E-commerce growth forces firms to rethink accruals, margins, and sustainability.

Accounting ARC

With Liz Mason, Byron Patrick, and Donny Shimamoto
Center for Accounting Transformation

Holiday shopping has never been easier. With a few taps on a smartphone, consumers can buy gifts from bed, track deliveries in real time, and return unwanted items with minimal friction. But behind that convenience lies a complicated accounting reality—one that came into sharp focus during a recent episode of Accounting ARC.

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Hosts Donny Shimamoto, CPA.CITP, CGMA; Byron Patrick, CPA.CITP; and Liz Mason, CPA, examine the financial, operational, and environmental consequences of e-commerce returns, using the holiday season as a lens to explore broader shifts in consumer behavior and business sustainability.

Industry research shows that nearly 25% of e-commerce purchases are returned after the holidays, compared with less than 9% of in-store retail purchases. For accounting teams, that disparity introduces volatility into revenue recognition, inventory valuation, and profitability forecasting—often at the worst possible time of year.

Integrated planning, not heroics, creates life-changing outcomes for clients.

Big 4 Transparency

By Dominic Piscopo, CPA

For CPA Trendlines

What happens when you fuse a CPA firm with a wealth advisory under one roof and design the operations from a blank page? In this two-guest episode of the Big 4 Transparency, host Dominic Piscopo sits down with Owen Pryor and Steve Blake, managing and senior managing advisors at Evans May Advisory, the sister firm to Evans May Wealth Advisory. Their premise is simple and radical: serve the client with unreasonable hospitality, align wealth and tax strategy, and deliver family-office convenience to high-net-worth families and growing owner-operated businesses.

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Pryor and Blake describe a system built on proactive data sharing (with client consents in place) so the firm, not the client, chases documents, coordinates advisors, and executes. The impact shows up in small, high-leverage wins (e-paying taxes and killing paper vouchers, physically banking clients’ mailed checks twice a week, fully recording receivables) and in headline outcomes (structuring a family-farm sale from an estimated $550,000 tax bill to near $0 through planning; spotting missed depreciation and back-catching via Form 3115; introducing lesser-known international strategies like ICDIS where relevant). The result is relief for clients and measurable ROI that converts conversations into scope.

Firms that wait until a partner is ready to retire have already waited too long, plus 19 more key takeaways.

The Disruptors
With Liz Farr

Erin Daiber, founder and CEO of Well Balanced Accountants, keeps seeing the same issue in firm after firm. A partner announces their intention to retire within a year or two, and the firm suddenly realizes no one is ready to take over. “Firms are not starting that conversation soon enough,” Daiber says.

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“They’re not thinking about succession planning as a strategy,” she explains. Instead of treating succession as an ongoing process, firms see it as simply the point in time when a partner exits the firm. According to Daiber, succession planning should ideally begin with hiring decisions and culture building so that firms can be confident that they won’t lose clients or staff due to uncertainty about what might happen as partners get older.

When succession planning fails, firms lose key employees before they even reach partnership consideration. “We're losing them much sooner than that, which creates a big hole in the pipeline,” Daiber notes. She identifies an inability to have difficult conversations as the root cause, particularly when dealing with founders who view the firm as their legacy.