PwC Cuts Disney & The Uncertain Career Path for CPAs

0:04Would you trust a mechanic who's never worked on a car but could tell you everything about the engine? Like, I wouldn't.

0:11Blake Oliver: Coming to you weekly from the OnPay Recording Studio.

0:20David Leary: Hello and welcome back to the Accounting Podcast, your weekly roundup of news in the profession.

0:26Blake Oliver: I'm Blake Oliver. I'm David Leary. And Blake, we've made it to episode 500, which is kind of amazing. Like, we've never skipped. Actually, I think we had one hiccup where we had to double record one week. But essentially, 500 weeks in a row, we've released the show. It's a milestone.

0:44David Leary: It's hard to believe. And we should tell the story of how this podcast started because it's a fun one. I get asked about it a lot. And I don't know if we've ever shared it on the show. I don't think we've shared it on the show. Yeah. After we thank our sponsors, we'll talk about that. I also want to thank our two special guest co-hosts for this episode. We've got Adam Zaki, reporter at CFO.com. Adam, welcome. Thank you, guys. I'm happy to be here. Congratulations. I'm a listener of not all 500 episodes, but I've been listening to you guys for a while. Thank you for putting your podcast together.

1:19I love it.

1:19David Leary: Thank you for all the great stories that you write. They inform our show. That's what we talk about on the show. So it's great to have you here. We've also got Adrian Gonzalez, Managing Editor of Going Concern. Adrian, great to have you. Bye. All right. Let's thank our sponsors, David. Who are our sponsors for this week?

1:36Blake Oliver: Our sponsors this week, we have OnPay, Canopy, Thomson Reuters, and Cloud Account and Staffing. Are you tired of peril headaches getting in the way of the client experience that you want to deliver? Manual workflows creating bottlenecks compliance nightmares, and endless support calls that go nowhere, there's a better way for your team and your clients. OnPay is the payroll partner that accountants and bookkeepers actually love. Why? Because it's easy to use, packed with value, and backed by support that actually supports you. Their teams get great reviews for being fast, expert, and actually reachable when you need them.

2:09Blake Oliver: OnPay handles all the heavy lifting. You get a dedicated onboarding coordinator who sets up worker profiles and transfers year-to-date data from previous providers, all at no extra cost. Their seamless QuickBooks and zero integrations eliminate manual journal entries, and they support any type of businesses you serve, farms, restaurants, nonprofits, you name it. OnPay can handle the unique requirements without adding complexity. And OnPay keeps pricing simple, too. Everything your clients expect from multi-state filing to off-cycle pay runs is included. No hidden fees, no surprises. To book a demo, head over to accountingpodcast.promo.onpay.

2:43Blake Oliver: That is accountingpodcast.promo.onpay.

2:48David Leary: And thank you to OnPay for being an incredible sponsor of the show, support of the show over the years. We really appreciate you. Please do visit those links to let them know that's how you found us. All right. Let's get into the origin story, David.

3:01Blake Oliver: Well, you want to welcome our live studio audience that are starting to show up here?

3:05David Leary: Oh, yeah, that's right. Look at all the comments. Boring accountant, as always. Arcula. We've got Oswego Sharks and Kobe and VCMZ and James and Linda and Melanie. and Coquilla, thank you for commenting. Let us know as you watch, what are the favorite stories that you've heard on the show, favorite moments, anything you want us to discuss. We love to hear from our listeners. So David, do you remember how this all started? Yeah, so you were kind of,

3:36Blake Oliver: you had your blog, the Blake Oliver blog, and then you, it evolved to where you had, it was called, you had a cloud accounting blog, right? Or cloudaccounting.com. You had that. and you were you basically were using the square skates blog site to record a couple podcast interviews over zoom or something you did about eight episodes and then in wait David we have to go back even further oh yeah before that's

3:59David Leary: right this is where we met yes yes yes that's right I forgot about that part of the story yeah I mean years so we were at expense a con at in Maui at the and as resort and I remember this is how I remember it this is I think this is the first time I ever met you, perhaps. I'm lying on a lounge chair by the pool, and I've got my one-year-old there. No, he's not even one yet. He's Thomas. He's not even walking. He's crawling around. And I'm exhausted because we're traveling with a kid and at a conference. And I'm lying there, and I've got my eyes closed, and I'm getting my one minute of zen, right?

4:39And all

4:39David Leary: of a sudden I hear my name and I open my eyes and standing over me is David Leary. And I think within the first few minutes of talking to me and introducing yourself, you were like, we should have a podcast. Yeah. I did. That's how I remember it anyway.

4:55Blake Oliver: Yeah. It was like over beers or drinks and like three years later, we finally have a podcast. It was just like, yeah, it really, there's a big gap of no podcast, no actual planning. And then you were doing a podcast on your own. Intuit bought T-Sheets and you had me on because you wanted to talk about that story. And then as soon as we were done recording, I said, let's just do this every week. And I've never left. So I just crashed your podcast and I just never left it.

5:18David Leary: Well, you know what you did is you planted the seed in my mind and then it grew. And I totally forgot about it until you reminded me when you were a guest on the show and you were episode six or something. And it went so well that basically after that, you were always on. That's how it happen. So thank you. And I love that about us because I feel like it is sort of is like how our working relationship works, right? Is you plant these ideas in my mind that then grow, and then we work on them together eventually.

5:50Blake Oliver: The best story I still think, and the reason we've been successful and hit 500 episodes is I'm a Gen Xer, Blake's a millennial. I don't know, maybe episode 14 or so, Blake was like, I want to skip this week. And I just told him, if you skip this week, we'll skip next week. And this whole thing's dead. And I didn't let Blake skip. And because of that, that's why we hit 500 episodes. If he would have skipped, this thing would have died at episode 15.

6:13David Leary: That's true. Credit goes to you for that. And we're getting comments here in the chat. We'll check in on you later. Thank you all. Let's get to the news, shall we? Adrian, I want to start with you. Going Concern is probably the first accounting publication I ever started reading when I just entered accounting. And I feel like actually it's really popular with a lot of young accountants because of the issues that you talk about, the irreverent attitude, the brave, unvarnished coverage of the big four and all that. And so I wanted to ask you, what do you want to talk about today? What is top of mind for you?

6:58David Leary: Let's start. Let's kick it off. And actually, it looks like we may have lost, Adrian. Oh, no. If you can hear us, Adrian, go ahead and refresh your browser and come back, and we'll get back to you. So over to Adam Zaki. Adam, great to have you. What's top of mind for you? Listen, I'm a kid in a candy store here. Adrian's one of the best writers writing about accounting right now, and you two are the best. So I can't thank you enough for having me. But I got a lot to talk about. I want to I guess we could open up with the future of the billable hour, because this is something that I just did a story on.

7:27I interviewed the co-CEOs of Cross-Country Consulting, and they told me the future of the billable hour is waning. And CFOs would love to hear that. Right. Because the idea of product based or outcome based pricing is huge for my audience. Especially now, like we've seen it in your world where one of the big four firms was asking for a reduced rate because their auditor used AI. I believe it was KPMG or PwC. I don't want to get that wrong. But one of them did do that, right? And so if the firms themselves see that the value of things like auditing is going down because of AI and value meaning the cost, I should say the cost, why can't we all get that cost benefit?

8:04That's what my audience is saying. And so I think that the move to outcome-based pricing is totally legit in the consulting world. I don't know where it will come first, right? Will it be consulting? Will it be in accounting? But it's coming. I just don't know when and where.

8:19David Leary: I believe it. I mean, my own experience was in outsourced accounting. And once we got all these like cloud-based accounting tools and we could automate a lot of repetitive write-up work, like literally typing transactions into accounting systems, our billable hours dropped by 80%, 90%. And we as a team, as a department inside of a firm had no choice but to move to fixed fees. whether or not you value price, you fix fee, right? Like we had to do it. We couldn't bill hourly anymore. And I'm wondering what, what you're hearing and what you're seeing, uh, from the consultants about like the effective AI on their hours, on their timesheets and how that, how they're going to adapt.

9:03David Leary: Like, what are they thinking? What are they doing? Well, that's where, you know, my job gets hard, right? Is getting into the nitty gritty of, okay, so you have this plan, but what is the plan? Right. I think first it comes down to training, right? People are trained to work off the billable out. Like the more time you put into a client, the more money you make for the firm. That's a mindset that people have to grow inside firms. And that goes for accounting and consulting. So I think that's step one, right? Is to remove the mindset of hours equal dollars, right? And outcomes should equal dollars.

9:34The greatest example in my audience is ERP transformations, right? When you put in a new ERP system, a lot of times it's a separate firm that does the implementation process, not the company that sells you the ERP. A lot of times they have a partner that will help you and it's recommended. You could bring in whoever you want, but they have a recommended partner, right? And so in situations like that, like when accountability is hard to come by because somebody who sold you the product is not the person that's implementing it for you. And then the time they spend on implementing it may be different than what the salesperson told you in the sales process.

10:09And so there's a lot of hiccups in finance technology implementation right now. And I don't know if AI is necessarily like the end-all be-all answer for solving them, but if it can reduce time, it might be a great start. But I just, like I said before, I don't know where it's going to start first because accounting looks like it has a lot more solutions, but consulting is a much lower stakes in a lot more regards. And so it might be more ripe to try new stuff in consulting and not like your audit, it, right? No CFO wants to be the guinea pig with AI technology in their audit, right? Especially if they're paying for the name of a big four, from a big four.

10:45And so I think that's huge. But I don't know, what do you guys think? Is it, are we going to see an accounting or consulting first?

10:52Blake Oliver: Well, who's going to drive the behavior changes? Are CFOs now just like, hey, I'm expecting next year to pay less for accounting and consulting services. And the year after that, even less. And the year after that, even less.

11:01David Leary: Is the market going to put price pressure and force them to

11:04Blake Oliver: change their business models to a fixed price type thing? Or is this going to be... I just don't see the accounting firms working out of the goodness of their heart to switch this model just because, unless the market's telling them to. Well, the market is advertising to my audience. Everybody is AI powered, right? Everybody's using these new tools. So if they're advertising that we're saving time and being more efficient, they're going to want the cost benefit on the buyer's side, right? And so I think that's the key. If you are dealing with a firm, and let's just say we're talking about the top 10 firms right now, that is marketing out there.

11:40We are an AI first, agentic AI powered accounting so-and-so. That's where you're going to say, all right, if you're saying this, give me the cost benefit. But there's a lot of boutique firms out there. And this is where I think, and this is something we can get into in a while, but this is where I think the future of accounting will rise. Boutique firms, niche services. If you are a food and beverage company, a mid-market food and beverage company, I feel like in the future, you would want to do business with a small accounting firm that specializes in your industry. And the idea of dealing with a firm in the top 10 because of the name, or we can say big four too, is losing its appeal.

12:18And I'm just talking about the mid-market, maybe even the small business part of my audience. The enterprise CFOs will always deal with the big four. But I think mid-market, which is where a majority of the CFOs work, the majority of my readers are that post startup pre-IPO CFO. And that's where a majority of CFOs are. And there, I think there will be more trust in the future in boutique niche accounting firms that can show experience, right? And maybe if they have a partner that worked at Big Four for 20 years, and then they bring them on board, that might be enough legitimacy to give a boutique firm a chance, I think in the future, not for the enterprise CFOs, but for those mid-market, small business type of CFOs.

12:57I think that will be the future.

12:59David Leary: I agree with you, Adam, for another reason, which is that when we step back and think about why do bigger businesses work with bigger firms? The answer in my mind is, well, mid-sized businesses, enterprise-sized businesses, they need more knowledge. The firm has to have more knowledge to be able to handle all the complexity of what that business is doing from an accounting finance perspective and tax perspective. And the only way to get that in the past was to simply add more experts, right? Add more partners. And now it feels like with AI, a smaller firm with fewer people can have more knowledge.

13:46David Leary: Like that's what it gives us, is access to all this knowledge that we don't have to gain through experience necessarily anymore, or maybe not as much experience. And so that's why the small firms, we're going to see more and more solo firms, right? Small firms competing with the mid-market accounting firms.

14:04Blake Oliver: Because the smaller firms would have to merge with other firms to get that level of expertise across their firm. And now in theory, if the knowledge is becoming democratized, a lot of smaller firms can run solo for a lot longer.

14:18David Leary: Yeah, exactly. Like, like, for instance, traditionally, if you wanted to do, I don't know, if you want to handle sales tax for clients, like mid size businesses, you had to have a whole team that just specialized in all the state and local taxes, in order to have the knowledge to be able to advise them on what they need to do. But now, maybe you just need one person, or maybe you can have a partner who does a bunch of different areas of specialty. like people can be more generalist because we have access to all that knowledge maybe that's like i i don't know i tell me if you feel differently but i feel like i know so much more now because if i know where to know how to ask the question ai can give me the answer i have to be able to uh you know validate it know enough to figure out whether or not it's getting in the right direction but it's like you know it's like google when we got google but 10 100x that.

15:17I think my readers would be concerned about if it's a one-man or two-man accounting shop, AI-powered, what are you doing with my data that's allowing you to do that? Are you uploading all my financials into Claude? Because if you're doing that, we can't do business. And I think that's a real concern. And I just did a story about this. I attended an OpenAI webinar about their finance technology webinar. The word governance did not even come up on the webinar. Right? And this is a big thing that CFOs want to know. Where is my data going and what are you doing with it? And if we're going to work with small firms, I think they need to address that.

15:51David Leary: That's a great point. Adrienne, we've got you back. Tech challenge is solved. You hear us? You see us? I do. Sorry. I'm on 2010's internet, a.k.a. Comcast, Xfinity, whatever they call it these days. I'm back. Welcome back. Great to have you back. just before you cut out I was tossing it to you for your top of mind stories this week whatever you want to talk about you know let's do it let's hear it what's going on well we're on the accounting podcast so I suppose nobody wants to talk about PlayStation ending physical disc production in 2028 but that's that's been top of mind for me end of an era end of an era um I've been buying PlayStation 3 discs that I probably won't play just look at and admire um top of mind for me um that i think we should talk about is pwc ending the impact uh intern get together and the as cory doctorow said that in shittification of everything has now spread to the intern experience you know like they take away everything now they don't even get to go to disney and i think that's sad wait yeah what so tell me about this because uh you know i never did big four uh never got that experience uh what what what what does pwc have to do with disney so they used to it's been like i don't know um 15 20 year old like one of our oldest readers ongoing concern uh remembers attending and he's definitely old but um they would have this get together at disney if you go on youtube you can actually find you know nowadays kids with their fancy cameras and they take these really great you know they cut together these great clips and everything.

17:36Like it looks like a lot of fun. I've never been either, but you know, I've heard it's a lot of fun and it's just a cool thing where they get together for a couple days and, you know, get to see the people that they're going to be working with and get to talk about, you know, all that stuff and network and kind of not think about the fire pit that they're about to get thrown into as PwC interns. And it sort of quietly went away this year. I happened to just see something on Reddit, you know, that it's just, it's off. And apparently they're still getting a gift so they still get to apparently choose from like an i don't know if an ipad is better than disney but they're still getting something um apparently we haven't confirmed that but um yeah it's a get together for them to kind of you know have fun before the the work starts really

18:20Blake Oliver: honestly it's part of the onboarding right they bring everybody to orlando they do an in-person onboarding professional development blah blah and then one of those events during that week or whatever, is a private theme park excursion. And now they've cut that out. And I love meals and dinners and stuff. And I think it's kind of good too, because I feel like it's a good bridge from college to work. Instead of going straight into that environment, you have this kind of buffer where you're expected to be professional, but you can still kind of chop it up with people your same age and your same experience level before you get to that you know next level of being fully professional i remember years ago i think that the only related scandal was when i think it was ey who um stopped providing alcohol some years ago i seem to remember because somebody had incident with alcohol whatever but um yeah so now it's over there's no there's no impact what why would pwc do this well are they are they i don't think

19:21David Leary: they're hurting for money, right? I think that cost is certainly an issue. I think that revenues haven't been great the last couple of years. I mean, they're certainly not hurting for money. That's, you know, without a doubt, they've got money. Some people might say Paul Griggs, the current CEO, is just, you know, cutting, cutting, cutting until there's really nothing left. Honestly, I don't know why they would. It does kind of signal that they can't afford it, though, right? When they cancel something like that. Isn't that your first thought? Yeah, I mean, that's what I always think. I mean, they're an accounting firm, so maybe they're watching their expenses.

19:55David Leary: And I reckon this is an iPad. Go for it, Adam. Okay. I was going to add, how many iPads are worth admission to Disney? Sounds like a cost-cutting effort to me. It probably costs you 10 iPads to get into Disney, right? But, you know, the whole idea of doing a trip like that is to get the interns excited about coming to work at PWC as associates. It's getting them, it's their first drink of the Kool-Aid. And it's a recruiting thing.

20:24Blake Oliver: I'm looking at a website right here for USC and it's for prospective undergrad students. And there's a blog post that's titled My Summer as a PWC Start Intern. And it's a photo of this intern and this friend's co-workers in front of the Magic Kingdom. Like literally there's like, when your interns are making blog posts about their summer experience, it's a recruiting tool. So now that's gone. Nobody's going to write a blog post. I got an iPad. I got an iPad, right.

20:51David Leary: Okay, here's a theory then. So maybe it's PwC is deciding we don't need to do this special trip because we don't need to recruit as many associates. Well, that is true. They are cutting down their recruiting numbers. Another interesting thing we've heard that's sort of developing in the last couple of years. So it used to be if you were a big four intern, you were basically guaranteed to get an offer unless you did something really egregious or, you know, whatever. That is no longer the case. It's kind of emerging now where it's like you're not guaranteed. Now, first of all, they're cutting down their graduate numbers.

21:30And then also you're not guaranteed an offer. And you don't have to take a dump on the senior's desk in order to not get an offer. Like there's so much, you know, it's just, you could be at a high level, but you're just not at this level, you know, there's just not enough room for you. So that's something to keep an eye on too. I think it's just further and shitification of everything. Like everything just sucks now. I want to back you up on that. I have a good source of mine. I won't say which firm, but a recruiter in the big four recently just shared the same thing with me that it used to be your job to lose.

22:02And now many more are doing exactly that. They're losing it on their own accord. It's their fault. They do something they mess up or there, you know, there's a lot of weird things. Even there's a famous stat out there that how many Gen Zers brought a parent to a job interview, right? There's some crazy things these kids are doing. But it's funny you say that because I just heard that, that these jobs now are no longer yours to have and that they're being more selective in who they hire. But all you hear is how they're cutting entry level hiring, but not, you know, new hires. But in the intern program, there's seldom information out there about how, hey, it used to be if you get into two hours.

22:36But I haven't seen that story out there of, hey, this is changing. Could be a good story for us.

22:42David Leary: I want to come back and talk more about career paths, both at the associate level and at the executive level, because that's changing a lot. But first, let's thank our next sponsor. And Matt is Canopy. Let me ask you something. How much of your day is actually spent doing accounting? If you're like most firm owners, 30 to 40 % of your time is eaten alive by the work around the work. We're talking chasing client documents, drafting the exact same emails over and over again, manual filing, and trying to remember what a client said on a call last Tuesday. It's an administrative tax, and it's killing your profitability.

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24:14David Leary: And now I want to put up a chart. And ironically, well, not ironically, but just completely coincidentally, it's part of an article written by Luke Fry on CPA Practice Advisor, and he's the accountant in residence at Canopy. He's a CPA. And the headline here is, Diamonds May Be a Firm's Best Strategy, How AI is Rewriting the Structure of Modern Practice. Artificial intelligence is changing who does the work, and that change has the potential to reshape the very architecture of your firm. And that's what I want to talk about, which is the future of the business model, not just of the big four, but basically any accounting firm of any size has traditionally been a pyramid type structure.

24:59David Leary: We call it the pyramid, right? Like you go in and there's more people at the bottom layer. And as they move up the ranks, it's up or out. And that's been the way accounting firms have been built for who knows how long, right? And so there's an actual diagram of it, the change that we are seeing. And it is that pyramid getting the corners cut off. And so now it looks like a diamond upside down, like sitting on the face. And you've got the entry level and individual contributors on the bottom. And then you have middle management, which basically they are just inverted and they are the same size.

25:42David Leary: and then it gets skinnier as you go up to senior management in C-suite. So an inverted diamond, if that makes sense. And I wanted to get your take on this, Adrian, Adam, David. Do you think this is what's going to happen? And if it does, what does this mean for the profession? Because this is a big shift.

26:07Blake Oliver: I think at first, sure, it's going to be a diamond in this little transition time because there's still a huge layer of middle management. So if you're hiring less because you're using AI and the bottom is getting smaller, but eventually it's just going to be a smaller pyramid. That layer, it's not just going to keep going like that because where does the fattest part come from? How does it get fat if it starts out skinny and small? Like this could be a snapshot of what the migration affirms. For a little while, it'll be diamond shaped, but it can't go on forever. It's just going to become a triangle again.

26:42David Leary: So you're saying it's not sustainable.

26:44Blake Oliver: It just doesn't logically make any sense. If you bring in 100, how do you get 125 at the next tier?

26:51David Leary: Well, no, it's supposed to be smaller at the next tier, right? But I think that -

26:55Blake Oliver: Well, that'd be a pyramid. If you have 100, then the next tier is smaller. Yeah. But a diamond, it gets bigger. It gets fatter at some tier.

27:02David Leary: Well, I think if you look at the chart, let me try to put this up again. So if you look at the chart, basically, I mean, there's different ways you could like visualize this, right? But it is in this version, it is...

27:16Blake Oliver: You're not sharing right now, Blake. Here it comes.

27:18David Leary: Yeah, here, I'm going to put this back on the screen. I had an issue with my screen sharing. So I put it back on and I can't zoom in on it for some reason. Oh, I know why, because I'm looking at the wrong screen. Here we go. Dismissed that pop-up. So this is the chart. This is what I meant to be sharing the whole time. Here we go. So we've got, sorry, David, we've got, here we go. Zooming in. Can you see this now? I think it's good. Okay. So you see like with the, the area, the total area of the bottom layer is now basically the same size as the middle layer. So if you were looking at an accounting firm like this, basically the associates and all the staff would be the bottom layer.

27:59David Leary: And then the next layer would be the managers and directors, let's say, or just managers, right? And basically, you're getting the same number. So in this version of a firm, you would have the same number of staff as you have managers. And my question is, if that's the case, you have to be able to retain 100 % of your staff to have the same number of managers that you used to. But firms don't do this now. So how does it work? Like that's my concern, which is essentially the same as yours, David, I think.

28:37Blake Oliver: Yeah, because how do you, if you have 100 entry level, the next level is going to be smaller, which now you're a pyramid. You're right back to being a pyramid. Like I just don't see it. Or it's a tower and it's all the same all the way up, but that doesn't work either. Adam. Where's offshoring? where's offshoring in that in that pyramid i don't see that anywhere oh yeah well i guess i guess

28:59David Leary: that's you do it either way right reduce the entry-level people with offshore or ai i don't know the only thing i'll go ahead please the only thing i have to add is i think you mentioned it this idea of the up and out model we've written about this on the consulting side of the business at cfo.com but it applies like you said directly to accounting too that may go away because if If you're not providing value upfront early on, they might toss you. Like, why keep you around for 10 years and let you grow if at the entry level, that's where the automation is happening, right? So those people who are maybe, you know, a slightly above average employee at the entry level that grow up in consulting or accounting, that don't go on, they're not on the outside of the up and out, right?

29:42That stick around. I feel like those people will be less. There'll be less opportunities inside the firms to grow. And it'll kind of act as like a talent filter. You know, if you're just above average, just slightly above average, you're probably not going to be able to stick around and hide in a place like McKinsey or Deloitte as easy as you would be in 10, 15 years from now. It's just my guess.

30:03David Leary: Richie in the live stream said, and I believe this was in a comment on what I was talking about. Richie said, not necessarily. That assumes people stay in each rung the same amount of time. If you need the middle to be fatter than the bottom, you just keep people in the middle longer. So that sounds like what you were talking about, Adam, right? Yeah. Like the idea of growing in one firm over the course of your career. I mean, we see it. Like CFO in my world, the average CFO tenure is about three and a half years. Years ago, that was much different, right? And so I think that the idea of the up and out being this idea of if you're not growing here, leave.

30:44I think it's going to be very clear early on if you join a firm whether or not they want you to stay. And if that's clear early on, then this up and out may happen much quicker. Yeah, I think it'll speed up the process of getting the average talent out and be able to keep the great talent in-house.

31:02David Leary: Right, but stuck at manager level. Yeah, stuck at manager level. And not making it to partner level. No, no. Stuck at manager level. Which, Adrian, I believe has actually increased even before all of this AI stuff. It used to be that to become a partner at a firm, it took like an average of, I don't know, a decade. and it's creeping closer and closer to like 20 years. Well, not to mention they put another level in there of non-equity partner. You have people that are sticking at director. What I think is going to happen, honestly, is I think the primary function of, I'm speaking, we write a lot about big four, so I'm speaking about maybe the bigger firms mostly, but I think they're just going to be salespeople.

31:45I think the technical aspect is going to be not as important because like you were talking about, you have the technical aspect covered by AI automation, all this other stuff. I think it's going to be primarily sales. And that definitely then filters out. You can put a bunch of trained accountants into a role auditing, accounting, and they don't necessarily have to have, it's a different skill set. But people who are good at selling, and that's the priority, I think it's going to completely change, you know, what even the firms are looking for and what they're training up and, and, you know, who stays, honestly.

32:23But yeah, there is definitely, there's another layer in the partner track. And it is, it's even no longer guaranteed that you stick around X amount of time, you'll get a promotion. You know, just this last round of promotions, you had people that were stalling because you have people who don't want to quit, attrition is too low, blah, blah. So it's definitely changing for sure.

32:43David Leary: I want to keep talking about the promotion pipeline. Adam, you've got a story about the pathway to CFO changing and maybe becoming impossible for some folks that are currently on that journey. I want to get to that next, but first let's thank our next sponsor and that is Thompson Reuters. David, do you have that one handy?

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34:30David Leary: Let's talk about the pathway to CFO. one of the end jobs, right? What do you call it? Final destination as a CPA is to either end up as a partner at a firm or a CFO. And that's changing. Adam, tell us. Especially the way you get there. And I will just say one response to what you just said. I think the new landing spot is CEO. Lots of CFOs that we talk to now want to be CEOs. They want to take over their own companies and take that position. So the landing spot may be CEO for CPAs of the future. But in terms of this story, super interesting because this is the first time in my career at CFO.com that a CFO told me the pathway that he took is gone.

35:16But if somebody replicated his career, it would never get to the CFO seat, right? This is somebody who started out in NetSuite as a senior analyst in FP &A, finance manager, then became head of finance at a tech company. And he said he basically developed his knowledge by building systems, right? And developing the finance function of these businesses. And the fundamentals is what taught him, not his education. And this is something we've talked about on this show, the three of us, me, you, and David, Blake, is this idea of how entry-level talent learns. And at the CFO level, if places like the big four are going back to accounting, like we were just talking about, eliminate entry-level hiring, where are the nuts and bolts of corporate finance learned for future CFOs?

36:06That is the question. Because according to this CFO, he learned it all on the job. And I'm sure lots of CFOs who I've interviewed would tell me that, right? But he was very candid about this. And I think he is in not a unique situation whatsoever. So there's a risk, right? What does the future CFO look like is the obvious question. But I think the deeper question is like, what does it take to get there? Like if you are in public accounting now and you say, I'd love to be the CFO of a publicly traded company in the year 2035, the path to get there is not clear. And it was 15 years ago, right? If you wanted that job, the map was pretty much cut out for you as long as you follow the protocol.

36:48But that is not the case. So I do this for a living and I couldn't tell you what the CFO of 10 years, in 10 years from now what their resume will look like, right? I mean, it's dependent on company, but I think there's a real issue in terms of what makes up the fundamentals of the future CFO, because it's either an FP &A CFO or an accounting CFO, kind of like bisected in terms of experience, right? There's two career paths you can take, but what does that mean in 10 years from now? I don't know. And so I did this super interesting interview. It's with a company called Tika Metrics. Brian Bupri is his name.

37:22He's the CFO. You could find it on cfo.com. But it just really stuck with me because we're changing the way people traditionally built their knowledge in corporate finance. And it's going to impact the executive level. And I don't know. I mean, I try to talk about it, but I don't know if it's talked about enough.

37:39Blake Oliver: Because right now we talk about how we need to have human oversight or human in the loop for AI. And if somebody has experience, they could kind of recognize that AI might be wrong or it's not taking the right path, but that experience was gained pre-AI for decades of in the trenches. So now the next generation is not going to have anything in the trenches. They've only used the AI. Do we just lose human in the loop and we just take AI? That's the only way we do it because we don't have any expertise of human in the loop in the future? Yeah, I don't know. I mean, would you trust a mechanic who's never worked on a car, but could tell you everything about the engine?

38:18Like, I wouldn't. Like, that's the thing. It's like, do you, what is the value? We talked about it before. Like, what is the value of knowledge now with AI? Is it, it's obviously gone down, but is it, has it gone down so low to the point where it's almost an afterthought? I would say no. But the way that the movement of incorporating these into systems, you would, it says yes. But to me, I say, you still need that fundamental of, especially in this industry, of the knowledge of how systems work in order to develop them. And at the CFO level, if you don't have that, who knows what the CFO in 10 years will look like.

38:56David Leary: So maybe your boss will be an AI someday. Currently, I just looked this up, currently only 15 % of workers are okay with swapping a human manager or a CEO for an artificial intelligence system. And that's still a pretty hefty number. 15 % of people would be okay working for an AI instead of a human boss. These are general people? Yeah, just a survey of everyone. Yeah, everyday workers. How many people in that group hate their boss? Right. That's the question I would ask. I mean, maybe it could be an upgrade, but I don't know. You might be held more accountable. It was a survey of like 1 ,400 adults in the United States by Quinnipiac.

39:44David Leary: and it was in March of this year. I also want to highlight another stat related to what you were talking about, Adam, which is it was the percentage of CFOs who came up as CPAs because it used to be years ago that most CFOs were CPAs. It was 55 % in 2012, and that dropped to about 40 % in recent years, and it's been on a decline. So where did those CFOs come from instead of accounting? I think, like you said, finance. Yeah, investment banking. Consulting. Consulting. And so... Sorry. No, no, please. So yeah, then that begs the question, okay, well, if now consulting is being eaten by AI, where the future CFO is going to learn what they need to know?

40:50That's a great question, Mark.

40:52David Leary: It is. And if our listeners have any ideas, we want to hear from you in the chat here. All right. Where do we go from here? Adrian, training the next generation? have we talked about that enough yet or do you have more on like how we actually train people oh and i want to highlight a comment here um that i saw this is a one of our loyal listeners hk geek hk says there's an influx of individuals skipping entry level if ai can do more for us then you gain the knowledge and start right at level two i have some questions about that like Can you just skip level one? Can you just - I think that's the whole question here.

41:38And I think Adam is kind of hitting on it, but I'll say it more enthusiastically. Like, is this being talked about enough? Are we talking about, you know, KPMG is talking about AI is going to do all the cash testing. There was, you know, comments a year before that from, it might've been them talking about, you know, all our cash testing is done offshore. So, you know, the associates don't even touch that anymore. You know, the onshore associates. I see it talked about, but what is the plan here? Because time is going to fly by and suddenly we're going to realize we have all these, you know, young people who came into the profession they didn't learn on.

42:17And we're talking about rote sort of repetition of tasks, right? That's how they were trained in the past. It was doing it over and over again is how you learn it. okay, what is the alternative? Because now we can't be talking about, you know, what should we do about this? Like it needs to be discussed now. And I've seen, I saw an article in Wall Street Journal about how, you know, KPMG is doing like this AI bootcamp. That's there. They're going to teach critical thinking.

42:42Blake Oliver: I mean, it's muscle memory, right? People aren't building up the muscle memory. I remember when I came up through tech support and, you know, Intuit would put us in six weeks, intensive QuickBooks training. Then you get out there and you start taking phone calls and you suck for nine months. You have to build the muscle memory. You just can't take the course and be like, I'm at level two now. I know the knowledge. You don't have the muscle memory of the knowledge. There's a gap. And you're right. This is going to bite us. It's going to catch up here soon. Ten years from now, five years from now, I don't know.

43:13David Leary: Well, I think five years from now it's going to. AI-powered simulations. Is that the answer? I think KPMG, right? Working on that. So you're going to play games, basically. Like, how do you, but can you, the question is, and maybe this is, we're coming at from the perspective of older people. So maybe we don't get it because to us, the way to understand it is to do it. And maybe there is some other way. Maybe simulations are the answer. But can you teach critical thinking in young people if they haven't been exposed to the environment? You know, how, and that's the question that I think is unanswered.

43:49I don't think you, I don't think you can.

43:52David Leary: Well, with simulations that I've experienced in the past, I would say no, it's not enough like the real world. The simulations that we all do to study for the CPA exam and those simulations - Yeah, you're triggering a lot of people right now bringing up simulations. Yeah.

44:08Blake Oliver: We do all the simulated trainings for sexual harassment and that still happens at the big firms. Nobody learns their simulations.

44:15David Leary: That's true. That's not exactly a great case study there. Yeah, the simulations that you do for like the CPA exam, they're not real world at all. Like you actually, you know, like the simulation is like create the set of financial statements and then you have to, you know, manually create like, you know, an income statement and balance sheet from a, and statement of cash flows from a trial balance. Like nobody does that in the real world anymore. The simulations are not real world. Or it might be like, you got five emails, you know, now you have to do this job. I don't know. Yeah. Maybe if they can make them realistic enough, right?

44:48David Leary: But that's the tricky part. How do you make something, how do you actually educate people to do real world work when academia is so not real? Hopefully you don't have any educators in the chat right now. I think, I mean, wasn't KPMG kind of trying to do that with the whole metaverse thing? Wasn't that kind of going to be close? Oh, you're triggering me now, Adrian, with that metaverse stuff. I actually had to attend an online virtual conference in the metaverse during COVID.

45:22Blake Oliver: You did?

45:23David Leary: And I think that might be -

45:24Blake Oliver: You spoke at it, I think even, right? Didn't you have a avatar and you spoke at this conference? Yeah, yeah.

45:28David Leary: It was like you walked around. It was like, what was that? What was that? The original metaverse thing? Roblox? Before that even. But yeah, let's say it's like you're walking around in Roblox. Oh, Second Life? Second Life, yeah. You're walking around and then in order to talk to somebody, you have to come within certain proximity to them and then you can hear them. And then you can speak. And the whole thing was just so bizarre and weird and uncomfortable. Please tell me a video of this exists somewhere because I am dying to see it. I hope not. Please. It might be in an episode of the podcast somewhere.

46:03David Leary: Nobody go dig it out. I'm going to go look for it. I'm going to make it my mission to find it. All right. Let's thank our last sponsor of this episode, last but not least. And it is Cloud Account and Staffing. Are you tired of the endless search for qualified accounting talent? You're not alone. Growing accounting firms are struggling to find available and affordable team members when they need them most. Cloud Accountant Staffing has the solution with their revolutionary candidate portal. Unlike traditional staffing agencies that waste your time with sales calls, paperwork, and deposits, the Cloud Accountant Staffing candidate portal gets you instant access to highly vetted, qualified accounting professionals.

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47:18David Leary: That's accountingpodcast.promo.cas. And that's our last ad of the episode, so it means we're not getting paid for anything after this, so we can wrap up whenever we like. All right. David? I have a kind of a silly... You take it. Go for it.

47:35Blake Oliver: I don't know if this is a silly story, but it's kind of what are you thinking? So there's a company called BitQuery. They're kind of a crypto company. And they build investigation agents and they target them at law enforcement and criminal investigations to track money across over 40 different blockchains. So it's anti-fraud, fraud detection tools. Well, the co-founder and former CEO has now had a lawsuit filed against him for allegedly siphoning$5 million from company accounts. What caught my eye is right before he left, he deleted 194 financial records from QuickBooks. So they're literally in the business of fraud prevention, financial fraud prevention, and they're committing financial fraud.

48:23it's it's i can't grab my head around it completely that's an insane story yeah so the

48:31Blake Oliver: lawsuit was filed in manhattan supreme court in june of 2026 it claims that he deleted 194 financial records from quickbooks right before resigning in october 2025 194 expense and bill records deleted from quickbooks and apparently he still has the company's banking logins and won't return them either. This is the problem of having people with too much control. But they're literally an anti-fraud, like a criminal investigation software for crypto, but it doesn't.

49:02David Leary: And that is the correct use of the term irony right there.

49:06Blake Oliver: Yes.

49:08David Leary: All right. I want to touch on some listener comments. We got so many listeners who have joined is live. Thank you for joining us. Arcula says, that's an amazing milestone. Congratulations to Blake and David here since episode one. You've been listening since episode one? I don't even think I've been listening since episode one. We've got Boring Accountant here with five coffee emojis saying, happy Friday. Happy Friday to you. Oswego Sharks says, congrats on 500 episodes. Thank you. And Carl says, congrats on the 500 milestone. I don't often make it to the live streams. Excited to be here. We are happy to have you too, Carl.

49:51David Leary: VCMZ, congrats on 500. Kobe, congratulations. Let's see. 500 and going strong from Melanie. Awesome. Thank you so much. David says, way to go, guys. Let's see. Oh, here, Linda Bors says, my absolute favorite. This is her favorite episode. My absolute favorite and the one that got me hooked was the two-part episode that you did on the employee that stole the payroll tax withholding or something like that. It was fascinating. I remember that, David. That was my payroll HR.

50:21Blake Oliver: My payroll HR. That was, do you remember that?

50:25David Leary: Do you remember the gist of that story? Yeah.

50:28Blake Oliver: So he was, basically it's old school kiting, right? And he's moving funds to the one thing, but he was trying to get funds because he runs some basketball camps or something, but he also had this payroll company. And what they did is he modified the ACH. So instead of the, so he pulled the ACH from the employers, right? Pulled all the money and the tax liability, pulled it all in. But then instead of moving it to the IRS and to the employee's bank accounts, kind of just funneled it to his own account. Right.

50:57David Leary: And he was check kiting until it got so large that the payroll accounts overdrafted. And then nobody got paid. For thousands of companies. Yeah, it was a lot of companies that didn't, a lot of people, not a payroll.

51:11Blake Oliver: And it was extra complicated because there's another company that actually moved the funds. And then would they put money into people's bank accounts like Wells Fargo, et cetera. And then they realized, wait a minute, we just got hosed on the back end. So they tried to pull the money back. So people would see their paycheck, go in their bank account, and then be pulled out of their bank account. And I was like, it was a big story. It was a really big story.

51:31David Leary: Carl says I'm in Fresno, California and I even have memories of traveling to see one of my groomsmen in Oklahoma and listening to one of those episodes while on a run around his neighborhood one of the MyPayrollHR neighborhoods that's great Linda says my husband and I were on a driving vacation and that payroll episode kept us so entertained while driving

51:56David Leary: let's see oh Carl said this is regarding the hourly billing conversation, Adam. Carl says, I bill a flat fee for tax prep and planning. I still have so many seemingly future-focused people, clients, financial advisors, who still make comments about my effective hourly rate. It's so ingrained. Have you guys had Ron Baker on the podcast, the king of the kill the billable hour? We must have at some point. I'm almost certain. You have to, right? You have to, right? We've talked to – No, on the podcast. Yeah. And, you know, Ron, he makes all the excellent arguments logically as to why it makes no sense.

52:41David Leary: And then people keep doing it. And it's that ingrained behavior. Same as last year. I think it's something that is like, like Carl said, ingrained in us when we go into any job as a first year where we have to fill out a timesheet. Timesheets, yeah. You do it long enough and, you know, you hate it at first and then you get used to it. And then in a perverse way, you start to enjoy it. And I think here, I'm going to play the other side of this. I'm going to say what I like about a timesheet. Let me know what you think if you agree. So here's why timesheets are great. It's because I, as an employee, know that if I fill up my timesheet with enough billable hours for the right clients, I've done my job.

53:40David Leary: I can look at that timesheet at the end of the week and say, I hit my target. I can go off for the weekend, hopefully, and rest and know that I was successful. It is a very easy metric for me to see my own success or failure. And to show how ingrained it is in people, we're using some time tracking software at Earmark for some employees.

54:07Blake Oliver: And Blake is obsessed about it. He's obsessed with tracking other people's time. kind of on like and it just shows you how ingrained this is arguably somebody who is against it and arguably for fixed fee pricing and killing the bill of hour blake is still obsessed with time sheets like it's so in his dna net because he worked at accounting firm he went

54:26David Leary: down that career path well you know what it is david it's that if you don't have something else it's the best thing you've got and you need something you if you if you're not going to be able to evaluate outputs, then tracking inputs, you have to do it, right? And we have remote workers. We don't have an office. We don't know when they're working or where they're working. So if they're not tracking their time automatically, it does it automatically for them, right? Then we really have no idea what they're doing. So - But is there a task that they're doing? Like that's the question, right? Can you, you can't evaluate the task and say this task that I gave them was completed?

55:09Well, we could because these are developers of the Earmark app and CPE course reviewers.

55:18David Leary: And we could develop a system to evaluate their contributions to the team. But like turning that into a metric, like quantifying the tickets that they have closed or the code that they have contributed or the features they have built, that's hard. Right, David? I mean, you run products.

55:39Blake Oliver: Yeah, it's hard because you could count, well, how much code they write? Well, somebody could write five lines of code that's better than somebody else's 200 lines of code. Right, right. So you can't, you have to, it's really hard to measure and time's an easy, very black and white easy way to measure something.

55:53David Leary: It's very, very easy. And somebody might spend months working on a feature that like is unimportant, right? And somebody might ship a major feature in a week, but if we just call them both features, it's equal, right? So I think that's, now that I have both filled out a timesheet and then saw the need to manage people with them, I understand why accounting firms don't do anything else because it's hard. You have to really dedicate the time to it, create the system for it. And I don't know, when you don't have a lot of time, like we don't have a lot of time in our startup, it's like that's the last thing we want to figure out how to do.

56:33David Leary: but we should do it. That's the funny part. We know we should do it. Well, that's what I was going to say, Blake, is how much do you want to pay people to log their time? Right. It's got to be easy. I know you're a business owner. You want to know what your employees are doing, but from an employee perspective, I mean, my output is you can Google it, right? It's pretty easy for my job to see whether or not I'm doing my work, but for somebody who doesn't have output like that, it's gotta be a system where it doesn't take up, you know, three hours of my week to tell you what I'm doing. Right. And that's what timesheets, in my experience of previous jobs, were.

57:05How much time am I going to spend telling you what I'm doing? I could be doing what I'm supposed to be doing.

57:09David Leary: So here's what we do that's different is we use automatic time tracking. So when you log in and start working on your computer, it just tracks your time. And if you're active working, it counts it. So you don't have to keep tabs in a spreadsheet or in software or whatever yourself. It just does it. And the other thing is we don't make our people allocate their time to different customers or projects. It's just how much were you active? So, you know, that is, that's sort of one way, one possibility, you know, a way for firms to, you know, reduce the administrative burden. And I don't know if anyone's listening who's doing this.

57:57David Leary: I mean, there are plenty of firms that track time down to the individual client and individual engagement. I think that's pointless in so many ways. It's too much detail. I think that firms would be much better off tracking at a higher level and not making your people. That was the part I hated, right? Having to allocate my time in six minute increments to a client or a project. Let me ask you then, Blake, what if your best developer was only logged on for two hours a day? Or that I've shown you?

58:33Blake Oliver: This is so, this suddenly turned so serious. I mean, that could be true, but here's my observation that I've seen in this. Asking somebody to use some tool to track their time, which is a relatively simple ask. And it's almost like a leading indicator. If you can't seem to accomplish that, what else are you not accomplishing? So this hypothetical, Adam, honestly, my belief is we would never have that issue. because the best developers also does everything else they're asked to do. Does that make any sense? Like the tracking would be aligned. Like it would be perfect time tracking from the best developer because I think it goes hand in hand.

59:11Blake Oliver: It's really a leading in. If somebody can't fill out their timesheet correctly, they probably can't do anything else correctly. It's kind of my point of view on this.

59:20David Leary: Here we go, 500 episodes and we are completely inverting the discussion on the timesheets. I guess they're essential, necessary, We're total hypocrites. Look at where we've been. Look at where we've come. I want to keep highlighting some more comments before we go. This is regarding, let's see. Oh, this is, here's another congratulations from Shelly. Congrats on 500 episodes, changing careers, and so glad I found the pod early on in this journey, learning a lot and having fun doing so. Nightlight says knowledge is power. What was that in relation to? That must have been the AI stuff, right? Knowledge is power.

1:00:01David Leary: Sometimes. But sometimes bad knowledge is the opposite. Like listening to a teenager repeat information that they got from YouTube. Like influencers. Wait, are we on? Oh, no, we're on YouTube right now. Yes, that's us. Don't repeat us. don't don't don't take anything we say as fact do your own research do your own research boring you'll find your papa one of jasmine deluche's videos blake if you talk at a turn so be careful i mean that would be a milestone for sure uh i'd probably get more impressions being in one of her videos than our entire podcast ever has boring accountant life says can i onshore my accounting work to blake no i'm retired thank you though uh ray says, regarding the diamond org chart, David is right regarding the mathematical logic.

1:01:01David Leary: The solution is to snipe experienced staff with two to five years experience.

1:01:10David Leary: But like sniping, that's expensive, right? You got to offer people a lot more money and there's no guarantee they'll stay with you, right? Sniping, it just shifts the problem elsewhere anyway uh here's here's richie's comment about ai i'm a cpa with no math degree ai helped me solve a 40 year old math problem and get published this took audit not math verify claims etc will cpas do far more varied work because they can audit ai oh i like that i have not I have not thought about that maybe auditors because of what we are what auditors are taught are are well positioned to be AI uh users because they're skeptical supposed to be supposed to be skeptical um who else boring accountant life says can I get an AI babysitter chad gpt and gemini can't last four minutes with my six-year-old before having a mental breakdown yeah why don't we have um why don't we have like ai robot child care at this point you don't even need that you've made youtube you have youtube and an ipad they've made furbies they're making uh little stuffies that have ai in them yeah i just saw them they're oh no wait before we wrap can i ask a listener question something we didn't get to that i wanted to ask I need an update on this.

1:02:38I'm sure other listeners do. I wrote a story about this on CFL.com. It did so well. What happened with you and NASBA? We've kind of been left out in the open on how this all ended. Can you share with us what happened, please? Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

1:02:52David Leary: So, well, the short story is that I spoke at a conference, and I gave my typically unvarnished opinion on how CPE courses are developed and taught and administered. by the National Association of State Boards of Accountancy, NASBA. And I did not intend for any of my comments to be perceived as negative or insulting or whatever it is that they didn't like. But after I gave that presentation, I got a letter from NASBA saying that my conduct was unprofessional and not in compliance with the standards agreement that I signed as a NASBA sponsor. which says that I can't make negative, I forget the exact terms, right?

1:03:40David Leary: But essentially I can't make negative comments about NASBA.

1:03:46David Leary: And they threatened our sponsor license. They threatened to take away our ability to offer NASBA CPE. And so that was like a tough moment because this is our business. It's the existence of Earmark. It's everything that we've worked for for five years, potentially on the line. do we just say okay i'm not gonna speak out of line anymore and ask for forgiveness or do we stand up for our rights and well you know me i i know the plot you know yeah i did i can't help myself and so um i wrote them back i first of all i shared their letter on the air with our listeners and with you, Adam, and you wrote about it.

1:04:31David Leary: And thank you for sharing that. A lot of people came to me and said that they don't agree that this is acceptable, that NASBA shouldn't be acting like this, that they're a bully, you know? And then I wrote a letter back to them. And I basically said that, you know, I told them I didn't intend my comments to be negative, that it was trying to be constructive to help move CPE forward, to modernize education. which needs to change. I think anybody who's taken CPE webinars understands the issues with that system. And I said, I'm not going to apologize and I'm not going to change what I said, because I don't believe that NASBA has the authority to regulate the speech of CPAs, to essentially violate my First Amendment rights, because no board of accountancy could do that.

1:05:29David Leary: If a board of accountancy tried to tell a licensed CPA what they can and cannot say, that would be instantly struck down as unconstitutional. And a lawyer, an attorney for a large organization that fights for the rights of professionals like CPAs reached out to me and offered to sue NASBA. I don't know if I mentioned that to you, Adam, but yeah. And so then I had to decide, you know, do I want earmark to become party to a lawsuit against the National Associated State Wards of Accountancy? Because I do believe that what they did was unconstitutional. Even sending the letter is a suppression of speech because it forces me then to decide the next time I'm speaking about CPE whether or not I will be honest because my business could be shut down.

1:06:25I decided not to do that because while I want to help NASBA

1:06:35David Leary: move forward. Well, I do want to help NASBA move forward. I want it. I think it has value. It's necessary. And it needs to change. But I don't think that like going to war with it is the way to do that. Good for reading, though. I was going to say, I wish you did. It would have been a great story for me. I wish you did so. I would have loved it personally. But I understand where you're coming from. Me too. That would have been a step too far. So I used my better judgment and didn't do that. And thankfully, they read the letter and they resolved it without any issue. Basically, they considered the matter resolved and we're not going to have another problem with them.

1:07:19David Leary: I hope. So water under the bridge. Nice bow on that story, huh? Yeah. And it was great because I'd actually never spoken to anyone at NASBA before. And they reached out and I got to know them. You know, it's funny they sent that letter without even talking to me. And so now I am connected with some people there. And I do believe that there are, you know, in any large organization, there are people who are holding it back and there are people that want to move it forward. And I do believe there is interest in moving it forward. And I'm, I said, I'm happy to help in whatever way I can.

1:07:56Blake Oliver: so and and i this story really parallels what our five-year journey has been especially with aicpa and the 150 hour rule and the state societies it started out like you kind of got in the soapbox big and heavy and aicpa didn't like it and then we'd slowly get the state societies like there'd be little buckets of people that yeah we need the change keep doing it and they encourage you encourage us to like draw more attention to it and ultimately we just gave it a voice. Right. But that was kind of the same thing as like, we're raising the awareness of the ways NASBA should change in the same way we kind of did with 150 hour rule.

1:08:32Blake Oliver: I would say it's very, very, very parallel, the journeys.

1:08:36David Leary: I just want to hit on a few more listener comments before we go. I know we're way over the hour, Adam and Adrian. So if you need to drop, please don't let me hold you. Tino says, I remember being a guest on this show way back when Blake first moved to Arizona and had questions about multi-state income taxes. That was over 200 episodes ago. Let's see. Blake, you used the show to get tax advice on multi-state tax advice after moving. Is that what that comment said? I mean, you know, I'm just... I'm just asking. Yeah, no, it's like, well, what is it? It's a trope, right? That like accountants are always getting asked for free advice.

1:09:21David Leary: So if I didn't do it myself, then I'm missing an opportunity here. Let's see. Fluffy Hammer Bookkeeping says regarding the AI training, VR headset, fill out this 1040.

1:09:38David Leary: You want to talk about the unshittification of the world, Adrian. Can you imagine going to work at your cubicle and putting on a VR headset and that's your cubicle inside the cubicle?

1:09:49Blake Oliver: But you have to actually go in person to do that.

1:09:52David Leary: In person to do it. Of course. You have to. So everyone's in cubicles, but wearing the headset. Wearing the headsets, not able to see each other or talk to each other. I mean, it's kind of like that looking at our Zoom screens, right? You don't get a fleece when you join the firm. You get like an outfit for your avatar or something. You have to pick one. You have to buy it with credits that you purchase. Yes. From your like. You know, we're joking, but I don't think we're that far off from that, honestly. sadly it could be coming the the dystopia is it going to be a dystopia or is it is it going to be a utopia of ai as with everything maybe it'll be both a little bit of both a little bit of both um all right too many comments to get to them all well no i gotta get this one last one hazardous item says Blake needs to start his own MAGA movement, make accounting great again.

1:10:49I have

1:10:50David Leary: a funny story about that. When I worked at Flowcast, I made a hat. I made a red hat that said make accounting great again in the exact same font as the Trump hats, the MAGA hats. And I had it, it was a joke, right? And I had it on my desk or above my desk and people could see it walking by. but the problem was people don't read they just saw the red and the white like they just saw the hat and they they didn't read it well i'm sure they tied it back to you being the

1:11:27Blake Oliver: president of the young republicans in high school and stuff and they just tied two and two together blake i did start that club but you know that was a different era i just want to say i'm

1:11:36David Leary: it was uh god we're like we're going on three decades now different era in politics anyway let's wrap it up adrian adam thank you for all the hard work you do reporting and and summarizing and being just an incredible resource for me and david to be able to do this show because if it wasn't for you, this show wouldn't exist. So thank you. Thank you. I feel that way about you guys's tweets. Sometimes when you tweet out stuff, I'm like, oh, that's something interesting that I see. You're like my, you're like my Google news sometimes. Happy to return the favor, David. I just want to say to you personally, it has been an honor to do 500 episodes with you.

1:12:27David Leary: It is the longest personal or business relationship. And I just really appreciate you. And this has been so much fun.

1:12:37Blake Oliver: It is.

1:12:38David Leary: It's a highlight of the week, every week.

1:12:40Blake Oliver: Somebody called us out though, that this is the only work we do all week. There was a comment.

1:12:46David Leary: The only work we do. Honestly, Blake and David only work 90 minutes a week during the podcast and nothing off air. If only. I would love to spend all the time on this podcast, but we have other jobs to do. Like bringing you Earmark, the app that gets you free CPE for listening to podcasts like this one. Go to earmark.app in your web browser or get the free Earmark CPE app on the App Store. Create a free account. Earn one free CPE per week. And if you want to support the work we're doing and get unlimited on-demand podcast-based CPE, subscribe for the low price of$200 per year. It's the best deal in CPE.

1:13:26David Leary: We're crazy for pricing at that low. What are we doing, David? I guess it's a good thing we have this podcast to pay the bills. Thank you, everyone who joined us live. Thank you to all of our loyal listeners who have supported us over the years. We appreciate you. Thank you. And we will see you around here next week for our 501st episode. Bye, everyone.

1:13:59Blake Oliver: Time for the classifieds.

1:14:04Blake Oliver: This fall, make sure you head to Miami for the event of the year, Reframe 2026. The theme is innovative advisory, flipping the AI narrative by making the accounting profession more relevant than ever. Reframe has sold out four years in a row, so block your calendar for November 5th through the 7th, 2026, and buy your ticket now before they sell out. Head over to accountingpodcast.promo slash reframe2026. That is accountingpodcast.promo forward slash R-E-F-R-A-M-E 2026.

1:14:39Blake Oliver: Are you an accountant with strong opinions on bill pay, spend management, or AP workflows? flows flow glad is looking to speak with professionals who help clients improve cash flow maximize card rebates and reduce manual work around payables and spend they'll pay your hourly rate for a short research call to learn how you work and where current tools fall short for you and your clients reach out to them at founders at flowglad.com or use the scheduling link in the show notes want to get the word out about your newsletter webinar party facebook group podcast, ebook, job posting, or that fancy Excel macro you just created, why not let the listeners of the Cloud Accounting Podcast know by running a classified ad.

1:15:19Blake Oliver: Hit the show notes for the link to get more info.