Advisory Amplified 2026: dates, cities, cost and whether it is worth your day

Advisory Amplified is a six-city US tour of one-day events for accounting and bookkeeping professionals, built end to end around a single subject: how to build, sell and deliver advisory work. Not a general practice conference with an advisory track bolted on. Each stop runs roughly 8:00am to 6:00pm, caps at around 200 people, carries 6 CPE credits and costs US$149 to US$199.

It is built for firm owners, partners and advisory leads at small and mid-sized US firms, and the single-subject format is what makes it work at both ends of the journey. A firm that has not sold its first advisory engagement and a firm running a mature CAS line get value from the same room, in opposite directions. If you are within driving distance of a stop and advisory is the thing you keep meaning to get moving, you are the target audience. If what you need is product news and vendor comparison at scale, you are not.

Most accounting conferences ask for the same three things: a flight, three nights in a hotel and the better part of a thousand dollars before you have learned anything. Advisory Amplified is built on the opposite bet. One day, one city closer to home, around 200 people, and a ticket that costs less than a decent dinner for four.

The 2026 tour runs from 22 September to 9 October across six US cities. Here is what it is, what it costs, who is behind it, and an honest read on whether it earns your time.

Advisory Amplified 2026 at a glance

• Format: a six-city US tour of one-day events, roughly 8:00am to 6:00pm, capped at an intimate scale rather than a convention hall.
• Dates: 22 September to 9 October 2026, running on Tuesdays and Fridays.
• Size: the organisers pitch each stop at 200 plus accounting professionals.
• CPE: 6 credits per stop.
• Cost: varies by city. As at August 2026, Minneapolis was listed at US$149 early bird and Phoenix at US$199. The 2025 tour ran at US$99, so pricing has moved and is worth checking per city.
• Included: full-day access to sessions and workshops, locally sourced meals, a physical and digital workbook, and a goodie bag.
• Who runs it: Fearless Foundry, the creative consulting agency led by CEO Madeline Reeves.

The 2026 tour stops

• Raleigh, NC. Tuesday 22 September, Transfer Co. Food Hall, 500 E Davie St. A renovated 1920s coach garage a few minutes from the Moore Square Arts District.
• Nashville, TN. Friday 25 September, Seventh Story, 646 W Iris Dr, 8:00am to 6:00pm. A former recording studio in Berry Hill.
• Minneapolis, MN. Tuesday 29 September.
• Boulder, CO. Friday 2 October.
• Phoenix, AZ. Tuesday 6 October, monOrchid.
• Sixth stop. Friday 9 October. The city was not listed on the pages we could verify at the time of writing, so check the tour site before you plan around it.

Those cities were chosen by polling the community rather than defaulting to the usual convention markets, which is why the list reads Raleigh and Boulder instead of Las Vegas and Orlando. For a lot of US firms this is the first industry event in years that does not require a plane.

What actually happens on the day

The programme is built around three questions rather than a product roadmap: how to scale advisory across your team, how to actually use AI in your practice, and how to design the firm you want to run.

The fixtures worth knowing about:

• A live recording of The Accounting Podcast with Blake Oliver at every stop. If you listen to it, this is the closest most people will get to seeing it made, and live episodes tend to be blunter than the polished ones.
• Hands-on sessions and workshops rather than theatre-style keynotes. The workbook exists because you are expected to leave with something written down.
• A keynote from Karbon and sessions led by the tour's technology partners.
• A panel on the future of AI in accounting, which the organisers describe as candid. Take that on trust until you have sat through one.
• Curated vendor access. A handful of handpicked partners rather than an exhibition floor you have to survive.
• The sessions you miss, written up anyway. Vinyl is the tour's official notetaker, so attendees get the key takeaways from every session, not just the ones they sat in. At an event running parallel workshops, that solves the oldest problem in conference programming: picking one session means losing another. (Vinyl sponsors the tour and is a commercial partner of The Firm.)

The 2025 edition leaned hard on a women-led speaker lineup and a deliberately small vendor list, and the 2026 tour carries the same design. If you have ever left a big expo feeling like you spent six hours dodging badge scanners, that contrast is the point.

Who you will hear from

Advisory Amplified does not run on a single headline name. There is no stadium keynote, which is the main structural difference from a flagship conference. The programme is built from three groups instead.

• Blake Oliver, recording The Accounting Podcast live at every stop. He is the closest thing the tour has to a marquee name, and the one fixture you can count on regardless of which city you pick.
• Vendor voices, kept short. A keynote from Karbon plus sessions led by the tour's technology partners. The organisers describe the mix as software partners building with agentic AI alongside practitioners already using it, which is a more useful pairing than either group alone.
• Practitioners from the local market. Each stop leans on firm owners and advisory leads rather than a touring cast, which is the point of choosing the cities by community poll. The 2025 tour was built around a women-led speaker lineup and the 2026 edition carries the same design.

One caveat on planning: per-city lineups are published on each city page and were not fully listed everywhere at the time of writing. If a specific speaker is the reason you would buy a ticket, check your city before you book rather than assuming the roster travels.

Who is sponsoring it, and what that signals

Around twenty partners back the tour, which is a fraction of a flagship expo floor and the point of the format. Read the list as a map of where advisory tooling actually sits right now.

• Headline partners: Karbon on practice management, and Meridian by Pilot on AI-assisted month-end.
• Reporting and advisory delivery: Spotlight Reporting, Aider, Count and 3motion. This is the heart of the subject: the tools you actually deliver advisory through.
• Banking, spend and payments: Relay, Bill, Brex, Expensify and Kick.
• Payroll and benefits: OnPay and Human Interest.
• Tax: StanfordTax and Tax Figure.
• Firm growth and capacity: AccountGroove on lead-to-paid, TeamUp on offshore staffing, and CAS.
• Media and community: XU Magazine and Earmark.
• Official event notetaker: Vinyl, capturing every session across the tour so attendees leave with the takeaways from the workshops they could not sit in, not just the ones they chose.

Two things stand out. There is no general ledger sponsor, which is unusual and tells you the day is pitched above the ledger rather than at it. And the mix leans heavily toward tools that help a firm sell and deliver advisory rather than close books faster. If your advisory problem is packaging and pricing rather than production, this is a well-matched room.

How it compares to the big conferences

Put the numbers side by side and the case makes itself. A ticket to a flagship vendor conference runs several hundred dollars before travel: Xerocon Denver was US$650 standard this year, and that is before flights, three nights of downtown hotel and two days out of the office. Advisory Amplified asks for a day and, at the prices listed in August 2026, US$149 to US$199.

What you give up is scale. A big conference is where a vendor announces something that changes your workflow. Our Xerocon Denver recap shows what that looks like: payroll, payments and an AI agent roadmap in one morning. Advisory Amplified will not break news like that.

What you gain is conversation. Two hundred people in a food hall is a different social object to five thousand in a convention centre. You will meet the same people at lunch that you sat next to in the morning session, which is how professional relationships actually form.

The honest caveats

Three things to weigh before you book.

The price moved. The 2025 tour built its reputation on a US$99 ticket that undercut everything else in the market. At US$149 to US$199 it is still cheap by industry standards, but the gap has narrowed, and the accessible-by-design story is a little less dramatic than it was.

Vendor-curated content is still vendor content. A short partner list beats a hall of a hundred booths, but a keynote from a practice management vendor is still a keynote from a vendor. Take the filter you would take to any expo: ask for a customer using it in production, on real client data, today.

One day is one day. Six CPE credits and a workbook is a good return on a Tuesday. It is not a substitute for the depth of a multi-day programme, and if your firm has one training budget and one travel budget for the year, that is a real trade-off rather than a rhetorical one.

Who should go, and who should skip it

Go if you run a small or mid-sized US firm within driving distance of a stop, you are trying to build an advisory line and have not got it moving (our guide to app advisory that actually pays pairs well with the sessions), or you have been meaning to get serious about AI in the practice and keep not starting. The format rewards people who turn up with a specific problem. Our AI for accounting firms pillar is a reasonable way to arrive with sharper questions than "what should we be doing about AI".

Go if you are at any stage of the advisory journey. That is the genuine strength of a single-subject day: a firm that has not sold its first advisory engagement and a firm running a mature CAS line are both in the room, and the peer exchange works in both directions. A 200-person room is also a far easier place to introduce yourself than a keynote hall.

Skip it if you need product news and vendor comparison at scale. That is what the flagship shows are for, and the Xerocon calendar and the rest of our events coverage will serve you better.

The bigger point

The interesting thing here is not the ticket price. It is the argument underneath it: that the profession's calendar has been built around a few expensive, centralised events, and that a lot of good practitioners quietly opted out of all of it. A tour that polls its audience on which cities to visit is testing whether the demand was ever missing, or just badly served. On the evidence of a second tour with a new set of cities, it was badly served.

Frequently asked questions

What is Advisory Amplified?

Advisory Amplified is a six-city US tour of one-day events for accounting and bookkeeping professionals, organised by the creative consulting agency Fearless Foundry under CEO Madeline Reeves. Each stop combines hands-on advisory and AI sessions, a curated group of technology partners and a live recording of The Accounting Podcast, and carries 6 CPE credits.

When and where is the 2026 tour?

The tour runs 22 September to 9 October 2026. Confirmed stops are Raleigh on 22 September, Nashville on 25 September, Minneapolis on 29 September, Boulder on 2 October and Phoenix on 6 October, with a sixth stop on 9 October. Days run roughly 8:00am to 6:00pm.

How much does Advisory Amplified cost?

Pricing varies by city. As at August 2026, Minneapolis was listed at US$149 early bird and Phoenix at US$199. The 2025 tour ran at US$99. The ticket covers the full day of sessions, meals, a workbook and a goodie bag, so the real comparison is against a conference ticket plus flights and hotels.

Does Advisory Amplified offer CPE credits?

Yes, 6 CPE credits per stop. That is a solid return for a single day, though it will not replace a multi-day programme if you have a large annual requirement to meet.

Is it worth going if I already attend a big conference?

They do different jobs. A flagship vendor conference is where product news breaks and where you can compare a whole market in two days. Advisory Amplified is a smaller room, closer to home, aimed at peer conversation and leaving with a plan. If your budget covers one of each, they complement each other rather than compete.