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Your CPA Exam Scores Might Be Lost and Your AI Bookkeeper Is 57% Accurate

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“No kings means no paychecks, no paychecks, no government.” When Treasury Secretary nominee Scott Bessent dropped this line in a Fox News interview, Blake Oliver and David Leary weren’t sure if they should laugh or be terrified. As David put it: “That’s the most un-American thing anybody could say.”

In episode 458 of The Accounting Podcast, Blake and David dig into a series of accountability failures that would be funny if they weren’t so serious. From the Trump administration creating a brand new IRS “CEO” position to dodge Senate confirmation, to NASBA somehow losing track of CPA exam scores, the organizations supposed to maintain standards can’t even maintain their own data.

The IRS Gets a CEO (Because Who Needs the Constitution?)

The Trump administration’s latest move isn’t subtle. It created a new “CEO” position for the IRS that doesn’t require Senate confirmation. As Blake explains, “If the president just creates a new role that has the same responsibilities but doesn’t get checked by the Senate, then that’s just a run around the rules.”

The plan goes deeper than personnel changes. Gary Shapley, an advisor to Treasury Secretary nominee Scott Bessent, wants to weaken IRS lawyers’ involvement in criminal investigations and eliminate extra procedural steps for sensitive cases involving elected officials and tax-exempt groups. These aren’t reforms—they’re removing the safety rails.

“Where’s the AICPA on this?” David asks. The AICPA wrote a letter about the government shutdown’s impact on taxpayers but stayed silent on bypassing Congress to appoint IRS leadership. Blake doesn’t mince words: “They don’t. They are not willing to take a stand on something that matters because they’re afraid of political blowback.”

According to Wall Street Journal reporting that Blake and David discuss, Shapely has already compiled a hit list. The targets? George Soros and affiliated organizations, major Democratic donors, and left-leaning nonprofit groups.

The hosts make an important point that transcends politics. “The Obama administration targeted right wing groups,” Blake notes, agreeing with a viewer comment. “This is why you don’t want to give the government too much power. The other side gets the gun eventually, then points it at the other side.”

When Accounting Organizations Can’t Do Accounting

If you think government accountability is bad, wait until you hear about the profession’s own organizations.

Professor Joseph Ugrin, who creates the CPA Success Index published by Accounting Today, discovered NASBA’s 2024 data is essentially garbage. Between 25% and 40% of candidate scores are simply missing. Plus, Iowa community colleges appear in the data despite state law requiring bachelor’s degrees to sit for the exam.

“NASBA has access to all the transcripts submitted by the candidates,” Blake points out. “So there’s no reason why they couldn’t correctly classify what schools they went to.”

David speculates, “This smells like somebody at NASBA tried to use AI to summarize some stuff and screwed it up.” Whether it’s AI or old-fashioned incompetence, Ugrin can’t publish the Success Index this year because the data is unusable.

Meanwhile, the Chicago Teachers Union hasn’t released required financial audits for over five years, despite paying $80,000 for audit services in 2025 alone. When members finally got federal filings, they showed only 18% of spending goes to representing teachers. The other 82%? Overhead, politics, and “leadership priorities.”

As David asks incredulously: “How did it go past one year?”

The issue isn’t confined to Chicago. Forty-three Arkansas cities can’t get state funds because they can’t find CPAs to do required audits. “The auditors are retiring. They’re not being replaced,” Blake explains. Small-town America is literally running out of accountants.

AI to the Rescue! (Just Kidding, It’s 57% Accurate)

While real problems go unsolved, the profession is being sold AI magic beans.

One marketing CEO’s experience with QuickBooks’ new AI features reads like a horror story. “Although trained on transactions, QuickBooks frequently miscategorized payments based solely on dollar value,” he wrote. If a vendor sent one $1,000 invoice, the AI recorded all future invoices as $1,000. Contractor payments were recorded under “QuickBooks payments” instead of the contractor’s name. The company spent thousands on accountants trying to fix problems that couldn’t be fixed.

“QuickBooks sits at the heart of our business,” the CEO explained. “When AI upgrades destabilize that core, the consequences ripple across the organization.”

The hosts shared another headline that calls AI’s accuracy into question. Microsoft’s AI agent in Excel achieves 57.2% accuracy on spreadsheet benchmarks. As Blake says: “57.2% accuracy is not going to cut it. Not even 98% accuracy is going to cut it.”

Yet companies like Docyt claim AI will let one accountant manage 300 clients. The hosts’ response? “I’ve talked to firm owners that are super efficient,” David says. “Their best bookkeepers maybe handle 45 clients a month.”

Blake’s experience backs this up: “A typical bookkeeper could do 20 to 30 on average. And my all star could do 40 to 60.” The idea of 300 clients per person? “You would have too many questions coming in emails,” Blake explains. “I don’t think there’s an AI tool that can do that.”

Blake’s ideal practice would have ten outsourced controller clients, meeting weekly with each. “Once I got the ten clients, I could probably do it in four hours a day.” That’s realistic. Managing 300 clients with AI? That’s fantasy.

The hosts haven’t seen AI actually eliminating jobs. “I have yet to talk to an accountant that says, oh, we implemented this thing and now we got rid of two of my staff,” David states. Even at their own company, which uses AI extensively: “We’re not getting rid of anybody. We just hired more engineers.”

The $300 Trillion Oops

Just when you thought it couldn’t get wilder, David shares the stablecoin story that should terrify everyone.

Paxos, which provides stablecoin infrastructure for PayPal, accidentally minted $300 trillion in stablecoins. Not million. Not billion. Trillion. For context, the US deficit is $2 trillion.

“You understand how a stablecoin works in theory.” David says. “A dollar goes in, you get a stablecoin worth a dollar back. What if I told you none of that is true?”

The company claimed it was a “technical error that briefly appeared for 20 minutes,” then they “burned” the excess tokens. But as David points out, if companies can just create and destroy them at will, this proves stablecoins aren’t actually backed by dollars.

This matters because Ripple just bought a treasury management firm for $1 billion, putting cryptocurrency at the center of corporate cash management. “Accountants are going to be touching this stuff,” David warns. “It’s going to be here next year.”

Time to Pay Attention

This episode of The Accounting Podcast is a reality check for a profession facing multiple crises simultaneously. The IRS is being restructured to avoid constitutional oversight. Professional organizations can’t maintain basic data integrity. AI is being forced on businesses with disastrous results. And small towns can’t find CPAs to do basic audits.

“We don’t need a king,” David emphasizes about Bessent’s comments. But between government overreach, organizational incompetence, and technological snake oil, the profession is being pulled in all the wrong directions.

The hosts’ frustration is justified. When Blake asks why the AICPA won’t stand up for constitutional principles, when David wonders how organizations go years without audits, when they both laugh at the idea of one person managing 300 clients, they’re asking the questions the profession should be asking itself.

Listen to the full episode to hear Blake and David’s complete breakdown of these interconnected failures. In a profession built on trust and verification, their willingness to be brutally honest is exactly what’s needed.

Deloitte’s $440,000 AI Fabrication Scandal Exposes the Accounting Profession’s Deepest Fears

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A startup founder discovered $2.1 million in embezzlement by his co-founder in just 18 minutes using Claude AI. The company’s internal auditors, external auditors, and even the CFO had completely missed it. Meanwhile, Deloitte was forced to refund the Australian government hundreds of thousands of dollars after delivering a report filled with AI-generated fabrications.

In this episode of The Accounting Podcast, hosts Blake Oliver and David Leary dig into these stories. They explore how AI is both exposing massive frauds and creating embarrassing failures, examine the chaos from the government shutdown, and question whether traditional accounting services still matter when 86% of major companies use broken charts that nobody even notices.

When AI Catches What Humans Miss (And Creates What Shouldn’t Exist)

The accounting profession is experiencing an AI identity crisis. On one hand, artificial intelligence can spot complex fraud that teams of professionals completely miss. On the other hand, professionals are using it to generate work that looks legitimate but is actually riddled with fabrications.

Let’s start with Deloitte’s spectacular failure. The Big Four firm charged the Australian government $440,000 AUD (about $290,000 USD) for a 237-page report on welfare compliance systems. The problem? It contained over 20 AI-generated errors, including completely made-up quotes from federal court judgments and references to non-existent academic papers.

Chris Rudge, a Sydney University researcher, spotted the errors immediately. One fabrication attributed a non-existent book to constitutional law professor Lisa Burton Crawford on a topic completely outside her field. “I instantaneously knew it was either hallucinated by AI or the world’s best kept secret because I’d never heard of the book, and it sounded preposterous,” Rudge said.

Even after getting caught, Deloitte insisted its findings and recommendations were still valid. This prompted Australian Labor Senator Deborah O’Neill to observe that Deloitte has “a human intelligence problem.”

But here’s where it gets interesting. While Deloitte was using AI to create fake references, a startup founder used it to uncover real fraud. He exported his company’s QuickBooks data into Claude AI and asked one simple question: “What’s wrong with this picture?”

In just 18 minutes, the AI found what everyone else had missed: 17 fake companies routing $2.1 million to his co-founder’s personal accounts through shell companies. The AI spotted patterns humans overlooked, including fake vendors paid on 23-day cycles while real vendors were paid on 28-day cycles, and payment amounts that followed Fibonacci sequences, which humans subconsciously create when making up numbers.

The founder has since turned this into a business, selling AI-powered fraud detection prompts for $10,000 each to 47 clients. He’s probably making more money from his fraud-detection business than from his original startup.

As Leary points out, this creates both an opportunity and a threat for accounting firms. “The real risk of AI taking accounting jobs isn’t that AI will take the job away. Clients are just going to say, ‘I can do that myself. I don’t need to pay somebody $400,000 to do a half-assed ChatGPT thing.’”

Government Shutdown: When Critical Systems Break Down

The conversation then turned to the government shutdown’s impact on air travel and tax services. The situation has become genuinely dangerous, with cascading failures that reveal how fragile our systems really are.

Air traffic controller-related delays jumped from a typical 5% to 53% as workers called in sick rather than work without pay. Oliver experienced this firsthand when his flight was delayed for hours with no official explanation, though flight attendants privately blamed air traffic control shortages.

The scariest incident happened at Burbank Airport in Los Angeles, where the tower went completely unmanned. “When that happens, there is a backup procedure, which is that the pilots have to do their own air traffic control,” Oliver explains. “They get on a shared frequency and have to communicate with each other. There’s no intermediary. So that not only slows things down. It also creates risk. There’s a huge risk of these planes crashing into each other because they miscommunicate.”

The economic impact is staggering. The US Travel Association estimates $1 billion in weekly losses to the travel economy. Over 750,000 federal workers have been furloughed, while more than a million work without pay. For TSA screeners earning an average of $51,000, the situation is untenable. “If they don’t get paid, they are not paying their bills,” Oliver notes. “They’re going to go drive for Uber to pay the bills.”

The IRS shutdown creates serious problems for accountants. Nearly half of IRS staff have been furloughed. While electronic returns continue processing and automated refunds still flow, human support has collapsed. Phone support is essentially gone, paper returns sit unprocessed, and audits have stopped. Yet interest and penalties continue to accrue, and all deadlines remain in effect.

Adding to the chaos, Trump fired over 4,100 federal workers instead of furloughing them. The Treasury alone lost 1,446 employees, including about 1,300 IRS workers. “It’s the first time in modern history that mass firings have happened during a funding lapse,” Oliver observes.

The administration also created a new “CEO of the IRS” position to bypass Senate confirmation, appointing Frank Bisignano, former CEO of Fiserv, who still owns about $300 million in company stock. This creates obvious conflicts of interest, especially since Fiserv is involved in launching digital stablecoin initiatives. “This is why you have to have hearings. You can’t just appoint somebody to a position,” Leary emphasizes.

When Independence Becomes a Joke

Next, Oliver and Leary discussed how financial entanglements are destroying audit independence while regulators focus on trivial violations.

Take BDO’s current crisis as an example. The firm took a $1.3 billion loan at approximately 9% interest from Apollo Global Management to finance its employee stock ownership plan. The debt forced the company to lay off employees, freeze travel, and conduct emergency cost reviews across all divisions.

But while BDO was giving First Brands a clean audit opinion, Apollo was actively shorting the company. First Brands collapsed months after BDO’s clean audit. “If I’m BDO and I audit a company that is being shorted by a company I took a $1 billion loan from, where’s the independence?” Leary asks. “What is the fraud triangle? Opportunity, rationalization, and financial pressure. All the parts of the fraud triangle are here.”

Meanwhile, EY is celebrating a “dramatic audit quality turnaround,” with its deficiency rate dropping from 46% in 2022 to below 10% in 2025. They achieved this miracle by firing 132 public company audit clients. In other words, the problematic audits didn’t disappear. They just moved to Deloitte and KPMG. “Have we actually achieved anything here? Or have we just shifted the bad audits somewhere else?” Oliver wonders.

The hosts also discussed a new scheme where crypto promoters target CPA firm clients. The Truevestment Bitcoin Legacy Fund wants CPAs to help raise $150 million from their clients, which institutional investors will then match before merging into a Nasdaq entity—essentially a SPAC wrapped in Bitcoin speculation.

The marketing compares buying Bitcoin today to “buying the Dow at 900.” But as Leary points out, when the Dow was at 900 in the mid-1960s, it consisted of companies like AT&T and General Electric—”companies that made things” and created real value, not speculation.

Why Nobody Cares About Financial Reports Anymore

Perhaps the most damning revelation from the podcast’s recent news roundup is that 86% of major companies are using broken charts in their financial reports. A CPA Journal study found bar charts with misleading axes, pie slices that don’t match percentages, and deliberate distortions to exaggerate performance. Of 1,584 charts reviewed, 12% had fatal flaws that completely misrepresented the data.

“The fact that so many of them have errors and nobody’s pointing them out indicates to me that nobody’s reading them,” Oliver observes. Indeed, 10-K filings get downloaded an average of just a few dozen times.

The hosts even shared a bizarre example where social media bots criticizing Cracker Barrel’s new logo caused the stock price to tank. According to Wall Street Journal data, 44.5% of posts about the logo change were from bots. “Maybe nobody cares about your charts because nobody even cares about the financial statements,” Leary suggests.

What This Means for Your Firm

The key insight from Hector Garcia stuck with David: “AI is never going to do perfect accounting, but it’s going to do it good enough.” For most clients, “good enough” financials that they can generate themselves might be perfectly adequate.

Accounting professionals can embrace AI for meaningful fraud detection and insights, or watch clients realize they can generate “good enough” work themselves. As this episode of The Accounting Podcast makes clear, the traditional value proposition of professional accounting services is crumbling. The firms that survive will be those that identify and deliver human value that transcends what AI can do: strategic insight, ethical judgment, and genuine expertise that no algorithm can replicate.

Listen to this episode to understand not just the challenges facing accounting, but what you need to do differently starting today.

How One CPA’s Personal Software Solution Became the Answer for Firms of Every Size

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Tim Sines, CPA, has been practicing accounting for 38 years. During that time, he tried “pretty much all” the practice management software platforms available, but nothing worked the way he wanted. So he did what any developer would do: He built his own.

What started as a personal solution evolved into Mango Practice Management, a cloud-based platform that now serves everyone from solo practitioners to firms with over 100 employees. During a recent Earmark Expo demonstration, Sines walked through the system he’s been perfecting since the DOS era, showing how it addresses the core challenge facing most accounting firms: managing multiple disconnected systems.

The Problem with Disconnected Systems

Sines didn’t set out to revolutionize practice management. He just wanted software that actually worked for his practice. After years of frustration with existing tools, he developed his own application. The system has evolved dramatically over the decades, progressing from DOS to Windows desktop to its current cloud-based form, which has been running for over eight years.

Mango Practice Management handles time tracking, invoicing, electronic payments, project management, engagement letters, budgeting, and reporting. “Those are really the core things you’re doing daily within your firm,” Sines explains. The problem wasn’t that these functions were too complex. It was that they existed in separate systems, creating inefficiency at every step.

During his demonstration, Sines shows how Mango handles time entry in a way that connects directly to other functions. Users start typing any part of a client name, and the system automatically brings up relevant engagements. Whether you’re doing tax planning or tax prep, the system handles billing increments and supports multiple concurrent timers. The time flows directly into invoicing without requiring users to switch systems or re-enter data.

The integration is especially valuable when corrections are needed. As Sines notes, staff “notoriously record time to the wrong engagement or wrong client.” Instead of forcing users to exit invoicing, navigate to time tracking, make corrections, and start over, Mango allows these fixes right in the invoicing interface. Users can move time between clients or engagements and see write-ups and write-downs in real time.

Streamlined Client Payments and Communication

The platform extends its integration approach to client interactions, particularly around payments. Traditional practice management often treats payment collection as an afterthought, requiring clients to navigate separate portals or remember login credentials.

Mango embeds payment functionality directly into client communications. When clients receive an invoice, they see a “click to pay” button. “The client does not have to log into a client portal to make a payment,” Sines explains. If they’ve entered payment information before, the system displays the last four digits for easy recognition.

The integration goes deeper with engagement letters. When a client agrees to recurring services and signs electronically, the system automatically sets up the entire payment infrastructure. It creates recurring invoices, establishes payment schedules, and collects payments on agreed-upon dates. Sines calls this “invoicing on autopilot,” noting that some firms have “100 or more of these set up” and “don’t even have to do the invoicing.”

Document management follows the same seamless approach. Using Outlook and Gmail plugins, accountants can send document requests through simple email links. When clients click the link, their uploads automatically route to the correct engagement folder. “You don’t have to log into the portal,” Sines explains. “In that email, there’s a link. Click it, and you’ll be redirected to a screen. You just drag and drop your documents.”

The system also handles collections automatically. It monitors payment terms and sends statement reminders without human intervention. “Mango will go do these statements automatically in the middle of the night” for any client with overdue invoices, with customizable follow-up intervals.

Project Management That Connects Everything

Many practice management tools treat project tracking as a separate feature. Mango makes it central to firm operations. The project management dashboard shows projects due this week, next week, and overdue items, connecting these deadlines to internal workflows and capacity.

A key feature is what Sines calls “complete tasks in order” functionality. This prevents team members from jumping ahead in workflows. “I can’t review the tax return until I’ve done the tax prep,” he explains. This ensures that “staff focus on what is in the batter’s box, not what’s on deck.”

The system addresses a common problem: showing people everything they need to do creates cognitive overload. Instead, Mango shows only tasks that are actually ready to be worked on, helping teams stay focused and productive.

When projects reach completion, the system automatically releases associated time for billing, connecting project milestones directly to revenue. Project notes “live with this project as it rolls forward,” ensuring that when different staff members handle recurring work next year, they have access to context from previous engagements.

The capacity planning feature shows utilization across all projects and allows managers to easily reassign tasks to different team members if somebody is out or leaves the company. Calendar integration with Microsoft Outlook and Google Calendar displays all past, present, and future appointments for any team member who had appointments with that client directly within the client view.

Pricing and Technical Details

Mango offers three pricing tiers. The basic tier includes core features, while the Plus tier adds project management and budgeting. The Pro tier, at $69 per user per month, includes all features plus document management, e-signatures, and capacity planning.

For electronic payments, ACH transactions cost 1% with a $12 cap, while credit cards run approximately 3%. The platform includes a mobile app that allows users to enter time and expenses, look up client contacts, and add notes while away from the office.

One practical feature Sines highlights: if users accidentally close their browser or log out while timers are running, their timers will still be there when they log back in. “You will not lose your timers.”

The system also supports multiple browser instances, allowing users to have “project management tab open” alongside “time tracking” and “billing worksheets” on different screens while maintaining data consistency across all views.

Integration as a Competitive Advantage

Sines’ demonstration reveals why unified platforms are essential for accounting firms. The ability to handle multiple functions in one system eliminates the data re-entry, system switching, and workflow friction that drain efficiency from traditional setups.

The platform includes a master template library that anybody using Mango can access and customize. This allows firms to adopt proven processes quickly rather than building workflows from scratch.

The notification system provides what Sines calls workflow intelligence, sending alerts when specific conditions are met, such as assigning tasks, resolving dependencies, or approaching project deadlines.

For firms evaluating practice management solutions, Sines recommends visiting the Mango website to schedule a demo or attend one of their weekly webinars. “We have two webinars every single week,” he notes, where potential users can ask questions and see the platform in action.

The Move Toward Unified Systems

Firms are moving away from juggling multiple disconnected systems toward unified platforms that treat practice management as an integrated workflow.

The demonstration shows how this integration eliminates friction between core business processes. When time tracking connects directly to invoicing, when project management triggers automated billing, and when client communications embed payment options, the entire operation becomes more efficient and responsive.

As practices grow more complex and client expectations increase, the competitive advantage belongs to firms that operate as unified organizations rather than collections of separate systems. The traditional approach of patching together different solutions for each function isn’t just inefficient; it creates operational bottlenecks that can’t keep pace with modern client demands.

Watch the full demonstration to see how Mango’s unified approach eliminates the inefficiencies that come from managing disconnected systems, and discover why accounting firms are choosing integrated platforms over fragmented tool approaches.

From Vanishing Jobs to Work Slop: Inside Accounting’s AI Reality Check

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The accounting profession faces a stark reality-check as entry-level auditor positions have declined by 43% since January, and a third of accountants admit they cannot identify AI-generated fake receipts. 

In episode 455 of The Accounting Podcast, hosts Blake Oliver and David Leary address the growing evidence that AI is disrupting accounting more rapidly than most firms can keep up with. From vanishing entry-level jobs to the rise of “work slop” (low-quality AI output that wastes time and money), the profession is struggling with changes that are both promising and perilous.

The Tech Stack Problem Nobody Wants to Talk About

Before diving into AI’s disruption, Oliver shared a surprising statistic: only 37% of accounting firms require their clients to use their technology stack. That means 63% let clients choose their own tools, creating a mess of incompatible systems and inefficient workflows.

“It’s one of the things we did in my firm that was a differentiator and allowed us to scale quickly,” Oliver explained. “It reduced training time. It increased the speed at which we worked.”

The reluctance to standardize reveals a deeper problem in the profession: firms are so afraid of losing clients that they sacrifice efficiency and scalability. Yet Oliver found the opposite: “The ones that were willing to make that shift ended up listening to us about other things, too. So you might want to consider requiring clients to switch as, like a testing mechanism to see if they’re actually going to be a good fit.”

This standardization challenge becomes even more critical as firms try to implement AI. Without consistent data inputs and workflows, automation becomes nearly impossible.

The Vanishing Entry Level: A 43% Wake-Up Call

The most alarming news Oliver shared was the 43% drop in entry-level auditor job postings since January, based on a study of 126 million job postings. Meanwhile, senior positions requiring ten or more years of experience increased by 6%.

“These firms are extremely shortsighted,” Oliver argued. “They are just trying to juice profits and revenue in the short term. And the easiest way to do that is to replace your entry-level people with AI.”

The vulnerability of these positions is clear. As Oliver explained, “The stuff an entry level auditor does is so basic, like cash confirmations. You can have an AI agent doing cash confirmations all day long. It’s not complicated.”

The fear extends beyond auditing. Nearly half (45%) of accounts payable professionals now fear layoffs in 2025, up from 27% last year. These workers see AI agents matching invoices, approving bills, and processing expense reports—tasks that once required human oversight.

Leary raised an important question: Are firms actually succeeding with AI, or are they cutting staff first and hoping to automate later? In Oliver’s view, the automation is working well enough to justify the cuts. But this creates a long-term problem. Without entry-level positions to train tomorrow’s senior accountants, where will future leaders come from?

Work Slop: The $200 Hidden Cost of Bad AI

A new Harvard Business Review study coined a term for low-quality AI output: “work slop.” And work slop is expensive. Each incident wastes nearly two hours and costs about $186 per worker per month.

Forty percent of workers report receiving work slop in the past month. More than half feel annoyed when they get it, and 42% view the senders as less trustworthy.

“Every time one coworker gives another coworker slop, it costs your company 200 bucks,” Leary emphasized. But, “Employees who turn out work slop probably already did work slop before. They just did it at a much slower volume.”

The hosts shared their own experiences with work slop. Job applicants submit unedited ChatGPT responses. Guest pitches reference the wrong podcast. Some candidates even feed interview questions into AI during live video calls.

“It looks good,” Oliver said about typical work slop. “Like if you look at the email, it’s nicely formatted and it looks good and then you actually read it and you realize that it’s garbage.”

The paradox is striking: 97% of firms admit they’re not using technology efficiently, yet 86% believe AI-using firms have a competitive advantage. The gap between aspiration and execution means firms produce more low-quality work faster rather than better work more efficiently.

The Fraud Detection Crisis

Perhaps most concerning is accountants’ declining ability to spot fraud. Thirty-two percent admit they can’t recognize AI-generated fake receipts. Another 30% are seeing more fraudulent receipts than last year, and 42% suspect colleagues have submitted fake or altered receipts.

“If you want to see just how difficult it is or how easy it is to make one, just go and ask ChatGPT to make you a receipt,” Oliver challenged listeners.

Leary noted that expense fraud isn’t new. After all, people used to pick a receipt up off the ground at McDonald’s. But AI changed the game. Now anyone can generate perfect forgeries on demand.

Oliver explained that current AI models don’t understand physics, so shadows and lighting in fake images often don’t match reality. But detecting these requires expertise most accountants don’t have.

“When nothing is physical anymore, how do you, as an auditor or an accountant, rely on a scanned document?” Oliver asked, highlighting a fundamental challenge for the profession.

Solutions Emerging from the Chaos

Despite the challenges, practical solutions are emerging. Zapier announced a “human in the loop” feature that pauses automated workflows for human review at critical points. “Don’t try to automate the whole workflow,” Oliver advised. “Try to automate one task in the workflow.”

Keeper launched a new AI product that converts payroll reports and settlement statements into journal entries—a task that previously required complex spreadsheets and manual work. At $50 per client per month, it represents the kind of targeted automation that actually works.

Even Drake Software, long criticized for being behind the times, launched cloud-based tax software. While limited to certain forms, it signals that even legacy providers recognize the need to modernize.

These tools show that successful AI implementation isn’t replacing humans entirely. Instead, it augments specific tasks while maintaining human oversight for quality and judgment.

Looking Ahead: A Profession at a Crossroads

The accounting profession faces interconnected challenges that require more than technological solutions. The 43% drop in entry-level positions poses a threat to the talent pipeline. Work slop erodes trust and efficiency. Fraud detection capabilities are falling behind those of fraudsters.

Yet there are opportunities within these challenges. Firms that thoughtfully integrate AI, maintain human oversight, and invest in training the next generation will have an advantage over those who chase short-term profits by cutting entry-level positions and blindly implementing AI.

As Oliver noted about his own firm’s success, standardizing technology, requiring client buy-in, and focusing on quality over quantity created real competitive advantages. The same principles apply to AI adoption. Success requires strategy, not just software.

To hear Oliver and Leary’s complete analysis of these shifts in accounting, including their discussion of H-1B visa changes, Trump’s latest tariff threats, and more practical insights for navigating AI’s impact, listen to the full episode of The Accounting Podcast. Their unfiltered weekly discussions provide essential perspective for anyone trying to understand where the profession is heading and how to thrive despite the uncertainty.

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.