Her Story
About Chelsea
Chelsea Stone is a Senior Tax Analyst at Cain Watters & Associates with a strong foundation in accounting, finance, and client-focused tax services. She holds a Bachelor of Business Administration in Accounting and Finance from The University of Texas at Arlington and is currently pursuing a Master of Science in Accounting from Texas Woman’s University. She is also an Enrolled Agent (EA), bringing advanced expertise in tax compliance, representation, and strategic tax planning.
Her career journey has been nontraditional, beginning in nursing where she trained and worked as a Patient Care Technician in an intensive care setting. That early experience strengthened her ability to remain composed in high-pressure environments and deepened her commitment to helping others, even as she ultimately transitioned into accounting to align with her strengths and passion for numbers. Over the course of her career in tax and accounting, she has grown into a leadership role, overseeing a team of approximately 7–9 professionals, reviewing returns for accuracy, ensuring compliance with IRS regulations, and helping optimize client outcomes.
Chelsea specializes in the dental industry within tax practice and has made significant contributions through process improvement, including collaborating on the development of standardized templates for dental practice sales to dental service organizations and training others on their use. Outside of her professional responsibilities, she enjoys reading thriller and fantasy novels, as well as spending time outdoors hiking and kayaking. She is also actively working toward becoming a VITA volunteer, with the goal of supporting low-income families and older adults in her community by providing accessible, no-cost tax preparation services.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Chelsea
01What do you attribute your success to?
I attribute my success to my support system. You can accomplish anything if you have the right mindset, but it's harder if you don't have a support system. Having the support system helps you get to where you want to go a lot faster and a lot easier than if you didn't have one. So I definitely attribute my success to my support system.
02What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?
The best career advice I've ever received is don't be afraid to ask questions. We all get stuck from time to time, and we don't know everything. If you don't know, ask the question, and somebody will help you find the answer.
03What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
Once you hit the ceiling, keep going. There are so many women in today's society that have a place in accounting. It is not just a man's world anymore. We have the ability to make our names and make a place for ourselves and get to the top, just like everybody else. There's definitely room. So once you hit the ceiling, just keep going.
04What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
AI is definitely becoming a challenge, but it is also a huge opportunity to learn how to apply the AI tools that are out there to our current roles to make them more efficient. Because AI is still so new, there's a lot of challenges with it, with bringing it in and it not working correctly and not giving you what it's supposed to be giving you. In my field right now, AI has been around for a while in a simpler form where it can read something and spit it back to you, but not in a logical, conversational way that AI is now. So now that we're getting more into that, how to use it and implement it has been a challenge. I think the expertise that is needed in my field is so nuanced that AI can't fully take over, but it can be used as a more efficient tool.
05What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
My values differ just a little bit between personal and work life. For my personal life, my values are tied with my family, my health, and my success, and I define success as being in a comfortable spot where I don't feel like I'm struggling. In my work life, it overlaps with the success part because I want to be able to succeed, so I value integrity, transparency, and honesty. Those are my three top things in my work environment that I definitely put on the top of the totem pole.
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