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Smart Accounting Firms Are Done Being Yes People

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Picture an  accounting firm that keeps partner salaries locked away like state secrets. Staff spend years wondering what partnership actually pays. Meanwhile, another firm down the street posts everyone’s salary on a public leaderboard. The path to partnership comes with clear milestones and transparent rewards.

This stark difference shows just one way “renegade” firms are shaking up the accounting profession.

In episode 104 of the Earmark Podcast, recorded live during the Advisory Amplified tour in Austin, host Blake Oliver digs into what it means to be a “renegade” in accounting. He’s joined by Madeline Reeves, founder and CEO of Fearless Foundry, and Wesley McDonald, go-to-market leader at Relay. Together, they explore how forward-thinking firms and tech companies challenge everything we thought we knew about running an accounting practice.

What Makes a Firm “Renegade”?

So what exactly is a renegade firm? Reeves has worked with many of them, and she has a clear answer.

“A renegade firm is leading their clients to somewhere new and is not settling for the ways things have always been done,” she explains. These firms challenge the status quo. They see tech companies as partners, not just vendors. And they push their clients and technology partners to do better.

These firms also stand out in unexpected ways. Take Lance CPA (now part of Revel CPA). When they signed new clients in the brewery and hospitality space, they didn’t just send a standard engagement letter. They delivered beautiful welcome kits complete with custom beer glasses and cool socks. It was their way of saying this isn’t your typical accounting relationship.

But being a renegade goes deeper than nice gestures. These firms also excel at saying no.

“A lot of firms are dedicated to being acts-of-service people,” Reeves notes. “They become a little bit of “yes people” or people pleasers. But the real renegade firms are like, ‘I do not do that service or I do not work with that industry.’”

They’re not trying to be everything to everyone. They focus on being exceptional at what they do best.

Taking the Lead with Clients

Traditional firms often let clients call the shots. They use whatever software the client prefers. They adapt to the client’s processes. They follow rather than lead.

Renegade firms flip this completely around.

Reeves puts it perfectly: “When I go to the dentist, I’m not telling the dentist, ‘No, don’t use that drill in my mouth.’ I don’t know how to do dentistry. So if you’re an accountant, it’s your job to lead your clients.”

These firms come to the table saying, “This is how we do this job well and effectively for you. If the goal is advisory services, this is how we get there better, faster.”

When you’re the professional, you set the standards for how the work gets done.

Breaking Open the Black Box of Compensation

One radical change happening in renegade firms involves money—specifically, who knows what about everyone’s pay.

“On the most successful sales teams I’ve been a part of, there’s a leaderboard that shows exactly how much people have attained in their salary in that quarter,” McDonald shares. “Which is a wild concept to think about in some industries.”

Oliver points out the obvious problem with traditional secrecy: “One of the biggest secrets is how much the partners make. But if we want everybody to want to be a partner, why don’t we tell them?”

It’s not just about knowing the numbers, though. Reeves emphasizes that firms need “not just pay transparency but pathway transparency.” People need to see the clear steps to advancement, not just the end goal.

McDonald, drawing from his tech experience, says promotions shouldn’t be about time in seat. “You’re ready to move to the next level as soon as you’re performing at that level.”

This represents a huge shift from the traditional model where you might wait five years for a promotion regardless of your performance.

Building Teams That Actually Want to Work Together

The old model pits high performers against each other. Remember those weekly emails showing who billed the most hours? Competition is the traditional way to drive performance.

Renegade firms take a different approach.

“If you have people on your team who think the only way up is their own performance, your whole team is going to be fighting against each other,” Reeves explains. She learned this building sales teams. When she tied part of compensation to team performance, not just individual metrics, “We saw performance double because people were suddenly willing to turn to the teammate next to them and show them what was working.”

This collaborative approach is essential for attracting younger professionals. As Reeves notes, “There are a lot of young people who are coming out of school, and there’s nothing exciting to them about working 90 hours a week during tax season. They’re like, ‘hard pass.’”

“You can tell people to do the work and you can pay people to do the work,” Reeves says. “But to actually get people to want to show up and fully do the work, it has to align around the things that genuinely motivate them as a human.”

When Banking Becomes a Partnership

Banking isn’t usually seen as innovative. But companies like Relay are changing that, starting with how they work with accountants.

Most people choose banks for passive reasons. “It’s because I know that bank exists or they’re down the street or my parents bank there,” McDonald observes.

But what if your bank actually worked for you and your accountant?

“Relay is purpose built for our accounting partners and their clients,” McDonald explains. Traditional banks gatekeep information. Relay surfaces it to accountants so they can actually help their clients.

The difference is stark. “I’m not even sure how I would give feedback to Chase or Bank of America or Wells Fargo,” Oliver admits. In contrast, McDonald says, “If a partner of ours has an idea and they bring it to us, we will act on that idea.”

This isn’t just talk. Being a champion for SMEs and their partners is one of Relay’s seven core values. They were the first banking platform to go to market specifically through accounting professionals.

Reeves shares her own frustration with traditional banking. She wanted to support a local community bank that shared her values. But they had no online banking. Getting statements required writing emails to a banker.

“If you’re really serving small business at the core of who you are,” she says, “making me have to email a banker to get a bank statement isn’t serving small business. That’s creating extra manual work for me or for my accountant.”

Learning from Renegade Mistakes

Being a renegade means trying new things. And that means making mistakes.

Reeves shares a particularly painful one. She built what she thought was an innovative compensation model, paying top performers a percentage of deals they closed. Then she discovered a senior employee was committing fraud, jacking up prices in their proposal system to increase her cut.

Reeves recalls discovering the fraud just before a major conference and having to lock down all her banking immediately. The experience taught her to “trust but verify.” You need systems to ensure people act the right way, even those you trust.

McDonald shares his own revelation about breaking from the traditional path. He started his career as a fixed income broker. But as he earned promotions, he looked around and realized, “everyone there had been doing it for 30 years. I thought, ‘Can I do this for 25 more years?’”

He chose the non-linear path instead, moving between sales, consulting, and building teams. “I had stopped my learning journey,” he reflects. “I want to be a lifelong learner.”

Oliver’s “mistake” was majoring in music at the most expensive university in the country. But the experience taught him how to teach himself anything—a skill that proved invaluable in accounting. “If you can sit in a practice room for six hours a day and learn how to play a concerto, that’s all just breaking problems down into literally measure by measure, note by note.”

The Path Forward

The renegade firms discussed in this episode aren’t making small tweaks to the traditional model. They’re rebuilding it from scratch.

They’re becoming strategic leaders who guide rather than follow clients, creating transparent cultures where collaboration beats competition, and embracing technology companies as true partners rather than necessary evils.

With younger professionals rejecting traditional firm culture and clients demanding strategic guidance over compliance work, the old model is dying. The renegade approach offers a sustainable alternative that actually addresses why people leave accounting.

These innovations are happening right now at thriving firms. From brewery-themed welcome kits to banking platforms built for accountant collaboration, these changes prove accounting firms can create experiences that rival any modern service business.

Want to hear the complete conversation? Listen to the full episode. You’ll get the full story of how Reeves uncovered fraud through her proposal system, Olivers’s journey from professional musician to accounting innovator, and detailed strategies for implementing renegade principles in your own firm.

The Accounting Platform That Achieves 96.5% Automation Reveals How They Did It

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“No one’s going to be outcompeted by the AI itself. You are going to be outcompeted by firms that really adopt this aggressively,” warns Jeff Seibert, whose company just hit 96.5% accuracy in automated bookkeeping—something that seemed impossible just a few years ago.

In this milestone 100th episode of the Earmark Podcast, Blake Oliver sits down with Jeff Seibert, co-founder and CEO of Digits, to explore how AI is fundamentally changing the architecture of accounting software. Seibert brings fresh eyes to accounting—he previously led consumer product at Twitter and built Crashlytics (now running on six billion smartphones). His frustration was simple: Why could product teams access real-time analytics while business owners waited weeks for black-and-white spreadsheets?

Founded in 2018, Digits set out to reimagine accounting in the age of machine learning. While traditional software treats transactions as meaningless text in rigid databases, Digits achieves near-perfect automation by treating financial data as interconnected objects that learn from patterns across millions of transactions.

The 30-Year-Old Problem Holding Back Accounting

As Seibert sees it, the fundamental issue facing bookkeeping automation is that every major accounting platform—QuickBooks, Xero, and even NetSuite—runs on relational databases designed 20-30 years ago. These systems treat transactions as simple text entries with no understanding of what they mean.

“QuickBooks is just going to see an Uber transaction as “U-b-e-r”. It just sees text,” Seibert explains. “It doesn’t understand the data, it doesn’t know what Uber actually is.”

This limitation explains why Intuit, with all its resources, has yet to deliver meaningful automation. The answer is architectural. Each QuickBooks company exists in its own isolated database, preventing the software from learning patterns across businesses. The constraints run so deep that QuickBooks still can’t handle having a vendor and customer with the same name—it appears they chose “name” as the primary database key decades ago.

Digits takes a completely different approach using what’s called a vector graph data model. Everything becomes an object—Uber is an object, your expense categories are objects, your bank accounts are objects. Transactions become connections between these objects, creating a web of financial relationships the AI can understand.

This mirrors how large language models (LLMs) work, converting transactions into vector embeddings, essentially plotting them in multi-dimensional space where similar items cluster together. When trained on 170 million transactions representing nearly $1 trillion in business activity, patterns emerge that would be obvious to humans but invisible to traditional software.

“When you have that scale of data and you see how everyone has booked Uber before, you start to see patterns,” Seibert notes. “The model starts learning. If it sees Lyft in your accounting for this client, it then knows how to book Uber.”

How AI Agents Actually Work (Hint: Like Clever Interns)

The accounting world is buzzing about “AI agents,” but what are they really? Seibert explains, “An agent is simply an LLM that you run in a loop. You give it a task, it attempts the task, you ask if it completed it. If not, it continues until it’s done.”

Think of them as clever interns who never get tired. Digits has been running these agents in production since January 2024, primarily for researching unfamiliar transactions.

The system uses three layers of intelligence. First, it checks if this specific client has seen this transaction before. If yes, it books the transaction exactly the same way. Second, if the transaction is new to this client but familiar to the platform, it uses its global model trained across all users. Third, for completely novel transactions, the agent literally Googles them.

“What would you do as an accountant? You would probably Google it,” Seibert explains. “What do our agents do? They literally Google it, research the transaction, build a dossier about it.”

As a result, only 4-5% of transactions now require human review, compared to the 20% that typically slip through even well-maintained rule-based systems. Notably, the system maintains strict confidence thresholds. Any transaction it is unsure about gets flagged for human review. It never guesses when uncertain.

The upcoming reconciliation feature shows how sophisticated these agents have become. The system pulls statements directly from banks or extracts them from PDFs, then matches transactions with pixel-level precision. “You can literally click on the transaction and see it on the statement and vice versa,” Seibert says. This builds trust with accountants who need to see exactly where the numbers come from.

What This Means for Your Firm’s Future

As of August, Digits hit 96.5% accuracy, up from 93.5% in spring. Each percentage point represents thousands of transactions that no longer need human touch. But it begs the question: how do you price services when the work happens automatically?

“If you’re charging purely per hour right now, then automation may make that challenging,” Seibert acknowledges. But forward-thinking firms are already adapting. They’re moving to fixed-fee models for routine work like monthly closes, which become increasingly profitable as automation reduces time investment. Many use a hybrid approach, charging fixed fees for the close, and hourly rates for advisory work.

At a flat $100 per month (with volume discounts for accounting partners), Digits offers predictable pricing that contrasts sharply with QuickBooks’ constant increases. The platform even offers specialized SKUs for ledger-only or reporting-only clients, accommodating diverse practice needs.

The staffing implications are real but not apocalyptic. Junior bookkeeping roles focused on data entry will diminish. But Seibert points out this could make the profession more attractive: “You don’t want to just sit there doing data entry all day long. You want to learn how to advise businesses.”

Seibert recommends firms start small when implementing automated bookkeeping. “Pick one client in your firm and see what you can achieve,” Seibert challenges. Choose a simple, digital-native business like consultants, SaaS companies, or agencies with predictable electronic expenses. Build confidence, then expand to complex cases.

Building Trust Through Transparency

With financial data flowing through AI systems, security is crucial. Digits addresses this with architecture developed at Seibert’s previous companies, where they handled crash data from billions of smartphones.

Everything stays within Digits’ systems; they don’t send raw data to OpenAI or other third parties. All data is encrypted at rest using per-object envelope encryption, where each object has its own encryption key. Even if breached, stealing one key wouldn’t compromise the system.

The platform is SOC 2 Type 2 certified, with complete audit trails showing who changed what and when. You can even grant granular access, like giving your marketing manager visibility into only marketing expenses. “They can see marketing, all the transactions booked to marketing, and nothing else,” Seibert explains.

Importantly, when AI does the work, you can trace exactly what happened. Click on any transaction to see the activity log. This solves the common problem of clients making changes in QuickBooks without anyone knowing.

The Competitive Reality Check

Seibert’s warning deserves repeating: “No one’s going to be outcompeted by the AI itself. You are going to be outcompeted by firms that really adopt this aggressively.”

This isn’t hypothetical. Firms using advanced automation already serve more clients with similar-size teams, offer competitive pricing while maintaining margins, and provide real-time insights that clients increasingly expect.

You don’t have to become a tech expert. Set aside time each month after the close to try new tools. Watch YouTube videos about AI agents (though Oliver warns to avoid the hype channels). Most importantly, maintain healthy skepticism. As Seibert notes about AI doing math, “If it’s not 100% correct, what’s the point?”

Remember, AI agents are like clever interns. They’re eager, overconfident, and need supervision. They excel at tedious, repetitive tasks but need human judgment for nuanced decisions. The goal isn’t to replace accountants but to eliminate the work accountants wish they didn’t have to do.

Taking the First Step

Thoughtfully evaluate how these innovations can augment your practice. Start with one simple client. See what 96.5% automation actually feels like. Build confidence, then expand gradually.

Listen to the full episode to hear Seibert’s complete vision and practical guidance on everything from selecting pilot clients to restructuring pricing models. The tools to eliminate tedium while amplifying expertise aren’t coming; they’re here, proven, and improving rapidly. How quickly and thoughtfully can you integrate it?

Navigating QuickBooks Online’s Interface Changes: From Frustration to Opportunity

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QuickBooks Online’s latest interface changes have left many accounting professionals feeling like the ground is shifting beneath them. Just when you get the hang of one workflow, the layout moves, the buttons change, and suddenly everything takes twice as long. 

In episode 106 of The Unofficial QuickBooks Accountants Podcast, titled “Cha-Cha-Cha-Changes: Navigating QuickBooks Online’s New Interface,” host Alicia Katz Pollock, MAT, dives into what these updates mean in practice. She acknowledges the frustration many users feel without brushing it aside.

Understanding the Real Disruption

“I am not minimizing your experience when I’m talking about this stuff. I am not discounting your turmoil in any way,” Katz Pollock emphasizes early in the episode. What she’s trying to do is provide perspective and practical solutions.

The productivity hit is real. Two weeks before recording, Katz Pollock’s screens were loading so slowly, she’d “literally click to open a sales receipt and the framework would come up and literally nothing would load.” She’d start chugging water and get “six or eight sips in” before the transaction appeared. While performance has improved since then, the delays remind us we’re not just learning new workflows. We’re doing it while the platform struggles with its own growing pains.

Katz Pollock frames this challenge through a lens every accountant understands: onboarding time. “When I bring on a new hire, I don’t actually expect them to be productive out of the gate,” she explains. The same applies here. Build in grace periods over the next month or two. Communicate with clients about timeline adjustments if needed. This isn’t making excuses, it’s acknowledging reality.

Practical Solutions You Can Use Today

Instead of dwelling on what’s changed, Katz Pollock offers concrete navigation solutions that work right now.

First, she shares a few helpful navigation tricks:

  • Right-click links to open them in new tabs (two clicks instead of hunting for the missing “New Window” option)
  • Drag menu items up to your tab bar to create new tabs instantly
  • Bookmark frequently used pages like the Reminders list (which requires three clicks to reach otherwise)
  • Customize your menu using the pinned section in the bottom left corner

Katz Pollock strongly recommends RightTool by Hector Garcia and Mark Corum. “For me, it’s essential equipment,” she says. This browser extension adds shortcuts and automations, like copying classes down entire journal entry columns with one click.

Other interface changes accountants need to know about include:

  • The Transactions menu is now called Accounting
  • Sales is now Sales and Get Paid (highlighting the underused payment links feature)
  • Apps moved to Integrations in the upper right corner
  • Accountant Tools briefcase became My Menu in the upper left

The new sticky second-tier menus actually improve navigation once you get used to them. When doing customer work, all the customer links stay accessible without constant back-and-forth clicking.

Hidden Features Worth Exploring

While everyone’s focused on what’s different, Katz Pollock discovered several improvements that solve long-standing problems.

The Tasks feature (clipboard icon in upper right) now lets you link directly to specific transactions. “When you click “link a record,” you can actually pick an invoice or a bill or almost any kind of transaction,” Katz Pollock explains. You can attach backup documents, assign priorities, and even create recurring tasks in QBO Advanced to outline your entire workflow.

Inventory improvements are coming. New QBO files now offer FIFO or Moving Cost Average valuation methods. The development team is working on assemblies and units of measure—features that previously required third-party apps.

The Sales Tax Center has its own menu section with a product grid where you can assign tax settings to all products at once, instead of editing each individually. You can even turn sales tax off now, which wasn’t possible before.

For bookkeepers managing client billing, you can now transfer wholesale billing rates directly to another accountant user without losing discounts. This means no more calling Intuit support.

The AI Reality Check

Here’s where Katz Pollock puts the tough realities on the table. While we complain about AI pop-ups in QuickBooks, the entire industry is racing in a different direction.

“The new general ledgers that are generating all the buzz are like Digits and Puzzle,” she notes. “Their entire general ledger is built on AI first. The manual work is the secondary thought.”

This is a fundamental change rather than a gentle evolution. The choice isn’t whether to accept AI in accounting software. It’s whether to work with AI that still respects manual oversight (like QuickBooks) or jump to platforms where human input is treated as an afterthought.

Turning Disruption into Opportunity

Rather than just updating her QuickBooks courses piecemeal, Katz Pollock is seizing this moment for a complete overhaul. Starting September, she’s teaching her entire Royalwise OWLS curriculum in sequence, all in the new interface, at an accelerated pace: one class per week through June,  progressing from basics through advanced features

Annual membership is $1,500. This includes more than 35 classes, 81 hours of CPE credit, plus monthly Q&A sessions. There’s also a business membership option covering fundamentals through December—perfect for clients who need training. Her “Great QBO Refresh” opportunity can be found at http://royl.ws/QBO-Refresh?affiliate=5393907.

“Investing a little bit of time in direct education,” Katz Pollock explains, “means you don’t have to spend all that time spinning your wheels down the road.”

Making Your Voice Heard

Throughout the interface, you’ll find feedback links specific to each feature. “Don’t just say, I don’t like that the pane takes up too much room,” Katz Pollock advises. “Say, ‘I would like an option to have this pane open up or not’.”

Be specific and actionable. The more people who communicate similar needs, the more likely changes will happen. Remember, Intuit uses MVP (Minimum Viable Product) philosophy. They release features to gauge interest, then develop or abandon based on user engagement. The more people who comment about a feature, the quicker the feedback will be implemented.

Looking Ahead

Katz Pollock will be at several conferences this fall, including Women Who Count in Mesa, Intuit Connect in Las Vegas, and Hector Garcia’s Reframe conference in Miami. These events offer opportunities to learn more about upcoming changes and connect with other professionals navigating the same challenges.

The bottom line? Yes, these changes are disruptive. Yes, they cost us time and cause frustration. But they also push us to evolve. As Katz Pollock reminds us, the choice isn’t whether to adapt; it’s whether to approach change strategically or reactively.

Listen to episode 106 for Katz Pollock’s complete analysis, more navigation tips, and a healthy dose of perspective on thriving in a profession where the only constant is change. Whether you’re drowning in the new interface or ready to master it, this episode provides both the validation and practical strategies you need.

Visit royalwise.com/qbo-refresh to learn more about the Great QuickBooks Refresh training program, or find the podcast at uqb.show/106.

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!

Why Accountants Are Both Thrilled and Terrified by QuickBooks’ Latest AI Push

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How much should we trust AI with our critical financial processes?

In a recent episode of The Unofficial QuickBooks Accountants Podcast, hosts Alicia Katz Pollock and Matthew “Spot” Fulton break down the August 2025 “In the Know” webinar from Intuit, where AI agents take center stage alongside major Enterprise Suite enhancements and ProAdvisor Academy improvements.

From payment collection to payroll processing, QuickBooks is pushing automation further than ever before. But as Fulton and Katz Pollock discuss, the technology that saves you hours today needs careful oversight to avoid compliance nightmares tomorrow.

ProAdvisor Academy Gets Smarter

Before diving into the AI updates, the hosts highlighted some welcome improvements to ProAdvisor Academy. You can now filter courses by length and CPE credit amount—perfect for those moments when you think, “I have an hour, what can I learn right now?”

Even better, the system finally saves your CPE certificates in the “My History” section. As Katz Pollock notes, “They used to email them to you and you had to save them, and that was it. So the fact that you can actually now track your CPE is pretty darn awesome.”

Intuit is also launching a new quarterly series called Solution Spotlight, where support experts will tackle complex challenges and deep-dive into underutilized tools. The first topic? Bank transactions and reconciliation—the community’s most requested subject.

Enterprise Suite: The Multi-Entity Game Changer

Fulton and Katz Pollock spent considerable time discussing Enterprise Suite’s powerful consolidation features, and for good reason. These updates address long-standing issues that have plagued multi-entity businesses for years.

The Shared Chart of Accounts feature uses AI to standardize accounting across all your entities. As Fulton explains it, “You choose which chart of accounts you want to be your primary one, and then you can use the AI to say, okay, we think these accounts are going to match up with those accounts. You still have the ability to review and say, yep, you got this right.”

The time savings are massive. Fulton speaks from experience, “As an accountant, the time and energy it takes to try to normalize a chart of accounts is extensive. There’s a lot of thought and knowledge and wisdom that goes into it.”

Multi-entity transactions are even more impressive. When you invoice another entity in your organization, the system automatically creates the corresponding bill in that entity, complete with a PDF attachment. Fulton recalls the old way: “You would pull up two browsers, you’d have both companies up, and you look at the intercompany exchanges between one company and the other, and you go line by line to make sure both sides are there.”

But Katz Pollock raises an important point about accessibility. She has clients with multiple small entities—”literally QuickBooks Ledger or Simple Start”—who desperately need these consolidation features but can’t justify Enterprise Suite’s price tag. Her suggestion? “I think they should make an Enterprise Lite version focused solely on multi-company functions.

The Payments Agent: Getting You Paid Faster (and Smarter)

The Payments agent analyzes customer behavior to optimize your collection strategy. When you create an invoice, it shows you how long they’ve been a customer, their payment history, open invoices, and average payment time.

But here’s where it gets interesting. The agent suggests payment methods based on what will get you paid fastest. It even calculates total time to receive funds, including your customer’s typical delay. When Katz Pollock saw “ACH 14 days” in the demo, she clarified, “It wasn’t that ACH takes 14 days to clear. It’s that the customer takes on average nine days to pay, and then you have the three to five days it takes to clear.”

Fulton cuts to why this matters, “As business owners, all too often we rely on small margins to where we are super sensitive to cash flow. If it’s going to take somebody longer to pay, we need to know that.”

The system can also parse invoices from text, images, or PDFs, though Katz Pollock admits it “doesn’t do the line items yet. But you know, it’s just the infancy of the technology.”

One limitation bothers Katz Pollock: Reminder settings apply to all customers universally. “I have placeholder invoices or agreements with customers where it’s okay that they’re not going to pay for another 90 days,” she explains. Her workaround? Adjust due dates to match actual payment expectations.

The Payroll Agent: Convenience Meets Controversy

The Payroll agent’s text-message time collection generated the most heated discussion. Employees receive texts asking for hours, overtime, and tips. They respond with simple messages, and the system compiles everything for manager approval.

Sounds great, right? Not so fast.

“If they’re not keeping a time card, you know they’re going to overestimate how much they actually worked,” Katz Pollock warns. Fulton agrees, “How many employees are always completely honest with their hours and their overtime and their tips?”

The system is heavily restricted during beta. It’s only for US customers who don’t use auto payroll or QuickBooks Time, have one pay schedule, and use basic pay types. Fulton sees wisdom here, “Let’s make sure this is working before we give it to all the crazies out there.”

Still, there are safeguards. The system flags anomalies, requires manager approval, creates audit logs, and needs employee consent for each payroll period. Fulton even sees potential for construction companies where daily time certification is required. “They’re having to certify by responding back to this the amount of time they worked.”

Katz Pollock’s verdict? “The technology is going to be great. It’s the humans that you can’t trust in this particular issue.”

Customer Leads: Your Email Becomes Your CRM

Currently in Gmail-only beta (Outlook coming soon), the Customer Leads agent scans your email for customer interactions and organizes them into a sales pipeline: inquiry, negotiation, finalization, contracted, or lost.

Fulton’s excited about consolidation. “I’ve been using 17 Hats, but the challenge I’ve always had is the integration piece. I can handle all this stuff up to the estimate and invoice somebody, but it’s always been external.”

Katz Pollock uses Method CRM currently and sees the appeal, “This will be really nice to be able to just keep it right inside QBO and not have to go to another app.”

The hosts admit they’re still learning this feature, and Katz Pollock has a future episode planned to dive deeper.

More Updates Worth Your Attention

A few other updates the hosts are looking forward to include:

Scheduled Compensation Changes

This might be the sleeper hit of the updates. You can now pre-program raises and bonuses with effective dates. As Fulton exclaims, “This is sunlight shining down onto us so we can take a vacation at the end of the year, too!”

Katz Pollock shares a perfect use case: “I had a client whose employee broke their field service iPad and was reimbursing them out of their payroll, $150 per month for six months.” With scheduling, that deduction would automatically end on the right date.

Sales Tax Automation Expands

QuickBooks now handles sales tax filing for Iowa, Minnesota, North Carolina, Rhode Island, Vermont, and West Virginia at $40 per filing. While the hosts debated the price, Fulton notes it’s actually market rate compared to services like Avalara.

Looking Ahead

The hosts emphasized community feedback throughout the episode. As Fulton puts it: “Are you using Enterprise yet? If you are, what features are you loving? If you aren’t, what features are most enticing?”

They’ve even started a LinkedIn group for the podcast where listeners can discuss episodes and share experiences.

Katz Pollock is launching her “Great QBO Refresh” training series in September, completely rebuilding her curriculum to address all the interface changes. 

Don’t miss Intuit Connect (October 27-29 in Las Vegas) or Reframe Conference (November in Florida), which Fulton calls “by far, hands down, the best conference I’ve been to in years.”

The Bottom Line

These AI agents aren’t replacing accounting professionals; they’re redefining the role. The firms that thrive will leverage AI for efficiency while maintaining the human judgment that ensures accuracy, compliance, and client trust.

As Katz Pollock wisely advises about the payroll agent’s rollout, “Intuit, go slow on this one. We want to actually see use cases before it becomes universal.”

The future of accounting isn’t human versus machine. It’s human with machine, each doing what they do best. Ready to dive deeper? Listen to the full episode above and join the conversation in the Unofficial QuickBooks Accountants Podcast LinkedIn group.

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!

AI Won’t Just Speed Up Your Close – It Will Eliminate It Completely

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“I want it gone.”

Aaron Harris, CTO of Sage, isn’t talking about making the financial close faster. He wants to eliminate it completely. No more monthly scrambles to lock the books. No more accountants working late to reconcile accounts. No more rigid cycles that control how businesses operate.

He shared this goal during his recent appearance on The Accounting Podcast, recorded at Sage Future in Atlanta. Harris has been a returning guest since 2019, and his message has stayed remarkably consistent: artificial intelligence will fundamentally change accounting processes and how businesses operate.

Harris isn’t just talking about automation making things faster. He’s challenging the basic business cycles that have defined corporate operations for generations. He envisions a future where annual audits become continuous, where quarterly tax filings disappear into real-time government systems, and where rigid business cycles give way to always-on, intelligent operations.

From Simple Tasks to Autonomous Operations: The Three Waves of AI

Harris breaks down AI’s evolution in accounting into three distinct waves, each building toward his vision of eliminating business cycles completely.

Wave One: Task-Based AI

The first wave focused on very specific jobs like reading invoices or classifying transactions. These systems worked like sophisticated scripts. They could automate tasks, but they needed humans at every step. “You can’t really interact with this AI,” Harris explains, “and because these are sort of very narrowly defined models, they can’t do a lot very flexibly.”

Wave Two: Generative AI

This wave brought conversational interfaces like Sage Copilot. Suddenly, AI could interact naturally with users and work more flexibly. This opened up possibilities for people outside the accounting team to use these systems. “The two big things are now you can interact with the AI,” Harris notes, “and it’s those underlying capabilities allowing that interaction that allow the AI to work more flexibly.”

Wave Three: Agentic AI

This is where Harris sees the real transformation. These systems can plan, execute, and operate on their own. They can access tools and interact with other systems without constant human guidance. “The real breakthrough comes with Agentic AI, where we’re now equipping these large language models. They think through how to plan something start to finish and execute on that.”

The progress has been dramatic. Harris tracks the journey from two to three weeks for financial close in 2019 to just two to three days today for some customers. But he’s not satisfied with just making things faster. “There are some breakthroughs, and we’re going to reach a point where businesses say, you know what, we’re just not going to operate this way anymore,” he predicts.

Sage already has AI systems handling complex tasks autonomously. Their outlier detection works across accounts payable, supply chain operations, and construction bidding. These systems don’t just flag problems; they prevent them by catching patterns humans would miss.

This evolution leads Harris to ask, if AI can keep our data accurate all the time, why do we need to “close the books” at all?

Why the Financial Close Needs to Die

Harris challenges something most accountants take for granted: the need for periodic closes. “Why do I need a close?” he asks. “Isn’t that kind of an archaic concept? Like, I’m locking up the books so nobody can access them anymore, and so that the data is memorialized forever. That’s ancient.”

This isn’t just theory. Real examples around the world show businesses moving toward continuous operations. In Brazil, every invoice must be filed with the government in real time. The UK’s “Making Tax Digital” (MTD) program requires businesses to upload their general ledgers to government servers quarterly, with AI automatically coding transactions. “Fundamentally what happens,” Harris explains, “is your general ledger gets uploaded to a government server. When it comes time to file the taxes, you’re just signing something, because they already know what you owe.”

These government requirements force businesses to modernize in ways that make continuous operations inevitable.

Harris’s vision for continuous auditing might be the most radical change. Instead of annual audits that review old data, he sees auditors providing ongoing assurance with technology constantly monitoring books. “My vision for continuous auditing is that the auditors are going to make a lot more money than they’ve been making,” he predicts. “It’s going to be continuous assurance.”

This would transform the relationship between businesses and auditors from periodic validation to ongoing collaboration. Instead of finding problems months later during annual reviews, continuous auditing would catch issues immediately and help fix them in real time.

Building Trust: Making AI Accountable

The biggest challenge is psychological. How do you get CFOs to trust AI systems with decisions they’re responsible for?

Harris understands this deeply. “You have to understand that psychology to design this experience,” he explains. The key is creating a “trust journey,” gradually giving AI more autonomy as users gain confidence through transparency and proven results.

Sage’s answer is its AI Trust Label, which Harris compares to a nutrition label. Click on any AI feature and you can see exactly how it works: what models it uses, how it handles data, security measures, and whether it uses your data for training. “We’re not saying here’s how much you should trust this,” Harris clarifies. “We’re saying here’s the compliance we are subject to and we are meeting and here’s the models we use.”

This transparency is crucial for complex tasks like accrual processing. Before a CFO trusts AI to handle accruals alone, they need to see the system’s suggestions, verify it contacted purchasing about pending invoices, and understand how it decides what to accrue. “I want to see in a very transparent, auditable way what the AI is doing before I say ‘yep, you can do it now’,” Harris emphasizes.

Sage’s careful approach reflects what customers really want. Harris cites a survey showing 75-80% of businesses want AI companies to “take it slow and get it right.” This finding shaped Sage’s strategy of gradual rollout rather than rushing autonomous agents to market.

This approach contrasts sharply with competitors like Intuit, whose AI agents Harris criticizes as trained on community forum content rather than authoritative sources. He describes Sage’s strategy as “a lot less reckless,” emphasizing their focus on serving CFOs who demand absolute accuracy. “We’re ruthlessly focused on the accounting profession. That CFO needs to trust us and they’re not going to use something they don’t trust.”

Instead of using general-purpose AI models, Sage is developing specialized accounting expertise through their partnership with the AICPA. These smaller, fine-tuned models focus specifically on accounting knowledge rather than trying to be good at everything. “I want it to be an expert at a very narrow set of things,” Harris explains. “You want it to be as capable as a CPA.”

AI in Action: What Sage is Building Now

Harris shared several examples of AI already working in Sage products, showing how these concepts are becoming reality.

Sage Copilot has been rolling out across different products over the past year. It started with small businesses using Sage Accounting, then expanded to Sage for Accountants, Sage 50, and now Sage Intacct. The system helps with three main areas:

  1. Close management. Copilot keeps users informed about what’s preventing the books from closing and helps them through the process
  2. Budget variances. It engages budget owners outside the finance team to understand performance and explain variances
  3. Product guidance. Users can ask conversational questions about how to use the software instead of searching through help files

Outlier Detection is Sage’s first major AI investment. Harris explains they built this capability first because “when we talk to finance teams and CFOs, the thing that comes through loud and clear is that they need to be trusted. The thing they care about the most is that their books are accurate.”

The system works differently for each company because “an outlier for company A is not the same as an outlier for company B.” Examples include:

  • Accounts payable. Detecting vendor impersonation, unusual billing patterns, or duplicate invoices using fine-tuned models that create “fingerprints” for common vendors
  • Supply chain. Warning about potential fulfillment problems by spotting irregularities in supply chain activity
  • Construction. Helping estimate projects by recommending which subcontractors to get bids from and flagging unusual bid amounts

What’s impressive is how these systems work together. Harris notes that building AI isn’t just about creating one model. “You’re building a system, and that system is going to have traditional tech. It’s going to have AI. And usually, when there’s AI in it, there’s a lot of different pieces of AI that work together.”

The Bigger Picture: Reimagining Business Operations

Harris’s vision involves fundamentally changing how businesses operate in a real-time economy.

Consider the implications: When we can continuously validate financial data instead of reviewing it annually, investors get unprecedented confidence in business performance. When tax compliance happens in real-time instead of quarterly bursts, businesses can allocate resources more strategically. When companies can predict supply chain issues and prevent them instead of discovering them during month-end reviews, they can maintain customer relationships without the traditional firefighting that defines many finance roles.

For accounting professionals, this means preparing for a future where the monthly close might become as obsolete as manual ledger books. Annual audit cycles that consume enormous resources could give way to continuous partnerships between businesses and their assurance providers. Rigid approval workflows that slow decisions could be replaced by intelligent systems that understand context and risk better than static rules ever could.

The early signs are already here. Harris points to the international examples, Sage’s current AI capabilities, and the continuous monitoring being deployed across industries. “The question isn’t whether this transformation will happen,” Harris suggests, “but how quickly businesses and professionals will adapt.”

What This Means for You

Harris’s predictions might sound futuristic, but they’re grounded in technology that’s already working. The measured approach Sage is taking—building trust through transparency, developing specialized expertise through professional partnerships, and prioritizing accuracy over speed—suggests this transformation will happen thoughtfully.

Accounting professionals should start preparing for a world where traditional business cycles might disappear entirely. The skills that matter won’t be about managing monthly closes, but about interpreting continuous data streams, collaborating with AI systems, and focusing on strategic analysis that only humans can provide.

The future Harris describes isn’t just possible; it’s already beginning. Understanding this evolution and preparing for it might be the most important investment accounting professionals can make in their careers.

Listen to the full episode above to hear Harris’s complete vision for how AI will reshape the fundamental rhythms of business.