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The Earmark Podcast

The End of Data Entry and What It Means for Your Tax Practice

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Elizabeth Beastrom left public accounting 30 years ago because she was sick of rekeying data into tax returns. Now, as President of Tax and Accounting Professionals at Thomson Reuters, she works to make sure no accountant has to do that mind-numbing work ever again.

“I was a lazy CPA,” she admits with a laugh during this episode of the Earmark Podcast. “I didn’t want to spend my time doing work that I didn’t think was necessary.”

In this conversation with host Blake Oliver, Elizabeth and Kirat Sekhon, Thomson Reuters’ Head of Technology, map out their vision for automating the entire tax workflow, from gathering documents to delivering returns. They want listeners to know that AI-enabled firms are going to outcompete everyone else, and the shift from compliance to advisory isn’t optional anymore.

Why Tax Firms Can’t Keep Doing Things the Old Way

The numbers tell the story. Fewer people are taking the CPA exam while more accountants retire every year. Meanwhile, tax complexity keeps growing, which means more demand for services with fewer people to do the work. Throw in private equity firms buying up practices and pushing for efficiency, and you’ve got a perfect storm.

But it’s not just about headcount. The new generation of accountants expects modern tools that actually work together—not the clunky desktop software their predecessors put up with.

“They expect to use intuitive and connected tools,” Kirat explains, “so they have a better experience while they deliver value to their customers.”

So why has tax software stayed stuck in the desktop era while cloud accounting tools have taken off? Kirat points to two reasons. First, tax calculations are hard to get right, and once you build something that works, nobody wants to break it. Second, accountants themselves haven’t pushed for change. When you’re working 80 to 100 hours during busy season, the last thing you want is to learn new software.

“The term SALY—same as last year—still comes through,” Elizabeth notes. “You found a way to do it and you like to replicate that. Change is hard, especially when you have to introduce that to the firm when you’re working 80 to 100 hours a week.”

But resistance to change is becoming dangerous. Elizabeth’s own exit from the profession 30 years ago shows what happens when the work becomes too tedious. Back then, she discovered she loved the advisory side, including talking to clients, understanding their businesses, and making recommendations that actually helped them improve. But she was stuck doing data entry.

“I would spend time talking to my customers,” she recalls. “Some of my best inputs came from the people in accounts payable or accounts receivable. I would get a detailed understanding of their process.” But then she’d have to go back to rekeying tax data, and the contrast was too much.

Building the “Bookends” Around Tax Prep

Thomson Reuters isn’t trying to fix one piece of the tax workflow; they’re automating the whole thing. Their strategy focuses on creating what Elizabeth calls “strong bookends” around their core tax engines (GoSystem Tax, CST, and UltraTax).

The front bookend came through their acquisition of SurePrep three years ago. Practitioners dump all their client documents into the system, and SurePrep automatically classifies them, pulls out the relevant numbers, creates a binder for review, and fills in the tax software. No more manual data entry.

“That’s a huge time savings when you don’t have to spend time doing all of that manual data entry,” Kirat says, “and they can actually focus on the return.”

The back bookend arrived with SafeSend, acquired earlier this year. It handles return delivery, e-signatures, and payment collection, eliminating what Elizabeth remembers as the nightmare of printing, mailing, and faxing documents back and forth 30 years ago.

What’s different about Thomson Reuters’ approach is they’re keeping these tools open to work with competitors’ software too, not just their own tax products.

“It is an open, curated ecosystem,” Elizabeth emphasizes. “If customers find value in part of their workflow, we want to make sure we connect to it.”

Beyond just automating existing steps, they’re trying to eliminate unnecessary work entirely. Take the client questionnaire—that paper organizer Blake’s mom still fills out by hand every year. Thomson Reuters wants to “kill the questionnaire” by using AI to pre-populate information from prior returns and only ask for what’s actually new or missing.

The next frontier is what Kirat calls “agentic AI,” systems that don’t just handle one task but orchestrate entire workflows. These AI agents can use multiple Thomson Reuters products in sequence, making decisions along the way to get a return from start to finish with minimal human intervention.

But everything the AI does needs to be auditable. Kirat stresses that any AI handling tax work must show exactly what decisions it made and why.

“Our customers expect the work product of an accountant to be 100% accurate,” she explains. “Without providing that audit log with the decisions and choices and confidence levels, we’re missing the mark.”

Blake agrees enthusiastically, sharing his frustration with current AI tools that don’t show their reasoning. “I want to know why it matched this transaction,” he says. “There’s an AI conversation for each one of these transactions. Why not give that to us?”

The Shift to Advisory Can’t Wait

If machines can prepare returns faster and more accurately than humans, what exactly are clients paying for? Two-thirds of Thomson Reuters’ customers say they want to shift to advisory services, but most don’t know how to actually do it.

Enter Ready to Advise, launched in June 2024. The tool takes everything from a completed return and analyzes it against potential tax strategies based on that client’s specific situation and goals.

“It will quantify the savings,” Elizabeth explains. “It will ask for more information to get to a range. It will allow you to have that discussion where you can say, ‘Hey Blake, I noticed from your 1120-S filing some potential strategies you should take.'”

Then it walks you through implementing those strategies and produces client-ready documentation. For firms struggling to move beyond compliance, this is huge.

But technology alone won’t fix the business model problem. Clients have been trained to expect strategic advice for free. “I might call my accountant and say, ‘Hey, tell me what this big beautiful bill does for me this year?,’ which is code for don’t charge me for this,” Elizabeth says, capturing the conundrum perfectly.

That’s where Practice Forward comes in. It’s Thomson Reuters’ tool for helping firms understand their worth and develop advisory pricing models. The goal is shifting from hourly billing for returns to year-round advisory subscriptions.

Ready to Advise also solves a talent problem. Traditionally, you needed years of experience before you could offer meaningful tax advice. But with AI assistance grounded in Checkpoint’s content (maintained by over 4,500 subject matter experts), newer staff can contribute to advisory work much sooner.

“That junior associate’s experience, paired with all the knowledge that there is available in generative AI today, is incredibly powerful,” Kirat notes.

Blake shares a personal example that drives home the value of advisory over compliance. His tax preparer advised setting up a C-Corp to potentially qualify for QSBS treatment, which could save millions in taxes someday.

“I can’t even quantify the value of that,” Blake says. “But that’s why I’m willing to pay thousands of dollars for a tax return. It’s that insight, not the return.”

Meanwhile, DIY tax software keeps getting better. Blake describes doing a business return himself using consumer software with ChatGPT open for research. The same process would have taken hours of manual work just a few years ago.

Firms that stick to just preparing returns are going to get squeezed from both ends.

“AI-enabled professionals and firms, they’re going to outcompete and outperform,” Elizabeth warns, “because they’re going to be able to do it faster, better and get to this advisory, which our clients want.”

What to Do Right Now

So where should a traditional tax firm start? Elizabeth recommends figuring out what you hate doing.

“What are your pain points that you hate to do?” she asks. “There’s a pretty high likelihood that I or a talented person on my team is going to be able to say, ‘This is how we can solve that for you.’”

The technology exists today. SurePrep can handle document gathering. SafeSend can automate delivery. Ready to Advise can help you identify tax-saving opportunities. CoCounsel can answer complex questions using curated, expert-verified content. The audit logs are there to verify everything the AI does.

The harder change is mental: accepting that the compliance work that defined the profession for decades is becoming commoditized, and the future belongs to firms that embrace automation as the foundation for higher-value advisory services.

Elizabeth even suggests bringing these concepts into accounting education to attract new talent. Currently, tax courses focus on rules and calculations rather than strategy. After all, accounting is still “the language of business,” as Elizabeth was told as an undergraduate. The difference is that AI can now handle the grammar and spelling, freeing professionals to focus on telling the story.

The transformation won’t be easy, but it’s not optional. As Elizabeth learned when she left the profession out of frustration with mundane tasks, talented people won’t stick around if the work doesn’t engage them. The good news is that automation finally makes it possible to eliminate the drudgery and focus on what really matters: helping clients succeed.

Listen to the full conversation with Blake, Elizabeth, and Kirat for more insights on preparing your firm for the automated future of tax.

Your Excel Data Never Leaves Your Computer With This AI Automation Method

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While 58% of professionals have tried AI, only 17% use it regularly. Kyle Ashcraft sees opportunity in that gap.

In episode 108 of the Earmark Podcast, host Blake Oliver sits down with Kyle, a CPA who built Maxwell CPA Review and helped over 1,500 students pass their exams, for a live demonstration that might change how you think about Excel automation. Their conversation shows how any accounting professional can start automating their work in under an hour. No coding experience required.

The AI Gap Nobody’s Talking About

“The more advanced AI becomes, we can take one of two directions,” Kyle explains during the demonstration. “You can continually veer away from it, and the more that comes out, you step farther and farther away from it. Or you can make it a goal to learn, let’s say, one new tool a week.”

The problem isn’t that accountants don’t want to use AI. It’s that they don’t have dependable strategies for implementing it. Kyle describes the typical approach as, “Opening up ChatGPT, throwing in a spreadsheet, and then giving it a prompt and seeing what it comes up with. Sometimes like a Hail Mary, where you just want to see if it gives you an acceptable output.”

There are two major issues with this approach. First, it often takes multiple attempts to get the output you want because ChatGPT can’t read your mind. Second, and this is crucial for accountants, when you upload a spreadsheet to ChatGPT, “your Excel document is going directly to OpenAI. Your prompt is going to them, and the prompt that they output to you is going to them as well.”

This matters because OpenAI’s data retention practices are questionable at best. They’re currently in a lawsuit with The New York Times and required to permanently retain logs. No wonder 70% of accounting professionals cite data security as their primary concern with AI adoption.

Enter “Vibe Coding”: When Everyone Becomes a Developer

Kyle’s journey started with a challenge. Could someone with zero coding experience build something that traditionally required a development team?

Four months later, he had his answer. Using Cursor, ChatGPT, and Claude, he built a complete assessment platform that identifies students’ weakest areas, emails follow-up practice materials, and provides analytics dashboards for professors. All with no programming background whatsoever.

“This really shows it’s possible to not have any idea what the code itself is saying, but with clear communication and patience, you can accomplish things that would have been impossible just two years ago,” Kyle tells Blake.

This phenomenon has a name: vibe coding. It’s coding without being a coder, using everyday language to generate complex scripts. During the demonstration, Kyle shows how Cursor generates hundreds of lines of Python code based on simple English instructions. You don’t need to understand what those lines mean, you just need to know what you want to accomplish.

Kyle offers a metaphor that reframes the entire relationship with AI. “Picture it like an orchestra and a conductor. You’re the conductor. You are in control. You set the tempo. You set the vision of what you want to achieve. And it’s the orchestra that’s doing all of the hard work.”

“There’s this assumption that AI is going to eliminate a lot of work,” Blake observes. “But what we find in reality is that it shifts the work from doing to reviewing. So that job is not going away, but now we review the output and provide feedback.”

The Script Solution: Privacy and Reliability in One Package

During a live Q&A, one attendee asks the question on everyone’s mind: “When you load the project into Cursor and it shows you the Excel files, does this AI platform not retain that client data? How is this different than uploading the Excel into ChatGPT?”

Kyle’s answer reveals why scripts are game-changing for accounting work. “It does not retain this data because with this process, it created this Python script, which is just Python code. It’s offline. There’s no record of this script.”

Your Excel data never leaves your computer. Instead, AI creates a script—basically a recipe—that runs locally on your machine. Think of it this way: instead of handing your sensitive client data directly to an AI company, you’re asking AI to write you instructions. The AI writes the instructions based on your request, but it never sees your actual data.

Blake highlights another advantage: “When Cursor communicates with AI services like Claude, it does so through APIs that have zero data retention policies. That’s in stark contrast to the chat interfaces most people use.” As he explains, these companies want large enterprises to be comfortable, so API interactions have much stricter privacy protections.

But privacy is only half the equation. Scripts also solve the reliability problem. Blake shares a cautionary tale about a Big Four firm in Australia that had to refund a government contract because its AI-invented citations didn’t exist. “They send an entire report to the government, the government clicks on the links for it, and they don’t exist. It’s disastrous if you don’t actually review the output.”

When another attendee asks about the risk of hallucinations, Kyle explains why scripts are different: “You’re not having an AI model interact with the Excel information. You’re having this step-by-step script that says, ‘do an auto sum of column B.” The script uses Excel’s own functions, it just automates the clicking and typing you’d normally do manually.

This deterministic nature means the same script produces the same result every time. As Blake notes, “We can reuse the script we created, apply it to a new Excel file and get the same expected result without having to check everything over again.”

The Three-Part Formula That Makes It All Work

“Goal. Steps. Output.” With these three words, Kyle unlocks the secret to making AI do exactly what you want.

During the demonstration, he tackles three real-world Excel challenges that every accountant faces. First up: a messy data export with empty rows, headers in row three, 14 different date formats, and inconsistent spacing.

His prompt is elegantly simple:

  • Goal: Clean up this Excel file
  • Steps: Identify any inconsistent formatting. Add basic color and style. Analyze each column to better understand its format
  • Output: A new Excel document

Within moments, Cursor generates hundreds of lines of code. The result is a perfectly formatted table with consistent dates, proper headers, and professional styling. “It looks clean, smooth, with some nice shading,” Kyle observes. “It’s just easier to look at overall.”

When Blake asks whether Cursor can do its own checksum, they quickly add both files and ask Cursor to verify nothing was lost. The response: “All 20 transactions are present. All amounts were correctly processed. The sum of $19,000 is maintained.”

The second demonstration scales up the complexity. Kyle shows a General Ledger detail export with 400 rows spanning every account. Manually organizing this would require hours of filtering and copying. His structured prompt creates a summary tab showing account codes, transaction counts, debits, credits, and net amounts, plus individual tabs for each account’s detailed transactions.

“Instead of going to each account in your accounting system and exporting the GL individually, just export all the accounts together and then run this through,” Kyle suggests. What might take an hour completes in under a minute.

The third example addresses bank reconciliation, comparing statements to GL detail to find discrepancies. No more scrolling row by row. The automation identifies matching items, missing transactions, and differences between the files instantly.

Blake connects the dots for viewers. “I picture our listeners who work with some older ERP systems that don’t have very customizable reporting and who are doing a lot of manual formatting. Now you can automate that recurring task every month or every week.”

Getting Started Is Simpler Than You Think

The transformation begins with two downloads that take five minutes each. First, download Python, then download Cursor. Start with the free tier. Kyle uses the $20 monthly plan for daily use, but the free version is powerful enough to begin.

When you first open Cursor, it will ask you to install some packages like “pandas” for Excel interaction. Kyle recommends, “Click the dropdown button and choose ‘run everything’ so you trust the platform. It’s very reliable, and then anytime it needs a new required package, it automatically downloads that.”

Don’t forget to adjust your privacy settings. In Cursor’s settings menu, scroll to privacy options and select “privacy mode” with “no training data used.” This ensures your work isn’t incorporated into AI training datasets.

The key to success is to start small and be patient. “Try it with some information that is not private at all, maybe one of your own documents,” Kyle suggests. “The more patience I have, the more I follow up on that review step by giving it tiny pieces of feedback, the more it improves over time.”

Blake adds perspective on managing expectations: “When I try new tech, 80% of what I do doesn’t have a payoff, but then the 20% has a huge payoff. So don’t get discouraged if your first few attempts fail.”

For recurring tasks, the payoff compounds quickly. “Private roles always have month-end closing. Public end clients always need amortization and depreciation schedules for their notes,” Kyle notes. Even creating client checklists based on prior year information becomes a candidate for automation.

The Bottom Line: Your Move

The tools are accessible. The knowledge is available. As Kyle demonstrated with live examples, you can go from messy data to polished reports in minutes using nothing more than clear English instructions.

So, will you step away from AI as it advances, or learn one new tool at a time and stay connected to this movement? Because as Kyle reminds us, “It’s not going to go away. It’s just going to become more integrated into everyday work culture.”

To hear these demonstrations in action, listen to the full episode at podcast.earmarkcpe.com/108. Kyle has also offered to help early adopters, so reach out to him at kyle@maxwellcpa.com with questions or to brainstorm how this could apply to your specific work situation.

As Kyle challenges at the session’s close, “Try your first task with it this week and see how it works for you.” The revolution in accounting work is here, waiting for those bold enough to embrace it.

After 50 Years in Internal Audit, Richard Chambers Sees the Profession’s Greatest Risk Yet

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“Who’s going to provide the skepticism, the intellectual curiosity, and the institutional knowledge to our audit teams in ten years? Because the rest of us are going to be gone.”

Richard Chambers drops this stark warning after 50 years in internal audit. His concern isn’t about losing jobs to technology. It’s about the growing gap between how we’ve always trained auditors and what the profession now demands.

On this episode of the Earmark Podcast, host Blake Oliver sat down with Richard, Senior Advisor for Risk and Audit at AuditBoard. He brings a unique view of internal audit’s transformation. When he started in 1974, fresh out of college and working in a bank’s internal audit department, the job was all about checking financial records and looking backward. Today? Financial risks make up only 25% of audit plans. The rest involves cyber threats, AI governance, supply chain chaos, and what Richard calls “perma-crisis”—our new normal where tariff rates can change three times in a single day.

Most companies use AI, but only a quarter have set up proper governance over it, according to AuditBoard research. That gap presents massive risk and opportunity for internal auditors who can bridge it.

From Bean Counting to Risk Navigation

Internal audit has changed dramatically since Richard joined that bank in 1974. Back then, it was all ledgers and reconciliations—purely financial work focused on last year’s numbers. Today, financial risks are just a quarter of what internal auditors examine.

“The profession has matured,” Richard explains. “While we still do some work in the financial space, that’s really a small percentage of internal audit’s focus.”

The real game-changer has been what Richard calls “perma-crisis.” It started with the COVID-19 pandemic and hasn’t stopped. “We’ve been lurching from one risk-induced disruption to another,” he says, listing the cascade: pandemic, forty-year-high inflation, supply chain breakdowns, wars in Europe and the Middle East. “We’re in our sixth year of it, and I would submit this is the new normal.”

This constant chaos makes traditional planning almost useless. Richard found that nearly 60% of internal audit departments had already changed their 2025 plans by May. When tariff rates can swing wildly in a single day—Richard recalls hearing three different numbers from Washington in one day—annual planning is dangerous.

“You can no longer have any confidence that one scenario is the only one you have to worry about,” Richard emphasizes. Organizations need what he calls “scenario risk management,” or planning for multiple possible futures at once.

This need for flexibility shifts how internal audit works with other departments. The old model was called “three lines of defense”: management controlled risks (first line), oversight functions monitored them (second line), and internal audit was the last barrier before disaster (third line).

But pure defense isn’t enough anymore. In 2019, the Institute of Internal Auditors dropped “defense” from the name. The new message? “Independence does not mean isolation.”

Richard uses a ship analogy that really hits home. Organizations are like vessels at sea that need lookouts watching in all directions and talking to each other. “If your internal auditors are looking in one direction and your risk managers are looking in another,” he warns, “but they aren’t sharing what they’re seeing, then you don’t know whether there are gaps.”

AI: The Top Risk and Best Opportunity

Three years ago, AI wasn’t even on internal audit’s risk list. Today, it’s number one, pushing even the talent crisis to second place.

“Pre-2022, before ChatGPT came out, we weren’t asking about it,” Richard admits. Once he started surveying the profession, AI rocketed up the list: middle of the pack the first year, third place the next, then straight to number one.

This isn’t just another tech disruption. After watching five decades of change, Richard doesn’t mince words: “In the five decades I’ve been in internal audit, there’s never been a greater risk to this profession in terms of becoming irrelevant.”

The scariest part? When Richard asks why audit teams aren’t using AI more, the top answer is, “We don’t really understand it enough.” That hesitation could be fatal.

Yet Richard himself uses AI daily as his “research assistant.” He asks it to identify industry risks, outline articles, analyze data. “It takes me longer to write the prompts than it takes to give me the answer,” he notes.

The use cases are obvious and powerful. Risk assessments that used to happen annually can now be continuous. AI can scan for threats humans would never spot. Data analysis that took weeks happens in minutes. Even audit reports can be AI-generated.

But the trap is that AI excels at exactly the work that trains new auditors. Entry-level graduates traditionally learned by doing routine tasks. Now AI does those tasks better and faster.

“College graduates have traditionally been able to ease into professions by doing some of the more rudimentary tasks,” Richard explains. “But AI is prime for rudimentary tasks.”

This creates a vicious cycle. Companies hire fewer entry-level auditors. Without that pipeline, who develops the judgment for complex work? Richard’ solution: “We shouldn’t refrain from hiring them. We should be willing to bring them in and help them leap the learning curve.”

“AI won’t replace internal auditors,” Richard predicts, “but it will replace internal auditors who don’t use it.”

The Human Superpowers AI Can’t Touch

“To assess culture, you also have to be able to rely on your sense of smell.”

A chairman of the board of a large Indian company shared this wisdom with Richard years ago, and it perfectly captures what separates humans from AI. Technology can analyze documents and data. But it takes human instinct to sense what happens when nobody’s watching.

Richard identifies three “human superpowers” that AI cannot replicate: professional skepticism, intellectual curiosity, and relationship skills. These aren’t soft skills; they’re the core value of internal audit.

Take culture assessment. Richard has done two major research projects showing how toxic culture can destroy organizations. But judging culture requires reading between lines, sensing unspoken tensions, and understanding human motivations. As Blake pointed out during the conversation, “The body language, the way people talk to each other, all of that is context that AI just cannot have access to.”

The audit committee relationship shows this even more clearly. Richard chairs an audit committee and knows these relationships need more than data transfer. They require courage to “grab them by the face” and focus them on hidden risks.

“If we’re content to just answer the questions they ask,” Richard warns, “then we’re not really serving our organizations well. We have to help them understand the questions they need to be asking.”

This shift, from giving answers to finding the right questions, represents a huge evolution. While AI can list potential questions, there’s something fundamentally human about knowing which questions matter.

Most critically, Richard identifies one role that must stay human: assessing AI’s own governance. “I shudder to think that there may be a day where we ask AI to assess its own governance,” he says. “We would never do that with anyone else.”

The challenge is developing these human skills when the traditional path is disappearing. Without routine work to learn on, how do new auditors develop judgment?

We need to help new auditors develop skepticism, intellectual curiosity, and institutional knowledge from day one. Teach them to ask “why” before teaching them “how.”

As Richard reflects after 50 years, “What a difference from the bean counter view of internal audit. You get to be so curious as an internal auditor these days.”

The Next 50 Years Start Now

Richard’s journey from a bank to internal audit’s leading voice shows a profession that has transformed before and must do so again.

The collision of perma-crisis and AI doesn’t doom internal audit. It clarifies its purpose. When tariffs change three times daily, cyber threats evolve by the hour, and AI makes decisions we don’t fully understand, organizations desperately need professionals who ask the hard questions.

Not “What does the data say?” but “What isn’t the data telling us?” Not “How do we implement AI?” but “How do we govern what we can’t fully understand?”

The saying “independence does not mean isolation” applies to both organizational relationships and the human-AI partnership. Tomorrow’s successful auditors won’t resist AI or surrender to it. They’ll orchestrate a sophisticated dance between computational power and human intuition.

The fact that entry-level work is vanishing while judgment becomes more critical demands new thinking about professional development. Organizations can’t wait for fully-formed auditors. They must cultivate intellectual curiosity from day one.

For accounting and tax professionals watching internal audit’s future, Richard warns those who avoid or fear AI will become irrelevant. But he also extends an invitation: those who combine technology with human capabilities will find themselves at the center of organizational decision-making.

Listen to the complete conversation to understand why this moment represents internal audit’s greatest challenge and its most exciting opportunity. After five decades in the profession, Richard reminds us the question isn’t whether internal audit will survive the age of AI. It’s whether individual auditors will choose to evolve with it.

From Random Acts of Advisory to Strategic CFO Services

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“The darkest times for an industry are the times in which an accountant is most valuable.”

Chris Macksey, CEO of Prix Fixe Accounting, learned this firsthand during the COVID-19 pandemic. While restaurants nationwide struggled to survive, his specialized firm actually grew—not despite the crisis, but because of it. Restaurant owners desperately needed help navigating Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans, Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL) applications, and industry-specific relief programs that their generalist accountants couldn’t handle.

In this live recording of the Earmark Podcast from Boston’s Advisory Amplified tour, host Blake Oliver explores how accounting firms can evolve beyond traditional services to become true strategic partners. Joined by Chris and James Erving, Head of Sales, Americas at Fathom, the conversation shows that delivering valuable advisory work doesn’t require advanced certifications or complex methodologies. It just takes a willingness to form opinions and use modern tools to turn financial data into business guidance.

What Advisory Really Means (And Why Accountants Struggle With It)

The accounting profession can’t even agree on what advisory means. James cuts through the confusion with a simple definition: “Being involved in the decision-making process rather than just the delivery of information.”

Chris takes it further. At Prix Fixe Accounting, he treats advisory as completely separate from Client Accounting Services (CAS), even assigning different team members to each. “It’s any of the work that you can’t scope really very easily,” he explains. Unlike predictable bookkeeping tasks, advisory demands flexibility and judgment.

The real challenge is having an opinion. “I have run into so many accountants who just won’t have an opinion about anything other than the accuracy of the financial statements,” Blake says bluntly.

Chris shows what having an opinion looks like in practice. When a restaurant’s food costs creep up from 23% to 28%, he doesn’t just report the variance. He digs deeper. “Is it that something’s changed in the kitchen, or is it just inflation that’s causing that number to gradually rise over time?” That shift from reporting what happened to explaining why it happened (and what might happen next) is where advisory begins.

But not every client needs this level of service, and knowing when to offer it makes all the difference.

Finding the Right Clients for Advisory Services

James identifies three clear signals that a business needs advisory support. First, rapid growth that outpaces the owner’s ability to manage finances. Second, reaching a size where DIY financial management becomes overwhelming but hiring a full-time CFO doesn’t make sense. Third, major events like acquisitions or exit planning.

This targeted approach beats what James calls “random acts of advisory”—the unpaid, unstructured advice many firms already provide without recognizing its value. By identifying specific triggers, firms can systematically deliver advisory services rather than hoping opportunities appear.

The conversation also reveals an important distinction between types of forecasting. James explains that small businesses often need short-term cash flow forecasts to predict cash positions in the next week or two. Larger or more stable businesses benefit from FP&A-style planning with three-to-12-month horizons and scenario modeling.

Understanding which clients need which services allows firms to focus their efforts where they’ll have the most impact, and where clients see enough value to pay premium fees.

Why Industry Specialization Accelerates Advisory Success

Chris’s restaurant-only focus demonstrates the power of specialization. His firm doesn’t just understand debits and credits; they understand why champagne and caviar became popular during the pandemic, how street construction affects revenue, and when consumers will pay for fine dining versus seeking value menus.

“Right now, consumers really feel a lot of pain in the pocketbook,” Chris explains. “The auto loan default rate is up. Credit card balances among consumers are at their highest levels. Consumer confidence is down.” This economic insight shapes his current advice: forget the $175 prix fixe menu and focus on feeding a family of four for under $75.

The specialization advantage goes beyond knowledge. Chris spent over a decade as a chef before becoming an accountant. “It’s a little bit of a cult industry,” he says of restaurants. “If you’re in, you’re in. If you’re out, you’re out.” This insider status builds trust that no amount of technical expertise could match.

His firm even mandates their approach. “The tech stack is set. There really aren’t any options. And there’s only one price point, it’s prix fixe. And you’re just going to have to enjoy the ride.”

This confidence comes from aggregated data across similar businesses. When restaurants see sales drop 20%, Chris can show clients it’s an industry-wide trend, not a personal failure. “When you can actually see that data and validate it for yourself, you know that no, it’s not you. It’s just the economy.”

The depth of specialization creates value generalist firms can’t match, but you don’t need a decade of industry experience to start delivering meaningful advisory services.

Making Advisory Practical: Tools, Metrics, and First Steps

“Once they actually do it for the first time, they realize, oh, I’m just looking at the last three years. I’m kind of rolling it forward, making an educated guess on what it’s going to be. And that’s really all it is.”

Chris uses this approach to explain forecasting for his team. Rather than treating it as an advanced skill only partners can handle, he involves staff accountants in creating annual budgets. They examine historical data, consider market conditions, gather client insights, like upcoming construction that might impact foot traffic, then make informed projections.

The key is matching the service to the business reality. Chris doesn’t do detailed cash flow forecasts for restaurants because “they have such tight cash flow that you’re off 5% and your cash flow projection’s shot.” Instead, he focuses on annual budgets with monthly check-ins.

Visual presentation transforms complex data into insights clients can actually use. “Our client base is largely visual people, and the financial literacy is usually pretty low,” Chris notes. He spent over a decade cooking before seeing a P&L statement, so he understands the challenge. Charts showing 12-month trends for metrics like food costs communicate far better than spreadsheets full of numbers.

Non-financial metrics add crucial context. For lodging clients, Chris tracks occupancy rates, average daily rates, and rooms sold. These are “numbers that you will not see surfaced in QuickBooks.” When revenue changes, these metrics reveal whether it’s a pricing issue or a volume problem.

James emphasizes the importance of using proper tools. “You don’t have to build an entire Excel model customized to a client to get started.” Modern platforms like Fathom automate much of the work, creating professional forecasts and visual dashboards without custom spreadsheets for each client.

For firms ready to begin, Chris and James offer practical advice. Start with forecasting, since it’s a natural extension of work you already do. Pick one or two industries where you have multiple clients and build expertise gradually. Ask more questions about your clients’ businesses. And remember, clients don’t expect you to know everything. They value accountants willing to connect financial data to business decisions.

Your Path from Compliance to Advisory

The shift from traditional accounting to advisory starts with three elements: forming opinions based on financial data, developing knowledge of specific industries or situations, and using modern tools to make forecasting efficient rather than overwhelming.

Chris’s experience during the pandemic proves the value of this transformation. While generalist firms struggled to help clients navigate crisis programs, his specialized knowledge made Prix Fixe Accounting indispensable.

The firms making this transition today position themselves for a future where their value only increases. Economic uncertainty creates more need for strategic guidance. Industry disruption demands advisors who understand both the numbers and their context. Business owners facing unprecedented challenges need professionals willing to venture beyond historical facts into forward-looking advice.

Listen to the full episode to hear additional insights on pricing advisory services, overcoming staff resistance, and managing the cultural shift within your firm. Chris and James’s conversation offers a practical roadmap for any firm ready to move beyond “random acts of advisory” to systematic, profitable guidance that transforms both your practice and your clients’ businesses.

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.