Cosmin Nicolaescu

Ever since I met @sidd in our early days at Stripe, I hoped we’d one day find an idea big enough to start a company together. That day is finally here. After building quietly for the past year, I’m excited to officially launch @AccrualHQ, a new foundation for professional accounting 👇

Firm Growth Forum with @AccountingToday is a wrap! It was great to see so many clients, advisors, and industry leaders all in one place this week in sunny San Diego. Very proud of the way Accrual showed up - from panel discussions, to onstage case studies with @Armanino_HQ, to dinners and nonstop conversations. The through line was clear: firms are moving past the question of whether AI will matter in accounting. They are focused on how to pilot it, evaluate quality, build trust with reviewers, and move from a controlled test to a firm-wide rollout.

First tax season at scale == tons of learnings 🤓

@AccrualHQ @Armanino_HQ The most ambitious firms aren't buying point solutions. They're rebuilding how the work gets done. 82% of Armanino users plan to expand next season. Grateful to Cody, Tim Webb, Chris Carlberg, and the entire Armanino team. Full case study and video: accrual.com/insights/arman…

What that looked like in practice: • 15 min median time to draft a return • 3 existing tools replaced with Accrual • 74% client portal acceptance (industry: 10 to 40%) • Up to 60% fewer prep hours on complex returns • Reviewers shifted from field-by-field verification to judgment and client work

🧵@AccrualHQ is building the platform accounting firms can run their AI transformation on. That's why @Armanino_HQ has been such a strong partner. As part of their Vision 2030, they set out to rethink how tax work gets done, and brought AI into production this season across six offices.

A new genre of AI benchmark keeps reaching the same verdict: "AI can't do accounting." We've read them. The problem isn't the execution. It's that they evaluate an agent in isolation, asked to produce a Form 1040 in one shot, with no review, no iteration. No preparer would work that way either. Production systems are built differently. They pair the agent with a deterministic tax engine. They give it the same context a preparer has: emails, prior-year work papers, client notes. They flag uncertainty instead of guessing. They iterate, with secondary agent reviews catching inconsistencies before a human ever opens the draft. The right question for firm leaders isn't "what does this AI score?" It's "is this designed to work the way tax preparation actually works?" Read more in our latest article in @AccountingToday accountingtoday.com/opinion/ai-can…

AI isn't a question of strategy for accounting firms anymore. It's one of execution. Great conversation @houlihanlokey 's ONE Global Conference this week about the billable hour, deployment strategy, and AI’s role in growth and service line expansion. A few things that stood out - @getCos : ➡️ AI is now a board-level execution mandate. The days of "wait and see" are gone. ➡️ Compliance is the engine. Automating compliance workflows generates the leverage. ➡️ The innovation of today is the commodity of tomorrow. Models are evolving at an incredible rate, and accounting has been historically neglected, which means abundant low-hanging fruit. Expect the floor to rise every tax season.

@samdblond Kudos to you and the team for crushing it right off the bat!

We're announcing our $50M Series B led by Benchmark. Founders Fund and Human Capital are tripling down in the round. We gave Benchmark a sneak preview of our upcoming GA release. They saw the future of sales. We had a term sheet 2 hours later. The future of sales is Monaco.

Our team is back from @BDOAlliance EVOLVE! A year ago, the question was "will AI matter for tax?" This year, nobody asked that. The questions were sharper: where does Accrual actually work, and how do we put it into a firm without breaking the things that already work? Most of our "just taking a look" conversations turned into workflow conversations within ten minutes. That tracks with where the market is. A few takeaways: ➡️ Firms aren't shopping for tools anymore. They're rethinking the whole arc, intake, prep, validation, review, as one system. Point solutions are starting to feel like the problem, not the answer. ➡️Trust is the constraint. Not speed, not UX. Accountants want traceable data, continuous validation, outputs that a preparer can sign their name to. Without that, faster is worse. ➡️Buying still happens in rooms like BDO Evolve, not on websites, not from a demo link. Every vendor is claiming AI right now, and firm leaders are sorting real from noise. The bar to earn trust is a real conversation. Usually over dinner. Thank you to everyone who stopped by our booth and joined one of our events!

Met with @FirasSozan on what you actually give up to be a founder: 🔒 Employees can leave when a company stops being right for them. Founders can't. If it's working, no one wants you to go. If it's not, no one wants to take it on. 📈 Every hire adds a notch of stress. Each person is betting their career on you, and you carry that. 🎯 Most decisions don't matter. A handful do. The job is figuring out which is which. Full episode: m.youtube.com/watch?v=9XxE7q…

Tax engines. Portals. CRM. Workflow. Billing. Time tracking. Plus the email and shared drives holding it all together. Accrual plugs into the stack you already have. Here’s how we think about integration: accrual.com/insights/how-a…

A successful AI pilot does not always translate into deployment. The gap between "this worked for the pilot group" and "this is now how thousands of people across nationwide offices prepare taxes" is where most enterprise AI initiatives stall... That's not because the technology failed, but because rolling out AI tools is genuinely novel work that demands more hands-on training, change management, and workflow redesign than most firms anticipate. We've published a step-by-step guide, which draws from practical experience successfully implementing AI tax prep across firms during the TS26 season. We're out here demystifying AI integration. Learn more at: lnkd.in/eHTCmwbe

K-1 automation isn't an extraction problem. It's a comprehension problem. You can read a K-1 perfectly and still produce the wrong return. The numbers are right, but they land in the wrong fields, flow to the wrong state calculation, and create a false sense of completeness during review. The real challenge isn't reading the document. It's knowing: → where each number belongs in the return → how state rules change that mapping → how prior-year context affects the decision That's a three-layer problem: understanding the document, planning the return, populating the worksheets. Most tools collapse all three into extraction, and that's where firms get burned. Across Accrual's client base this season, over half of all K-1s included state supplements and one in three involved PTET elections. Read more about how Accrual solves the planning problem and what firms should look for when evaluating tools. accrual.com/insights/k-1-p…

AI is reshaping the accounting profession faster than most firms are ready for. Next week at @BDOAlliance EVOLVE, our team will be on the ground talking about what AI adoption actually looks like in practice. If you're heading to Las Vegas, come find us at Booth #302. And, don't miss @getCos 's panel discussion on "AI in Tax." We'd love to connect and can't wait to see you there. #BDOEvolve

Thanks for having me, @AmirBormand!

Proud of Sidd's academia moonlighting 👏

We made a thing 👀 Insights is live — where we share how we’re rethinking accounting with AI. Perspectives, research, and what we’re building. accrual.com/insights

Required listening for accounting firms! On the latest episode of @TheUniqueCPA podcast with @RCrabtreeCPA , Accrual co-founder @getCos got into the harder questions around AI: pricing, talent, and what the profession actually looks like in five years. Listen to the full episode: randycrabtree.com/theuniquecpa/2…