A Note from Our Founder

After hearing firm leaders say they should be doing more with AI, Financial Cents co-founder and CEO Shahram Zarshenas looked at what nearly 500 accounting and bookkeeping professionals are actually doing, and why firms shouldn’t mistake AI noise for falling behind.

I could have opened this letter with some astronomical, unfathomable number to catch your attention. Something about how many billions of dollars are pouring into AI or how many hours it’s going to save you over the course of your lifetime.

I could have droned on and on about how unrecognizable the accounting profession will be by 2030 or pontificated about how much of today’s work will be rendered obsolete.

But you’re probably tired of all that sensational chatter and the overblown math that goes along with it. I know I am.

So, I’m taking a different tack.

Over the past year, nearly every tech-focused conversation I’ve had with accounting firm leaders has eventually found its way to AI. What strikes me, though, isn’t what accounting professionals have to say on this topic. It’s how they say it.

There’s a certain tone blanketing their words—one that straddles the line of guilt and exhaustion, like a student who’s already behind on homework they haven’t even been assigned yet.

I’ve heard some version of that sentence dozens of times, from dozens of people who are exceptionally good at their jobs. People running healthy firms with loyal client bases. People who have hired great teams and built their firms with care and intention. Yet somehow, the AI conversation has convinced them they’re failing at something.

That bothered me, because in my eyes, they were thriving—successful by virtually every measure. Naturally, I wanted to know: is this profession really that behind, or has the AI “hype machine” simply tricked them into believing they are?

So, a few weeks ago, we surveyed nearly 500 bookkeeping and accounting professionals across North America to find out how they’re actually using AI. Not what they plan or aspire to do, but what’s really happening with this technology inside their firms today. We turned their responses into our recently published State of AI in Bookkeeping & Accounting Report, and they’re also the foundation of this latest issue of Two Cents Magazine by Financial Cents.

The TL;DR? Almost everyone in this space has at least tried using AI (mostly in the form of general tools like Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini). But very few have gotten any measurable value out of it.

Contrary to what you might assume, this lack of clear ROI isn’t due to skepticism, fear, or resistance to change. Instead, it all comes down to time (specifically, not having enough of it). 

At face value, it might sound like a convenient excuse. But any firm owner with a bloated email inbox (which is most of them) can attest to the overload of AI information they are bombarded with on a daily basis. Another webinar here. Another certification there. Another course, another conference track, another tool with a prompt box in the corner and a blinking cursor begging for attention.

It’s a lot of noise. And the majority of it assumes the problem is that you haven’t learned enough. But the actual problem is that your week is full and your mental bandwidth is tapped out.

On a more positive note, the report also revealed something very encouraging. When we asked what matters most in this work, particularly in light of AI, the answer came back nearly unanimous: professional judgment and strong client relationships. In other words, the human side of accounting.

The question, then, isn’t necessarily, “How can I leverage AI more?” Instead, it’s, “What is eating up the time I could spend interacting with my clients, and how can I get rid of it in the least disruptive way possible?”

With that in mind, here’s where we stand on the whole AI conversation at Financial Cents:

Now, full disclosure: we build AI at Financial Cents. I’m not a neutral observer here, and I’m not going to pretend to be.

That’s actually part of why Two Cents exists. Financial Cents powers its publication, but you won’t find a product tour anywhere in these pages. Instead, in this AI-themed issue of Two Cents, you’ll find:

• An unbiased breakdown of what nearly 500 of your peers had to say about AI
• Honest accounts from firm owners, ops leaders, admin managers, accountants, and bookkeepers who are actively testing and adopting various AI tools
• Advice and observations from the industry’s top AI voices

Some of them disagree with each other, and that’s okay. Despite what some of the headlines might have you believe, we are still in the messy middle of AI, with plenty of conflicting perspectives on what is the right way forward.

Our goal with this issue is to give space to all of them—to paint a complete, multi-dimensional picture of where we are and where we might go, while making it abundantly clear that no one has all the AI answers.

And if you take one thing from this issue, I hope it’s this: you are not behind.

The most important thing is that you’re paying attention, keeping an open mind, and remaining flexible. But the folks featured in this issue make that case better than I ever could, so I’ll let you get to it.