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FloQast aims to make CPE fun with Audit Jamz accounting music

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FloQast, an accounting software developer based in Los Angeles, recently debuted Audit Jamz, an accounting music album that provides an enjoyable way for CPAs to earn continuing professional education credit.

The album, which dropped in October, comes from FloQast Studios, which also produces the YouTube sitcom series PBC, featuring several former cast members of “The Office” working for an accounting department at a tech startup.

The Audit Jamz album includes a compilation of different genres on each track, inspired by the compilation albums of the late 90s and early 2000s, with CPE credit provided by FloQast’s FloQademy

FloQast office exterior

“The idea came as we were brainstorming creative ways to get CPE credits out there and make them more fun to get,” said FloQast CEO Mike Whitmire. “That’s really the purpose of our FloQast Studios group. A big part of it is to produce CPE content that’s a little more entertaining while educational at the same time.”

FloQast director of strategic planning Drew Carrick, also known on YouTube as The Rapping CPA, and FloQast Studios head Josh Sims teamed up on the project. 

“Josh Sims is an incredible musician, and he was able to come up with all the music,” said Whitmire. “We wanted to do an album where each song was from a different genre. Josh would create the music, and it’s amazing. You could just be like, ‘Hey, man, make a country song.’ And he could go and make a country song. You can say, ‘Hey, make a rock song.’ And he can make a rock song. We’re able to do all that internally. And then Drew Carrick from the FloQast Studios team went ahead and wrote the lyrics and did all the rapping and singing and all that good stuff.”

Last month, FloQast also debuted a new book, “Shift Happens,” co-authored by Whitmire and  FloQast accounting operations evangelist Stefan van Duyvendijk. Despite the jocular title, it takes a more serious professional approach than Audit Jamz.

FloQast CEO Mike Whitmire
FloQast CEO Mike Whitmire

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“That’s more about what we see in the industry today, and where we really think it’s going,” said Whitmire. “It’s about the rise of the operational accountant and the operational mindset, thinking really less about numbers and the derogatory beancounting type notion. It’s more about helping the organization drive more operational efficiency. What we found is accountants are really good at process improvement and workflow management, and if they can take that skill set and really drive it across the organization, they’re able to produce really, really big results. That’s more about the professional landscape, how we view the change going forward.”

Meanwhile, FloQast Studios is getting set to debut the third and final season of PBC, a sitcom whose cast has included Danny Trejo from “Machete” and Kate Flannery and Creed Bratton from “The Office.”

The final season is expected to be released by the end of the year, and there may be a wistful note as it concludes. “I would say it’s a very satisfying and melancholy end to the series,” said Whitmire.

He sees an educational role for the series, even though there’s no CPE credit. “On the PBC side, that’s an attempt to really highlight accounting, explain what we do from behind the scenes,” said Whitmire. “I don’t think there’s an actual good understanding of what accountants do on a regular basis, if you ask the average person on the street, and we’ve actually done this before. We sent Drew down to Venice, and we had him ask people what accountants do. The answer you get, time and time again, is taxes. And then the second answer behind that is kind of wealth management, which I found to be an interesting answer that we got on the street there. But the reality is, most accountants work inside corporations. They’re part of the team. They go through various struggles together. There’s a lot of team bonding, and I find that to be one interesting factor of accounting that’s really left out of the equation is how much it is a team sport. You really start to develop relationships with your team. You’re in it together, you’re trying to hit deadlines together. That camaraderie, to me, is one of the more rewarding parts of being in the profession, and that’s just not highlighted. And as you’re going through the series, you’ll see our accounting department going through all those trials and tribulations that a growing accounting department has to go through. It’s about really pulling together as a team to get through it.”

FloQast has also been advancing its software, taking it beyond the close management features it originally highlighted. The company recently showed off its latest offerings at its Take Control user conference. 

“We got to unveil all of our new products that we’ve put out in the last year,” said Whitmire. “2024 was a really heavy year for product investment for us, and we were able to unveil a lot of that at our user conference. The big shift we’re making is we started out with month-end close management, and that was sort of the focus upfront. And we think with the platform that we built out and a lot of the automation capabilities that are now possible because of AI, we’re at a point where we can really help transform accounting departments at large, and so we have broader positioning now. We call ourselves an accounting transformation platform, and our goal is to really help automate a lot of the mundane work and drive big operational efficiencies within an accounting department.”

He sees a significant role for AI in the program. “We think AI is a great tool for automating a lot of this mundane work and puts accounting and accountants in a position to really help close the work-life balance, take care of some of that mundane work and hopefully elevate them to do the more interesting stuff that we really learned about in college when we were taking these accounting courses,” he said. “It’s more the technical side of it, less of the rote work side of it.”

Advanced technology is needed as accounting firms and departments have more trouble filling open jobs amid the shrinking talent pipeline, which is one of the subjects of his book. 

“I do think it’s a really dire situation,” said Whitmire. “We actually are going down in the number of accountants that are able to do this job on a year over year basis, and the demand for accounting is going to continue to go up. So we have to close that talent gap somehow, and we believe technology is the best way to close that talent gap. And so the idea of the talent gap is one of the big discussions within the book. Not only are we going to be losing people in the profession, there’s going to be more standard accounting work to be done, and our role is going to shift to drive more efficiency. And so to do all of that, you simply have to lead with technology, and the people who are able to make that change and adapt to the new technologies that are coming out are really going to be the people who are effective and successful going forward. And that’s one of our goals at FloQast, is to build technology that accountants can leverage to automate their own work. We really want to put the power in the hands of the accounting department, because we think they’re best suited to take a look at how they can optimize and automate their own work.”

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IAASB tweaks standards on working with outside experts

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The International Auditing and Assurance Standards Board is proposing to tailor some of its standards to align with recent additions to the International Ethics Standards Board for Accountants’ International Code of Ethics for Professional Accountants when it comes to using the work of an external expert.

The proposed narrow-scope amendments involve minor changes to several IAASB standards:

  • ISA 620, Using the Work of an Auditor’s Expert;
  • ISRE 2400 (Revised), Engagements to Review Historical Financial Statements;
  • ISAE 3000 (Revised), Assurance Engagements Other than Audits or Reviews of Historical Financial Information;
  • ISRS 4400 (Revised), Agreed-upon Procedures Engagements.

The IAASB is asking for comments via a digital response template that can be found on the IAASB website by July 24, 2025.

In December 2023, the IESBA approved an exposure draft for proposed revisions to the IESBA’s Code of Ethics related to using the work of an external expert. The proposals included three new sections to the Code of Ethics, including provisions for professional accountants in public practice; professional accountants in business and sustainability assurance practitioners. The IESBA approved the provisions on using the work of an external expert at its December 2024 meeting, establishing an ethical framework to guide accountants and sustainability assurance practitioners in evaluating whether an external expert has the necessary competence, capabilities and objectivity to use their work, as well as provisions on applying the Ethics Code’s conceptual framework when using the work of an outside expert.  

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Tariffs will hit low-income Americans harder than richest, report says

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President Donald Trump’s tariffs would effectively cause a tax increase for low-income families that is more than three times higher than what wealthier Americans would pay, according to an analysis from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.

The report from the progressive think tank outlined the outcomes for Americans of all backgrounds if the tariffs currently in effect remain in place next year. Those making $28,600 or less would have to spend 6.2% more of their income due to higher prices, while the richest Americans with income of at least $914,900 are expected to spend 1.7% more. Middle-income families making between $55,100 and $94,100 would pay 5% more of their earnings. 

Trump has imposed the steepest U.S. duties in more than a century, including a 145% tariff on many products from China, a 25% rate on most imports from Canada and Mexico, duties on some sectors such as steel and aluminum and a baseline 10% tariff on the rest of the country’s trading partners. He suspended higher, customized tariffs on most countries for 90 days.

Economists have warned that costs from tariff increases would ultimately be passed on to U.S. consumers. And while prices will rise for everyone, lower-income families are expected to lose a larger portion of their budgets because they tend to spend more of their earnings on goods, including food and other necessities, compared to wealthier individuals.

Food prices could rise by 2.6% in the short run due to tariffs, according to an estimate from the Yale Budget Lab. Among all goods impacted, consumers are expected to face the steepest price hikes for clothing at 64%, the report showed. 

The Yale Budget Lab projected that the tariffs would result in a loss of $4,700 a year on average for American households.

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At Schellman, AI reshapes a firm’s staffing needs

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Artificial intelligence is just getting started in the accounting world, but it is already helping firms like technology specialist Schellman do more things with fewer people, allowing the firm to scale back hiring and reduce headcount in certain areas through natural attrition. 

Schellman CEO Avani Desai said there have definitely been some shifts in headcount at the Top 100 Firm, though she stressed it was nothing dramatic, as it mostly reflects natural attrition combined with being more selective with hiring. She said the firm has already made an internal decision to not reduce headcount in force, as that just indicates they didn’t hire properly the first time. 

“It hasn’t been about reducing roles but evolving how we do work, so there wasn’t one specific date where we ‘started’ the reduction. It’s been more case by case. We’ve held back on refilling certain roles when we saw opportunities to streamline, especially with the use of new technologies like AI,” she said. 

One area where the firm has found such opportunities has been in the testing of certain cybersecurity controls, particularly within the SOC framework. The firm examined all the controls it tests on the service side and asked which ones require human judgment or deep expertise. The answer was a lot of them. But for the ones that don’t, AI algorithms have been able to significantly lighten the load. 

“[If] we don’t refill a role, it’s because the need actually has changed, or the process has improved so significantly [that] the workload is lighter or shared across the smarter system. So that’s what’s happening,” said Desai. 

Outside of client services like SOC control testing and reporting, the firm has found efficiencies in administrative functions as well as certain internal operational processes. On the latter point, Desai noted that Schellman’s engineers, including the chief information officer, have been using AI to help develop code, which means they’re not relying as much on outside expertise on the internal service delivery side of things. There are still people in the development process, but their roles are changing: They’re writing less code, and doing more reviewing of code before it gets pushed into production, saving time and creating efficiencies. 

“The best way for me to say this is, to us, this has been intentional. We paused hiring in a few areas where we saw overlaps, where technology was really working,” said Desai.

However, even in an age awash with AI, Schellman acknowledges there are certain jobs that need a human, at least for now. For example, the firm does assessments for the FedRAMP program, which is needed for cloud service providers to contract with certain government agencies. These assessments, even in the most stable of times, can be long and complex engagements, to say nothing of the less predictable nature of the current government. As such, it does not make as much sense to reduce human staff in this area. 

“The way it is right now for us to do FedRAMP engagements, it’s a very manual process. There’s a lot of back and forth between us and a third party, the government, and we don’t see a lot of overall application or technology help… We’re in the federal space and you can imagine, [with] what’s going on right now, there’s a big changing market condition for clients and their pricing pressure,” said Desai. 

As Schellman reduces staff levels in some places, it is increasing them in others. Desai said the firm is actively hiring in certain areas. In particular, it’s adding staff in technical cybersecurity (e.g., penetration testers), the aforementioned FedRAMP engagements, AI assessment (in line with recently becoming an ISO 42001 certification body) and in some client-facing roles like marketing and sales. 

“So, to me, this isn’t about doing more with less … It’s about doing more of the right things with the right people,” said Desai. 

While these moves have resulted in savings, she said that was never really the point, so whatever the firm has saved from staffing efficiencies it has reinvested in its tech stack to build its service line further. When asked for an example, she said the firm would like to focus more on penetration testing by building a SaaS tool for it. While Schellman has a proof of concept developed, she noted it would take a lot of money and time to deploy a full solution — both of which the firm now has more of because of its efficiency moves. 

“What is the ‘why’ behind these decisions? The ‘why’ for us isn’t what I think you traditionally see, which is ‘We need to get profitability high. We need to have less people do more things.’ That’s not what it is like,” said Desai. “I want to be able to focus on quality. And the only way I think I can focus on quality is if my people are not focusing on things that don’t matter … I feel like I’m in a much better place because the smart people that I’ve hired are working on the riskiest and most complicated things.”

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