For me, any type of checking to make sure that BAS is right is a win for the accounting market. I don’t care if it’s Xero, QuickBooks, MYOB or whatever it is. For every single transition we do, we probably see one out of 20 balance sheets match the GST return, and usually people get PAYG right. But like, and I’m talking accounting firms, large businesses, small businesses. So I love that MYOB is getting into that market and automating that process and really trying to put, I think, some guardrails on it. To me, it’s such a high-risk, high-error process that I think a lot of firms are potentially doing too quick.

— Tyler Caskey, Partner at TheBeanCounters

The first quarter of 2026 has delivered an extraordinary wave of AI-powered enhancements, mid-market strategy shifts and workflow automation upgrades across the accounting technology ecosystem. This session, presented at the Sydney Accounting and Bookkeeping Expo, dives deep into what matters, what is hype, and where firms should pay attention.

• MYOB Solo, MYOB AI BAS checks and Intuit Accountant Suite signal strong practice management evolution
• Xero Ultra beta, dashboard upgrades and API pricing changes reshape the mid-market and app ecosystem
• Karbon recurring billing, AI agents and Uncat integration enhance workflow efficiency
• Paidnice transforms debt collection automation, alongside major payroll innovation from Tanda
• Fathom AI commentary, Dext AI Assist and Dashboard Insights BAS Pro elevate advisory conversations

As always, the key message is this: block time in your calendar and properly explore these features. Many of these releases can immediately improve efficiency, reduce risk and deepen client advisory if implemented thoughtfully.

The podcast is also released on Accountants Daily Momentum Media’s Under The Hood brand: https://www.accountantsdaily.com.au/technology/22289-under-the-hood-accounting-tech-update-for-q1-2026

Hi. This is Heather Smith here, the rapid deployment of AI powered solutions for the start of 2026 has been quite astounding, hasn’t it. Tyler Caskey and I are here to recap accounting tech releases for the first quarter of 2026 these quarterly updates are a good reminder to ensure you are fully using the features and functionalities of tools in your tech stack, and may flavour future conversations with your clients.

Tyler and I presented the following at the recent Sydney accounting and bookkeeping Expo. For those of you who are madly making notes from our session, here is the podcast I promised you can deep dive into the details.

So how is this going to work? I’m going to hand over to the live audio, and then I’ll jump in at the end and go through what we did not get time to cover off in the session. I encourage you to block some time in the calendar, brew yourself a pot of tea, lock the door and buckle up for lots of updates from the accounting technology world.

One more thing while you’re listening, can I ask you to subscribe to the podcast so you never miss an episode, and if you’re an app vendor listening in, Please promote the podcast via your newsletter or socials, and I encourage you to sign up to the accounting Apps newsletter at accounting apps.io and join the accounting apps mastermind groups where we can continue these conversations.

James Carey

Afternoon body. Welcome to the next session, which is going to be sharing their wealth of knowledge about latest impact trends. I enjoy all the content that they put out. I’m always learning things take it away.

Heather Smith

Thank you so much, James, and I’m always learning from you too. And special thanks to the chairs who spend the day chairing these rooms and organising everything. It’s a great help to everyone. So welcome. We’re wonderful that you are here. This episode is also pushed out through accountants daily and the accounting apps podcast. So I encourage you to listen here, but also check in and subscribe to that.

So thank you, Tyler, so much for joining me. Many of you will know Tyler Caskey, who is a like myself, a chartered accountant, and he works at BeanCounters and does some phenomenal work over there.

How has your start of the year been, Tyler?

Tyler Caskey

It’s been really good. Had a very nice and quiet January. Got to spend time on the beach, and then we’ve had two or three large projects take off in February, March. So we are full noise, as we would say, fantastic.

Heather Smith

So I encourage any of you to connect with Tyler on LinkedIn, because he always has some very interesting, insightful content there, and you missed out on the party last night Tyler, where a young lady said that Tyler always finishes his posts with because his name is Tyler Caskey TC, and she said that that meant, too cool.

Tyler Caskey

I actually do a little kiss kiss here as well. Who knows.

Heather Smith

And we were like, Oh, you’re so young, if you think.

Tyler Caskey

I’m too old for that.

Heather Smith

No, she was young. She was 26 and we were like…

Heather Smith

So initially, we want to start with some updates from the GL world.

MYOB, you had a look at the AI best and the agentic agents in BAS?

Tyler Caskey

I’ve been staying very close to the practice management pieces. Over the last, I think it’s been six, seven months, I cannot wait for better, best reporting, better best analysis to come out into the market. It’s great that my ops having a look at this. For me, any type of checking to make sure that BAS is right is a win for the accounting market. I don’t care if it’s Xero, QuickBooks, MYOB or whatever it is. For every single transition we do, we probably see one out of 20 balance sheets match the GST return, and usually people get PAYG right. But like, and I’m talking accounting firms, large businesses, small businesses. So I love that MYOB is getting into that market and automating that process and really trying to put, I think, some guardrails on it. To me, it’s such a high-risk, high-error process that I think a lot of firms are potentially doing too quick. Yeah. And I, you know, there’s, there’s a bunch of other businesses that are trying to get into this bears lodgement thing. And it’s, it’s great to see.

Heather Smith

Yeah, there absolutely is a number of solutions. Samuel David has one in their startup ally that helps you with the abas as well. One of the things I wanted to mention was something that I missed last year, which was MYOB solo, which is a, it’s just a really good, well, it’s a good app for the gig worker, the solo worker. They can have it on their phone as the accountant. You can view it on your desktop, and it starts, look the starting point of it. Starting price is $1 per month, and then I think it goes up to $10 a month after the first year. But in the starting out, in that space where you don’t have a lot of money and you’re a solar worker, it kind of does that, and it has two bank cards you can attach to it as well, which is interesting.

Tyler Caskey

MYOB Solo is good, like I use Xero predominantly in my business. Most of my clients have, but dear Lord, they’ve hit the money like MYOB Solo is good. They’ve got the MYOB card. How many people have had troubles connecting a bank feed to any system in their in their past, right? It’s, it’s not fun. So having MYOB, have the card and the app kind of relieves some of that pressure. I think they’ve done very, very well, and it’s app based only for clients. So your clients don’t have an on web, you know, web based system, they are app based users only. I think it’s very good.

Heather Smith

So if you do have the smaller clients, the solutions, the channels, are getting expensive now for those clients who don’t necessarily need it. It is worth taking a look at moving swiftly to Intuit, who launched Intuit accountant suite, which has covers five core areas: client management, client collaboration, service delivery, business planning and team management, one platform. So the Intuit team are very excited about that.

Have you had a look at Intuit?

Tyler Caskey

Yeah, I think Intuit’s done a very good job, like they’re obviously newer to the practice management market. They’re, they’re, they’ve got some pretty good financial statements, and they’re starting to combine things very similar to the way Xeros combined XPM and HQ. So it’s, it’s a good step. They’ve also got proposals built in there as well. So for some of the smaller practices, Intuit’s making like, really good moves, you know. And it actually has a pretty well priced, reliable system.

Heather Smith

The personalised proposals is a kind of a big deal as well. And they also have introduced auto save to help you as you’re going through invoicing. It saves it as you go along, which is useful.

Tyler Caskey

And I will touch on that. Like, are there any Xero practices here? in the…Yeah. Have you connected your XPM and HQ together? Of course, of course you have.

Tyler Caskey

Yeah, like, they pushed the release over. And I think that’s what’s happening in the market. Is like, you know, we’re trying to get a single source of truth on clients. We’re trying to get a better UI, a better experience there. Like, I like what Xero is doing with it.

Heather Smith

So the big release in Xero that everyone is very excited about is in find and recode. You can now search in lock dates, so you have the option to go back into history and search without going and changing anything.

Tyler Caskey

I mean great, very high risk for people unlocking books. I yeah, I always get cautious on that. But also they’ve got the new dashboard, like, I think xero’s new dashboard is, is very, very good. I think they’ve got my favourite piece there is about the most recently paid bills, even me, as a business owner, being able to look through and going, here’s the last five bills that I’ve been paid, or client invoices. I think it’s really positive. Those types of information. I think is good.

Heather Smith

Yeah, I don’t think the finding of code means you can find the information. Doesn’t necessarily mean you can change the information. Yeah, you can have a look as well, having a look at it, like configure some things out quickly. And you’ve mentioned that there is Xero Ultra in beta. I don’t have access to this. Something special that you’ve got access to.

Tyler Caskey

No, it’s not, it’s not released. But Xero is coming up with a, I think it’s a 5000 transaction per month plan, so above their big, large system, because Xero has kind of got a soft limit of about 2000 transactions. They’ve been working on this for a long time. We’ve got a couple of clients in beta on this, and it’s, it’s a really good move for Xero. So they’re doing enhanced user controls, so people can see and not see certain bank accounts. So you can really start for these larger businesses to separate that, which I think is great, and also for especially for, like retail businesses that have 345, 1000 transactions, Xero is trying to get into that mid market. You know, they’ve even started recruiting for this mid market team. They. Just haven’t released it to the wider market.

Heather Smith

Think everyone is trying to get into the mid market at the moment, it feels a bit like analytics powered by sift has been renamed to Analytics, which is a lot simpler. Thank you very much. And you can bulk upload employees past earnings with a file, so if you’ve got that from a previous Payroll solution, so that can save a lot of time in that.

Tyler Caskey

I read that one. It made me incredibly nervous, because if you the amount of times I’ve double loaded people’s salaries on the STP portal when, like, we’re doing any type of payroll, there’s no easier way to annoy someone. So we actually, I try to never bring across earnings. And yeah, let that, let that stay blank, but I love that they’ve done it.

Heather Smith

Yeah, fair enough. And payroll is an area you have to be very careful in. So we wanted to just briefly mention that Xero has made changes to the way app develop, the way they price, the API for app developers.

Do you want to touch on Xero changes?

Tyler Caskey

Tyler, yeah, this is really big there. For a lot of the accounting apps, things got wildly more expensive. So think about balance sheet rep apps. They are could be attacking 1000 of your files, right? So they’re now getting charged based on how many files and how many gigabytes they’re working through. So for these, for some of the singular apps, right? If you’ve got a consolidation app or an approval Max, not going to be a huge financial change for them, but any of the Xero apps that are attacking multiple so in accounting firms like I do think this is going to impact like, some of the prices, you know, balance sheet, RECs used to be like, 10 bucks a client per year. My gut feel is this is going to pass on the cost.

Heather Smith

Yeah, so I think we are going to either have the cost passed on to us, but I also think some some solutions possibly will close down and may not even start up, because it is quite, it’s quite hefty change,

Tyler Caskey

Yeah, and instead of, like a 15% revenue share that they used to have,

Heather Smith

I wanted to move on, and just mentioned that tax sorted, rebranded to work papers sorted. I know everyone’s talking about work papers at the moment.

BGL announced a new integration between Simple Fund, 360 simple invest 360 and Beta Share Direct. Do you have a comment about that?

Tyler Caskey

Yeah, it’s, it’s good that they’re integrating more. I mean, there’s beta shares is one of 1000 different investment portfolios, but it’s huge in Australia, so the more they can get that data, I think the better. And it’s just means you’re not manually plugging information.

Heather Smith

Yeah, absolutely. So moving on to practice management solutions. Carbon, the practice management software built specifically for accounting and bookkeeping firms, now integrates with uncat and Microsoft Teams. So for those of you don’t know, uncat helps resolve Uncategorised transactions with their clients.

Tyler Caskey

Yeah, I love uncat. If you haven’t touched it, dear Lord, touch it the way it can give information to clients of missing transactions and they fill it in and come back. Is awesome. It’s so much like one of my friends you know, as a small business owner, his bookkeeper still sends it to him in Excel. That’s that needs to die, like, the way we’re getting information from clients, just needs to change. And it’s got a really nice play. Yeah, I might, I might touch on that. Yep, I know you go. I was going to touch on the recurring billing. Yeah, carbons got recurring billing. Like, is that a new I think it’s a new function from them. And it’s great to see, like, the amount of entities that have recurring billing. I’ve seen this go from like a 20% of the market. I’m seeing most accounting firms get up to like 50% of the market for recurring as well.

Heather Smith

Yeah, no, it’s fantastic. Yes. And carbon has also introduced AI agents, AI powered teammates to help you move along the workflow faster. Yeah. So moving on from that, Halak, see practice management for healthcare. And I know many of you may not necessarily be aware of that, but if you have clients in that area, it’s introduced ai file summary, inbuilt features instantly summarise your upload files, creating clear, concise summary of what matters most for patients. Really useful in that space.

Tyler Caskey

Doctors have the worst accounting I’ve ever seen in my entire life. Yeah, I’ve seen a few nods. I’ve never seen a doctor with a balance sheet that makes sense. I’ve never seen a doctor that is happy with their finances. They they do not value it well. So I think the more automation that these can have, the better the other one that they’ve got here is like, you know how programmes like employment here? And tender release. When they release awards into the system, it happens, you know, first of July or 30, you know, just before June each year. Galaxy does the same thing with Medicare rebates. So as they come in, heli helix, he pulls that into the practice management system. So when people are getting rebates, as those change each year, so it’s just, like a bit of a no brainer. Now, for like, some doctor practices, I don’t think it’s a cheap product, but it’s a very good product.

Heather Smith

Yeah, absolutely.

Would you like to jump into some of the systems you’ve reviewed recently, such as, Paidnice?

Tyler Caskey

Oh, yeah. Has anyone seen Paidnice? The debt collection? Yeah, I if I’m if I’m recommending one app that every single person should look at today is paid nice. They’re not here. Their programmers are in New Zealand and Amsterdam. They’re the two guys that built a to x, which is the connection between Shopify Xero and since seven paid nice is the best debt collection system with Xero or QuickBooks you will ever see. It is so clean to use. The login takes the best part of them, not kidding, 15 seconds to log in. And it does. We put it into a farm, and these this farm sells cattle and holds cattle. Their data book was two and a half million dollars within about three months of paid nice revenue, increased debtors went down to 2.2 automated statements, automatic reminders. It doesn’t camp at five reminders. It’s one of my it’s the debt collection system I’ve been looking for for the last 15 years. And I want to I say this with love towards accounts receivable people, but this is the first one that can mean, you know, a financial controller could effectively automate 80 to 90% of the accounts receivable role. It’s amazing.

Heather Smith

Fantastic. I didn’t realise they were 80x builders as well.

Tyler Caskey

Yeah, they sold. I’m sure they made a tonne of Tony and Jamie. Yes. And then so it looks as beautiful as a 2x and they’ve started to build in payments as well. So a 2x pulls data from PayPal and then batches it into Xero, and the they’re thinking about the same thing from paid nice so automated collections. Then they’re looking at posting multiple bill payments, similar to stripe inside Xero as well. Like, it’s phenomenal.

Heather Smith

Awesome.

Is there anything else that you want to talk about?

Tyler Caskey

Yeah, I want to talk about Tanda. I know Tanda has been around for a long time. Their payroll released, like, I think, three, four years ago. It’s used by massive places now. So Guzman and Gomez is using it. We’re helping zoo street greet with 750 people get onto Tanda, and it’s the most amazing restaurant and award franchisee software I’ve ever seen. It’s got the ability to control multiple entities and multiple rules. So if we’re all we’re all in a restaurant, and we’ve got the management team and the front of house team. You can separate the teams, and you can say you can only hire, you know, levels 123, and four for these types of people, and you can really control all the awards. And I think this has come out of, obviously, how many times KFC and McDonald’s and everyone else got in the paper. But if you’ve got a franchise, you’ve got a multi entity, you’ve got awards, dear Lord, have a look at tender. It’s $12.80 per user per month. I cannot express how impressed I’ve been with this product.

Heather Smith

Now, yes, and it’s a Brisbane-based solution, so extra kudos to that.

Tyler Caskey

Yeah, I’ll do a sneaky one. Next is emerge. Emerge is coming up as a multi entity Xero app for drop shipping. So it manages stock, which is really, really good, automates into multiple Xeros, especially if you’ve got a Chinese office, a US company and an Australia company. EMERGE is probably one of my favourite new apps I’ve looked at, built out of Singapore, specifically for, like, all these online retailers, so that one’s a real big play, and the last one I reckon I’ll do, of mine, is restock. Has anyone touched restoke For Yeah, yeah. Restock does menu building for restaurants? We’ve used it back in 2020 when restaurants, like we’re closing, closing down, closing it in a lot of trouble, restoke does probably the best costed menus I’ve seen. They’re getting into purchase orders, and I’ve got a sneaky feeling they’re going to get into paying a purchase orders as well. So like, they’re taking away so much of that pain, and it’s an amazing product, fantastic.

Heather Smith

Thank you so much. Tyler. So Andrew Payton Smith, who said he was going to be here, but I’ve not seen him. You may know from jazz, contacted me and told me that he has launched advisor lie advisor li went live in March aimed at advisors, accountants, SMEs. Single platform from pre revenue startup through to exit forecast benchmarks, loan preps, I am prep and board reporting.

Tyler Caskey

Yeah. Jazoogle is surprisingly nice. It’s a just a reporting system that sits on top of Xeros and can really help automate multi entity and kind of board packs, but it does some very good kind of budgeting and information management data, which honestly is like it can be very expensive work, and I think accountants can do a lot more of that in jazz.

Heather Smith

Yes, yes.

Fathom has, and this is kind of where I thought the llms were going to go. Has introduced a commentary writer, a feature that automatically generates written commentary for management reports based on the financial data within the reports. It allows you them to understand the business context, such as goal, strategy, market conditions and the AI can interpret financial results more accurately combined with financial data, AI generates smarter commentary reflects what’s happening in the business.

What do you think about Fathom’s update?

Tyler Caskey

I saw it. I hate it like I I think, I think we, we should be the ones reading the commentary and writing it like, if AI writes it like aI wrote me a job description the other day. It was pretty good, but it also was rubbish. Like, it’s, I think it’s part of the world, especially these large listed businesses. Like my favourite comment that my old one of my management accountants used to make, is actual is higher than budget, because budget is lower than actual, and so yeah, at least it’s going to be better than that. But like I do, think commentary needs is where the accountants, you know, should add our value.

Heather Smith

Yeah, look, and I hear you, and we lose the elasticity in our brain function if we don’t explore and extract our own insights there. But for the people who are not offering insights, maybe it starts them on a foundation, to move them along that level and read it.

Tyler Caskey

There’s another point there about like, Employment Heroes, and even LinkedIn has started to pre write job posts as well. So Employment Heroes obviously always had their smart match where they help you hire, but now they can pre write using an AI tool, your job posts and LinkedIn is done the same. If you do a post on LinkedIn about, hey, I’m looking for this type of staff member, it’ll pop up. Hey, I’ve pre written this. Do you want to post this? Very similar to Employment Hero. It’s very, very good. It’s, honestly, it’s probably better than the way I’d write it.

Heather Smith

Awesome. So we all send these sessions talking about where we will be next. And normally we have a lot of things to go to, but this year, I don’t know what’s going on, but next week, I think you’ll be at SuiteConnect in Sydney, which is on the 23rd of March, 26

Tyler Caskey

Yeah, NetSuite’s kind of annual or biannual, kind of conference?

Heather Smith

It’s annual for Australia.

Tyler Caskey

Ah, nice. Thank you. Yeah, I’m, I’m looking forward to that NetSuite is a beast. So need to learn more.

Heather Smith

If you’re looking and thinking about the P space I would read, you have to pre register. There’s lots of ID checks to go through, so you have to, it’s not as easy as to get in as this one. So you have to pre register 24 hours in advance to go to SuiteConnect. The other one I possibly am going to is Xerocon London. And you are going to Xerocon Denver?

Tyler Caskey

Yeah, I have a, I have a marketing consultant in Denver, so I’m, yeah, very keen. It’s not during the NBA season, but that’s okay.

Heather Smith

Fantastic.

Heather Smith

Hey, it’s Heather Smith here, jumping in again. Let’s keep going through all this great information.

Heather Smith

So in the practice management space, the project management and collaboration platform, active club, active collab, has built a designated area for apps and integration. This is useful for finance teams trying to piece together data, and it’s a timely reminder, if you’re using a solution, it’s worth periodically checking new integrations as they may streamline your tech stack in the reporting space, calcs, which automates budgeting, cash flow, forecast, forecasting, KPIs and group consolidations intelligently the team mic Devine and the team have introduced custom report templates.

Users can now build their own reporting templates when preset reports do not meet their needs. Templates can include actuals, budgets and variances, different business units by column and any date range per column.

Dashboard insights have released five new features. Let’s see. We’ve got a Chrome extension, automated reports, rules based automation for the preparation of BAS and a BAS pro advisory feature, which adds an intelligent analysis layer to post bas communication, and in that communication. Information that it includes profitability indicators, cash flow and balance sheet health and operational signals to start a conversation with your clients, and at the very end, I will highlight there is dash. Dashboard insights are having a road show across Australia, which you might like to attend.

Share site, the investment tracking software has introduced a demo portfolio. Let’s take a moment to encourage all solutions to provide us with access to a demo to test the solution out.

Now moving across to accounting tools. So in February of this year, Enrico Palmer palmerino, Enrico palmerino, founder and CEO of bot keeper, an AI driven automated bookkeeping platform, announced the closure of bot keeper, a company he founded in 2015 two weeks later, it was announced that zendu, that’s with an ex zendu would acquire bookkeeper look, it’s never good to see businesses go through troubling times, but at the start of the year, seems to have been particularly hard in the SaaS world.

Amanda Linton, the CEO of the Institute of Certified bookkeepers, remarked on LinkedIn that, along with bot keeper, the NAB bookkeeper, powered by Friday, she remarked that two platforms that were built around replacing professional bookkeepers have both collapsed within weeks of each other Moving across to document management systems.

SuiteFiles has introduced a new, modernised document workspace, rather than simple document storage, it combines editing PDF tools, including powerful new PDF editing capabilities version control tasks and clients sharing into one environment for professional services firms. And Tyler particularly loved that you didn’t have to edit the PDFs in Adobe workflow moving to the workflow builders section, Zapier has built in AI guardrails to safety check any zap which will block or redact sensitive information in a workflow.

And if you’re using Process Street, you may need to jump in and update your active runs to the latest version.

And moving to bills and expenses. EzzyBill has released integration with Procore and Service Titan and offers po matching with workflow Max and many thanks to the easy bills team who shared that release update with me and wrote about it in a blog post, which really helps me find out about all the new updates that People are putting out there. Sometimes they can be hidden away in the product development team, and we don’t get to hear about them. But as accountants and bookkeepers, we want to know what’s happening.

DEXT has introduced AI assist, an AI agent that helps accountants, bookkeepers and finance teams automate everyday bookkeeping decisions. Ai assist learns from how you work, surfaces suggestions and keeps everything transparent and reviewable. It’s designed to support professionals, not replace them.

So where will we be next? Disappointingly, this year is quite quiet on the conference front in Australia. So here are a few of the Australian and international conferences that are on my radar, but please let me know if there are any others out there. MYOB, Discover Live, April, May. April. May. This year, the Accounting Conference and Expo is happening on the 26th of June in Sydney. Xerocon London is happening in July. The accounting benchmarking road show, powered by dashboard insights, is happening in August. Xerocon Denver is happening also in August. ABN the bookkeeper event is happening on the Sunshine Coast in October. NetSuite, sweet sweet world is happening in Las Vegas in October. And Intuit Connect is also happening in Las Vegas in October. And they’re happening they’re on the exact same date, 26th to the 29th of October. So there are going to be so many accountants in Las Vegas from the 26th to the 29th of October. Someone needs to make a movie about that, because that I don’t know that seems like an awful lot of accountants. Intuit connect, typically has about 10,000 people. I think NetSuite can range in the 20 to 40,000 I think. There’ll be so many accountants.

The ICB are having their Australian bookkeepers summit in Adelaide in October, and Wacoa, which is World Congress of accountants, is happening in Seoul, in South Korea, in November. But that’s invite only, very sadly, and I’m not on the invite list currently, which is also very sad, but very excited that wacoa is happening in South Korea. And people will need to let me know what happens there, because that it wakoa Is the Olympics of the accounting conference world.

So be sure to let Tyler Caskey, and I know if you find this, use this update useful, and remember you can read the blog, which has all of the links so you can deep dive into everything that I’ve shared. Thank you so much.