Richard Lynch can list every reason the billable hour is broken. It undervalues experienced professionals, creates perverse incentives, burns people out, and reduces human beings to time-tracked units. But without a hint of irony, he admits that Sikich, one of the largest CPA firms in the country, still tracks hours “on a religious basis.”
That contradiction tells you everything about where the accounting profession stands right now.
On a recent episode of the Earmark Podcast, host Blake Oliver sat down with Richard, a managing principal at Sikich with over 25 years in public accounting. They had an honest conversation about where things actually stand. Not where the conference keynotes say they stand or where vendor demos suggest they stand, but where they actually stand inside accounting and advisory firms, at the level where someone still has to fill out a timesheet at 9 p.m. on a Tuesday.
The takeaway is that the profession’s transformation is stalling because firms can’t let go of the operational scaffolding they’ve built around the billable hour.
The Super Accountant Vision
Richard has a term for what’s coming: the “super accountant.” It sounds like marketing language, but his definition is specific. A super accountant has AI fluency, strong judgment, and understands compliance without needing to physically perform it. “They’re not a tech person doing accounting work,” Richard explains. “They are a technical person, maybe a CPA, that specifically knows how to leverage technology.”
The structural change everyone talks about is the pyramid becoming a diamond with fewer people at the entry level and more in the middle. But Richard makes an important distinction. The bottom rung is moving up in capability, not disappearing. Future CPAs will “reach a higher level of intellect, capability, and advisory skills at a much earlier age without decreasing the standards.”
Richard points to how this has happened before. Thirty or forty years ago, interns got coffee and made copies. Today, interns do actual client work. “The capability of interns moved up,” he says. The same shift is about to happen again, just bigger.
But the education system isn’t ready. Accounting programs are mostly theoretical. They “lay a foundation,” Richard says, but “certainly don’t give you anything that is pretty or accessible to a client.” Firms will have to bridge the gap with intensive training, it may look like six to eight months where new hires don’t touch billable work, just learn the craft.
The Review Problem
Blake raises the concern many accountants have voiced. If AI does all the basic work, how do people learn to review? The whole system depends on doing the work first, making mistakes, getting feedback, and building judgment.
Richard doesn’t dismiss this. He calls it “a real concern” and says you “can’t underestimate or understate the value of experience.” But then he reframes it with an analogy.
Try explaining to kids today why they need to know how to use an encyclopedia. It seems absurd. The skill became irrelevant because the tool changed. What replaced it was arguably harder: filtering reliable information from unreliable information online.
The same thing is happening with review. “Technology will take care of putting it in the proper box,” Richard says. “Your objective is to have the filter of understanding how to interpret the outcome.” And he goes further: “There may be a benefit to actually not having that anchor of how we used to do business.”
This isn’t theoretical. Tax GPT claims it fully automated 1040 preparation. Basis says it’s done the same for partnership returns. Richard has talked to both vendors. The pace of accuracy improvement is “impressive.” AI is rapidly getting to where it’s “right more than it’s wrong.”
But Richard draws an important distinction. Completing a tax return is just compliance. The real product is what happens after: the advice on paying less tax, structuring a business sale, or planning succession. “When you engage with your clients beyond delivering compliance services,” Richard notes, “fees don’t really come up.”
Why the Billable Hour Won’t Die
“Our people hate entering their time,” Richard says plainly. “There’s no value to the time they spend entering their time and it undervalues us.” Experienced professionals solve complex problems in an hour because they have 30 years of experience. Bill that as one hour, and you’re “undervaluing the 30 years of experience that allowed you to answer that question.”
Richard calls abandoning timesheets “the Mount Everest” of firm transformation. The billable hour is the operating system. Everything runs on it, including utilization, productivity, margin, capacity planning, performance evaluation, even work-life balance monitoring. “You can’t really erase billable hours without erasing all of it,” he says.
Then Richard makes an argument Blake hadn’t considered before. Timesheets might actually help prevent burnout. Sikich monitors employees running over their expected hours and treats it as a capacity problem. Without those guardrails, Richard argues, ambitious people “will work so hard, they’ll burn themselves out really quickly.”
But Blake zeros in on the real issue. AI has destroyed the link between time and value. If AI makes your team twice as fast, the client pays half as much under hourly billing. That math doesn’t work anymore.
So what replaces hours? “We haven’t necessarily identified a better alternative,” Richard admits. Accountants like data and hours provide lots of data. Any replacement becomes more subjective. Client satisfaction? Value delivered? Team engagement? These are harder to measure, and for a profession built on measurement, that’s a problem.
The Basketball Team Problem
Richard draws on his sports background to explain what might work better. Think about the 1990s Chicago Bulls. Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen scored the points. But Dennis Rodman, the defensive specialist who didn’t score much, was essential. His contribution didn’t show up in the headline stats, but the team needed him.
“We’re not even looking at points. We are looking at time on the court.” Blake points out. The profession measures the wrong thing entirely.
But Richard warns that team models only work if everyone performs. If Rodman doesn’t hustle for rebounds while Pippen is scoring, or if Pippen takes a game off while Rodman is sacrificing his body, the whole thing falls apart. “You have to have a culture where the team performs within kind of a standard deviation of each other.”
The deeper problem is cultural. “The connotation of the employee becomes, I am an hours-based person. All I am is hours,” Richard says. When every review, promotion, or conversation starts with “how many hours did you work,” people internalize that their value is their time. Not their judgment or ideas.
And the system treats every hour as equal, which Richard calls “baseline, categorically false.” Some people think faster. That doesn’t make them more valuable, but under an hours system, it makes them look more productive.
The Implementation Gap
Richard says people actually don’t burn out from long hours. “I don’t hear complaints about the hours when it’s engaging work,” he says. He says his team gets excited working a long weekend for a complex client issue. The burnout comes from being stuck at 9 p.m. “dealing with software issues and plugging numbers into spreadsheets.”
AI can eliminate that burnout-causing work. But only if firms actually let it.
“We’re playing with it, but we’re not really implementing it,” Richard says. “We’re purchasing it, but we’re not really relying on it.” Firms pour billions into AI tools, but their training, career paths, and daily operations haven’t changed. The technology is there but the willingness to break old processes isn’t.
“There will be progression and there will be extinction. The question is at what pace,” Richard says, framing the stakes clearly.
Working harder won’t compensate for failure to adopt anymore. Buying AI products doesn’t mean you’re adopting AI. And trying to fit AI into existing processes instead of letting it break them is a choice with consequences.
“If you consistently try to find a place of complacency and comfort, you will not adopt at the pace necessary,” Richard warns.
The Choice Firms Are Making Right Now
What makes this conversation valuable is Richard’s willingness to acknowledge he doesn’t have all the answers. “I still have a lot to learn,” he says.
He can see the billable hour is broken and the pyramid is unsustainable. He can see buying AI tools without changing operations is theater. And Sikich is still tracking hours religiously.
That honesty tells you where the real work is. The super accountant future requires dismantling training models, educational assumptions, and measurement systems that have existed for decades. Not just purchasing new software.
For accounting professionals at every level, including partners making decisions, managers caught between old metrics and new realities, or someone early in their career wondering what’s ahead, the question is whether the firm will let AI change your work.
Richard has a message for other firm leaders: “Don’t let fear rule the day.” The firms that use AI as permission to break outdated processes will thrive. The firms that bolt AI onto unchanged operations will struggle. And that divergence is accelerating.
“I have every desire to be on the side of progression,” Richard says. Which side is your firm choosing?
Listen to the full conversation between Blake and Richard on the Earmark Podcast for deeper discussion on replacement metrics for the billable hour, building the super accountant pipeline, and why letting go of the past might be the profession’s biggest challenge. Then visit earmark.app to earn free NASBA-approved CPE credit.