CPA Practice Advisor has announced the 2025 Tax and Technology Innovation Award winners and finalists. Now in their 22nd year, the awards serve to honor new technologies that are helping advance the profession through increased efficiency and productivity.
The winners and finalists are selected by a panel of thought leaders, technologists, and key influencers in the profession. Presented by CPA Practice Advisor, the Innovation Awards debuted in 2004. Nominated products or technologies must be less than 2 years old or have had new, significant features or enhancements during that time.
Read below for more information on each of the 2025 award winners and finalists, as well as a list of all 2025 award nominees.
Award History
The Innovation Awards got their start in 2004, under the editorial leadership of Gregory L. LaFollette, CPA. In its inaugural Tax and Accounting Technology Awards, CPA Practice Advisor aimed to recognize new or recently enhanced technologies that benefit tax and accounting professionals and their clients through improved workflow and efficiencies, increased accessibility, enhanced collaboration, greater accuracy, or other means. The publication and online technology resource was founded in 1991 as The CPA Software News and has evolved technologically along with the profession.
Just as automation, remote technologies, and paperless office technologies dramatically shaped the profession in the early 2000s and 2010s, since the pandemic years it has been the advent of artificial intelligence that has driven much of the latest innovations in practice technologies. Reflecting this phenomena, most of this year’s award winners and nominees have core AI integrated into their operations.
“Every year we are stunned by the quantity and quality of new products and services that are being created to make the life of accounting professionals easier,” said editor-in-chief Gail Perry, CPA. “We are fortunate to have the opportunity to report on and follow these developments and to bring them to the attention of our readers. Accountants are fortunate that they have so many exciting options for improving the way they run their practices and take care of their clients. It’s an honor to share all of these new technologies with our readers each year.”
Perry also manages a tax practice and is the author of more than 30 books, including Mint.com for Dummies, Surviving Financial Downsizing, and Idiot’s Guide to Introductory Accounting.”
Winners of the awards are selected from nominated products by an awards committee, which includes thought leaders and professionals engaged in various practice specialties across the accounting space. Products must be either 2 years old or newer, or have undergone significant enhancements in that time.
CPA Practice Advisor provides a variety of independent digital and print resources for accounting professionals, including practice resources, podcasts, reviews of practice technologies, interactive tools, and content that helps firms achieve greater productivity.
Award winners are listed in alphabetical order – the descriptions are provided by the nominating companies.
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2025 Award Winners:
4impactdata Business Guidance System
4impactdata exemplifies innovation by moving beyond dashboards to deliver advisory intelligence that tells professionals what to do next for every client. Instead of spending time hunting for insights, firms see their entire book of business monitored in one place, with prioritized alerts that explain who needs attention and why. Our platform packages proven advisory playbooks into Codified Wisdom, placing expert logic beside the metrics that matter so guidance is consistent, repeatable, and ready to use in a client conversation. By focusing on Monitor, Predict, and Recommend, 4impactdata flags forward-looking signals like cash flow strain, margin pressure, revenue volatility, and customer concentration, then translates those signals into clear talking points and next steps.
The result is measurable gains in efficiency, productivity, and profitability. Advisors prepare faster with decision-ready action items instead of manual reports. Capacity increases because portfolio-level monitoring and automated triage let each advisor proactively cover more clients without adding headcount.
Earlier interventions reduce churn and prevent costly surprises, while better, more strategic conversations raise revenue per client and strengthen attachment to premium services. In short, 4impactdata complements your existing systems by answering the question that matters most for modern CAS and tax advisory teams: what should we do next for each client, and in what order, so we can deliver higher-quality guidance in less time.
Arti, by Artifact
Artifact AI exemplifies innovation in tax and accounting by deploying agentic, reasoning-driven automation that executes end-to-end workflows—from document intake and authentication to bank reconciliation, GL posting, fixed-asset and prepayment handling, and real-time categorization—across the systems firms already use. Rather than forcing migrations, Artifact overlays QuickBooks, Xero, NetSuite, and Sage to deliver day-one value with human oversight and full auditability. This directly addresses the profession’s biggest bottlenecks: fragmented data, manual data chasing, and repetitive, error-prone processing.
The platform unifies file collection, reconciliation, and posting in a single, autonomous pipeline so teams spend less time gathering and cleaning inputs and more time reviewing outcomes and advising clients. Transparent event-by-event scoring and audit trails maintain control and compliance while accelerating delivery; outputs are explainable and easy to verify.
Measured impact is substantial. Firms report up to 5× productivity improvements as staff manage by exception instead of line-item entry. Accuracy rates reach ~99% on reconciliation and ~96% on GL postings, cutting rework and shortening month-end close and tax prep cycles. These gains translate into profit: organizations see 30%+ margin uplift by increasing throughput without proportional headcount. Critically, Artifact delivers attractive capital efficiency, with an ROI of ~7× achievable in under a year, driven by lower labor hours per engagement, faster realization, and reduced error remediation.
For professionals, the benefits are immediate and durable:
- Efficiency: Autonomous ingestion → reconciliation → posting slashes manual touches and exception chasing.
- Productivity: Teams cover more entities and periods per full time employee, freeing capacity for higher-value advisory and planning.
- Profitability: Faster throughput, fewer errors, and better realization expand margins without disrupting existing systems.
- Risk and quality: Auditable, explainable agent actions preserve trust and compliance.
In short, Artifact AI converts AI promise into firm-wide results—scalable automation, verifiable quality, and compelling ROI—elevating efficiency, productivity, and profitability in modern tax and accounting.
AuditFile AI Audit Agents
From the company that was first to bring audits to the cloud, the first to apply artificial intelligence to audits, comes another groundbreaking innovation: being the first to bring agentic AI to the audit.
The new AuditFile AI Audit Agents features are designed to amplify human expertise, not replace it—handling repetitive, time-consuming audit tasks so professionals can focus on high-value judgment and client service. AuditFile AI Audit Agents enable auditors to leverage the power of AuditFile’s patented AI technology to complete attest procedures, analyze large amounts of financial data, prepare financial statements, and aid in the assessment of risk.
The AI Audit Agents autonomously plan, execute, and follow up on audit tasks while keeping the human auditor in control with real-time approvals and feedback.
“We built AuditFile AI Audit Agents to act like the most dependable member of your team: one that works around the clock, does the work correctly, and never complains about work-life balance.” said Steven Bong, CEO of AuditFile.
AuditFile is the only complete, cloud-based all-in-one engagement automation platform for public accounting professionals. Offered in three subscription options, AuditFile easily scales to meet the specific needs of firms of all sizes and specialties, and includes data storage, web-based training, and technical support in the subscription fee. AuditFile was recently awarded the title of #1 Audit Tool in the 2023, 2024, and 2025 CPA Practice Advisor Readers’ Choice Awards.
Audit software not incorporating agentic AI is now obsolete.
AuditFile was awarded patent 10,891,294 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). The patent covers the application of artificial intelligence to financial statement audits.
Bloomberg Tax AI Assistant
Bloomberg Tax & Accounting is redefining how tax professionals approach research with its new AI Assistant. This innovative chat-based research tool is designed to streamline workflows and reduce time spent on manual research, exemplifying how generative AI can transform the tax and accounting profession.
At the core of this innovation is efficiency. The AI Assistant automates complex research by delivering clear, citation-backed responses to tax questions in minutes. The chat-based functionality allows users to perform targeted document searches, generate summaries, and conduct cross-jurisdictional comparisons, all without additional training or learning curves. By embedding this tool directly into Bloomberg Tax’s trusted research platform, professionals gain seamless access to generative AI insights while working in familiar workflows.
The result is not only greater efficiency but also measurable productivity gains. A senior manager at a major corporation described Bloomberg Tax’s AI-powered products as delivering “precise, relevant results without clutter,” highlighting the time saved and the confidence gained by leveraging AI-driven research. Firms adopting these tools report operational efficiencies, improved accuracy, and faster turnaround on complex tax issues: outcomes that directly translate to enhanced client service and profitability.
Innovation in this space also requires a focus on trust and reliability. Bloomberg Tax applies rigorous validation processes to ensure AI-generated answers remain accurate, relevant, and aligned with professional standards. Continuous user feedback drives product updates, ensuring the tools evolve alongside the rapidly changing tax landscape. To further support adoption, Bloomberg Tax provides robust education and dedicated support, giving professionals the confidence to integrate AI into their practices responsibly and effectively.
With AI Assistant, Bloomberg Tax is not simply adding new features, it is setting a new standard for how AI can be harnessed in the tax profession. By combining authoritative content, advanced AI capabilities, and a commitment to accuracy, these tools empower professionals to achieve greater efficiency, enhance profitability, and deliver superior client service. This innovation represents the future of tax research, making Bloomberg Tax a strong contender for recognition in technology innovation.
Field Agents, by Fieldguide
Field Agents are Fieldguide’s most advanced AI innovation yet—a transformative suite of audit-grade agentic AI capabilities purpose-built for audit and advisory workflows. At a time when the accounting profession faces the perfect storm of evolving standards, increasingly complex client needs, a stagnant talent pool and increasing pressure to deliver faster, higher-quality work, Field Agents enable firms to scale without needing to add headcount by automating the most repetitive, manual phases of engagements.
While most tools focus on isolated tasks, Field Agents autonomously execute entire multi-step workflows and are seamlessly embedded in Fieldguide’s end-to-end platform. Current agents focus on testing controls in SOC 2 engagements and substantive procedures in financial audits, and reduce time spent on labor-intensive activities by up to 70% while improving accuracy, documentation, and audit quality.
Key features include:
- Multi-Agent System Purpose-Built for Audit: Field Agents are not a single-tool solution; they’re a growing system of audit-grade autonomous agents embedded across the full spectrum of audit and advisory workflows. Fieldguide has agents to perform testing, analyze population data, perform sampling, generate client requests, and more, all with transparent, traceable reasoning and human input. Here are some of the most popular agents:
- Controls Testing Agent: Designed for SOC 2 and risk advisory engagements, this agent streamlines evidence validation across diverse formats, including files, configurations, screenshots, and system settings.
- Audit Testing Agent: Tailored for financial audits, this agent automates document-based procedures, such as revenue cutoff, expense verification, and liability testing. With new agents in development and deployment every day, Fieldguide is dedicated to supporting the most time-consuming phases of audit and advisory engagements, allowing practitioners to focus their time on analysis and providing deeper insights for their clients.
- Autonomous Workflow Execution: Field Agents handle entire workflows, from scoping and planning to testing and documentation, with audit-traceable outputs—all within seconds. Tasks like matching evidence to samples, extracting and validating data, and referencing source documents are fully automated.
- Human-in-the-Loop Intelligence: Rather than replacing professionals, Field Agents empower them. Auditors act as reviewers and orchestrators, focusing on judgment and advisory while the AI drives and accelerates execution. This shift redefines roles and elevates practitioner impact.
- Integrated, Scalable, and Secure: Built directly into Fieldguide’s cloud-native platform, Field Agents align with existing firm methodologies and templates. The solution adheres to ISO/IEC 27001, ISO/IEC 42001, and the EU AI Act, ensuring robust data governance.
- Proven Results and Industry Recognition: Early adopters report faster engagements through automation of up to 70% of the testing phase, improved margins, and increased client trust. Field Agents help firms of all sizes, from mid-market to top 35, increase capacity, drive growth, and reduce staff burnout.
In a world where quality, speed, and insight are non-negotiable, Field Agents are the innovation that firms have been waiting and asking for. They don’t just automate the work—they reimagine the workflow for the future of audit and advisory. As the system evolves to support even more engagement phases, Field Agents will continue to unlock time savings, increase capacity, and elevate the profession.
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2025 Award Finalists:
Accordance
Accordance is the Frontier AI platform for tax, audit, and CPA teams. Purpose-built for high-stakes tax and accounting strategy, it probes fact patterns, applies authoritative sources, and transparently documents assumptions, alternatives, and risk factors, accelerating everyone’s journey to top performer.
Our record speaks for itself: We implemented agentic solutions more than a year before multi-agent and mixture-of-expert (MoE) models became publicly available. We were early adopters of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and low-rank adaptation (LoRA). OpenAI featured our research partnership when they launched its reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT) capabilities.
How has Accordance improved efficiency, productivity, profitability?
The improvements and efficiencies are substantial. One top 50 firm conducted a study that showed a 60% increase in efficiency: 10 hours of research was as, if not more, rigorously analyzed after just six hours. The gains were so significant that Accordance forced the firm to begin an overhaul of its hourly business model. In the short-term this firm expects to raise its hourly rates by 30% to accommodate the increased efficiency.
Other companies, realizing the same issues, used Accordance to fully transition their teams to fixed-fee engagements.
“This is a huge productivity gain. You can no longer bill by the hour because you need half as many hours to do the same amount of work. Fortunately, jobs become more predictable—you have a reliable estimate of how long they will take. That helps to de-risk flat-fee billing,” explains another customer.
AuditDashboard Office 365 + Copilot Integration
Accounting firms are under pressure to deliver faster results while managing rising client expectations, tighter deadlines, and mounting compliance requirements. AI has the potential to transform workflows, but many innovations operate outside of a firm’s secure environment. For firms entrusted with sensitive financial information, this creates more risk than reward.
The Innovation
AuditDashboard’s Microsoft Office 365 + Copilot integration provides a secure, practical way for firms to harness AI in their workflows. Professionals can open and view Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and PDF files directly in their browser without downloads or version-control issues. With Microsoft Copilot layered in, firm users can summarize documents, extract key data, and generate insights—all within the firm’s existing Microsoft tenant, governed by the same permissions, retention, and security policies IT has already approved.
This approach extends the value of the firm’s Microsoft licenses, which it’s already paying for, while embedding AI-powered functionality directly into the engagement process. Unlike other AI innovations, it allows firms to confidently use AI without introducing new platforms, additional costs, or compliance risks.
The Result
By combining secure document handling with AI analysis, firms shorten review cycles, reduce repetitive work, and minimize manual errors. Professionals spend less time on administrative tasks and more time on deeper research, higher-value analysis, and client service, all while ensuring sensitive data never leaves their secure Microsoft environment.
Impact on the Profession
This integration enables firms to embrace AI practically. It enhances efficiency, accelerates collaboration, and reduces risk—demonstrating that true innovation in accounting technology lies not in adding new tools, but in extending the power of the ones firms already use and trust.
CCH Validate
CCH Validate delivers a next-generation, cloud-native audit bank confirmation platform, engineered to redefine how audit professionals operate. Purpose-built for speed, security, and intelligence, this fully online solution empowers tax and accounting firms with intuitive onboarding and instant client-authorized data delivery—reimagining the bank confirmation process into a smarter, faster, and highly secure audit experience.
By leveraging advanced technologies—including blockchain for tamper-proof assurance—CCH Validate enables 100% bank statement retrieval from financial institutions worldwide. This transforms audit workflows through automation and innovation, empowering professionals to deliver higher-quality results with greater efficiency and client satisfaction, putting auditors in full control to obtain confirmations with unprecedented speed.
Key features of the new CCH Validate include:
- Entirely Online Experience: Users can self-serve through a browser-based interface and begin using the tool in minutes.
- Client-Driven Authorization: Clients securely and privately authorize data processing, removing the need to wait for bank responses.
- Speed: Setting up a firm’s account followed by requesting and receiving its client’s confirmation data is all processed in a few quick steps—without the need for human interaction.
- Trial First: Firms can try the platform at no cost before committing.
- Cloud-Native Architecture: Built for scalability, security, and speed, accessible from anywhere, anytime.
- Global Reach: Currently designed to support firms in the U.S., integration across platforms in Canada and the U.K. will soon follow.
- Connectivity: Ability to retrieve data from a global network of financial institutions, including any national bank, state and local bank, credit union, and brokerage firm with an online presence.
- Security: Blockchain and data encryption is leveraged to ensure requests are 100% tamper-proof and delivered fully certified and compliant with audit industry standards, including SOC 1, SOC 2, ISO 27001, etc.
- Audit Trail: Provides a comprehensive and immutable audit trail of the end-to-end process stored in the blockchain.
- Fraud Prevention: Eliminates the potential for fraud by eliminating human intermediaries in responding to requests.
Digits Accounting Agents
Digits embeds AI agents to run entire accounting workflows for firms on its Autonomous General Ledger (AGL). Digits AGL is a new generation of accounting software that has already powered 2,000+ month-end closes across hundreds of businesses. Traditional accounting software is user-operated: every new capability appears as yet another feature—more buttons to click, settings to configure, and steps to complete. The catch? Every new feature creates more work for accountants to do, not less.
Digits turns that model on its head. Instead of piling on features, Digits embeds agents that run entire workflows from start to finish, pausing only when human judgment is necessary or desired.
Digits AI agents understand the accounting workflow end-to-end, and they do as much of that work for accountants as possible. Each of these workflows used to require a long checklist of tasks, endless mouse clicks, and tedious data processing. Now, a dedicated agent does the work for accountants who review and approve the results.
Digits was designed from day one to work with AI agents, removing the time-consuming manual work that has frustrated firms. In a world where accounting talent is in short supply, Digits is proving that an AI-native approach redefines how firms scale, grow, and deliver for their clients.
Ignition AutoPricing
Ignition has been helping accounting professionals sell, bill, and get paid for their services for more than 10 years. One of the most challenging parts of running an accounting firm is pricing. According to Ignition’s recent pricing benchmark, 80% of U.S. accounting firms are planning to raise prices in 2026. However, planning price increases is easier than executing them.
Many firms struggle with raising their prices because it’s cumbersome and awkward with clients, ultimately leaving revenue on the table. To help solve pricing challenges, Ignition recently introduced industry-first AutoPricing capabilities to automate price increases at scale for firms.
AutoPricing is a suite of pricing automation capabilities that empowers customers to effortlessly increase prices in bulk to grow revenue and improve profitability. It allows accounting firms to:
- Increase prices in bulk for annual renewals: Customers can automate price increases for multiple clients at once to simplify contract renewals when re-engaging clients, improve pricing consistency, and grow profitability. They can renew proposals in bulk, then select a percentage price increase to apply automatically across all clients or specific segments. Ignition also makes it easy to opt to further adjust pricing for particular clients with an easy-to-use pricing wizard.
- Update service pricing in bulk: Customers can change the price of a service once, and it flows through to all active and future agreements automatically that contain that service. This offers huge time savings while making it easier to maximize revenue when updating service pricing.
- Choose whether to notify clients of new pricing with bulk, pre-filled emails: Pre-built email templates can help avoid awkward client conversations.
Ignition’s AutoPricing suite makes increasing prices easy and consistent so businesses can focus on improving revenue and profitability—while automating the entire client renewal process within one platform.
As more accounting firms expand their services to include CAS, the ability to manage pricing becomes critical. Firms can add new services and adjust their pricing across clients. AutoPricing makes it easier to manage and grow a CAS practice without leaving money on the table.
Ignition customers already rave about the AutoPricing capabilities:
“It’s impossible not to be excited. Look at that extra revenue that comes from five minutes of my time now that I can increase fees in a much more streamlined way. As business owners, we don’t want to spend our time doing all of this administrative stuff—we have more important things to do—but pricing is so crucial for getting that extra money in the door, so I love that it’s so efficient.” — Joey Albertson, owner of The Profitability Project.
Looking forward, Ignition will continue innovating pricing capabilities for its customers. In June 2025, the company announced plans for AI-powered pricing intelligence to help firms and agencies price smarter.
Last Mile Automation, by HubSync
HubSync’s Last Mile Automation exemplifies true innovation in tax and accounting by transforming the most critical—and traditionally the most manual—phase of the return lifecycle into a seamless, automated process. Where firms once chased signatures, monitored forms, validated deliverables, and manually updated workflows, HubSync now automates each step: securely delivering returns, requesting and tracking authorizations, validating jurisdiction-specific requirements, releasing filings, and closing workflows based on e-file status.
This eliminates repetitive manual tasks, such as monitoring e-file form submissions, cross-checking state requirements, and keying submission IDs, saving firms hours during peak season. The result is not only faster turnaround and reduced error risk but also improved staff utilization—allowing professionals to focus on higher-value advisory and client service. HubSync’s innovation has been recognized across the profession, as evidenced by its many awards, and its traction is validated by adoption at more than 40% of the top 25 U.S. CPA firms and a recent $100M+ growth investment from Thoma Bravo.
By consolidating return delivery, e-file management, workflow tracking, and validation into one integrated platform, HubSync’s Last Mile Automation redefines efficiency and scalability for modern firms. In practice, firms see gains in productivity, client satisfaction, and profitability, as fewer resources are tied up in administrative work and more returns are completed on time and without errors. In short, HubSync makes the “last mile” of tax preparation—once the most time-consuming and error-prone—the easiest mile, setting a new standard for how automation can elevate the profession.
2025 Award Nominees
Nominations for the 2026 Innovation Awards will open in summer 2026.
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