Today, our guest is Gail Perry. Gail is the Editor-in-Chief of CPA Practice Advisor Magazine. She’s the author of many books. I think I heard right now we’re at about 34, but I’ll let her correct me if I’m wrong there, on a variety of different topics from accounting, financial planning, financial software—wow, she’s got a wide variety of knowledge and skillset. In addition, she’s actually maintaining a small tax practice in Indianapolis. She’s worked as a state and local tax specialist for Deloitte, so she’s seen many sides of this industry. She’s been a newspaper columnist, an adjunct professor, a computer applications instructor for the Indiana CPA Society—I normally don’t go through all this, but I wanted you to see this unique path Gail has gone through and actually was editor-in-chief of AccountingWeb before coming with CPA Practice Advisor and joining that team. Gail, welcome to The Unique CPA.

Thanks Randy, thanks so much for having me, I’m happy to be here today.

Yeah, well we’ve been, you and I have been trying to do this for a while, so I’m glad we got it done, and I was very fortunate I got to hang out with you in December in Dallas at the Insuring Success Conference that you put on, which was my first time, and that was a lot of fun.

It’s a lot of fun, yeah.

Yeah, it was a lot of fun, just all the topics you did and the speakers you had, but it was fun because we all got to hang out too and go out to dinner and have some drinks and meet all these really cool people doing really cool and influential things in the profession. So thank you for that.

You’re welcome. Glad to have you there.

So let’s—oh, and you and I, I think we originally met, was the first time we met in person at Bridging the Gap two years ago? Or did we meet prior?

Yes, yeah.

Okay, that was. Alright. And thanks for being out to Bridging the Gap, and I expect to see you at Bridging the Gap 2025, so looking forward to that, too.

I will be there, yeah.

So, I just went through this bio, and really, honestly, that’s the short version, because you’ve done so much. Really, you have a unique background in this profession. I kind of want you to expand on this because how do you go from, you know, accountant, a CPA, to a journalist, to editor-in-chief, kind of take us through that path a little.

Okay, it was actually the opposite direction. 

Oh, really? Oh, you have told me this, yep!

Yeah. I’ll give you just the short version, but I came home one day from school when I was in 7th or 8th grade and announced to my parents that I had figured out my life path, I knew what I was going to do—I was going to be a musician when I grew up. My dad owned a tool and die company. He didn’t say much when I told him my plan, but that Saturday, he said, “You’re coming into the office with me,” which I thought was fun because I liked hanging out there. And he had called his CPA and had his CPA come and meet us at the office. And he pointed me in the direction of the CPA and said to the CPA, “Teach her something useful because she’s going to need it.” 

I don’t think that was a reflection on my musical ability, but at the same time, he spent a whole day with me, crash course in bookkeeping. I could do billing by the end of the day, I could do payroll, I could do purchase orders, I knew how to make entries in their general ledger. I learned enough so that I could fill in all through high school, whenever their office manager took time off, I just came over and did the books and did the payroll and paid the bills.

And so fast forward, I went to college and majored in music, and after a year, I decided I wanted to switch to journalism, and there were a lot of superfluous reasons why I wanted to do that, but I went ahead and switched my major to journalism, and that’s what I graduated in. Never took an accounting course with one exception—I decided I had heard that you could go work for H&R Block in the spring if you took their course.

Oh, yeah. 

And it cost me $79, I remember that, and I took their course, it was like two or three months, nights, and then they let me work in their office, so for two semesters when I was in college I worked at H&R Block, so that was the extent of my accounting experience, except for the fact that also I lost both my parents when I was in college, and I needed to work-work, and so I remembered I had these bookkeeping skills, so I took a part time job as a bookkeeper in addition to the spring at H&R Block, and got through school eventually with a journalism degree and a few years of bookkeeping experience and some tax experience. So I decided to follow that direction when I got out of school rather than go into journalism.

So I did that, I went to work in actually a law firm as a bookkeeper, and then sometime after that I got married and my husband said, “You know you should go back to school and you know do it right,” because he was big on certifications, he was a lawyer. So I went back to school and I went to Illinois State University, we were living in downstate Illinois. I took the entire undergraduate accounting curriculum in one year because I didn’t want to like, be supported. I wanted to, you know, get back in the workforce. So they waived all the prerequisites for me and I took all the courses at once, overlapping things that were supposed to be prerequisites for each other, but I finished at the end of a spring semester and took the CPA exam that May and passed it. And then I went to work for Deloitte. 

So now I’m in the accounting world. I was at Deloitte for three years. I also then worked for a regional firm in Indianapolis after that. And all along the way, whenever they had things that needed to be written, like for clients to explain something to them—this was before, long before email and internet and stuff, so I was like the house writer. So I kept writing business things and, you know, summarizing tax law and sending off—and then we started a newsletter for clients and now we’re getting into the computer era and they started, I also minored in computer science when I was in college.

You got it all!

Yeah, in my spare time. So the accounting firm would give me the computer programs and say, “Learn this, and then could you teach the rest of the staff?” So I’d learn the program and then write some training material for it, and then set up classes. And I did that in our firm, and then they started offering those classes to our clients, and so I started teaching mainstream computer programs to general public or to small business people, and I was writing all the training material. And then I started teaching for the CPA Society, because they were looking for people in their computer labs, so I finally, I reached a point where I decided I had kids at this point, and I wanted to be there when they got home on the school bus. So I gave up public accounting—although I continued teaching for the firm I was at, I just wasn’t working every day as an accountant at the firm—teaching for the CPA society. And I got this bug to continue writing about computer applications. And it was an era when this was the late 90s, early 2000s, you couldn’t walk in a bookstore without half the bookstore being filled with computer books because everybody was getting computers now. All the businesses had them. People started getting them at home. Nobody knew what to do with them. So it was a heyday for computer book publishing.

Living in Indianapolis, Indianapolis happens to be a hub for computer book publishers. There were 10 to 12 computer book publishers in Indianapolis, all the major names were there. And so. I just started knocking on doors at all the publishing houses and saying, “You know, I write this stuff here, all my training manuals, you know, I can do this.” And finally a publisher gave me a break. He actually said, if I stopped pestering him, he would give me a couple of chapters to write in a book about WordPerfect. So I did that. That was the first thing I did in a book, and they thought the work was fine, I met my deadlines, and now it comes back into play that I have this accounting background and they contacted me and asked me if I would write TurboTax for Dummies. The Dummies Press was in Indianapolis and they needed an accountant who could write about taxes in the “Dummies” format, so I said, sure. So that was my very first book, TurboTax for Dummies. And 34 books later, I’ve written several “Dummies” books, several “Idiots” books—they’re actually different, even though it sounds like it should be the same—and several other books for, as you mentioned, a variety of genres, but everything somehow related to accounting or finance and computers. Yeah, so that’s kind of the path I took. 

Traditional path for sure. 

Exactly. And then I was in Indianapolis and they were revamping the Indianapolis Star newspaper to include a new business section. And I contacted them and asked if they wanted a tax writer and they said, sure. So I started writing a tax column for the Indianapolis paper, a weekly column. So that was sort of my foray into journalism back, you know, finally coming back to what my degree was in the first place. My column caught the eye of AccountingWeb, which was at that time just moving into the States—they’d been in England for a few years—and they were opening a U.S. branch and the publisher that they hired in the U.S. happened to be in Indianapolis. He was reading my column and asked me if I’d come on board and be the editor there. So that was my step into accounting journalism and I’ve been there ever since. It’s been 25 years.

Wow, that’s quite a journey. And in fact, before I even asked you about that, the whole time you’re saying that I was thinking you and Blake Oliver need to talk. I don’t know, have you ever talked with Blake before? 

Yeah, absolutely. He was at the conference with you in December.

Oh yeah!

I think you didn’t cross paths, maybe on different days.

Yeah, I think I did see him, but he was there a short time. But yeah, so you know his story.

He’s a musician too. 

Yeah. Musician to CPA, to really journalist now, so very similar.

Yeah, innovative, innovative.

Oh, and technology, right? Innovation, technology too. So, in fact, I need to figure out a panel to put you two on at our conference. 

I love that, yeah!

Yeah. That would be kind of interesting. I’m going to write that down. Alright.

We could bring our instruments.

Oh, I love that too. I’ve actually thought about doing like a talent show or something with a few different people. It’d be kind of fun. Oh, you two, Amy Vetter can get up there. I know she plays an instrument as well. And alright, you got me brainstorming now. Let’s do this. Or you’re brainstorming and I’m following along. Alright, so let’s go into the accounting profession, since that’s what we’re talking about, and you’re still, obviously, as journalism, you’re doing that, but through this whole path and arc and everything you’ve done, and you and I, I think, probably have similar, a little bit, history in the profession from the standpoint of, you know, we were there pre-internet, like you said, pre-email, in fact, my first tax season, which was actually a couple of years after I graduated college, because I was actually a computer programmer, I was in sales and then decided I should be a CPA. But my first tax season was, we actually filled out forms, sent them out to somebody else. 

Right, same here.

Yeah. Alright, then filled them out and then send the returns back to us. And we’d hope they’d be right. Because otherwise you’d have to send them back out to them. And so this is obviously a big change. I mean, we could talk about all the changes that have happened. I mean, the progression of it, that’s a lot of history between you and I of all these changes, but what are some of the things that have really had a major impact over the years, you think, changing, affecting the accounting profession? And then we really need to get into what’s happening today as well.

Right. Technology is what changed everything. I mean, I think the accounting profession was pretty much the same for hundreds of years, until you know, really this new millennium. I think that suddenly everything is in upheaval, and the fascinating thing I think is that a lot of people are trying to hold onto grasping some part of the past. I mean, it’s still at the end of the day, debits equal credits and, you know, accounting is still accounting, but there’s so much more involved in it now with everything being online and the programs that you use and the way you can analyze things so quickly. We are very much moving into an arena of accountants being expected to read the numbers and say what they mean and help people utilize the information from their financial statements to make decisions about the future.

And that I think is fascinating. I think that it makes every firm different though because it’s really how much of it you grasp and what choices you make about what software you’ll use and how you present it to your clients. It used to be, I think the firms were all pretty cookie cutter, and big or small, you know, the big clients went with the big firms and small clients went with the small firms. And now small firms can handle big clients because they can handle the technology and big firms are looking for a variety of clients because they want some diversity in the things that they do so they can speak to people everywhere. And it’s just fascinating to watch.

Yeah, it is. It is interesting. There’s some, and funny, I wasn’t even planning on going there, but since we brought up Blake Oliver, I just remember Blake had thrown some stats out recently on, I think his podcast, where he was talking about some things that have changed from last year to this, and some of them were pretty amazing to me, but one was the big change just in the profession, we’re not even seeing this just in the profession, but many of the firms are going back to, you know, in the office work, which I don’t know if you have an opinion on it. I do. I’ll let you go first though. Have you had, have you thought about that or looked at what’s happening in that?

Yeah, it’s—of course, we all got turned upside down during COVID and the pandemic and needed to rethink how we do work and how we can make work available and get it done to people who are not able to come in person, whether it’s our clients or our staff members or, you know, various businesses that also moved online. We did it because we had to during the pandemic, and then we kind of perfected it because so many people liked it, and now I think there is a blend because we’re seeing what we’re missing by not being face-to-face with people. And I’ve worked remotely for decades, but I still know that there are days when I think, “If only I could just walk down the hall and ask this person,” you know, or you send someone an email and it’s two days before they respond, and you’re like, “If they were just down the hall, I could get this taken care of right away.” 

Interestingly, you mentioned, I do have a tax practice. I still see most of my clients in person. They like it. I like it. Sometimes it doesn’t happen. They like the fact that they can upload documents to me if they need to. But also, it’s the relationship that I really like with these clients, and I feel like I get a better story from them in terms of how things have transpired over the year and what their tax issues are going to be if they’re talking to me in person.

Yeah, I can see that. There’s an interesting dynamic there because I think most people, I believe, want the flexibility. And we did a survey this year that showed that was an area where most employees within firms want to have the flexibility of working remote. But then there’s also, as you said, it’s super important to have that face-to-face, that in person. So I think there’s a happy medium there. I think some of the firms that, this is my personal opinion, not the views of Gail Perry or Tri-Merit or anybody else, but my personal opinion is, I think we’re going to probably, some firms are going to go too far towards all in-person and realize that they’re going to lose people because of that, because they have other options elsewhere. And in reality, it’s not everybody’s as old as me and the next generation really does want more flexibility. That’s my personal opinion. So it’ll be interesting to see where this goes. 

Another thing that he saw, I don’t know why I keep quoting Blake today. Blake’s on my mind, I guess. Another thing that he pointed out, and I’m just going off memory here, but that I think the number of firms or the amount of advisory services that firms are offering has shrunk from last year to this. And everybody talks about advisory and talks about how important advisory is and how they don’t want to add advisory, and I agree with that, but do you have an opinion on advisory, or why we see this, you know, potential shrinking of advisory services being offered? At least, based on Blake, I don’t know—I haven’t fact checked Blake at this point, but that was a little interesting to me.

Yeah, I haven’t heard, actually, about a shrinkage in advisory services. I still hear a lot of talk about some confusion over how to offer advisory services.

Yes.

And I think that accountants still feel at the end of the day, well, their job is tax returns and financial statements and those traditional documents and they throw in extra services kind of on an ad hoc basis to their clients who need them without actually realizing this could be a service line—I still see a lot of that. So, I think that’s still a work in progress. And there are accountants who will adopt it and there are accountants who are just so busy doing the traditional stuff that they don’t feel they need to add more services to what they offer. Really, I think it depends on what clients demand and if clients start asking for more stuff, then they’re going to offer it.

I can see that. I think maybe it’s a little bit of the, “Hey, we don’t know what advisory is, so we’re not going to concentrate on that because we have all this compliance.” And compliance is great. I mean, compliance, you can scale, you know, probably more than advisory because it is consistent, but for me, from my standpoint, it’s the higher value advisory that I think will help more with what we struggle with as accountants is the work life balance. And that’s a topic I’d like to discuss a little bit because that’s something you and I and a panel discussed when we were at Insuring Success.

Right, yeah, and I think there is very much a need for it because of the potential commoditization of so much basic accounting work—more and more things are being done automatically or through AI. I think we are expecting a major change in the arena of tax preparation and there are changes in the audit field as well that are going to make the work that traditional accountants used to do a little bit less necessary—not that the work doesn’t need to be done, but it can be done automatically. So really advisory work provides accountants with a new direction to go in that is more lucrative and it’s not as hard, actually, especially if you bill it as advisory, you know, “I’m giving you advice and I hope it works out,” as opposed to, “Here’s your tax return, and if it doesn’t work out, I’m still on the line for it.” So I think it’s pretty interesting. 

I created a workshop for the AICPA a few years back, it was right before COVID, on how to help tax accountants add financial planning services to their practice—not just tax planning, but all kinds of financial planning services, retirement planning, education planning, eldercare, there were a dozen things. The premise was you actually already know how to do most of these things because you are CPAs—you’ve got all this training on basic accounting and that’s what all this comes down to is basic accounting—and you probably give advice on all these things already when your clients ask, but it actually can translate into marketable services. You can add these to the menu on your website. You can bill for them. And it can be in many ways more worthwhile to your clients who maybe don’t like getting financial statements and tax returns, but they sure like being helped with how they can make financial decisions.

Nice, yep, I like that. I’ve got to go look at the program you put together. That’s pretty cool. Alright, so as I do, I go back and forth on all different topics because I hear what you say and I want to hear more. Let’s talk though, let’s concentrate on what you’re really doing today now with, I mean, you’ve got still many things you’re doing, but as Editor-in-Chief of CPA Practice Advisor. You’re monitoring these things that are going on in the profession, you’re reporting on these things that are going on in the profession, you’re seeing what’s hot, you know, you’re seeing what changes are happening, I guess a two fold question: How do you keep abreast of everything that’s going on in the profession, and then after we go over that, what are the hot topics that you really see that you’re concentrating on these days?

So, keeping abreast of everything is pretty much a 24/7 job. A lot of things come to us, I mean, obviously we get wire service reports, we get reports from the state societies, the AICPA, we get reports from accounting firms, people pitch stories to us, we’re constantly searching every day, you know, through Google searches and what have you and getting news alerts of things that are popping up in the news. So there are dozens, actually, of sources where the news comes from. And we’re out talking to people and keeping in touch with certainly the leaders of the profession, the people who are kind of making decisions that impact all of the accounting world. So the material’s out there, it’s just a question of following up on everything and talking to the people we need to talk to, to make sure we’re reporting the correct information and as much of it as we can.

So there’s plenty of news, maybe more than we can cover, but we try to cover as much as we can. I would say in terms of what’s trending, well, right now it’s things coming out of the federal government. 

Oh yeah. 

It’s like every day there’s lots of news. So in particular, we’re trying to monitor the things that are being said about financial issues, whether it’s taxes or social security or consumer finance or any things that are going to impact accountants or impact their clients. So that’s the big thing right now. In terms of other general topics that are really major, we’re following how AI is impacting the profession, we’re following things like private equity, impacting the accounting profession, lots of mergers, the talk of there being a shortage of accountants coming out of the schools, what’s happening with the CPA exam, and are they going to allow people to get CPAs without passing the exam? And then just the constant cyber issues—cybersecurity that impact people every day, and information is at risk all the time and trying to help people stay on, our accounting readers stay on top of what they need to do in order to make sure all the data they have is secure. So there is a lot to follow.

Oh yeah. Believe me, I was looking at your website and I mean, there’s like eight different headlines, you know, topics that you start covering from accounting and auditing to tax, to pay. In fact, I’m reading it right now. Payroll, the tech, the advisory, firm management, the profession, resources, conference. I mean, yeah, there’s a lot out there. And then for people who are writing, are they, do you get outside submissions or is it all internal? 

Yeah, we have full time staff and we have regular freelancers who write for us all the time and then we have, we accept outside submissions. They come from a variety of sources. There are accountants in the field who write for us and many of the state societies provide information to us. Also, we have the great fortune to be kind of at the helm of several groups in the profession. We name the 25 Most Powerful Women in Accounting each year, we name the 40 Under 40 in accounting each year, and we also monitor the Accounting Thought Leader Symposium and all of those groups are providing people to us who want to write and get in front of our audience, so it’s kind of handy to have those connections.

Yeah, I was going to ask you about that. What’s the 25 Most Powerful Women—what’s the title of it?

It’s “25 Most Powerful Women in Accounting.”

Yep, and I think I’ve got a handful of friends that are on that list annually, which is cool to see. And then the 40 Under 40 is something that I’ve always watched,

That’s fascinating. Actually, both of those groups, the most fun is reading all the submissions and finding out all the people who are doing such great things in this profession. And it gives us an introduction to a lot of people through those awards, and then we have independent panels who judge them and ultimately decide who the winners will be. But I kind of feel like they become part of our community once they’re in that award bank, even if they aren’t winners, once they’re nominated, their names are familiar to us.

Yeah, I appreciate it. I think it’s great to give people recognition in the profession that they’re doing really cool things. That 40 Under 40 is really how I met someone that I really looked up to, which was Josh Lance, who unfortunately passed away a little over a year ago now. But when I saw that—and I’d seen it before—but that’s where I really started following him and then got to meet him and got to spend time, but he was, I think, guest number three on this podcast or something like that. He’d been on, he’s probably on two or three times. But then, you know, somebody like Caleb Jenkins, who, you know, started probably on that list at age 18 or something. 

Right, he was a teenager.

Yeah. Which is so, so cool to see. And then the, the Most Powerful Women, everybody impresses me. The only thing I’m sad about is I don’t qualify for either of those lists, so.

I’m sorry!

So, but I still, I get to watch and see all the cool things that people on those lists are doing. Alright, Gail, it’s always a pleasure to talk to you. Before we wrap this up and the information you share and what you’re doing in the profession, I’m always in awe of, so thank you for what you do. Before we go to a couple final questions, any final thoughts on what we’ve talked about today or just the profession or, you know, anything you want to close out with?

I just think it’s a great time to be in the profession and to be doing what I’m doing because just getting to monitor all of this is pretty exciting and not having to worry about, you know, what my big firm is doing or something—having the opportunity to stay on top of what’s happening in the profession is a pretty exciting place to be.

Yeah, that’s where I feel like I am too. And it’s just like fun to watch and see and interact as well. And hopefully be part of, maybe, a positive change within the profession, which you’re definitely doing. Alright, so then final two questions: We just talked about accounting, which we’re both passionate about, and journalism, and tech and everything else we talked about. But when you’re not doing—oh, and I know one of the things I can answer for you for this question—but when you’re not doing accounting and looking at this profession, what do you do for fun, what’s your outside of work passions, what do you enjoy?

I’ve always been a fan of movies and actually. When I left Deloitte, before I went to work for a public accounting firm, my husband and I opened a movie theater. 

Oh! That’s cool.

So we didn’t, we took over an existing theater, but it was a theater that was available, so we rented it for a year in Champaign, Illinois, and I ran it full time—my husband kept his job, so we’d have a paycheck.

Good call!

But it was absolutely amazing. I’m looking at, you can’t see, I’m looking across the room here at posters on the wall from the theater. It was just, I loved it. I loved every minute of it being completely different from what I had ever done anywhere, but it helped me stay on top of everything that’s going on in the movie world; I think I can safely say for a year and a half I saw every single movie that came out except maybe some horror movies, and it’s not really my favorite genre. But yeah, and dealing with people who are in that field and the business of movies is pretty exciting. So, I’m still connected to some of the people in there, and so it’s like, Oscar night is one of the biggest nights of the year in our house. So, that’s sort of my outside passion.

Well, that makes sense because that place where we were broadcasting Sharing Success from was like a movie studio or something. How did you find that place?

They do movies there actually, they do some movies, documentaries, and a lot of commercials and stuff. Several years ago, this guy named Jim Parente, I don’t know if you’ve run across him or not?

No.

He’s based in Dallas and he does a lot of CPE. And he used to do—I don’t think he still does—but he used to do an all day, end of year tax conference. And it was in that format, panel format. And he did it from that studio and he contacted me and asked if I’d like to be on his panel one year. So I came and spent a day there with him in the studio talking about all the changes that were happening to taxes in that year and how they’re going to impact the year ahead, you know, your basic end of year tax update. And the studio was so amazing, and so when I got the idea to do this conference, I went back to them and said, “This is the format I want to use, and this is where I want to do it.” And I looked at some other studios just to make sure I wasn’t ignorant of what else might be out there. But this studio was by far the best, just give them a plug, it’s AMS Pictures in Dallas and they do everything for our conference. They do all of the video, we stream it live out of there onto our website. It’s just an amazing place.

Oh yeah, it was fun. And then the other thing I was going to say that I know one of your, I don’t even know if we call it passions, but your knowledge base, I learned when we were out to dinner is, you know, your Italian wines fairly well, and I don’t. So letting you pick an Italian wine out at dinner worked out well for me. That was a very good wine.

I have become a big fan. I take at least one wine trip a year, go to a wine trail and taste wines and learn about what goes into the making of wine. It’s pretty fascinating.

Oh yeah, I agree. I’m currently in Healdsburg, California, which is wine country, and we’ve been here for what, four weeks, I think right now? We’ve got another two and a half weeks to go, and we’re enjoying quite a few glasses of wine out here. So it’s fun. And then finally, if people want to hear more about you, what you’re doing, CPA Practice Advisor, anything else that’s out there, what’s best place for them to look?

Well, I’m at CPA Practice Advisor every day. It’s CPAPracticeAdvisor.com. I am at GPerry@CPAPracticeAdvisor.com, and that’s probably the best place to find me.

Alright, Gail. Well, always a pleasure. Thank you for being on here and enjoyed the discussions with you today on The Unique CPA, so thanks for being part of this.

Thank you for having me.