Tax, audit, advisory and practice management solutions provider
"Arc brings the rest of your firm's knowledge into Accrual," said co-founder and CEO Cosmin Nicolaescu during Sept. 9's Accrual Exchange event where Arc was first unveiled. "Unlike Copilot, where you give it some documents and maybe it'll summarize them for you, you give Arc a long-running task and it'll ask some clarification questions and generate a plan. You can review it, approve it and then it executes."
During the presentation, co-founder and CTO Siddarth Chandrasekaran noted that Arc is made for three kinds of tasks: the work you drive (as in, sitting down and directly interacting with the agent), the work you teach (tasks you did manually so the agent can understand the workflow and replicate it itself), and the work you automate (things you set the agent to do on a regular basis on its own.)
To illustrate, he gave the example of a theoretical client called Clarity Partners PPC where the human accountant needs to prepare the client's partnership return. The agent first generates the return itself, and then the user drops in "a shoebox of documents and the agent generates a full tax workbook."
Once it has done that, the agent identifies "a bunch of open issues that have not yet been resolved." One is a $100,000 trial balance for guaranteed payments for one of the partners, but "we don't know who it actually went to and we really have to figure it out." Usually, the practitioner would need to do things like make phone calls, hold meetings and maybe look through some old notes and documents.
"In this very specific case, I actually had a conversation with Caroline, the managing member of this partnership," said Chandrasekaran. "We had that conversation over Teams, so I can tell Arc that I talked to Caroline about this open item, please take a look at my personal Teams calls and tell me what we should update."
Arc then found the transcript from the meeting, reviewed it, went through every single open item and "like a good preparer, proposed changes," said Chandrasekaran. He emphasized that the AI did not go ahead and make the changes on its own. Arc, instead, returned to the preparer and said, "Here is everything I will change because of this conversation. Do you want me to do this?"
"It even gave me a pretty flowchart of all the changes that are proposed and how they would change the output of the return," said Chandrasekaran. "I approved it. Arc went off and updated the work paper."
"You see a bunch of the open issues on this have since been resolved," he added. "And not only did it leave a clear audit trail, it also tells us exactly where it got the state from. It goes to the minute and second of the transcript that it found. It even helpfully dropped the transcript itself into the client's binder, so we can look back at it and say, 'Oh, this is where it came from.'"
This, he said, was an example of the work you drive. To illustrate the work you teach, he showed that the same client received a tax notice from the state of New Jersey. He asked Arc for a list of exhibits he should send the client, and then asked it to update the binder for the client. It did so with a full set of document requests as well. He said he'd send this to "Caroline" and have her upload them into the client portal.
Chandrasekaran noted that Arc, entirely on its own, pointed out that it did not have a power of attorney on file for the client, so he asked the AI to please take care of that. Arc generated the signature request, filled in the current version of power of attorney for the state of New Jersey, then calculated pixel offsets so it could place a signature block for the partner and the practitioner.
"But the really cool thing about this is now that I've taught it the process, I can click on a single button to institutionalize it," he said. "So the next person who's starting at the firm doesn't have to start with a random Google Drive and a random template, but instead has a replayable agent in their library."
On the third kind of task, the work that automates, the practitioner is very happy with how tax notice intake and response letter narration has been working lately. With a few clicks, said Chandrasekaran, the practitioner could schedule this process to run every single day.
"So now I don't even have to be the person that shows up and clicks on this routine and says, 'Please go through the notices.' I can instead have Arc go through, sweep every new notice that has come up, and draft me the signature letters, the response to the regulators, whatever else it might be. And again, I can shift myself from being somebody who's clicking buttons to somebody who's reviewing the work that Arc does," said Chandrasekaran.
Jobs can run for minutes or hours, with multiple assignments underway at once. Practitioners can move on to other work, then review the results alongside a record of the sources, tools and actions used to produce them.
Nicolaescu said during his presentation that Arc began as an internal tool meant to give everyone the kind of productivity boost that software engineers have gotten from AI coding agents. Since there was nothing on the market that quite fit their needs, they decided to build it themselves, which he said was a great success, leading eventually to the idea to release it as a product.
"Our CRM runs on Arc. Our CPAs run emails on Arc. In fact, much of the planning for today was actually [done] on Arc. … Then someone asks a very simple question: If we love it so much, why wouldn't we give this to our customers?" he said.
The learning portion is especially important to Arc's design, as it is not meant to be a new tool people need to learn from scratch, but rather, something that uses the tools people already use in the way people already use them.
"We ingest your methodology. We don't ask you to adopt our own, like most other tools do. We want to be as flexible as possible, navigating that change management," he said.
Arc extends Accrual's platform across tax, audit, client accounting services and advisory. It works alongside Accrual's other dedicated workflow products to handle investigations, analyses and other assignments that span systems. Permissions, recorded actions and human review are built into the process; practitioners retain responsibility for final judgment and approval.
Arc launches with 20 agents for common accounting firm workflows, with new agents added each week. Firms can also teach Arc their own processes, save them as reusable agents, share them across teams and schedule recurring work.
