What does a teenager who has heard the word "accountant" but never met one actually do with that curiosity? For years, Start Here. Go Places was the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants' answer to exactly that question: a site built to translate a CPA career into something a high school sophomore or a first-year college student could picture, complete with career information, scholarship details, and tools aimed squarely at people deciding whether numbers might be a living.
Original mission for students and educators
That original mission is worth describing in plain terms, because it explains why Start Here. Go Places still appears in school resource lists and counselor handouts. The AICPA put it together to reach students, but also to reach the adults standing next to them: teachers, faculty, and school counselors, the people the site grouped under the label "influencers." Educators got their own track of material; students got theirs. Education World reviewed Start Here. Go Places in 2007 and slotted it into the grades 9 to 12 band, which tells you the reading level and intent it was pitched at. None of that was incidental. A national professional association does not usually run a teen-facing outreach site unless it is trying to widen the pipeline into the profession, and this property was that pipeline's front door.
Two successor sites today
The current reality is narrower. Visit Start Here. Go Places today and the original content is gone. The landing page has been stripped down to a redirect hub, and it points to two successor destinations. The first is ThisWayToCPA.com, which carries forward the student-and-educator split the old site used, with a section for aspiring CPAs and a separate one for faculty. The second is BankonitGame.com, an accounting-themed educational game that asks visitors to create an account and log in before they can play.
Comparing ThisWayToCPA and BankonitGame
So the work Start Here. Go Places once did has been unbundled into two more specialized properties. ThisWayToCPA is the information and pathway resource, the place a student goes to read about exam steps, coursework, and what the credential actually requires. BankonitGame takes the engagement angle and turns it into something interactive, which is a sensible split: the people who respond to a structured reading experience and the people who respond to a game are rarely the same people, and trying to serve both from one page tends to dilute each. The account-login wall on the game side is the one friction point worth flagging, since a casual visitor curious enough to click may not be curious enough to register.
What this means for anyone landing on Start Here. Go Places is straightforward. It is no longer a destination in its own right. It is a signpost. The brand name survives, and it survives precisely because it is memorable and because school materials and CPA society pages printed it years ago and still link to it. Rather than break those inbound links, the AICPA kept the domain alive and repurposed it to forward traffic to wherever the live material now lives. That decision is the reason a name from a 2007 review still resolves to something useful instead of a dead address.
Redirect leaves visitors without guidance
There is a small loss in that arrangement that is fair to name. The old Start Here. Go Places bundled scholarship details, career framing, and educator tools in one recognizable place. A visitor arriving from a 2007-era citation expecting that bundle now has to make a choice between two doors, neither of which is labeled with the full scope the original promised. The redirect is clean, but it pushes the orientation work onto the visitor, who has to guess whether their question belongs on the pathway site or the game site. A single intermediate page explaining which door answers which need would smooth that over, and its absence is the clearest seam in how Start Here. Go Places hands off its old job.
Serving students before they decide
For the audience Start Here. Go Places was built to serve, the substance still holds up well once you follow the redirect. A high schooler weighing whether accounting is dull or actually a route to steady, well-compensated work will find the successor sites speaking to that doubt directly. The educator track matters more than it might seem, because counselors and teachers are the ones who put a resource like this in front of students in the first place, and keeping a dedicated lane for them is the difference between a site students stumble onto and a site they are guided to.
Who the site does not serve
It is also worth being clear-eyed about who this is for and who it is not. Someone already enrolled in an accounting program, or a working professional studying for the exam, will find the framing here too introductory; this material is calibrated for the moment before the decision, not after it. The value of Start Here. Go Places, in its day and through its successors now, sits in that early window where a student has not yet ruled accounting in or out. That is a narrow but genuinely useful slice, and the AICPA has clearly chosen to keep serving it. The wording of the brand itself signals the intent. Start Here. Go Places is built as a prompt to a hesitant student, an instruction more than a description, and the successor sites honor that framing.
A brand kept alive as infrastructure
Read as it stands, Start Here. Go Places is best understood as a piece of institutional infrastructure that has aged into a forwarding role. The name still lands in the places that cited it, the mission it once held has been handed to ThisWayToCPA and BankonitGame, and the original toolset, the scholarship pages, the career guides, the counselor resources, no longer lives at the old address. A visitor who knows that going in will not be confused by the bare redirect page; a visitor who does not may wonder where everything went. The Education World nod from 2007 and the steady trickle of school and society links are the residue of what the site was, and they explain why the domain was kept rather than retired.
One last detail tells the whole story in miniature. The landing page now offers two outbound links to its successors plus links to Terms of Service and a Privacy Policy, and nothing else. The site that once tried to talk a generation of students into the profession has become a quiet hinge between its own past and the two properties that carry its work forward.
