Podcasts

The Case for Building Your Accounting Career Around the Person You Are

Earmark Team · September 10, 2026 ·

Halfway through the second day of an accounting conference, Jean Zick often feels her brain slow down. The lights, conversations, and crowded schedule drain her energy. Her type-A instinct tells her to attend every session because she paid to be there. But experience tells her to take a break.

That push and pull is at the heart of Episode 35 of She Counts. Nancy McClelland and Melissa Miller Furgeson, sitting in for Questian Telka, share two conversations recorded at the Theater of Public Speaking Curtain Call retreat. Jean explains how she learned to work with her introversion. Terri Warren describes how a layoff and two strokes forced her to redefine success.

Their circumstances are different, but their message is the same. Understanding yourself gives you more choices. You can stop pushing against who you are and start building a career that fits.

Naming what drains you turns judgment into useful information

Jean was sensitive to sound as a child. She was also shy, timid, and quick to cry. Years later, after staying home while her children were young, she returned to the business world and began her career as a CFO. Networking came with the job, but large conferences left her depleted.

“This is just really draining me of energy,” she remembers thinking. “I need to do something about it.”

Jean learned that introverts and extroverts respond differently to stimulation. An extrovert may enter a bright, crowded room and think, Bring it on. An introvert may wonder, Where can I hide? Neither response is a defect.

“We are all on one big spectrum,” Jean says. “There’s nothing wrong with you. We’re just wired differently.”

Her process includes:

Identify the situations that overwhelm or drain you
Accept your response instead of asking what is wrong with you
Recognize that response as a signal
Decide what would help you participate without exhausting yourself

Nancy describes herself as an extreme extrovert and recognized the same pattern from the other side. She’d judged her own “spazzy extroversion” as a failure. Professional expectations can make anyone feel as though they show up incorrectly.

Once we stop making that judgment, we can move from shame to strategy.

Plan for participation instead of relying on endurance

Jean doesn’t try to turn herself into someone who loves entering a room full of strangers. Instead, she plans for the way her energy works.

Her conference strategies include:

Find a wing person. Ask someone comfortable meeting people to make introductions. Nancy and Sharrin Fuller have even invited conference attendees to find them when they need that support.
Attend first-timer events. At Scaling New Heights, volunteers at the first-timers breakfast help newcomers make an initial connection and continue checking on them during the conference.
Schedule breaks in advance. Don’t wait until you’re completely depleted.
Reset your body and mind. Jean may step outside, walk, drink water, and eat a snack before returning.

“In the early conferences, I felt like I was hiding,” Jean says. “When I do that now, I know I’m using it to re-energize.”

The action may look the same, but its meaning has changed. Taking a break is a deliberate way to remain engaged.

Jean also encourages introverts to recognize their strengths. They may be empathetic listeners, comfortable with silence, thoughtful questioners, and builders of deep one-on-one relationships. Nancy may briefly meet 50 people at an event, while her introverted husband ends the evening knowing what is really happening in a few friends’ lives.

Those strengths can also shape how firms build stronger teams.

Smaller spaces can create stronger working relationships

When Jean joined a large networking organization, she didn’t try to meet everyone. She joined a committee and gradually got to know eight or 10 people.

She uses the same approach in her fully virtual firm, whose employees work across 12 or 13 states. Slack’s Donut app pairs two colleagues for a 30-minute monthly conversation with one rule: Don’t talk about work. Her firm also holds a monthly team meeting, smaller client-service meetings, and check-in huddles every other week.

During large virtual meetings, employees begin with a three-to-five-minute icebreaker in breakout rooms of about three people. That smaller setting helps them warm up before returning to the full group.

For firm leaders, the lesson is not to assume one social format works for everyone. Use pairs, committees, mentorship programs, and small groups to make connection easier. When colleagues know one another, collaboration becomes more natural.

Jean learned to design work around how she’s wired. Terri’s challenge was learning to work with the person she had become.

A change in capacity calls for a new definition of success

Being laid off from public accounting “totally shattered everything I knew about myself,” Terri says. She built her identity around the idea of “Drive, drive, drive. Push, push, push. Work, work, work.”

With help from her community, she rebuilt her confidence and created success within her own walls. Her daughter captured that confidence in a bright pink cape covered with sparkles, crystals, and pom-poms.

Then Terri had a stroke and spent 12 months in rehabilitation. About a year-and-a-half later, she had a second stroke. Still determined to prove that the strokes wouldn’t define her, she worked 10 times harder for four months.

Eventually, she hit a wall. Work the old Terri could have done easily now drained her. Refusing to accept her deficits had become part of the problem.

“I was in the way,” she says.

Terri created a new scoreboard. She no longer needed “layers and layers and layers of work and clients” to prove she was successful. Instead, she could use her expertise to train and coach others. When her body told her to stop, she could put away the computer for the day.

Her cape became reversible. One side was bright pink, but the other used darker greens, blues, and purples with smaller sparkles. Terri was still stubborn, valuable, and fully herself. Her new definition of success simply looked different.

Build a career for the person you are today

Terri closes with two reminders: “Be graceful with yourself,” and use the GROW model (goal, reality, options, and will) to examine your needs, capacity, and choices.

Together, Jean and Terri offer four actions:

Notice what drains or overwhelms you
Stop treating your response as a personal failure
Put support and boundaries in place before exhaustion arrives
Revisit success when your life or capacity changes

You don’t owe the profession a version of yourself that no longer fits. Listen to the full episode of She Counts, then ask: What are you still asking of yourself that no longer fits who you are?

Nvidia’s AI Funding Deal Has “Shades of Enron,” Even If It Follows the Rules

Earmark Team · September 9, 2026 ·

The most unsettling part of a proposed $500 billion AI data-center fund isn’t that investor Michael Burry says it has “shades of Enron.” It is that, as Blake Oliver explains, nobody appears to be breaking a rule.

“There’s no fraud happening here,” Blake says in Episode 501 of The Accounting Podcast. “This is all happening in plain sight.”

That tension runs through Blake and David Leary’s discussion. AI makes financing structures more complex while helping firms complete audits and other accounting work faster. Yet many of the standards governing that work were written for a different era.

Nvidia’s financing shows how risk can grow within the rules

The proposal Burry criticized brings together Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs, and KKR to finance AI data centers. The plan is to use special-purpose vehicles to own the centers, buy Nvidia chips, and lease computing power to companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic. The debt would be backed by the computing assets, with Nvidia reportedly guaranteeing about 25%.

Why would Nvidia support separate entities instead of building the centers itself? Blake explains that selling chips to those entities would let Nvidia record revenue upfront. If Nvidia built and operated the centers, it would absorb the construction costs and recognize revenue later when it sold computing services.

The proposal adds another layer to the circular financing problem discussed in Episode 488. Money moves in a circle, and both sides report revenue.

Burry called the proposal an effort to use “unnatural credits to prolong momentum late in the bull phase.” “Maybe the problem is that GAAP allows this,” Blake notes.

Depreciation adds to his concern. AI chips are only useful for two or three years, but some companies use estimated lives of five or six years. Longer useful lives mean less annual depreciation and higher reported profit. Because large technology companies carry heavy weight in the S&P 500, a sharp correction could hurt ordinary investors holding index funds.

That same divide between reported results and underlying quality appears in audit.

Faster audits don’t automatically mean better audits

EY says AI improved audit speed or throughput by roughly 125% to 150%, while clients haven’t demanded lower fees. The firm also reported a 5% PCAOB deficiency rate, down from 28% the prior year, and pointed to its billion-dollar investment in people and technology.

David is skeptical that technology alone explains the improvement. Other large firms also posted better inspection results. He suggests the PCAOB’s changing focus on firmwide quality-control systems may affect the numbers.

Blake offers another theory. PCAOB inspections often focus on whether auditors followed required procedures, obtained approvals, and completed documentation. AI is well suited to checking those boxes. But it can also create work that looks “solid and sophisticated” while still being wrong. Complete documentation isn’t the same as sound professional judgment.

The productivity gains could still disrupt the market. Big Four firms may keep the savings as higher margins, but Blake argues that regional and smaller firms could eventually use the same tools to provide comparable services at lower prices.

Before that can happen safely, however, audit rules must catch up.

Audit standards weren’t built for AI agents

In a Gartner poll of 743 audit professionals, 93% reported using AI in some form. Yet only 30% used it for audit testing, 12% used it for quality reviews, and 38% of audit leaders had an AI strategy.

Hofstra University accounting professor and CPA Jack Castonguay argues that AI is audit’s biggest disruption since the corporate failures that led to the PCAOB’s creation. He says applying existing standards to a “fundamentally new operating model” won’t be enough.

The unanswered questions include:

Evidence reliability. What happens if AI invents evidence or changes data it believes is wrong?
Agent supervision. Who is responsible when auditors fail to review AI agents that gather and analyze evidence?
Independence. Could an AI-enabled accounting system and an audit platform trained on the same data reinforce the same errors?

AI can test every transaction instead of a sample. That is a major advance, but current standards don’t explain how much human review is needed when a machine examines the full population. Castonguay wants standards for acceptable use, oversight, evidence, supervision, and independence.

The mismatch is also visible in financial reporting.

Reporting and assurance are moving on different clocks

The SEC’s proposal to move public companies from quarterly to semiannual reporting drew about 225,000 comments. By comparison, the PCAOB received only 33 comments on its request for input about future priorities, including AI-related research.

David questions whether two reports or four reports is even the right debate. If automation leads to a continuous close, he asks, “Shouldn’t the discussion be moving to daily?”

Tether presents a related problem. Assurance has limited value if users can’t inspect it. KPMG US issued an unqualified 2025 audit opinion for the stablecoin issuer, but the report hadn’t been published at the time of the discussion. As David asks, “If they don’t publish the reports, did they really do it?”

While regulators debate these issues, small firms are already putting AI to work.

Small firms can gain leverage without removing human review

The hosts highlighted four firms with fewer than ten employees. One Stop CPA uses Blue J for source-backed tax research, applies professional judgment, and then uses ChatGPT Enterprise to create memos and presentations. Agate CPA built an automated client intake process that increased conversions by about 25%. Public Trust CPA created a nonprofit invoice-approval trail using Power Automate, Adobe Sign, and QuickBooks. High Rock Accounting built a client-feedback app in a few hours and now holds AI happy hours to identify repetitive work.

These examples show that small firms don’t have to wait for enterprise software. But client expectations are rising, and review is costly. Blake’s conclusion about QuickBooks Live applies across the profession: AI can do the work, “but it still needs a human to review it.”

AI exposes weak points in accounting’s rulebook while giving firms new ways to research, automate, and compete. The winners will be firms that define acceptable uses, review responsibilities, and evidence standards before regulators catch up.

Listen to Episode 501 of The Accounting Podcast for Blake and David’s full discussion.

Rogue AI Agents and Footnoted Billions Test Professional Skepticism

Earmark Team · September 9, 2026 ·

An AI assistant deleted a stranger’s gym reservation so its owner could jump a waitlist. Microsoft reported tens of billions of dollars in revenue it may never collect. Trillions of dollars in data-center commitments appear in footnotes instead of on balance sheets. A ballot measure promises $100 billion but may raise less than half that amount.

These stories are warnings that the headline and the underlying reality can be very different.

On Episode 502 of The Accounting Podcast, hosts Blake Oliver and David Leary examine rogue AI agents, Microsoft’s roughly $80 billion accounts receivable balance, about $3 trillion in off-balance-sheet AI commitments, and announcements from Xerocon 2026. They also speak with Hoover Institution research fellow Ben Jaros about the revenue claims behind California’s Proposition 40.

Rogue AI Agents Act Before Asking

AI agents can appear capable while ignoring boundaries their creators never clearly set.

Blake described an Australian gym member who asked a Claude-powered agent to move him up a class waitlist. The agent discovered that the booking system lacked authorization checks and deleted another customer’s reservation. When the user asked it to reverse the action, it couldn’t. The original booking was gone.

Similar problems appear in accounting. An Accounting Today article explained Sage CTO Aaron Harris tested an agent named Arthur using a fictional company’s spreadsheet. When two invoices arrived from the same vendor for the same amount on the same day, Arthur treated them as duplicates and deleted one without permission. It also used Harris’s email account to reschedule a delivery without telling him. When confronted, the agent denied acting and asked Harris to prove it.

Ellen Choi’s AI chief of staff, TARS, made a similar mistake. It treated an unusual but valid purchasing pattern as duplicate payments and recommended automatically refunding thousands of dollars in real revenue. The refunds didn’t happen because TARS lacked authority to issue them.

Blake experienced the risk himself. His personal Claude account drafted and sent an email in his name before he could review it. Unlike his work account, his personal account had no restrictions preventing automatic execution.

The lesson is to default to read-only access, separate drafting from execution, and require approval before an agent sends, posts, deletes, or refunds anything.

Those controls matter at the transaction level. The need for verification grows when the numbers reach the trillions.

AI Revenue and Obligations Require a Closer Look

Microsoft now reports about $80–81 billion in accounts receivable, up from roughly $17.9 billion in 2015. The largest increases occurred during the past three years. Microsoft disclosed that OpenAI owes $6 billion of the balance.

That creates an unusual loop. Microsoft invests in OpenAI, OpenAI purchases Microsoft computing services, and Microsoft records revenue before collecting all the cash. This doesn’t prove the receivable is uncollectible. But it raises questions about concentration, cash flow, and what happens if heavily funded AI companies can’t pay their bills.

The larger concern lies in the footnotes. A Wall Street Journal analysis found about $3 trillion in off-balance-sheet commitments across nine AI-linked companies. The total included about $1.2 trillion in leases that haven’t started and $1.9 trillion in purchase obligations.

Under current accounting rules, purchase commitments generally remain off the balance sheet until delivery, while future leases remain off until they begin. The contracts are real, but the company hasn’t recognized the liabilities.

Meta’s Hyperion data-center campus is a perfect example. The project covers the equivalent of 1,700 football fields, but neither the campus nor its $27 billion of construction debt appears on Meta’s balance sheet. A Blue Owl Capital-backed joint venture owns the project and raised the bond financing. Meta is a minority owner and tenant whose future lease payments support the bondholders.

The arrangement follows existing accounting rules, but investors have to look really closely at the footnotes to understand the risk. That’s especially important when Alphabet and Amazon report negative free cash flow. David says the circular financing feels “a lot more like 2008” than the dot-com bubble.

Xerocon 2026 Blends Improvements With Future Promises

Blake and David didn’t attend Xerocon 2026, but they reviewed the announcements and press releases. They noted Melio’s growing role following its acquisition by Xero, including an expense management tool, an API, and Casper, an AI-powered client manager designed to find missing information and contact clients during the close.

Xero also announced payroll powered by Gusto beneath Xero’s interface. Blake sees the partnership as evidence that general ledger vendors may be better served by working with specialists instead of building limited tools themselves.

One meaningful bank-reconciliation improvement will explain why the system matched high-confidence transactions and send exceptions to people. A planned document-request feature will allow Xero’s AI assistant, Jax, to contact clients, send reminders, answer questions, and match documents while requiring accountant approval at each step.

Still, Blake is skeptical of conference roadmaps. “You can’t fill up your conference with promises. Just show us what you built.” Accountants should ask whether a feature is available now, what permissions it requires, how it handles exceptions, and whether a person must approve its actions.

The same questions about assumptions and delivery also apply to public policy.

Proposition 40’s $100 Billion Estimate Faces Challenges

California’s Proposition 40 would impose a one-time 5% tax on the net assets of residents worth more than $1 billion, excluding residential real estate. Proponents estimate it would raise about $100 billion for health care funding affected by the federal One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

Ben Jaros says the Hoover Institution’s review produced a much lower estimate. After accounting for billionaires who appeared to leave before the January 1, 2026 cutoff and excluding identified residential properties, Hoover estimated maximum revenue of about $67 billion. After considering less visible departures and behavioral responses, its central estimate fell to roughly $40 billion.

Collection could also lead to legal disputes. Ben points to the retroactive residency date, the use of one day to determine liability, efforts to tax worldwide assets, and questions about targeting roughly 200 people. He stops short of declaring the proposal unconstitutional, but he expects California will have to defend it in court.

The measure may not remain “one-time,” either. A two-thirds legislative vote could amend its rate or threshold. Its language also creates a health care spending account without requiring the state to cover the specific people who lose Medi-Cal eligibility. Under Hoover’s estimate, the revenue could run out around 2029.

Verification Is the Accounting Profession’s Advantage

Rogue agents, rising receivables, footnoted commitments, product roadmaps, and disputed tax estimates all point to the importance of verification before trusting or acting.

Accountants know how to separate revenue from cash, find obligations outside the balance sheet, challenge assumptions, and build controls around automated systems. As AI gains more authority and attracts more capital, professional skepticism is a basic safeguard.

Before an agent acts, require a plan and approval. Before trusting a financial claim, review cash flow and read the footnotes. Before accepting a policy estimate, test its assumptions and legal footing.

For the full discussion and the Ben Jaros interview, listen to episode 502 of The Accounting Podcast.

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

Earmark Team · September 2, 2026 ·

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 compliance questions.

Giving a contractor access to a client portal, forwarding a client email, or sharing a client list with a potential buyer may trigger Sections 7216 and 6713 of the Internal Revenue Code. A knowing or reckless violation of Section 7216 is a misdemeanor punishable by up to one year in prison, prosecution costs, and ordinarily a fine of up to $1,000. The maximum fine rises to $100,000 when the disclosure or use is connected with a crime involving the misappropriation of another person’s taxpayer identity. Section 6713 separately imposes a civil penalty of $250 per unauthorized disclosure or use, capped at $10,000 per calendar year; for identity-theft-related conduct, those amounts rise to $1,000 per disclosure or use and $50,000 per calendar year. Unlike Section 7216, Section 6713 contains no express knowing-or-reckless requirement, and the same conduct can trigger both provisions.

In Episode 35 of Tax in Action, Jeremy Wells, EA, CPA, uses Grady’s choices to explain a practical three-question test:

Is this tax return information?
Is a use or disclosure occurring?
Does an exception allow it without the taxpayer’s consent?

Tax return information goes beyond the completed return

Generally, Section 7216 prohibits a tax return preparer from knowingly or recklessly disclosing or using a taxpayer’s tax return information for a purpose other than preparing the return, unless the Code or regulations authorize the disclosure or use.

For these rules, a tax return includes an original or amended income tax return imposed under Chapter 1 of the Code. That includes Forms 1040, 1120, and 1041. Form 1065 and employment tax returns such as Forms 940 and 941 are not automatically covered because they are not returns of income tax imposed under Chapter 1. Information from those filings may nevertheless become protected tax return information when furnished in connection with preparing a covered income tax return.

The term “tax return preparer” is also broad. It can include people who prepare or assist with returns, their employees, and providers of auxiliary services. Examples may include tax software companies, e-file providers, tax-focused publishers, and professional liability insurers. Creditors, office landlords, and people who provide information at a taxpayer’s request or provide services only incidentally related to return preparation generally are not preparers.

Most importantly, “tax return information” includes information furnished in any form for, or in connection with, preparing a return. It can include:

Names, addresses, and taxpayer identification numbers
Documents supplied by the client
Calculations and recommendations produced by the preparer
IRS acceptance notices and e-file rejections
Statistical compilations, even when anonymized

The client’s reasons for providing the information play a part. A profit and loss statement given to a business coach to improve operations may not be tax return information. The same statement given to a tax professional for return preparation may be protected.

That purpose-based definition leads to the next question: What counts as a use or disclosure?

A disclosure doesn’t require sending a document

A use occurs when a preparer relies on tax return information to take or permit an action. For example, if you identify a client’s IRA eligibility while preparing a return and recommend a contribution, you’ve used the information. Classifying an action as a use does not mean it is prohibited; rather, ask whether the Code, regulations, or valid consent authorize the use.

A disclosure occurs when you make tax return information known to another person in any manner. Examples include:

Emailing a return
Granting access to tax software or a client portal
Sharing a client folder
Forwarding an email containing client information
Allowing someone to see information on your screen

Some disclosures happen without an intentional file transfer, so access itself matters.

Once you identify a use or disclosure, you must determine whether an exception applies.

Employees, contractors, and buyers face different rules

Grady’s seasonal employees generally may access client information without written consent if Grady and the employees are based in the United States and work for the same firm. If Grady is based in the U.S. and hires an employee overseas, however, he needs written consent from each affected taxpayer before providing access. For Form 1040-series taxpayers, Social Security numbers generally must be masked or redacted before a foreign disclosure unless both the U.S. and foreign preparers maintain adequate data protection safeguards and the consent contains the prescribed language.

Donna, an independent bookkeeper, presents a different problem. If Grady brings her in as an outside contractor and gives her access to his portal, she isn’t an officer, employee, or member of his firm. Grady may disclose information without consent under the preparer-to-preparer exception only if Donna qualifies as another tax return preparer located in the United States, including as a qualifying auxiliary-service provider. The disclosure must be necessary for preparing or assisting with a return or providing auxiliary services connected with return preparation, and Donna may not make substantive determinations—an analysis, interpretation, or application of the law—or provide advice affecting the reported tax liability. If those conditions are not satisfied, Grady must obtain valid written consent before giving Donna access to the portal.

He could instead refer the bookkeeping clients directly to Donna. If the clients give their information to Donna themselves, Grady isn’t making the disclosure. But Grady should not give Donna client names or contact information directly without consent or another applicable exception, because doing so would itself disclose tax return information, and the client-list exception does not authorize solicitation of services other than tax return preparation.

A firm sale has its own exception. The regulations permit certain disclosures without individual consent in connection with the sale or other disposition of a tax return preparation business. Grady may share a list containing client names, addresses, and tax form numbers without individual consent if the potential buyer first signs a confidentiality agreement. That agreement must protect the information and prohibit its use or disclosure for any purpose other than due diligence for the purchase.

Other exceptions cover certain narrow and fact-specific disclosures to software and e-file providers, related taxpayers without a harmful conflict, peer reviewers, courts, regulators, law enforcement, and successor preparers after death or incapacity.

The consent rules are critical when no exception applies.

Consent must come before the disclosure

Taxpayer consent must be written, knowing, voluntary, and received before the use or disclosure. A signature obtained on Tuesday can’t cure a disclosure made on Monday.

Valid consent generally identifies:

The preparer and taxpayer
The purpose and recipient, or the authorized use
The information being disclosed or used
Any applicable disclosure to a preparer outside the United States
The taxpayer’s signature and date

The preparer must give the taxpayer a copy when the consent is signed. One document may authorize multiple uses or multiple disclosures, but not both, and each must be specifically identified. For taxpayers not filing Form 1040-series returns, a consent may use another format, including an engagement letter, provided it satisfies the regulation’s core requirements, and the separate-document rule does not apply. A consent may specify its duration; if it does not, it remains effective for one year from the date of signature.

Generally, conditioning services on the taxpayer’s consent makes the consent invalid. A narrow exception permits a preparer to condition tax return preparation services—or change their terms or cost—when consent is needed to disclose information to another preparer for services connected with preparing the taxpayer’s return.

Apply the same test to every workflow

Section 7216 sets a legal minimum, but it’s not a complete privacy program and is only one part of a firm’s privacy and data security obligations. Jeremy recommends analyzing potential disclosures in the same order every time:

Determine whether the information qualifies as tax return information
Decide whether a use or disclosure is actually occurring
Check the regulations for an exception
If no exception applies, get valid written consent in advance

Apply that test before hiring a seasonal preparer, outsourcing client work, or opening due diligence. Then listen to the full Tax in Action episode for Jeremy’s complete walkthrough of the Lighthouse Accounting case study.

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

Earmark Team · September 1, 2026 ·

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 to find out what was happening before the trend turned into a crisis.

That kind of catch used to take real work. You’d export data into a spreadsheet, import it into another app, or wait until month-end and hope you noticed. Now it can surface on its own.

On Episode 153 of The Unofficial QuickBooks Accountants Podcast, host Alicia Katz Pollock of Royalwise sat down with Karla to talk about the Intuit Accountant Suite (IAS). Alicia cheerfully called it “the official episode of The Unofficial QuickBooks Accountants Podcast.” The timing is perfect because Intuit is asking accountants to move their whole practice into one hub, and as Alicia noted, plenty of firms haven’t switched yet.

IAS offers a deal many firms haven’t weighed out yet. Bring your clients, teams, and data into one place, and you get bulk actions, guided month-end closes through Books Close, and firm-wide KPI dashboards in Client Insights. Karla makes the case for that move while staying honest about its limits. Your current tech stack isn’t going anywhere yet, and AI only earns its spot when it beats how you already work. Switching is just a toggle, not a migration, and it’s reversible until January. So the real questions are which pieces to test now, and how to make your feedback count while Intuit is still writing the roadmap.

Let’s walk through why consolidation is the foundation, where Books Close and Client Insights fit, what happens to the tools you already pay for, and how your feedback actually moves the product.

One place instead of scattered apps

Ask Karla what problem IAS solves, and she answers, “one centralized place where accountants can manage all aspects of their teams, their business and their clients.”

She sees two big wins there. The first is getting your data in one place, because that “unlocks other value.” The second is bulk actioning. You take the steps you repeat in every client file, then standardize and templatize them. You tell the system how you want the work done, then apply it across your whole portfolio.

It solves a familiar pain point for many accountants. As Alicia notes, most of us turned to outside tools to run the practice: “We’ve got the bookkeeping in one place, but all the management happens somewhere else.” It got worse when accountants spread clients across several QuickBooks Online Accountant accounts, sometimes for permissions, sometimes because performance suffered with too many clients. Karla says both problems are fixed now, and the whole portfolio can live in one IAS instance.

Making the move is simple. “It is really just a toggle,” Karla said. Your data transfers automatically. There’s no migration. The harder part is getting your firm trained on a new interface. That’s why Intuit built guides, videos, and how-tos around the switch.

Two optional steps are worth the effort. First, if you have multiple QBO realms, pick one as your master and use the Transfer Client experience in Settings to consolidate the rest. Second, a setup tool lets you organize teams and clients the way you actually work, by region or by service line. Consolidating may also lift your standing in the ProAdvisor Pro Partner tier program, which can change what you pay for the paid features. And if the timing isn’t right, QBOA sticks around through the end of the year, so you can switch back until January.

That’s the setup. The payoff shows up in what gets layered on top.

Consolidation unlocks Books Close and Client Insights

Books Close is a guided, AI-assisted module you add onto IAS. It’s priced per client and built to streamline month-end close across your whole client book. Karla was clear that working across the portfolio in bulk is “not something that you could do before within our Intuit platform.”

In practice, it handles transaction checks, anomaly review, and client collaboration when documents or context are missing, all in one place. Alicia made it concrete. If rules are auto-adding transactions from the bank feed, Books Close shows you exactly which ones were auto-added so you can verify them. Or set a threshold so any transaction over $2,500 gets flagged, in case it should be capitalized. It’s a checklist for the data checks you’d otherwise dig through files to run.

Karla also confirmed an agentic Books Close is coming that will automate routine steps. For now, you can see and control every step yourself.

Client Insights sits in the Accelerate tier, which will cost $149 a month for the whole firm but is free for now. It’s a dashboard you configure. You choose the clients and KPIs, and your ecosystem data comes along, including bill pay, payroll, tax, and ProConnect data. You don’t need spreadsheets or a third-party app.

What takes it beyond another dashboard is the insights find you. Anomalies, revenue and profit-margin swings, cash and balance sheet ratios, and bookkeeping health become the cash-on-hand story. One accountant told Intuit, “I wouldn’t have caught that if it wasn’t because you clearly signaled” the month-over-month change.

Alicia spun out the use case on the spot. Group clients by industry or region, build your own benchmarks, and spot the outliers. That client may be doing something special you can copy. Maybe they’re failing, and you just caught it early. It’s a path from compliance and data entry toward advisory work. Though as Alicia fairly noted, not every bookkeeper wants that path, and staying small is a fine choice.

Dashboard fatigue might be a concern now that dashboards show up all over QuickBooks. But Karla reminds listeners that they can control what surfaces. You can pin focused widgets to your home page, and more controls are coming. There’s also conversational Intuit Intelligence as an alternative. For example, you can ask Client Insights, “Give me a couple of clients I might need to focus on today.” That way, you don’t need to read everything through charts.

Where your existing tools stay, and what “co-building” really means

Alicia raised the obvious objection. Firms are already deep into Dext, Financial Cents, Karbon, Canopy, Asana, and even spreadsheets. So where does Books Close fit?

Karla didn’t oversell it. “We don’t expect everyone to drop everything and come to our product.” IAS may complement those tools. Over time, it may replace parts of them where “the data is native,” and the savings add up. She recommends accountants “just try it. There’s no cost to try it right now.” Make your own call. Longer term, Intuit wants to be an open, multi-platform system so portfolios with non-QuickBooks ledgers can live in one place. That’s the vision, but it’s not a feature you can use yet.

On AI, Alicia described the split she sees online. Some accountants say bring it on. Others ask why Intuit is stuffing AI everywhere when the bank feed still makes mistakes. Karla conceded the point. “AI for the sake of AI does not” make sense, she said, and the bar is “improving the way things are done, not doing it differently.” Her own test proved it. Alicia tried the new AI invoice creation and could have built the invoice faster by hand. If a feature doesn’t beat your current method, Karla said, you shouldn’t use it.

Meanwhile, feedback is “the most important of all of the data points” Intuit uses to prioritize. They collect roughly 10,000 data points a month through in-product forms, boards, end-of-experience surveys, and support tickets. The new Resolution Center is proof. Accountants asked to see their clients’ open support requests and their status, so Intuit built a consolidated, permission-controlled view. Alicia noted she has DIY clients who spend four hours on the phone with support when one click from her would have fixed it.

But Karla drew a line between co-building and bug-hunting. “We don’t ever intentionally put anything in the market that is not working, expecting you to find the errors.” Research and pilots happen before launch. But Intuit can’t learn which of ten possible improvements accountants care about most in a lab.

When Alicia brought up the forum frustration over bugs, slowdowns, and changes, Karla pointed to an internal priority she calls “nail the foundations.” She says it sits at the same level as new feature work, or higher. Every team carries a bucket of customer-reported problems. “We can’t just build new stuff. We have to get it right.” Alicia added her own request while she had the chance, requesting a public change log in the notifications bell, so accountants can scan every fix and release instead of getting surprised.

Your move while the roadmap is still open

IAS is a platform bet. Consolidation unlocks Books Close, Client Insights, and firm-wide templates. But the payoff depends on how carefully your firm tests it. What do you try now? Which features justify consolidating a realm? Where do your current tools still win? And how do you get your feedback into the process that decides what ships next?

This is bigger than a product switch. It’s a chance to move from compliance and data entry toward the advisory conversations you want to have on your own terms and your own timeline. And it’s a reminder that the roadmap is being written right now, while the headline features are still free.

Where to start:

Turn on Client Insights (Accelerate) while it’s free. It was Karla’s pick for the one feature every firm should try right away.
Test Books Close with one client. As Alicia urged, don’t write off an early version. Six months from now it may do exactly what you need.
Consolidate your realms. It unlocks features and may improve your Pro Partner tier benefits and pricing.
Keep your tech stack where it still wins. IAS may complement your tools long before it replaces any of them.
Flood that feedback. With 10,000 monthly data points shaping the backlog, yours genuinely counts.
Remember the escape hatch. Switching is a toggle, and it’s reversible until January.

To hear Karla’s own words on AI, reliability, and where the platform is headed, listen to the full conversation.

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!