Accounting

How accountants can stay ahead of AI

Published

21 hours ago

March 20, 2025

For years, advisory services stood as a bulwark against the relentless march of automation, a place where accountants could seek refuge as software took over more and more of the routine, compliance-based processes that, until recently, defined much of their jobs. Sure, the conventional wisdom holds that computers can now easily crunch the numbers — but it still takes humans to interpret what those numbers mean and to communicate that meaning to the client. However, as artificial intelligence continues to evolve, this conventional wisdom is increasingly challenged.

The truth is that while advisory services still stand as that bulwark, AI has begun nibbling at their foundations as it moves past updating journal entries and into generating the same kinds of data-driven insights and analyses that, before, had only been offered by human advisors. For better or worse, advisory is no longer the safe haven it once was. In the face of these changes, it is no longer enough to simply shift to advisory, as certain areas are already being transformed by AI. Instead, accountants must be smart about which areas of advisory they choose.

A great example of an area where this transformation is nearly complete is financial planning and analysis, according to Joe Woodard, head of accounting and business coaching firm Woodard. While there may once have been a time when a firm could sustain itself on analytics alone, those days are long past, as even public AI models are now capable of analyzing mountains of data in mere minutes, and writing reports on their findings in mere seconds.

“AI can do FP&A, and it does it well. A lot of people were initially disillusioned with ChatGPT because it couldn’t manage attachments and would guess when it didn’t know an answer. But now, it no longer plays the guessing game — it can absorb documents and do so securely, especially in enterprise or team editions,” said Woodard.

As an example, Woodard asked ChatGPT-4o, “If I have a gross profit margin of 60% and annual revenue of $15 million, what’s the ideal headcount for accounting associates, partners and reviewers?” He said the AI broke the problem down in real time — assessing firm dynamics, considering average pay rates, benchmarking professional service models, and calculating a typical partner-to-staff ratio. It even separated associates from other billable staff, factored in administrative and support personnel (“which I didn’t even ask for,” Woodard noted), and ultimately estimated a headcount of 85 to 95. And after doing all that, it provided firm strategy recommendations — niche practice areas, geographic market considerations, outsourcing, automation, and technology investments — all in about 45 seconds.

“So yes, AI is extremely deep and powerful,” Woodard said.

Randy Johnston, executive vice president of accounting training and education firm K2 Enterprises, said that he has seen this as well. For a long time, the kind of work that FP&A advisors did required a great deal of effort and time, but technological advancements mean it’s become much easier and faster to analyze a financial situation.

“The amount of time it takes to get high-value advice for clients in an advisory capacity has been dramatically reduced. If you’re doing pure advisory work that involves strategic analysis, historically, a lot of that was done by manually researching and Googling around. Now, you can use AI to get far better summary results and reference materials. I actually think Microsoft’s Copilot 365 does a great job — it will write the summary and provide the links. Does it find everything? No. But does it generate quick insights? Yes,” he said.

(Read more: “AI in advisory: What work is at risk?”)

Overall, the advisory services that are most at risk of disruption are — like compliance services — those that rely on relatively mechanical, step-by-step processes, which AI excels at. This also includes those that rely primarily on financial modeling, as Johnston says professionals no longer need to spend hours building custom models in Excel when they can now run those same figures through AI “and it does a much better job.”

“You still have to check the results, but it’s far faster than starting from scratch,” he said.

In contrast, Woodard said that operational finance roles, such as controllership, are relatively safe for now. He noted that many areas of corporate finance have been effectively automated away, but actual financial leadership positions, he believes, “will endure for the foreseeable future.”

While AI agents have made stunning advances in just a short time, even these semiautonomous bots are still unable to handle the vast number of responsibilities of a competent finance leader. A controller at a $2 million company, for example, needs to juggle financial oversight, operational problem-solving, team management, compliance enforcement and more, all of which requires dynamic, big-picture thinking that AI, for now, lacks.

“Bookkeepers who report to controllers will see their roles largely automated. Reviewers who check books for controllers will also be replaced by AI-driven analytics. FP&A professionals — who primarily compile financial reports — are at high risk. But controllers and CFOs will remain essential. The controller must operate within the company’s day-to-day reality, and the CFO must engage in high-level strategy, investment negotiations, and executive decision-making. These are operational, relationship-based roles that AI cannot replicate,” said Woodard.

Staying relevant

Woodard cautioned, though, that it’s not so much about the advisory areas themselves but, rather, how accounting firms perform them.

He said the biggest mistake he sees firms make is equating advisory with analytics, saying that if their definition of advisory is just building dashboards and explaining financial reports, then they are ripe for AI disruption. On the other hand, if their definition of advisory remains human-driven and client-centric in a way that allows the professional to understand the full context of their client’s situation, ideally based on a years-long relationship, to guide actionable financial decisions, then even FP&A can be fruitful.

“Financial analytics itself — the science of it — is easily and already being displaced by AI. For a human advisor to stay relevant, they must contextualize knowledge within a relationship with the client, understand operational complexities, and inject wisdom. AI cannot be wise; it can only be analytical … If you’re building a practice around delivering financial insights — essentially just interpreting numbers — AI will disrupt that,” he said.

Establishing such relationships and demonstrating credibility is a process that can take a long time, but Johnston said it can be helped through specializing in particular industries. For example, if a firm specializes in utilities and has its own internal data (perhaps indexed by AI) to give meaning and context to events within that sector, “that’s a real game-changer” as many models rely on public data that is not easily accessible to AIs.

“If you have expertise in any industry — utilities, for example — and you have legacy documents that can be indexed, that data is far more valuable than almost any public data available. Public data is useful, but having private data that has already undergone expert analysis is far more powerful,” said Johnston.

However, there is also the matter of educating clients as to why a human professional is still valuable. While accountants know that AI cannot do their entire job, media hype and technology misconceptions can sometimes lead people to believe that it can.

Even among those who already have an accountant, Woodard said that he has seen clients using AI as their first point of contact and only contacting their human professional for a second opinion. (See sidebar, page 8.)

“This is how AI is undercutting the value proposition of accountants. CPAs are increasingly becoming a second opinion rather than the first source of expertise,” said Woodard.

Relationships are the key to avoiding this. Accountants not only should be working on establishing and maintaining longstanding client relationships, they should be acting proactively to keep them informed of new developments that might affect them — so, rather than waiting for the client to call them, whether as the first or second opinion, the accountant should call the client.

Johnston, though, said that another somewhat unintuitive response might be to lean even further into these routine transactional services by leveraging AI to automate these tasks at a large scale, while still offering high-value advisory. However, one way or another, he said it ultimately comes down to keeping the client at the center.

“The key is staying client-centric. The accountants who remain first points of contact for clients — rather than second opinions after AI — will thrive. AI will become embedded in tools accountants already use, making it more invisible over time. But the accountants who don’t leverage AI will be replaced by those who do — especially offshore professionals using AI more aggressively,” he said.

Accounting

AI in advisory: Valuation | Accounting Today

Published

29 minutes ago

March 21, 2025

Business Finance News

Artificial intelligence has brought new efficiency and productivity to the valuation field, particularly where it concerns data entry, processing and analysis, which is a major part of the process, as well as generating the reports to explain what the data says. Lari Masten, who heads valuation advisory firm Masten Valuation, said that working the technology into her own processes has saved countless hours, turning tasks that were once an interminable slog into relatively quick jobs that can be completed in minutes.

One of the biggest use cases in the valuation world, said Masten, is data entry and processing. Valuation tends to require a lot of data inputs that can take hours or even days to complete, but recent AI advances have allowed her to sort through literally thousands of documents to find data patterns. This not only aids her own insights but also thwarts those who want to hide those insights in massive piles of unstructured data.

“Recognizing patterns [means] you can dump a ton of PDFs into a model and it can quickly summarize what is going on and put things in order a lot of times. I do a ton of litigation, and it’s so helpful there because for valuation purposes generally it’s not somebody who wants somebody looking at all their financial records and it comes in a big old pile, and so it helps organize it — ‘Here’s 4,000 pages; organize it by date and by financial record first and then underlying quantitative data second, etc.,'” said Masten.

Her firm also uses AI for coding support when creating new macros, some of them quite complex and developed for specific clients for evaluation purposes. Instead of having to constantly test and retest an ineffective macro, professionals now can describe what it is they need to do and why, and the AI can provide assistance.

“We’re not having to go out to Microsoft or Google and ask how to do a particular task. We can just go to one place and not be distracted by it,” she said.

But while these might seem like purely quantitative processes, Masten said there are uniquely qualitative elements that make it difficult to imagine AI ever completely taking her place, saying professional valuation is both a science and an art. While valuation involves a lot of calculations, what exactly is calculated, and how, can come down to the holistic judgment of the professional. This has been the case, she said, even before AI came onto the scene.

(See our feature story, “Staying ahead of AI.”)

“For decades, valuation has had software out there. You can dump a bunch of numbers in there and churn, but it doesn’t mean that it gives you a good output. I don’t have confidence that if I put in a bunch of information into a tool that it’s going to be able to understand how Lari Masten would reason through and solve that problem. It can do the math, but did it do the math in the way that when I do valuations? When anybody does a valuation, there’s three or four dozen decisions that they make and each decision gets them to a different place,” she said.

There are reasons she does the things she does that a computer can’t necessarily understand at this point in time. While the calculations can be automated, according to Masten, the thinking behind them cannot, particularly where it concerns the ultimate conclusion of a valuation engagement. She has yet to find an AI model that can do that.

“They’ll say, ‘Here’s three ways to solve it’ but they don’t understand if this one is more reasonable than that one. If you work on it you can automate a lot of portions … but the bigger picture of, what is the problem I’m having to solve? What standard of value do I have to follow based on that problem? How is the valuation date going to make a difference? What was known or knowable on a date? AI is not going to be able to really sift through that depending on what the inputs have been already. It’ll just pull information and it may not know when something became known or knowable, so there’s that professional judgment. The good reasoning, the backbone really behind any valuation, can’t be automated,” she said.

Overall, she is supportive of AI and believes it will be of great benefit to the profession, but noted that there are some cons, particularly the need to vet information and not automatically trust what the AI says. Further, she expressed concern that even though AI cannot replace a valuation expert, professionals over time might lose some of those inherent human qualities that prevent this from happening now.

(Read more: “AI in advisory: What work is at risk?“)

“There’s some measure of responsibility on the valuation people to go in and make sure that they’re vetting that information, that they’re still applying their logic, overlaying their skills, knowledge, expertise, training, that kind of stuff because [no matter] how great it is as a tool, it can’t use that logic that we have, it’s not a replacement for the interactive qualitative piece that the valuation analyst knows and tie that necessarily to the quantitative art that it does,” she said.

This ties into communicating to clients the value of a human valuation expert: Yes, a computer can crunch the numbers, but that’s not all there is to an engagement, and not even necessarily why someone might hire a human professional in the first place.

“It’s not [just] how to do valuation. The value ad is that you understand the problem,” she said.

Accounting

Embracing independence at CLA | Accounting Today

Published

2 hours ago

March 21, 2025

Business Finance News

The ability to invest in the future has never been more important in our profession. The emergence of artificial intelligence, the need to rebuild our talent pipeline and create value for future generations is top of mind across the industry.

In fact, in the Accounting Today Top 100 Firms of 2024 report, investment in technology and retaining and upskilling talent were among the many reasons for firm growth in the last year. The correlation is obvious. But we are also seeing growth in other areas, from outside investment to mergers and acquisitions. The pace of change is undeniable.

The landscape of the accounting and professional services sector is undergoing significant transformation, in part, driven by the influx of outside investment and mergers. The American Institute of CPAs announced it will revise its “independence rule amid the wave of private equity investments in accounting firms.” The volume of investment in professional services is shining a light on the fact that this is an exciting and vibrant time for the industry. The ability to be forward leaning and realize the investments that are needed to keep pace is essential to our ability to evolve.

The pace of change can be challenging for any firm, large or small. As firms evaluate their strategic options, it’s imperative to recognize there are varied paths to achieving growth and innovation. One size doesn’t necessarily fit all. At CLA, we are watching how outside investment is impacting the industry. For some firms, outside investment has been successful and led to immediate growth. In other cases, we have observed that quick growth results in a lack of autonomy. This has furthered our belief in the independent model that is the foundation of our firm.

Independence enables flexibility

The independent model lends itself to making decisions at a local level. When a firm is independent, there’s flexibility and a cogent desire to invest in the future. This allows organizations to be on the forefront of cutting-edge AI and digital technology solutions with a long-term vision. When firms invest in these technologies, they can consider the long-term value it will deliver to their clients instead of only considering the monetary return on investment.

CLA’s commitment to investment extends beyond technology to workforce development and industry innovation. We recognize that size and scale matter when it comes to AI and digital transformation. As a top 10 firm, we invested in technology and talent far before the influx of outside investment began transforming the industry. During the pandemic, for example, we pursued advances where others hesitated.

The CLA Academy and engagement with non-CPA professionals reflect our dedication to evolving talent alongside industry needs. We continue to invest in workforce solutions to address the accounting shortage in addition to supporting initiatives like SkillsUSA to cultivate talent in sectors we operate in and deeply understand. By maintaining our independence, we ensure our investments align with our long-term vision while keeping jobs local and serving the heartbeat of the economy.

Independence also enhances the ability to invest in your people and your clients. At CLA, we seek out talent who embody the “ownership mindset,” who are looking to grow their careers alongside the firm. The career stability and longevity in the independent model has brought the industry to this day. We believe it can and will continue.

Right now, in this environment, the partnership model that we believe in seems to be the different approach, whereas in the past, it was perhaps the only approach. Because of our independence, the flexibility it provides, and our willingness to invest in our future, we will be on the forefront of cutting-edge AI and digital technology solutions. It enhances our ability to invest in our people and in clients. At CLA, we firmly believe that our unique position within the market and our growth trajectory over the years validates such an approach.

Independence propels growth

The partnership model is particularly appealing for firms at a crossroads — those that are strong, profitable and successful, yet uncertain about their future in a labor-constrained, tech-driven environment. Over the past several years, firms like ours have grown not only organically, but also by joining forces with firms eager to leverage our extensive resources and industry expertise, benefiting from our unwavering commitment to independence.

Agility and responsiveness are key differentiators in our industry. They enable an organization to swiftly adapt to market changes and client needs. A commitment to innovation and resilience can provide a robust platform for growth, allowing partners to thrive within the partnership framework.

As we consider our growth options, not only are we bringing in new clients and expanding our services, but we are also inviting regional and national accounting and professional services firms to join our path forward. Because of our partnership model, CLA offers many of the same benefits as outside investment, while ensuring that decision-making remains at a local level, prioritizing the best interests of our clients, our people and the communities we serve.

Just as we advise clients, firms need to reflect on the optimal path forward. We like to think that while we’re independent, we have plenty of room to expand our partnership model. We are eager to share how that independence is a differentiator in the market, as we evolve our industry, elevate client service, and create uncommon but robust results.

As firms evaluate their strategic options, it’s imperative to recognize there are varied paths to achieving growth and innovation. Our independence allows us to make strategic investments that work toward long-term goals over short-term gains. Whether through AI and digital transformation, workforce development, or expanding our partnership model, we remain focused on delivering value to our clients and the communities in which they call home.

The accounting profession is experiencing a transformation, and firms across the industry must carefully evaluate their path forward. While outside investment has accelerated change, we believe our partnership is the only way forward for CLA. It fosters agility, innovation, and a true sense of ownership. By staying independent, we can continue shaping the future of our industry on our own terms.