Last week, I attended the largest accounting technology conference in North America, Scaling New Heights, in Orlando, Florida.

The show floor was packed with the latest software and services, all now claiming the newest AI tech to improve our businesses.

There are new entrants in the accounting general ledger space, and it was interesting to see them report their phenomenal efficiency gains.

Then, at the lunch tables, we all shared our experience testing these products, and the conclusions were the same.

One colleague shared how her first two months of testing were amazing, and then the third month brought a completely revised chart of accounts created by the AI.

These tools will get better. They already have. But for now, in these early stages, we’re still testing and learning.

I saw a lot of gains in the ancillary tools, like practice management software.

We have been on the same system since 2014, when I launched the company.

Now there is software that will let us actually use the frontier LLMs like Claude across our practice, within the practice management system itself.

These tools are designed to reduce software switching and to use AI to aid our work.

I’m excited that we are migrating to one of the premium tools in the space over the next two months.

Overall, we had a great time at the conference and are already planning and looking forward to next year.