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Timesheets seem to be paving the way for the exodus from the accounting industry, and we've got more stories of the less-than-happy side effects of using them! After we talk about how the (forced) use of timesheets can cause employees to throw caution, and ethics to the wind, we'll look at how one "fixer" left an employer that didn't want to fix their timeclock issues ...
Show Notes
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Show Notes
... We've also got updates on the IRS "facelift" that fell flat, some big raises, some app news, and much more!
... We've also got updates on the IRS "facelift" that fell flat, some big raises, some app news, and much more!
02:44 – IRS backs away from facial recognition
04:26 – IRS To Ditch Biometric Requirement for Online Access
06:33 – A Guide to Completing Your Organizer This Tax Season
11:00 – Listener Mail – A Tale of Two Timesheet Stories
14:20 – The first Rule of Timesheet Club ...
17:42 – Listener Mail – Big 4 Timesheet Racket
20:11 – Listener Mail - Letters from Outside Alcatraz
23:49 – Deloitte audit chief sees profession evolving amid pandemic | Accounting Today
27:35 – The Real Reason America Doesn’t Have Enough Truck Drivers
34:09 – Payroll Employee Quits on the Spot After Finding Potential Wage Theft, Exposes Company with Viral TikToks, Sparks Controversy
38:34 – The Timesheet Lies Coffee Table Book Needs You!
39:59 – The Crypto Bowl is the beginning of a blockchain advertising bonanza
41:59 – Crypto paychecks have more appeal outside the U.S. | Accounting Today
44:53 – Accounting Standards Are Key to Getting Digital Assets on Corporate Balance Sheets
46:54 – Uber CEO: Crypto Payments Are Coming…Someday
47:37 – KPMG Canada Latest Firm to Add Bitcoin, Ether to Balance Sheet – Blockworks
Accounting Giant KPMG Invests in Bitcoin and Ethereum
48:40 – More Listener Mail – Modern Treasury
50:21 – $66 million to give accounting firms the practice management solution they deserve | Karbon resources
Next Xero? Aussie accounting tech firm worth $402m after $93m raise
50:59 – GoCardless Valued at $2.1B After Series G
51:15 – Neat Inks Deal With Document Scanner Maker Raven
51:42 – Taxfyle raises $20M Series B round, plans to grow its team by 100+
53:08 – One More Listener Mail – Gaming the Accounting System
54:15 - Accounting Games - They're a Thing?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBXV1feuKSs
54:15 - Accounting Games - They're a Thing?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBXV1feuKSs
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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.
David Leary: OnPay is an easy-to-use full-service payroll and HR app that is the right fit for all your clients, whether they have just one or 500 employees, to stay organized, to save time and get compliant. If you're wondering why OnPay is so great, it's because it was built by payroll experts with over 30 years of payroll experience and has the most robust and customizable QuickBooks Online and Xero integrations of any payroll provider. Stay tuned to hear more from our sponsor, OnPay later in the episode.
Blake Oliver: We have a profession that is like a leaky bucket with a hole in it, and we are losing people every year. They are churning out, and you can see it in the numbers. Both people who are diverse and also people who have diverse thoughts, people who just think different, they leave because of this timesheet crap, they leave because the profession's not moving forward. And the solution from our leaders is to add more water into the bucket.
David Leary: Coming to you weekly from the OnPay recording studio, this is the Cloud Accounting Podcast.
Blake Oliver: Welcome to the Cloud Accounting Podcast. I'm Blake Oliver.
David Leary: I'm David Leary.
Blake Oliver: Super Bowl Sunday, David.
David Leary: Super Bowl Sunday. The Olympics are in full swing. I'm getting up early and watching. Usually, the hockey games are on at like 6:00 AM for us doing that. Valentine's day is tomorrow.
Blake Oliver: So, who's your team?
David Leary: My team's the Buffalo Bills, but I'm kind of pull for the Cincinnati Bengals in this just because blue-collar city, Cincinnati, you got to kind of pull for them. The fans are so fair weather in L.A.
Blake Oliver: Well, they haven't had a football team until-
David Leary: They don't even deserve a Championship.
Blake Oliver: It's not fair. It's like you get a football team now you win. It's great. Hey, as somebody who lived in L.A for quite a while, my wife's from L.A, I got to root for them. But here's what I'm really excited about this week. We got so much listener mail, actual voicemails, emails, emails and voicemails about timesheets, some app recommendations, and even a recommendation for accounting video games that play to brush up on your accounting skills. And you've got something like a TikTok we're going to listen to that I haven't heard yet.
David Leary: TikTok, I got a follow-up on tax organizers, I got a follow-up on the ID.me. And combining everything together, I have an article about Super Bowl. I think we have to call it the big game. I don't want to get sued by NFL. Maybe I think let's say the big game.
Blake Oliver: The big game.
David Leary: Everybody loves the ads that are on there, but crypto ads have hit a whole new game. We're going to see this year.
Blake Oliver: I have to watch the Super Bowl just for the ridiculous crypto ads.
David Leary: And maybe you could live tweet after each one. You could rate the commercials on their spaminess and scaminess, and this could be kind of fun. Everybody could follow along. Do you want to jump in just a really quick one with the IRS facial recognition?
Blake Oliver: Yeah. The ID.me thing, what's going on? Well, they canceled that.
David Leary: I kid you not, we literally pushed the episode live, and like two minutes later, or maybe the morning we were about to push it live, the IRS came. And in that episode, I said, "Oh, they're probably going to get rid of this." And of course, they got rid of it.
Blake Oliver: And I feel bad now because I told everyone, "Go out and get this set up right away."
David Leary: I know, I think I said that a couple episodes ago.
Blake Oliver: One of our listeners did.
David Leary: He called me out on Twitter like, "Thanks, Dave." It's really funny because I actually went through this week’s before it hit the media. I should have jumped on this story. I could have broke it. We could have been the leaders of the story because I did it and I set up the ID.me thing, but I was conditioned because I just did the clear-
Blake Oliver: Yeah, the clear app that you used in the airports.
David Leary: But you had to do that for the conferences, and it was like the same experience. And I noted it, but I didn't note it noted, and I probably should have jumped on this. We would have broke the story before nobody else got it. But essentially yes, they're pulling back. They're going to look at some other alternatives. One of those alternatives though is a recommendation. So this is inside of Brian Krebs on Security.
Blake Oliver: Before you talk about the alternatives, can I just say how this whole episode with the IRS and ID.me is indicative of how we are completely screwing over the IRS. Because we tell them, "You have to modernize, you have to modernize," but then we don't give them the funding to do it, so they go outside to a contractor to do it. Then they go outside to a contractor to do it, and we get mad at them for not doing it themselves. Does anyone else see the cognitive dissonance here?
David Leary: Well, I think that's some of the problems. My observation is like, wow, the IRS can actually make decisions fast and reverse decisions, so they can move fast. So Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden of Oregon, Democrat out of Oregon, he challenged the Treasury Department IRS to reconsider the requirements and then obviously they backed down, but he's urging them to use, I don't know if you know about this initiative, that there's something called login.gov, which is essentially single silent service that Congress required federal agencies to use in 2015.
It's currently used across 200 websites run by 28 federal agencies and 40 million Americans have accounts. But it has not reached its full potential because many agencies just flooded the congressional mandate that they use. Obviously, the IRS never used it. And his argument is because of this, because people aren't adopting the federally established one, it's led to billions of dollars in fraud and essentially fueled the black market for stolen personal data and enabled companies like ID.me to commercialize what should be a government core service.
Blake Oliver: Why wouldn't the government be using this? Why wouldn't the IRS have used this instead? Is it just not very good?
David Leary: I have no idea. It's run by the U.S General Services Administration. And they said that they're committed to never deploying facial recognition.
Blake Oliver: Yeah, we'll see how long that lasts. I mean, in the digital world, how else do you verify somebody's identity if you don't use biometrics? Long term, that's what we're going to end up using. Facial recognition is going to be here, whether you like it or not. [crosstalk].
David Leary: Let's just contact China because they have all the 23andMe DNA data now.
Blake Oliver: That's right. Yeah. That's the hilarious part of all.
David Leary: You lick your tax return so there's some DNA on it before you mail it in.
Blake Oliver: I think we have to make this crystal clear. Everybody who is doing all these DNA kits, voluntarily taking droplets of blood, and sending them off to private companies, you're giving your DNA to these companies. And in their terms of service, it says they can do whatever they want with this stuff.
David Leary: And it's all being done in China. So, you know as they analyze it and they mail it, they're just building the database somewhere else. Yeah.
Blake Oliver: So, you're worried about ID.me, an I'm American company having a picture of your face and you're okay with companies outside the U.S having your DNA. They were not throwing up big concerns about this. Oh, and by the way, TikTok, one of the most popular social media platforms that all our kids are on is a Chinese company, and they've got all your videos.
David Leary: We'll follow up on tax organizers. So, Jody Padar, CPA. So most people know Jody Padar is. I think she's like the most LinkedIn followers of all CPAs or something crazy like that. But she was at bookkeeper, and now she's with that new tax company we talked about two weeks ago.
Blake Oliver: Which I can't remember the name.
David Leary: Something called April.
Blake Oliver: Oh, April. Yeah.
David Leary: She wrote a guest blogpost which is for Bloomberg Tax. And essentially, it's a guide to completing your organizer this tax season. She tagged me in the tweet to let me know that she's responding to my issues with tax organizers. And this article is really written for the consumer, the person having to fill out the tax organizer. And she's talking about why it's important. It ensures your tax preparer understands what occurred over the past year, could impact your tax situation. But if you really read this article, it's all about the stuff I have to do, like collect all your tax forms before submitting them to your tax professional.
If it's early in the tax season, wait until you have all your documents before saying your organizer is finished. If you haven't received them all by mail, check the websites. It's all the stuff I have to do. She talks a little bit about the COVID-19 related stimulus payments and all that. This is another important area. You want to make sure this information is reported correctly. How the hell am I supposed to know that? I think people aren't our space are kind of missing the point of my argument, which is nobody has the ability to actually do this.
Blake Oliver: What do you mean nobody has the ability to do this?
David Leary: Accountants and bookkeepers do. But I think there's too much expectation that you're going to do it correctly. And I think I saw another tweet or a blog post where people can't even fill out a W-4 where it says, enter your legal name and put their legal name correctly on a W-4. How do you expect people to fill out tax organizers correctly? I think there's some weird expectation here. I just don't get it.
Blake Oliver: It's a lack of empathy and a lack of understanding.
David Leary: Maybe that's what it is.
Blake Oliver: That we as tax professionals or accountants, we have all of this knowledge and experience, and it's very familiar to us. This stuff is table stakes or, I don't know, bread and butter, whatever you want to call it. It's easy for us.
David Leary: You could fill this out in your sleep as a tax preparer.
Blake Oliver: This is what we do. But for your typical taxpayer, it's Greek, it's Latin. It might as well be code. We have a hard time understanding that as accountants. And I think if we could develop a little more empathy for our clients and develop systems and processes that help them with this stuff and we don't just expect them to do it, like you're experiencing David. You bring up such a valid point about the customer experience. And I have always said customer experience is the next frontier of accounting firms, client service, making that experience better. There's so many ways to do that. The loaning side.
David Leary: It's kind of bad.
Blake Oliver: It's not complicated either. That's the thing.
David Leary: That's the vibe I get is this, like you need to do all this stuff properly so we can do our job properly. It's kind of like if I hire a plumber, usually the instructions for me is like, "Don't shove that down the drain again next time after it's been fixed."
Blake Oliver: When you hire a plumber, you're not expected to go out and procure your own toilet for them to install.
David Leary: Well, not only that, I'm not expected to troubleshoot what was wrong or reach in and identify what's clogging the pipe.
Blake Oliver: Well, now you're going to get in trouble for comparing accountants to plumbers, David. But you know what? We've done this before. Plumbers make more money on an hourly basis than most accountants do.
David Leary: Well, that's the justification for expertise. People use plumbers as an easy example of that because you're not paying for the plumber to unclog that toilet of yours, you're paying for their 20 years’ experience. And in theory, that should be the same for accountants and bookkeepers.
Blake Oliver: Well, David, we got these six audio files to play, some listener mail, some voicemail.
David Leary: Let's jump in.
Blake Oliver: Let's jump into one of these. So I'm going to let you pick, David, when we... We could spin the wheel.
David Leary: Oh, it's like a number game. Okay.
Blake Oliver: So I'm going to give you number 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Pick a number between one and six.
David Leary: Let's go four.
Blake Oliver: This is an email from Timothy in response to the timesheet stories. Call to action. I asked all of our listeners, "If you have a story about timesheets that can give us a little more insight into how honest people are with them because we all know-"
David Leary: It's about people at firms filling out firm timesheets.
Blake Oliver: Yeah. And my belief is that lying on timesheets is widespread. It's endemic in the profession. If you think about it, if people are lying on their timesheets and manipulating timesheets to meet unrealistic budgets, the underlying data is wrong, which means that all of the theory of managing an accounting practice using that data goes out the window. It would be like trying to fly plane with faulty instruments and landing on the runway in fog. You can't do it because the underlying data is wrong. So here's one from Timothy. He's actually got two stories.
Timothy: So I've got two stories that are somewhat similar. The first story goes like this. Last week, I was looking for something on a shared company drive. When I came across a spreadsheet called Time Entry, I was curious, so I opened it up. What I saw was a list of someone's clients with the annual budget based on approximate fee in one column. There were then columns that went week by week, keeping track of the amount of time used so far against the approximate annual budget. It looked like whoever had made the file was basically just entering their time at the end of the week based on what the budget had space for. I looked into the file properties and identified the person who made this file and who had accidentally saved it to a common drive. It was an audit manager. I sent him a Team's message, and he was incredibly grateful that I had let him know the file was in a place it didn't belong.
There are people in the firm that he would not want finding that. I didn't scold him or anything like that. Instead, we had a quick call and commiserated over our shared hatred of timesheets. He admitted what I had suspected that he was plugging the timesheet at the end of the week with whatever he had remaining budget for. My own experience at a large firm where there was a lot of pressure to rack up high hour totals is another example of how inaccurate timesheets can be. The firm I worked for at the time stated that the minimum billable hour amount during tax season was 55. But if you were right at 55, you'd be getting pressure from partners to put in more time. The true minimum was at least 60. And then there were admin tasks on top of that.
I would keep my time throughout the day in an Excel spreadsheet and at the end of the day sometimes for whatever reason I'd only have, say 8 hours of chargeable time accounted for. I'd been at the office for more like 14 hours, though and had been working steadily, only stopping for brief periods of time for lunch, dinner, etc. So I knew I had to have, say, 12 hours of chargeable time. I used the spreadsheet to allocate the additional 4 hours needed to get me to the 12. Now, it's not that I didn't actually work that time, it's just that the way it was booked across clients was likely not very accurate. I've suggested moving to a flat fee model and to drop the time tracking to the partner in my group. He won't do it because he feels like in a flat fee model, there is always a winner and a loser. I disagree and think that with the right technology, processes, etc., both sides can win, and it's not a zero-sum game.
Blake Oliver: So to summarize, what Timothy is saying here is what I experienced myself in a big firm, which is that person that he caught, that audit manager, was looking at the budgets, the time budgets for these clients, and then deciding what to enter for timesheets based on the budgets not based on reality. And that happens, I think, more than anything. That is the sort of manipulation that occurs. And it's because they're measured based on the budgets. And then Timothy says, of course, that he does it himself, too. If you're going to reward and punish people based on hitting budgets, what do you think they're going to do? Also, they're working insane hours. Keeping track of time when you're working like twelve-hour days is not exactly what you want to do, especially if you are eating all those hours. So what do you do? You look at your budgets for the week or that day and you say you just allocate the time like as best you can. It's not accurate. It has no basis in reality.
David Leary: One thing I took away from his message is he found a community had his own company. There's this other person that had the same thoughts and values that he has. Obviously, the senior partners and managers that love timesheets, they're all a community of themselves. They're the pro timesheet community. But how do you, at a firm, especially if working at a bigger firm, identify those other people that might share your beliefs? How do you tiptoe around that, how do you find them? I'm thinking about like Fight Club. They all knew who the other Fight Club guys were. They're walking through the city, but they're not black guys. How do you know who else in your firm you could bring this subject up to and build a mass voice?
Blake Oliver: I think there already is the secret fight club of timesheets in these firms. There's the true believers who believe in timesheets who tend to become partners.
David Leary: That's a secret to becoming partner.
Blake Oliver: Even actually some partners, as we'll see in one of these other voice meals that I got, even the partners are aware of this insanity. That's the crazy thing. So I think there's a mix of true believers in timesheets in firms that keep the system going and fight for it, and then there's the people who know that it's all a sham but continue to support it because they don't know the alternative and they're not willing to stick their necks out and suggest an alternative. Because what happens is when you do, then somebody who really loves timesheets comes and says, shut you down. People are not risk-takers. Partners in accounting firms are not risk-takers. You don't become a partner in accounting firm. If you enjoy risk. Because if you enjoyed risk, you'd go do something else.
It doesn't require you to have the same job for your entire life. I could have been a partner. I was on that path. It would've been very easy. If you're a smart white guy who knows how to network and get business, it's pretty easy to become a partner in an accounting firm. If you're willing to put up with all the bullshit, which I was not willing to do. Just being real here. To get your question right, I think there's a lot of people, and I met these people, and I would say, "Oh yeah, I hate filling out my timesheet," and I'd sort of like feel them out and find out what they felt. And then in my experience in the firm I was in, the senior accountant who showed me her secret timesheet, I loved that. She had exactly the same thing, a secret Excel sheet with the budgets and her actual hours worked and then what she was going to enter on her timesheet.
David Leary: This episode of The Cloud Accounting Podcast is sponsored by Synder. With direct connections to Amazon, Shopify, eBay, Stripe, Square in 20 of the most popular online and e-commerce platforms, Synder automatically categorizes and accurately post transactions into the accounting system. Or you need to easily prepare your clients data and organize their consolidated P&L, regardless of the number of platforms they may be selling on. Synder allows you to use the general ledger of your choice, QuickBooks, Xero, or even sender's own GL, which is designed specifically for e-commerce businesses and contains everything you need out of the box to make tax season a breeze. Synder can sync all the necessary details like inventory items, tax shipping discounts, classes, and locations. Even correctly handles the processor fees.
With tools like a duplicate detector and roll-back functions, you can rest assured your client's books will never get messed up because you can undo and restore any synced data with literally one click. If you need support from Synder, they offer free help using your favorite means of communication via chat, email, or phone. To try out Synder for free, head over to cloudaccountingpodcast.promo/synder, that is cloudaccountingpodcast.promo/S-Y-N-D-E-R. So I would say, instead of me picking a random number for the next listener mail, if you have one that's related, I think you should just play it.
Blake Oliver: So this is called Big Four Timesheet Racket.
Listener Mail: Hi, Blake, I want to add my experience to the book for the coffee table you are putting together. I was funneled into the Big Four through my university undergrad and Master of Accounting programs with big dreams and ambitions. I actually really enjoyed my internship as an auditor, especially the hourly pay and overtime offered to interns. I was sold on the offer to return full-time and grind with the team through the busy season. I started as a naïve first-year full of integrity and trust with very little experience or consideration of corporate politics. As such, when I was told, "Track what you work, work what you track," I did just that.
Within the first couple of weeks of mandatory 55 hours, I was working about 70 hours per week, and that's when I reported. I didn't know to do anything else. Apparently, there was an unspoken cap on hours reported to be somewhere between 60 to 65 hours. Then the office managing audit partner sent out an email to everyone in the office calling out not only those people who were clocking less than 55 hours, but also those who had reported more than 65 hours. My name was at the top of the list. Funny thing, though, my manager who worked at the client right next to me during all those hours also showed up on the list in the email as someone who had tracked less than 55. That started me off on the wrong foot and I think contributed to a subpar performance review in my first year and my decision to leave at the end of my second busy season. The worst part was finding out from one of the partners later than ours reported don't really matter and hourly rates are adjusted to get to the number agreed upon with the client anyway. Love the podcast, and I am excited to use Earmark CPE to get some credits now that the Big Four isn't paying for it.
Blake Oliver: Isn't that amazing? The partner said it doesn't matter because we just adjust the hours anyway to get to what we had agreed on with the client. So if that is the case, why, why even do the hours? And they're punishing people for having less than 55 and more than 65. The person he was sitting next to on the same engagements somehow billed 55 when the reality was, they both worked 70. This is what happens when you take utilization to its extreme, this performance metric, people game the system. Even the partners themselves are gaming the system. It makes no sense. It's insane. Here's the thing. We talk about we have a CPA pipeline problem; how many CPAs are pushed out of the Big Four because they can't stand the timesheet problem? I bet it's a lot.
David Leary: I think it's a combination of the timesheet problem in just hours in general, the expectations.
Blake Oliver: Yes. All right. Here's the last one on timesheets. This is from Shane Mason.
Shane Mason: Blake and David, long-time listener. Second-time caller. Shane Mason here driving across the Golden Gate Bridge, looking at Alcatraz, which is the place I would be if lying on your timesheets was a crime because I used to do it all the time. I had a partner even make me roll off of her account because I was honest about my time on a small client that she – wink, wink – told me not to run up the bill too much, even though he had like 10 [INAUDIBLE] that we needed to file, and he was a first-time client, so needed to have a good engagement the first time around. I think every accountant that has ever had to record timesheets has lied on them at some point; it’s just required. And that’s why we don’t use timesheets at our firm. We've got 10 accounting and tax people, and none of them use timesheets. It's glorious.
Second thing is that your billing that you mentioned- the other caller that was all upset about the Bitcoin thing, or the Tether thing, if you use Practice Ignition, you can bill a down payment upfront; say $500 was your minimum, and you might bill between one and $1000 on the back end. You can figure out what schedules need to be attached or what the final bill is, and you can both bill upfront and get accurate billing on the backside [INAUDIBLE] you know all the schedules that are attached to the return, and you don't even need to ask for the invoice the second time; you can just use the credit card that's on file. Fairly easy. Practice Ignition is great. Thanks, guys.
Blake Oliver: Thank you, Shane. That's a great recommendation for a solution. Here's my thoughts on this, David, and then I want to hear yours too after hearing all these three callers. We pride ourselves as accountants on being ethical. Ethics is core. We are taught this from the beginning of our accounting education, and we're reminded of it because of our ethics continuing education requirement. And yet, as a profession, we bring in first years into our firms and we throw them into a system that incentivizes them and, in many ways, requires them to lie on a daily basis. To succeed in the system, you have to lie on a daily basis. So we wonder, why do we have ethics violations all over our profession and why do we have these situations where we have massive public companies failing? Yeah, the ethical auditors quit. Sorry, go ahead, David.
David Leary: No, I'm just shaking my head up and down. Yes, you're really piecing this together. The people that try to be ethical with their timesheets get spanked so they leave, and so you're left with a bunch of people that are okay to have things a little gray. I'm not accusing anybody being unethical, but you don't have the same level of ethics.
Blake Oliver: Let's call it what it is. It's lying. They are okay with lying on a daily basis about what they are working on and when they're working on it.
David Leary: So then when it's something very important because they know it's something super important, it's easy to turn a blind eye that because you're conditioned.
Blake Oliver: Oh yeah. And these firms too, in their rules, in their handbooks, they'll lying on your timesheet is a fireable offense. And yet everybody's doing it all day long.
David Leary: Maybe that's the voicemail we need. Has anybody gotten fired for lying on their timesheet in this industry?
Blake Oliver: Nobody has ever gotten fired for lying on their timesheet. Nobody ever gets fired for that. I was just reading a story ongoing concern about an audit partner or something who has gone through three of the big four and is now at a regional firm and got drunk at a bar and went and peed in somebody's gas tank.
David Leary: I saw that too.
Blake Oliver: And the best comment was, "Oh, well you see, this person has been through all of the Big Four firms. It's clearly behavior that has been tolerated."
David Leary: Maybe he'll get off because he'll go to the judge and be, "Look, I've had to work for these firms."
Blake Oliver: Yeah, I think our profession is set up in a way to dissuade the honest people from sticking around. This is part of the pipeline problem. I was just reading an article featuring an interview with Deloitte CEO, Lara Abrash. And she talks in this interview about the CPA pipeline problem. And just like everybody else that I hear, all the bigwigs at the top, they all love to talk about how the pipeline problem is in the colleges and in the high schools and diversity too. We need to go out to underserved communities. We need to go out to accountants. Before they become accountants, when they're students, we need to convince them that this is a great profession to be in, that we need to modernize the CPA exam, to have technology in it so that we don't lose people to STEM.
But then you look at what's happening, we are hemorrhaging accountants out of the profession right now. If you look at diversity, the IMA did a study on diversity and found that 50 percent of candidates from diverse backgrounds, 43 to 53 percent of respondents from groups underrepresented at senior levels left their employers due to a perceived lack of equitable treatment, and at least 30 percent have left because of a lack of inclusion. So we have a profession that is like a leaky bucket with a hole in it, and we are losing people every year. They are churning out. And you can see it in the numbers. Both people who are diverse and also people who have diverse thoughts, people who just think different, they leave because of this timesheet crap, they leave because the profession is not moving forward. And the solution from our leaders is to add more water into the bucket.
David Leary: At the bottom. Yeah.
Blake Oliver: Not to plug the hole. And they are even aware of like it's not a good idea. Like Lara Abrash says, "We're trying to be very strategic in how we invest our time, how we invest money with this goal of increasing the pipeline, as well as increasing opportunities for advancement." If we get this right, we're not going to know it in six months, we're going to know it in a 5-to-10-year period. And that's the problem with trying to solve the pipeline by increasing the volume coming into the funnel, it's going to take too long. 75 percent of the CPAs in our profession are ready for retirement, are eligible to retire. We don't have 5 to 10 years to solve this problem. And I don't think it's going to work anyway.
She also says, "The number of CPAs that are coming out of colleges and universities are on a trajectory that's not positive. They're going down each year. I would get back to root causes. Over the last decade, there's been an inordinate amount of focus on STEM, an inordinate amount of focus on STEM and this belief by students that that's the only way to be successful in the future. Even when students do choose business, they are looking at that fifth year and they're looking at what they know they can do when they graduate."
I think it's funny that she says inordinate amount of focus on STEM. Like somehow if you choose to go into science, technology, engineering, and math, like you're making the wrong choice. Because if I were a student and I'm looking at, oh, I could go into accounting or I could go into science, technology, engineering, and math, I'd probably choose STEM. Because why? Well, I don't have to do that fifth year and I don't have to work 70 hours a week. And nobody ever talks about what it's like to be an entry-level staff accountant. It sucks. The job sucks. It's a lot of hours and low pay. So why would anyone in college sign up for that knowing what it's like. And all you have to do is go on social media to see it. To me, the problem is completely obvious. It's that the job sucks. The first few years are terrible. So if we want to solve the pipeline problem, maybe we should focus on the job, the work environment.
David Leary: It's really that first two years’ experience of the work environment, you're arguing, is making, and breaking everybody. And this goes back to the tax organizer, the client experience. The whole entire experience around all this is broken on both sides.
Blake Oliver: It's broken on the staff account side and the client-side. The experience sucks. And I have something actually related to this, if you don't mind, David, humoring me for one more moment. The New York Times had a special, I think, it was in their magazine. The headline is "The Real Reason America Doesn't Have Enough Truck Drivers." So I'm going to tie in our pipeline problem in accounting with the shortage of truck drivers.
David Leary: I always love when we're able to pull in other industry things and it really overlaps nicely.
Blake Oliver: So, David, what do you think? What is the common idea around this? Why do people think that we have a shortage of truck drivers? What do you hear in the media?
David Leary: We have a bunch of shipping containers that are sitting there, and we have lots of semi-trucks sitting there, but we don't have enough people to sit behind the wheel and actually drive them. That's the shortage.
Blake Oliver: And what is the common reason given for why we have this shortage of truck drivers? Do you hear why? Do you have any ideas why?
David Leary: No, do not have any ideas why.
Blake Oliver: All right. So the New York Times did a nice little investigative piece and went and talked to truck drivers and talked to their labor unions and talked to people doing the job, followed them around doing the job. It's a really interesting read. Basically, the job is really freaking hard. You are driving 11 hours, then you rest for 10. You are sleeping in the back of your truck. The bathrooms are disgusting. The food is unhealthy. It's brutal. It's a hard job. People don't want to do it anymore.
David Leary: And I think there's a lot of risk, like you have to buy your own truck, you're financing it. You're assuming a lot of risk on top of the horrible conditions.
Blake Oliver: Driving a truck, being a trucker used to be a better job than it is now because there were more unions, and they protected the truckers. That all got deregulated over the last few decades. So as a trucker, unless you're a Teamster, which there aren't as many anymore, you have terrible benefits, and the pay is not very good. Steve Viscelli, who's a labor expert at the University of Pennsylvania who used to work as a truck driver is quoted in this article as saying, "This shortage narrative is industry lobbying rhetoric. There is no shortage of truck drivers, these are just really bad jobs." As proof, they cite that the Trucking Association says that more than 10 million Americans hold commercial driver's licenses. That is nearly triple the 3.7 million trucks that required a driver holding that certification.
So we have plenty of people with the licenses, we just don't have enough people willing to do the job because the job is really, really, really hard. And I think that in accounting, it's the same story. It's not that we have a shortage of people studying accounting. I mean, we can improve that, that would be great. But the real problem is that we have a job. The traditional pathway is not appealing to people anymore. Now, maybe at one point, they were willing to do that. The previous generation was happy to work those hours. It was a different time. It was a different culture. It was more accepted that you would go into accounting. You'd work at a big firm, and you'd work 70 hours a week, and you were okay with that because you had a housewife at home who was taking care of the family. I mean, I don't consider that to be an ideal type of family environment.
David Leary: The whole leave it to beaver nuclear family, whatever, blah, blah, blah.
Blake Oliver: Right. You got the breadwinner, and you got the homemaker. You can do that. You can work 70 hours if you've got a partner who's doing all the home stuff. But we don't live in that culture anymore. It doesn't work. People don't want that.
David Leary: The homemakers got disenfranchised by it because the promise was all this automation to do all the household chores, that never came. Remember the '50s? All the automation was going to come, and it never happened.
Blake Oliver: Never happened.
David Leary: How's that for your automation in AI?
Blake Oliver: So and at the same time, we as parents spend more time with our children than ever before because society requires it. To educate your child to be a knowledge worker is a lot harder than educate your child to be a factory worker. It just is. It takes a lot more investment. So we as parents invest more time. Oh, and also wages haven't gone up. So you’re working those 70 hours in that big firm, but you can't afford a house. You can't afford the American dream. So that promise of trade us your hours, and in an exchange, we will give you the American dream doesn't exist anymore. So why would anyone do it? Young college students are looking at this, and they're saying, like, "It doesn't make sense." I can go do something else.
David Leary: Well, especially if they plan on being an accounting major or going to the accounting profession, they're probably good at weighing all the financial parts and putting this into a spreadsheet and be like, "Wait a minute, this doesn't make sense."
Blake Oliver: Exactly. They see it. They're like, "Okay, what is going to give me the best ROI? It's not accounting." So why, as accountants, when we look at this problem, why don't we look at it the way accountants look at these problems and actually make that spreadsheet? If we did, it would look pretty bad. And I think the reason we don't is because the leaders in our profession are not interested in solving the problem. They just want to keep things going as long as they can so that they can make it to retirement in four to five years and not deal with this issue. It's going to hit a breaking point.
Accounting has been the same for 100 years. It hasn't changed in 100 years. If you look at how accounting was done in 1920 and you look at it today, it's pretty much the same industrial model of production. We've got firms that are still using industrial cost accounting to try to manage people in a knowledge worker environment. You cannot manage knowledge workers effectively using industrial cost accounting. People are not 2,000 hours, they're people. And I think that's what some of these new firms are starting to figure out. It's a lot more fun. Accounting can be really a wonderful profession if we just stop making it so terrible.
David Leary: This episode of The Cloud Accounting Podcast is sponsored by OnPay. As a small business owner, I've had my share of accounting, tax, bank feed, and nap issues. Some could say I'm a mess, kind of like some of your clients. But as I reflect on the last three years of my business, the one app that I have not had any problems with is OnPay. It has been set it and forget it payroll. I quickly sign in each week, run payroll, and minutes, maybe seconds, and I'm done. I get a perfect sync to QBO. I never think about payments reports to government agencies because OnPay is doing it all for me. OnPay can do it all for your clients too. OnPay Partner Program offers free payroll for your firm discounts, a dedicated support team of in-house payroll experts who will do all the heavy lifting, from setting up your dashboard to add in your clients and their employees. They'll even enter any prior wages to make it easy to switch. To learn more about switching your clients to the award winning OnPay payroll and HR, head over to cloudaccountingpodcast.promo/onpay, that is cloudaccountingpodcast.promo/O-N-P-A-Y. OnPay, switch to better payroll.
Maybe, and this will tie to you, so I have a TikTok video that talks about timesheets, but this is not from a firm. So it's not firm related. It's basically what I would say is just a typical bookkeeping one-on-one problem that lots of companies have and their solutions in the market to solve it. But that's not the highlight of the story. So there is a viral TikTok that went viral, and I mean, 1.4 million views of this video.
Blake Oliver: 1.4 million views of this. And we're going to listen to this, right?
David Leary: Essentially, TikToker Heidi Al-Sahsah, she's also known as bravely living on TikTok @bravely_living. She took a job with a company called Jogan Health Solutions who apparently is like a traveling nurse company provider. Apparently, they were already kind of in the news because they were paying the nurses incorrectly. They hire Heidi to come in and fix this system because obviously something's broken. There's a defect here. If people aren't getting paid properly, something's wrong.
Blake Oliver: Let's take a listen.
Heidi: So I walked out of a job yesterday for the first time in my adult life. This company hired me to fix their payroll system because it's broken. How broken you ask? It is so broken that they made it into the news for not paying their COVID travel nurses appropriately. Now, when I got there, I immediately identified the problem. The problem is the fact that they're not using a timeclock. All of the people had to fill out a paper timesheet still. And then the managers have to fill out a spreadsheet with this information manually, and then manually, the payroll people have to then compile all of this information. And then they send the spreadsheet where it is manually entered into the payroll software instead of using the timeclock that the payroll software comes equipped with. Now, when I put together my plan of action on how we can fix these things, I was told, "Thanks for your outside perspective. It's always great to have a new set of eyes, but we're not going to be going in that direction."
Really? I later that day got an email that said, "Just do what you're told to do." And then they tried to write me up for not answering an email. I got hired to fix your payroll system. I am not the maintenance person, I'm the fixer. That's what I do. I go in, I identify problems, I fix them. And then you hire somebody to maintain it because that's not me. I'm not the maintenance person. Once they decided they were going to try to write me up for that, I decided that this was not the place I needed to be. It was a toxic work environment where they wanted me to work 8:00 AM to midnight for Mondays and Tuesdays so that they could get payroll done appropriately. But instead of wanting to fix it, they just wanted me as an extra body to help key in the system. No, I am not working 8:00 AM to midnight two days a week. No, that is such a toxic environment. And I told it was toxic, but they decided they didn't want to fix it. Well, I can tell you quite honestly, that company's not going to make it unless they do something about it. It's just going to fail.
David Leary: We could kind of tie this into everything. First, I'm just surprised.
Blake Oliver: Well, we can say the exact same thing. She's saying the same thing about this company that I'm saying about traditional accounting firm.
David Leary: Yes. Yes, exactly. So it's perfect that like the synergies of this coming in, but I'm just amazed at like it's just a typical bookkeeping issue. Arguably, every one of our listeners have had a client like this where they are doing paper timesheets and they need to move to an app or something like this. But the fact that 1.4 million people found this interesting is amazing to me. She has two more TikTok she released a couple of days later after this. What happened was because this video had 1.4 million views, she started getting a text and so did other employees about, hey, we need you to put in your first name, last name, and your email or whatever for our new system. Essentially, they rolled out Homebase.
Blake Oliver: The company that she was complaining about.
David Leary: Because obviously, they saw the size of this video, they were like, "Oh crap, we look stupid." So they rolled out Homebase. So then she a third video where she comes out and says, "Well, the problem is Homebase doesn't integrate with their payroll system. So when it's all said and done, they're going to have to take all the time tracking that's done in Homebase, and they can't push it into a payroll system."
Blake Oliver: Oh, so they took her advice, but then they didn't actually ask her what they should do.
David Leary: It just goes on in the last two video about how she noticed there's a payroll implementation specialist at Homebase, and she's going to apply for that job instead, which is kind of full circle. So going back to this timesheet stuff, what if the next time you have to lie on your timesheet at a firm, you make a TikTok video about you doing it and then 1.4 million people view it. Do you think then that firm might change some policies? I don't know.
Blake Oliver: Yeah. Well, it might. And that's my hope here. We're doing our small part to expose the big lie of accounting. Timesheets, in my opinion... I'm not going to say, in my opinion, timesheets are the big lie of accounting. Everyone knows. Well, not everybody, but a lot of us know, a good chunk of us know that it's bull crap. And we need to expose it for what it is so that we stop using it because it's destroying our profession. So hey, if you have timesheet stories, this is my call to you. Tell me. Send me an email blake@blakeoliver.com. You can write it out in an email, and I will use AI to create a voice for you. Even better, like what Shane did, just pick up your phone, turn on that voice memo and just tell me the truth. And I will work with you to spread the truth.
David Leary: There's enough of this coming in now where it could be its own standalone podcast of just-
Blake Oliver: Oh, I will read this one.
David Leary: ... Every voice of those goes out in RSS feed and people can just subscribe to it.
Blake Oliver: My joke in our last episode was I'm going to turn this into a coffee table book and send it to Ed Lewis, who is the chief defender of timesheets. I want to get enough to do a calendar because it's related to time. So you could have a timesheet lies calendar, and every month, there would be 12 of them. What are we up to? 1, 2, 3, 4. Already four.
David Leary: That's pretty funny. It would be a calendar of timesheet stories. That's funny.
Blake Oliver: Yeah. And you could post it at your desk just to remind you that it's all a big lie.
David Leary: So I want you to take a breath before we get you all fired up on crypto. So take a breath. We can transition. So they're calling the Super Bowl Crypto Bowl because FTX, Coinbase, Crypto.com and others have booked commercial time during the Super Bowl this year. On top of that, they're playing at SoFi Stadium, who's in the crypto game. And all the point-of-sale systems at SoFi Stadium are run by Square, who is now renamed itself The Block because obviously they're pushing into bitcoin. And then they said this is not even going to stop because after the Super Bowl SafeMoon, they bought billboards in Times Square. Bitcoin ads are on Hong Kong trams. And there's been crypto promos now inside of fortune cookies. Fortune cookie says you should buy a crypto. It's in your future. Something like that and what they're saying is they're comparing this to two thousand Super Bowl. They called it the dotcom bowl. This is Pets.com, the sock puppet. When a fifth of the ad space went to internet startups.
Blake Oliver: Well, this could be the next big bubble in pop. I've said that and I'll stick to it. And you know why I believe that? Because there's not a whole lot of evidence that people are using cryptocurrency for anything other than speculation. They're not using it to buy things. They're not using it to... Well, yeah, anything other than just buy it, hold it, hope it goes up. So unless people start using it for something practical, what is it other than a speculative asset? And here's some evidence for that.
David Leary: Before you jump on to that, speaking of ads for crypto. I do find it ironically funny that these companies with lots of integrity like Facebook and Google and Twitter actually banned crypto ads in 2018.
Blake Oliver: Because there's so many scams around there.
David Leary: They had to ban crypto ads.
Blake Oliver: Most new cryptocurrencies are just scams.
David Leary: And I'm saying Google, Facebook, Twitter is like these integrity companies loosely.
Blake Oliver: It's funny. It's funny. Yeah, they have too much integrity for crypto. Okay. So let's put this in perspective. One of the things that we've been hearing about a lot to sort of like pump up crypto is that people have been taking their salaries in crypto, like the mayor of New York and football players, Eric Adams, mayor of New York, Francis Suarez of Miami, they've been taking paychecks in bitcoin. Deal is a global payroll company, and they are releasing data on just how many of the employees on the Deal platform are getting paid in crypto because Deal apparently supports this. It's actually really helpful for paying international employees in many cases. This is one of the real-life use cases. Out of 100,000 hires in more than 150 countries that deal has been involved with over the past six months, about two percent opted to take at least part of their salaries in currencies not backed by sovereign.
David Leary: Wow. That's more than I would've expected, actually.
Blake Oliver: Again, I'm a crypto skeptic, I'm a blockchain enthusiast. I think international payments are exactly where crypto can be really valuable and where it is currently being very valuable. Bitcoin accounted for about two-thirds of those payments. Now, the thing is, people in the U.S. Are not really adopting this. The overall share in the U.S. Among Deal hires is just one point two percent. You know where it's the highest is in countries like Argentina, which has high inflation. A third of the hires there are getting paid in crypto. In Nigeria, it's about one-fifth, and in Brazil, the figure drops to around three percent. So in places where you have high inflation in a government that is mismanaging the fiat currency, yes, crypto is extremely helpful. I will say that's a positive thing. But like the people buying Crypto.com stuff because of the Super Bowl, that's just gambling. That's gambling. That's my take on that. This episode of The Cloud Accounting Podcast is sponsored by FreshBooks. Recently, I chatted with Twyla Verhelst, director of the accountant channel over at FreshBooks because I wanted to see what they've been up to. For those who don't know, FreshBooks was the first accounting software I used as a freelance bookkeeper back in 2011, so I've been really curious to see what's new. Turns out, a few years ago, FreshBooks launched a new platform that is now more than just invoicing. Freshbooks is now a full general ledger with financial reports, bank feeds and journal entries. Freshbooks also has your favorite app integrations, even some embedded ones like Gusto for payroll. And with the launch of their new accounting partner program, Twyla and the FreshBooks team are creating a platform and a partner experience that's showcasing that they're really listening to our feedback. If you want to learn about the benefits of working better together with FreshBooks, head over to cloudaccountingpodcast.promo/freshbooks, that is cloudaccountingpodcast.promo/F-R-E-S-H-B-O-O-K-S.
David Leary: So I saw an article in CoinDesk's, an opinion piece. And the title of the article, and this is what attracted me to it, said Accounting Standards Are Key to Getting Digital Assets on Corporate Balance Sheets. And it has a subtitle, which is the Financial Accounting Standards Board Says Crypto Accounting Standards Are the Top Priority Among its Stakeholders, But the Lack of Guidance is Harming Adoption. But the FASB Looks Likely to Act Soon, Says the Head of Chamber of Digital Commerce. This is an opinion piece by Perianne Boring.
Blake Oliver: Wait, the last name is Boring?
David Leary: Boring. She is the founder and CEO of the Chamber of Digital Commerce. I'm like, "What the hell is that?"
Blake Oliver: Every city has a chamber of commerce, so maybe this is the one for the metaverse. Is that what it is?
David Leary: So I dig in, it's a lobbying group for Bitcoin, or I mean, crypto.
Blake Oliver: Crypto.
David Leary: It's a crypto lobbying group. They're basically blaming the fact that FASB has not set these standards. It's causing a lower adoption of digital assets. Their whole game here is to get people to buy crypto. They're lobbying group to get right governments and standards boards to create standards that's going to basically encourage more purchasing of crypto. And their argument is, is about how many consumers are now buying it. 52 million Americans now own crypto, and 27% of all millennials. FASB doesn't dictate policies for millennials and just Americans, it's for businesses and accounting standards.
Blake Oliver: Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.
David Leary: They're trying to justify the FASB doing this because people are buying crypto because they saw a Matt Damon.
Blake Oliver: Well, the treatment of crypto in the accounting standards is terrible. Because you can only write it down, you can't write it up. And I think what they really want is for businesses to be able to write it up the gains before they sell. Because that would then inflate prices further. If everybody's balance sheets are growing because crypto's going up, that would actually make things really bad. That would make it even worse. The conservative treatment of crypto on corporate balance sheets is a good thing right now. It's the thing putting the damper on all this.
David Leary: So that's something to just put in your list of search terms to keep an eye on the Chamber of Digital Commerce.
Blake Oliver: Yeah, interesting.
David Leary: And you know what people can't use their crypto for?
Blake Oliver: What?
David Leary: You can't use it to get an Uber. So the CEO of Uber, Dara, I'm not even going to say the last name at all. I'm not even going to go for it. She says that maybe one day, at some point in the future, crypto could be an acceptable form of payment, but right now is not the right time because the cost of the exchanges, there's high transaction fees, the environmental impact of mining on the grid. You can't use it. So you can't even use your crypto to get an Uber. And that's a super forward-thinking tech company.
Blake Oliver: Well David, what else? We may have some app news.
David Leary: We should notify our management that we're going to run a little long, this episode, it's feeling like. And I don't even know if you want to touch it, but KPMG bought Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Blake Oliver: Yes, that's what I wanted to talk about. I forgot about that.
David Leary: Okay, go. Jump in.
Blake Oliver: So this is funny. So KPMG issued a press release saying that they are now invested in Bitcoin.
David Leary: KPMG, Canada.
Blake Oliver: KPMG, Canada has put Bitcoin and Ethereum on their corporate balance sheet. And this was trumpeted throughout the Twitter sphere as a huge thing for crypto. And then you read the article. It says in there that KPMG, Canada did disclose how much Bitcoin or Ethereum they had purchased. So David, I think that we should buy $10 of Bitcoin using the Cloud Accounting Podcast account and then issue a press release saying that the Cloud Accounting Podcast has now added cryptocurrency to our balance sheet. It's such crap. At least disclose the amount. Have the courage to do that.
David Leary: That's the whole game of the crypto thing is the courage. See, we could be taking that chance. I mean, we probably should just do this. We have PayPal connected to our-
Blake Oliver: Buy 10 bucks. [crosstalk]
David Leary: Just open the app and just go to the other tab and just buy some crypto. Jump in.
Blake Oliver: All right, here's an app news voicemail.
Mike: Hi, Blake. You and David are talking about how everyone is becoming a bank now. Well, you really need to cover the company modern treasury. They are making this all happen by providing all the background information technology and software to allow companies to basically become banks overnight by connecting with modern treasury. The companies, Square, Block, etc. are likely not rebuilding an entire bank infrastructure. More likely, they are just interfacing with a company like Modern Treasury, www.moderntresury.com. Thanks. Mike.
Blake Oliver: So this is, David, related to your "everyone's becoming a bank" thing. This company, Modern Treasury, I took a look at it. You should take a look at the website.
David Leary: Yeah, I'm super familiar with them. But unless they've pivoted my understanding was really for treasury management for internal companies like your huge company, you have to move money around, you can build out your own automated tech stack and manage this through APIs instead of manually transferring funds around between accounts.
Blake Oliver: Yeah, yeah. Which is a big problem because you've got lots and lots of accounts all over the world and you have to make sure that you're under the insured thresholds and all that stuff. You can automate it with this. This starts at $500 per month. They've got payments, percentage fees. This is definitely for like mid-market and up, most likely. But it's totally worth a look. If you're looking for something like that and you're in corporate, there you go.
David Leary: Should we pivot then into app news?
Blake Oliver: I've got one more about accounting video games to take us out. So I'll let you decide. Do you want to do that at the end or now?
David Leary: Let's do the video game one at the end. And then we'll knock out a couple app news here.
Blake Oliver: What is top of mind for you on the app news? I know Carbon raised money. Do you want to talk about that?
David Leary: Yeah, so carbon raised-
Blake Oliver: 66 million Series B investment led by Tidemark and Dave Yuan.
David Leary: Yeah. So currently, Carbon has 2,500 accounting firms in 20 countries. And they're estimating 160,000 to 170,000 accounting firms based on LinkedIn data. So they basically have 1% of the market right now. And what they're currently doing, they're currently doubling their client base every year, and their next big milestone would basically have 10,000 accounting firms on the platform. And to do this, they're going to start pushing the larger firms and they're hiring an additional 170 people this year.
Blake Oliver: Congratulations to Carbon. It's great to see. I mean, I remember when they were 12 people.
David Leary: GoCardless raised 312 million in their Series G, bringing its valuation to 2.1 billion. GoCardless has a very strong European and UK presence. It's a lot of ACH money movements type stuff. A lot of accountants in the UK use it for auto polling for their clients. You remember Neat, the Neat company, they used to make the scanners.
Blake Oliver: The receipt scanners, but they pivoted out of the hardware game.
David Leary: Yeah. And now they have NeatBooks and NeatFiles. They are basically an account accounting system. Well, they did a deal with a scanner maker. I just thought it was like full circle. So they're doing a deal with the document scanner maker called Raven. And essentially, the Raven Scanner has a touchscreen display, and you'll be able to scan things straight over to NeatFiles or NeatBooks. Like Full Circle. Now, they're in somebody else's scanner hardware, which I thought was funny. Another one is Taxfyle. Taxfyle. They kind of say like, "Oh, we're the Uber of accounting, or we're the Amazon fulfillment center of accounting." But they just took a raise of 20 million, and they want to onboard more accounting professionals. They want to expand that 75 percent team and make platform improvements. They currently have two hundred 25 CPA firms that are using them to address their staffing shortages. And 3700 accounting professionals are on it, and they want to double that number. They want to add 100 new accounting professionals to their platform every month.
Blake Oliver: So the headline on their website has changed. And it's quite interesting. It says, "The Internet's Accounting Workforce, whether you're an individual looking to file your taxes or an accounting firm looking to outsource tens of thousands of returns to domestic tax professionals, tax files apps and APIs connect you with the right accountants to meet your needs." And you know why these guys are winning? Because they're offering domestic tax professionals flexible work from home. That's why. You can quit your big accounting firm job where you work 70 hours a week and you can work as much as you want for Taxfyle.
David Leary: And now they're also offering some APIs. So third-party apps then can start offering tax prep built into their app. So if people are worried about, oh my gosh, Square has tax, and obviously, TurboTax has tax, and this company has tax. Now, what about for lawyers or construction app? Everybody's going to have tax prep and all these apps possibly in the future. Which is going to make everybody's job harder, I think, in our industry.
Blake Oliver: Well, David, that's all the time we've got for this week. Mind if I take us out with a voicemail?
David Leary: Perfect.
Blake Oliver: All right. This is accounting video games.
Peter: Hi, Blake and David. In your February 10th episode, David talked about surgeons gamified CPE course. I wanted to let you know that by coincidence, right before listening to that episode, I had discovered that accounting and bookkeeping games is in fact an entire subgenre of indie PC games. Some of them, like surgeons, are made by companies or schools, but plenty of them seem to just be made by indie game designers who are obsessed with bookkeeping. Since I have a YouTube channel that focuses on, I swear to God I'm not making this up, game's programing and accounting, I threw together a video looking at a few of these games and intend to continue to survey the field in future weeks to see if there are any particularly interesting ones. If any catch my eye is standouts. I'll send them your way. Thanks for the great podcast.
Blake Oliver: That is Peter. Thank you, Peter, so much. And he sent me a YouTube link to one of his videos. And it's about this like Singaporean video game that teaches you how to audit.
David Leary: Do we have anybody that's in our space that are big Twitch... It's Twitch, right, you stream playing video games?
Blake Oliver: Somebody should do an accounting Twitch.
David Leary: Yeah. And it's like you just filling out.
Blake Oliver: Well, you do the accounting games and then you also just like stream doing Excel.
David Leary: Yeah, exactly. Just sitting there doing your job all day. Your timesheet.
Blake Oliver: Yeah. I think actually that's a big opportunity because the Excel talkers have become popular. What if you were an Excel Twitch streamer? I bet there's a market for that. Well, David we'll have to leave that where it is for now. If people want to get a hold of you on the interwebs, where can they do that?
David Leary: I'm all the socials. Whoops. Hold on. I clicked this link to look at the video and it's Google auto-play ads. Oh, it's the worst. They're ruining YouTube. To get a hold of me, you can use any of the socials. I'm just @DavidLeary.
Blake Oliver: I am @BlakeTOliver. And email me your timesheet stories, either as text or audio to Blake@blakeoliver.com. Let's make this coffee table book or calendar or whatever print on demand. Maybe we'll have multiple different editions of it however you want to consume it. David, I'll see you here next week.
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Blake Oliver: Hey, podcast listeners, it's Blake, and I wanted to let you know about a new show I'm working on with CPA/comedian, Greg Kyte, and blogger/former CPA Caleb Newquist. It's called Oh My Fraud, and it's a podcast all about financial crimes. That's right, a true-crime podcast for accountants, by accountants. Caleb and Greg are you going to come together every couple of weeks to unpack their favorite frauds and explore the circumstances, psychology, and interpersonal dynamics involved? They also fully indulge in victim-blaming the defrauded widows, orphans, infirm, and feeble-minded. Because who can resist? If you fancy yourself a trusted advisor or prefer your true crime with spreadsheets instead of corpses, listen to this show to learn what to watch out for and to keep your clients, your firm, and even yourself safe. To subscribe, go to ohmyfraud.com or search Oh My Fraud on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
David Leary: Want to get the word out about your newsletter, webinar, party, Facebook group, podcast, e-book, job posting, or that fancy Excel macro you just created, why not let the listeners of the Cloud Accounting Podcast know by running a classified ad. Get the show notes for the link to get more info.