Via CPA Practice Advisor: How AI-Powered Automation is Helping One Small Firm Reduce Administrative Drag and Scale Smarter
Steve Tonkin & Company had a familiar small-firm problem: functional software that made routine work needlessly slow. CPA Practice Advisor reported on April 15, 2026 that the Lakewood, Colorado family-run bookkeeping, accounting and controllership firm relied on traditional accounting tools and spreadsheets. Reconciliation, transaction review and account navigation required extra clicks, loading time and manual intervention.
By early 2026, owner Steve Tonkin estimated that he had spent 12 to 15 hours on software-support issues alone. That time was neither billable nor available for advisory work. For a practice built around responsiveness and personal service, the friction constrained growth twice: it consumed owner capacity and delayed the work clients actually valued.
Tonkin brought more than 20 years of accounting experience and extensive hands-on work with accounting systems to the decision. He was not shopping for novelty after hearing the word “AI” on a podcast. He was looking for a workflow redesigned to remove repetitive effort rather than another feature bolted onto a legacy stack.
This case independently summarizes CPA Practice Advisor's reporting and Tonkin's statements. Steve Tonkin & Company is not an AgentsROI client, and AgentsROI did not select or implement the platform described below.
Tonkin selected Digits, an AI-native accounting platform intended to automate bookkeeping and reporting while providing current financial visibility. The migration was still underway when CPA Practice Advisor published the case. Five clients had moved fully, and Tonkin expected most new business to start on the new platform instead of the legacy system.
The operating goal was specific: grow beyond 30 clients without adding administrative drag or weakening responsiveness. Faster reconciliation and easier access to current balances, transaction activity and reconciled views meant client questions could be answered within hours rather than waiting for month-end processing. The source reports near-real-time visibility, not autonomous accounting and certainly not the retirement of professional review.
Tonkin reported approximately 20% immediate time savings after moving away from the legacy systems. He projected 30% to 50% longer-term efficiency gains as more clients migrated. The distinction matters: 20% was the early reported result; 30% to 50% was an expectation, not an achieved outcome.
CPA Practice Advisor also reported faster reconciliation and quicker client responses. The new visibility let clients see updated financial information without waiting for static month-end reports. That shifted some bookkeeping value from retrospective record production toward current management information.
The result is encouraging but bounded. Five clients had completed the transition, the wider migration remained in progress and the source did not publish audited time studies or dollar savings. The useful evidence is that Tonkin measured an early operational gain while keeping the projection labelled as a projection. Accountants will appreciate the refusal to book future efficiency as current income.
Start with a Workflow ROI Audit. Count support hours, reconciliation steps, response delays and rework before comparing platforms. Identify where client data moves, what still requires professional review and how success will be measured during migration. Tonkin had a 12-to-15-hour support baseline and an early 20% result; another firm needs its own numbers.
Model Selection & Continuity Planning then compares capability, cost, privacy and fit against the actual workflow, with a fallback if pricing, access or performance changes. Managed AI Operations keeps integrations, permissions, quality checks and ROI reporting current after launch. The software choice matters. So does the unglamorous work of running it next month.
AgentsROI did not choose Digits for Steve Tonkin & Company and does not claim its outcomes. It helps owner-led accounting firms assess their own workflow, make a vendor-neutral selection and govern the operation around sensitive client financial data. Book a no-pressure assessment to determine whether the lost hours justify a migration before moving records or signing a long contract.
Credit: This article independently summarizes CPA Practice Advisor's reporting and statements from Steve Tonkin. Steve Tonkin & Company is the featured organization; Digits is the platform named in the source.
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