01/05/2026
I was on the No Accounting for Tech podcast with Aaron Patrick for AccountingWEB at Finance, Accounting & Bookkeeping Show… and it was a really interesting conversation.
If you’re running a firm right now, or even just trying to stay on top of your numbers, you’ve probably noticed how much noise there is around software.
A lot of “AI this” and “AI that”. Most of it sounds great… until you actually try and use it.
One of the things I said on the podcast was how interesting it is to see audit starting to shift.
Caseware is doing some really interesting things on that side. Proper data analytics, AI looking at disclosures, flagging anomalies. It’s the first time in a while audit tech has made me stop and pay attention.
I also talked about how ChatGPT was the first tool I used. I find it’s a great support tool for communication. I’m a numbers person, writing isn’t naturally my thing, so having something that helps me structure and draft things properly has made a big difference. It means clients get clearer, more thought-through responses instead of rushed replies.
Fireflies.ai came up as well. A lot of our audits are remote, and we need to keep a clear record of conversations, email trails and decisions. Having meeting transcripts and recordings captured properly without relying on notes makes the whole process much more robust. It also means nothing gets missed, which matters more than people realise.
We also touched on tools like Apron with William pulling documents out of email chains. Clients have invoices everywhere, so anything that reduces the back-and-forth speeds things up for everyone involved.
Even improvements to things like QuickBooks bank feeds are making a difference day to day, which is easy to overlook but adds up quickly.
We kept coming back to the same thing… it’s not about one big piece of software changing everything. It’s the smaller improvements that add up to make things clearer, quicker and easier to manage.
I’m really interested to see how all the softwares develop over the next year, especially if the focus stays on tools that genuinely make things easier for firms and their clients.
