Advertise on podcast: The Ash, Hubert and Kevin Podcast

Nobody is blocking your promotion. Your manager just can't afford to lose you. If you disappeared for four weeks and everything broke, you're the most valuable person in the room — and the least promotable. Kev and Ash unpack the competence trap: why being reliable, fast and cheap to deploy quietly locks you into the role you already have, especially in the flat org structures most finance teams now run. They get honest about the yes-man years, the cultural pressure to never push back, the imposter syndrome that makes you over-commit, and the humbling moment leadership asks what you actually do — after a year of Sunday reporting. Then the practical part: three concrete moves to get unstuck, plus the point nobody makes — sometimes stable isn't stuck. Sometimes a 9-to-5 that gets you to daycare pickup is the right call for the season you're in. What we cover Why reliability is a floor, not an upside Flat structures and the missing rungs between FM and CFO Saying yes to everything, and what it actually costs you Busy vs valuable — and the retrospective framework to tell them apart The "just stop sending it and see who screams" test (4 hours a week back) Career stagnation vs career stability as a parent

"Sales were down due to lower volume." If that's your month-end commentary, you haven't actually explained anything.In this episode, Ash, Kevin, and Hubert (all Chartered Accountants) break down why variance commentary is one of the most common finance outputs — and one of the easiest to do badly. This is where finance stops being reporting and starts driving decisions. They get into:  Why "movement is not an explanation" — and who actually needs the why How to think about your P&L drivers by industry (zoos, construction, waste, FMCG, recruitment) The Root Cause Ladder & the 7 Whys — how to unravel what really drove the change Ash's "who said you can't change the P&L?" story — why nobody actually knew How to use AI (Claude / ChatGPT) as a thinking partner WITHOUT outsourcing your critical thinking Why bad questions get you bad AI outputs If you build month-end packs, this one you can apply immediately.-The out-of-the-ordinary factors that wreck your numbers — weather, seasonality, interest rates, 5-week months

100% of this panel started their careers in auditing — and they've got very different feelings about it. In this episode, Kevin, Ash, and Hubert (all Chartered Accountants) break down whether audit is the smartest way to launch a finance career, how long is too long, and whether they'd ever hire a career auditor onto their own teams. They get into: - Why 20–30% of accountants start in audit — and whether it's worth it - The 5 skills audit actually teaches you (fast business comprehension, context switching, resilience + more) - Ash losing a CFO role to the company's own auditor — and why the client made that call - Hubert's 11 years in audit and why he thinks that was too long - Cadet vs grad: starting straight out of high school on a $23K salary - Would you hire someone straight out of audit? The "coachability over knowledge" hiring test - What we'd tell our own kids about taking the audit path Whether you're a grad weighing your first move, a finance leader building a team, or a CFO reflecting on the road in — this one's for you.

Ops doesn't ignore finance because they're difficult. They ignore finance because we keep showing up after the decision has already been made. In this episode of AccountDads, the boys unpack the gap between what finance reports and what operations actually does — and why that gap quietly wrecks your credibility as a business partner. We get into the month where margins "collapsed" and it turned out nobody had dropped the ball at all — leave hit 25% against a 20% budgeted average, revenue dropped, and there was suddenly no margin left to absorb overheads. Nothing operational had broken. Finance just couldn't explain it.

Most of us are driving a supercar in first gear. Same AI model, same power, but only a few finance leaders know how to actually configure it. In this episode, we walk through the exact setup I gave my own team: how to turn Claude from a glorified chatbot into a genuine thinking partner for your business. Accountants don’t have capability gaps if they put in the work…remember, you are already brilliant. You just need to work on configuring the tools at your disposal and spending time in them!  What we cover:  – Choosing the right model (and why Opus is great for reasoning + checking its own work) – Privacy settings you MUST turn off on a personal plan before adding company data – Building context & memory so Claude actually knows your business – Global instructions vs. project-specific instructions – Chat vs. Cowork vs. Claude Code — when to use each – Using Projects to segment work and give Claude your chart of accounts, board packs & budgets – Skills: automating repeatable jobs (like month-end) so they run the same way every time – Connectors: linking Xero, your ERP & GL- or using a tool like Safra There are two types of accountant: the one who re-explains the entity structure every single month, and the one who spends the time to set it up once so it's replicable. Both use the same tool. Only one builds a brain. Your homework: do this for your business, your client, or even your personal finances. Want sample data to play with? Drop a comment and we'll send it over. 👉 If any of this resonated or you want a deep dive on one of these features, let us know in the comments or DM us.

"I don't think I'll ever hire a financial accountant again." That's a real CFO, talking to a real recruiter, about a real decision he's already made. Tom Hunter runs Story Recruitment and hosts The CFO Track. He spent months interviewing Australian finance leaders about how they're actually using AI — not the LinkedIn version — and packaged it into a free practical workflow guide. We sat down to go through it. 📄 Link to the AI in Finance — Practical Workflow Guide:  https://www.linkedin.com/posts/tom-hunter-story_ai-in-finance-workflow-guide-story-recruitment-ugcPost-7473132331864702977--msC/ What we got into:  — Why only ~15% of businesses have genuinely embedded AI into BAU (up from 10% a year ago), and why everyone else is quietly panicking for no reason — The AP team that went from 3–4 officers plus a manager down to 1–2 staff — The double standard: a human at 98% is "fantastic," an AI at 98% is "not trustworthy" — Why the AI wizard doesn't get the job, and the communicator does — What "good with AI" actually means when a CFO asks for it — The one risk Tom flags for every finance professional — How he built TomBot with zero technical background If you work in finance and you've been told you're behind on AI: you're probably not. But you probably should start. 👤 Tom Hunter, founder of Story Recruitment — finance recruitment for Australian startups, from first finance hire to CFO recruitment.

This is a practical discussion based on real-world experience, not management theory. Based on the previous episode, the AccountDads reflect on areas such as organisation maturity, team, sporting reflections, recruiting to collaborating. What’s worked and what's not worked. You get the real insight from the leaders who have navigated their own paths and created their own styles.

We get asked in interviews sometimes what management style do we prefer. Now is this something you have thought about. It is said that “People don't quit jobs, they quit bosses”. So what style is the right style. Do different styles work with different people. Today we will explore some of these styles and discuss why they do work or don’t work.

If you're not getting hands-on with AI tools and rethinking your own processes, you're making yourself replaceable, and someone else is already doing it. This one's for finance managers and leaders who suspect the game is shifting but haven't felt the urgency yet. The trigger was a real conversation with a peer finance leader, and it opened up a live debate: are senior leaders wrong to delegate the tools downward? Three anchors drive the episode: the skill that's quietly replacing technical accounting ability, why the month-end pack has become the most expensive low-value deliverable in finance, and what Anthropic's approach to compute reveals about the CFO's actual job: identifying the scarce resource in your business and making sure it flows to the highest-value work.

The government said they wouldn't touch the tax rules. Then they came for CGT, negative gearing, trusts… and gave us a $250 offset that doesn't even kick in until 2027. 🙃 This week Hubert finally gets his 30 minutes to vent about the budget — and Kevin and Ash don't hold back either. We dig into what actually changed, why there's so much hate towards it, and whether ANY of it makes sense long-term. We also break down the budget replies from the Liberals and One Nation, plus we ran an AI analysis on all three parties' economic policies to see who actually came out on top from a business and investment lens. (Spoiler: it's not who the government wanted.) ⚠️ This is NOT us waving a flag for any party. We're accountants and business owners looking at the facts — and we want YOUR pushback in the comments. In this episode:  🔹 The broken tax promises (and why trust is the real issue)  🔹 CGT, negative gearing & the trust changes nobody saw coming  🔹 The $250 offset… and why it's basically useless  🔹 Housing: supply, demand, immigration & where tradies fit in 🔹 Government spending vs GDP — how we stack up against China  🔹 Net zero, energy policy & ageing infrastructure  🔹 Privatisation: smart move or selling the family silver?  🔹 Income splitting & why it could be a game-changer for families  🔹 The AI verdict: who had the best economic policy? 👇 Drop your thoughts and pushbacks in the comments — what did we get wrong? What should we dig into next episode? 👍 Like & subscribe if you want more no-BS finance and business chat.

Everyone's talking about CGT, negative gearing, and the 30% trust tax. But there are 10 other items buried in this budget that quietly change the game for Aussie businesses, founders, and accountants, and almost nobody is covering them. We break down what is buried in the fine print — no spin, no opinion, just what's actually in there and what it means for you. If you're a business owner, CFO, or accountant — these are the moves to start thinking about now, not in 2028. 👇 Drop your own budget observations in the comments — we're covering this in more detail next week with the full squad. Like, subscribe, and join the AccountDads community.

We gave AI our messy ERP data, a budget model, and a list of management decisions. Here's what happened. This is Part 2 of our AI series — if you missed Part 1, go watch that first (linked below). In this episode, Kevin and Ash take the next step up the AI maturity ladder: from sifting transactions to actually building and updating a full financial model using Claude Projects. We walk through a live demo using a fictional cabinet manufacturing business — loading April actuals from an ERP export, rolling the model forward, adding new hires, tweaking revenue assumptions, and generating a three-scenario analysis. All from a prompt and a couple of uploaded files. In this episode: How to set up Claude Projects as a persistent FP&A workspace for a clientWriting guardrails that stop AI from hallucinating financial factsRolling actuals forward and updating a forecast in real timeRunning a sensitivity analysis and three-scenario (downside / base / upside) comparisonGenerating a management dashboard and director talking points — automatically

Claude AI is becoming the most powerful tool in an accountant's toolkit, and most finance professionals haven't touched it yet. In this episode, we break down everything you need to know to get started with Claude as a finance manager, CFO, or business owner. We cover our 7 layers of AI adoption (and where most accountants are stuck), a simple trust framework for validating AI outputs, and then we open up our screens and demo two real use cases live. Use Case 1: Processing a folder of supplier invoices into a structured, categorised CSV — with ABNs, line item flags, and category classifications — in seconds. Use Case 2: Taking 500+ raw bank transactions in Excel and using Claude's Excel add-in to categorise them, build a full monthly P&L with formulas, and format it into presentation-ready financial statements.

Why does change feel so slow in so many businesses? Operations wants speed. Finance wants certainty. And somewhere in the middle… nothing happens. In this episode, we unpack the real tension between finance and operations, why spreadsheets become a comfort blanket, and how value creation and value preservation often pull in opposite directions. We cover: Why finance is wired to slow things downWhy operations can’t wait for month-end thinkingThe hidden cost of Excel addictionValue creation vs value preservationHow better alignment actually accelerates changeIf you’ve ever sat in a meeting thinking “this should be simple”, this episode is for you. 👇 Let us know in the comments Are you on the ops side, the finance side, or stuck in the middle?

Is AI about to replace finance and accounting roles — or is that just clickbait fear-mongering? In this episode of AccountDads, Ash, Hubert, and Kevin break down the real impact of agentic AI on finance teams. We cut through the hype and talk honestly about what AI actually replaces (manual tasks), what it doesn’t (business partnering, leadership, judgment), and why most AI implementations fail before they even start. We cover: -Why forcing old finance processes into new AI tools is a guaranteed fail -The difference between deterministic systems (ERPs) and non-deterministic AI -Why finance teams resist change more than operations -Real stories of AI fear, bans, and leadership pushback -How AI shifts accountants from “doing the work” to supervising and deciding -Why culture, data structure, and guardrails matter more than tools If you’re a CFO, finance leader, accountant, or business owner trying to navigate AI without drinking the Kool-Aid — this one’s for you. 👇 Like, subscribe, and join the AccountDads community as we shape the future of finance.