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This week, Blake and David are puzzled by the results of a survey that shows 40% of tax professionals believe generative AI will allow them to charge clients higher rates. They also cover the sham audit firm BF Borgers and question why the firm's CPA is still licensed despite SEC charges. Blake demonstrates how he uses Zapier Central to build an AI agent that can automatically respond to client emails about the status of their tax returns. Wrapping up, they examine Digits' $35 million raise and pivot to bill pay, and Xero's new filtering functionality for bank reconciliations.
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Chapters
- (00:53) - Generative AI's Impact on Pricing
- (05:39) - The Curious Case of BF Borgers and Sham Audits
- (08:19) - The Slow Response of Regulatory Bodies to Fraud
- (18:07) - NASBA Hires New President
- (19:24) - NASBA and the CPA Exam: A Call for Modernization
- (28:16) - The Trump Stormy Daniels NY Trial
- (35:19) - Rudy Giuliani's Financial Woes: A Deep Dive
- (38:18) - Building AI Agents with Zapier Central: A How-To Guide
- (39:38) - AI Tools for Productivity: Insights from ClickUp
- (40:41) - The Power of AI in Automating Client Communication
- (48:04) - The Big Money in AI-Powered Practice Management
- (53:54) - Bill Pay Innovations and Market Dynamics
- (55:12) - Xero's New Features and Bank Feed Improvements
- (58:58) - The Real Value of Dashboards in Business Management
- (01:04:10) - Closing Remarks and Future Events
Show Notes
Rudy Giuliani Forced to Learn Accounting After Bankruptcy Beancounter Bails
Stormy Daniels payment puts focus on Trump and check-writing as trial testimony resumes
Trump Accountant on His Stormy Daniels Coverup Notes: ‘I Made a Boo-Boo’
Trump Accountant Exposes Checks to Michael Cohen in Damning Testimony
What’s new in Xero — May 2024 - Xero Blog
End of Trump Media’s Auditor Jolts Hundreds of Other Companies
Trump Media hires new auditor after previous accounting firm charged with 'massive fraud'
Digits Launches AI Bill Pay for Small Businesses
https://www.pymnts.com/news/b2b-payments/2024/digits-launches-ai-bill-pay-for-small-businesses/
Countsy Debuts Platform to Streamline Back-Office Management
Countsy Debuts Platform to Streamline Back-Office Management
Why we’re calling 2024 ‘the year of the US bank feed’
Let's Meet NASBA's Next President and CEO
Digits Launches AI Bill Pay for Small Businesses
Digits AI Bill Pay -- The World's First AI Bill Pay, Built Specifically For Startups
Imagine the Chaos If the PCAOB Starts Naming and Shaming Audit Deficiency Clients
'Nobody seems interested' in helping Giuliani with accounting in bankruptcy case, lawyers claim
Canopy Secures $35 Million in Funding to Enhance AI-Powered Practice Management for Accounting Firms
Trump Media Replaces Its Accounting Firm BF Borgers With Semple, Marchal & Cooper
Trump Org. accounting system was designed in the '90s and was "antiquated" by 2017, McConney confirms
Who Is Deborah Tarasoff, a Trump Trial Witness?
Live updates: Donald Trump's hush money trial
The most hated workplace software on the planet
Generative AI may let tax pros charge more
How to Use AI as a Personal Assistant to Boost Productivity
Paymerang Says Acquisition by Corpay Will Help Create Jobs
Who is Jeffrey McConney, witness in Trump’s criminal trial and co-defendant in civil fraud case?
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Transcripts
The full transcript for this episode is available by clicking on the Transcript tab at the top of this page
Creators & Guests
What is The Accounting Podcast?
The Accounting Podcast (formerly the Cloud Accounting Podcast) is the world's #1 accounting, bookkeeping, and tax podcast! Join us weekly for a roundup of accounting news, analysis, and interviews. Plus, earn free NASBA-approved CPE credits for listening with the Earmark app. Learn more at https://earmarkcpe.com.
Attention: This is a machine-generated transcript. As such, there may be spelling, grammar, and accuracy errors throughout. Thank you for your understanding!
Blake Oliver: [00:00:04] Trump accountant on his Stormy Daniels cover up notes. I made a boo boo. He literally said that on the stand. Yeah. Jeffrey Mcconney said, quote, I made a boo boo when describing the erroneous math he scribbled on Trump corporate letterhead.
David Leary: [00:00:22] Coming to you weekly from the OnPay Recording Studio.
Blake Oliver: [00:00:29] Hello and welcome back to the show. I'm Blake Oliver. And I'm.
David Leary: [00:00:32] David Leary. And, Blake, I need your help to unpack something that's kind of been bothering me. Every day I've been waiting to for us to broadcast this show. So I saw the the loose headline, which was generative AI may let tax pros charge more. But the real stat in this, which was kind of shocking, is 40% of tax professionals believe that the rise of generative AI will allow them to charge their clients a higher rate and get this 2%. 2% say it would. Significantly, they'd be able to raise rates significantly because of using AI.
Blake Oliver: [00:01:05] Okay, wait. So let me get my mind around this. 40% of tax pros tax pros say that ChatGPT Claude, whatever are going to let them charge more.
David Leary: [00:01:15] Correct.
Blake Oliver: [00:01:16] But that but that means that like 60% don't think it'll allow them to charge more. Are they the ones that are afraid of it taking their jobs?
David Leary: [00:01:25] That I'm not sure. But then the article. So this is a survey from Thomson Reuters of about 100 professional service workers. And so some of it, you know, they even talk because Thomson Reuters has a big audience of lawyers as well. Yeah, lawyers. The only 13% say it's going to let them charge more. Right? I think.
Blake Oliver: [00:01:42] Yeah, they're in for I actually have a study about how, uh. Chatgpt I really helps with legal work, so they're probably already feeling it. Oh that's.
David Leary: [00:01:52] Good. That ties in because.
Blake Oliver: [00:01:54] David, you and I, on a previous episode on our YouTube channel, we actually drafted an operating agreement using ChatGPT. Remember that? Yes, that was when we did our taxes last year and we didn't have the operating agreement. And TurboTax wouldn't do our return without it. So we used it for our LLC operating agreement. Yeah. It doesn't.
David Leary: [00:02:12] This is where I'm trying to reconcile this, because they tried to explain why they think this, and it's because tax professions are more likely to pass costs onto their customers. Rent or charge for it on a case by case basis like so. If I looked, if I'd used ChatGPT, I'm going to bill you extra for my use of this other tool, but this is the part that I can't grok, right? We here are using AI at earmark write extensively. Yeah. And we're using extensively. And we keep getting more and more efficient. And ultimately it's enabling us to either a charge less or possibly bundle more services or increase the service offering that we're giving at a current price.
Blake Oliver: [00:02:52] We're doing more for less money.
David Leary: [00:02:54] And our point of view is, yes, AI has a cost, but it's negligible versus hiring a person.
Blake Oliver: [00:03:01] Absolutely right. Yeah.
David Leary: [00:03:02] So I don't get it. Like, like, do these pressures know something that I don't like? I don't grasp why they think this way.
Blake Oliver: [00:03:09] I'm very skeptical of these surveys and especially also surveys of CFOs. Whenever you see surveys of executives relating to like technology, like there's no chance that most of these guys have used it and they're just they're just sounding off. Right? They don't they're clueless. It's like surveys of a bunch of clueless people don't mean anything.
David Leary: [00:03:26] The only way I can think about this is that tax professionals, their current rates they're charging, is so pitiful that if they spend $100 on AI tools in their firm that they got to pass that cost on to their clients because they can't afford the $100 in AI tools, that's the only logic I can connect here.
Blake Oliver: [00:03:43] Well, I do think it will raise rates and and I hope it'll actually get all these tax pros who are still billing hourly to stop. Because if you become super productive because of AI and you get this like 4 to 8 times productivity boost that we're seeing at earmark with AI, and you do that in tax or accounting. You can't bill hourly anymore. It's like when I was doing bookkeeping work and I automated 80% of my job, I had to stop billing hourly. I switched to fixed fees, and that was the basis of my entire firm. And now everyone's doing that. I was just doing it ten years early. And so it's it hasn't hit tax and an audit and accounting yet because it's not as easy to automate that stuff. But AI is is going to make it possible. So I, I'm, I'm hopeful that we will see the end of the billable hour in our lifetime, hopefully in the next ten years because of AI, because how do you bill hourly for using AI? You can't.
David Leary: [00:04:35] It has to happen very, very quickly. I think it's and I know AI with cloud it was like took longer. We always think and everything takes longer than you think. But I this is this is going so quick. If you just think about the last two years we've had with it. Right.
Blake Oliver: [00:04:49] Um hum. Um, I've got some follow up David, on bf Borgers the firm, the sham audit mill. That's the SEC's words, not mine. The sham audit. Was it sham audit mill or sham audit firm? I can't remember, but whatever it was, they were doing sham audits 1500 over just two and a half years. And it was actually 1500 filings with the SEC and the SEC that said something like 75% of them included, just completely like made up stuff. And this was also the auditor of Trump's media company, and that's why it blew up in the national news and, uh, sham audit mill. Thank you. Lighten them up. Oh, and thank you everyone who has joined us live. Richard, great to have you with us. Gator NYC is here as well. Uh, if you have any, uh, thing you want to say, anything you want to share with us, please do that in the comments. But back to this BFF borders thing. So it you know, SEC hits them last week. It was on Friday a week ago. We're also recording on Friday. So this was exactly one week ago. Hit them with this, uh, charges of fake audits, $14 million fine, but no jail time, no penalties. Other than that. And BFF borders doesn't even have to admit wrongdoing. And I'm thinking to myself, that's crazy, that that's it. No, no, no criminal penalties. Nothing. Like you can just fake a bunch of filings and get away with it. I mean, you got to pay back the money. But we even saw you.
David Leary: [00:06:19] I saw a picture of you on Instagram at the swimming pool, and you couldn't enjoy the pool because you were thinking about how he did not get in trouble.
Blake Oliver: [00:06:26] Yeah, well, you know, I enjoy thinking about stuff like this. And I'm sitting there at the pool and I'm thinking like, how can you get away with this? I actually think that he probably made more money than he even paid out in fines. He probably came out on top on this. And then I started thinking, well, this guy's in Colorado, right? Surely he cannot still be a CPA in Colorado, but he is. If you go to the Colorado Board of Accountancy website and you look up Benjamin Borger's. Benjamin Fitzpatrick, Borgers. You can see that he has an active CPA license originally issued in 2006, and he's still a CPA and as far as I can tell. The Board of Accountancy has made no move to get rid of his license to punish him for any of this. He does have some actions against him one back in 2019, 1 in 2021 and a recent one in March. But they don't seem to be related at all to any of this SEC stuff that we're talking about. And go ahead, David.
David Leary: [00:07:31] We the SEC put out this press release last Friday when we recorded at 9 a.m., we recorded like an hour later, we kind of broke the news on this story. And then it was everywhere on national media. So I'm sure people in the state of Colorado know, and the governing boards in Colorado know that this exists, right? Like somebody just has to go in like check uncheck him, right. Like put him in the inactive column.
Blake Oliver: [00:07:54] Well, they got to have a meeting, right. They got to do a disciplinary hearing. And there's there is due process. But like they had a whole week and they didn't do anything. Not even a press release as far as I can tell. So you know what, if there's ever a case in which you could move quickly, it seems like this is pretty open and shut, you would think. Right. So I'm just starting the timer. Let's just see. Starting now, it is today's May 10th. So it's been one week. And every single week that this guy's license remains active I'm going to bring it up. We're going to look at this website every single week and see just how long it takes the state of Colorado to revoke this guy's CPA license. If they do and if they don't, it's a travesty. And just think about all the hassle that these boards of accountancy put CPAs through to get their CPA compliant, to get licensed. And then a guy like this comes along and is an outright fraud and causes a ton of trouble for all of his clients now who have to go get new auditors and refile, potentially, if stuff had issues like they're going to, it's going to be very expensive for these customers. And here this guy is still an active CPA.
David Leary: [00:09:04] Well, now you're going to be you're going to be proactive checking that what else you could check too is I think I saw Trump's uh, media company hired a firm in Phoenix. You could just go knock on the door there and do a little investigation, see how it's going, ask them how the audits are going.
Blake Oliver: [00:09:19] I'm. I'm, you know, maybe I'll get out of my cave here in my house and actually go outside and go visit Simple Marshall and Cooper LLP. They were hired on Saturday, the day after the whole news about BF Borgers came out to audit Trump media. I'm actually really curious about this firm. I don't know anything about them. And I maybe we should just like go on LinkedIn and see who is this CPA firm.
David Leary: [00:09:51] I think I saw that all their other audit clients combined added up, are not as big as the true social deal they just got.
Blake Oliver: [00:09:59] So they are company size is 11 to 50 employees with 27 associated LinkedIn members. Headquarters is Phoenix, Arizona, founded in 1982. So, uh, and they're a member, an independent member of the BDO Alliance. So hopefully these guys do, uh, real audits. I mean, I guess we have better odds of that. Oh, one more thing before we get off the BF borgers story. I reached out to the AICPA because BF Borgers was previously a member of the AICPA Peer Review program, and some commenters on LinkedIn told me that they were kicked out of the peer review program in December of 2023. So December, this past December, they were booted out of the program.
David Leary: [00:10:51] Can you say explain what is the peer review program?
Blake Oliver: [00:10:53] So peer review is the primary way that the CPA firms that do audits self-regulate. So there is no PCAOB inspecting CPA firms that do audits of privately held companies. It's only publicly traded companies.
David Leary: [00:11:11] Okay.
Blake Oliver: [00:11:11] That are regulated, or only firms that audit publicly traded companies are regulated by the PCAOB, which is part which is controlled by the SEC. And that's their domain public. But private companies like there's no federal agency, right, that regulates the audits of private companies. And so it's left up to firms, the CPA profession to regulate itself. And that's what peer review is. So if I have a CPA firm every few years, I have to go to you, David, and you have a different firm and you're registered as a peer reviewer, and you go look at my work papers and say.
David Leary: [00:11:47] Okay.
Blake Oliver: [00:11:48] Hey, Blake, you're doing great work. Or here's where you need to improve. Here's what you're not doing right now. I have my own, like, feelings about this. Like how effective is peer review really? Because what if I just go get somebody to peer review who's like, my buddy, your buddy? Yeah, right. Like I mean, it is it really doing the job it's supposed to be doing. But in this case, BF Borgers failed and failed so bad that they got kicked out of the peer review program and they were terminated. And I reached out to the AICPA and I asked, hey, you know, why did BF borgers get kicked out? Because there's nothing on this website. They have like a public website that lists, um, it has some documents and there's a, there's a report in here that shows like that, the audit that was inspected, the audits that were inspected like failed. And that was in, let's see, in 2022. So September of 2022, Haney and Company did a report on the firm's system of quality control and failed them. So, you know, more than two years ago now, right. And then there was the whole back and forth. The firm gets to respond. They are supposed to make certain changes, and they didn't. And then they got kicked out in December of 2023.
Blake Oliver: [00:13:04] But there's like no documentation on the website about why that happened. So I reached out and I asked, and I also asked, well, let me just get to that point. So I asked why there weren't the documents. And the ACP said that the public file contains specific information and documents. Other documents are not included in the public file. So there are documents about the termination, but they're not in the public file. And the only reason that the firm's three peer review documents were in the public file is because the firm was a voluntary member of the Employee Benefit Plan Audit Quality Center. So I guess. If a firm is voluntarily part of it, then the documents are public, but as soon as they aren't, there are no public documents anymore. Okay. And then I asked, well, okay, so the firm failed. Does the AICPA like, do anything about this? Right? Or is it just you're kicked out and then they just don't do anything but you would like I would think maybe it would be in the AKP's interest to like, report this to the Board of Accountancy and maybe do something about this guy acting as a CPA and doing fraudulent audits, right?
David Leary: [00:14:14] Yeah. Because, I mean, their job is to protect the profession, right? Right. They would they should tattle on somebody like this, right?
Blake Oliver: [00:14:21] Like it's like, um, I don't know if you're a teacher and you think that your student is being abused, you have to report it by law, right? That sort of thing. Like you can't just do nothing. Yeah.
David Leary: [00:14:29] Mandatory reporting. You're right. Yeah.
Blake Oliver: [00:14:31] Mandatory reporting.
David Leary: [00:14:32] Aicpa employee would be in some sort of mandatory reporting when they find out a CPA is being fraudulent.
Blake Oliver: [00:14:38] So here's a statement I got. The AICPA is a membership organization, and we do not issue licenses that give firms the legal ability to perform to perform audits. Cpa licenses are issued by state boards of accountancy. We provided the fact that this firm was terminated from the AICPA Peer Review Program to the Colorado Board of Accountancy. It would be this regulatory body to consider what, if any, actions should be taken with respect to this firm's ability to practice public accounting, including the performance of audits and sweet coffee on a monthly basis, sends a correspondence to all state boards of accountancy, which includes member disciplinary and ferm drop and termination notices. So the Colorado Board of Accountancy was notified by the AICPA of this and has not done anything.
David Leary: [00:15:24] About it via monthly email newsletter from Seward Coffee like that. How they do it, it's like a monthly email from MailChimp or something.
Blake Oliver: [00:15:30] So, you know, what does this look like from an outsider's perspective? It kind of looks like that the boards of accountancy, or at least in this case the Colorado Board of Accountancy, is not doing its job. Or if they are doing their job, then whatever they are doing is not enough. How can we be assured that there aren't more auditors like Borgers out there doing sham audits and failing to protect investors? I don't think there's any way to know. Just the fact that one was able to do it for so long makes me think that there might be more.
David Leary: [00:16:04] I mean, sorry to rain on your parade, but I don't think it's going to get better any time soon because a lot of these organizations are more of the same. You know, you applied right to be the new president of Nasba. And they turned they.
Blake Oliver: [00:16:16] Didn't they didn't get an interview, unfortunately.
David Leary: [00:16:18] Well, they hired the new president. And just like that famous who song that the two song won't get fooled again, meet the new boss. Same as the old boss. So the new Nasba president is Daniel J. Dustin, CPA. He's been selected to become NASA's next president and Chief Financial Officer beginning on August 1st, 2024. But you know what he's done for the last 12 years? He's just the vice president of Nasba.
Blake Oliver: [00:16:46] So?
David Leary: [00:16:48] So nothing's going to change. It's just the same, same blood going in the same positions, you know, and arguably it's probably even things wouldn't change because in theory, right. If you're the CEO of Nasba, you're Ken Bishop and you're a good CEO, you probably make your VP's really run the company, right? Yeah. So arguably he was running Nasba for the last 12 years, so I don't see a lot of change happening because what we have right now is really his creation. Probably. So not to rain on your parade, but this is why these folks, they don't function, they don't change.
Blake Oliver: [00:17:20] Well. And, you know, it's it's, uh, it's a shame too, because Nasba could be doing so much more to make it easier for students to take the CPA exam and get licensed. I've heard students talking about how right now, it's taking six months to get exam scores, six months for an exam that is administered on a computer. How is that possible? Other exams, you get the results immediately. They can be computer graded and for some reason the CPA exam can't be done that way. When I took the enrolled agent exam, I took part one. I don't know why I did it, but I took part one and I got my results instantly I knew that I had passed. And yet CPA exam six months. And that's really stressful because if you miss that part of the exam now you got to retake it. And you could have been studying that whole time, right? You've probably forgotten a lot of material. So I don't know I don't know what's going on there. Right. Like even without changing the requirements to become a CPA, just streamlining it would be huge. But I don't even think they realize they have a problem.
David Leary: [00:18:22] Well, I think it has to do with like who their customer is, right? Is there? Do they think of their customers as the students and the people becoming CPAs and paying to take the test, or do they think of their customers as the state boards and leadership at the state boards and the CPA? And this ties into I saw this article. It was titled The Most Hated Workplace Software on the planet. I was like, oh, I got to read this.
Blake Oliver: [00:18:44] Oh, is it, um. What is it? Is it?
David Leary: [00:18:47] Tell me. It's worked out. You almost said it. It's worked out.
Blake Oliver: [00:18:50] It's good. Well, they're never going to sponsor us, so it's okay. I was going to say sponsor us. I was going to say an app that might sponsor us someday. So.
David Leary: [00:18:57] And it immediately starts out with this great quote, getting someone onboarded using workday is like trying to get water from your sink to your stove using a colander. And I mean, it's gigantic. Um, workday is used at half the fortune 500 companies, trillions of dollars in revenue. It's worth the $70 billion. So it's bigger than Fedex. Nintendo. It's bigger than Honda, right? Of, um, about 160 million Americans. Right? Have jobs. About 130 million are paid through their employer. So they're getting wages and salary and health care. And so you need an app like this to manage payroll and the hiring and all of that. Um, and we've talked about the failed ERP rollouts, but this article was really getting into how cumbersome it is. So even if the rollout is successful, people hate using it. And as I really started thinking about the article and reading it, it goes back to the customer. The customers of workday are the C-suite and VP's. Yeah, it's not you who are applying for a job. It's not you who are trying to get reimbursed for an expense on your pay stub. It's it's none of the or you who has to write an employee review. Self-review none of the or the vendor that you have to pay bills to.
David Leary: [00:20:14] They don't care. Those aren't the customers. So none of that stuff has to work. And it almost feels like nasba right? You're saying, yeah, who cares what the experience is like? And so there's just nightmare after nightmare after nightmare and a really good example or a story about this, and this is what really stuck with me, is this is a creative director at a fortune 500 company, and apparently it's very easy for an HR professional or C-suite. So if I spend millions of $40 million on workday and I'm like, oh, we can now do employee, uh, appraisals once a year, oh, well, we just have to hit this one radio button and now we can do for a year. Oh, we could do monthly appraisals. Right. And what's happened, it just every time that happens it's super easy for the HR person, but it creates hundreds of thousands of hours for work for your organization. Yeah. Right. And so it's very broken, the whole mindset of this. And I almost feel like this is like we talked about this with accounting firms. People solve for internal processes regardless of the experience for the customer. And that's I think Nasbe is doing it to test takers Workday's doing it to job employees.
Blake Oliver: [00:21:16] Same thing. I think you've nailed it. The organizations that run the CPA license, the CPAs are not their customer or they don't see it that way. It's it's all these other organizations, the state boards of accountancy, the educational institutions. So they've lost sight of their mission. Which is to advocate for CPAs. And, um, I was just doing a webinar. This. Uh, this week I interviewed Alan Wittman on my earmark podcast, and we did it as a live webinar. And Alan Wittman was the CEO of Baker Tilly, us for, I think, eight years, maybe longer. One of the largest accounting firms in the country. And he grew that firm three times in that period, which is a lot, a lot, a lot. And it was fascinating to me because we spent the whole time or not the whole time, a good chunk of the beginning talking about how he thinks the billable hour is just terrible, and that firms need to break the mold and move away from billing for time and bill for outcomes. And this was music to my ears, you know. And I asked him like, well, well, did you do this at Baker Tilly? And he's like, no.
David Leary: [00:22:32] That's.
Blake Oliver: [00:22:34] So there's all these people right in the profession at the top of the profession who, like, are advocating for this, but they don't do it in their own organizations.
David Leary: [00:22:42] And is it an after the fact, like, like now that they're out, they finally they're stepped out of the business, they've retired and they take a breath, they're like, oh man, everything we did for 30 years was wrong. Is it one of those moments for people? Because it happens a lot like.
Blake Oliver: [00:22:56] We speculated for a while about it. I said, you know, is it because that CPA firms are just making so much money they have no incentive to change? That's my theory, right? That once you get to partner, you don't want anything to change because you spent all this time getting there and now you want to reap the rewards. And change is risk, right? It could it could reduce your compensation. Um, and by the time you get there. Right. Like your risk averse. But I brought him up because. I thought it was. I forget why I brought that up. Actually, David. We were. What were we talking about?
David Leary: [00:23:28] Talking about the the management and who the customers are and who you're solving for. And firms. Uh, make don't give their customers the actual good client experience as they solve it. Right.
Blake Oliver: [00:23:38] And solve it for firms bill hourly because it's easy, not because it's a good experience for their clients. And now Alan's out there saying, no, we need to change this. But I think part of the problem is that it's the structure of the firms that prevents them from doing this. And it's the same thing with Nasba, right? The way that Nasba is governed, the way the OCC is governed is it prevents them from being accountable to their end customer and to CPAs. Um, but, you know, it was interesting regarding like the whole education aspect of becoming a CPA and the 150 hour rule and all that. Um, you know, Alan's all about stop focusing on the hours and start focusing on the outcomes. And so I hope that people take that message and apply that to accounting education, because right now, if you think about it, all of the education is based on hours. Yes, it's literally 150 semester hours of education. It's not on the outcomes. And so if we really want to like. And Alan's on the board of the AICPA. The board board, not just the council. And so I said to him, I said, look, you know, if, if, if, if you're saying that we need to focus on outcomes and not inputs and not these hours, then let's do that with the education. Right? What matters is that you got the bachelor's degree, not that you spent 150 hours doing it. Yeah. So I really hope that folks like Alan, now that they've had this epiphany, now that they're no longer running these firms, will change the mentality at the AICPA and stuff. All right, moving on, David, I want to talk about our headline. The Trump Stormy Daniels case. In New York. And it's because. We had a bunch of accountants on the stand, and the headlines that have come out of this case regarding the accountants are pretty hilarious.
Blake Oliver: [00:25:27] The Daily Beast had my favorite Trump accountant on his Stormy Daniels cover up notes. I made a boo boo. He literally said that on the stand. Yeah. Jeffrey Mcconney said, quote, I made a boo boo when describing the erroneous math he scribbled on Trump corporate letterhead. The former Trump Organization controller testified about the notes he took during a January 2017 meeting that laid out how the family real estate company was going to surreptitiously reimburse attorney Michael Cohen for fronting the $130,000 that silenced the porn star Stormy Daniels. That payment kept her from going public about her decade old one night stand with Trump in the days before the 2016 presidential election. The farce was laid out in black and white, with handwritten notes explaining the fuzzy math at play. Cohen would be paid 180,000, which was doubled on paper so that it would make up for the roughly 50% taxes the midtown Manhattan resident would have to pay in federal, state, and city taxes. Mcconney wrote, quote, 180,000 times two for taxes, unquote, in black pen. On the bright white paper on the witness stand, he admitted the company was fine, having it grossed up to ensure Cohen got his proper share. The sham continued when tallying up Cohen's bonus. Initially, 50,000 was marked as paid to Redfinch for tech services, but that seemed to morph instead to mean 60,000 for Cohen himself. And then it goes on and I guess, like they went into detail on this like handwritten note and he basically like made some math errors or something. There's actually a picture of it. It's kind of funny. You want to see this. Yeah.
David Leary: [00:27:06] This is pulling that up.
Blake Oliver: [00:27:07] So like this is like the equivalent. This is the accounting equivalent of like all the, you know, um, salacious details from the trial. Like we're not focused on, like, the, the, the Stormy Daniels testimony, like the accounting.
David Leary: [00:27:19] I could.
Blake Oliver: [00:27:20] I could care less about, like, you know, when did she take her clothes off? And did you know Donald Trump lying on the bed in his underwear? Right. Like I'm more interested in. I want to see this. Uh, I have a.
David Leary: [00:27:30] Full screen of of of accounting quotes and stuff. Yeah.
Blake Oliver: [00:27:33] Look, look, here it is right there on the Trump letterhead. It's the it's the handwritten calculations of the reimbursement. And like it's crossed out he added up 51 8180 and he got 230. But then he had to cross it out because he made a math error. Oh my God. It's pretty funny.
David Leary: [00:27:50] And there's some quotes that that came through. So CNN politics must have had somebody in the room possibly. And so think about like a Twitter feed. Right. Imagine if you were sitting in the courtroom and you just had you just had to spit out little blurbs. So there's these, these little interactions of of quotes they had from the trial. So one of them, the quote is Trump Dawg accounting system was designed in the 90s and was antiquated by 2017, Mcconney confirms. And they uh and he confirms this on the stand.
Blake Oliver: [00:28:21] You know, does he say what it was?
David Leary: [00:28:22] Did not say what it was.
Blake Oliver: [00:28:24] I wish I.
David Leary: [00:28:25] Could, he said it was designed in the 90s. But here's the best part. He confirms that the drop down categories used in the system were rigid, and any time payments were made to an attorney, the legal expenses category was used. I'm like, yeah, if I open up our QuickBooks right now, Blake and the only choice I have is legal expense.
Blake Oliver: [00:28:44] So they were using the default chart of accounts.
David Leary: [00:28:46] Probably something I wonder.
Blake Oliver: [00:28:47] If they were using like QuickBooks desktop. Right. You could say that's outdated by when. What was it. What was the date?
David Leary: [00:28:53] Oh 2017. Yeah, it might be. It might be QuickBooks desktop. We don't know. We don't know. And they're using.
Blake Oliver: [00:28:59] The default chart of accounts. Right. They never customize it.
David Leary: [00:29:01] And then some of the quotes are just funny. So this is the Trump attorney. Uh, emo boeve Boeve Boeve I don't know. Asked if he because he was testifying that he didn't. Uh, Mcconney was testifying. He didn't speak to Trump very often. And then then this was the question from the lawyer. When you did speak to him, you didn't talk about accounting software. And he said, no, like, that's what's coming up in these things. And then there's an email, okay, there's an email that was sent. And it's really funny. The subject line is $2 signs. And then it says, Mike, just a reminder to get me the invoice you spoke to Alan about. Thanks, Jeff. In reference to, you know, because they're they're using code, right, to not actually talk about the thing that's happening a lot. But if you really step back, he's up on the stand. He's being asked about accounting software, tenant lines that are issued liability accounts, payments to Michael Cohen, checks, spreadsheets, invoices, retainers, expense reports, bank statements. This is an accounting one on one class. If I was in accounting 101 teacher and I would want to have a fun class next year, I would just take all these transactions and make make my students data entry them into QuickBooks or an accounting system. They're all simple transactions. It's very, very simple.
Blake Oliver: [00:30:12] Oh the payments to to Michael Cohen. Yeah. Use those in your examples. Well you have.
David Leary: [00:30:16] A liability and then. Yeah. And yeah.
Blake Oliver: [00:30:18] Yeah you could.
David Leary: [00:30:19] Do the whole thing.
Blake Oliver: [00:30:22] Oh my God I would love that. Well you know what the the most ridiculous thing about this entire case is, in my humble opinion, it's the fact that the Trump Organization is still using paper checks that's. I can't get this out of my head. Right. Like, like. And they were taking the checks to the white House for Trump to sign in the, I assume, in his residence or in the Oval Office, I don't know. Um, yeah. The court was shown images of voided checks, including a $70,000 check signed by former Trump Organization CEO, CFO Allen Weisselberg and Donald Trump's son, Eric Trump. They're writing paper checks.
David Leary: [00:31:00] And still signing them and.
Blake Oliver: [00:31:01] Still signing them. You know, maybe it would be easier to cover your tracks if you didn't have, like, you know, paper checks.
David Leary: [00:31:07] The part I don't get about this whole thing. And this is where, like over and over again, it feels like the, the Trump Organization and the the Trump method of doing things is really stupid. Like you, if you're a Trump, don't you already have like a separate bank account just set aside for just in case money. Like like if I ever get rich enough, I'm going to have a just in case money that I can use for nefarious things that doesn't come out of my normal bank account and doesn't come out of the political funds. Like it's just like the the brain waves here. Yeah, like, just don't make any sense. Well.
Blake Oliver: [00:31:42] Like, you know, Cohn's supposed to be Michael Cohen's supposed to be Trump's fixer. And obviously it wasn't very good at his job. Right. That's I think that's the problem. There's a lot of people that work for Trump that are just really bad at their jobs. You know, Rudy Giuliani is a great example. And he was in the news recently in connection with accounting because guess what? He can't find an accountant. How do you spell Giuliani? Because I'm trying to find this story in my database and I I'll just use Rudy. Nope. It's not coming up. I have this here. Come on, Rudy, there we go. Rudy Giuliani forced to learn accounting after bankruptcy. Bean counter bails. They're getting really good with these accounting headlines on The Daily Beast. Rudy Giuliani, facing bankruptcy, has been left to manage his own financial records after his accountant resigned and took a $12,000 fee, leaving no other professionals willing to take over the task. Uh, we found this out in a court filing because Giuliani is saying, hey, I need more time because my accountant bailed on me. Now, when your accountant bails on you. Right. That generally indicates that you're a shitty person, in my opinion, because most accountants will put up with a lot of crap. And if you can't find an accountant to work with you, you're a terrible person.
David Leary: [00:32:56] And borders can still work, apparently.
Blake Oliver: [00:32:59] Yeah, yeah, he should get. He should call up Ben Borgers. Creditors are pressing the court, claiming Giuliani is exploiting the legal system to delay resolving his debts. Isn't that just a sad thing? I remember growing up and Giuliani was like this hero, you know, he brought order to New York, he cleaned up the streets, and now look at him like.
David Leary: [00:33:17] This is perfect publicity for the show. Take him on as a client.
Blake Oliver: [00:33:21] I'll clean up his books.
David Leary: [00:33:22] Do it. Take him on. Rudy Giuliani city for us.
Blake Oliver: [00:33:27] Our producer will have to make this into a TikTok Rudy Giuliani. I'm a CPA. I will clean up your books for bankruptcy court. Go to @BlakeTOliver dot com fill in my contact form. I'll do it. All right. I don't even know where to go from there. David.
David Leary: [00:33:45] Uh, you want to talk about I stuff a little bit because you said something. You said something about almost the first story. You said lawyers are more efficient now because of AI or.
Blake Oliver: [00:33:54] Okay, actually, David, I want to follow up on, um, last week. So last week, I demonstrated how to use Zapier Central to build your own AI agent, and I.
David Leary: [00:34:07] Would say showed off more than demonstrated, but.
Blake Oliver: [00:34:09] I showed off. And by the way, David, you said before we started recording, I should do a webinar on this. Yes, and I agree. So I'm going to do an earmark webinar walking through step by step how to build an AI agent using Zapier Central. So, David, how can people get notified of those webinars?
David Leary: [00:34:28] Uh, the webinar is the easiest thing is to attend one of the existing webinars. But you could, uh, you could if you're right here on YouTube watching us, you can just go to the earmark YouTube page, see them there. You can go to earmark Cpcomm slash webinars. I think that's the O.
Blake Oliver: [00:34:42] Actually, the easiest way is just go to earmark Cpcomm and put in your email address. And that should add you to the webinar mailing list. Yeah. Every week you'll get a list of our upcoming CPE webinars. And so it will be on there in future weeks. And then you can register. So I'm going to do a webinar on this and I will show you how to do this in more detail. But I just want to like show you what I've done, because I talked about doing it last week and I've actually done it before.
David Leary: [00:35:08] You share it. Yeah. What you're going to do, I'm going to share something quickly on the screen that I saw that I was going to follow up for what you talked about last week. Clickup had this amazing blog post that's gigantic. And essentially it ties what you said how to use AI as a personal assistant to boost productivity. This blog post has 30 things in the table of context, and we don't have to go through them in the show, but people should go to the show notes. Hit the link. All these little things you could do writing an email assistant, voice assistant, customer service, marketing assistants, finance assistants, assistance for schedule management. It just goes on and on, and they give really concrete examples of how to build these little assistants you're talking about. So everybody should check the show notes and hit that up.
Blake Oliver: [00:35:52] And what tool are they using for this?
David Leary: [00:35:54] Um, I it's all over the board. It's not even though it's on the Clickup blog.
Blake Oliver: [00:35:57] You're scrolling so fast. Oh, I cannot read anything, David. It's so.
David Leary: [00:36:00] Gigantic. Well, then some of it's got animations. It's on the Clickup blog post. But it's not about just click up. It's about just AI tools in general to build personal assistants.
Blake Oliver: [00:36:12] Okay, well, why don't you copy that link and put that in the chat?
David Leary: [00:36:15] I'll put that in the chat right now. Yep. And then let you share your screen okay.
Blake Oliver: [00:36:18] So. What its last, or what I theorized last week, was about using Zapier Central to build an AI agent that would answer client questions about tax returns and also about, say, accounts payable if you're in corporate. The one I did this week was tax returns. So so what I did is I set up a spreadsheet and it's called Zapier Central Tax Return Tracker. And I had ChatGPT create some dummy data for this. So it's just a Google sheet and it's got a client ID column, client name, column, client, email tax year. And then it has a status column. So complete waiting on client not started. Got a client or a column for tracking the status of the payment. And then one for what we're waiting on from the client and a bunch of other stuff. Right. But that's the important thing is here we have a tracker status of the return and what we're waiting on. And I went into Zapier Central and I created a new bot called Tax Return Tracker. And I gave this bot a behavior called tax status lookup. And the instructions are when I receive an email inquiring about the status of a tax return, look up the email sender in the tax return tracker Google Sheet. If you can find the email of the sender in the tax return tracker, draft a reply in the same conversation and include the following a friendly greeting, an acknowledgment of their request, the status of their federal and state returns, and anything we are waiting on from the client. If you don't find the sender's email in the spreadsheet, do nothing. Uh, so the trigger is a new email in my Gmail account, and the actions it can do are looking up spreadsheet rows and creating a draft reply so it can't auto respond. It can only create the draft reply. And I also gave it the ability to use this spreadsheet as a data source.
David Leary: [00:38:11] And if you or your employee were to create this draft, you'd be opening 2 or 3 screens, couple of browser tabs. You'd be copying and pasting things, get them into the email. It's a 15 minute job, if you're lucky, probably a 45 minute job.
Blake Oliver: [00:38:25] So, you know, I ran this and over on the right hand side, if you're on YouTube, you can see the testing behavior and it finds an email. I sent an email from my personal account to my work account and I said, you know, uh, what did my email say? It said something like, hi, Blake. Just checking in on the status of my tax return. Right. We all get those. And so. I can see here in the thread that the agent is parsing the email. It figures out that it's from Blake@blakeoliver.com. It looks up that email in the spreadsheet and it finds the piece of data. It finds all the columns and then it drafts an email reply. Hi Blake, thank you for reaching out. To check on the status of your tax return. Here is the current status. And then it says we're currently waiting on the following item from you W-2 from your second job. Please send this to us as soon as possible so we can proceed. And it is in my inbox. Or it's in my drafts ready to send. There it is. Already drafted.
David Leary: [00:39:34] So. How long did it obviously take you to build this?
Blake Oliver: [00:39:38] Well, a lot faster than the first one I did, because now I know how this app works. Even if you.
David Leary: [00:39:44] Add the hours you spend on the first one.
Blake Oliver: [00:39:47] I don't know, like maybe a couple hours. So to learn like to build. This probably took like 30 minutes maybe. Oh, I had to make the spreadsheet, you know, and I had to connect it. And I had to write the instructions and then test it. But yeah, it's not hard. Uh, it just takes a little practice. So my plan is I'm going to do this for everything, anytime, any, anything where I'm like, doing a repetitive answering a question from somebody. And I can connect this agent to a data source, like a spreadsheet. And I can just automatically give them the information, like, why wouldn't I automate that? It's trivial to do it because I don't have to code. I can just write in plain English what I want the agent to do. All it has to have access to is a data source, and it can create draft email replies, and it can watch every single email that comes in my inbox and try parsing it and try to answer it so, you know, the data sources are limited. Right now. You can use, uh, HubSpot, Airtable, Google Sheets, a Google Doc notion, or tables, which is Zapier's custom database. But it looks like you can let them know if you want them to add more data sources. And I wouldn't be surprised if they add this, because the more data sources you have, the more powerful this becomes.
David Leary: [00:41:05] And it's easy, though, because the nice thing about Zapier is you can connect 2500 or 3000 apps to Google Sheets, so you can basically have whatever app and technology you're using. Even if you're tracking all this in Excel, you just have that a zap that updates your Google Sheet, and then you connect to your Google Sheet. So your Google Sheets kind of isn't the the true source. It's just a copy of your data wherever that data may exist. So as long as you can get something into Google Sheet, you have unlimited imagination of what you can do with that data.
Blake Oliver: [00:41:31] And then this AI agent can access that data. So think about your practice management software. Can you do an export to a Google Sheet. Maybe you could just have an admin do an export to a Google Sheet every day. And just have that person's job is just a copy paste it basically into the Google Sheet. But like this could be really useful for a ton of CPAs and accountants and tax pros, because a lot of them don't use practice management software. Most of them don't.
David Leary: [00:41:57] They're just tracking spreadsheet like that.
Blake Oliver: [00:41:58] Yeah, you're just tracking it in a spreadsheet. So if you already have a spreadsheet where you're tracking the status of all your clients or all your work or jobs, you could connect that to an AI agent in Zapier Central, and you could start doing this kind of stuff. And it's not limited to drafting emails. You can you can do anything that you can make a zap to do. So that could be texting a client to remind them that you need a document.
David Leary: [00:42:25] Well, now you don't need all those quoting apps. You could just what what do you need done? They've sent a plain text email. And then you send an email back with the quote. Because you have a spreadsheet of all your services, it can kind of match it up and kick it back. So so going by David.
Blake Oliver: [00:42:38] I just got to show you this. Like you can just use this internally, right? I could say what is the status of Blake's return. And boom, it goes to the spreadsheet and it pulls the information that the federal returns ready for review. The state returns in progress, but the overall return status is waiting on the client. Okay. You know, and this is.
David Leary: [00:42:55] Great, right? Because you, as a manager or partner in the firm, can get the information you want without having to get your employee to stop working to tell you. Exactly.
Blake Oliver: [00:43:03] Yeah. And let's say, um, you have a problem getting your team to update the spreadsheet. Well, you could have like a field in there that is last updated. Or maybe there's a way to pull that automatically, like when a, when a cell was last updated and you could actually get this agent to bug your team every single day at a certain time to update the spreadsheet and tell them which clients that they have not updated recently. So I'm thinking about ways I can automate my job as the CEO of this company. So.
David Leary: [00:43:32] So I don't know, I don't completely fully related note and this is why I asked you how long this took you to do this. So and you mentioned practice management, right. Practice management software. Did you see canopy just raised $35 million to add AI powered practice management to their app. And now remember years ago we, uh, canopy took a lot of money in the past and grew too fast and had to have those big layoffs. They almost went under, I think, um, before. So now they've taken more to do AI in some level. I'm just like, if Blake can kind of do a good enough half ass version of this in a day, like, what are they going to spend $35 million on?
Blake Oliver: [00:44:10] It's incredible how much cash these startups burn through and how little they accomplish, and how some of them are still searching for product market fit. Digits is my favorite example of this. I mean, no offense to the fine folks at digits who work there and the employees that are trying really hard, but it's crazy to me that digits has raised over $100 million and still doesn't have a product that people want to buy. And the reason I know this is because they just launched, I bill, pay for small business, and whenever somebody pivots to bill pay, to me that means that they're really struggling to find something that people will pay for because everybody does bill pay. I think it's like the easiest thing you could do.
David Leary: [00:44:55] Well, timesheets may be the easiest timesheets. Yeah. Then bill pay.
Blake Oliver: [00:44:59] Yeah. So digits has introduced I bill pay and you know like digits started out as a whole reporting platform. You know the idea was I'm going to connect all my QuickBooks files for my clients to digits. And then they'll get this super cool AI powered dashboard they can log into. But before that.
David Leary: [00:45:14] It was never. I saw the early pitch decks of digits way early, and they were. It was one of those like, we're going to automate accounting and all this. And then it comes out and it was just a dashboard y thing, right?
Blake Oliver: [00:45:24] Right. And the problem is that nobody actually wants a dashboard. No business owner has ever asked for a dashboard to run their business. It's something that people like making because they look really cool, but it's nobody's managed. I mean, and that doesn't mean somebody won't someday make the dashboard that people actually want to use. But the problem is up till now, like. They haven't.
David Leary: [00:45:48] So I'm going to share my screen because I have a screenshot of it. Now this is this like good and bad things with. Digits. So. The overengineer their stuff. So that page are you seeing it? Am I sharing successfully?
Blake Oliver: [00:46:02] Yes, I see, let's.
David Leary: [00:46:03] Be careful not to move my mouse, because if you move your mouse, the screen changes and it's like over. I just want screenshots, six screenshots in a row. Scroll down the page. Oh yeah, it's got.
Blake Oliver: [00:46:12] All that parallax motion going on.
David Leary: [00:46:14] Yeah, but now it did stop on the screen. I wanted to show one thing that was kind of cool. I was looking at. It is just think about a Trello board or a Trello board, or a Kanban board where you can drag in things and you can see the status of the bill through the system, right where the bill has been scanned, the bill's been data entered, the bill's been paid, the bill's been reconciled right as it moves through the workflow. And I thought that was kind of a cool take.
Blake Oliver: [00:46:36] Yeah, but you and I could build this in Airtable in, like, half a day. Okay. Right.
David Leary: [00:46:40] Point taken. Um, the other thing that the the press release had in it. Yes, they kind of use how their their first product to fully understand invoice document structure, leveraging custom trained state of the art layout and language aware models. But the real thing, they went out of their way to call out. It was very clear that the data isn't leaving their app and no humans are involved. So we maybe have finally tipped with these bill scanning, invoice scanning companies to where it's all done in house, and they're not using humans in India or Philippines to power their document scanning stuff. In the same way, auto entry or Receipt Bank used to have people in India.
Blake Oliver: [00:47:19] Yeah, I'll see it when I believe it. You know, it's like that Amazon store story that we were talking about the other week where it turned out they had a thousand people in India watching, everybody shopping. It was that store that didn't have any checkouts. They couldn't automate it 100%. And that's the problem is that if you can't get it to like 99.999%, it doesn't work. There's that last mile problem in automation. So.
David Leary: [00:47:47] Before we pivot off, I have two quick bill pay stories.
Blake Oliver: [00:47:51] Can I talk about my favorite new thing that Xero has done?
David Leary: [00:47:54] Before we go to this tie to bill pay, let me get these out there. There's 40s pay. Stan is acquiring team pace. You have a bill pay product pay stand, which kind of used like blockchain and crypto technologies to pay bills. And then you have team pay, which was like an expense card app. They got purchased by them. Then core pay, which used to be, um, what was the name of Corp before Fleetcor. So Fleetcor changed their they rebranded as Corp. And Fleetcor is a lot of like fuel cards at all the gas stations. So if you get a shell card or an Exxon card, that was where they really started expense cards and expense tracking. And now they've acquired a Big Four they already acquired. Roger. I like a small business payments app, but now they've acquired Payment ring, which is in the enterprise space for AP automation. So you're starting to see this consolidation in bill pay. In the meantime new companies are building bill pay. Yeah.
Blake Oliver: [00:48:46] They all think that they can own this you know trillion dollar market. I think that's why they all are able to raise so much money because oh, I'm going to get a tiny little piece of every single transaction out there.
David Leary: [00:48:55] Because look Trump's still using paper checks.
Blake Oliver: [00:48:58] Exactly.
David Leary: [00:48:58] They're all using paper checks. And that's the example. Yeah.
Blake Oliver: [00:49:00] Well here is an example of a company that's building a feature that actually matters. And I'm very excited to see because I'm a Xero user and I've been actually very disappointed with Xero recently. I'm going to be totally honest. They have not done very much with the product in it feels like years, but they're starting to listen to their users again, which to me indicates there's a really good sign. So this is from their What's New in Xero for 2020 4th May blog. And I'm just going to scroll down to this little animated gif. And this is the sort of thing that you love, Dave, when you can actually see the product working. And what you're seeing here is on the reconcile screen, which is that page where you see all your bank statement lines and then the matching of the transactions or the entering of the transactions. You can now filter and search those transactions, which you could not do before. It used to be that the bank statement lines that came in from the bank were just in chronological order, from oldest to newest. And you could not filter, you could not sort. And so you had to go. I was taking.
David Leary: [00:50:02] A page, a new client that had hundreds just connected their bank feed for the first time. And I have thousands of transactions I have to go through. I can't like do a filter of just show me the ones that have Starbucks in it and yeah, or just or just.
Blake Oliver: [00:50:15] All the checks, right, that were written so that I can go and enter those. Right, or whatever it is. Yeah. So now you can actually filter and you can filter by basically it looks like everything and reconcile those. And then it's great. Yeah. Now the overall Xero search still sucks. So they need to do a ton of work on that. But this is great. And what I liked about this is that they they actually said the reason they built this is because this was one of the most popular community feedback items, with 966 votes on the Zero Product Ideas board. And then you.
David Leary: [00:50:51] Voted for it like 15 years, years.
Blake Oliver: [00:50:53] Ago. And this was the problem that Xero had, in my opinion, is that they set up this whole community board and then their product people just started ignoring it to the point where everyone got really upset and they eventually, like, locked. It took down dates they were doing really, uh, what I would consider anti customer type stuff by ignoring these votes. And it looks like they're back to it, so they're going to start paying attention. I hope this is the beginning of Xero paying attention to what the accountants and what the users want, because there's still a ton of basic functionality in the product, just like in QuickBooks, that is super clunky, but that no product manager wants to own fixing because it's not sexy.
David Leary: [00:51:28] I had a zero story as well. Um, I mean, sitting out for about two weeks. So zero is calling 2024 the year of the US bank feed. So I remember we were at New Orleans for zero con and people were on the main stage talking about problems with bank feeds, and that was only two years ago. You're still happening, still happening. But they've been listening and they finally have started to fix it. So they've increased their direct bank feeds from 20 to 600. They've partnered with an additional company called Flinx, which is a bank feed aggregator, and now they have multiple aggregators. So what they can do is if Bank A sucks with this aggregator, they'll use the other one for that bank, right. And they can get more reliable across the board. Um, they've also added the ability to import feeds via CSV sheaf of Qbo and qfx files, and then their direct PDF imports of bank statements they can scan to extract the data in 35 seconds now. So I wonder if that becomes hard to do this.
Blake Oliver: [00:52:27] I wonder if that's the hubdoc technology at work, because like that's a big deal is I can just dump in a, I can just take a PDF and import it directly into Xero, and I don't have to do some OCR bullshit anymore. That's awesome, Linda says. Totally agree Blake. I gave up putting any suggestions on that board. Well, hopefully they'll start running through. They've got a backlog of like ten years of suggestions that they never implemented. Um, boring accountant says that is not true. Regarding my statement about dashboards, many tradespersons like electricians and plumbers want monthly finance dashboards and job costing dashboards. Okay, I'll give that to you. But I would argue that is not what digits was building. They were building like a generic accounting dashboard. And the reason those always fail is because there is not enough information in the accounting system by itself to actually give you a useful dashboard to run your business, because accounting is lagging, all the financial numbers are lagging indicators. And what really matters is all the stuff that actually generates revenue and costs in your business. So yeah. Uh, I agree that like those kind of dashboards are good, but accounting software apps are not going to build them. It's going to be the the tools that you use to run your business. And like, what's the name of these apps that these tradespeople use? David. There's a category like niche.
David Leary: [00:53:50] Apps, right.
Blake Oliver: [00:53:50] Well yeah.
David Leary: [00:53:51] But it's like very specific.
Blake Oliver: [00:53:53] It's it's like the, um, dispatch apps and like the job order service app. Field service apps. Yeah, yeah. So a field service app, the dashboard in that is very valuable because I can see here's how many jobs I've got open and here's my costs on those job. And here's my, you know, what I quoted on the job. And here's where I'm at with the job. But none of that's in the accounting system. So that's why all these accounting dashboards fail.
David Leary: [00:54:17] And the other struggle with them is they're expensive. You know, a lot of these these dashboarding apps are 100, $150 a month, right, for a dashboard app. And then you got to set them up, you got to connect them to your accounting software. And in many times people are like, what are my overdue invoices? And it takes you two seconds or what? My sales last week, and it takes you two seconds just to run the report and Xero or QuickBooks anyways. Exactly. And it's.
Blake Oliver: [00:54:40] Not. It's not like saving you that much time.
David Leary: [00:54:42] Yeah. I think the mindset on dashboards and you said it best like what do you put on the dashboard. Like when you see that number change up, down, left, right, what action are you going to take. And if if it just isn't eye candy. Right. And I've had some success using dashboards like in Salesforce and stuff to help surface anomalies in the data. So as soon as that number is this, it's almost like having something always show zero. And the second changes to a one, you're like, okay, that means this happened over here on a different report, like kind of for uh, uh, almost like a dashboard to check some. Right dashboard.
Blake Oliver: [00:55:20] Yeah. And that's kind of what apps like keeper are, if you think about it. Right. It's finding all the inconsistencies in your client's data and surfacing that to you as the manager or the owner of the practice so that you can just act on those things. I think that's what they do, right? They do. That's an aspect of it, making sure that here's.
David Leary: [00:55:38] The UN category, here's unreconciled, here's possibly mis posted, here's duplicate numbers. Yeah, all those kinds of things. Yeah.
Blake Oliver: [00:55:45] But but like, you know, I have no interest in signing up for like a financial dashboard for earmark, because what I'm really interested in knowing is how much CPE did we issue last week? How many courses did we put on our app? How many people signed up for our app? Those are all the things that drive revenue in our business. I don't really care what the revenue is, because I know that if we do those things, the revenue will go up. Yeah. You know, and that's how most small businesses are. And we just manage our business in a way that we know that our costs don't exceed our our billings. Right. We have a very efficient what, uh, what's the word I'm looking for?
David Leary: [00:56:19] Just lean.
Blake Oliver: [00:56:20] We have we have a and we have a good cost structure. So I'm not worried about comparing revenue and expenses and calculating net income on a frequent basis. I just need to know what's my burn. Right. And that's easy to get from the accounting system. If I reconcile every month, like honestly, we could we put everything in like four buckets of expenses. Honestly. Like it doesn't have to be that detailed, right? Most startups, you got your R&D, you got your general and administrative, you got your sales and marketing. There's not much more. Yeah. And so you just what's the what's the number? You're what's the cash going out the door every month and how much how many months of runway do you have with the cash in the bank? And then, uh, you try to extend that as long as you can before you raise money. And so then, you know, all these, like, slick dashboards. You don't really need it to run the business. It looks good. And you know, the reason accounting firms buy them is because they like having something slick to show prospects on sales calls. But then they don't actually use them in the business. So those go nowhere.
David Leary: [00:57:27] Pop over to Kelsey, who's an accounting firm. They just, um, I'm still on the wrong tab. One second. They basically built a front end client, uh, portal with all the apps they use, and it's really clean. It's nice, but going back to your word, it's if you're going to build something that has to be visual. So then, you know, they have giraffe and it launches a bunch of graphs. And that's one of their selling points on their page is exactly that. It's I'm willing to bet that they.
Blake Oliver: [00:57:51] Get most of the clients are not looking at those graphs. Yeah. That's my you know, if you actually like how many clients even ever log into the portal, I could never get even half of my clients to log into my portal in my firm. All right, David, that's all the time we have for this week. Thanks, everyone who joined us live on a Friday afternoon. You are rockstars. If you're listening on the podcast feed and you want to see what we look like, uh, you want to join us live, subscribe and turn on notifications on YouTube. Just search for the accounting podcast on YouTube. We got all sorts of great content on there, including, uh, excerpts from the show shorts. Um, and don't forget, you can earn free CPE for listening to this episode. Go to earmarked app. Sign up for your free account if you've listened to prior episodes. We got the courses up already. The one for this episode will be up next week. Earn a free CPE for your CPA license renewal. Works for CMAS. Works for enrolled agents. If you're abroad, it probably works for you too. We've had accountants in the UK and Australia and Canada tell us that they can use our credits for their license renewals. We put the duration on the certificate so you can report that to your licensing agency. Um, thanks everyone who joined us. Hey, Heather. Heather from Brisbane, Heather Smith joined us. Heather says have fun in Charleston without you. Well, I'm not going to Charleston either. Heather, I have a conflict, I will be. Oh, I should mention this. I'm going to be in Orlando next week at the accounting, the Association for Accounting Marketing Summit. Yes, there is an association of people who specialize in marketing just for accounting firms. I'm going to be there and I'm going to show them how to use AI to create content from transcripts. Thanks, everyone for joining us. We will see you here next week. Bye, David. All right.