Gusto has named Southern Payroll & Bookkeeping a national winner in its 2026 AI Innovation Awards, recognizing our firm in the Growth & Scale category — one of six firms selected from across the country.
The award came with a $5,000 prize as part of a $30,000 total distribution, but the recognition matters more than the check. It says something we have believed for a while: the firms that win the next decade are the ones that give their people better tools, not more hours.
The problem we set out to solve
A few years ago we ran an honest audit of how our accountants spent their time. The answer was uncomfortable. Roughly 80% of it went to gathering data — pulling reports, chasing documents, reconciling one system against another — and only about 20% went to the part clients actually hire us for: telling them what the numbers mean and what to do next.
That ratio is backwards, and it is the same in most firms our size.
What we built
Under the direction of Johanna Prila, our AI Enablement Lead, our team built 13 specialized AI agents, each pointed at a specific bottleneck in our workflow. Two of the results:
- A labor insights analysis that used to take 15 hours now takes 3 minutes.
- A business valuation that used to take 6–7 hours now takes under an hour.
Every one of those outputs still passes through a human accountant before it reaches a client. The agents do the gathering. Our team does the judgment. That distinction is the whole point.
What it means for our clients
The time we get back does not go into billing more hours. It goes into advisory work — the conversations about pricing, hiring, cash timing, and entity structure that actually change a business’s trajectory.
As we put it to Gusto: instead of producing reports, we produce decisions.
If you run a firm
Gusto’s own advice at the end of the piece is the right place to start: your firm needs one task that is costing you hours. Find that one. Not thirteen. One.
📄 Read Gusto’s full feature: What AI Looks Like Inside an Accounting Practice
Southern Payroll & Bookkeeping is a Gusto Gold Partner and Xero Platinum Partner serving small and mid-sized businesses in all 50 states from Chattanooga, Tennessee.
