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 second of a two-part series, the focus is on accounting and audit services.
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 00:10
Welcome the accounting Technology Lab. I’m Randy Johnston with co host Brian Tankersley. This is the second episode in a coverage of the 2025 tax and accounting Technology Innovation Awards. This session is focused around accounting services, Audit Services and the like. And Brian and I had the wonderful pleasure of being judges for this year’s awards. There were others we’re not going to disclose who we’ve, you know, admired, but we pulled some very specific products we wanted to cover because we think these are interesting accounting innovations and advisory innovations in the 39 options for this year’s awards. Now, again, we encourage you to go back to the published results from this year’s awards. But Brian, I know you had one in particular from BDO that you wanted to discuss.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 01:13
Yeah, the BDO thing was really just a consultative selling persona that was an AI tool that videos, marketing and communications and data and AI teams put together to try to help people cross sell other services. And I think, you know, generally, the the hope of all the private equity firms that are out there is that, you know, when they’re rolling up, like Mary was talking about in a session we did a couple of weeks ago, about about 40 firms getting rolled up by one PE group and the culture challenges of putting those things together. You know, the thing I would just generally say to you here is that I don’t recall being told much and getting much training on how to sell. Now, certainly, there are organizations like convergence coaching and the Rainmaker group and many others that teach accountants how to sell. But I was particularly intrigued by BDOs tool, and this is an internal tool, so you can’t buy this, but they have a tool that they use to help qualify people and qualify clients for additional lines of service and help qualify, and again, make those referrals effectively to the other practice areas. And I think that, I think you know, again, generally, we don’t know what we don’t know about, AI, the AI. But I think also we have to look not just at the tech, but also at how it’s used. And I think the use cases in here really inform, you know, the way we’ve got to change our practices.
Randy Johnston 02:55
And you know, I’m just reflecting on your observations on this, Brian, because, you know, we obviously record these podcasts for your benefit, and many times, when I’m watching informative shows, I’d like to know what they say Off mic. So I’m going to actually take something that I said Off mic to Mary Delaney of carbon and she said, Yeah, I’m in agreement. So I don’t want to put words in her mouth, but I do want to say it like that, because one of the things that I am cognizant of is advisory services should be very client centric and done for the benefit of the client, not for the benefit of the firm to sell a lot more services. And you are right, Brian, few accountants have actually been trained in management and in selling, and you know, we’ve we basically learned to do tax and audit, and some have morphed over into client accounting services and valuation and other skill sets. But it’s not like we’re slick sales people, and in fact, put off by most slick sales people, consultative selling maybe, but client centric, client first, to me, is the big deal, and that’s where the for impact data product that we reviewed comes into play, you know, the one of the founders, and I think I do know all the founders there, but Eric eager, basically reached out to me probably seven or eight years ago and said, Randy, you know, I’ve, I helped build business software, which was sold to Insight software, you know, a good platform for financial reporting. And he did well on his exit and all that stuff. But he said, I got an idea that I’d like to really help small businesses thrive, survive and thrive. And he said, I got this idea to build a platform to do that. And that platform, he. Evolved into four impact data. And today, this advisory tool can give you your advisory team leverage. And today they’re promoting the concept that they’re 10x advisory so instead of increasing headcount, they’re using AI technology in their advisory platform to do rapid diagnostics and recommendations from an advisory perspective. And I do believe that they are doing that job pretty doggone. Well, at this point they refer to their system as a guidance system. And, you know, I think that’s actually pretty accurate. You know, we talked about it in a prior accounting technology lab with you. You can get more details in that but for impact data as of the date of our recording today, versus the for impact data that we covered before, wildly improved, and I just don’t want you to miss the opportunity have kind of what I’d consider Best of Class advisory capability. And just for the record, I think there’s only about four platforms in the market today that I’m aware of that are doing advisory the way I see advisory client centric, and for impact data is one of those. So I’ve spoken way too much here, Brian, but what would you say about for impact data?
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 06:30
Well, you know, I know when I talk, when you and I talked to Eric, when he was exiting and again, moving along from his previous opportunity. You know, initially it appeared the product appeared to be just kind of a BI tool. And it certainly does bi quite well. But the more interesting piece that it does is it makes recommendations. And I think, you know, I think more than anything in today’s lean leaned out accounting firms, I think it’s critical that you have a second set of eyes on things, and that you have additional insights that you’re getting from other places. And I think that, you know, for impact data, I think does some pretty amazing things in here. You know, again, it has tools to look at cash flow strain, margin pressure, revenue volatility, customer concentration, all kinds of things like that. And I think it’s a I think it’s a critical tool in the advisors toolbox. Now, remember when you’re looking at when you’re doing advisory one of the problems that accountants have is that we are all sitting in the limousine looking at the back window, expecting to run the future looking out the back window. Okay, you cannot run the future of things without looking out the front window. Okay? And that means that you have to look at other data sources besides just the working capital things and accounting and again, other things like that. So I think generally that for impact data is a nice, you know, I would describe it as kind of like a crescent wrench or an adjustable wrench that you can have in your toolbox as an advisor to help, give you to help, you know, prepare insights related to past performance, but also things that could affect things in the future.
Randy Johnston 08:23
Yeah. And you know, as it turns out, Brian, I learned from you that whoever is doing the client accounting services sees the opportunities first, that type of phraseology, and I believe that Cas is one of the advisory services that you could sell, just like tax planning could be one of the advisory services that you provide, but in the big picture, these types of tools let us help clients where they’re having issues. And to me, that’s the real winner in for impact data. And you know, that really brings me over then to perhaps another AI powered digital assistant. This assistant case where ADA the AI powered digital assistant kind of a nifty little acronym, but it’s designed to revolutionize audit and accounting, and it is an extension of a case where it’s a relatively new tool in their platform, but it’s really designed to help with workflow efficiency and some other items. So what would you say about casewares Ada?
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 09:37
You know, we’ve seen a lot of as we talked about in our previous episode on tax tools that showed up in this in these wards, one of the things that we’re seeing now is more and more tools inside the AI, inside the audit space, using a and I thought it was interesting how it’s, you know, just how it solves all these. Problems of, you know, summarizing documents and answering questions about content, and again, going through and reading things to people, reading things aloud. So you could use that, for example, to tie out your financial statements by having them read aloud to you. You know, I think they’re generally a lot of interesting use cases for AI. And this really just kind of puts them inside of CaseWare and makes them available through the CaseWare tool set. And I’m, I think it’s a worthy addition to their stack of tools.
Randy Johnston 10:36
Yeah, so a couple of other they’ll call it technical pieces to be aware of. You know, casewares Ada is running on anthropic clod, which we admire what that model does, but it’s also running on top of Amazon’s bedrock in AWS. So they believe that they’ll roll this out worldwide. When bedrock is rolled out to other regions. It’s not available everywhere right now, but that’s actually a pretty important thing to know about. This further in terms of protection of the data. CaseWare claims that when you put something in form, that the content, but not the underlying prompt is stored so the team there can have feedback on that, and that’s actually pretty important, because many of the frontier models, such as pick on open AI’s chat, GPT stores the prompts and allows humans to look at The prompts and claims that the prompts are their property. So CaseWare is very specific that they don’t store the prompts, and the prompts are not fed back into any models, so there’s some protection of your prompting here, which I admire.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 11:59
Yeah, definitely, you know. And I would just say that it’s you know again, I think it’s, I think, as you get into this AI space, I think you have to allow yourself time to tinker. So many of us are used to living a life six minutes or 15 minutes at a time, so we can fill out our time sheets that I think you need to block off at least an hour or two a week just to tinker with new things, because the productivity increases that you can get off of. A lot of these things are absolutely revolutionary, but you’ll never find the things if you don’t try.
Randy Johnston 12:34
Yeah, well, that really leads us to the next product. Now, again, we could have put this in the tax session as well as here, but I wanted it here because we had the fortune of interviewing Mary Delaney, who is the CEO of carbon. And again, you can listen to those two separate episodes to get her insights. But Brian and I were quite aware of carbons innovations this year with their portal, with their workflow, with their integrations, and what they’re doing with the document management piece. So one of the pieces that was in the 39 products that we were to evaluate was carbons end in tax workflow. Now it’s good. I like what they’re where they’re at. They’ve got, still got a ways to go. So don’t think that it’s a fully baked product. And she basically said the same thing, you know, there, it’s an evolving situation for them, but their integration over into Stanford tax was also innovative this year. And of course, they just recently purchased the advisory tool Ader. So there’s a number of things that would be included here, but the focus of our evaluation was around the Indian tax workflow. So Brian, any observations that you have on the Indian workflow?
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 13:58
Well, you know, the thing that carbons got that’s so interesting is kind of their, I don’t know, their embrace and include thing they’ve done with strategic partnerships. You know, Ian basin that you and I’ve known for years from Intuit and zero and then one of the founders of carbon I’ve known forever. You know, there are many other people associated with carbon that are, again, we’ve known for a long time. And you know, the interesting part about it is how they seem to be kind of putting together all the other tools, a lot of the new, innovative tools, and putting direct integrations into them in their stack. And I think this is a great example here. But again, the Stanford tax tool we reviewed. We like it, you know, it has great, you know, there’s great tracking with it. And again, you’ve got lots of things including FIFO work queues and tax stack integrations and extension management and all kinds of things like this. CPA that I think are particularly interesting. You know, the firms though, that I think are going to be most interested in this are going to be especially the Pro Connect ecosystem users are going to find this to be particularly interesting. But generally, I think everybody ought to at
Randy Johnston 15:19
least have a look at it. Yeah, understood. And you know, one of the things that Mary reminded us of, carbon has been around for 11 years at the point that we’re creating this podcast for you today. And they started out in the client accounting services world, and then they’ve been morphing over into tax, and they’re trying to morph over into audit. And this really was a end in tax workflow. So you’ve called out the key features, I think there, but you know, the Stanford tax extension for client organizers and then the progress reports that are available in the platform, are some of the key features that they’ve released. So I can see the promise of where this is going. And you know, Sarah Gopal, who’s the Chief Product Officer at carbon, basically says that the way most tax firms run today is broken, and we’re fixing that.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 16:14
And I will say that the Ian’s director of relationships actually lives in Knoxville, Sam ustage and I can’t seem to go to any major conference without seeing him there. Out of Knoxville, Tennessee, where we both live, because we end up sitting next to each other on the airplane. Somehow, I don’t know how that works out, but it does, but I will say that I’m quite interested to see where they go in the future with this, because I think Mary’s really honed in on something. And again, I think the carbon people have really honed in on rethinking a lot of things, and most of their thinking is very
Randy Johnston 16:54
good. Yeah. And you know, to finish what Sarah had said, she said that our newest features solve the chaos of managing extensions, reviewing returns and chasing clients, while reinforcing carbons vision of intelligence, scalable workflows for every service line. So whether you’re a tax firm or an advisory first practice, carbon gives you the platform to grow with confidence. And as we have said in other accounting technology labs, we have been monitoring the 60 plus practice management tools and the 90 plus portal products that are out there, but we see very few innovations in workflow right now. And so I was excited to see that this particular announcement, but you know,
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 17:41
I think workflow is really more migrating toward bespoke things of direct integrations with tools like Power automate, just like happened with SAP and Oracle e business suite and, you know, all the major document management systems 25 years ago in the enterprises. The difference is now you can actually do those kinds of integrations without having to spend the gross national product of India on the implementation.
Randy Johnston 18:07
Yeah. Well, I want to turn our attention here for a bit to another product that we’ve followed for a while, called makers hub. Now, Charlie Howe is the president and co founder there, and it turns out that Ted McRae, who we’ve known from another organization, is there. And there’s lots of good people over at for impact, sorry, makers hub. And you know, when I think about this particular product, we were impressed with its Accounts Payable operation, the ability to classify and split line item transactions and so forth. But what we were to evaluate this time around was their new purchase order module. So Brian, what would you want our listeners to know about makers hub.ai?
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 18:59
Well, of course, make we’ve always loved Ted’s tool maker’s hub. It’s always been one of our favorites, just because it will take invoices at line item level, not at the total for the invoice, but it will take the individual line items and classify those at a detailed level, which is quite different from most of the other platform. So
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 19:26
who’s and and receiving and invoices, and so that’s a in general, I think that’s,
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 19:40
you know, anybody can pay simple bills with a, you know, Company issued credit card, okay, you know. And there are a lot of, you know, table stakes, have, you know, there are a lot of table stakes related to invoice entry and approval things, okay, but the people that are doing things at the line level. And dealing with the hard problems like maker sub are really changing the world of payables, and I think that, and purchase orders for that matter. And I think, you know, if you’re looking for a tool, you know, if you do work with a lot of restaurants and you have the job or invoices where you have 50 lines that need to go to different things and need to all be saved so your inventory can be accurate. You know, this is a tool that will help you solve those more complex problems, and it’s one of the reasons I love makers up is because this, you know, everybody thinks that if you apply AI to something, somehow the hard problems get solved. No, they don’t Okay. And these got these guys are some people solving a lot of those really hard payables problems that really have to get solved for the automation to be trusted.
Randy Johnston 20:52
And in this particular case, with their po module, they’re supporting both item and category detail so they can match, regardless of the structure on that, and actually, you know, pay the bill across multiple POS. But even beyond that, they’re matching POS alongside the bills, so you can make sure that you’re actually paying the right amounts there. And beyond that, they have an auto calculate capability on received quantities based on the PO totals and invoice data. So even in a partial receipt situation, they can adjust the taxes for shipping and other prorations along the way. So you know this integration over into QBO, into QuickBooks today is a big deal, and typically this type of sophistication you only see in your higher end systems. But another thing that we’ve admired about makers hub is their ongoing work on integrating with multiple different platforms, and one of those is also sage, intact, generally. So again, we admire what they’ve done. Historic with AP and the PO piece steps up the game another level. Now, Brian, any other comments on makers hub?
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 22:21
I mean, I think you’re not living right if you’re trying to automate payables, and you’re not, at least considering it or looking at some of the things it does. Yeah.
Randy Johnston 22:28
So, one other product that clearly was evaluated, but I’ve been using one since before release, was the scan snap IX, 2500 from Rico. And we have also done another accounting Technology Lab on that particular product. So just a reminder that it is a fine upgrade in the scan snap line, giving the scan snap IX, 2500 comparable capabilities to their production quality, work group quality scanners, similar handling mechanisms, innovative new panel. I gotta tell you, I use the doggone thing most every day that I’m in the office, and it’s so much better than anything that I’d had up to this point.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 23:21
Well, I have to say that that, you know, Rico and before them, Fujitsu, where the RICO scanner line came from, they have the honor of being one of the product the scan stamp is so simple to use. It’s one of the products that my wife has actually expropriated from me. Okay, now, when you’re married to somebody for a long time, you want them to be successful. And so when, when I go to, you know, trade shows and other things, and come back with new things to try out or review, my wife often will look at those things, and as soon as she saw the scan, snap the one button scan for the first time. She said, I’ve got to have that okay, that scanner is going to my office. You don’t know it yet. It’s going to my office, and you’re going to order another one, and it’s going to go to my assistant at his desk. And by the way, if you need another one, then you need to buy it yourself. Okay? Because it is so easy to use. You know, now, in this world we live in, where so many documents are generated electronically, and there’s not as much paper stuff that needs to get scanned it, we need to simplify that whole scanning process. And this tool, in my judgment, has really done that, and in particular because it will work with mobile applications and it’ll work if it’s attached to a computer, and, you know, you can scan online, and so with all of those things, I think it realistically checks so many boxes for things that, again, Randy’s right. You don’t have to have a production quality scanner anymore. Or, or, again, a work group, class scanner anymore, and with remote workers, you may not have a place where everybody can share it anyway, but again, given that we have so many fewer things to scan, simplifying that process is important, and I think that’s where this really hits a home run.
Randy Johnston 25:17
Yeah, indeed, it does. Well, I wish you could have had the same experience that Brian and I did reviewing the 39 products in the 2025 tax and accounting Technology Innovation Awards. You know, there are times when, you know, we actually call the dogs and the cats, and there really were no applicants. This time around, I said they’re in the wrong room, okay, and I’ve had that in some years with some of the applicants, but this time around, most everybody had good innovation. You know, this is one of those where the old catchphrase, I wish they all could be winners. But as it turns out, I kind of think they all are. There’s certainly something to be had in everyone. So Brian, parting thoughts for our listeners this time, lot
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 26:09
of great things happening in the accounting profession today, both with independent companies, like startups like you know again, companies like carbon, like makers hub for impact data and many others out there. The thing that I think is critical is that is on your side, okay, the listener here, okay, I think the listeners need to try new things out. Okay. You need to have that R and D time to try new processes, because the broken processes are never going to fix themselves. And so again, we strongly encourage you to try out these new tools, because some of these things, some of these problems that I’ve been chasing for the 30 years of my career now are largely solved. And you know, again, I want you to see this world that we’re living in, not live in the world that you had 20 years ago when you set up your processes. Wonderful.
Randy Johnston 27:03
Well, we appreciate you listening in today, and we’ll talk to you soon in another accounting Technology Lab. Good day.
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