We’re pleased to welcome David Wyle to Qount’s Board of Directors.
Dave has spent nearly three decades building technology for the accounting profession, including two companies that helped create entirely new categories of software for firms. He founded ePace! Software, one of the profession’s first paperless audit solutions, and later founded SurePrep, which helped establish tax document automation as a category.
That experience is especially relevant to where Qount is headed today. Practice management is an established category, but it is also in the middle of a significant transition. Firms are moving away from legacy systems, expectations for connected workflows are increasing, and AI is creating new possibilities for how firms use the operational data already flowing through their systems.
Dave has spent much of his career at similar inflection points.
A Track Record of Building What Firms Needed Next
Dave began his career as a CPA at PwC before founding ePace! Software in 1997. The company developed one of the profession’s first paperless audit solutions, helping firms automate financial reporting and reduce work that had traditionally been handled manually through Word, Excel and paper-based processes.
CCH acquired ePace! in 2001, and the technology evolved into ProSystem fx Engagement, which remains widely used across the profession today.
In 2002, Dave founded SurePrep. At the time, tax preparation still involved enormous amounts of manual work around collecting, organizing and processing client documents. SurePrep helped establish tax document automation as a new category and changed how firms approached that part of the tax workflow. Thomson Reuters acquired the company for $500 million in 2023, after which Dave served as General Manager of Audit, leading Thomson Reuters’ global audit software business.
There is a common thread across those businesses. Neither was built around replacing an existing software category with a slightly more modern version of the same thing. They focused on work that was still manual, disconnected or unnecessarily difficult and used new technology to create capabilities firms had not previously had.
That perspective is one of the reasons we are excited to have Dave involved with Qount.
The Opportunity To Transform Practice Management
Practice management systems already sit at the center of a tremendous amount of firm activity. They contain information about scheduling, time, billing, engagement history, client activity, capacity and the work moving across the practice.
For many firms, however, a meaningful amount of the work associated with that data still happens somewhere else. Leaders export information into spreadsheets to analyze performance. Teams use separate tools to fill gaps in existing workflows. Important context gets distributed across email, meetings and systems that do not always communicate with one another.
As firms replace older practice management systems, we believe the opportunity should be bigger than simply moving those same workflows into a newer interface. A modern platform should be able to connect more of that work and make better use of the information being created along the way.
AI is an important part of that opportunity, but only if it is applied in a way that materially improves how firms operate.
“Every practice management company is racing to bolt new features and chatbot-style workflows onto their product and call it AI,” said Pete Miele, CEO of Qount. “That’s not the bet we’re making. Dave has repeatedly taken new technology and applied it in a way that created an entirely new capability for firms. He understands the difference between using technology to fundamentally change what firms can do and simply making an existing product incrementally better. That judgment is exactly what we want in the room as we build QAI, the AI layer embedded across the Qount platform.”
Building AI Around the Way Firm’s Work
Our approach to QAI starts with the data and workflows already connected inside Qount.
As firms manage engagements, track time, bill clients, communicate, assign work and monitor progress in the same platform, that creates a much richer picture of how the practice actually operates. AI can then work with that context to surface patterns, identify issues and help firms make better decisions without constantly exporting information or stitching together separate tools.
The long-term opportunity is to create a learning loop between the work being performed and the data that work produces. If the platform understands how engagements actually run, how long work takes, where margins change, where bottlenecks appear and how teams respond, that context can make the system more useful over time.
Dave sees that as a natural next step for the category.
“Today’s technology is more powerful than anything we’ve ever had, and the opportunities for accounting firms are enormous,” said Wyle. “The key is figuring out how it fits into a firm’s day-to-day work, how it adds real value, and how it earns enough trust that people stop double-checking it and actually change how they work. The technology that moves this profession forward has always been the kind that gives firms a capability they didn’t have before, and that’s exactly what I see in Qount.”
“Practice management is in the middle of a generational turnover, and firms finally moving off legacy systems they outgrew years ago shouldn’t settle for a more modern version of the same software. No other system in a firm holds richer operational data: scheduling, time, billing, the entire life of every engagement. Yet so much of the work tied to that data still happens outside the system, in spreadsheets and disconnected tools.”
“Qount uses AI to bring that work into the platform and close the loop on the data, so it learns from how engagements actually run and continuously gets better. The result is capabilities the category has never offered, replacing the manual work around the data instead of just the software underneath it. That’s why I’m excited to be involved.”
That trust component is important to how we think about AI at Qount. Accounting firms are unlikely to change how they operate simply because a new feature is labeled AI. The technology has to prove that it can make work easier, reduce unnecessary steps and produce information people can confidently act on. Over time, the measure of success should be whether AI becomes a natural part of how the firm operates rather than another layer employees have to manage.
Dave’s Role at Qount
As a member of Qount’s Board of Directors, Dave will work with our leadership team on growth and product strategy, with a particular focus on how AI adoption takes hold inside accounting firms and what turns it into lasting efficiency rather than added complexity. His perspective will directly help shape QAI and the learning loop it powers.
That experience will also be important as Qount continues to grow with larger and more complex firms. As firms scale, the cost of disconnected systems and manual work becomes more visible. Data becomes harder to interpret across teams, processes become more difficult to standardize, and seemingly small inefficiencies can have a meaningful impact on capacity, client service and profitability.
Dave’s career has been built around identifying work the profession had learned to live with and finding ways for technology to remove it. That is the perspective we want as we continue evolving Qount. The opportunity is not simply to add more AI features to practice management. It is to use the operational data already flowing through the platform to reduce the manual work surrounding it, make that data more useful and give firms capabilities the category has not historically been able to provide.
That is the standard we want QAI, and Qount as a whole, to meet.
