Podcasts

The Big Four Keep Publishing Fake AI Citations and It’s Getting Embarrassing

Earmark Team · July 20, 2026 ·

A solo accountant can complete two years of bookkeeping in a few hours using Claude Cowork. But KPMG had to pull an entire AI report after 89% of its citations turned out to be fake. The AI revolution in professional services is already sorting winners from losers.

In episode 493 of The Accounting Podcast, hosts Blake Oliver and David Leary tackled a cluster of stories that paint a clear picture of how AI is restructuring professional services right now in real workflows, real paychecks, and real embarrassments for the Big Four.

There’s a growing divide between professionals who use AI carefully with human oversight (and get massive productivity gains) and those who rush to market themselves as AI experts while failing basic verification. This episode covers the Big Four’s repeated AI failures, the incredible productivity gains available to practitioners who use AI right, and the broader industry signals showing how AI is reshaping everything.

The Big Four’s “Vibe Citation” Problem Keeps Getting Worse

KPMG’s 2025 report, “Total Experience: Redefining Excellence in the Age of Agentic AI,” was supposed to showcase its AI expertise. Instead, it became the latest example of Big Four firms publishing AI-generated content they apparently never checked, also known as “vibe citations.”

GPTZero, a platform originally built to help teachers detect AI-generated text, analyzed KPMG’s report and found out of 45 citations, only five were accurate. Twenty-eight pointed to real sources but had made-up details. Twelve were too vague to verify. At least 16 were complete hallucinations. The tool rated the report 89% flawed.

The fake details weren’t subtle. KPMG claimed an Austrian utility called Verbund was using AI for real-time household energy optimization. In reality, the citation was about Verbund investing in a startup that might do this someday. They said Emirates airline had a chatbot named “Sara” that could change flights. Sara was actually a robot assistant from 2023 with no flight-change capability. The biggest gaffe was claiming East Japan Railway was using AI agents in 2019, before this type of AI even existed commercially.

UBS, NHS Greater Manchester, and Transport for London all said KPMG’s claims about their use of AI were “completely false or misleading.”

“We have to create a database and just track these because the Big Four just keeps doing it over and over again,” David said, noting similar recent incidents at EY and Deloitte.

The irony is KPMG’s website features an article titled “Essential Elements of Responsible AI: How Solid Guardrails Can Help You Scale AI Faster.” They’re selling AI expertise while failing at basic fact-checking.

David’s sarcastic take nailed it. “The only way I could think this could work is if the Big Four can go to the Fortune 500 and be like, ‘Look, we know all the mistakes that can be made. Now listen to us because we know what not to do.’”

How to Actually Use AI: A Real-World Success Story

While KPMG was publishing fantasy case studies, Blake was using AI to do real client work and showing what responsible AI use looks like.

He needed to complete two years of write-up work for a service business: 2,200 transactions across nine accounts, with source documents in a messy mix of PDFs and CSVs from different banks. In the old desktop days, this would have taken days of manual entry. Even with cloud accounting, it would take many hours of importing and coding.

Using Claude Cowork, he finished everything in about four hours, including gathering documents.

His approach was smart and deliberate. He pointed Claude at folders of bank statements and had it extract all transactions into Xero-compatible import files. It did OCR on PDFs, merged CSVs, and organized everything by account. Then he gave Claude the prior year’s general ledger and asked it to categorize transactions, but with a key addition: a confidence score for each categorization.

“I could open that up, sort by that score, and look at the transactions that are less than 90%,” Oliver explained. Instead of reviewing 2,200 items, he focused on exceptions.

The results were impressive. Claude missed just six transactions out of 2,200, and two of those were due to credit card statement date issues, not AI error. When a $5,000 clearing account discrepancy appeared, Claude opened Xero in a browser, analyzed the details, and identified the problems itself. One was a returned payroll miscoded to transfers. The other was more complex: undiscovered transfers to a business line of credit. Claude suggested this possibility, Oliver confirmed by pulling statements, and Claude then created the loan account, separated principal from interest, and fixed everything. That kind of discrepancy usually requires hours of investigation.

“I didn’t just say, ‘Here’s the GL detail, here are the transactions, go code them all and enter them into Xero,” Oliver emphasized. “I wanted to review it first, and I caught significant stuff.”

This capability is becoming more accessible. Microsoft’s Copilot Cowork is now available, with over half of Fortune 500 companies trying it during preview. Microsoft says it’s 30-40% cheaper per prompt than Claude, and since most accounting firms use Microsoft 365, it might already be on your computer.

Not everyone’s getting it right, though. David shared his frustration with QuickBooks AI. When he uploaded a PDF containing 12 monthly bills, QuickBooks mashed them into a single bill with line items from each invoice. No questions asked.

“It should say, ‘Hey, I noticed there are 25 bills in here. Do you want one bill or 25 separate bills?’ And I would just answer,” David said, comparing it to AI coding tools that ask before acting.

The Market Is Already Picking Winners and Losers

Meanwhile, CPA firms are seeing interesting pricing patterns. According to CPA Trendlines, overall pricing is up 4.2% year-over-year, reversing last year’s decline. But looking more closely at the breakdown, tax prep and planning jumped by nearly 8%. Advisory work rose over 6%. Audit only increased by 2.3%.

Clearly, clients will pay more for services requiring human expertise and judgment. Tax planning and advisory command the biggest premiums. More routine, standardized work, like audit, lags behind.

“Clients are willing to pay for tax planning advisory, for the human in the loop to make sure that the numbers are right,” Oliver said. “AI isn’t putting pressure on those fees at this point. And I don’t expect it to.”

The Real Divide: Verification vs. Vibes

The stories from this episode are different views of the same shift. KPMG publishes an AI report that’s 89% wrong while a solo practitioner uses AI to finish two years of work in an afternoon with near-perfect accuracy. CPA firms raise tax planning fees by 8% because clients value human judgment.

AI compresses the value of routine, unverified work while amplifying the premium on carefully applied expertise.

The divide in professional services is between those who verify and those who just publish. Between practitioners who build workflows with confidence scores and exception review, and firms that let AI-generated content sail through with fake citations. Between organizations that treat AI as a force multiplier for human expertise and those that use it to substitute for expertise they never had.

The practical takeaway is to learn the tools, whether that’s Claude Cowork, Copilot Cowork, or whatever comes next. But build human checkpoints into every workflow. Use confidence scoring. Review exceptions. Don’t set it and forget it. The productivity gains are potentially five to ten times traditional methods, but they disappear the moment you skip verification.

The market is already pricing this reality. Clients pay more for advisory, planning, and the assurance that a qualified human reviewed the work. Firms and practitioners who master this balance will command premiums. Those who don’t will find themselves on the wrong side of a restructuring that’s happening right now.

To hear Blake Oliver’s complete breakdown of his AI workflow, David’s full critique of accounting software AI, and more details on KPMG’s “vibe citation” disaster, listen to episode 493 of The Accounting Podcast.

What If You Managed Your Private Company Like It Was Publicly Traded?

Earmark Team · July 20, 2026 ·

Ask any business owner what their company is worth, and you’ll likely hear a number they picked up at a conference, borrowed from a buddy’s sale, or scribbled on a napkin using some multiple of EBITDA. Ask them how they’re actively managing toward that number, and the room usually goes quiet.

It’s a huge blind spot in privately held businesses. Owners spend years, even decades, building something valuable. Yet they operate without the one metric that could guide every decision: a clear, defensible stock price.

In a recent episode of the Best Metrics podcast, host Glenn Dunlap sat down with Michele Hammann, Chief Strategy Officer at SSC CPAs + Advisors. She’s a certified valuation analyst and author of Go Public in Private: A Strategic Blueprint to Go From Owner to Investor. The conversation explored the idea that every privately held business has a stock price, whether the owner knows it or not. And the businesses that calculate it, track it, and manage toward it operate completely differently from those that don’t.

Michele has spent more than two decades working with privately held companies, from family businesses to larger enterprises, helping owners shift from thinking like operators to thinking like investors. Her message isn’t that private companies should go public. They should adopt the disciplines that make public companies investable without giving up control.

Your Business Has a Stock Price. It’s Time to Find It

Your company has a quantifiable stock price right now, whether you’ve calculated it or not.

Michele knows this firsthand. Her firm, SSC CPAs, is 100% employee-owned through an ESOP, meaning they get a formal valuation every year. Every team member knows the share price. And that single number is the metric that connects daily work to enterprise value.

“You feel like maybe you can move a $50 needle easier than you can move a $5 million needle,” Michele explained. When you translate a multi-million dollar valuation into a per-share price, the concept of value creation becomes real. It’s a number your team can discuss the same way people talk about Apple or Nvidia stock prices.

So how do you actually calculate a stock price for a private company? Michele walked through it on the episode, and it starts somewhere that might surprise owners used to looking backward. “The market doesn’t buy what you’ve done. They buy what you say you’re going to do.”

The process begins with forecasted future cash flows, which the business can realistically generate going forward. You apply a discounted cash flow model to bring those future dollars back to present value. Then you check it against comparable transaction data, similar to pulling comps when selling a house. There are databases where business brokers log closed deals, searchable by industry code, region, and revenue size.

Interestingly, Michele describes value as a three-legged stool. First is profitability relative to peers. Second is cash flow and balance sheet health, i.e., how much cash you can actually pull from the business. The third leg is intangibles. “There’s a lot of soft side to increasing your enterprise value,” Michele noted. Things like management depth, customer concentration, and whether you produce regular financial statements all affect the capitalization rate used to value future cash flows.

Stop Watching the Scoreboard and Focus on What Moves the Needle

Michele shared a scenario every business owner should pay attention to: something goes wrong on the manufacturing floor on June 1st, starts eroding margins immediately, but the books don’t close until July 15th. “We’re 45 days behind a decision that could be made differently,” she said.

This is why financial results are lagging indicators. They tell you what already happened. Operational metrics, on the other hand, show what’s happening right now. They’re the leading indicators that actually drive financial results.

“It’s not 50 metrics,” Michele emphasized. “It’s finding two or three where you can marry that operational data with the financial data that really tells the story.”

She gave a perfect example from a coin-operated laundry company. Their biggest expense was machine repairs. So they track minutes per repair and minutes per swap. The technicians don’t need to know that each stop costs $40. They just need to know the target is under 15 minutes. That’s something they can control through better tools, having the right parts on the truck, and efficient restocking.

The same principle works across industries. In nursing homes, where labor is the largest expense, the key metric is nursing hours per patient-day. How many nurses are on the floor relative to the census? It’s something a floor supervisor can manage in real time, not discover six weeks later in the financials.

Michele described two approaches to finding the right metrics for your business.

Bottom-up. Start with what you’re already tracking operationally and add the financial layer.
Top-down. Benchmark your financials against peers, find where you’re underperforming, and trace those gaps back to operations.

Either way, simplicity is crucial. “You don’t want this to be where we have to get out an Excel spreadsheet and call four people to figure it out each time,” Michele said. If it’s too complex, it won’t stick.

Build the Accountability That Creates Value

Knowing your stock price and tracking the right metrics is just the beginning. What separates businesses that drift from businesses that compound is structure: the kind of structure that public companies are forced into and private companies get to choose.

First, forecast forward, not backward. Michele’s entire methodology is built on forecasts, not history. She compares monthly financials to forecasts, not last year. “They’re a different company than they were last year,” she explained. And consistently hitting or beating the forecast dramatically increases value.

Second, hold regular check-ins. Public CEOs do quarterly investor calls. Michele recommends private owners do something similar at least three times a year. “Sit down and synthesize what you’re hearing from suppliers, clients, and the market,” she said. Compare it to where you said you’d be and recalibrate.

Third, build an advisory board. Move beyond dinner table conversations or management team meetings where everyone has a vested interest. Assemble a mix of professionals from the accounting, legal, and banking sectors, plus fellow business owners. “Most business problems are just a form of something else that happened before,” Michele observed. “Someone at the table has probably seen your version.”

If you’re not ready for a formal board, Michele recommended starting with AI. Load your forecast and industry context into Claude and have it ask challenging questions quarterly. It’s not a replacement for human advisors, but it’s a legitimate first step.

Once you have a stock price and forecast, filter every decision through one question: Does this increase or decrease enterprise value? “It gives you a framework for decisions,” Michele said. “Is it perfect? No. But is it better than the absence of that information?”

It’s Not About the Exit; It’s About the Choice

This isn’t just about selling your business. Michele wrote her book specifically because too many conversations get reduced to “exit planning” when most owners aren’t ready to quit.

“Let’s frame this as growing to where we want to be,” she said. “Let’s just focus on growth and making sure you reach your goals.”

The discipline of knowing and managing your stock price improves everything from financing terms to family transitions, resilience against disruption, and the daily experience of running a business. “You never have to sell to an outside entity,” Michele noted. “But being ready is just good practice.”

Not every business needs to become a transferable enterprise. Michele shared a story about an audiobook producer who tried adding middle managers and discovered “this wasn’t fun anymore.” She went back to working directly with talent, knowing her business value wouldn’t grow significantly. “That’s a great decision,” Michele said. “Are you making good money? Are you happy? Are you having fun?”

The danger isn’t choosing to stay small. It’s arriving at the end of your career without ever making a conscious choice at all.

Start Where You Are

Every privately held business has a stock price. The question is whether you’ll calculate it, track it, and manage toward it or let someone else assign it when it’s too late to change.

The framework Michele laid out is practical and incremental. Calculate your enterprise value as a per-share price. Identify two or three operational metrics that actually drive value. Build accountability through forecasting, regular reviews, and advisors. Use value as your decision framework.

As Michele put it, “We identify what we know today, and then we just let our clients pick the next right thing. Just do the next right thing.”

This is a huge opportunity for advisors and CPAs. Most business owners have never been asked what their stock price is. The professionals who can lead these conversations move from compliance providers to strategic partners.

And if you’re an owner who decides building a transferable enterprise isn’t your path, that’s completely fine — as long as it’s a deliberate choice made with full awareness, rather than a default you stumble into.

You’re the investor. You get to grow at your own timeline. Just do the next right thing.

To learn more about Michele’s framework, listen to the full episode of Best Metrics.

Shared Business Activity—not Mere Co-Ownership—Often Determines Partnership Status

Earmark Team · July 20, 2026 ·

Two friends buy a short-term rental together. They split everything, from income and expenses to responsibilities, 50/50. One manages the bookings while the other handles repairs. They never wrote up any agreement, registered an LLC, or created any paperwork at all.

Did these friends accidentally create a partnership with federal filing requirements?

Now make it more complicated. What if those two friends are married? What if they’re flipping houses instead of renting them? What if one spouse does all the work while the other occasionally helps with administrative tasks?

These are real questions that come across the desk of tax professionals every week. While they might seem straightforward, the answers are anything but simple or academic Partnership status affects filing requirements, basis calculations, elections, self-employment tax, audit procedures under the BBA, and the availability of numerous Subchapter K provisions. That’s why correctly identifying whether a partnership exists is the first step in any partnership analysis.

In episode 31 of Tax in Action, Jeremy Wells, EA, CPA, tackles this tough question in small business taxation: When does co-ownership cross the line into a partnership under federal tax law? Drawing from IRC §761(a) and §7701, Treasury regulations, and Supreme Court cases dating back to the 1940s, Jeremy builds a practical framework you can apply to client situations starting today.

Determining whether a co-owned activity is a partnership requires more than checking if someone filed an LLC with the state. You need to analyze the shared profit motive, business activity, and genuine intent. The analysis is shaped by decades of court-tested criteria. You also need to understand the distinct exceptions available to married couples.

Get this analysis right, and you’ll meet reporting requirements while positioning clients for partnership planning opportunities. Get it wrong, and you face unfiled return penalties, missed planning strategies, or both.

The Federal Definition Casts a Wide Net (With Important Limits)

To determine if your client’s co-owned activity is a partnership, you first need to understand how broadly federal tax law defines the term and where it draws the line.

IRC §761(a) defines “partnership” to include syndicates, groups, pools, joint ventures, and other unincorporated organizations (excluding corporations, trusts, and estates). That’s remarkably broad. As Jeremy explains, essentially any business-like activity with more than one participant could qualify. Add the companion definition in IRC §7701(a)(2) and Treasury regulations, and you have a framework that captures far more arrangements than most people realize.

There’s also the familiar default rule: Under Reg. §301.7701-3(b), a domestic eligible entity with two or more members that hasn’t filed a corporate election is treated as a partnership. This is where we get “multi-member LLC equals partnership.” For foreign entities, you need to check whether any member lacks limited liability, but the domestic rule is straightforward.

Despite this broad sweep, the regulations carve out two important exceptions that do not create a separate entity for federal tax purposes:

A joint undertaking merely to share expenses
Mere co-ownership of property (even income-producing property)

That second exception matters most in everyday practice. Two unrelated people can buy a rental property together, split the income and expenses, and that alone doesn’t necessarily create a partnership.

Jeremy shares an example from Laura and Noel Cunningham’s textbook, The Logic of Subchapter K. Two people co-own a taxi cab. Each drives it 12 hours a day, tracking their own fares and expenses separately. No partnership exists because there’s no joint profit motive. What you earn during your shift has nothing to do with what I earn during mine.

But change the facts and lease that cab to a third party who pays both owners. Now you’ve introduced a collective profit motive, and it looks like a partnership.

The Cunninghams identify two key features: business activity and sharing of profit. When both exist, you likely have a partnership. When either is missing, you probably have mere co-ownership.

This is where things get tricky. A single rental property split between two friends is probably mere co-ownership. But if they offer concierge services for an extra fee or they’re building a portfolio of rentals and managing them like a business, each additional fact pushes the activity toward partnership territory.

As Jeremy emphasizes repeatedly, federal tax law, not state law, controls this determination. You can register an LLC, file articles and get a certificate of formation, but none of these facts, standing alone,

determines whether a partnership exists for federal tax purposes. As the Supreme Court established 75 years ago, states can create entities on their books, but they can’t dictate federal tax consequences.

When Partnerships Actually Form

Knowing a partnership can exist is one thing. Knowing when it forms and triggers filing obligations is another matter entirely. It has nothing to do with filing paperwork at the Secretary of State’s office.

A partnership forms for federal tax purposes when participants join capital or services together with the intent to conduct an enterprise or business. Courts generally look for both genuine intent to carry on a business together and some actual contribution of capital or services.

Plans, discussions, and handshake agreements don’t count. Something tangible must go into the pot.

This framework comes from two landmark Supreme Court decisions every practitioner should know.

Tower v. Commissioner (1946) laid the foundation. The Supreme Court held that a partnership forms when people join “their money, goods, labor, or skill for the purpose of carrying on a trade, profession, or business” with a “community of interest in the profits and losses.” The critical question: whether the partners “really and truly intended to join together for the purpose of carrying on business and sharing in the profits or losses.”

Tower also drew a bright line between state and federal authority. As the Court stated, a state “cannot, by its decisions and laws governing questions over which it has final say, also decide issues of federal tax law.”

Culbertson v. Commissioner (1949) clarified what Tower meant. Lower courts misread Tower as requiring some minimum threshold of capital or services. The Supreme Court corrected this, saying, “The question is not whether the services or capital contributed by a partner are of sufficient importance to meet some objective standard,” but whether “considering all the facts, the parties in good faith and acting with a business purpose intended to join together in the present conduct of the enterprise.”

Culbertson produced the factors courts use to assess intent, and practitioners should memorize these criteria:

The agreement and the parties’ conduct in executing it
Whether each participant genuinely participates or is just a name on paper
Testimony of disinterested persons (would vendors or advisors see this as a partnership?)
The relationship of the parties
Their abilities and capital contributions
Actual control of income and how it’s used
Any other facts showing true intent

Jeremy notes that family partnership cases of the 1940s-1960s drove much of this development. Families were forming partnerships primarily for tax benefits. Courts had to determine whether these were genuine business partnerships or just tax avoidance vehicles. When the intent was purely to dodge taxes rather than to operate an enterprise, courts rejected partnership status.

Sparks v. Commissioner (1986) adds practical guidance. The Tax Court held that startup discussions, soliciting contributions, negotiating with third parties, and even incurring expenses were “pre-operating activities,” not partnership formation. The partnership didn’t form until members’ capital interests vested, meaning contributions were made and ownership interests received.

The practical takeaway is to document everything. Jeremy emphasizes that small business owners are terrible at this, and tax advisors must encourage better practices. A partnership or operating agreement that records when contributions were made and the ownership interests received establishes the formation date, not the LLC filing, planning meeting, or domain registration.

Three Ways to Avoid Partnership Treatment

Once you’ve determined a partnership exists, the next question is whether an exception allows the parties to sidestep partnership reporting. Three pathways exist, and practitioners regularly confuse them.

Electing Out of Subchapter K

Under IRC §761(a), members of an unincorporated organization can elect out of Subchapter K treatment if they can determine their incomes individually and the activity involves:

Investment purposes only
Production, extraction, or use (but not sale) of joint property
Securities underwriting over a short period

But the catch is that this election only removes Subchapter K rules. It doesn’t exempt the activity from any other IRC provision.

Jeremy highlights Cokes v. Commissioner (1988) as the cautionary tale. A widow inherited her husband’s interest in an oil venture that had elected out of Subchapter K. She never attended meetings, voted, drilled wells, or supervised operations. Her involvement was zero beyond holding an interest. Still, the Tax Court held her income was from a trade or business, subject to self-employment tax under IRC §§1401 and 1402. The partnership remained a partnership, just not subject to Subchapter K.

Qualified Joint Venture for Married Couples

The first spousal exception is available only to couples filing jointly who meet all three requirements:

The spouses are the only members
Both materially participate under IRC §469(h)
Each reports their share as if operating as a sole proprietor (separate Schedules C (or F) and separate Schedules SE)

This splits what would be a partnership into two sole proprietorships for reporting, eliminating Form 1065.

A critical limitation to be aware of is the qualified joint venture is NOT available if spouses operate through an LLC. If they registered an LLC, this door is closed.

There’s no form to file. Spouses simply submit separate schedules with their joint return. The election continues while requirements are met. Revocation needs IRS permission.

Community Property LLCs

The second spousal exception applies when there IS an LLC, exactly where the qualified joint venture fails. But it only works in nine community property states: Arizona, California, Idaho, Louisiana, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas, Washington, and Wisconsin.

To be eligible, the LLC must be wholly owned by spouses as community property with no corporate election filed. When met, Rev. Proc. 2002-69 lets spouses report the activity as either a partnership or a disregarded entity.

This isn’t an election, so there’s no form, statement, or revocation. It’s simply a choice the IRS respects. Spouses can theoretically change annually (though Jeremy says they probably shouldn’t).

Your Two-Step Framework for Partnership Determination

Jeremy distills everything into a practical framework you can apply immediately.

Step 1: Does a partnership exist?

Ask these questions in order:

Are there two or more distinct owners? (Not an individual and their disregarded entity. They have to be two separate taxpayers)
Are they merely co-owning property, or operating a business together?
Is there a shared profit motive? Do they act like business co-owners or like investors holding the same asset?

The more parties look like business owners running an enterprise together, the more likely a partnership exists.

Step 2: Does an exception apply?

Check for:

§761(a) election out of Subchapter K
Qualified Joint Venture under §761(f) (spouses, joint return, no LLC)
Community Property LLC under Rev. Proc. 2002-69 (spouses, community property state, LLC)

Key Takeaways for Tax Professionals

Shared property doesn’t create a partnership. Shared business activity does. One rental is probably co-ownership. A portfolio with services looks different.
State entity formation doesn’t control federal partnership status. The Supreme Court settled this in 1946.
Partnerships form when participants contribute capital or services in exchange for ownership interests, not when they form an LLC or buy a domain. Document that moment.
Push clients toward written agreements. Small business owners resist this. Partnership or operating agreements that record contributions and formation dates are essential.
Don’t confuse the spousal exceptions. Qualified joint ventures and community property LLC rules are completely separate regimes for different situations.
Electing out of Subchapter K doesn’t avoid self-employment tax or any other IRC provision.

These determinations have real consequences. Get it right, and you’ve met reporting requirements while positioning clients for planning opportunities. Get it wrong, and you face unfiled returns, unexpected self-employment tax, or missed savings.

If you’re ready to dive deeper, listen to the full episode of Tax in Action for all the case law details, regulatory citations, and Jeremy’s complete analytical framework. In the next episode, Jeremy examines who qualifies as a partner and tackles the increasingly important question of which partners face self-employment tax.

What Women in Accounting Gain From Conferences Has Little to Do With CPE Credits

Earmark Team · July 10, 2026 ·

Picture standing in a crowded expo hall, trying to reach a single vendor booth, but you can’t make it more than a few steps without someone pulling you into a hug. The problem gets so bad that a colleague appoints himself your personal handler, physically steering you through the crowd like a celebrity bodyguard.

That’s what conferences become when you’ve invested in relationships over the years, and it’s exactly what happened to Nancy McClelland at a recent conference when Tony Proctor had to escort her through the expo hall. On the other end of the spectrum, her She Counts podcast co-host Questian Telka once attended Intuit Connect with the goal of walking up to just one person and introducing herself without having a panic attack.

In their latest episode, Nancy and Questian dig into why professional conferences matter so much more than the CPE credits they offer, especially for women in accounting, tax, and bookkeeping. They’re even taking their own advice. She Counts recorded live at WAVESeattle this year, moderated by conference organizer Erin Pohan.

Why Conferences Matter Beyond the CPE Credits

Yes, you can earn CPE credits online. Yes, conferences are expensive. And yes, if you’re an introvert who works happily from home for days without seeing another human, the idea of walking into a ballroom full of strangers might sound terrifying.

But as Questian puts it, CPE is just “the baseline reason to be there.” Nancy earns more than double her required CPE every year, so that’s not why she keeps going back to conference after conference.

For Questian, an admitted introvert who can work alone for days, conferences offer conversations with people who truly understand what she’s all about. “It’s not like when you’re talking to your spouse or significant other, your family member, where it just completely goes over their head,” she explains.

Nancy frames the conference experience through a story from a favorite childhood book, Hail, Hail Camp Timberwood by Ellen Conford. A girl arrives at summer camp feeling completely out of place while everyone else runs around hugging old friends. Then a stranger runs up and hugs her – confiding, “Look, I know we don’t know each other. It’s okay. I was just feeling so left out.” The two start hugging other lost-looking kids, and soon the entire camp is connected.

“Conferences kind of remind me of that,” Nancy says. “I can’t necessarily promise somebody’s going to run up and hug you and pretend like they’re a long lost friend, but it’s a little bit like that.”

These relationships are professionally transformative. Questian met nonprofit expert Greg Bossen at her second Intuit Connect simply by walking up and saying, “Hi, I work with nonprofits. I heard you work with nonprofits.” She had no idea who he was. It still took her five minutes to work up the nerve. That conversation turned into shared clients, co-teaching opportunities, and an ongoing professional partnership.

Nancy met Katie Helle through a community post about the Digital CPA conference. Katie is now helping Nancy navigate her first season with ProConnect Tax. “You’ll meet people you’ll be friends with forever,” she says.

Why Women Need These Spaces Even More

Nancy believes strongly that building these relationships is “two, three, ten, twenty times more important for women than men.”

For women in accounting, conferences offer personal validation and visibility. You can watch another woman take the stage and think, ”I could do that too.”

“Confidence gets built in real time,” Nancy explains. “We get visible, we take up space. We imagine bigger possibilities for ourselves when we see other women.”

The relationships you build become your safety net when life gets complicated. When you’ve invested in real conference relationships, you have people to call when everything falls apart. That’s something a webinar simply can’t deliver.

Questian’s favorite conference moment captures this perfectly. At WAVE-Seattle last year, Jen Posner mentioned listening to a podcast by two women in accounting on her drive up. “Is it called She Counts?” Questian asked. It was. “That’s my and Nancy’s podcast.” Early in the show’s life, that moment proved their work was reaching people in meaningful ways.

Choosing the Right Conference for Your Goals

“The best conference isn’t universal,” Nancy emphasizes. What works brilliantly for one person might leave another feeling completely out of place.

Before registering for anything, ask yourself what you’re actually looking for:

Technical learning? Deep dives on tax approaches or software implementation
Networking? Meeting potential collaborators and referral partners
Inspiration? Keynotes that help you dream bigger
Visibility? Opportunities to speak and take up space
Tool discovery? Hands-on software evaluation in expo halls
Community connection? Women-focused events or niche gatherings

Nancy once sent her senior accountant to a conference with one mission: find the best project management software for their team. That trip led them to Double (formerly Keeper), which Nancy calls “transformational” for their organization.

Size and Format Matter

Not every conference needs to be massive. Local pop-ups and touring events offer accessible starting points. Erin created WAVE-Seattle because she was tired of traveling around the country and wanted something for women in the Pacific Northwest. Jason Staats takes his On Firms events on tour. The Bridging the Gap Road Show and Advisory Amplified travel city to city, offering lower-cost options.

For larger conferences, each has its own personality:

Scaling New Heights: Heavy on accounting technology with a massive expo hall
Intuit Connect: Essential for QBO-specific firms
Digital CPA: Carefully curated vendors in shared social spaces for deeper conversations
Bridging the Gap: Focus on sustainable firms with an inclusive, come-as-you-are culture

Don’t overlook industry conferences outside accounting, either. If you specialize in construction or dental practices, you might find your next clients at those events.

Budget Solutions

If cost is the barrier, check out the Accounting Cornerstone Foundation. This nonprofit covers airfare, hotel, and admission for first-time attendees who can’t afford it. Multiple members of Nancy’s Ask a CPA community have already received scholarships and describe the experience as unparalleled. And if you understand the impact conferences make, consider paying it forward and becoming a donor.

Making the Most of Your Conference Experience

You’ve picked your conference. You’ve registered. Now what?

Set concrete goals. Come with one to three specific objectives. Maybe it’s meeting five people, evaluating two tools, or attending three sessions. Nancy brings a notebook listing client issues to resolve and vendors to meet.
Connect beforehand. Check whether your online communities, such as Bookkeeping Buds or Ask a CPA, are organizing meetups. Having familiar faces changes everything, especially for introverts.
Don’t overpack your schedule. Nancy admits she’s a “maximizer” who spends 2.5 hours planning for each session slot. “Don’t be me,” she cautions. It’s okay to sleep in, take a nap, or skip sessions for hallway conversations.
Branch out from familiar faces. Nancy and a friend deliberately arrive early and stay late at conferences to have quality time together. This frees them to meet new people during the event itself.
The hallways matter. Relationships form in the informal moments, like meetups, dinners, and wandering at expos. When Tony had to physically steer Nancy through the expo hall because she kept getting pulled into conversations, it proved how deep conference relationships can become.
Start small if you’re introverted. A few years ago, Questian’s goal was simply to introduce herself to one person without panicking. That single step catalyzed speaking engagements, teaching opportunities, and eventually co-hosting a podcast.

Your Next Conference Could Change Everything

Sometimes the most valuable part of a conference isn’t what you learn, but who you become after being in that room.

CPE is the floor, not the ceiling. The real value comes from relationships, visibility, confidence, and belonging you can’t build behind a desk. Choose strategically based on what you need right now. Go in with goals. Connect with your community. Give yourself grace. Push yourself to meet one new person, even if it takes five minutes to work up the nerve.

These spaces are incredibly valuable for women in accounting. Seeing other women lead, share vulnerably, and succeed gives you permission to imagine bigger possibilities. The relationships become collaborations, partnerships, and the safety net you need when life gets complicated.

This profession can be isolating, especially if you’re running your own firm or navigating spaces where you’re one of only a few women. Conferences are an investment in who you’re becoming.

Your Camp Timberwood moment might be one introduction away.

Listen to the full episode for Nancy and Questian’s complete conference recommendations.

Private Equity, Proprietary AI, and the Self-Reinforcing Cycle Coming for Independent Firms

Earmark Team · July 9, 2026 ·

In 2025, there were roughly 900 roll-up transactions in the accounting profession. Only a handful were mega-deals that made Accounting Today headlines. Most were small firms merging, tax-only shops joining advisory practices, and everything in between. Of those transactions, 200 were directly linked to private equity investments. Meanwhile, half of the top 30 accounting firms have now taken private equity money or adopted alternative ownership structures.

And while all that was happening, AI tools started being built exclusively for certain platforms, and locked behind walls independent firms can’t access.

Marcus Dillon, CPA, sees these forces clearly. As co-host of the Who’s Really the BOSS? podcast and leader of Dillon Business Advisors (DBA) and Collective by DBA, an advisory community for firm owners, he spent five consecutive weeks this past May traveling to industry events. His journey took him from the Collective Recharge conference in Mexico to Intuit’s council in California, ADP’s council in Nashville, meetings in Katy, Texas, and finally the Firm Growth Forum in San Diego. Across all those rooms, the same interconnected forces kept surfacing.

Firm owners need to understand that private equity timelines drive centralization. Centralization enables AI deployment at scale. And proprietary AI makes consolidated firms increasingly competitive against independent practices. It’s a single, self-reinforcing cycle that redraws the competitive map for firms of every size.

In Season 5, Episode 13, Marcus and Rachel Dillon unpack what he learned across those five weeks on the road, and what it means for your firm right now.

The M&A Wave Moving Downmarket

The numbers tell only part of the story. What makes this personal for most firm owners is where this M&A activity is heading.

MBA graduates from Harvard, the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and similar institutions enter the market armed with a concept called “entrepreneurship through acquisition.” Their professors specifically identified accounting as ripe for a roll-up. Now you have freshly minted MBAs, search funds, and pooled investor groups actively hunting for accounting firms ranging from $2 million to $20 million in revenue.

“Private equity gets a bad rap,” Marcus explains in the episode. “All it is is pooled money. There are great people to work with. Some people aren’t so great to work with. And some people have a great investment thesis and culture and treat team members well. And some people don’t.”

In practice, evaluating a capital partner is no different from vetting a new hire or vendor. The label doesn’t automatically make it good or bad.

Marcus and Rachel speak from experience. DBA completed two acquisitions in 2025. When Marcus mentioned firms that acquired eight companies in a single year, Rachel’s response was, “After acquiring two firms in one year, I think you need an award if you acquire eight firms in one year, whether good or bad, it’s not the easy way out.”

Three distinct models emerged among the firms being celebrated at these conferences:

Fully centralized firms like Aprio and Armanino that integrate acquisitions completely from day one
Decentralized platforms that preserve autonomy for acquired firms while sharing ownership
Hybrid models that centralize certain functions while leaving others independent

All three were celebrating wins. But something unexpected happens beneath the surface.

The Rush Toward Centralization

“Since I’ve been back in town, there’s been a big movement with people stating they’ll remain fully autonomous and fully decentralized,” Marcus observed. “They’re now moving towards centralizing.”

Two forces drive this reversal.

First, you can’t deploy AI effectively across disconnected data. Picture a platform with 20 firms operating independently, with their own tech stacks, databases, and processes. If that platform discovers a breakthrough AI automation, they’d have to install it 20 separate times. As Marcus puts it, the data is “so much more valuable when it’s all together, and you can deploy those efficiencies at scale .”

Second, the next buyer doesn’t want a project. Private equity funds typically hold investments for three to five years before seeking a larger capital partner. When platforms go to market, that next investor “doesn’t want to own 20 different brands on a loosely connected platform,” Marcus explains. “That doesn’t make sense to them. It doesn’t make sense to pay a premium for that.”

We see this play out in real time. Springline is rebranding acquired firms under a single brand. Crete Professionals Alliance just rebranded to Current. These are structural changes designed to make the combined entity more valuable and competitive.

Rachel offers practical wisdom for those watching these shifts. “You always want to level up to your top firm. It would be a little naive to think you can keep doing exactly what you’ve always done with the same tools.”

Marcus validates this from DBA’s own experience. When they integrated their two acquisitions, they immediately moved them onto DBA’s tech stack and systems. If they’d left everything separate, “it would have been a nightmare,” he says.

The AI Divide Takes Shape

Current counts Thrive as its biggest investor. Thrive is also connected to OpenAI. Together, they’ve built AI software available exclusively to firms on that platform, and the software won’t be available on the open market.

“When you have big technology companies like OpenAI or Anthropic partnering with firms and creating proprietary software, you have to question who’s going to win the technology battle at the end of the day,” Marcus says.

These AI-powered platforms are competing with smaller firms. You don’t have to join a platform to be affected. You just have to compete against firms that did.

Meanwhile, the broader AI landscape is chaotic. New AI products launch daily. Every platform is embedding AI. Canopy released Co-work, Carbon is building AI features, and Intuit Intelligence is rolling out within QuickBooks. “Everything we open up on a daily basis has some form of AI or agent now being built into it,” Marcus notes.

DBA takes a practical approach. Currently, they deploy Microsoft Copilot across the entire team because it integrates with their Microsoft ecosystem. Select team members also have Claude Enterprise for testing advanced solutions. Once something works in Claude, Angel Sabino, DBA’s Director of Technology and AI, productionizes it in Copilot for broader deployment.

“It’s hard right now to understand what’s real, what’s conceptual, what’s just a great video that somebody put together, or what is actually a true demo of a useful product,” Marcus admits about the current AI landscape.

“Be really aware and ready to start experimenting with it so when you do have a change in the firm, you can immediately solve for it and not try to figure it out when it’s too late,” Rachel counsels.

Your Window for Action

The accounting profession is facing an interconnected dynamic in which M&A drives centralization, centralization enables AI deployment, and AI makes consolidated firms more competitive. Each force feeds the next, and the cycle is accelerating.

But understanding these dynamics gives you power to act with intention. Here’s where to start:

Review your software spend now. Vendors push price increases in the summer. As Marcus advises, if you turned on software to experiment six months ago but only have one client using it, turn it off. DBA specifically moved clients to consolidated platforms like Ramp for bill pay.
Start experimenting with AI before you need it. Set aside a budget and designate a small group to test tools in a controlled environment. Don’t wait for a crisis.
Know your non-negotiables. Whether it’s a PE-backed buyer, a platform acquisition, or succession planning, understand what matters most before negotiations begin.
Take control with your dollars. “You can be a very reactive player in this market, or you can actually be proactive,” Marcus says. “And the best way to be proactive is with your dollars.”

At the San Diego conference, Marcus overheard a woman celebrating finding a session that didn’t mention M&A or AI. She called it “refreshing.” Her instinct isn’t wrong; good business fundamentals still matter. But ignoring these forces won’t make them disappear.

If you want to dive deeper into these dynamics and learn more about navigating this inflection point, join Marcus, Rachel, and other firm leaders at Gather this October in Grapevine, Texas. Visit collective.cpa for details while tickets remain available.

Listen to the full episode of Who’s Really the BOSS? to hear more of Marcus and Rachel’s discussion about preparing your firm for what’s ahead.

Rachel and Marcus Dillon, CPA, own a Texas-based, remote client accounting and advisory services firm, Dillon Business Advisors, with a team of 15 professionals. Their latest organization, Collective by DBA, supports and guides accounting firm owners and leaders with firm resources, education, and operational strategy through community, groups, and one-on-one advisory.