Who I am, in one paragraph. I'm Charlie Barmore, a CPA, CFE, and CVA in Georgia. I run Charles J Barmore CPA PC as an AI-native accounting practice: agents do the mechanics of the work, intake, document reading, workpaper assembly, the first pass at the books, and I do the judgment, the review, and the signing. I build the tools myself, with Claude Code, through my software studio, Ledger Labs. I help accounting firms adopt AI the same way, as a partner in AI Lab for Accountants and as the AI practitioner for The Collaboration Room. And I still do tax and accounting for a small roster of business owners, on purpose, because I don't think anyone can credibly advise firms on AI without staying in the work.
Why I'm doing this
My dad is almost 70 years old and still working seven days a week. He's owned a small public accounting firm for forty years. He has ten employees, and he still works more than any of them. He's a firm owner, but in reality, the firm owns him.
He does everything (admin, tax prep, tax review, compilations, client questions) because his firm doesn't have the systems and processes to take any of it off his plate. Most of it is still manual. None of it is the kind of work he'd choose if he had any other option. He keeps doing it because his clients depend on him, and because there isn't an obvious way out.
I'm a second-generation CPA. I've watched this my whole life. And I've come to believe that the most important thing I can do for our profession right now is help firms like my dad's adopt AI well, so they can stop being owned by their work and start running their firms instead.
My path
I spent the first six years of my career at my dad's firm, Barmore Hammond, doing the work the way it has always been done: tax returns, workpapers, review notes, audit, advisory. I learned the fundamentals that still guide everything I do. But I kept feeling the gap between what the profession could be and what the day to day actually was, so I left.
I took a role in government, then moved into technology. At Better Bookkeeping, now Visor, I built out the tax function while working alongside the founders and the product team. It was my first time with a foot in both accounting and software, and my first real taste of automating the tax-prep process. From there I became the founding tax lead at Nino, CoinTracker's agentic platform for tax and financial planning. I was the tax expert and the human reviewer behind the product: I sat next to the engineers who built the agents, decided what CPA judgment had to look like inside them, and reviewed what came out.
That is where it clicked. On my own work, I stopped just drafting emails faster and started automating the real thing: reconciling transactions against statements, standardizing messy workpapers, structuring large volumes of documents into usable output. Tasks that took hours took minutes, not because the thinking disappeared, but because the mechanics did. I learned to structure prompts for reliable output, to choose the right model for the job, and to build the guardrails that make any of it safe to trust.
What I do now
At the end of July 2026 I left Nino, and on August 1 I went full time in my own practice. It runs the way I think every small firm will run within a few years: a small number of clients, a CPA who does and signs the work, and a set of agents that handle the mechanics underneath. Every tool in it is one I built, because the problem showed up in my own work first. The ones worth sharing become products through Ledger Labs.
The other half of the practice is helping firms get there. I am a partner in AI Lab for Accountants, a weekly community where accountants put AI to work on real client files, and I am the AI practitioner for The Collaboration Room, a community of firm owners. Firms also hire me directly, to assess where AI helps, to build the workflow that removes their worst bottleneck, and to bring their whole team along. That is the role I want: the CPA who has actually built these systems, helping the people who will use them do it safely, with client confidentiality and professional judgment at the center, because responsibility for the work still rests with the CPA.
If you want the ideas rather than the biography, I have written out what an AI-native accounting firm actually is, what an agent-native practice looks like, and what MCP means for accountants.
I am doing this because I want my dad, and firms like his, to thrive in the next decade, not just survive it, and because I would rather hand the next generation of CPAs a sharper axe than tell them not to swing it.