The Accounting Podcast

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David Leary: [00:00:00] What is accounting practice management software? Is it the operating system for your accounting practice? Is it an all in one software solution for accountants? Is it the crucial tech standing between your practice and utter chaos? Accounting practice management software should bring together all of your practices mission critical functions in one place to make your life and your practice easier. Stay tuned to hear more from our sponsor Canopy later in the episode and how you can receive a $40 Amazon gift card. You dictate social policy and behaviors by tax policy. And if you you have a hidden tax policy, you can't really control people's behaviors because they don't see the money coming out or going in. Right. But at the same time, I was thinking, if you control the entire distribution of money for every single individual, you really have the best control ever as a government. You don't have to you don't have to do control through tax policy. Coming to you weekly from the OnPay Recording Studio, this is The Cloud Accounting Podcast.

Blake Oliver: [00:01:08] Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of The Cloud Accounting Podcast. I'm Blake Oliver.

David Leary: [00:01:14] And I'm David Leary.

Blake Oliver: [00:01:15] David, great to see you. I am caffeinated. I am ready to go.

David Leary: [00:01:20] In a way, it was a normal week. Next week won't be a normal week. As you listen to this, next week we'll be at QuickBooks Connect. So if you're there and you're listening while you're at the conference, come find us.

Blake Oliver: [00:01:30] I'm so excited. And we have our party. What is it? Wednesday, Wednesday night, seven.

David Leary: [00:01:34] December 7th at 7 p.m.. Seven or seven.

Blake Oliver: [00:01:36] Okay. It's at the Cosmopolitan Chandelier Lounge. I had fun at a different sort of event yesterday. I went to an Arizona CPA Society mixer in Scottsdale. It was at the Fate Brewing Company.

David Leary: [00:01:51] I just looked the second time. I think you did this a month ago. This is becoming a regular thing for you now, going to these state society mixers.

Blake Oliver: [00:01:58] Well, so the last time I went to a brewery was just to meet up with an individual. This was an actual CPA society mixer, and I have not yet, in the two years I've been in Arizona, participated in any of the Arizona CPA Society events. So it was kind of shocking. David I'm 39 years old and I was like the youngest person there, I think. And there were maybe 20 people there. And this is supposed to be the Phenix chapter. This is a city of five, 6 million people.

David Leary: [00:02:27] And so you said 38 and you felt like you were the youngest. I'm thinking, yeah, work the election. And I'm like 48 and I feel like I'm the youngest.

Blake Oliver: [00:02:37] So, yeah, I don't know what this says about the state of our profession, but it didn't look great to me from that event. I mean, this is a very appealing draw. This was a good event. They did it in the barrel room and, you know, it was a trendy place. And yeah, I'm a little worried, actually.

David Leary: [00:02:54] Can we take a time out and rewind for a second? Yeah. Okay. So could I have attended this? Not being a CPA.

Blake Oliver: [00:03:00] You can sign up as a non CPA member and yeah, you can go.

David Leary: [00:03:04] So younger people could attend this that are not CPAs yet.

Blake Oliver: [00:03:07] Yeah. Yeah. Students could go. And I was hanging out there with Michael Lee who you know David and he's not a CPA but he came he owns an accounting firm. We were just commenting on the fact that like, why are there no students here? Why are there no younger accountants, like staff accountants? There was nobody there representing the 20.

David Leary: [00:03:27] It wasn't the location. The location sounds very appealing for demographic.

Blake Oliver: [00:03:31] Yeah, easy to get to from ASU. So that that was a little worrisome. And, you know, as I usually do, I have some stories about the future of our profession, but.

David Leary: [00:03:42] I have one as well. Okay. Last week.

Blake Oliver: [00:03:45] Okay. What do I have? Employers rethinking the need for college degrees in a tight labor market. You talked about this in a previous episode. I think it was the state of Iowa. The auditor in the state of Iowa is no longer requiring four year degrees.

David Leary: [00:04:00] Yeah, just specifically for that. But we talked about, I think just half in jest, but half truthful of like when the economy gets tight, people are going to take jobs that they wouldn't have taken before. Right. And people are going to lower requirements if they can't hire. Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:04:13] And so Wall Street Journal did a story on this topic. Employers rethink the need for college degrees in a tight labor market. The tight labor market is prompting more employers to eliminate one of the biggest requirements for many higher paying jobs, the need for a college degree. Companies such as Alphabet, Inc's Google, Delta Airlines and IBM have reduced educational requirements for certain positions and shifted hiring to focus more on skills and experience. Maryland this year cut college degree requirements for many state jobs, leading to a surge in hiring. And incoming Pennsylvania Governor Josh SHAPIRO campaigned on a similar initiative. Job postings requiring a bachelor's degree in the US are 41%. That's down from 46% at the start of 2019 ahead of the COVID 19 pandemic. So we're trending down here, and I've mentioned on the show that when you look at accounting as a career path and you compare it to what you can achieve, especially without even getting a college degree, it's not it's not looking good for us, right? It's not we're not we're not competitive. And there's one example in here of a woman who completed Google's online college alternative program that I've mentioned before. Google, you can earn these certificates online. They're not accredited. They're just created by Google to fill positions at Google. She's one of more than 100,000 people who have completed an online certificate from them. And her name is Lucy Mathis. She was doing college. She learned about an internship at Google and dropped out of her undergraduate program to work at the company full time. After doing the certificate, she now she's 28 years old and now makes six figures as a system specialist. So you don't even have to finish college. You can complete a Google career certificate and you can make six figures as a system specialist, meanwhile. The starting salary for entry level auditors and tax people at big accounting firms is, you know, anywhere from like 50 to 80000 a year, depending on your cost of living area.

David Leary: [00:06:22] Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:06:23] So do the math. Right.

David Leary: [00:06:25] So do you think like this, this decision not just on our profession, just across the board, like colleges or colleges, going to have to lower prices if the demand for degrees is not there?

Blake Oliver: [00:06:35] I think a lot of colleges are going to go out of business because we've got fewer younger people. We have all these schools that thrived on federal dollars. And yeah, it's just not going to be there anymore. I think they're going to shrink, shut down. And yes, prices will go down, hopefully, as people realize that, hey, you don't actually need a traditional college degree to be successful in life. You can you can do really well without it. I mentioned Delta is in this article. There's a pilot shortage, right?

David Leary: [00:07:05] Yes.

Blake Oliver: [00:07:06] Yeah. Delta is dropping the requirement that their pilots have a college degree. I always thought that is a little strange, right? Why? Who cares? Who cares if the person flying the plane has a college degree? Like, does this class wait hours?

David Leary: [00:07:20] Right?

Blake Oliver: [00:07:20] Yeah, it's exactly. It's flight hours, right? This is the beginning of something that's going to really affect accounting If we don't figure out how to combat this, if we don't figure out how to unlink the CPA pathway from the traditional college degree program, and especially this fifth year, this insane, terrible bad idea of the fifth year, we're not going to be competitive. And I know that people say that, oh, we don't need to get rid of the fifth year. We just need to increase salaries and compensation so that people want to do the fifth year. Right. That makes sense, too. That's another possibility. But you can't you're not going to double it. It's not possible. There's no margins in there. The partners at firms aren't going to do that. They're not going to give up their profits. So what's the solution? So anyway.

David Leary: [00:08:11] I have an article from last week to follow up on That might be the solution here, Blake.

Blake Oliver: [00:08:16] Okay. Tell me the solution. I'm excited.

David Leary: [00:08:17] So this is from the CPA Journal. Have you ever seen this before?

Blake Oliver: [00:08:21] Cpa Journal. I've heard of dot com.

David Leary: [00:08:23] Yeah. Okay. So I don't for all the news coverage we do, it's never really came across my radar before, which is strange, but it's the CPA journal, quote unquote, the voice of the profession. And this is a very long article, and the title of the article is Building a Stronger Pipeline stacking pre CPA accounting licenses on the way to CPA. And long story short, a lot of the article just talks about the 150 hour model. The same thing you harp on and everybody harps on about. We don't have enough accountants. That's half the article. But basically the author goes on to argue about how having new licenses would enable the candidates right to to partially get licenses as they're in college still, and kind of working their way up. But essentially, it's like a stacked approach. So for the sake of conversation in his article, he calls one the APA, which is associate in public accounting. And then the next level would be your paraprofessional in public accounting. So that's the PPA. And then eventually you'd have the your third tier, which would be your CPA. And he's arguing that this should all be tied into the new CPA evolution model and the test in breaking out the test that the six parts of the test to where you give each level the test along the way and you build up to a CPA, even if you only take in half the test, you still have some sort of certification kind of.

David Leary: [00:09:44] That's the argument. So I get where he's coming from on this. But then he goes on to say, because he starts giving like they're not examples because this is an exist but theoretical examples and he talks about the associate and public accounting. And I'm going to read this and then see what you think the way this is what this means. The Associated Public Accounting Exam and license would align with basic bookkeeping skills knowledge shown in Exhibit one, but also basic individual income tax return preparation. A few common types of reconciliations. These types of work lend themselves to what college students might be doing in an internship, and it goes on to say the work supports important areas of accounting, of an accounting practice, and the billing rates and compensation for employees with this license would be low enough to fit firm cost structures at reasonable client fees. So my brain is like, is this just a way for partners to get cheaper staff like.

Blake Oliver: [00:10:37] Yeah.

David Leary: [00:10:38] Get a partial, we'll hire you without your CPA so we can hire you for even cheaper.

Blake Oliver: [00:10:43] Yeah, and that's why it won't work, in my opinion, because it's trying to solve a problem in a failing business model. And the business model is falling apart. I just feel like trying to create other credentials below the CPA is just going to confuse people. It's going to confuse the market. You know, people.

David Leary: [00:11:02] Have been enough on CPA, the brand.

Blake Oliver: [00:11:05] Right? People already don't understand the EEA versus the CPA. You think that creating like two more acronyms is going to solve this problem?

David Leary: [00:11:12] Yeah. Yeah. Inarguably. And he goes on to acknowledge he kind of took this model from the legal profession with paralegals and that type of a model. And then he also acknowledges that the community colleges kind of do this already, like some community colleges are now letting you get your associates with a technical proficiency, an accountant, some accountants, something like that. So so it's kind of happening at that level. But the other piece of this that, you know, he admits he can't predict the long term effects, but he thinks there's no obvious disadvantages of somebody going in this order and getting all three certifications working their way up the ladder.

Blake Oliver: [00:11:47] Well, the challenge is going to be trying to do it while you're working. And if accounting firms don't give their staff any slack, then they're not going to go get the CPA anyway, Right. It's that's the biggest problem that one of the biggest barriers to young accountants getting their CPA is not having enough time because they're overworked.

David Leary: [00:12:05] Well, he also thinks this kind of aligns the testing sections to the work you might be doing at that point in your career to where you're not freaked out trying to over study for something that you haven't either touched in your career and you might not touch for four years.

Blake Oliver: [00:12:19] Yeah, well, and this this goes back to the whole education being irrelevant and not not what accountants actually need to do the job. And I blame traditional education for that. Colleges have been sitting on their laurels. They've been collecting their fees, they've been getting their federal student aid money, and they haven't innovated in their curriculum. And so what you learn in in accounting in school, I'm sure most CPAs would agree with me that it's not useful. It's not what you need to know to be successful. So.

David Leary: [00:12:48] You know, and then he closes it off with just essentially the appropriate next steps would be to include a dialog among leaders in the profession across the sectors CPA firms, industry, education and government and podcasters. But actually he didn't have that in there, that you just start accountancy boards, Naspa and AICPA. But so we jumped into the discussion.

Blake Oliver: [00:13:09] I guess we got a listener message on Instagram from FIT Books about our coverage of the 150 hour rule, Flipbook said as it relates to episode 304 and the barrier to entry to become a CPA, I would like to know how many people or working accountants set out to become a CPA, obtained the necessary credits and hours yet never sat for the exam. It may shed some light on why the AICPA stands firm on the credit requirement. Love the show. Keep up the good work. And I said, Good question. I'm curious how many people did get the credits and hours but never sat for the exam? And if that's the case, if that's a lot of people, then I think it's the workload that's the problem there. Right.

David Leary: [00:13:51] Is the argument like, hey, if you do the 150 hours you hit that we trust, you know, your stuff enough that it's kind of okay if you don't get the CPA. Is that kind of the thought process on that?

Blake Oliver: [00:14:03] Well, AICPA is saying firms need to give staff more support to so that they get the CPA when they're working. I think part of the but, you know, it's not just that. Part of the problem is you graduate with your accounting degree and you did that fifth year MASTERS You go work in public accounting at a big firm. And a lot of people in that first two or three years decide, I hate public accounting, I hate accounting, and they leave the profession entirely and they get their CPA. And there's a variety of reasons they do that. And I think being overworked is one and not finding satisfaction in the work is another. And there's all these studies that have shown that this is like a huge problem. But but I do think that there are actually a lot of people who would like to work in public accounting because they don't have a lot of opportunities there. Career changers like me, like I was a career changer. I needed to figure out a stable career that would give me a good income. And I didn't want to spend a lot of money podcasting. And I chose accounting because I figured out how to get the extra 30 hours I needed and sit for the CPA exam, all for less than $10,000, which was a great investment because even if I stop being a podcaster, I could go out and make six figures doing actually not that hard work in industry, you know, as a controller or something like that very easily and automate most of my job, right?

David Leary: [00:15:21] You could create one of those master class kind of courses like how to become a CPA for ten grand and you could sell this online.

Blake Oliver: [00:15:28] It's not that complicated. You just look up, you know, courses online on Santa monica College and, you know, all that stuff. It's like community college.

David Leary: [00:15:35] Give away free, give away free.

Blake Oliver: [00:15:37] That's what the podcast is. We give it away for free. David Because knowledge should be free. I forgot where I was going with that. But yeah, it's, it's the business model of the firm. So the firms, the partners make a lot of money because they use young, underpaid, overworked staff to do 80% of the work. And that business model, that pyramid shaped business model is what is destroying the profession because nobody wants to be at the bottom of the pyramid anymore. Because there are other places where you don't have to be in a pyramid.

David Leary: [00:16:09] Well, especially in this next generation. Everybody wants to be a partner on day one. Like, that's the other fun. It's like the perfect storm, right? The business model over here and then labor over here and in the workforce. And, you know, maybe I sound like a boomer. Like they're entitled. They. Well, you don't. They don't put in the grunt work either at the bottom, Right. And you don't have to.

Blake Oliver: [00:16:32] That's just the fact of it. This is capitalism, right? When there is a shortage of labor, labor has power and that is going to just get more and more intense. People think it's bad now. It's going to be worse in five years. It's going to be worse in ten years. It's going to be insane in 20 years.

David Leary: [00:16:50] And it's not just us. I mean, we we were at it. I was at next week's conference or at Sweet World. Yeah. And Mike, some about surgeons. But there's all these issues like everybody. And I heard that NPR thing about veterinarians, like all the professions, are struggling to have enough talent. This episode of The Cloud Accounting Podcast is sponsored by Relay. The other day, Chris Maskey of Prefix Accounting tweeted the following quote, Not so hot. Take If your business banking cannot maintain a stable QBO connection, you do not in fact have a business account as a cheap knockoff of a real bank account, end quote. And I could not agree more. What's the point of a business banking account if it doesn't integrate with your accounting tech stack? Really is a no fee online business banking and money management platform built for you and your clients really integrates into your tech stack with direct integrations to QuickBooks Online, Xero and Gusto, and improves your workflows by allowing members of your team to have their own set of secure login credentials to clients banking data. No more bugging your client for two factor authentication codes. And did I mention the ultra reliable bank feeds? And your clients get powerful online banking features like 20 individual checking accounts and 50 physical or virtual MasterCard debit cards, which can be assigned to their team members to stop fighting with, as Chris tweeted, a cheap knockoff of a real bank and instead get a business bank account that cares about you and your small business clients. Head over to Cloudaccountingpodcast.com Promo relay that is Cloudaccountingpodcast.com Promo Ford for relay Y.

Blake Oliver: [00:18:28] Yeah, and this is why I and robotics is going to save us. And there's some really, really exciting stuff going on in A.I. right now that I've actually wanted to dedicate an entire episode to it. But I can't wait anymore. We need to actually talk about it. David. Okay, so there's this tool that I recommend everybody go check out. It's called Jasper. Jasper.

David Leary: [00:18:50] Now you're giving away more secrets.

Blake Oliver: [00:18:52] You know, this is why you listen. Okay? So, Jasper AI, it is a tool, a writing tool built on GPT three, I believe, which is the the big AI development in recent years. It's basically you can give it a command. You can say, here's a topic sentence. Now write a paragraph and it will write you a paragraph of original content that has never been written before by any human. It's not copying and pasting from the internet and how it does it. That's a whole thing. Just know that it does it and it is really good and it is scary good. And basically when I use it to write blog posts now, I can cut my time by about 80% because I can skip straight to the editing, I can write topic sentences, bullet points for what I want the flow to be, and then I can have the I flesh out the paragraphs and then I can edit for factual inaccuracies, which it still struggles with. But if you know the content, you can fix it. And it's like the same it's the same productivity increase that I experienced when I first went from desktop to cloud accounting, which cut my data entry time by 80%. It's this level in terms of creating content.

David Leary: [00:20:02] Yeah, it's not a replacement, but you still have to massage it and guide it and polish it a little bit. But it's doing the meat of the work, right? Yeah. The meantime, just simple bank feeds, right? For a QuickBooks Online or Xero, it's doing the most of it, but you still got to kind of watch it. You can't just blindly say, Here's the topic, create me a post because I typed this and I typed top ten accountants and it gave me a list of ten economists. So it's not perfect.

Blake Oliver: [00:20:31] So you have to.

David Leary: [00:20:32] Know what they are, you have to babysit it.

Blake Oliver: [00:20:34] But but what it's going to do is it's going to solve this problem of like the talent shortage of staff writers, because there's not going to be enough staff writers at magazines and publications. It's going to solve the problem of in accounting, doing a lot of the basic report generation. So you're going to be able to tell an app, I want a pal that is, you know, for this period and compares these things and it will generate it for you because it understands what you said. And Trevor Lee, who is the founder of Genius Sheets, actually demonstrated this on Twitter. He's building it into his spreadsheet app where you can just say in plain English what you want, and it will create the report. And it's not like he has to program it to understand all these different words. It does it intuitively like a child would.

David Leary: [00:21:23] Yeah, I've seen that. The it's really interesting because I've seen this built at the QuickBooks Connect hackathons in the past. There's an app called Shadow AI, and that was their whole bet. Like they built the whole and just it could not get it's interesting where the product's like, this is the market fit. And this goes back to the you said like the killer app or the killer thing. And it's almost like there's a solution here, but it hasn't figured out what it's solving just yet. Because in theory, as if I'm a small business owner and send me calling my accountant to find out my bank balance, I would just want to yell it to my Alexa and get it back. But that's all in theory, but nobody does it, so it's kind of a Yeah, I like how this happens.

Blake Oliver: [00:22:05] So, David, I know it's hard to believe if you haven't seen this, so I actually am pulling up Jasper right now. I'm in. A new document and let's write something. Let's see what it does. Just so our listeners are our livestream. Viewers can see it and we'll read it for our listeners. So, David, are you.

David Leary: [00:22:20] In the blog post? Because because Jasper does lots of different things. So you're in the let's create a blog post version.

Blake Oliver: [00:22:27] I'm in just the document. This is like the anything you can do, anything in this view. It's not it's not a workflow view. So we're just going to write like, let's tell it what to do. Like let's write a blog post, what kind.

David Leary: [00:22:38] Of blog.

Blake Oliver: [00:22:39] You want to write.

David Leary: [00:22:40] How to get your CPA. 350 hours for your CPA.

Blake Oliver: [00:22:45] Write a blog post about how to get your 150 credit hours to sit for the CPA exam. So that's my command. Let's see if it understands this. I'm hitting compose. Getting your 150 credit hours to sit for the CPA exam can seem like an intimidating and daunting task. After all, it requires you to have a deep understanding of accounting, finance and business concepts in order to pass the CPA exam. However, with careful planning and perseverance, it is definitely achievable. The first step is to make sure you have the necessary prerequisites for the exam. Generally, most states require that you have at least a bachelor's degree in accounting or a related field from an accredited institution. Additionally, you must also complete 150 credit hours of college courses that include specific courses in accounting, auditing, taxation and business law. It's important to note that while many states have different requirements for the CPA exam, some may require additional courses such as advanced accounting or business strategy. Additionally, you may need to complete an ethics course and or a state specific course in order to qualify. Once you know what courses are needed for the CPA exam, the next step is to find a college that offers the courses. Many colleges and universities offer degree programs specifically designed for those who are interested in taking the CPA exam. Aside from traditional four year colleges and universities, there are also plenty of online programs available as well. And it keeps going. I'm just pressing compose and it's writing that right now. I haven't changed a word. Isn't that amazing? And and and so Omatseye said we should do the top five reasons to listen to The Cloud Accounting Podcast. Okay, let's do that one. Write a blog post X. I'm going to put this into the content description slash brief field. Top five Reasons to Listen to the Cloud.

David Leary: [00:24:26] I'm going to use Jasper to write our episode title this week.

Blake Oliver: [00:24:30] All right, Here, compose. Let's see what it says. The Cloud Accounting Podcast is the perfect resource for staying up to date on the latest trends in news in accounting technology. Here are five reasons why you should be listening to this podcast. One Get expert insights. Host Blake Oliver has extensive experience and knowledge in cloud accounting, making him the perfect guide for navigating complex topics. He brings on top industry guests to provide their insights so you can stay informed of the latest developments to accessible content. The podcast covers a wide range of topics from basic accounting information to more advanced material. This makes it accessible for listeners at any level and helps keep the content engaging and informative. It just goes and goes. There's three up to date information for interviews with industry leaders. It's I don't even think I'd have to edit any of this.

David Leary: [00:25:13] It's amazing.

Blake Oliver: [00:25:14] Right? It's I get it. I'm getting chills right now doing this. And I got to remind everybody, this is not copying and pasting from something I wrote on Cloudaccountingpodcast.com. This is unique. It's as unique as if a human being had written it using their brain. They have figured out how to crack that aspect of artificial intelligence. Yeah, no words. So.

David Leary: [00:25:42] But you have to babysit it. Because I've seen I've seen here's a great example of this and I forgot the two apps that did it. So two apps within like a three week period, both put out top ten accounting podcast lists basically. One of them, that app went on Twitter and asked people about their top podcast and they compiled a list and they wrote the blogpost. Another app, I am sure, used AI to write the blogpost. And the reason I know this for the podcast it listed were from like 2015, which were on old blog posts from, you know, a decade ago. So you have to babysit this stuff. You just can't take it blindly.

Blake Oliver: [00:26:21] You know, you have to edit it. It's not perfect. But like that, that article was actually I as I was reading it, I didn't see anything I needed to edit on sometimes.

David Leary: [00:26:29] No, no, no.

Blake Oliver: [00:26:29] Sometimes if you give it a simple enough prompt, it's spot on. Michael Aliman has joined our live stream. Michael, great to see you. And he says, quote, Have your eye contact, my A.I. quote. And that's I think what we're going to see is Google building A.I. into Gmail, Microsoft building A.I. into Outlook, where it'll just write the response based on all your previous emails and knowing the context. And it'll be able to.

David Leary: [00:26:55] Text messages doing this right, right now. Like, yeah, I just hit the button that says, okay, and then you reply the button. Like we're just replying back and forth using suggested text.

Blake Oliver: [00:27:03] Just a text. Yeah. And Google does that for me.

David Leary: [00:27:06] Primary conversation.

Blake Oliver: [00:27:07] If I start typing in Gmail, it will fill out the rest of the sentence. If I pause and then I can just hit tab and often it's correct. It's just another step to go out and to write like full sentences, full paragraphs. It's in. We use Google Chat at Earmark. David and I don't know if you've noticed this, but in in Google chat, in the spaces we have threaded spaces. So you start a chat and it's like a specific topic, but it never had like subject subject lines, right? It wasn't like that. Google is automatically generating summaries of discussions now. So in the morning when I go into Google. Tat. It will tell me what everybody talked about at the top of the screen, and then I can scroll down to read the text, the full discussion. This is going to save our brains when it comes to Slack and messaging. It's the summaries. And oh, and that's one of the things Jasper does really well, is you can give it 20,000 words and it can summarize it for you. It can do that too. So check this out. If you're looking to do content marketing on your website, if you've always struggled as an accountant writing blog posts, which I love to write, but I am so slow and I struggle with it, you can use this, you can just give it an idea, give it the core of an idea, and then just say compose and it will write and it will write. And then you can just take out what you don't like, take out what's wrong, and then use it.

David Leary: [00:28:26] Sometimes it's almost like a lot of us are out there on islands and it's almost like having somebody to brainstorm with because it was just like when you because a lot of times when you brainstorm, one of the rules you need to do is you have to have 60 bad ideas to find a good idea, right? But because it's nobody cares, it doesn't have feelings. It just puts out a bunch of stuff and you're like, Oh, that's cool. And you just massage that one thing. You just steal it and use it, right? Because but it also will put out lots of bad things. But that's the that's the brainstorm process. And I think it's been kind of handy for that as well.

Blake Oliver: [00:28:57] So yeah, it's amazing. And so, yeah, in accounting, right, what are we going to see this type of, this text use for? It's going to be I want to get certain information out of my accounting system. I'm going to be able just to type it in plain English and then it will bring back that information also in plain English.

David Leary: [00:29:16] And I think we've seen apps that are like the opposite, where you have your contract and the contract has financial information in it and it goes and pulls that out to create the invoice.

Blake Oliver: [00:29:27] Yes, the lease accounting apps have been doing this.

David Leary: [00:29:29] Yeah. Or to audit the audit. What's on the invoice to make sure they align. Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:29:35] And Michael, is Jasper free. And we haven't answered that question yet. It's I know I'm paying like 50 bucks a month for it right now for and they charged by the word right. So the words that generates the amount you use it. What a deal. It's, it's insane. What a deal. What a deal.

David Leary: [00:29:56] This episode of the Cloud Accounting Podcast is sponsored by Kanopy. As you've heard in previous ads, Kanopy brings together all of your firm's mission critical functions in one place. Client management, Document management, workflow time and billing and payments to keep your team organized and having your team organized is great, but having your team spend less time on mundane tasks is even better. Did you know that Kanopy has automation built in? Sure, you can still use an app like Zapier with Kanopy, but for most firms the built in automation and Canopies workflow module is plenty sophisticated enough your team can create trigger automations based on status, task and subtasks as well as dates. Be it upcoming reached or past and canopy can complete the mundane tasks for your team like automatically ascending client requests or automatically assigning the next task or subtasks to a member of your team as they complete work for each client. Or how about a really nice email to the client after all the work's been completed? Can it be integrates with QuickBooks Online? Xero FreshBooks Crm's form Builder, spreadsheets, calendars, email, and of course Zapier. They have a mobile app, centralized file management Fillable, PDFs, a client portable task management, and the list goes on and on to get a demo of Kanopy and to receive a $40 Amazon gift card. Head over to Cloudaccountingpodcast.com promo slash canopy That is Cloudaccountingpodcast.com promo for Canopy. Why It's time to streamline your firm with Canopy.

Blake Oliver: [00:31:23] I have more about AI, but I forgot exactly what that was going to be. So if I think of it, I will come back. So, David, you're up next.

David Leary: [00:31:30] Up next, do you want to talk about KPMG Spark?

Blake Oliver: [00:31:34] Yes. Another one bites the dust.

David Leary: [00:31:38] So let me give me a second to open up a couple of things here, because I have.

Blake Oliver: [00:31:42] Okay. So the history of KPMG Spark is that they bought what did they buy originally?

David Leary: [00:31:46] So yeah, so let's go back so the eye to a bit more tab sorry.

Blake Oliver: [00:31:50] And also context. Kpmg Spark is like the bookkeeping cloud bookkeeping brand of KPMG.

David Leary: [00:31:58] So it's small business bookkeeping. Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:32:00] Like four X hundred dollars per month competing with all of us small firms. And when it originally started I said, Oh, that's funny because they're not going to figure out how to do it under their business model and they're going to fail. And it's just a matter of time. And they gave up. That's the story here. They sold.

David Leary: [00:32:18] It. So, so to rewind a little bit, so Berkeley was founded in 2013 as Berkeley Co, so it was like a proprietary accounting software package. Then 2015, they closed their second round of VC financing, Berkeley did. And then summer of 2018, KPMG basically acquired them, the KPMG size and they talked and sometime read closely. After the summer of 2018, they were acquired by KPMG, rebranded it to KPMG Spark, and they've been pushing, it's advertised everywhere and it was fairly cheap to model. The big problem with KPMG Spark and that I always had with it, it was proprietary and I remember being Emilio and you know, having the meeting, that meeting KPMG Spark team at CPA engage that one summer and, and they couldn't use it.

Blake Oliver: [00:33:12] Proprietary means that it's its own GL it's not QuickBooks.

David Leary: [00:33:15] Single. Yeah and based on my experience in this industry they are the only one of the top 100 accounting firms not using an off the shelf GL for their small business clients like a QuickBooks or a Zero or a Sage Intacct They're the only one using proprietary system, and it blocked you from using apps because nobody's going to build an integration for your 250 clients or 300 clients or whatever small amount of clients they even had. I think maybe it tops it was 400 based on some of these press releases about the acquisition. And the crazy thing is, and I remember talking to KPMG, I'm like, what you need to do is roll out what your Canadian brothers have rolled out. So KPMG in Canada rolled out what they call as finance Plus. And essentially it is a typical cloud accounting podcast listener tech stack. You're on QuickBooks or Xero. Do you have a stack of apps on that like a Dexter ADP hub dock wage point? And I'm like, Why don't you just roll out that in the States? Yeah, which would make sense, like kill KPMG Spark and just build the same kind of cash, small business cash practice everybody else is building. Right? And some part of it is like they had views of like, well, we're going to we don't want to let QuickBooks or take our business away. Like it's all like kind of castle walling by partners and really ultimately, well, turns out this didn't really work out. So now they sold to decimal. So decimal we've talked about before, mid-summer of 2022 in June, decimal raised $9.2 million. Decimal was part of another accounting firm. Somerset CPAs and advisors broke out a separate product or a separate cast firm, kind of a small one called Somerset Cloud. And essentially decimal really is a true QuickBooks stack with apps.

Blake Oliver: [00:34:58] It's a venture backed, venture backed bookkeeping.

David Leary: [00:35:01] Cloud assessment.

Blake Oliver: [00:35:02] Firm.

David Leary: [00:35:02] Casper. Exactly. So essentially, if remember then we talked about that decimal has a lot of scale factor employees working at it right The I think the chief operating officer was the chief operating officer at scale factor. Right. So they they have employees working there that are from scale factor. So then they've acquired now 500 new customers and they actually talk about how they've acquired they already had KPMG and B Spark employees working there already. Okay. And so now there's even more that are going to be working there. So some part of me is like, this is crazy. It's like the broken scale factor and broken KPMG's spark Like two failed experiments are like combining together. Like, I don't know, it's almost like if I was decimal, I would just buy the customers, turn off basically the KPMG spark product and just move them to a quick book stack.

Blake Oliver: [00:35:55] I imagine that's what they're going to do. It would be stupid if they didn't like. That's just the way to go. Don't.

David Leary: [00:36:00] So, so, so really, then maybe they just acquired the customers and not the actual tech. I mean that's the takeaway.

Blake Oliver: [00:36:07] If I were them, that's what I would do. So yeah, you know, they're just another they're another cloud bookkeeping firm and they're going to do.

David Leary: [00:36:13] Engineers.

Blake Oliver: [00:36:14] As long as they don't get stuck in building their own proprietary software, they're going to do great. That's the mistake that all these people. Will make is.

David Leary: [00:36:21] They? They made it seem like in the press release that they were a little excited because now they can go after smaller businesses like sole proprietors and stuff with this Berkeley software. So maybe they are going to try to keep it around. It doesn't seem like a good idea to me. No, it's KPMG did the experiment in Canada. They ran it this way called Finance Plus in the US they called it KPMG Spark and in the US they had it proprietary and didn't work. So we'll see where this goes. It will be interesting to watch.

Blake Oliver: [00:36:47] We got some good chat going in the live stream. Trinity is on the live stream. Thanks for watching, Trinity. She's talking about credit hours, cost per credit hour at your community college. So if you're looking to get your CPA and you don't want to spend a lot of money to do it, I did community college at Trinity's local state university. It's $885 per credit hour. So, see, that's that's expensive. David, You had to get 30 additional hours. Multiply that by $885. It's a lot of money to get those 30 hours. But at a community college, I think mine was. Trinity says it's $85 per credit hour to attend the K community college system. So yeah, and I think mine was with Santa monica College. I mean, this was a little while ago, but you know, maybe in the 100 to 200 range, 200 to 300, it was a lot cheaper than like a state school or anything like that. So that's great. Okay. You mentioned KPMG, so I'm going to stick with the big four. Let's talk about the Deloitte Walking Dead ad. Do you ever watch The Walking Dead?

David Leary: [00:37:54] David Not me went up, so I'm very familiar with it. It gets advertised a lot.

Blake Oliver: [00:38:00] I'm not good with like hyper violence. And so I've never watched The Walking Dead, although I think I'd probably enjoy it. But also I don't know how many years it's been on. I just I just don't have the energy in me to go back to the beginning of a show that's been on for like a decade, right? Yeah, Well, they had their season, they had their series finale, and Deloitte decided to place an ad on, well, The Walking Dead. And it's a bit perplexing because.

David Leary: [00:38:25] Like, when you say place an ad like it was it was a commercial or was it kind of an embedded in episode type thing?

Blake Oliver: [00:38:30] No, it was a commercial.

David Leary: [00:38:32] A commercial. Okay.

Blake Oliver: [00:38:33] So recruiting, recruiting and the headline on the web page, which hosts the commercial is Wanted Big Juicy Brains. At Deloitte, we combine world class business knowledge with a full command of technology. We work together with our clients to help them design what they want their future to be, and we help them get there, discover what it means to be part of Deloitte. And there's a picture of a zombie at a desk and it's one of the actors from The Walking Dead. And I'm just thinking to myself, what ... [CROSSTALK] already associate like having no life.

David Leary: [00:39:06] Come be a zombie; work for us.

Blake Oliver: [00:39:08] Yeah. Like who thought this was a good idea? Who greenlighted this at Deloitte? I mean, it's just it's. You want to watch the video?

David Leary: [00:39:16] Yeah. Turn it on. Okay. I just don't.

Blake Oliver: [00:39:19] Let's watch the video.

David Leary: [00:39:21] It doesn't pass the smell test at all.

Deloitte Advertisement: [00:39:23] Are you hungry for a new opportunity in a career at Deloitte?

Blake Oliver: [00:39:27] This is a zombie.

Deloitte Advertisement: [00:39:28] Right for you. We collect the biggest, brightest, juiciest brains to help our team shape the future. Discover the chance to put your brains to good use. Helping to nourish some of the world's largest organizations and solve their neediest challenges. Andrea, your 2:00 is here. Fresh Recruits. Email us at recruits at Deloitte.

Blake Oliver: [00:39:55] David, you're speechless.

David Leary: [00:39:56] Well, I think one of those temp higher places, indeed, or whatever. They have a commercial right now which kind of has like a zombie guy. And that, too, Maybe this is kind of the the cool thing right now with advertising agencies. But yeah, this doesn't look like the advertising agency that sold the boardroom on this. It was done out of context. People probably laughed, they giggled. It's kind of funny. But as soon as you put it in context of like, come be a zombie and work for our accounting firm, right?

David Leary: [00:40:24] Wow. Nice find.

Blake Oliver: [00:40:26] It's so weird.

David Leary: [00:40:32] This episode of the Cloud Accounting Podcast is sponsored by Liscio. Blake, and I talk a lot in the show about client experience. A great client experience may be the biggest impact on a firm success. To do that, Liscio is so focused on improving the client experience that they have even gone as far as trademarking and I quote client experience 2.0. This is all in one. Client experience starts with your own firm's experience. By allowing your team to do more together, having everything in one place, like secure messaging, client facing task file exchange and storage, electronic signatures, client invoicing and client emails. When you improve your team's experience, your client experience will follow. With Liscio, clients can use the app on their phone to easily e sign anything, scan and send you documents from anywhere. Send messages and best of all, pay you if you want to save 40% of your time by having everything in one place and start delivering a client experience. 2.0. Head over to Cloudaccountingpodcast.com Promo slash Liscio. That is Cloudaccountingpodcast.promo/liscio.

David Leary: [00:41:41] Oh, before we go, I don't wanna go to app news yet. I want to talk about the best tax system on earth.

Blake Oliver: [00:41:45] The best tax system on Earth.

David Leary: [00:41:48] The best tax system on Earth.

Blake Oliver: [00:41:49] I'm intrigued.

David Leary: [00:41:50] This is in a blog site called People's Policy Project, and the author of this article, Ryan Cooper. He went and went a little vacation. So we'll talk about this and we'll talk about what this best tax system is. So let me give you some background on this. So the Farrows. For us, it's a group of 18 islands in the North Atlantic, about halfway between Norway and Iceland.

Blake Oliver: [00:42:17] Would you say the Faroe Islands, the Faro? Yeah, I think that's how you say it.

David Leary: [00:42:21] But they're part of the kingdom of Denmark, and they're semi-independent. They use the Danish kroner as the currency, but they have most control over their foreign policy and domestic policy. They're not part of the EU. Okay. So they run their own welfare state, and they have their own fishing and trade treaties with neighboring countries. So they're kind of mostly kind of independent. So they basically. Here's how their tax system works. Well. Well, first he does talk about the problems of the American one. Like, right, We pay our employees.

Blake Oliver: [00:42:52] What are you talking about, David? We have a great tax system. It's excellent.

David Leary: [00:42:57] So? So we pay our employees, but then it's our responsibility to either use a service like ADP or on pay, etc., to get the taxes handed over to the government. Filed the right reports. Right. Right. Basically, the way this sounds, I'm going to read this and then reconcile this with you. Yeah. All ordinary wage and tax transactions are processed through a central government system. And tax tax automatically takes out whatever it estimates you owe before the money is deposited into your bank account, along with welfare payments, unemployment benefits, pension payments, and so on. And essentially, you don't have to file a tax return and then employers don't have the burden of payroll processing.

Blake Oliver: [00:43:35] So how does how does it work?

David Leary: [00:43:37] So basically, the way the way here's how I would summarize it. All the businesses in America stop using payroll. They take your your wages break and send it to the IRS. Then the IRS just how they deposited your stimulus money. They just deposit money in your bank account. See, nobody else does. This is the best tax system on earth, though.

Blake Oliver: [00:44:01] That's wild.

David Leary: [00:44:02] So it's really interesting because he goes on in the article to say, remarkably, nobody I spoke with was quite sure about how or why the tax system was developed. It was developed in 1984 with help from the Danish government, but nobody was sure why this was built this way.

Blake Oliver: [00:44:18] That you would send your wages to the tax authority, and then the tax authority would send it to the employees. Yeah. You know, I think that would be the iris would definitely never make any mistakes with our wages if that happened.

David Leary: [00:44:31] And so basically it's.

Blake Oliver: [00:44:33] Why is he smiling at the best?

David Leary: [00:44:34] He does have a benefit. Is this a benefit? So here's here's the one benefit that I thought it was a good idea of this, because right now we have all these welfare agencies, unemployment here, disability here, all these agencies that are stupid money, and they often maintain their own bank accounts that to get money out of the budgets and do all the stuff that goes all away because they just make the adjustments real time before they put it in your bank account, which I thought that was kind of interesting. Mm hmm. But I don't know. My conclusion on this is like, I think he missed the entire point, Right? Which you dictate social policy and behaviors by tax policy. Right. And if you you have a hidden tax policy, you can't really control people's behaviors because they don't see the money coming out or going in. Right. But at the same time, I was thinking, if you control the entire distribution of money for every single individual, you really have the best control ever as a government. You don't have to you don't have to do control through tax policy. So I think it's it's interesting, but it is kind of crazy to think about it that way. Could you imagine, like, yeah, no, all the money goes straight to the IRS, every dollar and then gets pushed back down.

Blake Oliver: [00:45:41] Never going to happen in the land of the free.

David Leary: [00:45:44] This is why we don't have the best tax system on Earth.

Blake Oliver: [00:45:46] Well, speaking of tax systems, Comey and McCabe weren't targeted for tax audits. Tigta finds the Treasury inspector General for Tax Administration. The auditor of the IRS found that actually James Comey and Andrew McCabe were not, in fact targeted by the Trump administration. They just got lucky. They were chosen for audits and sometimes famous people, people in positions of power get audited, too. Yeah. And I believe this because TIGTA really reams the IRS whenever it can. So I'm going to say they would have.

David Leary: [00:46:24] An opportunity here to.

Blake Oliver: [00:46:25] Do it, but not here to do it. And they didn't. Yeah. Yeah, It was the computer program code that selected their audits and it was not individuals who interfered with it.

David Leary: [00:46:34] So that's not conspiracy theory.

Blake Oliver: [00:46:37] We can put that conspiracy theory to rest.

David Leary: [00:46:40] Do you want to jump into opinions?

Blake Oliver: [00:46:41] Yeah. Let's do it.

David Leary: [00:46:48] So Intuit had their Q1 2023 earnings call and earnings report. There's nothing really in the report about the numbers because this is the odd quarter where there's not really big QuickBooks numbers and there's not TurboTax numbers yet. So it's kind of the odd quarter at Intuit, but the conference call was interesting. They do get into a little bit about how the the big theme of the conference call is MailChimp, for sure. Like a lot of MailChimp, MailChimp, MailChimp. The conference call got into a question about front office or back off. It's like, where's the demand from small businesses coming front office being your MailChimp and your marketing stuff in the back office being accounting. And it was interesting because Intuit basically answered and said both are equal, and they went on to say that small businesses don't think about it that way. They think in the entire of a full business platform and to quote unquote, that they really just look to have a platform to be able to grow their business and be able to manage their cash flow. And it reminds me of when Aaron Harris we were at Sage Intacct two in tax ago or Sage transform. I guess it might have been had a different name then because talking about how the accounting system is the actual business, it kind of so it's like almost like Intuit is thinking that way because the small businesses think that way. It's just all my business is all these pieces. It's not front office, back office per se. That was interesting. The other piece that was interesting, they talked about somebody asked about externalizing the live platform. So they have their expert I live platform. Sometimes it feels like it's buzzwords, but they asked if it was going to be externalized for third party developers, and Intuit answered this that it's currently a Horizon three project, which means it's been funded and they're determining what and what can and will be externalized. So instead of just having access to QuickBooks data as a developer or TurboTax data, you might be able to start routing data to pro advisors. I guess I don't know what this means.

Blake Oliver: [00:48:43] But what sort of data would you be able to route?

David Leary: [00:48:47] I don't know. Maybe. Maybe you could have your app match up with a ProAdvisor.

Blake Oliver: [00:48:52] Oh, got it.

David Leary: [00:48:53] I don't know.

Blake Oliver: [00:48:54] Interesting.

David Leary: [00:48:55] But the fact that they're they're thinking of opening that up is kind of interesting. And then the other thing they're talking about, they got really into their payment space because they're excited about payments. Yes. On the QuickBooks side, but MailChimp as well, because they look at MailChimp because MailChimp has ecommerce stores, MailChimp has a lot of front end customer ends. So imagine a bunch of pay with Intuit buttons being all over the place in these front ends, but they're talking about how they're doing more than $2 trillion of invoices that were managed through QuickBooks in fiscal year 2022 to trillion of invoices, and then how they're launching the QuickBooks Business Network, which we've talked about that in the past. And then they went on to say, which is really interesting line. We're also building our own Bill pay functionality in QuickBooks and plan to launch this capability in the future. So if you remember that suite rolled out suite banking with their bill, pay in tact rolled out their bill pay right the bank bit their bill pay that was built in and Emilio's been powering the bill pay that's built into QuickBooks.

Blake Oliver: [00:49:53] Yeah.

David Leary: [00:49:55] So it'll be interesting to see what that means is this If I read these transcripts, that's where all the juices.

Blake Oliver: [00:50:00] I always thought they would do that with the bank account because you can sign up for a bank account in QuickBooks. Like, why wouldn't you be able to pay from that bank account? Have it all run by.

David Leary: [00:50:08] Intuit right now. You basically can. It's.

Blake Oliver: [00:50:10] Amelio Yeah, right now right right. But does into it really want to rely on third parties to deliver a core experience? Probably not.

David Leary: [00:50:19] They do it all over though. So I don't know. We'll see.

Blake Oliver: [00:50:21] We'll see. Audit Club has launched an academy program for accounting students. This is an effort to address the talent shortage, so I'm excited to hear about this. And listeners of the show may have heard my interview with Chris Vanover, the CEO of Audit Club, who's a former audit partner and is aware of a lot of the problems in audit. And he told me in that interview, go check it out in our feed if you haven't heard it. The bonus episode. He told me that it's the business model of accounting firms that is leading to low quality audits. It's that they rely on people with one or two years of experience to do 80% of the work. And how can a fresh college graduate who's never actually done accounting audit the work of experienced accountants?

David Leary: [00:51:05] Because there's a lot of judgment, not it, right?

Blake Oliver: [00:51:07] Like, yeah, yeah, there is a ton. And these people have no judgment. They're idiots. I'm you know, if you're under the age of 25, you're probably an idiot because.

David Leary: [00:51:18] How can you smell fraud if you've never seen fraud.

Blake Oliver: [00:51:20] Right? Yeah. How can you smell fraud if you've never seen fraud? And how can you like how can you audit payroll if you've never run a payroll? You know, I mean.

David Leary: [00:51:28] You actually haven't ran you haven't even gotten a paycheck.

Blake Oliver: [00:51:31] How? Yeah. How can you audit cash if you've never, you know, even processed a check? Like, I don't know, it's it's backwards, right? The auditors should be experienced, not inexperienced. It'd be like, like imagine if you had instead of detectives having to work as. Tops for a while before they become detectives. What if you just, like, made people detectives right out of school and they'd never were cops before? How are they going to know how to collect evidence? You know? How do they know anything? That's so stupid. So anyway, Audit Club is doing their part. They've created Audit Club Academy, and it's going to raise awareness about auditing careers and offer career development opportunities to aspiring CPAs. And the way it works is that while you are in college Audit club Academy cadets there calling them cadets will team with senior level chief auditors to support audit club members, which range from CPA firms to private companies. The program accompanies students through their entire undergraduate and graduate journey, mainly targeting high school seniors and college freshmen. Candidates have until December 15th to apply, and up to five students will be selected for this original class. So that's cool. You're going to get experience doing audits while you're in college so that when you graduate, you actually know how to audit. So this is what.

David Leary: [00:52:47] This is now.

Blake Oliver: [00:52:48] This is what the school should be teaching.

David Leary: [00:52:50] Sorry, Go ahead. One of the airlines is doing that, right? Yeah. Like we talked about in the show, where they're just like, we're just going to train pilots from scratch ourselves through high school and not depend on the market. When I depend on colleges.

Blake Oliver: [00:52:59] I think somebody said that in the chat. I saw it go by that they've got a program to to. You can get your pilot's license, maybe Trinity which said that you can get your pilot's license. Well, you can train to get your pilot pilot's license while you're getting your bachelor's degree. So I think this is really neat, but, you know, funny that they have to do this. But like, really, the colleges should be changing the curriculum to make it more practical. Like why don't you actually have students who are studying audit, actually do audit. And that's what this is doing. So. And they get paid to. I think they get paid. I hope they get paid or maybe they don't get paid. And that's training them to experience being a low level auditor.

David Leary: [00:53:41] So Intuit just more Intuit news. Intuit acquired another company. Via their Credit Karma efforts. They acquired a company called Seed Phi. And when I clicked on, I was like, Oh, it's like a loan loan game. But then after I read about it a little bit, it's kind of an interesting concept. So it's going after people that kind of need instant cash, but they don't have good credit. And so you're going to pay a high interest rate 26%. But how it kind of works is you take a loan, but some of that loan gets put into savings. And then when you pay off the loan, they give you the savings at that point with with interest. So the example they have on the website is you take a $7,000 loan, you're following me here, math. Here we go, $7,000.

Blake Oliver: [00:54:27] $7,000.

David Leary: [00:54:28] Loan, you get $3,500. Now, they put $3,500 into a savings account. You pay back $130 every two weeks to pay off the loan. And because these are like microloans, they're reporting this every week to your credit report and helping you increase your credit score. But then when you pay off the loan after 37 months, you now have $3,500 of savings plus whatever interest you earned on that, on the amount in the savings. So it's it's an interest. You can't touch the savings until the loan is paid. So what's happening is it's helping people build credit and save up some money. And now and the little partnership they've done in the past with Credit Karma, people have raised their credit score up 21 points and as little as 30 to 45 days, and they've built over $10 million in savings. And so Intuit's seeing this as possibly, you know, it will beat the Intuit drum. Empowering prosperity.

Blake Oliver: [00:55:20] Yeah, it's a good way to.

David Leary: [00:55:21] Incentivize to help people. So it's an interesting way to give people, low income people with bad credit loans in a way that actually when they're done paying off a high interest loan, they might actually wind up being ahead.

Blake Oliver: [00:55:32] Well, what's the interest rate on this 26.99%? That's ridiculous. This is predatory.

David Leary: [00:55:40] Well. Well, it is. But I guess there's predatory loans like this where you take the loan, you pay it back and you're just screwed.

Blake Oliver: [00:55:47] Okay, so you're saying this is the least worst option?

David Leary: [00:55:51] Yes. Like it helps you build your credit score and you have a little say. You got wind up having a savings. So maybe you don't have to take this loan, a loan like this ever again. It helps you turn the corner. Possibly. I don't know. It's just different. And hence seed. Right. This is seeding you to.

Blake Oliver: [00:56:04] I mean, the thing that would really solve the problem we have in this country is if people could just learn to live within their means and not live paycheck to paycheck, but like a huge percentage of the population of this country lives paycheck to paycheck. And I understand people have reasons for that. But ultimately it comes down to what do you really need to be happy, Right? I'm very fortunate to live in a low cost area, to have moved to a low cost area where now I can easily live within my means. But I also don't have expensive tastes like I have trouble. I know people who go out to meals at fancy restaurants and spend hundreds of dollars or even thousands of.

David Leary: [00:56:42] Dollars per person.

Blake Oliver: [00:56:43] I live in Scottsdale. It's totally doable, right? I can't do that. I can't stomach it. You know, and and I don't get it. I would do that if I was, you know, fabulously rich and wealthy, I suppose if if it was, you know, But but it's it's. Yeah. You know, I was listening, I was on Twitter and every now and then on Twitter, you come across like one of those tweets that really teaches you something and educates you something. And it was. Munger Is it Charlie Munger? You know, I'm talking.

David Leary: [00:57:14] About Warren Buffett's buddy. Yeah, business.

Blake Oliver: [00:57:17] Partner, I guess he was. Yeah. He lives in Omaha. And I'm going to find I'm going to find this video for you because I want to play it because I've been thinking about it. It's about greed and envy. And it was a tweet. Here it is.

David Leary: [00:57:32] A good close here.

Blake Oliver: [00:57:33] Yeah. This will this will take us out here. Here we go.

Charlie Munger: [00:57:37] The world is not driven by greed. It's driven by envy. And so. The fact that everybody's five times better off than they used to be. They take it for granted. All they think about is somebody else has had more now and it's not fair that he should have it and they don't. That's the reason that God came down and told Moses that you couldn't envy your neighbor's wife or even his donkey. I mean, even the old Jews were having trouble with envy. And so it's built into the nature of things. It's weird for somebody my age because I was. In the middle of the Great Depression. The hardship was unbelievable. I was safer walking around Omaha in the evening than I am in my own neighborhood in Los Angeles after all this great wealth and so forth. So and I have no way of doing anything about it. I can't change the fact that a lot of people are very unhappy and feel very abused after everything's improved by about 600% because there's still somebody else who has more. I have conquered envy in my own life. I don't envy anybody. I don't give a damn what somebody else has but other people are doing.

David Leary: [00:58:52] That's easy to do when you're worth billions of dollars.

Blake Oliver: [00:58:55] He does. He is worth $2 billion. So it's.

David Leary: [00:58:57] Okay.

Blake Oliver: [00:58:58] But you got to.

David Leary: [00:58:58] Remember, I promise you, I won't envy anybody when I'm at $2 billion either.

Blake Oliver: [00:59:01] But you.

David Leary: [00:59:02] Will.

Blake Oliver: [00:59:04] But you will, David. You will. Because there's always somebody with more money than you. And there's always somebody with more money than you who has a bigger yacht. Who has a bigger house. Who has a bigger company. And even if you are the person with the most like let's say you're well, is Elon Musk still the richest man in the world right now? He doesn't seem very happy. There's always somebody to say sternly. Yeah, and I would say that envy. I used to say greed is the problem in our profession because we overwork ourselves. At least the partners overwork themselves for money. You don't have to work 80 hours a week. You don't have to work 60 hours a week because you know, the average partner, as we discussed in our last episode, which just dropped the average accounting firm, partner, CPA firm, partner, I should say, is making close to half a million dollars a year. And. If you could learn to live with less. You wouldn't have to work as hard, you know. But I think the problem with accounting is that we we spend so much time counting money that we become obsessed with it.

David Leary: [01:00:18] And I don't think it has to do with just money, though. I think I think this this envious thing. We live in a society now where it's like the impact, like TikTok and Instagram and all of these things like live life this way. I mean, even, for example, a conference we're going to connect next week and there's, what, 50 breakout sessions, 100 breakout sessions. And essentially every breakout session should just be called How to Be Like Me, because that's what those breakout sessions are, right? It's somebody up on stage talking about what they did. Yeah. And then now you feel envious and like, I need to do some of that stuff at my firm. Maybe. Maybe nobody needs to do anything. I don't know.

Blake Oliver: [01:00:52] I think that people. Well, maybe I, maybe I should pitch this as a talk for quick disconnect. I don't know if they'll accept it, but like, the way to fix your firm is just to, you know, be okay with making less money free up capacity. Right? Don't worry about trying to increase revenue and make time for yourself.

David Leary: [01:01:13] I'd be.

Blake Oliver: [01:01:13] Happy. You know.

David Leary: [01:01:14] That's a whole conference. But it's a whole conference. And you. You teach people how to fire clients. You teach people how to live within their means. You might have something here. The be happy conference.

Blake Oliver: [01:01:26] Yeah, the to be happy. And that's the thing that I struggle with is like, you know, I went into accounting because I knew that I loved music, but I didn't want to have to struggle financially to be a musician. And I said, I'm okay with that. I don't need to do this as my career. I'm going to do something else that might be not at all, you know, like accounting. I liked I liked accounting not because it was like creatively satisfying to me at the time. Music was right, but I liked that it was paid well and I could do it on my own schedule. And I did find it interesting enough and I don't know. So maybe that's and I just needed to make enough money to be able to do music on the side. That was my goal originally, so I never had this. Like, I need to make a lot of money. I need to be rich, you know, anything like that. And I think that's given me some helpful perspective. But I feel like the way accounting programs teach students is like there's this mentality, especially at the top programs where it's like, you got to go into the big four and you're going to work your ass off and you're going to make partner and you're going to make all this money. And, you know, it's like. It's not worth it. I think it's pretty clear it's not worth it. And it's getting clearer to the younger generation that's not worth it. So I don't know. Let's let's learn to be happy with what we've got. Right.

David Leary: [01:02:48] It sounds like you have a whole new podcast starting. Yeah. Bakes Blake's beliefs.

Blake Oliver: [01:02:52] Thanks, everyone, for joining us today. As a reminder to our listeners, we stream on YouTube, subscribe to our channel to get notified when we go live. It's typically on Fridays and now with the time change for the next six months or so, it'll be at 9 a.m. Pacific, 12 p.m. Eastern. And you can also get credit for listening to The Cloud Accounting Podcast. You can get CPE credit on the earmark app. Download Earmark CPE on the App Store or Google Play Store. Locate our episodes and take the quiz. If you've already watched this episode or listen to this episode, you can just take the quiz and get your free CPE credit. We're growing like.

David Leary: [01:03:28] Crazy because this keeps getting lost because I'll see people I know our listeners and I know are using that earmark app, but they're EIA's and they're always like, Oh, I just can't use it to get my credit. Yes. Ea enrolled agents can use the earmark app to get IRS approved CPE credit.

Blake Oliver: [01:03:46] Yes. Now, we don't have a ton of courses yet because only federal tax courses and ethics courses count. But we got some and we're adding more. We're actually launching a podcast that's going to be all about federal tax.

David Leary: [01:03:59] Hopefully stay tuned in January.

Blake Oliver: [01:04:01] Yeah. And so it's going to be every two weeks federal tax updates. I'm so excited. So EA is you'll be able to get all the CPE you need in just listening to that show and for free on the earmark app. So I think that's it for me. David, where can people find you online?

David Leary: [01:04:18] I'm on all the socialists, just @DavidLeary and yourself.

Blake Oliver: [01:04:21] Blake I'm @BlakeTOliver on Twitter and send us an email. We are a cloud accounting podcast at earmark. David I'll see you here next week.

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