A collection of online resources designed and built primarily by BYU Marriott students is helping accounting professionals around the world. During the past decade, BYU’s accounting Hubs—five websites that host hundreds of student-written articles and practical exercises—have racked up more than three million page views.
For their work as founders of and advisors for the BYU Hubs, School of Accountancy (SOA) faculty Cassy Budd, Scott Summers, Jeffrey Wilks, and David Wood earned the 2025 Ernst & Young Innovation in Accounting Education Award. The award is judged on innovation, adaptability by other educational institutions, and demonstrated educational benefits, value, or impact—distinctions that showcase the Hubs’ dual mission to give students hands-on learning while providing tools to the broader accounting community.
To populate the FinancialReportingHub, RevenueHub, IPOHub, and ESGReportingHub websites, students work with professionals at Connor Group, a business management company, to conduct research on relevant accounting topics. The students often add their own supplemental content before compiling all the material and posting it on corresponding platforms for public use.
Each of the five Hubs is designed to solve a different problem for accounting professionals. TechHub.training, for example, began when Wood and his colleagues noticed that there weren’t a lot of practice problems available for technology in accounting, which made it difficult for students and professionals to expand their skills.
“We had a student team come together and write a whole bunch of different challenges that people could perform,” Wood says. “Then the website would also allow users to record their responses, giving them a sort of résumé that they could show to recruiters.” The tracking feature turned practice into a visible, verifiable marker of skill.
“The whole Hub process is about students taking ownership and making something,” says Wood, who encourages students to lead while he provides guidance. This approach empowers students to talk directly with professionals, identify skill gaps in the workplace, and draft content. Student teams then collaborate to revise and prepare the content for online publication. “I love seeing student success—especially when they take on an unstructured problem and can create, invent, or make something better,” Wood says.
Student employees involved in Hubs build their skills—and their résumés—before they graduate. “The program gave me the tools and confidence to handle the complex and high-stakes transactions I advise on today,” says Nathan Clark, a previous BYU Hub student who currently works at Deloitte as a senior consultant. “I continue to build on that foundation as I work with clients around the world.”
Drawing on the accounting program’s rigorous curriculum, the Hub projects have become a widely used and well-regarded resource. “By providing free access to specialized accounting and reporting resources, the Hubs have become a go-to source for practitioners and educators across the globe,” says Joni Fisher, program director at EY Academic Resource Center. “I often highlight available resources on the Hubs when talking with academics or internally with practitioners.”
The Hubs’ success goes beyond page views or awards—it’s reflected in the students themselves, whose work makes a difference in the accounting world, says Budd. “I am proud of our Hub students and the contributions they make to our profession while they are still in school.”
Budd looks forward to seeing the Hub sites grow and evolve. “I expect that as long as there are technical questions to be answered,” she says, “we will have students who are interested in tackling them.”