From Checkbox to Catalyst: How Intuit’s ProAdvisor Program Is Reimagining Growth

We know training is important. But in a fast-paced, deadline-driven industry, when clients are waiting and your team is juggling competing priorities, it’s easy to think, “We’ll get to that later, when we have more time.” I fall into this mental trap a lot. But when this happens, I ask myself: Why do we think we’ll have more time in the future?

The truth is, we won’t. And what we don’t always see are the hidden costs of not training: slower onboarding, inconsistent work quality, uneven skill sets across the firm, and employees who can’t confidently grow into their next role because the baseline knowledge isn’t there.

That’s why I’m so excited about how the Intuit ProAdvisor Program is evolving, because Intuit is stepping in to help lift that weight for us.

Training Often Gets Left Behind

At Dark Horse CPAs, where I support our Client Accounting Services (CAS) operations, we’ve spent a lot of time talking about what “standard” really means.

What’s our shared language when it comes to accounting services? What’s our standard tech stack, and what processes should everyone be following around those tools? What’s the baseline level of technical knowledge every team member should have?

For years, the ProAdvisor certification felt more like a box to check. Honestly, it wasn’t something we monitored well. When onboarding new hires, we’d just tell them to get their certification. And when recertification approached, I’d remind everyone they needed to do it. There wasn’t a reward for completing it or a consequence for skipping it. Unfortunately, this was just the reality of running a fast-moving firm.

But this lack of visibility has a cost. Without a way to measure training, it’s impossible to identify skill gaps, know where training needs to be bolstered, or build a culture of continuous learning.

To help with this, Intuit is launching the ProAdvisor Training Manager (launching January 2026). It’s a dashboard that gives you a richer view into your teams’ learning journey. You can track certifications, assign courses, track progress, send reminders, and celebrate completions all within the Intuit Accountant Suite (IAS). This is going to help turn training from a one-time checkbox into an ongoing strategic resource to grow your people. Whether you’re a firm leader looking for visibility, a manager assigning training to your team, or an accountant developing your expertise, this clarity is going to be really helpful.

If the term Intuit Accountant Suite is new to you, then I’m stoked to be the one to tell you about it! This is a huge leap toward reconfiguring the Intuit suite of tools to better support how Accountants do their work. It’s a unified, AI-powered platform that brings together all the tools accountants need to manage their firm, clients, and team effectively. It’ll have features built specifically for accountants - like workflow management, client insights, and AI and automation layered throughout. With the combination of the ProAdvisor Program and Intuit Accountant Suite, so much of running a modern firm can be housed within the same platform.

Elevating Advisory Skills

Another part of this evolution that I’m personally really excited about is the new Client Advisory Services (CAS) Curriculum and Training. I had the privilege of working with the ProAdvisor team on developing this curriculum! It blends technical skills and soft skills, designed to build well-rounded professionals who can thrive in a world that’s headed toward advisory.

Intuit released the Bookkeeping Certification earlier this year, and I loved how hands-on it was. You didn’t just watch videos, you were actually doing the work - calculating and creating journal entries, demonstrating actual accounting knowledge. Now, they’ve expanded that foundation with courses that focus on communication and analysis, like how to build trust with clients and how to interpret financial reports to uncover insights. This is laying the groundwork to develop true advisors, knowing how to translate the numbers into something meaningful for clients.

The ProAdvisor CAS curriculum is laying the foundation helping to define what good CAS looks like. The definition of CAS is still debatable, every firm probably has a slightly different definition. This curriculum is getting to the root knowledge so we can start to develop a more unified understanding of CAS and the expectations of how accountants should progress in their knowledge.

If you’ve ever tried to build or maintain a training program, you know how heavy that lift can be. Between keeping up with new information, updating content, and finding ways to make learning stick, it’s hard. As someone who is heavily involved in the training program at Dark Horse, I’m SO grateful Intuit is helping with this.

Reimagining the ProAdvisor Program

The old ProAdvisor Program was built for a different time. Things have evolved rapidly and the program’s structure hadn’t caught up, so over the years, that misalignment caused the program to lose some of its perceived value. We stopped seeing the points as meaningful because they didn’t always lead to outcomes that mattered to us.

Intuit saw this was happening and has reimagined the ProAdvisor Program. Recently, at the Intuit Partner Advisory Council on Intuit’s campus last month, we dove deep into what kinds of rewards would be meaningful to us as accountants and firm leaders so we can all be driving behavior in the same direction. It’s so cool to be able to provide that feedback and have the program built to align incentives we’ve asked for.

The new point and tier system will reward the things that actually move firms and professionals forward: certifications, product engagement, ecosystem adoption, and skill growth. Points can be earned by individual and firm actions and now accumulate at the firm level so it encourages everyone to contribute. I want to be able to see which team members are contributing most to our points so we can properly acknowledge and celebrate them. Also, with the ProAdvisor homebase widget integrated right in Intuit Accountant Suite, you’ll be able to see progress in real time so growth is more visible and motivating, keeping this front and center year round.

These revamps to the Intuit ProAdvisor program changes things from a check box to actually driving behavior that adds value.

Onward and Upward

Learning isn’t something we do once a year, it should be woven into how we operate. The future of accounting is coming at us so fast, and no one has it all figured out. So I think the firms and professionals who will take the lead are the ones who learn best, and Intuit is helping provide a more clear, connected path forward within the platform we use every day.

*This is my content from my experiences, please note this is presented as part of a paid partnership with Intuit