News about accounting

At the CCH Connections 2026 event in Orlando, Wolters Kluwer Tax & Accounting brought together leaders from Microsoft, Salesforce, McKinsey and Sandra Wiley Strategies to discuss how accounting firms should adopt agentic AI. Panelists urged firms not to wait for a perfect firmwide AI strategy, but to start with one workflow, secure its data, and build agentic workflows with governance and controls. Key themes included treating AI as business transformation rather than just productivity, rethinking how newer staff build expertise, setting clear standards for accountability and human oversight, and tying AI budgets to firm strategy. The session closed by challenging each leader to set priorities for the next 12 months and choose one practical move to make within 90 days.

Moonshot AI's Kimi K3.1 Pro passed 86.1% of tasks on the DualEntry Accounting AI Benchmark, placing fourth and ahead of every model from Anthropic, OpenAI and Meta. Zhipu AI's open GLM-5.3 Flash tied for second at 88.1%, while Google's Gemini 4 Argon leads at 91.1%. Across the leaderboard, seven open models average 83.9%, compared with 81.3% for 13 closed models. Closed models still lead on reliability, however: the top score on hard tasks is 82.1%, shared by three closed models, and the five models that most often passed a task in all three runs are all closed.

A report from Tempo, a blockchain backed by Stripe, argues that a proposed FASB accounting update released in August could let qualifying stablecoins be classified as cash equivalents, removing a barrier to corporate adoption. Under current practice, stablecoin holdings may not count toward reported cash, affecting liquidity ratios and loan covenants even when tokens are fully backed by dollars. The proposal would require companies to hold direct redemption rights with the issuer, so buying USDC through an exchange would not automatically qualify, while Coinbase already classified USDC and other payment stablecoins as cash equivalents in its 2025 annual report. Public comments on the proposal are open until Nov. 19. It follows the GENIUS Act passed in July 2025, which sets the first comprehensive federal framework for US payment stablecoins and is scheduled to take effect in January 2027.