The Accounting Firm of the Future Is Already Taking Shape

Matt: Welcome to another instalment of Accounting Industry Insights with Mark and Matt. Today it’s our pleasure to have Trent McLaren with us. Trent is the co-founder of Vinyl, an AI meeting companion built for accountants and bookkeepers, and a recognised authority in accounting technology with more than 12 years’ experience. He has worked with fintech leaders including Ignition, Intuit QuickBooks and TOA Global, guiding go-to-market strategies and communities. Trent also runs Journey, a growth consultancy and media studio for accounting-focused SaaS firms, and co-founded The Firm, a peer-led platform sharing practical insights through podcasts, blogs and events. His mission is simple: helping accountants work smarter and build stronger client relationships. Trent, thanks for joining us.

Trent: Thanks for having me. That’s a mouthful! It’s good to be here. I love talking about anything in accounting and tech, but more importantly, how we build better relationships and everything that’s evolving in the profession.

Matt: You’re right at the tip of the spear in terms of what’s happening in the evolution of the accounting industry, so I’ve been looking forward to this episode. We all took part recently in the Crunch Benchmarking Report. One of the things I found fascinating was that the top firms aren’t necessarily billing more hours, they’re generating significantly more per hour. From what you’re seeing, what are they doing differently?

Trent: I was reading back through the report before today. I think people want better work-life balance and they want to charge more because they don’t want to keep working long hours without feeling they’re getting the value that should come with that. They’re also looking for better ways to support clients and move further into advisory. We’ve talked about that for years, but I think firms are more motivated than ever to price properly. A lot of people in the industry are thinking about retiring in the next five to ten years. If they want to improve the value of the firm, there needs to be value for someone to buy in the first place. They’re starting to apply some of the same succession advice they’ve been giving clients for years. When you look at the age profile of partners, many are now at the point where these questions are becoming much more immediate.

Mark: That timing seems to be speeding up too. With a lot of firms we’re working with, what might have been a five-year horizon can suddenly look more like two years. Technology is pushing things forward, compliance requirements are changing, and some older practitioners are asking whether they really want to go through another round of major change.

Trent: Exactly. We’ve had AML, Payday Super coming through and then AI on top of it. It was already noisy last year and this year it has exploded. Some practitioners are looking at 30 or 40 years of change, from paper to desktop, cloud, bank feeds, hosted systems and now AI, and saying, ‘Do I really want another five years of this?’ There are exciting opportunities, but for someone already thinking about retirement, it can also accelerate the decision to step away earlier.

Matt: For younger people in the profession, that could create opportunities sooner than expected. You need to think about the firm you want to own in the future, whether you want to acquire one and build quickly, or build something yourself without some of the legacy issues that can come with an existing firm. There’s also more government oversight and more perceived personal risk for firm owners. Does security remain the biggest roadblock to firms really diving into AI?

Trent: Security is one of them, but change management is still a major issue too. The move to cloud didn’t happen overnight. AI is still relatively early. Year one was everyone writing poems in pirate language in ChatGPT. Year two we started building little apps and experimenting. Now it’s beginning to take shape inside particular industries. In software, AI coding is already changing how teams work, but there’s still hesitation and the bottleneck just moves somewhere else. Accounting hasn’t yet seen the biggest changes AI will bring. A very small group of accountants are doing genuinely impressive things with it, but broadly it’s not yet commercially and globally scalable in the way it will become. Over the next year or so we’ll see more tools where you can simply sign up, connect your accounts and have the system start doing a defined job.

Matt: That feels a lot like the move to cloud. Another part of the challenge is clients. Some are completely comfortable with AI and others are nowhere near ready, so firms need to move forward while still bringing clients with them.

Trent: Absolutely. And security is the question I get asked every day: can I trust it, is it safe, what should I worry about? We heard exactly the same questions when firms moved to cloud. You still need to do your due diligence. Whether that’s your IT person, a security officer or an external specialist, get a professional view of what good security looks like. But I wouldn’t want security concerns to become the reason you do nothing, because you can get into a safe environment and start doing useful things very quickly.

Mark: The fundamentals still matter too. I was at an event with some NVIDIA people recently and asked what they were finding most interesting. Their answer was that people need an even stronger grounding in the fundamentals of their job, because that’s the only way they can recognise when AI has made an error. If you don’t understand what you do properly, you can’t validate the output.

Trent: That’s exactly it. If I understand accounting concepts thoroughly, I know what I’m asking AI to do and I can judge whether it has done a good job. The same applies to the next generation coming through. They still need the foundations and theory behind the work. I see it in AI coding too. If I don’t understand what’s happening under the hood, I can only judge what I see on the front end. AI can sometimes take the long way around and still get to the right outcome, just like a team member might. Implementing AI isn’t completely different from training a person. You still need good foundations, clear instructions and a way to review the work.

Matt: One interesting finding in the Crunch report was that daily AI usage was actually higher among some lower-performing firms than top-performing firms. I wondered whether that was because they were trying to build capacity quickly rather than taking the right steps around training.

Trent: Security standards and IT policies can explain some of that too. In a mid-tier or top 100 firm, people are often limited to approved tools. In a smaller boutique firm that’s all-in on tech, there can be all sorts of shadow tools being used. I’ve run AI training with both types of firms and the reaction can be completely different. In some firms the ‘wow’ moments are huge because people have barely seen what’s possible. In others, the team is already experimenting constantly. The way technology is implemented, the firm’s policies and the leadership around it all influence adoption.

Matt: So is there an element of slowing down to speed up? Do the work on security and strategy first, then get clearer on the right use cases, rather than just playing with whatever comes along?

Trent: Yes, although some people need to play before they understand what’s possible. I’ve seen firms create AI councils that meet monthly to share best practice. That tells me there’s a strategy and an intention behind what they’re doing. The distinction is whether you have a plan and a vision or whether you’re just trying tactics. Playing is fine, but you need to know what you’re trying to learn or achieve. Seeing what the tools can do often sparks the ideas that lead to a proper strategy.

Matt: What have you been building lately, either in Vinyl or outside it?

Trent: A mix of things. With Vinyl we get asked about phone-call capture a lot, so I wanted to understand how difficult that would be technically. I built a prototype in a couple of hours with a phone number, recorded a call, transcribed it and filed it where I wanted it. Another example was a friend in the UK who had spent £6,000 on a new website that was going to take eight to twelve weeks. I said, ‘I reckon I can build you one in seven days.’ About ten hours later I had a 25-page custom site published and already getting SEO traffic. That became a little side project called 7 Day Website. The bigger point is what AI is doing to the economics of work that used to require designers, copywriters and developers. The same kind of disruption can happen in accounting. If you’re a business owner, you have to ask what happens to the work people are doing manually today and what those team members transition into.

Matt: That connects with the talent shortage too. I’m not sure we can keep calling it a shortage. It may simply be the new reality. Firms still need skilled people who can have important conversations, but they also need to work out how the rest of the work gets done efficiently. Some work will become commoditised, and owners will have choices between technology and a person sitting in a seat. The challenge is not going so far that you stop developing people who can eventually step into senior roles and perhaps own the firm.

Trent: We’re already seeing what the next stage could look like. I can call a restaurant now and speak to an AI receptionist that can change my booking. You could imagine the accounting version: an AI receptionist takes a message, triages it, searches the practice management system or inbox and gives the client the information they need. That sort of technology is already working well in live chat. At Vinyl, around half of our support tickets can be resolved by AI, with strong satisfaction ratings. We still have a person there, but the system makes the support function far more scalable. I get a lot of ideas by looking at what other industries are doing and asking how that applies to accounting. Why couldn’t an accounting firm have live chat, email and phone support that works in the same way? I can see that becoming very normal over the next few years.

Matt: That way of thinking is also relevant to advisory. You can look at a good operator in one industry, understand what they’re doing well, and apply the logic to another client. Just because something has always been done a certain way doesn’t mean it has to stay that way.

Mark: The secret to advisory is to do it once and supply it to many, not do it once and then rebuild it from scratch every time. Compliance has always worked like that. Once you build a system, the numbers and dates change but the process is repeatable. Advisory needs more of that same thinking, and AI can help. One of the biggest frustrations clients consistently report with accounting firms is responsiveness. They leave a message and don’t hear back for days, or they don’t get updates. IT businesses often do this very well. You contact them, a ticket is created, you know who it has been allocated to and what the expected timing is. That’s client service 101. We can’t hide behind being too busy or not having enough staff forever. How can accounting firms learn from that?

Trent: A ticketing system is a big part of it. You need a clear control point for communication, whether that’s email, live chat, phone or a combination. The customer service blueprint needs to be mapped out and thought through. At Vinyl we use a knowledge base with articles covering the common questions people ask. Firms can do the same thing. Look back at the last 20 client conversations and ask, ‘What are the ten questions everyone asks us?’ Those answers can become knowledge-base articles, support content or even marketing content. Then AI can use that material to respond quickly and consistently. These systems aren’t just for technology businesses. Any firm can use them to improve the client relationship. And the hard part, which used to be getting all that content created, is now much easier with AI.

Mark: The cornerstone is still the client. We’re dealing with people. Anything that creates a better experience, stronger relationship and better responsiveness is worth looking at.

Trent: When I think about advisory, a lot of the work isn’t the conversation itself. It’s the analysis and preparation before and after. You might normally spend an hour or two pulling the file, reviewing the last meeting, checking milestones or scorecards. I can systemise a lot of that now. AI can look at the emails, numbers, data and whatever methodology or framework the firm uses, then apply that consistently across 50 or 100 clients. It can follow the playbook like a very good junior team member. Then the accountant can still turn up to the meeting as a human talking to another human who needs advice. That’s where the benefit is. Use technology to improve the preparation and process so you have better time with the client when they need you most.

Mark: Coming back to the Crunch report, one of the things we noticed was that the top-performing firms had an average hourly rate of around $260 compared with about $194 for lower-performing firms. How much of that comes down to pricing, the right clients, the right service mix and simply having confidence in passing on overheads and billing for value?

Trent: It depends on the firm. A small firm working from home has very different overheads from a team of 50 or 100. A firm using offshore teams or strong AI processes may also have a different cost base. So I find it difficult to compare hourly rates without knowing whether we’re talking about a small or large firm, regional or metro, and what the operating model looks like. The better question is: are you happy with the price and are you making a good margin on your time? If not, fix it. If you are, you can still ask whether there’s room to improve. Larger firms will continue to put prices up because their cost base keeps moving. And accountants should be helping clients think about their own pricing too. If a client hasn’t increased prices for three, four or five years, in real terms they’ve gone backwards.

Matt: That’s one of the conversations accountants can have when a client pushes back on a fee increase. You can explain that you’re trying to run a good business and your costs are increasing, then hold the mirror up and ask when they last reviewed their own prices. If they’re feeling a cash flow pinch, pricing may be part of the reason.

Mark: Price is probably one of the simplest and most valuable advisory services in the playbook. Helping a client understand the relationship between volume and price can have a direct impact on profitability, cash flow and business value.

Matt: One Vinyl feature I wanted to touch on is Revenue Opportunities. Pricing advisory work is something Mark and I get asked about a lot, and part of the gap we see between firms is that a lot of valuable information is still given away for free because people aren’t sure how to price it. Can you explain how Revenue Opportunities works?

Trent: It sounds simple, but it’s a powerful feature. Vinyl listens to the meeting, records and analyses it, then looks for revenue opportunities based on the conversation. We don’t need to know the firm’s entire service catalogue first. From what was said, the system can identify potential opportunities from an accountant or bookkeeper perspective, give each one a confidence score and urgency rating, and estimate a fee structure. The results have been really interesting, especially with existing clients. One UK firm uncovered £60,000 worth of opportunities in its first two weeks. In one example, a team member had a routine client meeting and the client mentioned in passing that their bookkeeper was going on maternity leave. The team member moved on because it wasn’t the focus of the meeting. Later, the partner reviewed the Revenue Opportunities report, spotted that comment and called the client to say, ‘We can actually help you with that.’ That’s what I love about it. The AI is doing the analysis, but it’s creating more human touchpoints. It gives you a reason to pick up the phone and talk to the client.

Matt: And for firms unsure what to charge for advisory, even using a tool like that as a sense check can be useful. You might look at the suggested fee and think it’s right, too low or too high, but at least it forces you to think about the value and have the conversation.

Matt: I also found Vinyl’s notes much more detailed for accounting than generic meeting recorders because the accounting logic sits behind them.

Trent: We’ve programmed hundreds of pieces of accounting terminology and local language into the system for Australia, New Zealand and the other major markets we operate in. That includes terms like Division 7A, ATO and HMRC, as well as product names that generic transcription tools often get wrong. We aim to produce the notes and transcript very quickly after the meeting, with accounting-specific corrections built in. We’re continuing to improve that with features like a glossary for names and other firm-specific terminology.

Matt: Trent, thanks for sharing your time and insights. Vinyl is also supporting our Fearless Leadership Program on the Gold Coast, which we really appreciate. Mark, how many places do we have left?

Mark: Only four at the moment. We’ve had a really good response to the first Fearless Leadership Program, or Young Guns Part Two as some people know it. There are only four places left within the capacity we have, so if you’re thinking about joining us, now is the time to get in. And thank you to Trent and Vinyl for supporting the program.

Matt: The program is on the Gold Coast on 29 and 30 October. I’d also encourage everyone to have a look at the Crunch Benchmarking Report and check out Vinyl. Trent, thanks again for joining us.

Trent: Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.