People ask me how a tax and accounting firm ended up building AI agents. The honest answer is that it never felt like a leap. It felt like the next, most natural way to do the thing I've been doing my whole life: help businesses understand themselves and grow.
It started with a frustration
I've been in this industry since I was sixteen years old. I'm fifty-two now — that's thirty-six years of tax seasons, payroll runs, and sitting across the table from business owners trying to make sense of their numbers. Thirty-six years is long enough to see the patterns, learn what actually works, and notice what the profession keeps getting wrong.
By 2017, I'd seen enough of how the big-firm world works to know what bothered me most: the small and medium-size businesses — the ones who needed help the most — often couldn't even get a meeting. They'd get turned away because they weren't big enough, didn't have an accounting department, didn't have "departments" at all. They were doing everything themselves, usually managing the whole operation off of one number: the balance in their bank account.
That frustration is why I started Legacy SBC. I wanted to build the firm that would take the call. The one that sits down with the business owner who's just getting off the ground, helps them understand their real strengths, and is honest with them about their weaknesses so they can actually fix them.
My mom always told me I should have been a teacher. I think she was right — I just teach through accounting. To this day, the thing I tell clients more than anything else is simple: don't run your business off your bank account. Your bank balance doesn't tell you whether you're profitable, whether you can make payroll next quarter, or whether that "good month" was real. Numbers, understood properly, tell you the truth. My job is to make sure you can read them.
Building something that lasts
I ran Legacy SBC on my own for about a year before we started to grow. And we grew the best way you can grow — entirely by word of mouth. No gimmicks. Just clients who felt genuinely helped and told other people.
Today we're a team, and I'm proud of something not many firms can say: no employee has ever left Legacy SBC. We have bookkeepers and payroll staff who've been with me for the long haul. The one thing I've never handed off is the tax work — the firm carries my name, so I've always been the tax department myself.
The other thing that's stayed constant is how we treat value. We bundle services and give things away because the point is to help, not to nickel-and-dime. If we prepare your tax return, your tax planning is included — free. That's not a loss leader. That's the whole philosophy: help first, and the business takes care of itself.
I love watching a business grow. I love solving the problem nobody else could untangle. And I love that this work forces me to keep learning, because the moment you stop learning in this field, you start falling behind.
The light-bulb moment
That last part — the constant learning — is what changed everything.
Early in the AI transformation, I had the good fortune to meet an incredible business owner who ran an AI company. I got to learn from someone at the front edge of all this, and I started building AI tools to transform Legacy SBC itself — tools I built with my own hands, for my own firm, to solve the exact problems I'd been solving manually for years.
And then it hit me. This was the light-bulb moment. If these tools could give my firm this kind of leverage — more time, fewer errors, faster answers for clients — then they could do the same for other accountants and other small businesses who were stuck exactly where I'd been. The people getting turned away. The teams of one. The owners drowning in work they shouldn't have to do by hand.
I didn't want to keep that quietly to myself. Teaching it forward was the point.
What AI for Accounting is
So that's what AI for Accounting became: the same mission I started with in 2017, built for a new era.
We do it a little differently than most. Yes, we sell a product — but we also support the person who buys it. Every Friday we release a new AI agent bundle and a fresh demo of one of our existing agents, because the whole thing runs on education. We don't just hand you a tool and disappear. We stick around to help you integrate it into the system you already use. We offer what we've already built, and we'll build something specifically for you. We even teach classes so you can learn to do it yourself.
And go ahead — check our prices. We beat everyone. Not because we're cutting corners, but because the goal was never to extract the most money from you. It was to put real capability in the hands of the businesses and accountants who've been overlooked for too long.
The thread that ties it together
When I look back, Legacy SBC and AI for Accounting aren't two separate chapters. They're the same story.
A sixteen-year-old who fell in love with the work. A firm built for the people the big firms wouldn't see. A teacher at heart who believes you can't grow what you don't understand. And now, after thirty-six years in this field, a set of tools that lets me do all of that for far more people than one tax department ever could.
That's what I want you to know about these AI agents: they aren't shortcuts dreamed up by someone new to the field. They're built on thirty-six years of doing this work by hand, knowing exactly where the time goes and where the mistakes hide.
I'm still learning. I'm still solving problems. I'm still watching businesses grow — only now there are a lot more of them.
If any of that resonates with you, I'd love to have you follow along. We're just getting started.
— Yvonne
