What Makes A Client Come Back Every Year? Disha Patel On The Part Of Accounting Machines Can't Do

In late June, the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India gathered over 4,000 delegates at Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi for its AI Innovation Summit 2026. Figures announced at the event were striking: more than 50,000 ICAI members have already been trained in artificial intelligence, and over 150 GPT-based tools have been developed for professional practice. Indian accountants are learning to work with machines faster than almost anyone else in the profession worldwide.

One question, however, hung in the air after the summit. If software can prepare a tax return in minutes, what exactly is the accountant for? Disha Patel, a Cases & Faces 2025 award winner and the author of a 2026 journal study on how AI changes an accountant's professional judgment, has spent eight years answering that question in practice. A Certified Public Accountant with an MBA, she manages accounting and taxation at a firm in Carle Place, New York, whose practice dates back to 2016. Inside the firm, she hires for and manages a team of 10-11 people (the number of team members depends on the tax season), as well as the work of an overseas office, trains accountants ahead of every filing season, and represents the firm's partners in direct negotiations with clients. We spoke with her about why, in a profession obsessed with numbers, careers are still decided by the ability to understand people.

Trust arrives before the numbers

At Rogg & Kejriwal LLP, a trusted CPA firm, known for a personal, client-focused approach to tax and accounting for small and mid-sized businesses, partners hand Disha Patel something more valuable than any client file: their own name. She speaks with clients on the partners' behalf, takes decisions where needed, assigns work across the team and reviews it before anything leaves the office. Weekly meetings with the partners keep every engagement visible to the top of the firm. An arrangement like this holds only when the person in the middle reads people as accurately as she reads tax returns.

“Partners trust me to deal with every issue and every tax deadline,” Patel says. “Confidence like that is earned slowly, and it rests on one habit. Know what a client needs before you open the file, and work on the case as if it were your own.”

Clients rarely describe their needs in accounting language. Somebody mentions a slow year at the shop, a young couple brings up a new house, and a founder worries about paying staff on time. Each remark, to a trained ear, is a set of instructions. Behind a slow year, Patel hears quarterly tax estimates that must be revised downward and losses that can soften next year's bill; behind a new house, deductions for mortgage interest and property taxes that may change the entire filing strategy; behind payroll anxiety, a cash calendar that has to be rebuilt around salary dates and tax deposits. Turning casual stories into precise moves on a tax form is, in her experience, the actual job; entering the numbers is merely its final step.

A season that tests every team

Tax season compresses months of work into a few weeks, and mistakes made under deadline cost clients real money. Long before the first return arrives, Patel trains her tax team and prepares new hires for the pace ahead. Method matters more here than motivation: she teaches juniors to slow down and read every form line by line, so that each of them understands why a document exists before touching it.

With 10-11 people on her team and an overseas office also under her management, her instructions must survive distance and time zones. Hiring, task allocation and final review all pass through her desk. By managing hiring, assigning work, and conducting final reviews for a geographically distributed team, Disha Patel helps maintain a high standard of quality and consistency across tax engagements, ensuring that work is checked before delivery and that team members follow established processes.

“Nobody fears the season if the team is ready for it,” she says. “Once a junior sees why a document matters, errors surface earlier, and clients feel the difference long before the deadline.”

Pressure, in her view, works like an audit of a firm's own habits: whatever was skipped during training resurfaces in March, when there is no time left to fix it. As a Senior Accountant - Tax Manager, Disha Patel combines technical expertise with a structured, process-driven approach to tax preparation and team leadership. Recognizing that tax season compresses months of work into a short period, she prioritizes preparation well before filing deadlines by training staff, onboarding new hires, and establishing consistent workflows. Rather than emphasizing speed alone, her methodology focuses on understanding the purpose behind every tax document and reviewing forms carefully, line by line, to promote accuracy and sound professional judgment.

Disha extends this methodology across a distributed team of U.S.-based and India-based tax professionals. By overseeing hiring, task allocation, mentoring, and final review, she helps ensure that work is completed consistently despite differences in location and time zones. Her emphasis on disciplined review and knowledge sharing enables newer team members to develop strong technical foundations while supporting a collaborative environment in which quality standards are applied uniformly across the team.

Reputation that no advertisement can buy

Accounting practices rarely go viral. Loyalty in this profession is measured differently: engagements renew every year, so a firm that has kept its doors open in the same Long Island town since 2016 has, in effect, been re-hired by its clients dozens of times. Relationships Patel manages on the partners' behalf are a large part of what gets renewed.

Beyond the office, she is a member of the National Conference of CPA Practitioners, an American association that speaks for practising accountants from small and mid-size firms and carries their concerns directly to US tax authorities and lawmakers. Networking rounds of BNI in New York add another circle: built as the largest business referral organisation in the world, BNI runs one of its biggest national networks in India. Hence, the format needs no introduction to Indian entrepreneurs. Colleagues, she believes, offer the same thing clients do: context that no manual contains.

The question of what machines leave to the accountant is also the subject of Patel's own research. Her article “Evolution of the Accountant's Professional Judgment in the Environment of Intelligent Financial Systems” appeared in the July-August 2026 issue of the International Journal of Research in Commerce and Management Studies. For the study, she screened 42 academic publications from 2022–2025 on artificial intelligence in accounting and auditing and analysed the 15 that dealt with how accountants form their judgment. From these findings she built her own model of how a decision takes shape inside an intelligent financial system: data passes through algorithmic processing and analysis before reaching professional judgment, with governance and control on top. The study concludes that AI moves the accountant's work from applying rules to assessing results the system has already prepared. It also warns that heavy reliance on automated outputs weakens critical evaluation, while responsibility for the final decision stays with the human. That work is continuing beyond the article. Patel is now writing a monograph on the same subject, where the model is developed at book length and turned towards daily practice: how an accountant should test a result an intelligent system has already produced, and which decisions cannot be handed to it. The book has not been published yet.

Geography changes rules, not human nature. India has just replaced a six-decade-old tax law; American states redraw their own codes almost every year. Wherever a client sits, the anxiety before a deadline feels identical, and so does the cure.

Her plans reach further than her current role: a partnership in a CPA firm or a practice of her own in New York. Laws will keep changing on both sides of the ocean, and tax forms will keep growing longer. Accountants who read people as carefully as they read returns will never run out of work.