Marc Howard - Firmlever

A torn invoice scrawled over with pencil and overstamped in blue ink illustrates that the deliverable is not the product clients are buying.

Pricing

Your Clients Don't Want a Tax Return. They Want to Sleep Again.

The firms winning right now stopped selling deliverables. They sell the problem going away, and the future on the other side of it.

AI and Accounting

The FirmLever Weekly Roundup: Issue #54

The Pricing with AI Edition

Torn handwritten ledger pages with a blue circle highlighting routine line items, illustrating where small firms find real AI productivity gains.

AI in Accounting

The 2026 AI Moves Small Firms Are Actually Making Money With

Forget the keynote demos. Here's what partners at $500K to $5M firms are actually doing with AI right now to claw back hours and protect margin.

A torn invoice fragment circled aggressively in blue ink, illustrating the under-quoted fee a nervous firm sends instead of its confident price.

Pricing

The Quiet Math Behind Fee Confidence

Most firm owners don't have a pricing problem. They have a confidence problem. Here's the math that fixes both.

The FirmLever Weekly Roundup: Issue #53

The "Talent Crunch" Edition

The FirmLever Weekly Roundup: Issue #52

The One-Year Anniversary Edition

Weekly Roundup

The FirmLever Weekly Roundup: Issue #51

The "Is My Firm Viable In 3 Years?" Edition

Claude, QuickBooks, and Xero logos collaged across torn ledger pages, with one platform circled in blue ink to mark where Anthropic's finance agents land first.

AI and Accounting

Anthropic Just Built An Agent For Month-End Close. My Reaction.

Anthropic shipped ten finance agents this week, including a month-end closer and a statement auditor. I called a member firm to talk through it. The takeaway isn't what most CPAs think.

An unbalanced scale with a single oversized figure outweighing a tray of smaller figures, illustrating how one dominant client distorts an accounting firm's value.

Operations

Accounting Firm Client Concentration Risk: The Three Thresholds That Decide Your Multiple

Client concentration is the single biggest reason buyers chop a firm's valuation. Three thresholds decide whether your book trades at a premium or a discount.

Wealth

600 advisors complained about CPA referrals. The CPAs answered them.

A BlackRock director's post pulled 75 comments, mostly from CPAs explaining why RIA referral relationships break. None of them named the third path that quietly erases the whole problem.

Weekly Roundup

The FirmLever Weekly Roundup: Issue #50

The 'It's Time to Fix My Pricing' Edition.

A water-stained invoice dripping under a brass tap with one line circled in blue, illustrating revenue quietly leaking through unnoticed underpricing.

Pricing

The Underpricing Trap: How to Spot It and How to Fix It Before Year-End

Most firms aren't underpricing because they're bad at math. They're underpricing because they can't see the signals. Here's how to spot them and how to actually move fees.