Every accountant knows the first principle of the profession, even if it's rarely stated out loud: We work in service of the business owner.
The financials we prepare and the insights we deliver exist to help someone else's business succeed. So, here's a question the profession has been too quiet about. If the data belongs to the business owner, why is it so hard for them, and for the accountants who serve them, to actually get it?
Consider the platforms most of the industry runs on. Both QuickBooks and Xero charge fees for API access, which means firms pay a toll to programmatically reach data their clients already own. Xero doesn't allow a complete export of the books, so switching platforms means leaving parts of your history behind. These aren't accidental technical limitations. They're conscious business decisions that treat client data as a retention strategy, at the expense of the very people the profession exists to serve.
I believe firms and their clients have the right to access their own data, in real time, without paying for the privilege. That conviction is why we built Digits the way we did, and why I think the profession should demand the same from every platform it touches.
What I learned building open platforms
I've spent nearly 25 years in technology, most of it building platforms designed to be built upon. My previous company, Crashlytics, was a developer platform used by hundreds of thousands of software engineers and was acquired by Twitter in 2013. At Twitter, I led the developer platform before becoming head of consumer product, and I had a front-row seat to one of the industry's great cautionary tales.
Twitter's early growth was inseparable from its open API. Third-party developers built many of the tools and features that made the service indispensable. When the platform later restricted that access, the ecosystem withered and the creative energy went elsewhere. The lesson stuck with me: openness compounds. Every integration built on open access makes the platform more valuable, not less. Closing the gates feels safe in the short term but costs you the future.
Accounting is living the closed-platform version of that story. When financial data can't move freely and securely, businesses fall back on manual re-entry across banking portals, payroll systems and the general ledger. Accountants spend their hours aggregating data instead of advising on it.
That's why open data was a founding decision at Digits, not a feature we bolted on later. We joined the Financial Data Exchange six years ago, when the company was just getting started. FDX, the nonprofit consortium unifying the North American financial sector around a single secure data-sharing standard, proves the infrastructure for open data already exists. And while the CFPB's open banking rule pointed in the right direction, it remains tied up in court and covers only personal banking. If open data is going to become the norm for businesses, our industry will have to lead rather than wait.
AI just raised the stakes
If closed data was a tax on the profession before, AI has turned it into a ceiling.
For decades, API access was only a developer's concern. That era is over. With modern AI models and emerging standards like the Model Context Protocol, virtually anyone can be a junior developer, describing a workflow in plain English and having an AI agent execute it. A staff accountant can build meaningful automations. A firm owner can wire client data into an agentic workflow that would have required a consulting engagement two years ago.
But every one of those possibilities depends on the data being accessible. An AI agent cannot reconcile, analyze or advise on data it cannot reach. A platform that gates its API behind a fee, or offers no MCP at all, isn't just charging for access. It's rationing intelligence, and its customers pay the price in capabilities they never knew they were missing.
This is why our API and MCP are free for every Digits plan, and why we keep expanding what they can do. Charging a business to let AI work with its own books strikes me as indefensible. I'd hold every platform in this industry to the same standard.
What the profession should demand
Firms choose the platforms, and standard-setters shape the expectations. Three commitments are worth advocating for:
Full exportability as a professional standard: A business owner should be able to take their complete books out of any platform, at any time, at no cost. Anything less is data hostage-taking.
Free programmatic access: APIs and MCP endpoints belong on every plan. In the age of AI agents, charging a business to access its own data is indefensible.
Open, shared standards: Rally behind common frameworks like FDX rather than proprietary formats designed to raise switching costs.
None of this requires waiting on Washington. It requires the profession to finally decide that the client's data belongs to the client.
Accountants have always been trusted stewards of other people's financial information. Stewardship, done right, means the owner can always take their property home. The platforms that embrace that principle will define the next era of this profession. The ones that don't will be remembered the way we remember every closed platform: as a cautionary tale.
