Five accountants. Five questions. One launch happening today. Friday May 15 · Noon Central · Live demo + bundle drop

This week I've been talking with accountants, bookkeepers, fractional CFOs, and firm partners about AI agents. Some are people I've worked with for years. Some I've never met before this week. Most of them found me through one Facebook group or one LinkedIn DM.

The questions they asked me are the reason today's launch exists. Here are five of them, in their own words.

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A fractional CFO scaling his practice asked:

"I'm working with five clients currently and looking to add 1-2 more while using AI to streamline my operations and add more value to the engagements and my clients."

That's the question every solo or near-solo professional eventually arrives at. How do I scale without hiring? AI agents aren't a hiring decision — they're a leverage decision. Today's demo shows the leverage on one workflow. The bundles are the leverage across a whole practice.

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Someone evaluating my work but not yet a buyer wrote back:

"Honestly it sounds interesting, I just probably wouldn't be able to invest in something like that right now."

I get this one a lot. Sometimes the timing isn't right, sometimes the budget isn't there, sometimes the practice isn't built out yet. None of those are wrong reasons. That's why the free agent claim exists — aiaccounting.legacysbc.com/claim-agent — pick one, try it, no follow-up, no funnel. The bundles are for when you're ready. The free path is for any time before that.

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A bookkeeper joining the community this week told me, in his own words:

"I want to learn how to use AI agents for different accounting functions."

That sentence is what today's launch is built for. Not "automate everything." Not "replace your judgment." Just — learn how to use these tools for the work you actually do. The Live demo is one workflow shown end-to-end. The bundles organize 57 agents by the workflow categories accountants actually run: bookkeeping, tax, client onboarding, full-firm operations, audit and quality review.

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A senior technical consultant from another accounting firm sent me a DM that stopped me cold:

"You are leading the way and I am watching."

That's the most generous sentence anyone has said about this work. It's also the kind of comment that reminds me why I'm doing this the way I am: teaching, education, affordable access. Not pressure. Not urgency. Not "buy now or lose out." Just the work, on screen, at a price that makes sense for the practitioners who'd actually use it.

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A multi-partner CPA firm partner asked me directly:

"Which service line eats the most of your week right now?"

I asked it back. He answered honestly. That conversation is still going. The bundles are organized to answer that question — wherever your week is heaviest, there's a bundle for it. Bookkeepers ($249). Tax ($249). Client Onboarding ($249). Accounting Firm ($249). Audit / Review / Quality ($249). Or all 57 agents in the Complete Library ($799).

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Why I'm doing it this way

I'm a business owner who believes in teaching, educating, and affordable ways for others to grow. That's the constraint on every decision in this launch. The agents are priced for practicing accountants and firm owners, not for enterprise procurement teams. The Live demo is free. The replay stays in the community. The free agent claim is genuinely free — no card needed, no follow-up sequence.

If today's Live works the way I think it will, what you'll see is not a sales pitch. It's a real bookkeeping workflow with a real client engagement, processed in 60 seconds, with three judgment calls handed back to the human. Same model, every agent, every bundle.

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Today at noon Central

The Live runs inside the AI for Accounting Facebook group. Free, no signup, no replay outside the room.

Join the group → facebook.com/groups/1024923770013348

Or grab a free agent right now → aiaccounting.legacysbc.com/claim-agent

Bundles drop at the close of the demo → aiaccounting.legacysbc.com/pro-bundles

See you at noon.

— Yvonne

What 90 minutes of bookkeeper work looks like in 60 seconds Friday May 15 · Noon Central · Live demo + bundle drop

Monday morning. A bookkeeper opens her email and finds the client's bank statement for last month — 38 transactions, a few thousand dollars of revenue, a few thousand more of expenses, and somewhere in there, three problems hiding in plain sight.

One transaction is a duplicate vendor charge for $2,740. The vendor billed twice, and unless someone catches it, $2,740 of the client's cash quietly disappears. Another transaction is a rent payment posted on the 20th — for next month's rent. If it goes onto the income statement as this month's rent expense, the books will overstate expenses by $4,500 and the prepaid asset won't exist. The third transaction is an incoming $1,200 PayPal transfer with no source description. It could be a customer refund, an owner contribution, or someone else's money that landed in the wrong account by mistake.

Finding all three manually takes the average bookkeeper somewhere between 60 and 90 minutes. Per client.

Multiply that by 30 clients and you've spent most of your week just reconciling.

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This Friday at noon Central, I'm walking through the same reconciliation workflow with an AI agent doing the work on screen. The agent processes all 38 transactions in about 60 seconds. It categorizes most of them automatically against the chart of accounts. It catches the duplicate and flags it for a vendor refund request. It identifies the prepaid rent and auto-generates the adjusting journal entry. And — this is the part that matters — when it hits the ambiguous PayPal transfer, it doesn't guess. It flags it back to the bookkeeper as "requires owner clarification."

The agent isn't replacing the bookkeeper. It's running the mechanical 80% of the work and surfacing the judgment 20% that needs a human. The bookkeeper spends 15 minutes making the three flagged decisions and signs off. Close-week stops being a fire drill and becomes a structured workflow.

That's the model. Every one of the 57 agents I've built for AI for Accounting works the same way. Mechanical at scale, human at the decisions that matter.

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Friday is also the day five themed AI agent bundles launch:

• Bookkeepers Bundle — 13 agents for close, reconciliation, AJEs, AP/AR, reports — $249
• Tax Bundle — 11 agents for prep, planning, research, 1099s, multi-state — $249
• Client Onboarding Bundle — 11 agents for discovery → engagement → first close — $249
• Accounting Firm Bundle — 21 agents for full-firm operations — $249
• Audit / Review / Quality Bundle — 9 agents for attest engagements — $249
• Complete Library — all 57 agents — $799 (saves $446 vs. buying the five separately)

Each bundle is built on the same model you'll see Friday: mechanical at scale, human at the judgment.

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See it Friday

The Live runs at noon Central inside the AI for Accounting Facebook group. It's free, no signup, and the replay stays in the group. If you've been wondering what AI inside an accounting workflow actually does — versus what LinkedIn claims it does — this is that.

Join the group → facebook.com/groups/1024923770013348

Or grab a free agent right now → aiaccounting.legacysbc.com/claim-agent

The bundles drop inside the group at the close of the demo.

— Yvonne

How We Cut a Monthly Close From 8 Hours to 2 (Without Hiring Anyone)

If you run a bookkeeping or accounting practice, you already know what your Tuesday looks like.

You sit down with a client's books for monthly close. You pull the bank feed. You check for the things the feed got wrong — duplicates, miscategorizations, that one Venmo deposit you have to track back. You reconcile the credit card. You look for transactions that don't fit a known pattern. You scope the trial balance. You prep the partner-ready package. You move to the next client.

For us at Legacy SBC, that workflow was at minimum eight hours per client. Every month. Every client. Sometimes longer.

If you read last week's post on how we rebuilt the whole firm with AI, this is the deep dive on the first of the four pillars — bookkeeping. The numbers and the story behind them.

We were a small firm — partners and a tight team — but the math doesn't work for any firm at that pace. We were spending Tuesdays in QuickBooks instead of with clients. Our team was typing coffee shop charges instead of catching what mattered. Our partners were carrying maybe 60% capacity on the work we were trained for, and losing the rest to data entry.

We didn't buy a tool. That was the wrong move.

The standard answer in this profession is to buy software. Sprinkle a new app on top of the existing process. Hope it sticks.

We tried that. It didn't work.

The reason it didn't is that a tool on top of a broken workflow is still a broken workflow. The categorization step got 15% faster. The data entry step got 20% faster. Nothing got cut. The hours didn't move because the shape of the workflow hadn't changed.

The question we actually asked was different.

For every step of the close, we asked one question: If we were starting this firm today, knowing what AI can do, how would we build this step?

The answer was almost never the way we were doing it.

Three workflows, rebuilt:

Bank reconciliation. The work used to be: pull statement, match each transaction, investigate exceptions, sign off. We now have an agent that does the matching and produces an exception list. The team only touches what the system can't resolve. About 70% of transactions reconcile without a human seeing them. The team's role moved from data clerk to reviewer.

Transaction categorization and anomaly flagging. The agent reads transactions against the client's chart of accounts, applies the categorization logic, and flags anything that doesn't fit a known pattern — a new vendor, an unusually large amount, a transaction that looks like personal use against a business card. The team gets a flagged list at the start of the close, not at the end.

Close prep and reporting. The trial balance review and the partner-ready package — what used to be the last two hours of the close — now generates from the cleaned books automatically. The team reviews and approves; they don't build.

The numbers, six months later:

• Monthly close per client: 8 hours → 2 hours. Same accuracy. Same review standards. The exceptions still get human attention; we just don't have humans doing what the system can do.
• Client load per team member: about 3x what we carried before — without adding headcount, without rushing the work.
• Partner hours reclaimed: 10+ per week per partner, redirected into advisory work and client growth.
• Tax season: for the first time in a long time, zero all-nighters.

What it took to get here.

I want to be honest about the cost.

This wasn't a weekend project. We spent 11 months testing, breaking, and rebuilding. We had wrong answers we had to throw out. We had clients we couldn't move onto the new workflow as quickly as we wanted. We rewrote our own SOPs three times before we had something that held.

The reason I'm telling you this is that most of the "AI for accountants" content out there right now is written by people who have never closed a book. They are selling you tools. We are showing you what changed.

For your firm.

If you run a small bookkeeping or accounting practice and any of this resonates — if you have a Tuesday close day that's eating your week, if you're carrying capacity on data entry that should be on advising, if your team is burnt out heading into next busy season — this is what we built it for.

This Friday at noon Central, I'm walking through the bank reconciliation workflow live inside the AI for Accounting Facebook group. Real client example. The agent doing the work. The deliverable on the other side. Free, no signup wall, no funnel — just come see what this actually looks like.

If you can't make it live, the replay stays in the group.

— Yvonne 36-year accounting operator. Founder & CEO, Legacy SBC. CFO, Simple AI.

We Rebuilt Our Accounting Firm With AI First. Now We're Helping Yours.

If you run a bookkeeping, accounting, or tax practice, you already know the math doesn't work anymore.

Clients want more. Talent costs more. Compliance is heavier every year. And the only lever most firm owners know how to pull is hire more people — assuming you can find them, train them, and keep them.

We were stuck in that same trap at Legacy SBC. So we did something most firms talk about but never actually do: we rebuilt our own firm with AI — end to end — before we said a single word about it to the market.

This post is what we learned. And what it means for yours.

We didn't buy a tool. We rebuilt the workflow.

The mistake most firms make with AI is treating it like software. Plug in a tool, sprinkle it on the existing process, hope something improves.

That's not transformation. That's a subscription.

We took our actual day-to-day — bookkeeping, tax prep, client communication, internal operations — and asked a different question on every single workflow:

If we were starting this firm today, knowing what AI can do, how would we build this step?

The answer was almost never "the way we're doing it now." So we changed it. Then we changed the next one. Then the next. Here's what came out the other side.

The four pillars we rebuilt

1. Bookkeeping that runs itself. AI now handles transaction categorization, reconciliation, and anomaly flagging on every client. Our team isn't typing in coffee shop charges anymore — they're reviewing exceptions and advising clients. A typical monthly close that used to take us 8 hours per client now takes 2. Same accuracy. Less coffee.

2. Tax prep and research at machine speed. AI drafts returns from source documents, pulls relevant code sections in seconds, and summarizes client packets before a preparer even opens the folder. Our team still signs every return — that part is non-negotiable — but they walk in with a head start, not a cold pile of PDFs.

3. Client communication that doesn't drop the ball. Intake, document requests, status updates, FAQs, deadline reminders — all handled with AI as the front line. Clients get faster answers. We get fewer "just checking in" emails clogging the day. And nothing falls through the cracks during busy season because the system never forgets and never goes on vacation.

4. Internal ops, review, and reporting. This is the one nobody talks about and the one that quietly moved the needle hardest. AI inside the firm: quality review on workpapers, partner-ready dashboards, capacity planning, turnaround tracking. We finally know — in real time — what's happening in our own firm.

The numbers

We were the guinea pigs, so we're the proof:

• 8 hours → 2 hours on a typical monthly close
• ~3x more clients handled by the same team, no new hires
• 10+ hours per week reclaimed by partners and owners, redirected into advisory work and growth
• A tax season with fewer extensions, faster turnaround, and — for the first time in a long time — no all-nighters

We're not saying any of this is easy. We're saying it's possible. Because we did it.

What this means if you run a small firm

If you're a solo practitioner or a 1–5 person firm, AI is the difference between drowning and finally building the practice you actually wanted when you went out on your own. You don't need a bigger team. You need a bigger toolkit.

If you're a growing firm in the 5–25 range, you're hitting the wall every firm hits at this size — and the old answer ("hire two more juniors") doesn't pencil anymore. AI is the new lever. It scales without recruiting, training, or hoping people stay.

If you run any small accounting firm, the firms that figure this out in the next 12–24 months are going to look very different from the ones that don't. We don't say that to scare anyone. We say it because we lived the before and we're living the after, and we're not going back.

Why we're telling you all this

Because most "AI for accountants" content right now is written by people who have never closed a book, never extended a return at 11 p.m., never sat across from a small business owner who's terrified of their own QuickBooks file.

We have. We still do. And we rebuilt our firm with AI before we ever offered to help anyone else rebuild theirs.

Now we're opening it up.

Join the community — free

We built AI for Accounting as the place for bookkeeping, accounting, and tax firm owners to see exactly what we built at Legacy SBC, how we built it, and how to bring it into your own firm — without selling your practice to a software vendor or hiring a consultant who's never done the work.

It's free. There's no catch. There's a real community of firm owners inside, real walkthroughs of real workflows, and ongoing training as the tools keep evolving (and they're evolving fast).

Come see what we did, and what it could look like for your firm:

https://aiaccounting.legacysbc.com/

The firms that move now get to design the next decade of this profession.

The ones that wait get to react to it.

We'd rather you design it with us.

— Yvonne Founder & CEO, Legacy SBC Chief Financial Officer, Simple Academy

I Miss You, Mom

 

I think I have read and re-read my moms obituary 47+ times in the last month.  The holidays are the most difficult time for me, when it comes to missing my mom.  My daughter and I often talk about mom/grandma - remembering what a wonderfully beautiful angel my mom was, inside and out.  I pray she is watching over us, especially during this time of year.

My mom had more love in her than anyone I have ever met.  Her ability to fully forgive amazed me.  She was so talented also.  She was an executive at work and a fully present mom at home.  Years ago we found a flaw in her...she turns every song into a country song when she sings it.  LOL  Have you every heard Air Supply sung in country twang?  I have.  Just thinking about it makes me smile.  

My mom had the most beautiful relationship with her father (my grandpa).  He, like my mom, was so giving and loving.  I do not remember a lot about my grandmother, on my moms side, but I have a very clear vision of coming through the front door at my grandparents house, seeing my grandmother in her chair in the living room, and running to her lap to play paddy cake.  Even today, remembering their home fills me with love.  

As we prepare for the week of celebration, I hope I pass even a smidge of my mothers loving spirit onto our children and grandchildren.  

Thank you for all you have taught me, shown me and allowed me to explore.  I miss you, Mom.  Everyday I wish I could pick up the phone and call you.  I love you more than I can possibly describe and wish you were here with us still.

For You, Rick

I have the best memories of and with Rick.  As a kid, and as an adult, we describe him as my dad's best friend.  That really is not true.  He was a best friend to our family.  He spent time with my dad, treated my mom like a queen and made me feel seen.

As a kid, I saw him several times a week.  You see, we grew up at the baseball park.  I remember being the back of my dad's truck as it filled up with boys on the way to baseball park.  Rick was the voice in the box.  He would announce the baseball games.  I honestly believe he is what made it more exciting to watch.  Of course, we loved every time there was a foul ball and Rick would tell us to return it to the snack bar to claim our prize (candy, hot dog - whatever).  For the longest time, to me, it felt like Rick was a celebrity.  Everyone knew him and, more importantly, liked him.

Rick spent many holiday's with us.  I remember, vividly, presents from Rick.  One year he got me Garfield pajamas.  My dad would tease me about them.  Every morning I came into the living room he would say "five" or "six", whatever number represented the amount of days he seen me in that same Garfield PJ.  Then there was the Grumpy School of Charm pajamas.  Envision Snow White's Grumpy on a PJ shirt with the Grumpy School of Charm verbiage across it.  Yep, another outfit for my dad to count.  Then, on my 18th birthday Rick gave me this beautiful gold clock that was engraved with "Happy 18th Birthday" and the date.  I still have it and always will.

I adored the relationship Rick had with his mom.  I still remember her amazing cherry pie.  Whether we went to their place or they came to ours, there was always food, laughter, and always full of sports talk as well (LOL).  Another thing I carry with me, I love to see men with strong relationships with their mother.  This was due to my respect built by Rick and his mothers relationship.  

Most importantly, Rick made me feel important.  I want to say he was more like an uncle to me, however, that does not express it well enough.  He was just...family.  We love you, Rick and you will forever be in our hearts.

To Begin, Again

 TO BEGIN, AGAIN

I have learned that it takes way more courage than I previously had to put my writing out there.  I thought it was safe to speak my own truth.  I quickly found that was not the case.  So, this time, I have decided I will brave the world and believe in me.  Although I would love to be supported, believed in and even liked - it is never why I began to write.  This time, it is for me.  

I lost my #1 fan when my mom passed away.  I still have not recovered from that day - February 27, 2019.  I have lost so much more since then.  Through it all I have found a stronger, more positive me.  I decided that I wanted to share this outlook.  We do not need to be lost in how others treat us or even how they view us.  Those that truly know me, have stuck by me through it all.  An amazing friend of mine pointed out what should have been obvious.  If someone knows you, they would know you would never hurt anyone on purpose.  

You see, my claim is not that I am perfect or even close to perfect.  My claim is - I always do what is right, even when I get the bad end of the situation.  My assumption is always that I did something wrong before I even look to another.  I support others, in any way I can.  I give where and when I can.  These are the things I learned from my mom, however, she did it with much more class and belief in others.  

It is my journey to find the best version of myself.  I share it simply for my own therapy and perhaps someone else will find a way to find themselves as well.  It is OK to struggle, but grab onto the things you can control and use it to move yourself forward.  You may lose people from time to time.  What I learned about that is... was it a positive relationship in the first place?  Be honest with yourself.  Do not allow others insecurities, negativity or even fakeness effect who you are.  A real relationship exists if you are in each others company or not.

I am stronger and I am proud to be me.