Accounting technologists Randy Johnston and Brian Tankersley, CPA, take a look at some of the products in the 2025 CPA Practice Advisor Tax and Accounting Technology Innovation Awards. In this, the first of a two-part series, the focus is on technologies involving tax compliance.
The Accounting Tech Lab is an ongoing series that explores the intersection of public accounting and technology.
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Transcript (Note: There may be typos due to automated transcription errors.)
SPEAKERS: Randy Johnston, Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 00:00
Randy, welcome to the accounting Technology Lab. Brought to you by CPA practice advisor, with your host, Randy Johnston and Brian Tankersley.
Randy Johnston 00:08
Welcome to the accounting Technology Lab. I’m Randy Johnston with my co host, Brian Tankersley, and we are happy to talk to you today about some of the innovation awards that have been completed by CPA practice advisor. Now today’s episode is on the tax tools. And as background, Brian and I both were fortunate enough to review 39 tools along with other judges, and what we learned along the way, we thought we’d share with you, so we picked tax tools today. And I’d like to start off with a product called accordance.
Now, accordance had a recorded demonstration by Jack Moore, who was one of the founders, there for us to review. And it was really a pretty stunning demonstration. So I think when Brian, you got in the thick of it, and we did not collaborate on this in any shape or fashion, just for the public record. We hadn’t talked on any of our scoring, any of that, until we got ready to produce this podcast for you today. And again, we’re not going to share our scoring when asked, just for the record,
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 01:20
and the things we’re talking about may not win, okay, when they’re when the winners are announced,
Randy Johnston 01:26
yeah, so, you know, in the big picture of things, we just want you to see what’s going on here. So accordance is the first one that I’d like to call out. Now, Brian, you and I have both seen accordance and what it does, but you know, they claim to be frontier intelligence for world class tax audit and accounting teams. That’s their basic positioning. And there are some pretty interesting things that I think you can learn about the tool from Brian and I. So Brian, I’m going to turn you loose first on this one.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 01:59
Well, the thing that I thought was so interesting about this was how how it was used, and the prompt engineering that went into it, just to because I think it not only shows you their tool, but I think it also shows you some of the techniques that you can potentially use When you’re working with any kind of AI where you define what success looks like, you define what the output looks like. You give it examples you know. You give it context. You ask it to assume a certain role.
One of the more interesting roles that we saw with accordance was where they were talking about how you know, you should take the position of the government side of the revenue enforcement and then tell me what your arguments are going to be with respect to these factual issues and, you know, and then comparing that and using that kind of as a risk management tool, and having that generated for you quickly, you know, I think generally, The the, the a lot of the things you know you don’t know what you don’t know about a new topic.
And one of the things that I find to be that I’m learning, and I assume you’re learning too Randy, is that the prompt engineering is really kind of a black art that we have to, you know, to the whole use of AI. And I think there was some interesting approaches used in this. A lot of those are fully baked into the product, but some of the ones were actually shared in the demo we saw. And I think it’s helpful to see that, because the way that you know, the way that you you don’t you know, you don’t know, again, you don’t know what you don’t know about AI, and I thought this was one of the, you know, the way that it went after specific things, you know, the two sentence and the two sentence answer to a question that’s complex.
The, you know, the here’s what? How would you argue this if you were trying to make this product taxable on the government side. And what arguments would you make with respect to the precedents in this, you know, the way it links back to direct primary sources. I thought all of that was quite interesting. But again, a whole the bow they put on it, I thought was particularly good, yeah.
Randy Johnston 04:19
So, you know, in the big picture, friends, remember when we’re talking about artificial intelligence, we’ve got the frontier models, the claws, the open AI chat, GPT is the copilot, 365, and Geminis and so on. And then I believe that AI is getting built into more products. We talked about that in a prior accounting technology lab where we covered the, you know, 10 plus announcements on agentic AI incorporated into products this year. And of course, I think there’s going to be standalone products with agents in them. And that’s really where I’m putting accordance right now. They claim to. Have tailored Guidance for Every practice area. In tax, they say that they’re going for authoritative code context and citations in an instant. In accounting, they do analysis of complex scenarios. And in audit, they say that they have critical insights for the most overwhelming details. And, you know, the product response and the way it acted, I thought was exceptionally good. So when I consider today, and probably up to, you know, accordance being released, and as of the day we’re discussing this with you, accordance is still kind of flying under the radar. You know, the product, I think will be now in my recommended list for tax research tools. In prior podcasts with you in the accounting Technology Lab, we’ve talked about the Blue Jays and the tax GPTs and the Wolters Kluwer AnswerConnect, and the Thomson Reuters CoCounsel, all of which we think are attractive. But this one, I think is going to be another research tool that I think has some real legs to it.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 06:19
I completely agree. You know, the thing that I think that the thing that I picked up out of that demo, that I thought, again, was so interesting was how, again, some of the use cases for it, and some of the ways they were trying to approach it, doing research, I thought were particularly innovative. And we, you know, you and I have taken long demos on all the other products, and I don’t think we’ve ever seen anybody approach the research in the fashion that these guys did.
Randy Johnston 06:46
Yeah, so I was very appreciative of what was done there. So let’s turn our attention next to another product that we’ve covered in a prior counting Technology Lab, and that’s the Bloomberg platform. Changes this year. Now, Bloomberg was nominated in multiple categories work papers and so forth, but it was really the tax assistant that we wanted to discuss with you for today’s podcast. So Brian, what would you say about the tax AI assistant?
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 07:18
Well, again, it is a it’s a chat based research tool, and you know, it’s from Bloomberg, so you know that you’re going to get the right answer out of it. And again, you know, when we look at independent, and one of the things, one of the concerns that you always have with anybody independent that’s pushing tax content, is, you know, are they going to get litigated out of existence? Are they going to continue to exist in the long term, Bloomberg is not going anywhere. And so I think there, I think from there, it’s interesting. I think it’s also interesting given the scale of the number of users that are using that platform for research. Admittedly, it’s not one of the big two, but it’s a close, closely following third to, again, to the checkpoints and CO counsel and the, you know, again, the, I guess, the, you know, yeah, so I think you’ve got, I think you’ve got interesting things there, you know. I think in general, the message that I would share is that tax research really has changed. With llms. You still need to read the primary sources yourself and understand them, but it’s, you know, I think the, I think we’ve moved out of the world of, you know, using an LLM to do tax research is innovative. I think it is now table stakes. And so I want you to look at it and to think about it, because I think there are a lot of things in both of the tax research tools we’ve talked about thus far that really help you improve your arguments based on how you use the tool to approach your work and how you structure the prompts that you put in there. So again, I think whichever one of these you use, if you don’t have any generative AI experience, you need to learn about prompt engineering, and you need to get examples of some of the successful prompts. But I think Jim, I think that this, I think that these tools are really showing us this new world that we’re looking at, and it’s going to make it a lot easier for people to get the right answer. Both the folks supporting clients as well as the as well as the state and federal government. So I think tax research the bar is going to be raised generally.
Randy Johnston 09:49
Yeah, I think that’s true. Now, of course, the tax AI assistant press release on that was July 15 of this year. So as a listener, if you’d like to at least. At that landing page. There is a demonstration in video that they have on that page, but a couple of call outs that I would make for you is Bloomberg claimed in their press release that there that it’s a significant upgrade to their research tool, but it’s provided at no charge, so there is no additional charge to get the AI assistant, which I think is important, plus, it is designed to have iterative conversational research, and it will keep your chat history stored securely. And one of the things that we talked about in our prior accounting Technology Lab on this was the jurisdictional treatment and the cross jurisdictional tax comparisons of this particular product. The chart builder, I thought was good in there, and there were other features there, but I do note that Bobby Puglia, the chief product officer, said that the AI powered features demonstrate bloomberg’s commitment to innovation in tax research. And many of you have used being a Bloomberg as kind of your high end authoritative content, and we’ve recommended it for some years on that light, but as Brian just pointed out, the table stakes of tax research are way higher. You know, I have said to my wife many times, you know, I used to love to play sports of all types, but today’s amateurs are better than the pros that I watched in the past. It’s really so stunning how much has changed in skill sets. But if you have not seen the Bloomberg tax AI assistant, you can easily see it for yourself without a sales call in the press release video. So Brian, any other thoughts before we move to our next product?
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 12:08
I think, you know, I think generally, if you’re not using some kind of AI, some kind of AI engine, in your tax research, I think you’re working way too hard.
Randy Johnston 12:18
Yeah, so that gets us to the next product. And again, remember, we looked at lots of different products. We just picked a few on tax that we wanted to talk to with you about today. The next one is tax now now tax now has a pro version, and they have a taxpayer version. And so understand that this is really playing a little bit of both sides of the game. But you know, from that vantage point, we’re really discussing the pro version here. So Brian, I know you were excited about this for multiple reasons, but what would you want our listeners to know?
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 12:50
Well, I think one of the things we have with any kind of tax resolution is we need to get the actual data. We just getting access to 10 years worth of transcripts and the other information in here. And getting through the POA engine and faxing 8820 ones and those kinds of things like that, is a nightmare. And I think this puts this gives you a tool set that helps you quite a bit with this. It also will give you master wage data from the different, I guess, employers and payees that have reported things out of here. And, you know, again, I think generally that, I think generally This tool provides something that we’ve not really seen as a separate tool to help help you keep an eye on what’s happening with your clients and what kinds of interactions and how things have been processed by the regulatory agencies.
Randy Johnston 13:55
Yeah, and, you know, historically, Brian and I have followed the tax resolution tools. It was probably an entree for us with, you know, at least five different products that we list on our websites that we’ve followed for a long time, but with text now, a few things that they provide for you is instant IRS access. So as you pointed out, Brian, you kind of skip all the caf number and the E services and all that. As long as you got a 7216 authorization, you can have access to the information. They also provide continuous tax account monitoring, and so you do get access to the client’s accounts with daily updates and alerts. So that is helpful, I believe, and the client integration and management in the product is good. There’s IRS compliance checks that they built in. So it gives you access to past transcripts. I If my recollection is right, it’s like 10 years worth of transcripts on this product. Product, and then they also have a live tax refund and payments tractor tracker, as well as year over year analytics, and then a tax alert and Calendar Feed, all inside the product. So you know when you look at the features you’ve got Pro and basic and plus in their product line. And by the time you have the transcript request, the tracks account monitoring, the income verification, the audit monitoring, the ERC tracker. You know, you’ve got some very interesting features in a platform that just feels like it’s pro focused. And you know, they also will track tax credits and other things along the way. So Brian, are there other things that you believe that our listeners should know about tax now,
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 15:53
you know, I don’t think so. I would just generally say that. You know, we’re we’re again. We went through and looked at demos and write ups on 39 different products. These are the ones that really stood out to us for tax practitioners. Again, I know that the publication goes out to a lot of not just CPAs, but also a lot of enrolled agents that are certainly looking for this kind of stuff. And I will just say I think the future is looking very interesting, sure. Well, one
Randy Johnston 16:27
other that Brian, you and I did not discuss in advance of recording today, I do want to call out that we recognize full well that there is a change a foot on tax preparation as well, because where we’ve talked about tax planning in the past, you know, Jackie Myers tax plan IQ and Andrew argues, Corvi was there. But we do have tax prep products coming with the instead platform as well. And you know, we can see the AI rolling into there. So notice that we could have probably picked another half dozen products. Talk about, we thought about, Wow, 39 products. What should we pull out as being kind of top of tax and there were many more tax products. So make sure that you spend some time on the actual published results of this year’s 2025 tax and accounting technology innovation awards. So again, Brian, I spent hours looking at this stuff in addition to our regular experience. So Brian, parting thoughts on the tax innovators.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 17:41
You know, I was we had a conversation with Mary Delaney from carbon, and one of the things that that I asked her was, what things are going away out of your workflow? Because I’ve been in the profession for 33 years, and I remember when paper went away. I remember when we started using siloed laptops, and then the networking, and then moved to cloud. And now we’re moving into now we’re in the world of AI now, and I asked her kind of, what’s coming next, and I think generally the, I think, you know, I think generally the things that are coming, you know. She said, work. She said again, losing the seven day a week life’s work lifestyle during busy times of the year and and I think that ought to give everybody some hope that maybe some work life balance is coming in our future, to help us go through, you know, to help us attract more people into the profession and help, help us again, be more successful at living our lives in the future. So I think it’s, I think in general, you need to look at the AI tools, you need to change up some of your workflows, and again, see, see how you can be not just more efficient, but also more effective using again, in the work
Randy Johnston 19:00
you do? Yeah, I appreciate the insight on that comment, and for our listeners, just a reminder, there’s another episode on accounting technologies in this year’s awards where carbon will actually be covered. And we also have a two part series of our interviews with Mary Delaney, who’s the CEO of carbon. So we invite you to listen to three other episodes, but for today, that’s what we wanted to pull out quickly for you on the 2025 accounting Technology Innovation Awards, we’ll have talk to you again in a future accounting Technology Lab. Good day.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 19:40
Thank you for sharing your time with us. We’ll be back next Saturday with a new episode of the technology lab from CPA practice advisor. Have a great week.
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