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I'm an MFA / MBA lifetime learner using the elusive Powers of Marketing to help daring…
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Mining for the heart & soul of your company during week one
Mining for the heart & soul of your company during week one
This week I started at Rill Data, and am facing the usual week one questions, both existential and pragmatic: Who knows…
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Mike Godwin shared thisHad some fun with this one. "Hey Accordance, let's dive into Odysseus & Penelope's 2025 tax returns..." Turns out the Odyssey to Ithaca was just the beginning of their troubles... Odysseus: King of Ithaca; fought for 10 years in the Trojan War and then spent years trying to return home. What's he going to have to detangle? Filing status (married, absent? dead?); joint return authority/signature; military/combat-zone variants; business ownership: basis and inventory in livestock; gifts received on return; casualty/theft/conversion losses. +++ Penelope: Married spouse in possession of the home; de facto household manager; not widowed in the base facts; not remarried; subject to pressure from suitors. Is she married filing jointly / separately; can she sign or elect for an absent spouse; is she “considered unmarried” for head-of-household purposes; If Penelope files jointly, §6013(d)(3) joint-and-several liability becomes relevant; receipt of suitor gifts; household-employee compliance; all the theft-loss substantiation. +++ Accordance, being a VERY thorough tax-focused analyst, goes deep on the whole suite of characters: Telemachus, Laertes, Eurycleia, Eumaeus, Philoetius, Dolius, and the suitors. I'll share the thread in the comments if you need a tax primer to fully enjoy the movie. Skip ahead to the "Suitors as the central economic drain" diagram for the real story...
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Mike Godwin shared this"75% of CPAs are set to retire in the next 10 years." ... This stat is always going around, but after reading this tax forum post, I needed to do the numbers. "Subject: Expat, Swiss. Couple left the US in 2008 and has not filed returns since then. I'm heading into retirement so I'm not interested. Anyone interested?" One practitioner, one knotty international case, looking to hand it off on the way out the door. Could this be the voice of a generation? Let's dig in. > First — where does that "75%" come from? The best source I could find is an AICPA / NASBA exposure draft from 2015: "the AICPA estimates that approximately 75% of its members will be eligible to retire by 2020." (1) So we're talking about AICPA members specifically, who are eligible to retire, by 2020. Hold onto that as we look at where things actually stand today: • The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects about 124,200 openings a year for accountants and auditors over the next decade. (2) • JoA finds that schools awarded 55,152 accounting bachelor's and master's degrees in 2023–2024. (3) • 28,082 new candidates entered the CPA Exam pipeline in 2024. (4) • 13,070 of them passed their fourth and final exam section that year. (4) • NASBA counts 653,408 actively licensed CPAs as of August 2025 (excluding Hawaii and New Mexico). (5) To me that doesn't look like quite the cliff the headline suggests — but it isn't a rosy picture either. It reads more like a pipeline that leaks at every junction: - students into accounting programs, - those students through to a degree, - graduates into CPA-track roles, - candidates through all four exam sections, - the newly licensed landing in firms that still want and reward the credential, - and finally, experienced practitioners into ownership, succession, teaching, mentoring. And when you line the numbers up, the leak is hard to miss: 124,200 annual openings → 55,152 accounting degrees → 28,082 new CPA Exam candidates → 13,070 fourth-section passers Now, that top BLS number is every accountant-and-auditor opening, so not strictly CPA seats. But even reading it generously, the pipeline is minting a small fraction of what the field seems to be asking for. If I had to rewrite the headline based on what I've read (sure, we've got this 75% retirement cliff) but: >> We're graduating new CPAs at maybe a tenth of the demand for new hires. Is that actually what the market feels like from the inside? For new & retiring CPAs, and for the firms trying to hire them?
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Mike Godwin shared thisMaybe AI could support more tightly knit ... communities? Writing that feels like a hot take, and I wish it didn't. We've got data center backlash, educators struggling to refactor curricula, businesses unsure whether to hire or fire. And personally, I see so many of the early AI use cases just accelerating patterns from an old way of marketing (see blog post → SEO game of the last two decades.) But last night I rolled into the first board meeting of the year for our small educational non-profit. Our goal is keeping the doors open for this quirky rural public elementary school. As Treasurer I'm usually busy assembling the books, tabulating parent vs community donations, drafting form 990s. AI did that all for me in an hour or so. Which meant: • I had capacity to think about novel ways to run our big annual pledge (tiers, perhaps?) • Each topic could be informed by the numbers without stealing focus from the real stuff — communicating and engaging our community. • The scripts are written. My admittedly VERY basic ledger is now on autopilot. I'm looking forward to a year of building closer community relationships, because those precious few volunteer hours I have are now free from (most of) the busywork. Maybe good old-fashioned community building could be an AI trend? (And special thanks to the new board energy and lovely kick-off: Hannah McFaull, Canyon Steinzig, Aaron Webster, Hope Price, Canyon Education Foundation, CESD)
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Mike Godwin shared thisI propose a toast to yet another hidden keystone of democracy: tax advisors. A few days into my time at Accordance, I flew to Washington DC for my first-ever tax conference — the AICPA National Tax Conference. I went in with one question: what makes a practitioner fall in love with tax? The answers were, of course, wildly varied: "PwC recruiters offered the best lunch." "I failed Orgo." "It's been in my family for generations." But somewhere in the Internal Revenue Service updates panel (and Kimberly Rogers, I'll admit most of it sailed clear over my head, though I found your talk quite inspiring) something clicked for me. Tax advisors are tasked with taking what lawmakers pass and carrying it out into the world, educating and implementing the programs the rest of us would otherwise never see. Without them, I'd be naively unaware of the incentives and penalties our nation creates to move itself forward. I love working with tax practitioners for the obvious reasons: sharp minds, healthy skepticism, good with numbers, even better listeners. But what really moves me is that quieter calling: raising their hands to steward the connection between main street and the capital. And it's a calling that doesn't clock out. So many of the practitioners I know carry it into volunteer roles: state societies, institutes, education, outreach programs. I'm continually struck by how deeply our clients show up for their local and professional communities. Hear, hear, 250. Curious to see how Accordance can help? CalCPA; Minnesota Society of CPAs; Iowa Society of CPAs; Illinois CPA Society (ICPAS); Arizona Society of CPAs; Pennsylvania CPA Foundation; Texas Society of CPAs; The Ohio Society of CPAs; Florida Institute of CPAs (FICPA)
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Mike Godwin shared thisThis is a puzzle about emergent systems, Vietnamese tax law, and the changing shape of product marketing. Let's start with Vietnamese tax law. One of our clients is a U.S. tax lawyer who's learning Vietnamese. He was looking for something quite specific: YouTube videos explaining the Streamlined Offshore Procedures — in Vietnamese. Not to learn the procedures (he's the expert there), but to pick up accurate tax terminology and train his ear. He'd already tried Google's AI. He explained exactly what he wanted and why, but it kept handing him tax videos in English, or Vietnamese videos about everything except the specific topic he'd asked for. Accordance found them right away. I love hearing that feedback. But it lands on something I've been working through for a while — what does product marketing look like when some features...just kind of emerge. For years, the product marketer sat between the engineers and the marketing team. We'd bring the subject-matter experts straight to the developers, and help tell those stories in a way that our most demanding experts, prospects, and customers would deeply value. In AI, and in vertical AI especially, our engineers are brilliant at improving the system. But often, they aren't building specific features at all. The system improves without anyone knowing the full scope of its capabilities. You ship something that performs beautifully in every evaluation you wrote for Scenarios A–G, but Scenario Q was not even on the roadmap. And sure enough, it handles Scenario Q (Vietnamese language tax videos) beautifully too. This is exactly what emergent systems do: exhibit complex behavior nobody coded directly. The puzzle is "what does exceptional product marketing look like now?" Fully emergent features upend the product roadmap, but the job is unchanged. We still need to plan, tell the story, coach, and upskill our clients. We've always known to listen for the most valuable use cases, maybe now we're listening for capabilities too. Check out where we're headed: https://accordance.com #ProductMarketing #VerticalAI #TaxAI #TaxTechnology
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Mike Godwin shared thisIt is indeed very exciting to see Accordance right at the top of Forbes inaugural AI 50 Brink list. And also this space is moving so quickly, I'm kind of wondering, "which brink did we just pass?" Here-here to this fantastic team. Next round of brinks is on me. 🍻 David Yue, Jack Moore, Finsam Samson, Fiona Li, Kristin Carter, CPA, Adyant Chawla, Kevin Boeckholt, CPA, Matt Biggar, Chuck Swenson, Sppencer Eppstein, Riley Munks, Jones Lam, CTP, Tom Nguyen, Timothy Q., Kai Yue, Joshua Cheng, Nathan Marks, Taia Cheng, Sumit Kalra.Mike Godwin shared thisThe AI ecosystem is expanding faster than ever, and a new generation of startups is emerging to define its next phase. For the first time, Forbes is introducing the AI 50 Brink List, spotlighting 20 promising Seed and Series A companies building at the frontier of artificial intelligence. Despite being just 24 months old on average, these startups are already competing for elite talent, securing significant funding and tackling complex challenges across software, infrastructure and scientific discovery. While the AI 50 captures the industry’s current leaders, the Brink List offers a forward-looking view into the companies shaping its future. #ForbesAI50 https://lnkd.in/ef-BCzmv 📸: Nectar Social, Resolve AI, Periodic Labs, Ashley Maxwell, Giga, Jim Vetter, Studio B Portraits, Axiom
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Mike Godwin shared thisWe've got this in-app feedback tool. Fast growing business, doing our best to move where our clients need us — all of the feedback goes straight to the company slack for review by everyone. And typically, it's pretty tough. Certainly the brutal honesty is a gift, and we treasure it probably even more than our clients' realize. But when you get feedback like this on a Saturday... Wow, that feels really really good: "I don't know if you have been working hard on the software but (1) wow it was fast this morning (Saturday)--much faster than usual and frankly I was running these queries side by side in Claude and Accordance and defaulted to Accordance because Claude Opus 4.6 didn't have a speed advantage over Accordance; and (2) wow Accordance was dead-on accurate and helpful in how it handled my queries for building a webcast I'm doing at the end of the month. GO TEAM ACCORDANCE!" Curious to see how Accordance can help? 👉 try.accordance.com
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Mike Godwin shared thisGetting to announce $13M in funding is pretty exciting. Yay, startups! But for me the real fun is connecting with accountants. Meeting the early adopters in the tax community over the past year has been wonderful. Every profession has its own "vibe" and accountants have proven to be smart, understated, cautious, thoughtful, very generous, and SO much more meticulous than I thought was humanly possible. A huge thanks to our early clients, who took a chance on Accordance and have had such an impact on our growth, so excited to bring you along for this next phase!Mike Godwin shared thisDear friends, I am incredibly honored to finally unveil what we've been working on in stealth: Accordance. When Finsam and I first started our journey bringing AI out of the research lab, we discovered an industry filled with some of the most thoughtful, principled professionals we'd ever met: tax and accounting practitioners who became our teachers, our guides, and ultimately our partners. As our entire team spent thousands of hours over the last few years climbing the learning curve, what we've discovered is that we're solving something much bigger than we initially realized. We began to see what keeps everyone up at night, and it wasn't what we expected. 75% of senior accounting professionals are retiring in the next decade, with only a 50% replacement rate. Meanwhile, regulations multiply and edge cases explode in complexity. The profession isn't just facing a labor shortage - it's facing an expertise crisis. That's when it clicked - our mission at Accordance matters more than we ever imagined. Most people think "AI for accounting and tax" means automating routine work - but we're doing the opposite. We're building the smartest tax & accounting AI that can handle the most sophisticated advisory work - the stuff that normally takes decades of experience. It's letting junior staff punch way above their weight and giving seasoned experts superpowers they've never had. We're not replacing professionals; we're amplifying their expertise at the exact moment the profession needs it most. The outcomes we're seeing are remarkable. But none of this would have been possible without our world-class team that sharpens iron with iron, our supporters who've been with us every step of this journey, and every professional who opened their doors and trusted us with their most complex challenges. We're grateful to have you on this mission with us.
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Mike Godwin shared thisI love startups because we all begin with a team that believes in something much bigger than themselves. But, getting to partner because of a shared vision ... that has been truly special. We discovered a shared vision with the University of San Francisco School of Law that goes well beyond technology in the classroom: about making tax and legal education more accessible and impactful, about expanding the expertise and capabilities of tomorrow's workforce, and helping each other be the best versions of ourselves we can be. It was moving getting to work alongside the School of Law folks, and I'm looking forward to our next steps. (Real words, no robot sentiments have been generated here. 😊 )Mike Godwin shared thisPleased to announce a partnership with the University of San Francisco School of Law that brings our frontier AI capabilities into legal education and expands access to the tools that are helping to define the next generation of tax leadership. ⚖️ Like USF, we believe legal education should evolve alongside the tools of the profession and that students deserve access to technologies that will shape their future practice. We also share USF's commitment to expanding access to justice through education. 🖋️ USF Students will use Accordance in legal research and writing courses, in clinics serving real clients, and in independent projects that examine AI's potential role in public interest law. The goal is to help students learn to use AI thoughtfully, and to understand its capabilities and limitations while using it to support their work. “Tools like Accordance make tax policy more comprehensible,” said Johanna Kalb, Dean of the USF School of Law. “They can help us ensure that what we say we value as a society is reflected in how we live our lives. I see our partnership as being the beginning of something that could have a tremendous public impact.” We couldn't agree more Johanna, thanks for all of your time and effort supporting this vision! David Yue, Finsam Samson, Mike Godwin, Jack Moore, Tracy Do, Shelli Rosenbaum Fyfe, Margaret Mullane, J.D.
Mike Godwin replied to a comment
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Costa Shepin, CPA I thought you were going to ask Accordance to help you time travel for your clients. If you just want us to help you develop tax planning angles from a pile of files, well that’s much easier!
Mike Godwin replied to a comment
2d
Ah Brian, a man above swag, respect. 😉
Accordance will probably look more expensive than most options, but you know, when you need a parachute ... I'd advise against trying the umbrella.
There's a Onestop.cpa account waiting for you at app.accordance.com
What makes it better? A whole pile of AI engineers and tax nerds building cool stuff in SF. I jest, but throw us your toughest tax questions and if you still want to chat, we'll be here.
Thanks for all you do!
Mike Godwin commented on a post
3d
Every year it's something, but I kind of look forward to learning where I made some small error in my personal taxes. Usually it's a pretty easy fix. Transposed digits in my kid's SS# number one year, boy was that confusing. So far so good though, and I get to learn!
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Mike Godwin liked thisMike Godwin liked this⭐⭐⭐ In-House Corporate Tax Opportunity ⭐⭐⭐ NDA required!! I am currently leading a search for a newly approved in-house Corporate Tax opportunity based in the central belt of Scotland on behalf of a recognised investment management firm. This is an excellent opportunity for a qualified Corporate Tax professional looking to broaden their experience within a truly international business, with exposure across: 🏠UK Corporate Tax compliance and reporting 🌏International Tax, including Pillar 2 and CBCR 🤝Acquisitions and strategic business projects This is far more than a traditional in-house compliance role. The successful individual will join a growing Group Tax function supporting a complex international organisation with 100s of legal entities across several international locations. The opportunity would suit someone currently working within practice who is considering their first move in-house, or an individual already in industry looking for broader international exposure and greater responsibility. Due to the confidential nature of the appointment, an NDA will be required before I can disclose the identity of the business or provide the full details of the opportunity.
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Mike Godwin reacted on thisMike Godwin reacted on thisLooking forward to attending my first American Accounting Association Global Connect conference on behalf of Accordance, August 1 through 5 at Las Vegas. Excited to meet with educators and faculty who are shaping how accounting gets taught as well as the students they're preparing for the profession.
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Mike Godwin liked thisMike Godwin liked thisThe One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) brought changes to the Research & Development tax credit. Under OBBBA, full expensing of domestic R&D expenses is now made permanent. You have several options for claiming this deduction. See an overview at the link below, and consult your tax advisors to determine which tax credit(s) or deduction(s) your business qualifies for and which would benefit the company most. #LocalFirm #JohnAKnutson #TaxAdvisor #Accounting #TaxConsulting #BusinessTaxJohn A. Knutson & Co., PLLP ClientLine Newsletter - Research and Development for BusinessesJohn A. Knutson & Co., PLLP ClientLine Newsletter - Research and Development for Businesses
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Accordance
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Treasurer
Canyon Education Foundation, CESD
- Present 9 years
Education
The Canyon Education Foundation is a registered non-profit organization dedicated to supporting the Canyon Elementary School, a public K-8 school located in Canyon, California.
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Marketing Consultant
Sustainable Works
- 1 year
Environment
Advised on marketing strategies including: enrollment into Google for Nonprofits, SEO / SEM best practices, and implementing solutions to help track success of various outreach programs.
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