For Accounting & Audit Firms
The operating layer for the modern firm.
Talent is thin. Fixed-fee billing is eating the slack. Compliance work is commoditizing. Every AI vendor is selling you something that touches client data without a defensible record. RARS sits on top of and governs the tools you already use.
Public beta opens May 2026
Illustrative- A-101Trial balance tie-out
- A-110Cash reconciliation
- B-200Revenue cut-off testing
- C-300PBC list: 3 items open
- D-400K-1 follow-up in UltraTax
- Z-900Partner review & sign-off
The squeeze is structural
This isn't a cycle. It's a rebuild.
The profession is repricing. The talent pipeline is thinner every year. Fixed-fee billing punishes inefficiency. The firms that invest in operating infrastructure are pulling away on margin, on valuation, on the partners they can recruit. The rest are being consolidated.
of financial leaders reported a talent shortage in 2024, up from 70% in 2022.
Wolters Kluwer Future Ready Accountant Report
decline in U.S. accounting-degree completions between 2021 and 2023.
AICPA Trends in Accounting Report, 2023
to replace a single staff accountant, including recruiting, training, and productivity loss.
Hemisphere Talent / Gallup analysis, 2025
of revenue at $50M+ firms now comes from non-compliance services.
Rosenberg MAP Survey, 2025
A scenario from every firm
Six months later, nobody can tell you exactly what happened.
- 01Staffpulls client data from QBO
- 02Staffcategorizes a quarter of transactions
- 03Staffprepares a draft return in UltraTax
- 04Staffemails the client for a K-1 that the partnership hasn't issued yet
- 05Clientuploads the document to Suralink
- 06Staffupdates engagement status in Karbon
- 07Partnerreviews workpapers in a separate system
Each tool does its job. None of them tell the same story. An auditor, a regulator, or a partner cleaning up an engagement two years later has to reconstruct intent from email threads, comments, and memory.
The work was done. The accountability trail is fiction.
Across your service lines
RARS sits as the orchestration and governance layer on top of the tools you already use.
We don't replace the software your firm has standardized on. We connect it, govern it, and give you a single auditable record of the work it does together. We're building integrations in order of design partner demand. Your priorities shape ours.
Tax · 40–60% of firm revenue
Tax workflow orchestration
Drive engagement checklists, PBC requests, K-1 follow-ups, and partner review cycles across your tax platform and practice management system. Every change to the return surfaces as a structured, attributed diff of what happened.
Ecosystem
UltraTax CS, Lacerte, CCH Axcess, Drake Tax, TaxDome, Karbon
Audit · regulated work
Audit evidence & workpaper assembly
Assemble workpapers with full provenance from source. RARS ties evidence to assertions and keeps extractions attributed to the actor and engagement, not to a vendor's UI.
Ecosystem
DataSnipper, Suralink, CaseWare, Fieldguide
Advisory · your highest-margin line
Advisory, governed
Engagement setup, proposal automation, recurring advisory dashboards, cross-client reporting. Free the capacity you need to move revenue mix toward advisory.
Ecosystem
Ignition, Fathom, Syft, CPACharge
CAS · your fastest-growing line
Client accounting, with controls
Transaction categorization, bank reconciliations, month-end close, and partner sign-off on exceptions. Your matrix defines which situations require approval before anything touches the GL. Scale a CAS book without hiring linearly.
Ecosystem
QuickBooks Online, Xero, Sage Intacct, Bill.com, Ramp
Workflows in focus
The first workflows we're taking on. Cross-system, by design.
Every workflow below crosses system boundaries. These are the places where point solutions can't compete, and where your audit trail currently lives in email threads. We're building them out first, alongside our design partners.
Client onboarding & engagement setup
Today
A new engagement touches 4–5 systems. Engagement letter, portal provisioning, folder structure, chart of accounts, task schedule. All done by different people, out of order, with half the steps skipped. Engagement-letter gaps are a leading cause of malpractice claims.
With RARS
A partner says "onboard Acme Corp, S-Corp, CAS client, $5K/month, Sarah's team." RARS creates the entity, generates the engagement letter with the correct scope, provisions the portal, sets up the chart of accounts, schedules the recurring tasks, and assigns the team. Every action logged as a versioned, attributed event.
Why it matters
The diff at the end tells the partner what happened and the policy that approved it. A year later, a regulator asking how this engagement was set up gets a single view, not an email archaeology project.
Orchestrates
PBC document collection
Today
Clients send documents piecemeal across the portal, email, and wherever else they can. Status lives in three systems and someone's memory. A 100-client firm loses 10+ hours a week on follow-up alone.
With RARS
When RARS runs your PBC process, it queries the current state of your document exchange and practice management system, reconciles what's been received against what's outstanding, evaluates incoming documents against what was requested, tracks dependency chains like outstanding K-1s, and surfaces extension decisions against your firm's policies. Everything that flows through the workflow is versioned and attributed.
Why it matters
The extension decision, the malpractice risk of filing with incomplete information, and the partner knowing which returns are actually ready. None of these can be answered from three disconnected tools today.
Orchestrates
CAS monthly close
Today
Each CAS client is a monthly slog across QBO. For a 50-client book, hundreds of hours a month with inconsistent execution and no unified status.
With RARS
On the 1st, RARS initiates close for every client, applies your categorization rules, reconciles, and produces a close diff showing what changed since last month.
Why it matters
A 4-hour monthly slog becomes a 30-minute review. Scale a CAS book without hiring linearly, which is the direct answer to the talent math.
Orchestrates
Firm-wide partner oversight
Today
A managing partner's view of the firm today is "walk the office and ask." Karbon for task status, QBO for financials, email for client history, the billing system for WIP. None of them give a unified picture.
With RARS
Because every action RARS runs becomes a versioned event, an event-sourced firm view falls out of the workflows you put through the system. "37 of 42 March closes complete. 5 pending partner review. 128 of 315 returns filed. 23 PBC requests outstanding across 18 clients." It isn't a dashboard polling APIs; it's an emergent property of how your matrix executes.
Why it matters
Oversight grows with adoption. Start with one workflow and the picture covers that workflow. As more of your firm's processes run through RARS, the view fills in. Partners stop managing by walking around for the work that flows through the system.
Orchestrates
And so much more. 1099 prep cycles, tax-season capacity routing, audit fieldwork orchestration, review-note resolution, partner approval routing, the list goes on.
Trust is the product
Your workspace is isolated. Your data is not our training set.
Private cloud, dedicated tenant (in development)
The private cloud tier, in development and rolling out to design partners first, will run your firm on a dedicated-tenant deployment with its own datastore and per-tenant encryption keys. Planned for business and enterprise plans at general availability.
Bring your own model
Route inference to the model provider your firm has already approved. Under standard API terms from major providers, your data is not retained beyond abuse-monitoring windows and is not used for provider-side training. On private cloud, Poliglot's workspace training setting is disabled by default.
Encrypted credentials, never persisted in plaintext
Credentials for your GL, practice management system, and document exchange are encrypted in your browser before they leave the client and stored under KMS envelope encryption. Plaintext is never persisted, and materializes only transiently during the action that uses it.
Customer-VPC on the roadmap
A customer-VPC deployment option is the next milestone for firms whose policy requires it. Talk to us about your deployment requirements and we'll tell you where you fit in the plan.
Engagement terms
We're selecting a small group of firms to help shape this.
Book a walkthrough to see RARS applied to an engagement like yours. Or apply for the Design Partner Program to help us build the matrices your firm actually needs.
What design partners get
Direct engineering access. Hands-on help building your matrix from the ground up. Early-adopter pricing that carries forward.