CPA Trendlines Podcasts

Accounting firms may offer flexibility, but outdated expectations and missed opportunities can still push experienced professionals out the door.

The Disruptors
With Liz Farr
For CPA Trendlines

Accounting firms have spent years worrying about the front end of the talent pipeline. Bonnie Buol Ruszczyk wants them to look at the other end as well. 

Ruszczyk, owner and research lead of the Accounting MOVE Project, led this year's MOVE report, Caught in the Middle: How Caregiving Pressures Are Reshaping Women's Careers in Public Accounting. This new report examines what happens when experienced professionals take on care for children, aging parents, spouses and partners, and whether their firms keep them on the path to leadership. 

Firms “tend to be pretty much 50:50 gender parity up until you get to the senior director, almost going to go into partnership,” Ruszczyk says. At MOVE firms, women hold about 42% of partner roles. Across all U.S. firms, that ratio drops to around 34%. For women of color, the drop is even sharper. According to Ruszczyk, about 20% of associates are women of color while only 5% of partners are.   

Caregiving isn't the only cause for the disparity, but it is “one of the areas where we’re seeing some leaks spring up,” Ruszczyk explains. While caregiving has always been a part of the lives of accountants – men and women – several converging trends are making this a bigger issue today.

Technical expertise earns credibility, but the ability to delegate, build trust, and guide people through uncertainty determines how far a business can grow. Full show notes here

Accounting Voices
With Rob Brown

An accounting firm’s biggest bottleneck may sit at the top.

The leader who reviews every return, answers every technical question, and makes every consequential decision can appear indispensable. But that dependence raises a difficult question: Who is building the business while its leader is busy checking the work?

MORE Accounting Voices with Rob Brown | MORE CPA Trendlines Streaming Network

In this episode of Accounting Voices, insights from conversations with nearly 50 influential voices in the profession highlight a pressing leadership challenge: Technical excellence is the starting point. Leading an enterprise requires a broader set of skills.

The episode calls this tension the “Competency Collision.” The expertise that helps accountants advance does not, by itself, prepare them to build adaptable organizations, develop future leaders, or make difficult decisions about what comes next.

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Overlooked client requests and undocumented know-how can distort pricing, strain teams, and limit advisory growth.

It's Not Just the Numbers
With Penny Breslin and Damien Greathead
For CPA Trendlines

Most accounting firm owners could tell you their billable hours down to the decimal. Far fewer could tell you where the other 25% to 30% of their team's time goes.

Jeanne Hardy, CEO and founder of the practice management platform Levvy and the CAS firm Creative Business, joins Damien Greathead and Penny Breslin on It's Not Just the Numbers to explain why that invisible work is the real barrier standing between most firms and a healthy advisory practice, and what she built to fix it.

Hardy has lived this problem from both sides. She has run a CAS firm for 20 years and built software to solve the gaps she kept hitting inside her own practice. That dual perspective runs through the whole conversation.

Recurring revenue, client boundaries, and an entrepreneurial mindset helps shape a career around family.

Accounting Conversations
With Chayton Farlee
Center for Accounting Transformation

Caitlynn Eldridge, CPA, is not trying to win a revenue contest. She is building an accounting practice that leaves room for the rest of her life.

The mother of five describes a business with an intentionally manageable workload: 55 tax returns in the season she discusses, an employee handling bookkeeping and sales taxes, and a schedule she puts at 10 to 15 hours a week. She knows those choices may look modest alongside the growth stories filling social media. For her, they represent a deliberate definition of success.

“This is purposeful. This is intentional,” Eldridge says.

On Accounting Conversations, she joins host Chayton Farlee to discuss how an accounting career can accommodate changing priorities, why students need to hear more than the public accounting pitch, and what entrepreneurship can offer professionals who want greater control over their work.

“This isn’t a flash in the pan. This is an actual structural change in the profession.”

Big 4 Transparency
By Dominic Piscopo, CPA
For CPA Trendlines

Private equity in public accounting is often reduced to a caricature - buy, cut, flip.

Tim Brackney, CEO of Springline Advisory, says that framing misses what many accounting investments are actually trying to do: fund a growth thesis built around expanded capabilities, talent development, and modernized service delivery. Springline, backed by Trinity Hunt Partners, is a “buy-and-build” platform that has completed nine deals across CPA and advisory firms as it works toward becoming a national and eventually global firm with “all of the capabilities inside our four walls that our clients will need.”

Brackney’s path to the CEO seat isn’t the “serial PE operator” stereotype. He started at PwC as an auditor, then moved into advisory and BPO work, and later spent two decades at Resources Global Professionals (RGP), a publicly traded Deloitte spin-out, ultimately serving as president and COO. He describes an 18-month mutual diligence process with Trinity Hunt, emphasizing that the goal wasn’t a quick arbitrage play, it was building an enduring firm, potentially by bringing in future investors over time rather than forcing a rapid exit.

A key early lesson, Brackney says, was that 2023 still required “Private Equity 101” education for many sellers.

Burnout pushed him to rethink growth, rebuild his processes, and make room for a better life.

The Disruptors
With Liz Farr
For CPA Trendlines

 When Nick Boscia joined his father's accounting firm in 2013, it was like stepping back in time.

“When I joined, we were still using like the green ledger sheets,” he recalls. “I started in 2013, and it was like it was 1980.” Today, Boscia is known as the Balanced CPA and is co-owner, with his brother Joe, of Boscia and Boscia PC, the firm their father founded in 1975.

Working for his father was difficult. 

“He didn't really value going on vacations or taking time off,” Boscia recalls. Adopting new technology was out of the question. 

“I’ve been doing this for 40 years, and it works, so we’re not changing things,” his father would say. But when Boscia and his brother took over, things changed dramatically.

“My dad was like, we’re not making changes,” he recalls. “I’m like, I want to change everything.”

In just a few years, Nick and Joe transformed a legacy, paper-based practice serving 700 clients into a modern firm that, at its peak, served 1,800 clients.

Leaders reveal a widening gap between adopting new capabilities and building firms that can use them effectively.

Accounting Voices
With Rob Brown

A firm buys powerful technology, announces ambitious growth plans, and asks an already stretched team to deliver more. The tools change. The way the business operates barely moves.

Accounting Voices explores the strain inside that scenario. Drawing on reflections from 48 firm leaders, consultants, media professionals, technology experts, and other industry voices, it examines what their observations reveal about accounting’s direction.

Nontechnical teams can use AI-built scripts to automate repetitive work, reclaim valuable time, and turn an accounting firm’s operational problem into a marketable product.

It's Not Just the Numbers
With Penny Breslin and Damien Greathead
For CPA Trendlines

Most accounting firms talk about AI automation in the future tense. They're waiting for the right tool, the right vendor, or the right moment to start using it seriously.

Trent Yesberg didn't wait. As director of Regional Business Services in Townsville, Australia, he started asking Claude and ChatGPT to write scripts that run his firm's internal workflows directly, with no ongoing subscription or per-task cost attached.

What began as a way to save his own team a few hours a week turned into Twine Biller, a tool now used by other firms to fix one of accounting's quietest profit leaks: subscription rebilling that slips through the cracks month after month.

His approach cuts against a common assumption, that AI automation in a firm has to mean either building an entire internal platform from scratch or renting one from a big software vendor. There is a middle path, and Yesberg has been living in it for the better part of a year.

Building an accounting tool with AI is only the beginning of making it useful, secure, and sustainable.

Innovation Insights
With Donny Shimamoto and Byron Patrick
Center for Accounting Transformation

An accountant builds a dashboard that pulls information from several systems. A proposal generator turns service selections into a polished PDF. A homemade utility eliminates a tedious step in the monthly close.

Then comes the question that changes everything: How do I let my team use it?

In this episode of Innovation Insights, Donny Shimamoto and Byron Patrick explore the distance between a promising personal tool and software an accounting team can depend on.

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AI makes building easier, they say, but sharing, securing, supporting, and maintaining what you build requires a different level of preparation.

For accountants eager to experiment with AI agents and “vibe coding” — using natural-language instructions to have AI generate code — the conversation offers both encouragement and a reality check.

Leaders must align everyday decisions with the flexibility, innovation, and growth they promise employees.

MOVE Like This
With Bonnie Buol Ruszczyk
For CPA Trendlines Research

In this episode of MOVE Like This, Bonnie Buol Ruszczyk sits down with Kassi Rushing, strategist and speaker with Kassi Rushing Consulting, to explore what future-ready accounting firms need from their people strategies, and why culture, caregiving, leadership development, and business performance are increasingly difficult to separate.

Rushing, who has spent 20 years working in and with the accounting profession, says firms have made significant progress in recognizing people as a critical business asset. But understanding that people matter and creating an environment where they can do their best work are two different things, particularly as firms navigate AI, changing workforce expectations, and significant demographic shifts. 

One example came from a firm that added a simple question to its employee survey: How many employees identify as caregivers? Leadership expected some but was surprised to learn that more than half of its professionals did. Many weren't simply caring for children; they were simultaneously helping aging parents, stepparents, siblings, or others. The finding prompted the firm to reconsider everything from when it scheduled social events to whether its benefits, training, and leave programs actually reflected employees' lives.

For Rushing, the lesson is simple: firms can't support people they haven't taken the time to understand.