. As Alan still asks himself: “Why did I say yes?” His answer has less to do with greed than with being human.

Listen to the full conversation with Alan on this episode of Oh My Fraud. Because sometimes the biggest frauds are orchestrated by ordinary people, one yes at a time.