KEY TAKEAWAYS
AI is changing accounting quickly, but small business clients aren’t asking their accountants for it. In Relay’s 2026 Cash Flow Compass, 74% of owners said they use AI to help run their business, but financial management and cash flow sit near the bottom of what they’ll let it touch.
AI can now run much of the monthly close, but it lacks context: the company’s history, the owner’s plans, and what’s missing from the numbers. Accountants supply that context and check the work.
What clients want most is confidence in their numbers and help acting on them, not more reporting.
Owners want a human in the loop on their money. That gives accountants an opportunity to get involved in banking decisions: where clients bank, how cash is set aside, and how it moves.
For all the talk of AI reshaping the accounting industry, there’s one place Jason Snider isn’t seeing it show up: his client meetings.
As the founder of Main Street Financial, Snider hears plenty about how firms should be adapting in the era of the LLM. But from where he sits, that urgency is often the industry talking to itself—his clients have other things on their minds.
“Clients aren’t asking for it,” Snider says. “They’re not coming up and telling me, ‘Hey, I want to see you using this and this. And you should be able to do it for less.’”
It isn’t that owners haven’t noticed. “They see the stuff in the news about agents gone haywire, getting hacked, and they think about their own finances,” Snider says. “They don’t know what to make of it.”
Relay’s 2026 Cash Flow Compass backs him up: 74% of small business owners already use AI somewhere in their business, but financial management and cash flow sit near the bottom of the list of things they’ll let it touch.
As it turns out, what clients really want right now is a lot harder to automate.
Clients have more data than ever. They want someone to explain it.
Venus Michael has been told she needs a couch in her office.
Her firm, One21 Account-Ability, does bookkeeping for service-based and creative entrepreneurs, and does it well. But that isn’t what keeps clients calling.
“What they want is a therapist,” she says. “A business therapist. They want confidence that they can trust the data in front of them.”
And there’s no shortage of data in front of them. Owners today have their bank balances on their phones, bookkeeping software that syncs itself, and AI that can close the books and write up what it sees. But Michael’s clients still come to her with the same questions: “Now what do I do? What does this number actually mean?”
The answer isn’t always what an owner wants to hear.
“Sometimes that means being the bad guy,” Michael says. “This is your burn rate every month. This is your cash in the bank. And if you don’t do something right now, we’re going to run out.”
With so much data at their fingertips, it’s more important than ever for owners to have someone they trust to tell them what it means—and help them find a path forward when the news isn’t good.
AI doesn’t know the whole story
None of those conversations can happen without the old-school work getting done first. Coding transactions, journal entries, reconciliations, the monthly close—they’re what gives Michael the evidence to raise the alarm.
But how much of it needs to be done by an accountant...or a human?
For Blake Oliver, co-host of The Accounting Podcast, the answer is: not much.
A former firm owner himself, Oliver now runs Earmark, the company he built that lets accountants earn CPE credits by listening to podcasts. He still keeps Earmark’s books, but AI now runs most of the monthly close. His own time goes into supplying context, reviewing results, and deciding what happens next.
“If the AI has all the context, then it can do the work,” Oliver says. “The problem is, it often doesn’t. It doesn’t know what questions to ask, and it doesn’t know what’s missing.”
What’s missing, he says, is usually the history of the company—the knowledge an accountant builds up over years of working with it.
“Business owners can now use AI to do a lot of the work themselves that they would have hired an accountant to do,” Oliver says. “But the issue is, how do you know that it’s being done right, if you don’t have the knowledge to evaluate it?”
Some of Michael’s clients have tested that for themselves. They’ve been dabbling, she says, using AI to crunch their numbers or build their own apps to avoid subscription fees.
“It backfires,” she says. “It puts them in a spot where they’re not compliant, or their data isn’t good, so they can’t make an educated decision. They don’t know what they don’t know.”
Closing that gap is where Michael now spends most of her time: in conversations with clients, going deep on what the owner is planning and what they want next. That’s the context that lets her see what’s missing, and ask the questions the owner hasn’t thought to.
“It’s not my job to tell them to go right or left,” she says. “It’s my job to make sure they have all the information they need to figure out which one fits where they want to go.”
Owners want advice they can act on
When it comes to the money itself, owners are clear about who they want involved.
In the Compass report, when asked what would make them trust AI with their finances, business owners said they wanted a human in the loop to review, approve, or override. In the era of AI, accountants are the natural fit for that role. The opportunity is in going further than most do: not just saying what has to change, but getting involved in the money itself—where it sits, how it moves—and showing owners how to do it.
It’s a gap Snider has heard about from clients who’ve come to him after working with other firms. “It’s not enough just to say, ‘Okay, increase your gross margin by 10% and everything’s fixed,’” he says. “Oh yeah, that’s nice, thanks. How do I actually do it?”
For Michael, the “how” usually runs through the client’s bank account—an area where she stays closely involved. Her client meetings always get around to what she calls the “big hairy audacious goal”: the first hire, the new equipment, the trip to Europe they keep putting off.
Whatever it is, her advice starts in the same place: “Let’s create an account for that.” Together, they settle on a percentage of income to set aside, open the account, and set up automated transfers to fund it—all while they’re still on the call. That moves the goal from an idea to a funded plan.
“You can audibly hear the sigh of relief, and see their face light up,” she says. “It’s so simple, and nobody thinks ‘that’s a big deal for a bank.’ But it is.”
That relief isn’t about the account so much as what it takes off their plate. The money is somewhere they can see it, it grows without anyone remembering to move it, and it’s harder to spend on something else. That’s what owners mean when they say they want a person involved in their finances: someone who can turn the numbers into a system they can live with.
It’s time to get involved in how the money moves
For Oliver, that kind of involvement is what gives accountants an edge: it’s what makes them the trusted advisor owners call first.
“If you want to be that person, you need to be involved in the money decisions,” he says. “Not just tracking it for them; helping them decide where to bank, which technology to use, and watching their cash flow.”
It’s an idea Michael shares—and it’s the reason clients keep choosing her. “I lock arms with them,” she says. “I treat their business as if it’s my business.”
Part of that involvement is the banking setup itself. In the Compass survey, 78% of owners hit at least one unexpected cash flow issue in the past year, and 42% didn’t have the reserves to absorb it. That problem often comes down to not knowing where they stood until it was too late to do anything about it.
The right setup closes that gap by giving owners clearer visibility into what they have and what’s already spoken for. That turns an opaque pile of cash into something they can plan against. Getting an owner there means having an opinion about where they bank. Being willing to give one is another opportunity to add value—and another reason to be that first call.
“There’s a natural tendency to stay neutral,” says Snider. “If you feel uncomfortable giving them one banking option, give them two or three,” he says. “You can frame it as, ‘this is something similar, I’ve heard others have used it. But this is the one I use and recommend.’”
The recommendation itself takes a minute. The setup it leads to is what makes every other piece of advice easier to act on.
Clients want someone to trust with the money
The tools at owners’ disposal will keep getting smarter. What they won’t get better at is knowing your clients: the hire they’ve been putting off, the bill that’s coming due, the goal they haven’t said out loud yet. They won’t notice what’s missing from the numbers, or say the hard thing when the cash is running short, or open the account that turns a plan into something real.
Clients aren’t asking their accountant for AI. They’re asking for someone to trust with the money. In the era of AI, that’s what makes a firm worth calling.
Relay’s updated Banking Partner Certification is designed to help you build that role, with practical guidance on spotting the clients who need a better banking setup, raising it with them, and making a recommendation that sticks. It’s free, self-paced, and takes about an hour.
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