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Rethink pricing and transform the accounting firm employee experience

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The accounting profession may have been built on numbers and spreadsheets, but today it’s also a people business. Client relationships, employee morale and firm culture are as important to your success as the software that runs your programs. 

Think about it: There is a stark contrast between the people side of the business and the way most firms charge for their services. Nobody became an accountant to track their time in 10-minute increments or spend time filling out timesheets. Yet, at a time when employee motivation and client retention are of the upmost importance, firms employ an outdated pricing model almost designed to frustrate employees and clients alike. It makes no sense at all!

Here are six ways you can build a better firm culture while attracting and retaining top-level employees. It comes down to changing a single fundamental of your business — your pricing model.

1. Free employees from the tyranny of the clock. Your staff aren’t factory workers, so why treat them as if they were? These highly trained, smart professional people are tasked with solving complex client problems and providing expert guidance, not obsessing over timesheets while fighting to meet arbitrary billing goals. If you switch their focus from the number of hours they bill per week to the knowledge and expertise they bring to the game, their work will become more meaningful to them. Clients will feel the change. 

Imagine how much more satisfying it is to know you’re making a difference in a client’s business instead of racing against a clock that never stops.

2. Empower employees to focus on results. No one outside of your office really cares how long it took to finish a project. They care about the quality of the work and how it benefits them. Your employees should have the same mindset. They should understand the scope of a project and what the client really needs. They should know how the project they are working on fits into the grand scheme of a client’s financial puzzle. Then they should apply everything they’ve learned to arrive at a suitable solution that will make clients happy.

You can add up time all you want, but the final score is what really counts. Value pricing understands this and shifts employee incentives from the amount of time they work to the quality and value of the work they do. In so doing, it aligns employee incentives with what’s good for the client.

3. Improve work-life balance. Burnout is a real problem and the billable hour is one of its biggest drivers. Most accountants have sat down at some point in their professional lives and wondered how to balance their family life with a profession that measures success by the amount of time they spend in their office. The pressure to constantly log more hours can lead to long days, late nights, and a lot of unnecessary stress. 

Value pricing is one of the keys to creating a healthier, more balanced work environment — one where employees feel more fulfilled while still generating profits for the company. An odd thing happens when results become the focus: Employees can manage their time more effectively and find ways to work more efficiently. There’s less overtime, fewer late nights, more family time and a far healthier balance between work and personal life.

Happy employees are productive employees. The benefits of switching to a value pricing model will ripple through the firm, improving retention rates while encouraging higher-quality work.

4. Create a more positive office culture. Slaves to the billable hour spend a lot of time watching the clock and worrying about wasting time on anything beyond the spread sheet in front of them. It’s a recipe for drudgery. An office culture where collaboration, innovation and engagement fade. 

Think about what happens when the focus shifts to client results. Focusing on results encourages everything the billable hour discourages: Collaboration. Innovation. Attention to detail. Predictably, employees will work together to deliver better outcomes for clients, knowing their contributions are valued.

Value pricing also makes it easier to recognize and reward employees for things that really matter — problem-solving, client satisfaction and innovation. This creates a culture where quality is prioritized over quantity. And that’s the kind of culture where people want to stick around. 

5. Attract and retain top talent. Every generation has its unique perspectives, and you can’t expect millennial employees to respond to the same incentives as Gen Zers. However, there are some commonalities between all generations. No matter their age, most people want to be recognized for their accomplishments and their unique capabilities, rather than their sameness. A strong firm culture acknowledges these facts and looks for ways to uniquely help employees build more fulfilling careers while improving the overall quality of service your firm provides. 

A firm that values unique employee expertise and provides better growth opportunities is bound to both attract and retain top talent. Better talent leads to better quality service which, in turn, leads to greater client satisfaction. It’s a positive circle that starts with value pricing and ends up helping you build a culture of continuous improvement. A win-win situation for employees looking for more professional fulfillment and clients looking for increasingly better results.

6. Encourage professional growth. It stands to reason that if the incentive is to deliver expert services and solve client problems, employees will spend more time on professional development because it holds the keys to their success. Again, value pricing aligns employee performance with client needs.

Beyond sharpening their expertise, this results-based focus will also encourage employees to think about their day-to-day activities in a different way. The focus will shift from grinding out hours to delivering superior results. Stronger client relationships will follow.

A happier, healthier workplace starts with pricing

Value pricing is not a cure-all for every problem facing today’s accounting firms. The work will still be challenging, even more so in many instances. There will still be some long hours required to deliver timely. And there will still be those overly demanding clients who try to get more than the agreed-up scope. But there is probably no bigger step a firm can take toward meeting the challenges facing modern accounting firms than implementing a value pricing model.

At the end of the day, pricing is about people as much as it’s about profits. Moving away from the billable hour and embracing value pricing aligns firm success with client success. In so doing, it creates a more positive, fulfilling work environment. A culture of collaboration and growth will flourish while employees will enjoy improved work/life balance.

In the end, value pricing isn’t just a better way to do business. It’s a better way to work.

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Accounting

IRS employee union requests emergency relief

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The National Treasury Employees Union, which represents workers at the Internal Revenue Service among 37 federal agencies and offices, has asked a federal judge for emergency relief to preserve the union rights of federal employees while NTEU’s legal challenge to President Trump’s executive order stripping unions of collective bargaining rights can be heard in court.

Trump signed an executive order last Thursday removing the requirements from employees at agencies including the Treasury Department that he deemed to have national security missions. On Monday, the NTEU filed a lawsuit to stop the move arguing that Trump’s rationale for protecting national security was just a way to end union protections for federal workers. The administration also wants to prevent the unions from collecting dues automatically withheld from employee paychecks.

NTEU’s request for a preliminary injunction was filed Friday with U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman.

 “NTEU seeks emergency relief to protect itself and the workers it represents from this unlawful attempt to eliminate collective bargaining for some two-thirds of the federal workforce,” the request stated.

The NTEU contended that the Trump administration’s executive order claims that allowing workers to join a union was a threat to national security were absurd.

“We all know this has nothing to do with national security and that the true goal here is to make it easier to fire federal employees across government,” said NTEU national president Doreen Greenwald in a statement Friday. “Just five days after declaring the administration would no longer honor our contract with Health and Human Services, thousands of brilliant civil servants who work tirelessly to improve public health were let go for spurious reasons and little recourse to fight back.”

The union pointed out that Congress declared 47 years ago that collective bargaining in the federal sector was in the public’s interest by giving employees a voice in the workplace and allowing labor and management to work together. It acknowledged there is a narrow exemption in the law for groups of employees whose work directly impacts national security, but argued that Trump’s executive order is blatant retaliation against federal sector unions and ignores the laws passed by Congress creating the agencies.

In agencies where a reduction-in-force has been announced, NTEU’s contracts provide time for employees to respond to a RIF notice and explore alternatives to mitigate the impact of the layoffs.

Earlier this week, after two court rulings in California and Maryland, the IRS’s acting commissioner, Melanie Krause, announced the IRS would be bringing back approximately 7,000 probationary employees who had been fired and then put on paid administrative leave.

A bipartisan bill has been introduced in Congress to preserve collective bargaining rights for federal employees. The Protect America’s Workforce Act (H.R. 2550), sponsored by Rep. Jared Golden, D-Maine, and Brian Fitzpatrick, R-Pennsylvania, would overturn Trump’s executive order stripping collective bargaining rights from hundreds of thousands of federal workers at multiple agencies.  Separately, eight House Republicans and every House and Senate Democrat have sent letters to the White House condemning the executive order.

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Estate planning for the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act expiration

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The political calculus involved with the details of estate planning next year and beyond may be distracting financial advisors and clients from a larger, simpler conversation, one expert says.

On the off chance that the federal estate-tax exemption levels of $13.99 million for individuals (and double for couples) revert to half those amounts when Tax Cuts and Jobs Act provisions expire in 2026, only 0.2% of households would face potential duties upon transfer of assets, according to Ben Rizzuto, a wealth strategist with Janus Henderson Investors‘ Specialist Consulting Group. He predicted that most financial advisors and high net worth clients, such as those he works with and others across the industry, will see no changes. 

With few other revenue-raising provisions available to President Donald Trump and Republican lawmakers, they’re not likely to shield all estates from payments to Uncle Sam — as much as they might like to play undertaker to the “Death of the Death Tax,” Rizzuto said, using the label for estate taxes adopted by critics favoring bills like the “Death Tax Repeal Act.” Lawmakers’ decisions on future exemptions from the taxes (and when they make those decisions) remain out of advisors’ control. Meanwhile, they must remind clients that estate planning is much more than having a will and avoiding taxes, Rizzuto said.

“For financial advisors and clients, I would expect for many of them not to have to worry about federal estate taxes next year,” he said in an interview. “Even though they may not have to worry about it, there are still a lot of good conversations to be had.”

READ MORE: Tax Cuts and Jobs Act expiration: A guide for financial advisors

The 1%

Trust tools that reduce the value of the assets that will transfer to spouses or other beneficiaries upon a client’s death, combined with the available statistics about the shrinking share of estates subject to taxes, could bring some peace of mind to clients. The 2017 tax law itself pushed down estate tax liability as a percentage of gross domestic product to a quarter of its 2001 level, according to an analysis by the “Budget Model” of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. Just two years after the law’s passage, the number of taxable estates had plummeted to 1,275 — or 1% of the number at the beginning of the century.

At the same time, advisors could raise any number of questions with clients about their estates that involve varying degrees of expertise and collaboration with outside professionals. And many surveys have found that clients are expecting them to do so. For example, at least 70% out of a group of 10,000 adults contacted in January by WeAreTalker (formerly OnePoll) on behalf of online legal information service Trust & Will said advisors should offer estate planning. In addition, 40% of the group said they would switch to an advisor who provided that service.

“We’re seeing a fundamental shift in client expectations,” Trust & Will CEO Cody Barbo said in a statement. “The findings are clear. Advisors who fail to integrate estate planning into their practice aren’t just missing an opportunity; they are facing a threat to their client base as wealth transfers to younger generations over the next two decades.”

READ MORE: Ethical wills can be a crucial tool for estate planning

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Get back to the planning basics

In that context, advisors and their clients should steer clear of trying to make sense of a complicated, ever-changing flow of news from Capitol Hill as Trump and the GOP pursue major tax legislation with a year-end deadline, Rizzuto said. If clients truly could be on the hook for estate taxes, a grantor retained annuity trust, a spousal lifetime access trust or gifting strategies may eliminate the possibility. One method involved with the latter could set them up in the future to receive stock that is “highly appreciated with lower basis,” Rizzuto noted, citing the example of equities that have gained a lot of value that a client could give to their parents.

“Why not gift them upstream?” Rizzuto said. “My father holds it. I tell him, ‘Dad, you have to do these things: Live for another 12 months, make sure you don’t sell, make sure that you update your will or your instructions to gift it back to me when you die.’ That’s another idea that we’ve been talking about with advisors.”

From another perspective, these possible paths forward may beckon to clients this year, if they are tuning into Beltway news about the progress of the tax legislation, he said. To bypass the risk of client perceptions that their advisor isn’t doing any tax planning at all, Washington’s complex maneuvering around the future rules is, “if nothing else,” a “great opportunity for advisors to bring this up at a very high level,” Rizzuto said.

“Advisors will really need to go back to basics and have some foundational conversations with clients,” he said, suggesting their goals with taxes as one key point of discussion. “‘What is it that we actually control within your financial and tax plan?’ When it comes right down to it, it’s really just incomes and deductions.”

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Developing future leaders in accounting: the new imperative in an AI and automation driven era

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As technology continues to automate routine tasks, the role of finance professionals is evolving, demanding deeper capabilities in critical thinking, communication and business acumen. 

Many of PrimeGlobal’s North American firms are focused on cultivating these skills in their future leaders. Carla McCall, managing partner at AAFCPAs, Randy Nail, CEO of HoganTaylor, and Grassi managing partner Louis Grassi shared their views with PrimeGlobal CEO Steve Heathcote on the need for future leaders to balance technological proficiency with human-centered skills to thrive.

AI is transforming the sector by streamlining workflows, automating data analysis and reducing manual processes. However, rather than replacing accountants, AI is reshaping their roles, enabling them to focus on higher-value tasks. In the words of Louis Grassi, AI can be seen as a strategic partner, freeing accountants from routine tasks, enabling deeper engagement with clients, more thoughtful analysis, and ultimately better decision-making. 

Nail emphasized the importance of embracing AI, warning that those who fail to adapt risk being replaced by professionals who leverage the technology more effectively. HoganTaylor’s “innovation sprint” generated over 100 ideas for AI integration, underscoring why a proactive approach to adopting new technologies is so necessary and valuable.

McCall advocates for an educational shift that equips professionals with the skills to interpret AI-generated insights. She stressed that accounting curricula of the future must evolve to incorporate advanced technology training, ensuring future accountants are well-versed in AI tools and data analytics. Moreover, simulation-based learning is becoming increasingly crucial as traditional methods of education become obsolete in the face of automation.

Talent development and leadership growth

As AI reshapes the profession, firms must rethink how they develop and nurture their future leaders. To attract and retain top talent, firms need to prioritize personalized development plans that align with individual career goals. 

HoganTaylor’s approach to talent development integrates technical expertise with leadership and communication training. These initiatives ensure professionals are not only proficient in accounting principles but also equipped to lead teams and navigate complex client interactions.

Nail underscored the growing importance of writing and presentation skills, as AI will handle routine tasks, leaving professionals to focus on higher-level analytical and decision-making responsibilities.

Soft skills are the success skills

While technical proficiency remains vital, future leaders must also cultivate critical thinking, communication and adaptability — skills McCall refers to as the “success skills.” McCall highlights the necessity of business acumen and analytical communication, essential for interpreting data, advising clients and making strategic decisions. 

Recognizing teamwork and collaboration remain crucial in the hybrid work environment, McCall explained in detail how AAFCPA fosters collaboration through structured remote engagement strategies such as “intentional office time,” alcove sessions and stand-up meetings. Similarly, HoganTaylor supports remote teams by offering training for career advisors to ensure effective mentorship and engagement in a dispersed workforce.

McCall emphasized why global experience can be valuable in leadership development. Exposure to diverse markets and accounting practices enhances professionals’ adaptability and broadens their perspectives, preparing them for leadership roles in an increasingly interconnected world.

Grassi reminded us that an often-overlooked leadership skill is curiosity. In his view the most effective leaders of tomorrow will be inherently curious — not just about emerging technologies but about clients, market shifts and global trends. Encouraging curiosity and continuous learning within our firms will distinguish the true industry leaders from those simply reacting to change.

A balanced future

What’s clear from speaking to our leaders is PrimeGlobal’s role in fostering trust, community and knowledge sharing. McCall recommended member-driven panels to discuss AI implementation and automation strategies and share best practice. Nail, on the other hand, valued PrimeGlobal’s focus on addressing critical industry issues and encouraged continuous evolution to meet professionals’ changing needs.

The future of leadership in the accountancy profession hinges on a balanced approach, leveraging AI to enhance efficiency while cultivating essential human skills that technology cannot replicate, which Grassi highlights skills including leadership and building client trust.

As McCall and Nail advocate, the next generation of accountants must be agile thinkers, skilled communicators and strategic decision-makers. Firms that invest in these competencies will not only stay competitive but will also shape the future of the industry by developing well-rounded leaders prepared for the challenges ahead.

By investing in both AI capabilities and essential human skills, firms can not only future proof their leadership but also shape a resilient and forward-thinking profession ready to meet the challenges of the future.

As Grassi concluded, while technical skills provide the foundation, leadership in accounting increasingly demands emotional intelligence, empathy and adaptability. AI will change how we perform our work, but human connection, trust and nuanced judgment are irreplaceable. Investing in these human-centric skills today is critical for firms aiming to build resilient leaders of tomorrow. To remain relevant and thrive, professionals must prioritize developing strong success skills that will define the leaders of tomorrow.

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