Students push for networking, compensation clarity, and creativity as the path to success in a changing profession.

Accounting ARC - Student-Led Conversations
With Chayton Farlee
Center for Accounting Transformation

When Dominic Piscopo, CPA, compared his first Big 4 paycheck to his weekend bartending income, he had one reaction: disbelief. “I clocked 100 hours during busy season, and the check wasn’t much different than what I made in two nights at the bar,” he recalls.

• MORE Accounting ARC: Bootleggers, Baptists, & CPAs: Rethinking Licensure | CPA Firm Ownership Under Fire | Walking Violation: When Showing Your CPA Gets You in Trouble | Audit Bags to TikTok Tags, Gen Z Talks Success | Students Challenge Accounting's Traditional Career Path | True Grit: Recognizing Struggles That Shape Our Successes | More Admins, Fewer Students, No Plan | What Career Advice Gets Wrong for Gen Z - And How to Fix It |Your Identity is Not a Liability | What Happens in Vegas… Gets Reported on a Tax Return | Burnout, Be Gone: Accounting Needs a Boundary Breakthrough | The Ultimate Business Hack You’re Probably Ignoring |

Instead of shrugging it off, Piscopo started asking questions—lots of them. He gathered salary data from peers across firms and discovered his cohort was underpaid compared to the market. Presenting the numbers to leadership, he helped secure a raise of nearly 10 percent for his entire group.

“That was the moment I realized transparency could change the profession,” Piscopo says.

Piscopo shares the story on Accounting ARC: Student-Led Conversations, hosted by accounting student Chayton Farlee. The two explore how networking, pay transparency, and building side projects can help students and young professionals set themselves apart in an industry struggling to recruit and retain talent.

Stop reacting. Start Guiding.

Move from Historian to Navigator with an AI-powered Business GPS platform purpose-built for growing CPA firm advisory.

The traditional advisory model wasn’t built to scale-- 4impactdata changes that.

Client Advisory Services at Scale

Start delivering scalable advisory in weeks — not months — with our 5-step implementation process.

4ID is purpose-built to embed codified wisdom into your existing workflow — quickly and seamlessly. With our proven 5-step approach, your team can confidently move from insight to action without complexity or disruption.

Advisory Beyond Dashboards.
Built for What Comes Next.

• Old School: Dashboards report what happened.
• New School: We scale your advisory with recommendations.

This stealthy tax rule could hit clients starting in 2026.

Quick Tax Tip
With Art Werner
CPE Today

Every tax bill hides a few surprises, and the OBBB is no exception. According to tax guru Art Werner, one of those surprises could wallop high earners through the quiet return of the PEASE limitation.

• Click here for more Art Werner

In the newest episode of Quick Tax Tip, he breaks down this often-overlooked provision, its history, and what it could mean for your clients.

Mindset shifts, gut instincts, and the right mentors matter most when starting your own firm.

The Disruptors
With Liz Farr

Making the shift from employee to entrepreneur isn’t always easy, as Questian Telka, founder of ReQoncile Financials and co-host of the She Counts podcast, discovered. Besides the obvious pieces of getting business licenses and opening a business bank account, Telka believes it’s essential to keep your reason for starting your business – your why – firmly in focus.

“If I lose sight of that why, then I am continually getting away from what it is that I enjoy about it, why I’m doing it in the first place,” she explains.

For Telka, her why centered around “having a little bit more freedom and flexibility to spend time with family, being able to take on my ideal clients.” Without the centering influence of a strong why, entrepreneurs may risk working with clients who don’t fit their ideal client profile.

Besides a firm focus on your Why, the shift from employee to entrepreneur requires a complete mental overhaul. “It’s a huge mindset shift, being an employee versus running your own practice, in your own firm, because everything stops with you,” Telka says.

Stop reacting. Start Guiding.

Move from Historian to Navigator with an AI-powered Business GPS platform purpose-built for growing CPA firm advisory.

The traditional advisory model wasn’t built to scale-- 4impactdata changes that.

Client Advisory Services at Scale

Start delivering scalable advisory in weeks — not months — with our 5-step implementation process.

4ID is purpose-built to embed codified wisdom into your existing workflow — quickly and seamlessly. With our proven 5-step approach, your team can confidently move from insight to action without complexity or disruption.

Advisory Beyond Dashboards.
Built for What Comes Next.

• Old School: Dashboards report what happened.
• New School: We scale your advisory with recommendations.

Stop reacting. Start Guiding.

Move from Historian to Navigator with an AI-powered Business GPS platform purpose-built for growing CPA firm advisory.

The traditional advisory model wasn’t built to scale-- 4impactdata changes that.

Client Advisory Services at Scale

Start delivering scalable advisory in weeks — not months — with our 5-step implementation process.

4ID is purpose-built to embed codified wisdom into your existing workflow — quickly and seamlessly. With our proven 5-step approach, your team can confidently move from insight to action without complexity or disruption.

Advisory Beyond Dashboards.
Built for What Comes Next.

• Old School: Dashboards report what happened.
• New School: We scale your advisory with recommendations.
  
  

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Trust outlasts spreadsheets.

By Rory Henry CFP®, BFA™

For CPA Trendlines

Like CPAs, financial planners have long been associated with numbers people. They’re highly trained to use mathematics to address a client’s risk tolerance, goals, time horizons, and a magic “retirement number.” But George Kinder, founder of the Kinder Institute of Life Planning, argues that most practitioners are overlooking the most obvious skill needed to be a successful advisor: listening.

• MORE Rory Henry and The Holistic Guide to Wealth Management
• BUY the Holistic Guide to Wealth Management

“Too many advisors take the math-first approach,” Kinder says. “Instead, they should be doing deep listening and building trust with clients to help them construct their ideal life. Only when that’s established should the math and money decisions be introduced."

Often called the “father of financial life planning,” Kinder is no touchy-feely guru. He began his career as a traditional tax preparer in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Harvard-trained math and economics student viewed the IRS code as a puzzle to master—one that required both precision and creativity. Over time, he realized that the most rewarding part of the work wasn’t solving the tax code but forming personal connections with clients.

“When a client comes in, they typically think their biggest obstacle is money,” Kinder relates. “But in many cases, they’re their own biggest obstacle.”

Kinder believes practitioners can uncover a client’s true priorities with three simple but powerful questions.

Zoomers expect clarity, equity, and purpose—and they’re not afraid to walk if firms don’t deliver.

Accounting Influencers

With Rob Brown

By 2025, one in 10 managers will be from Generation Z. That’s right—the so-called “lazy, entitled” group born between 1997 and 2012 is already leading teams in accounting firms. But instead of wrecking the workplace, Gen Z might be exactly what the profession needs to survive its crossroads.

• MORE Accounting Influencers with Rob Brown

On Accounting Influencers, host Rob Brown explores the rise of Gen Z and what their entry into the accounting workforce means for leaders, firms, and the profession at large.