Accounting education has traditionally prepared students for careers in audit, tax, and large organizations. Those paths remain important, but they do not represent the full range of opportunities available to today’s accounting professionals.
Small businesses need people who can manage day-to-day financial operations, use modern cloud platforms, solve incomplete and messy accounting problems, and communicate directly with owners. Firms also need professionals who understand how artificial intelligence can make routine work more efficient without weakening accuracy, judgment, or client trust.
This creates a growing divide between what students may learn in a traditional classroom and what many employers and clients expect them to do.
Brittany Brown has experienced that divide from several sides. She is a CPA, firm owner, entrepreneur, and professor at Utah Valley University. After beginning her career in audit, she created a remote accounting firm to gain greater flexibility and ultimately grew the business into a multimillion-dollar Client Accounting Services practice.
Brown joined Universal Accounting Center President Roger Knecht on the Building the Premier Accounting Firm podcast to discuss how academia, AI, and CAS are reshaping the profession. Their conversation makes one point especially clear: future-ready accountants need more than theoretical knowledge. They need experience applying accounting principles, modern technology, critical thinking, and communication to the real problems businesses face.
The Profession Has Expanded Beyond Tax and Audit
For decades, accounting students have often been guided toward two highly visible career tracks: tax and audit. Meanwhile, the internal financial work required to run a small business has received less attention in many academic programs.
That work includes:
- Bookkeeping and transaction management
- Accounts payable and receivable
- Payroll coordination
- Sales-tax administration
- Inventory accounting
- Month-end close
- Management reporting
- Cash-flow forecasting
- Controller services
- CFO and strategic advisory
Together, these responsibilities form the foundation of Client Accounting Services, commonly called CAS. In this model, an accounting firm functions as an outsourced or fractional accounting department for its clients.
Brown describes CAS as a comprehensive relationship rather than a single isolated service. A firm may support the client from daily transaction processing through controller-level reporting and forward-looking CFO guidance.
For a small-business owner, the appeal is clear. Instead of coordinating several unrelated vendors, the owner receives an integrated financial function from a team that understands the company.
For accounting professionals, CAS can create recurring revenue, deeper client relationships, and a natural path from compliance and recordkeeping into higher-value advisory services.
Knecht emphasizes the “advisory” dimension of the model. Accurate books remain essential, but clients increasingly need professionals who can help them interpret the numbers and make better decisions.
Practical Skill Is Different From Academic Knowledge
A graduate may understand accounting theory and still feel unprepared to process payroll, manage a bank feed, resolve a messy reconciliation, or explain a cash-flow problem to a business owner.
This is not necessarily a failure of the student. It reflects a curriculum designed around different priorities.
Brown argues that the profession needs more application-based learning. Students should encounter realistic situations in which information is incomplete, transactions are inconsistent, and the answer is not clearly signposted at the end of a textbook chapter.
Real clients do not always provide clean records. They may mix personal and business transactions, forget to send statements, classify items incorrectly, or misunderstand what an accountant needs. Professionals must learn to identify what is missing, ask useful questions, and “dig through the noise” to reach a supportable conclusion.
That problem-solving ability is difficult to develop through lectures alone.
Universal Accounting Center was founded in 1979 in response to a similar gap. Founder Allen Bostrom recognized that classroom instruction did not always prepare accounting students to perform the work businesses expected. UAC developed practical, career-focused training designed to help people become confident and competent in real accounting responsibilities.
That mission remains relevant as the tools and service models continue to change.
Simulated Client Work Can Bridge the Gap
Brown’s work at Utah Valley University offers an example of how accounting education can become more practical. While developing a QuickBooks course with fellow educators and an advisory board of firm owners, she helped create a simulated CAS experience.
Students manage several months of accounting activity for a fictional business. They work with bank feeds, accounts receivable, accounts payable, reconciliations, and closing procedures. The scenarios intentionally contain ambiguity and imperfect information.
That messiness is part of the lesson.
Students are not simply learning where to click in a software platform. They are learning how to think through a business process, connect transactions to accounting principles, recognize irregularities, and decide what additional information is required.
An effective simulation can teach students to:
- Follow a complete monthly workflow
- Recognize the relationship among accounting functions
- Investigate rather than guess
- Document decisions
- Communicate questions clearly
- Check whether the result is reasonable
- Use technology without surrendering judgment
These are precisely the skills small accounting firms need from new professionals.
UAC takes a similarly practical approach through self-paced video instruction, exercises, and academic coaching. Its Professional Bookkeeper program helps students develop the skills needed to perform bookkeeping work for real clients, while the Professional Tax Preparer program provides a foundation for serving individual and business taxpayers.
The purpose is not simply to recognize accounting concepts. It is to use them confidently.
Niching Makes Expertise More Valuable
Brown’s experience building a CAS firm also demonstrates the value of specialization. Her firm grew by focusing on e-commerce, an industry with complicated sales-tax, inventory, platform, and transaction-volume challenges.
Those complications create a barrier to entry. A generalist may need to learn a new business model on every engagement. A specialist develops repeatable knowledge, systems, technology, pricing, and language for a particular market.
Specialization can improve:
- The accuracy of scoping and pricing
- Marketing relevance
- Sales confidence
- Employee training
- Workflow consistency
- Service quality
- Team efficiency
- Profitability
It can also reduce the emotional cost of constant context switching. Employees who move repeatedly among unrelated industries must learn new terminology, revenue models, risks, and software environments. A focused niche allows the team to build deeper mastery.
The trade-off is marketing. A firm that says no to most general prospects needs a dependable way to attract enough clients from its chosen industry. Brown’s experience shows that niching and marketing must develop together.
This is where technical expertise alone is insufficient. Firm owners must know how to define an ideal client, articulate a specialized value proposition, build referral channels, and create a repeatable sales process.
UAC’s turnkey business training and marketing coaching help professionals address this side of firm ownership. Students learn not only how to provide an accounting service, but also how to position, market, and sell that service to the people who need it.
AI Should Follow Understanding, Not Replace It
Artificial intelligence is accelerating the need for practical education. It can draft communications, transform data, generate upload files, summarize information, and assist with analysis. Used well, it can dramatically reduce the time required for repetitive work.
Brown offers a useful teaching approach: require students to complete a process manually enough times to understand it, then introduce AI as an efficiency tool.
For example, students might enter several invoices themselves to learn the workflow and required fields. Once they understand the process, they can use AI to help create a bulk-upload file for the remaining transactions.
The sequence matters. Without underlying knowledge, the student may not recognize a missing field, incorrect format, or unreasonable output. With that foundation, AI becomes an accelerator.
Brown described applying the same principle during a QuickBooks conversion. She used ChatGPT to help reconcile several years of financial information, reducing what could have been hours of manual work to roughly 30 minutes.
The broader habit is to examine each workflow and ask: “Could AI help speed up part of this process?”
Accounting firms might use AI to assist with:
- Formatting or transforming data
- Preparing bulk-import files
- Drafting standard client communications
- Documenting procedures
- Identifying items for human review
- Summarizing nonconfidential information
- Generating questions for analysis
- Creating first drafts of explanations
Every use should remain subject to the firm’s security policies, confidentiality requirements, and human review. Efficiency is valuable only when the final work remains accurate and responsible.
AI Is Increasing the Pressure on Commodity Services
Technology has steadily reduced the time required for many accounting tasks. Artificial intelligence is likely to accelerate that trend.
As data entry, categorization, and basic reporting become more automated, clients may expect faster service and lower prices for work they perceive as routine. Firms will need to respond in one of two ways: become exceptionally efficient at standardized services or add value that cannot be reduced to transaction processing.
Most successful firms will likely do both.
Efficiency allows a team to support more clients without increasing hours at the same rate. Advisory services allow the firm to create value through interpretation, accountability, specialized knowledge, and human judgment.
AI itself can analyze financial statements and suggest potential actions. Therefore, simply producing an automated observation will not be enough. The human advisor must provide a better experience than the client can obtain alone.
That may include:
- Understanding the owner’s goals and concerns
- Distinguishing an important trend from irrelevant noise
- Applying industry-specific knowledge
- Challenging an assumption respectfully
- Helping the client choose among competing priorities
- Turning recommendations into an action plan
- Following up and maintaining accountability
The future accountant is not valuable merely because they have access to information. They are valuable because they help the client use it.
UAC’s Profit & Growth Expert program helps accounting professionals make this transition. The program prepares students to use financial information in CFO and advisory engagements, helping business owners improve profitability and plan for growth. As foundational work becomes more automated, these forward-looking skills become increasingly important.
The Human Relationship Remains a Competitive Advantage
AI may be able to produce an answer, but many business owners will still need a trusted person to help them evaluate and implement it.
Owners are busy. They may not have the time, interest, or confidence to build their own accounting workflows around new technology. When an integration fails, a transaction is unusual, or the business faces a difficult decision, they will look for a professional who understands the context.
This creates an opportunity for accounting firms to become more human as their technology becomes more capable.
Time saved through automation can be redirected toward:
- More frequent client conversations
- Proactive financial reviews
- Cash-flow and profitability planning
- Clearer explanations
- Faster identification of risks
- Accountability for agreed actions
- Stronger long-term relationships
Technology should reduce the administrative distance between accountants and clients, not increase it.
Firms Must Invest in the People They Already Have
AI also changes the staffing question. Growth has traditionally required hiring more people to process more work. Increasingly, firms may be able to expand capacity by helping existing employees use better tools and workflows.
The objective is not to demand twice as much work in the same number of hours. It is to remove unnecessary manual effort so employees can spend more time on review, problem-solving, communication, and advisory tasks.
That requires training. Teams must learn:
- How the underlying accounting process works
- Which AI tools are approved
- What information can be used safely
- How to write clear instructions
- How to test and verify outputs
- When human judgment is required
- How recovered capacity should be used
Managers must also create an environment in which employees can experiment responsibly and report mistakes or limitations without hiding them.
Continuous learning will become a core professional skill. The tools will change, but adaptable professionals will be able to evaluate them and apply sound accounting principles within new workflows.
Academia and Industry Must Learn From Each Other
Brown argues that accounting education should help lead the profession rather than always following years behind it. That requires ongoing collaboration with the firms and business owners using new service models and technology.
Educators bring expertise in principles, learning, and critical thinking. Practitioners bring current workflows, client expectations, software, and operational problems. Students benefit when both perspectives shape the curriculum.
Advisory boards, internships, simulated client engagements, practitioner-led courses, and frequent curriculum reviews can narrow the divide. Firms can also contribute by explaining the skills they need instead of simply complaining that graduates are unprepared.
Alternative and continuing education providers have an important role as well. Many UAC students already hold degrees but seek practical skills they did not develop through traditional coursework. Others enter the profession from different backgrounds and need a focused path into bookkeeping, tax, or advisory work.
UAC’s self-paced programs allow students to develop those skills while balancing employment, family, and other responsibilities. Academic coaches provide support through the material, while business and marketing coaching helps aspiring firm owners apply their knowledge in the market.
Prepare for the Accounting Career That Is Emerging
The accounting profession is not disappearing. It is changing where people create value.
Routine work will become faster and more automated. CAS teams will provide a broader range of outsourced financial functions. Advisory services will require professionals to translate accurate information into decisions. Industry specialization will help firms build deeper expertise and repeatable systems. Human relationships will remain essential when clients need context, judgment, and accountability.
As Brittany Brown explained during her conversation with UAC President Roger Knecht on Building the Premier Accounting Firm, education must prepare people for that reality. Students need practical accounting experience, exposure to current technology, and opportunities to solve the imperfect problems they will encounter with actual clients.
Universal Accounting Center has pursued that mission since 1979. Through the Professional Bookkeeper, Professional Tax Preparer, and Profit & Growth Expert programs, UAC helps professionals develop skills across the complete client relationship—from maintaining reliable records to preparing taxes and providing forward-looking advisory services.
To learn how UAC can help you prepare for a changing profession or build a modern accounting firm, explore Universal Accounting Center’s programs or call 435-344-2060 to speak with the UAC team.
The future will belong to professionals who understand the accounting, know how to use the technology, and can help clients make sense of both.
