Arc: How Accrual Builds Accrual

At Accrual, our CPAs update the code that prepares returns. Our account managers walk into customer calls already briefed. Our support team ships its own triage workflow. The specialist customers used to wait on are increasingly every employee at our company.

We built an internal agent platform to make that possible. We call it Arc (Accrual Remote Coder). This is the first of two posts about it. This one is about how Arc empowers every Accrual employee – especially the non-engineers – to build and operate with the help of AI. The companion post, written for engineers, will go deeper on how Arc is built and how our engineering team uses it.

Arc proves, to us at least, that the future of work isn’t about AI replacing jobs, but rather enabling jobs.

Work that used to belong to someone else

Our go-to-market team walks into a customer call already prepared, without spending the morning assembling the picture by hand. Arc draws on a CRM that maintains itself: open items from the last meeting, what has been resolved since, what is on your calendar today. It checks the codebase and the ticketing system so the brief reflects where each promised fix actually stands. The same context feeds our weekly status updates. Arc pulls together the state of every pilot we are running, then helps surface the high-priority items for the engineering team with the context that matters: what problem we are solving, and which other customers have hit the same pattern.

Our customer success team turns a messy set of meeting notes into tracked, de-duplicated, correctly routed items without opening six other tools to do it. Finance, recruiting, and marketing run the same playbook in their own domains. None of this required the person to become an engineer. It required a platform that lets a non-engineer do the technical part safely.

Our CPAs no longer just review the correctness of a tax return. Through Arc, a CPA can propose adjustments to the underlying tax preparation logic directly. The person best qualified to judge whether a complex K-1 was prepared correctly is also the person who can change the logic that produced it. An engineer then reviews and merges the change. We wrote about this in more detail in Compounding Returns.

When people can suddenly do work that used to belong to another function, rigid job boundaries start becoming obstacles. This is also why we do not have titles internally. A title tells you the job you are allowed to do, and it quietly tells you the jobs that are someone else's. When the tooling removes that constraint, the title starts working against you. The CPA who can change code, the account manager who can build the deck, the person answering your support chat who can ship the fix: none of that fits a title cleanly, and we would rather not ask it to.

What Arc actually does

A support ticket lands and the team on call opens six tabs: the support system, the user session, the product tracker, the customer relationship record, the meeting notes from the last call, the production logs. Multiply by every customer, every alert, every meeting, every week.

Our internal operations used to look exactly like this. We had engineers and accountants stitching context between tabs for hours every day, and the more the company grew, the more time it took.

Arc assembles the context an Accrual team member needs before they touch your work, and it drafts the plan for the work that follows. It pulls together the data, history, and signals scattered across the systems we operate and hands the relevant slice to the person doing the job. By the time someone on our side opens your ticket, joins your channel, or picks up your call, the briefing is already written.

Arc is not a chatbot pointed at your firm. It is the internal substrate Accrual employees use to prepare for the work they then do as humans. We built it for everyone at Accrual: customer success, CPAs, sales, finance, recruiting, marketing, engineering. Each team's usage of Arc looks different, but the platform underneath is the same.

The work splits into three buckets.

The customer-facing work. When you reach out, Arc has already pulled together the relevant context: who you are, what is open against your account, where each of those items stands, what came up on the last call. The team member on our side starts with the briefing ready, instead of asking you to recap history they could have looked up. The loop runs in reverse too: when a customer success call ends, Arc turns every distinct ask, bug, commitment, and question into a tracked item, labeled for your firm and checked against existing tickets for duplicates before anything is written. Your asks reach the right people inside Accrual already specified.

The internal-operations work. Finance reconciliation, recruiting research, marketing drafts, internal documentation – the small daily friction of a growing company. Leverage across every function that does knowledge work, applied by the people who do that work rather than handed to a backlog queue.

The product-building work. Engineering was the first place we pointed Arc, because engineering is the most measurable place to start. The unit of output is concrete: a code change, reviewed and merged, with a quick feedback loop. The interesting part is that there is no Arc team. Arc is built by everyone at Accrual.

Why we built our own agents

People at Accrual use Claude and Codex every day. Those tools are excellent at the work they are built for: thinking through a hard problem, drafting prose, summarizing material, exploring an idea. Arc, by contrast, is built for work that requires live connection to the systems that Accrual runs.

A general-purpose assistant cannot read your production logs. It does not reliably know which customer you are talking about. It does not have the correct permissions, the audit trail, or the context for any of it. Every time someone wanted to use these general chat assistants for real work inside Accrual's systems, they would have to provide all the relevant context by hand, which is exactly the problem we built Arc to remove. And even if a general-purpose assistant could securely connect to all of those systems directly, we would not want every employee configuring their own data access, their own credentials, and their own permissions to customer information.

Arc is the integration layer, the permissions model, the audit log, and the encoded process. The integrations are maintained centrally. The credentials and access patterns are managed once, audited, and refreshed automatically. The way Accrual thinks about a support ticket, an incident, a customer success call, or a tax preparation discrepancy is encoded in the agent that handles it, rather than being re-explained by every employee who opens a chat window.

A new hire on the customer success team should be able to start on day one with an agent that already knows Accrual’s operating cadence and which systems hold what information. That is what owning the platform makes possible.

Why asynchronicity changes the work, not just the speed

There is a second difference, beyond context, and it surprised us more.

A chat assistant means sitting at the keyboard, watching it think, feeding it the next instruction. Arc is different. You fire off many requests at once and walk away. You take a customer call or go for a walk while the work runs in the background. As the work completes, you check back in from your phone to answer a follow-up question, review what came back, or give the next instruction.

Two things follow from that, and they matter more than the time saved.

The first is that the work arrives at a later stage. Because Arc keeps going without stopping to ask you something every few minutes, what comes back is closer to finished, not a first step you then have to shepherd through ten more.

The second is that throwing work away gets cheap. If you want three different versions of a deck for the same talking points, one short with illustrations, one long, one in between, you do not decide the right direction up front and commit to it. You fire off three requests, come back later, and pick the one you like. The cost of exploring a direction and abandoning it drops close to zero, so you explore more directions. That changes what kind of work is worth attempting, not just how quickly you finish it.

How we think about safety

A firm's security lead should know how we think about the perimeter, because we have thought about it carefully.

Humans send the messages. Agents prepare briefings; humans send the messages. Agents that touch code open draft change requests; humans always approve and merge. This is true whether the person who opened the session is an engineer or a CPA. Automation runs against context-gathering and drafting, not against external action. Every customer-facing action that comes out of Arc is owned by a named person.

Constrained agents. Arc runs on the same firm-segregated infrastructure as the rest of the Accrual platform, governed by the same access controls and segregation principles as the agent that prepares your returns, one firm at a time. Arc does not train on customer data and does not aggregate findings across firms. The improvements we make to Arc are improvements to the instructions our agents follow, not improvements derived from your information.

Audit is a primitive, not a feature. Every tool call, every session, every action has a complete event history. We can answer "what did the agent do, in what order, with what inputs" precisely. Your data stays in the United States, and Arc never trains on it. The posture is the same one we publish about the customer product: a glass box, not black box.

Where this is going

Dozens of always-on Arc cycles running in the background. Evaluate every return as soon as it is filed. Watch for friction in customer workflows before anyone reports it. Watch every service-level violation and draft an investigation before anyone notices. Arc should not only respond to prompts. It should continuously inspect the system, draft useful work, and route it to the right human for review.

The principle that holds across all of it: humans remain responsible for every customer-facing action. The agents draft, route, and prepare. The humans approve, send, and own. That does not change as the volume of agent-drafted work grows. If anything, it gets more important.

We are always looking for exceptional people, whether you want to help build Arc or just work somewhere where context arrives before you do, and where your title does not decide what you are allowed to do. Learn more at accrual.com/about.