8 Things Worth Remembering from Taxposium 2026

Taxposium wrapped up in Cleveland this week. If you weren’t there, here’s the download. If you were there, this is your permission to laugh about the sloth one more time, but that’s saved for last.

Pricing came up constantly this year, in sessions and in conversations at the booth alike. Firm owners are thinking about it more than ever, but most of them are still working off the same rate they set years ago, or matching whatever the firm down the street charges.

A few patterns kept repeating. Partners at the same firm quoting different prices for the same service. Owners who haven’t raised fees in three or four years because they’re afraid of the conversation. Firms doing real advisory work, like walking a client through a business buyout or an estate question, and never billing for it because it didn’t feel like “real work” at the time.

None of this is a mystery once you see it. It’s a systems problem, not a willpower problem.

SmartPath Founder, Will Hamilton, presented Scaling Your Tax Practice for Sustainable Growth this year, focused on the operational side of growth: capacity, systems, and what actually needs to be true internally before a firm can take on more.

Loren Fogelman, founder of Business Success Solution and a business coach recognized by HubSpot among the world’s top business coaches, presented Simple Strategies to Confidently Raise Your Prices alongside Will. Loren has spent years helping accounting professionals move away from hourly billing toward value-based pricing, and her session focused specifically on the confidence and communication side of raising fees, not just the math behind them.

Different rooms, different angles, same underlying truth. A firm can’t scale sustainably on pricing that hasn’t kept up with the value it delivers, and it can’t raise prices confidently without the operational footing to back it up. Attendance was strong for both, and the questions afterward showed firm owners are starting to connect those two dots themselves.

AI had a visible presence again this year, but the tone of the conversation has changed. Last year felt like curiosity. This year felt like scrutiny. Firm owners weren’t just asking what a tool could do. They were asking where their client data goes, who has access to it, and what happens if something goes wrong.

That shift points to something worth remembering when evaluating any new AI tool: security credentials should be the first thing checked, not the last. SOC 2 Type 2 compliance is the standard to look for. It means a vendor has been independently audited over time, not just once, and it should be a non-negotiable question for any software touching client data.

SmartPath is SOC 2 Type 2 compliant, and so is SmartVault, its parent company. One AI tool worth watching in this space right now is SmartRequestAI, which handles document requests intelligently so firms aren’t manually chasing down the same missing forms every season. Before adopting any AI tool this year, ask about the security credentials first. The features are only worth having if the data behind them is actually protected.

One attendee put it plainly: “This is why people are retiring.” She wasn’t talking about burnout from client work. She was talking about the exhaustion of evaluating a dozen new tools a year and figuring out which ones actually deserve a spot in her stack.

That exhaustion showed up in smaller ways too. Firm owners comparing notes on how many logins they juggle before lunch. Owners who adopted three different point solutions in the last two years and still don’t have a clean way to see what’s happening across their practice. The tools were each supposed to save time. Managing all of them became its own job.

SmartVault wrote a good piece on this exact problem, called The Myth of the Modern Accounting Tech Stack. Worth a read if a growing tool list has started to feel like its own job.

A handful of conversations at the booth started with some version of “is there a faster way to get engagement letters out.” Not a crisis, just a genuine question from firms who are tired of drafting from scratch or tracking signatures by hand.

That’s exactly what SmartPath’s engagement letter and onboarding template library is built for. Standard templates mean every client gets the same protective language, and automated sending means nobody’s manually chasing down a signature three months into the engagement.

When the booth conversation got to the fact that SmartPath found $91,277 sitting in one firm’s existing client roster, the reaction was almost always the same: silence, then “wait, existing clients?” That question led more than one owner to ask what their own number might look like. One firm owner found out during a live roster analysis at the booth.

Not new leads. Not a different niche. The same roster they’d been serving for years, just never priced or packaged to reflect the full value of the work.

That’s the pattern behind both numbers. The firms doing the best right now aren’t necessarily finding new clients faster. They’re finally seeing what’s already in front of them.

The overwhelming feeling on the floor wasn’t burnout. It was firm owners who know exactly what they want their practice to look like and are looking for the shortest path there. That’s a good sign for the industry, even with all the tech-stack fatigue in the background.

SmartVault’s top swag item at the show was Sammy the Sloth, wearing a t-shirt that said “Don’t be a sloth. Speed up your workflows.” He pulled a steady crowd all week. A few aisles down, TaxAct had a claw machine stocked with unicorns doing the exact same job. Booth traffic doesn’t lie. People will cross a convention floor for a stuffed animal faster than they’ll cross it for a demo, and this year, they had two good reasons to do it.