Turning More Time into Top Line Growth
With Cosmin Nicolaescu
Support for this episode comes from BILL. Simplify your workflows and accelerate your growth with BILL’s accountant console. Take a demo today at BILL.com/UniqueCPA for a $250 gift card – terms apply.
In part two of their conversation on Episode 259 of The Unique CPA, Randy and Cosmin Nicolaescu, co-founder of Accrual, get into the harder questions: What happens to pricing when a hundred-hour return takes ten? What do junior accountants actually need to learn if AI handles the data entry? Which firms are quietly positioning themselves to win the next decade, while others stall on change management? Cosmin makes a pragmatic case that early adopters will capture a real arbitrage window before the market reprices, and that the firms who use that window to build advisory capacity rather than just cut costs are the ones who come out ahead. The conversation covers review workflows, glass-box versus black-box AI why organic growth in accounting has been so hard to achieve, and what might finally change that.
Show Transcript Hide Transcript
So you’ve simplified the process, you’ve made it user friendly. We keep saying user friendly, but we’ve made it user friendly now. They’re a lot more happy coming in. And now once that data’s come in the portal, I assume part of, you know, we just said, you know, if you have a complex return that’s taken a hundred hours, it could take as little as 10 hours now. So what is that next step then, once that data’s coming in the portal, are you automatically then populating the tax return? And I know I’m simplifying that, but where are we eliminating this accounting time, accountant time?
Yes. So we take all that data from all these documents. We extract information with very, very high accuracy. We draft a return for you with all the worksheets you would normally see in your tax engine, so very familiar to you, with citations for every single field. So you can go back these access to the document where that was picked up, or you can see exactly the formula that was used and explanations from the agent and why it did what it did. That process takes minutes to be able to do. We then give you signals on, hey, here are areas based on this return that you should kind of keep track of, and potentially follow up on. And they could either be missing information, we still don’t have certain things, conflicting information, they could be complex situations that are more nuanced. And so you, the agent might take a particular action, but you should probably follow up on that because it might be reasonable if you have more context to do something different.
And so again, our, our view is like, if I think about the way reviews were being asked, so typically to take a step back, and most folks in your audience are probably very familiar, but you typically have three stages. You have the gathering stage, the preparation stage, and the review stage in this workflow. And so we talked about the gathering stage: preparation, again, a very efficient agent mechanism to draft returns, and so let’s talk about review stage. In the review stage, most firms would tell you that the way they review it is they get it from a junior person or someone outsourced. Then they go, first pass that they do is they go field by field to make sure that the data was extracted correctly, because OCR technology is generally not very reliable. So they will do that. They will go and take a bunch of things that are not automatically extracted because technology doesn’t give them that and kind of go and do the work manually. That’s kind of arguably part of preparation, but a lot of times it’s done by the reviewer, based on what the preparer has done. And then they kind of go worksheet by worksheet and kind of make sure that everything’s right. They manually go and look at last year’s return to understand the differences from last year to to this year. And they, they again try to kind of do QA and ensure it’s as good as possible. They have multiple levels of people, right? Like you have, you might have another, their reviews and kind of this peer reviews, you might have a senior manager that does it, then you have a partner that reviews it.
And we said, okay, just like in the preparation phase where we basically automate the, like 90 plus percent of the work in, in the preparation flow, what is the equivalent of like in the review flow? Because clearly there’s value in reviewing and, and applying human judgment. That’s where we believe humans should spend time on. We said, okay, well, OCR level issues shouldn’t exist. We should extract data and information correctly. We shouldn’t have to have people that have to go through every single document because we can build better tooling, but that’s not going to drive massive efficiency. Number two is we should give them signals on where they should go spend their time on. It’s very hard when you have hundreds of documents and a return as a result has hundreds of worksheets to know where to look. And obviously over time you’ve built intuition that you kind of know what to do that, but a very common tool is to go look at last year’s, what has changed from last year, because clearly same as last year is, is, is a very common technique. And so we build that in the platform. Like as we draft a return, you’ll get a two year comparison and you’ll see. Like the difference for each category, you’ll see an explanation to the difference and you can kind of see like, okay, there’s a big swing there, let me go understand that. Maybe it’s readable, but maybe it’s not.
And the third, again, these follow-up items that the agent is giving you based on the kind of experience that it has in terms of kind of complexity or identifying things in the documents that were provided and the information that was provided. And so we’ve taken out their viewpoints and said, hey, here’s if you’re going to spend time reviewing things, these are the ones that are most likely the highest actionable items there. And so that’s kind of how we go about that. And the next stage is going to be in the future to say, okay, what are opportunities? So it’s not just issues that we find that are kind of correcting, what are opportunities that you can talk to your customer? And there can be in the tax season, it can be beyond the tax season, but it’s kind of the same, the same view of, of helping them with forwards-looking thing. Again, my whole idea is like I want to move from backwards-looking mechanical stuff to forwards-looking kind of strategic, time spent and so trying to constantly just nudge in that direction.
Yeah, and that’s a good point to kind of transition to another thing I was thinking about because you know, and you’ve said it, hey, we want to be forward thinking, we want to be looking, we want to be advising, we want to be having impact on this tax return rather than just reporting what happened last year, what’s having a positive impact on what happened before the end of the year so we can make a difference. But we also just talked about the fact that we’re going to automate a lot of this front end tax preparation. What does that do to the accounting, like new people coming into the profession? Because to get to that advisory standpoint, we have to have some base set of knowledge first. And so what do you think’s going to happen? Or is there a way you see that accelerating these new people straight into the advisory type work?
Yeah, I think, as I kinda mentioned earlier. I very much agree that in order to gain the kind of “street experience,” quote unquote, in this space, you need to kind of learn, on the job and, learn from people who have been doing it for a really long time and seeing real situations, kind of just doing stuff based on what in a course is not sufficient. At the same time, I think people are smart and pick up things much faster than years and potentially a good decade. And so to me it’s like how do I kind of accelerate that to, to kind of help folks ramp up much quicker? And I think there’s a few things there.
Number one is a lot of the tools out there today in this space feel very black box-ish where you enter some information, some documents, some whatever, and then it kind of spits out some Excel spreadsheets, or some other, kind of like artifacts, and it’s very hard to go and understand the, like, why and what happened. And so what we do is we tell people like, you can’t use that tool, you go from those input documents and by hand come up with the output documents so that you kind of learn how to do it yourself. Instead, what we’re doing with Accrual is like, well, why don’t we just show how, what the work is being done? How can we be as much of a glass box instead of a black box into the process, into the insights to, to kind of help? How do we kind of provide the experience where you can interact with the system and ask it questions: Why did you do this? And what was the situation? Have you thought about this decision?
For folks that kind of use any kind of AI tools, like if you go in like try GPT or Cloud or Gemini, any of these tools you can ask and learn about any domain. Like one of my favorite things to do is like, I have voicemail on my phone and I open it up and I’m like, let’s talk about some random topic and like. We just debate and learn. And then, yeah, obviously these models have infinite knowledge. Like every piece of information out there that is public is ingested. And so you can literally learn about, and you can have it tell you history, you can learn about any kind of subject that you want. Accounting is no exception to that. And what we’ve done is to say, not only you can learn the theory of accounting ’cause that you already have, but you can go now in each situation that for these complex clients that you’re working with your partner and really understand how it’s done without you having to just manually do data entry. The skill you’re learning is not the data, I know that you know how to transcribe a number from one document to another. What is important to understand is like why you’re transcribing a document, why you’re summing these two things, why you’re taking a certain kind of treatment. That I think is a valuable thing, it’s not the transcribing itself. So I think that’s number one.
And then the second piece is how do we kind of create the workflows for those folks to kind of level, like I mentioned, like. Learning how something is done and kind of seeing it transparently is one way to do it. But we have a few ideas of how we can kind of build some of these like, LND modules into the platform, more natively to, to help accelerate that. I think what that does is it gives a competitive advantage to firms that are using Accrual that are not like today, struggling potentially to hire. Because when I was talking to accounting firm owners who are not in the Big Four, or not even in the Top 20, let’s say, they really struggled to hire because they’re like, well, if you graduate with a CPA degree, again, fewer people, that’s well known, but they will want to go work at the largest firm possible. They’ll want to work at a Big Four, if not a Big Four. Again, Top 10, top 20. And so if you are the like 50th firm on those, which is by the way still doing over a hundred million dollars of revenue a year, it’s like quite substantial, it’s not like a mom and pop shop. They’re really struggling to hire. So you can imagine what the 200th company on the list or 500th company on the list feels like, not to mention the long tail of the rest of the 50,000 firms in the country.
And the reason why they want to go to a Big Four is like, hey, I’m going to get the logo, I’m going to get the experience. Obviously they have interesting scenarios, and then that experience allows me to go maybe in-house or maybe to another smaller accounting firm, but I have a kind of more prestigious logo on that. And if you talk to them, it’s like, well, why would you go to like, again, just say the 50th firm on the list? They’re like, well, they don’t have the same brand. I still kind of do the same miserable work, and so again, if all the work is equal, might as well get the logo. And I think that’s again, very rational. And so we’re trying to find ways in which we can kind of provide differentiation for these firms, for their employees, for their new hires, for their clients, and kind of help grow the business and help increase the pie overall for each firm and in the industry more broadly, and kind of create the situation where it’s like everybody’s much happier. Like I don’t think partners necessarily enjoy seeing new grads just be miserable and doing data entry, but they just think that’s necessary. Clearly, the new grads that you talk to are miserable ’cause they don’t enjoy the data entry, but they feel like there’s no other choice. So it’s like everybody’s in kind of this lose-lose situation right now that they’re unhappy, and we’re trying to completely flip that and say like, how do we just create more of these situations where everybody seems to gain.
Accountants deserve tools that work as hard as they do. With BILL’s Accountant Console, automate bill pay and use AI-powered AR to get clients paid twice as fast so your team can focus on what truly matters: Exceptional client service. Take a demo at BILL.com/UniqueCPA for a $250 gift card. Terms apply.
That makes sense. I think forever we’ve thought that this training process is a lot longer than it really has to be. And I think it’s just, you said it before, kind of same as last year. We’re a SALY profession, it is a, hey, we’ve always done it this way, so it has to be done this way, you’ve always taken 15 years to become partner, so you have to take 15 years, you have to do five years of data entry, you have to do whatever. And I think we just have to change the mindset of how we’re looking at the hiring process and the training process. And I think AI is going to obviously give us a lot more opportunities than we even know right now.
And again, I want to transition a little more because this is a concern I have: AI is great, and automating everything we can, I think is great. One of my biggest concerns is, how are firms going to react to that? Are firms going to say, okay, well now it didn’t take me a hundred hours, it took me 10 hours, so how can I charge the same thing I was charging when it was a hundred hour of my personal time tax return? And my fear is that we’re going to start maybe potentially commoditizing tax preparation when in reality the knowledge base is still there and all the advisory, the important stuff is still there. Do you see that as a potential problem, or do you think we’re going to be able to overcome that and realize what our true value is and still be charging what we’re worth rather than the inputs there, than the hours we put in, charging on the output, what we deliver?
I think accounting and generally professional services, most professional services are really relationship businesses. Most people, myself included, have worked with their accountants for many, many years, unless the accountant is horrible or is retired or something like that. I’m sure you have clients that you’ve worked with probably decades throughout your career. There’s that level of trust and kind of relationship being built there. And so when I look at relationships in general, I think about, do I feel like this is a good relationship or not a good relationship? And there’s, depending on the type of relationship, there’s obviously different situations. If I think about professional relationships and partnerships and those sort of kind of like business structures, you generally think of like, hey, do I feel like I’m getting a good, do I think I’m getting, or what cost I’m putting in, whether it’s my time, monetary value, whatever, am I getting a good return on that, and vice versa. And then the best situations are where both people feel that they’re kind of winning. Then the other like, you feel that like I’m getting a good deal, and maybe you’re not, I feel that you might not be getting as good of a deal, and you vice versa think I’m getting a really good deal, and so on. And so those are the optimal situations. If I think about pragmatically tax in particular, I could not care less how many hours my accountant spends time doing my return. It does not impact me.
I agree.
I care how much time I’m spending doing the return, and I want that to be as close as possible to zero. The accountant themselves, I think, looks at two things: One is, where am I spending time and do I enjoy spending time, again going back to the previous conversation, data entry, I don’t enjoy spending time on as an accountant, of any level, but it’s necessary today. And number two is, okay, now that I’ve, let’s assume that I changed that and now I’m enjoying what I’m spending time, I’m doing more things that are kind of forward looking, I’m doing more things that are more value-added, I’m spending time with a large number of customers and growing my business—any of those things—do I feel that the compensation that comes out of it is worthwhile for me? Part of that you can control by making sure you have differentiated services and part of that you are pardoning the market and whatever the labor market and kind of competitive pressure exists is what you have to do. So I would say that’s kind of at a high level how I think about the situation.
Number two, generally, prices in industries are set by the largest players in that industry. Like if I come in, it is not sustainable for me as a new entrant, for example, to kind of change pricing radically, because I don’t have kind of distribution power, and so on and so forth. If I think about the largest firms, they’re also the ones that are slowest to change. They might have the most resources, and I see Big Four firms all spending billions of dollars on AI and modernizing it, but ultimately we’ll see how fast they can actually move to roll those out and have the right level of effect. If I think about AI more broadly outside of accounting, the tools are exceptional today already. Yet the impact in the kind of enterprise business space has been not what investors have expected, like they would want to see more impact based on what the tools could do, but the reality is like, deploy those tools, change management, adoption, etc., those are hard problems. It’s not just a technical problem. So I think Big Four firms have the same challenges. It’s like even if you’re able to kind of invest those billions of dollars and build really good tools, that change management aspect takes time.
And so if I think about what is the economic impact of automating some of this work, I think it will take some time to actually trickle throughout the entire industry, all the way from the top to the bottom, which means early adopters I think have an advantage. Because I think you get an arbitrage opportunity like any other market where you are able to do things much more efficiently, and the market is still pricing at the old prices and you gain that arbitrage. You can decide to give up some of the arbitrage to acquire new businesses, if you want to, but you have an advantage because your clients are not going to say, well, I’m going to leave ’cause someone is doing cheaper, because the prices haven’t changed. I think again, at some point I do think you’ll see price compression on things that are automated in a large amount. But I think the level of automation also matters, like in practice, if we think about taxes for simple cases, the kind of taxes that H&R Block does, and TurboTax, they’ve mostly been on, like the level of automation they’re at compared to an ultra high net worth individual is kind of on polar opposites. And so there’s already been some automation we can see that has kind of created some price pressure to do a tax return on HR Block or TurboTax, a few hundred dollars to do my taxes with any kind of like Top 50 firm is thousands of dollars or tens of thousands of dollars. So very different order of magnitude. I think you will start seeing some normalization there as well over time.
But I think that is the tactical way to look at pricing, which is today I’m doing taxes and I’m able to charge per hour because it takes me 50 hours to do, and over time, those 50 hours, now let’s say they’re five hours and I want to charge 50 hours. That’s not going to work. It might work in that arbitrage opportunity period of time, right? But like, certainly, every economic principle will tell you that will not be sustainable. So what I would look for instead is my client had no idea or didn’t care that I was spending 50 hours on that return. That was kind of the situation, and now if all I do is spend five hours on that return and give them the same service, I will not be able to charge them the same because other firms will be able to say, hey, I’ll do it for much, much cheaper. And so what you need to do as the accountant working with that client is how do I bring services that match that value that I was providing. So if a client was paying for 50 hours, even if it takes me now five hours, how do I make up for those other 45 hours such that they get that sort of value? And now it’s not an hourly thing because, if I think about my accountant, if I was getting kind of like financial planning advice, that probably won’t take him the same amount of hours as kind of that preparation. So let’s use a 50 hour analogy. It’s not going to take him 45 hours of financial planning to do. But the value of those hours, each hour that he spent is much higher. So instead of charging, I’ll say $100 for a tax prep hour, he can charge probably $500 for a financial planning hour. And so now with a small number of hours, the value of those hours increases. And that’s how I look, whether it’s serving individuals, whether it’s serving businesses, for these accounting firms, is how do you actually spend that extra capacity that you will get thanks to Accrual and kind of technology more broadly, to grow your firm?
I think that is the biggest problem in this industry is I think growth is primarily coming through M&A instead of organic growth that you normally would see in a healthy kind of industry. There are two ways to kind of grow businesses. You acquire more customers and serve more customers, or you provide new services. Both are valid and there’s probably not an either or. There’s probably some mix and combination depending on your business, and that’s what we’re trying to do with Accrual, like helping grow that top line because everybody knows the bottom line and kind of efficiency will get influenced significantly over the next few years. We’re seeing it at Accrual by like an order of magnitude already, and we’re in our first year. And so we will see those kind of gains across everything that we build and increasingly so as what we build and the underlying technology gets even better. No firm that I talk to wants to get rid of accountants. They all want more accountants. Again, outsourcing I think is different, people look at it differently, and I’m actually, as an American, I’m actually quite happy to see more work coming back to the U.S. But no, I have yet to meet one firm that’s like, yeah, I would love to get rid of CPAs.
PE firms, I think, have a different view. Like if you talk to a PE firm, they’re quite excited about, maybe I can just RIF half the CPAs and kind of gain efficiency. But that’s not, I don’t think that’s a prevalent view, and certainly not the view that accountants and accounting firm owners have. So for me, the exciting thing is, and has been from the beginning, I think I told you this when we first met, when we first chatted at AICPA, is I have no doubt that I will improve the bottom line of all the firms that use Accrual by order of magnitude. What I want to prove, and I think the challenging thing is, can I actually improve top line? Can I actually get organic growth to be much higher? Can I actually increase margin significantly by kind of helping grow the business now by reducing costs alone? I want that to be the heart of it, that I think is the hardest thing in this space, rather than can I just automate some work and get some gains there.
Nope. I think that’s replacing these $100 hour roles with $500 per hour roles, and the perceived value, and that’s a big thing with value too: The perceived value that a client has with what they’re receiving is often different from the value the accountant thinks they’re delivering. And it’s just a matter of, you know, lining those up. And by doing this, what we’re doing is we’re replacing those lower paid hours with higher paid hours, and we’re doing what clients want. This is a stat that’s probably four or five years old in my head, but I think the numbers are something like 73% of taxpayers would pay more for this advisory, for this, you know, “having an impact on my tax return.” And only 27% of accountants were doing that advisory. And so the clients want it already. The clients want to pay for it, they want to pay you more for this, and most accountants just don’t have the time and effort. All of a sudden now they’re going to have that time available to do it. So I believe in your thesis, that you can grow top line, I think that is doable. I’m very excited to see where that goes.
So with that being said, there’s going to be change in this profession. It’s obvious. If somebody’s not changing, they’re going to be left behind, there’s no doubt about it. So people have to lean into this, people have to embrace what’s going on. And so from that standpoint, from what you see, what’s going on, from the impact that you are having, and other companies out there, what do you see happening? Where do you see the next five to 10 years looking like in accounting, or what are the top performing accounting firms going to do differently five to 10 years from now? And who are those that are going to be left behind because of that, I guess?
Yeah, I mean, I’ll start off by saying I think it is extremely hard to predict in any industry what the next five to 10 years is going to be, given the pace of AI and how quickly things are changing. Like, even for us, as a technology company, there’s so much innovation and things change so quickly, and we’re fortunate enough to have experience to be able to react to it, but it’s very hard to break. Like, if I ask some people, they will say that we’ll have AGI and infinite abundance of resources, and no one will have a job anymore, that’s kind of one view, in which case accounting itself is probably not the primary focus as a society. And if you talk to other people, they’ll basically say this is a fad, and these tools are basically overvalued and we’re spending way too much money on that. And so I’ll try to take a more pragmatic approach and answer that question. In the next several years, call it up to five years rather than five to 10, how do I think it will change, assuming kind of the current trajectory that we’re on. So I’m not going to assume that we’ve discovered AGI and have this abundance of resources, and kind of, within the next five years, I also will assume that what I’m experiencing with these tools in terms of kind of what I’m able to do in productivity will be at least the same if not continuing to increase. And so I don’t think it’s a fad. So kind of the in the middle approach.
What I think will happen is actually threefold. I think you’ll have some firms that will be left behind. We primarily spend time with the kind of largest firms in the US, like $100 million or more, top 50, top 100 firms. Obviously I meet with firm owners of all sizes. I think there is general desire to modernize, but I think translating that desire into action is much harder than it looks. I meet with firm owners and CEOs of very large firms that would want to do technology, but when it comes to actually deploying it, they don’t know how to operationalize it. I meet some that say they want to build everything in-house, even though they’re not a technology company. I think those will fail, because just like if I were to build an accounting firm from scratch, I would not be able to compete with the Big Four, or any real accounting firm at large scale. I think it’s really hard to kind of become excellent at something that is not your domain. So I think those companies will probably be left behind. The ability to catch up is really hard, ’cause you’re working on a clock cycle that typically has two deadlines a year, right? Like April and October, or March and September. Deployment takes a long time, change management takes a long time. So if you miss the boat in like one season, it takes you quite a long time to catch up. So that would be prediction number one is some of these large firms will actually be left behind, and that kind of goes exponential as well in terms of downsides.
Number two, I do think you’ll see organic growth, as per our previous conversation, because some of these early adopters, and firms that are able to deploy technology in a smart way, they will start making use of those hours. The first thing they’ll do is do the same thing, but for more customers, so they’ll start spending time on customer acquisition. The second will be that they’ll start thinking about like, how do I go deeper with some of my clients and kind of increase the per hour rate kind of mechanism in terms of financial planning assistance, other services, etc. I think those are non-controversial. I think anybody that you talk to that believes technology will have an impact can kind of give you those.
The third, and I think the most interesting aspect is, going back to “accounting is a relationship business,” the most valuable things that you have other than the people in the firm are your relationships with your clients. Those relationships are very deep. And if I think now on the business side, accounting firms help businesses of all shapes and sizes across the country in various technology aspects, right? Like you help them not just with like outsourced financials, like CFO kind of services and bookkeeping, but they help with implementation of different technologies and so on and so forth. I think there will be a shape of that work in the AI space where these businesses, like if I think about a construction company in the middle of the United States, they’re not going to afford McKinsey to go in and advise them on how to deploy AI inside their business. They can’t afford it, they don’t even know about it. Not that I think McKinsey is particularly exceptional at this. But I think they can actually get their accounting firm to help them with that. In order for that to happen, I think the accounting firm has to build credibility. They have to be able to say, hey, I’ve done it inside my firm, I’m doing good with other clients, I can help you apply AI in your business, in your industry, in your segment specifically. And I think that will be a huge revenue stream. And I think the set of advisory services that we offer today are going to look very different to the set of advisory services that we offer in the future.
I agree. It’s an exciting time. It’s exciting to see the impact that you’re having on the profession in just a year and a half, and the firms that you’re working with already. And so I’m excited to see what the next year, year and a half, five to 10 years, although I’ll be 64 years old in 10 years, so we’ll see. Or 74 years old in 10 years! So we’ll see how active I am at that point.
I hope you’ll still be deeply involved in helping us out.
Well, that’s my plan. I want to be involved in this profession as long as I can, but with not taking too much time away from my family. So that’s the balance that I’ve got to work on. We’re going to have to wrap up. This has been great. I want to end with two final questions. One is, we just talked about the amazing things that you’re doing and Accrual’s doing, and the future of accounting and what we see happening. But when you’re not thinking about the accounting profession and how you’re having an impact, what are the fun things you get to do or you enjoy doing?
I always think about this in the back of my head, there’s always a thread going on. I, similar to you, like to spend time with my family. I have a three and a half year old. We have a dog and we’re going to Legoland this weekend in San Diego since it’s her spring break, it’s her first time, and so spending time on that. My wife and I love traveling, hiking, I love sailing. I picked that up when I was in San Francisco, really enjoyed that. So yeah, some of the things, but accounting is always kind of in the back of my mind, the mind never stops.
I think I’m kind of at that point right now too, you know, how can I continue to have a positive impact on this profession, is always running through my head. But it’s fun. It’s fun for sure. And then lastly, if people want to hear more about, see more about what Accrual’s doing or hear about what you’re personally doing, where’s good places they can look?
They can go to Accrual.com and they can see the product and there’s a contact form as well. They can email me, Cosmin@Accrual.com. They can go on LinkedIn and message me there, any and all of these work really well.
Nice. Well, Cos, I appreciate you being on here. This was fun and very educational for me. I always like hearing what’s going on, so thanks for being on The Unique CPA.
Thanks for having me, and thanks for being part of the Accrual journey with us.
Thank you.
About the Guest
Cosmin Nicolaescu is the CEO and co-founder of Accrual, an AI-powered accounting platform built to automate complex workflows and help firms scale high-quality tax and assurance work. Before founding Accrual, he was CTO at Brex, where he helped scale the company from 40 to over a thousand employees, and before that an early engineer and manager at Stripe, where he worked on global payments infrastructure and launched Stripe Terminal. Those experiences shaped his conviction that accounting teams are most valuable as strategic partners to the business rather than reactive back-office functions, the founding thesis behind Accrual, which he built alongside co-founder and CTO Siddarth Chandrasekaran. He is based in Los Angeles.
Meet the Host
Randy Crabtree, co-founder and partner of Tri-Merit Specialty Tax Professionals, is a widely followed author, lecturer and podcast host for the accounting profession. Since 2019, he has hosted the The Unique CPA podcast, which ranks among the world’s 5% most popular programs (Source: Listen Notes). You can find articles from Randy in Accounting Today’s “Voices” column and the AICPA Tax Advisor, and he is a regular presenter at conferences and virtual training events hosted by CPAmerica, Prime Global, Leading Edge Alliance (LEA), Allinial Global and several state CPA societies. Randy also provides continuing professional education to Top 100 CPA firms across the country.