Katie Steele

Katie's path to serving accountants started at the dinner table. Listening to her CPA husband's colleagues talk about how hard it was to keep up with technology while still trying to grow their practices, she recognized a gap she was unusually well equipped to close.

She brings 30 years of bookkeeping experience to that work, most of it spent helping small and medium-sized businesses run more efficiently. Along the way she has worked across both the operational and the technical sides of the problem: four years as a Microsoft Dynamics 365 functional consultant on enterprise-level CRM and finance applications, hands-on turnaround work in private equity (fixing acquired businesses and making them more valuable ahead of a sale), and years of marketing experience helping small businesses get seen and win better clients.

That combination of deep bookkeeping knowledge, enterprise systems experience, and a growth mindset is what shapes how SmartFirm approaches automation. The starting point is always the same: find the workflows quietly draining a firm's best people, then put technology to work where it actually moves the needle.