In this episode of Accounting Technology Lab, Randy Johnston and Brian Tankersley, CPA, CITP, CGMA, sit down with industry expert Joe Woodard to explore the rapidly evolving landscape of accounting technology in 2026. The conversation centers on the shifting role of general ledger platforms, the growing importance of API-driven ecosystems, and the resurgence of “platform vs. monolith” debates in cloud accounting.
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 (with Joe Woodard as Speaker 1)
Randy Johnston 01:39
Welcome to the accounting Technology Lab. I’m Randy Johnson with my co host, Brian Tankersley, and are we super pleased to have a special guest with us today, Joe Woodard, who’s well known for his Scaling New Heights event, plus just his broad expertise in small business accounting, client, accounting services, advisory. And we want to talk about the real deal, the real state of accounting technology here in 2026 and boy, is it moving fast. So Joe, welcome. What would you like our listeners to know about
Speaker 1 02:11
your background? Randy Brian, it’s great to be here. Thanks for inviting me on board. The best thing your listeners can know to kind of frame this conversation is that we have the nation’s largest accounting technology expo, and therefore I’m staying very close to the chessboard with all these technologies.
Randy Johnston 02:27
Yeah, well, that is super well as you know. Brian and I have followed this accounting technology and all of its add ons for some time, and we’re watching the expansion, if you will, of features, the new capabilities, the platforms in prior accounting Technology Labs, we’ve talked about agents and mcps and vibe coding, lots of technical stuff, but also some of the extraction tools, unfortunately, one that’s kind of gone at this point, bot keeper, you know, I thought Enrico was doing a Nice job with that, but there’s some risk to our listeners. So what I’d like to do is maybe have a bit of a discussion with you about what you see as the current state of the general ledgers and the surrounding tools. So what do you think I love that?
Speaker 1 03:17
So let’s start with general ledgers. We’ll start with the platform and work our way out from there. Does that work? Yeah, as matter of
Randy Johnston 03:22
fact, it’s kind of the way I think about the world, as odd as it is, because what I really love is, if everything was in the platform. But, you know, historically, with Intuit and Xero and others, they just didn’t have all the capabilities. So we wound up with this whole third party echo system involved, and unfortunately, so many of our listeners had to select a tool to work with. Let’s say it was QuickBooks Online, or whether it was Xero or QuickBooks Desktop, whatever it was, historically, and then catch all the missing parts. And in fact, in a another accounting technology lab session, we’ll talk about the additive construction software, which I’m sure you’re familiar with. And you know, I just look at how many of these GLS have missed the mark on key things like inventory and costing. So many of them don’t have that.
Speaker 1 04:13
Yeah, you’re absolutely right, and I’m actually going to qualify and miss the mark, because they actually hit their mark. So what I’m seeing now is a pendulum swing back in the desktop world, Peachtree, QuickBooks Desktop, they really became what I called SMB, RPS, ERPs, for the SMB, and they were grossly under priced for their capabilities, but they were fighting on feature set and trying to win on feature set. QuickBooks Desktop was trying to hold people from natural growth cycles that would pull them upward and upward back in the day was to sort of be a mass 90, which became sage 100 so they in the some of the Great Planes or whatever. So they were fighting against that upward mobility, desktop war to desktop war. And they just kept building. And building out these feature sets competing on feature. And now I’m not seeing the cloud play being a compete on feature. Everybody kept waiting for QBO to become QuickBooks Desktop, and Intuit kept saying, from the beginning, we’re platform, we’re, you know, they didn’t use the word plumbing, but think of it like Plumbing, right? And then the house is built around that. Now that’s really smart for Intuit, because they don’t have to put as much energy in a product development queue. It can all be into API and ecosystem building. And it’s really smart as a strategic play for the small business, because they get best of breed. But it only works if the platform is extremely tight and open. And this is the tension that we’re starting to see already in cloud, and then I’ll get to how it’s going to exasperate in AI, but where the GL platforms are now swinging back toward a monolithic approach, not on industry specific but on new monetization models, payments, payroll, they want to own that now. And so they’re starting to not close the API calls, though. They’re doing a few doors and a few gates just to give themselves competitive advantage, mostly on reporting and outputs and more complex transaction handling. But they’re definitely pulling back on how they’re empowering that ecosystem. And so as this pendulum now swings from monolith, QuickBooks, desktop, enterprise solution, peach tree, right over to open is open. We’re plumbing. And now somewhere back toward the center, where we’re going to swing back to monolith, but only horizontally. You want construction, you still go add on. You want inventory, you still go add on. But everything else we like to control in the middle. Now, they had that noise, though, because they had to find new ways to monetize. Yeah, and that makes great sense.
Randy Johnston 06:55
In fact, we have a separate episode on the AICPA accelerator program, and we had this exact discussion during the accelerator event related to these platforms. And it went a little further, Joe, and you’re quite aware of this too, kind of the collapse of SAS and the things that are going on in that Apple area, which is also topical. And of course, Brian’s my digital plumbing guy. I think he’s the guy that first talked about plumbing between these platforms. But it turns out this feature war has long been over in my world, and we’ve got this whole radical shift like that. We’ll also talk about in our time together with AI, but this concept of we’re only going to be doing so much. You know, I got to see my granddaughter in New York this week, and I think one of my favorite phrases of her is, you know, hands on the face, grandpa, that not be the plan. And, you know, it not be the plan is what Intuit said all the way along about building out these extra features. It was not the plan. I understand not being the plan. So, you know, when we look at options, because for those of you who are practitioners trying to run a client, accounting services practice, or those of you who come from the VAR model, where you were trying to solve problems, you know it’s made it difficult to move. And we’re going to go one more step to get some of the completeness you may have to have gone up market to some of the platforms. And in the SaaS world, we had the bigs playing there, Sage Intacct NetSuite and Acumatica and dynamics, you know, all the players, like we do, from that vantage point, Joe. But the problem was with the big boys, they really got dull, guess, I’ll say, heavily monetized. They got a little greedy on their fees, and they were complex to implement. There was just lots of issues around that. So the problem has always been what our associate Matt McClellan calls the shim market, the space between mid market and entry, where a lot of us business operates. And historically, we did that
Speaker 1 09:01
with third party tools. Yes, we stretched QuickBooks with third party tools. And now this is a great segue into the AI, because sitting between the traditional SMBs, the zeros and the intuits of this world and the net suites and in tax of this world, especially between the net suite and those, is a an emerging category that’s more reachable. They’re the three key players that have raised about 300 million, about 100 million each, all within the last say, you know, 180 days. One of those recently is the last 90 days. Our dual entry, reel it and campfire. Now this is a very interesting group to watch, because, in one sense, they reflect the we are platform. We are plumbing, play. You go to you can’t you? They’ll handle a bill, but they’re the first to tell you, no. Use our bill integration, use our brex integration, use our ramp integration, or whatever they integrate with. And they’re hungry. They were hungry for AP partners, right out of the gate, spin partners, rather the gate, rather than build it. They will tell you. And I’ve met with their CEOs recently, and this was not told in confidence. They broadcast this strategy, we are not a construction platform and don’t want to be. We are not a warehouse management platform. Don’t want to be. So now they’re really hungry for those kinds of integrations, and because they’re trendy, people are listening to them, even though they’re install bases in the hundreds, not the 1000s. So. But this is particularly interesting, they are priced at about 25% the price of NetSuite. If you count the initial one year cost and implementation, it’s about 25% the investment to launch. And the bragging point now, I don’t know. I’ve talked to a few people that have implemented it and they backed it up, but the bragging point is that the adoption curve is around three months, as compared to NetSuite, which can be up to a year. Now, if they can hold this and back up these claims with consistency, and not jack up their price as they get to a tipping point. Then they’re standing in a position to disrupt. And then I’ll pause after saying this last sentence. And then they’re the opposite of monolith. They’re swinging that whole pendulum in the mid market, back to plumbing, back to platform, and I may swing back again. You know those things do that as they’re looking for new revenue models, but right now it’s going back
Randy Johnston 11:26
platform, yeah, and it is fascinating to watch. And again, you and Brian and I all try to help every firm that we can be better and understand what the choices are here. But when you look at other monolith platforms out there that a little lower in the odos and the zohos and all of those types of players. It becomes really a rather confusing market. And of course, there’s even more GL based AI products like digits, which you’re quite familiar with, or puzzle again, you’re familiar with. And I’m just watching and saying, okay, so which shot call should we take? Who’s going to be the survivor? But you know, when you consider the integrations that many of these platforms did with the bills and the ramps and, you know, the ADPs and the paychecks is and so forth, and all of a sudden those market shares are being, I’ll say, lightly taken away. It makes for a very well. As Brian likes to say, we live in interesting times. We live in
12:27
we live in a strange new world, is the way I would
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 12:29
phrase it. But it feels like we’re back in 1985 when everybody’s decided in engineering that they can fix accounting somehow, okay? And we’ll and they’ll make some progress, okay, but at the end of the day, I think the accountants are still going to have to fix things. Okay? Because the strategy, in my mind, is has a fundamental flaw, is that the interfaces are not going to work perfectly 100% of the time, okay, and your average end user is going to struggle to fix it.
Speaker 1 13:01
There’s a concept in artificial intelligence development. You may have used the phrase here on past episodes called human in the loop. You can’t talk to an AI platform or someone developing AI into their platform for five minutes without them using that phrase, human in the loop. Human in the loop
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 13:17
is like adult so listeners here,
Speaker 1 13:19
it just means that the human in the loop completes what the AI can’t do, and reviews what the AI does do. And then I would add as a third piece of that, as they do those two things, they train the AI in doing it better and better, cycle over cycle. So the human in the loop is, in a sense, the supervisor of the AI worker, okay, and the Completer of the process, typical review work now that, can I say that that’s that role is going to stay relevant? Brian, I agree with you for a while. I believe the role is going to shrink faster than most people think it’s going to shrink. Now, go away is a completely different animal, you know. And I think the complete is going to give way more and more to the review. The review is going to give more and more away as the consistency gets up and the confidence of trust gets up to smaller, smaller review cycles. So it’s going to squeeze that roll out. And we’re not talking decades, we’re talking years. So what I like to do with human in the loop is at a third piece, there’s complete, there’s review, there’s transcend. And so the human in the loop is more than the servant of AI. They are served by the AI, and they are providing judgment, they are providing wisdom. They are providing mentorship. They are emoting what is happening in the outcomes of the financials they are looking at. They’re putting all of that and contextualizing that into a relationship with the client. And those are the things that the bots cannot do, and even if they could mimic it, they ought not do.
Randy Johnston 14:57
Yeah, and you know, just thinking about the way you’re talking about that. An additional characteristic I think we see frequently is transparency, which enables a lot of the human in the loop. Joe and you know, again, an old phrase on this, you know, belt and suspenders, the human in the loop is fundamentally holding things together, if you will. Further, if Jeff Siebert, from digits is right with his claim that by the end of 2026, most month end closes will be automated. I think that’s a little quick in the estimate, but it could happen that quickly if you consider that many of these products are going to be doing monthly and closes, and then you go out to the reporting, and you actually got to exactly where I’ve been mulling, I say more than mulling. I’ve been waking up in the middle of night worried about this stuff, so that tells you how much it’s eating at my soul. Is accountants remaining relational? Because so many of these systems are trying to turn accountants into transactional animals, and you don’t have a relationship on transactions, you have a relationship by talking to people maintain.
Speaker 1 16:08
It’s got to be bolder than that, because, yes, some would maintain. I think many need to create. And what I’m hoping here is that it will put a positive pressure on the accountants to move into a relationship model, because they will have no choice. The ground is going to shrink underneath their feet. They can’t hide in the transactional anymore,
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 16:27
well, but historically, most of the really good sales accountants that I’ve known were really business social workers. Okay? I mean, they, you know, they weren’t helping they weren’t helping people get homes or helping people, helping people, you know, beat their drug problem, or anything like that. But they were definitely solving serious business problems, and they did things like they held the hand of the spouse of the dead business owner and the children, and said, We’re going to make it’s we’re going to make this and it’s going to be okay, because I’ve been down here before, and I know the way out okay. And you know,
Speaker 1 17:07
it’s an interest and comfort in crises. Sometimes nuclear crises,
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 17:11
yes, yeah. And the AI will never, ever be able to do that, because you will never be able to sleep and trust that chat GPT
Speaker 1 17:20
is got your back, and even if it’s accurate, and even if you could trust it to be accurate, it is not ultimately what you need or want. So when I was going through one of the darkest financial times of my life, I leaned on my CPA, who was also my business mentor, who was also my friend and and he met me on a Saturday morning at Panera Bread, and I bled on him, and I get emotional See, which I cannot do with chat GPT, because he reached across the table, and he just lightly put his hand on my hand, And he said, we will get you through this. A bot will never be
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 18:05
able to do that. The best CPA is and the best bookkeepers love their clients, and they’re like parents. They want them to be the best they can be. And it’s, in my mind, it’s sad that all these engineers think that the job of account, that the job of counting, is going away. Sure the staff works. Some of the entry level staff work for people that know the process in the accounting software to enter the data. Yeah, that works. Gone. Okay. But this mentoring, and, you know, just like a coach can motivate people to get the most out of them and to get them to get as close get it to achieve their potential. That is the role of the CPA in the business. And the other
Randy Johnston 18:53
thing that we’re seeing, and we’ve used these words before, and I don’t like to repeat things from the past, but too many fake advisory claims are being made, as I would see them, it’s truly consulting. It’s not real advisory work, and to me, that is where the future is at. But so many people have tools to sell to turn you into an advisor, as opposed to teaching you how to be an advisor and what it means that part’s also driving me kind of crazy. Now, I know Joe, you had another important vision in this strategy on where this is going with AI, because Brian and I have been talking about in prior episodes, you know, agents and how they work and mcps and how they can be used in the firms and so forth. So what do you see in the future here on accounting with AI?
Speaker 1 19:48
So just where do I see the entire industry going? Kind of Yes, sir, up to 40,000 feet. I see us being smaller in number than we are today. I. See that shrinking number impacting outsourced offshore labor first, and because that’s typically where we went when we needed inexpensive outcomes that we had the inability, through budgets or through staffing shortages, to resource on shore. So I see so if we watch what’s happening in India, in the Philippines, and we treat that as a leading indicator for what’s coming to the US, you’d be really good to look at that as a as a predictive metric. Then it’ll hit our shores, and then it will then the industry will right size around the technology. Now part of what’s helpful here. So it’s not apocalyptic. It’s actually a new era, like a dawn of a new era. We have about 10,000 boomers retiring per day in the country. That’s the pace right now, and that won’t stay at that pace, but that’s how we’re spiking right now, and Boomers typically are the leaders of these accounting firms, so they’re retiring off we were going to lose all of that top end leadership while the junior partners and the successors were buried down in tax returns and bookkeeping work and couldn’t breathe. So this is a much needed rescue by artificial intelligence. We’re starting to see a little bit of pickup in accounting degrees coming out from the universities, they’re mostly going into the top 20, so everything below that’s not getting that pressure relief. So it is a long way from being a corrective motion. Yet the work load is increasing. More businesses are forming, especially in a post covid world where you don’t have all the infrastructure and overhead and the optics of having to stand up offices and equipment and those businesses are sometimes rising quickly. And so as workload is increasing, we have workforce decreasing, and we have artificial intelligence Filling in the gap. So when I say that the profession will be smaller. I don’t mean that to say that it’s going to be a negative disruption. I think it’s going to just be an it’s kind of a rescue. It will come in and rescue our staffing crisis. But well, so
Speaker 2 22:15
what those who remain look like? Yes, but the people that refuse
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 22:19
to play in this new AI technology world, are going to be voted off the island by pricing and by all kinds of things. You will not give to it.
Speaker 1 22:28
Pricing to some degree, if you want to play at that level and go up against, you know, the retail side. You know, with the penetration pricing models don’t recommend. Some will try. They will fail. You can’t keep up with it now at the more neutral and skim pricing models, you know, boutique models. Brian, I think that price is not going to be the biggest driver. I think the biggest driver is just going to be competitive advantage and effectiveness. The firms that have embraced it are going to be 10 times 100 times more effective than those who haven’t. I do think their margins will also be significantly better, giving them a more competitive advantage on capital resources for r, d and marketing and customer experience.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 23:10
So do you think we finally reached the time of this real time reporting that we’ve been talking about for, you know, since, you know, collaborative accounting was talked about 15 years ago.
Speaker 1 23:22
Yeah, I think it’s upon us. Yes, I think it exists now, because it’s finally it exists with that human in the loop. Yeah, that final mile they have to do to get the package to the door. But it’s only the final mile, so it’s actually viable to do that at scale across your client base. Also it’s taking the client friction out of the equation, because what we used to depend on them for, we can now bypass them. More and more go straight from the source data, including even contracts. AI can scrape a contract and automatically set up the milestone based billing. So the more we take more, the more we’re the human in the loop. But we take the client is a human in the loop, out of the loop. More we can make it real time
Randy Johnston 24:06
well, so just kind of listening this and Joe, you’ll appreciate I’ve had an earworm from your comment earlier, because I’ve got the dawn of the Age of Aquarius. But I also throw back the hair. I loved that musical, but I
Randy Johnston 24:23
knew you’d love that, but you’ll love the next one even more. But I also had the Lion King theme, so I’ve got these two soundtracks going in my mind. Well, you know, I know we were trying to set up the second episode with Joe, where we talk about products, so I wanted to kind of wrap it up here and say, Look, if you’ve enjoyed what Joe’s shared with you in this episode, we ask you to join us on the next episode where we dig into a lot of the new generation accounting products. So this is Randy Brian and Joe signing off with you, and we’ll see you on our next accounting tax.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 25:01 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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