The Accounting Podcast

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David Leary: [00:00:04] And as of a half hour ago when we were recording. State regulators officially closed Silicon Valley Bank. Oh, wow. It's a failed first FDIC insured bank to fail this year.

Paul Barnhurst: [00:00:16] Oh, wow. They shut them down. That's they are out of California. And I know there are a lot of state regulators. There are a lot stricter.

David Leary: [00:00:23] But this is this is this is.

Paul Barnhurst: [00:00:26] Oh, this is FDIC that. Wow.

Blake Oliver: [00:00:33] Hello and welcome to The Cloud Accounting Podcast. I'm Blake Oliver.

David Leary: [00:00:37] And I'm David Leary.

Blake Oliver: [00:00:38] And we are coming to you live from the OnPay Recording Studio. David, we just got off a call with Ken Bishop, the president and CEO of NASBA. That's going to be a bonus interview episode that we released into this feed. David, your instant reaction?

David Leary: [00:00:55] Well, for starters, you're starting to turn us into these Twitch steamers, like we're doing two straight hours of streaming now. Like. Like we're never going to stop streaming. We're just gonna have a stream going all the time. But no, my head. The interview was great. Actually. It was. I'm really thankful that Ken Bishop came on. He's the president of NASBA, but he said something that completely blew my mind because, you know, talking about this right now, it's a three stool. You get some experience, you got some extra education on the CPA exam. And he said and I had to make him repeat it because it's blown my mind so much. The CPA exam is just proof that you're kind of an entry level person. So when you get those three letters, like if in my my now obviously I work inside the industry, I know different accountants. I think some are idiots, some aren't idiots. Okay, I get that. But send your email to Blake@blakeoliver.com now. So but if I think about consumers, right, they see those three letters, they assume, you know what the hell you're doing. If I go to a doctor's office and they have doctor in front of their name on the wall, I assume they're competent. So I just cannot believe that's the take because the market does not think that so is the brand. That is not true. But obviously when the president of NASBA says we give a test to certify you as a CPA and it basically just means you're you're good entry level one. Yeah. Sorry. I'll stop now. Stop. No, no. I mean, I'm not going to sleep for days because of this. Yeah, that was.

Blake Oliver: [00:02:16] That was really interesting. And I should say for our listeners, welcome, Paul Barnhurst to the program. Paul No, that's all right. Paul Barnhurst is the guy hosts the podcast today. So great to have you with us. Welcome.

David Leary: [00:02:31] Cpe Thank you.

Paul Barnhurst: [00:02:32] For having me. I'm not a CPA, so I'm enjoying this conversation.

Blake Oliver: [00:02:36] All right. You're you've got your popcorn out. You are eating it as as this goes on. Well, we'll get back to I still want to hear your thoughts on the profession and the CPA thing. The CPA, non CPA as an fpna person, right? Yeah, I would love to hear that. But David, let's get back to this for a moment. I came away from that conversation thinking, Wow, we have really screwed up as a profession by replacing the education requirement with an education. Wait, replacing the experience requirement with an education requirement. I mean, we have one year of experience required to be a CPA, but five years of education. And to me it should be at, you know, two years of experience, three years of experience. Right? That's way more valuable. And I think there's a big difference between somebody who's worked in a firm for a year and somebody who's been there for three years, and we can totally bring down the cost of getting the CPA by reducing the education requirement, you know, opening it up to people who are non accounting students. If they can pass the CPA exam and just make them work for three years in a firm, something like that. Right. And it solves the talent crisis because now firms have people who are going to come in and work. I don't know. That seems simple.

David Leary: [00:03:45] Well, it would make it. I mean, I'm sorry. I can't even put it together a thought, but it's really. It's the working right. And if that's the case, maybe the exam should not be given until you've worked for three years. Maybe. I don't like to prove that. You don't know. It feels like. Are they prematurely giving out those letters? That's what's going through my brain right now. I don't know. Well.

Blake Oliver: [00:04:06] We'll put that interview again. Interview with Ken Bishop, president of NASBA in the Feed as a bonus episode following this one. This one. But, you know, let's let's talk about something else, right? We've been talking about CPA stuff for an hour. Let's talk with Paul Barnhurst, CPA guy. Paul, will you give us a little bit of your background in financial planning and analysis? Tell us, you know, what is it? What do you do?

Paul Barnhurst: [00:04:31] So I'll run you through my background. So, you know, I actually started my career in procurement for the government pretty quickly, realized I didn't see myself writing contracts for the rest of my life, you know, went back to school, got a finance degree as well as a master of science information management, went to work for American Express and initially working kind of it's called a financial analyst, but I was really doing report writing and an opportunity came to get promoted and it was an A I really didn't know what that was, but I'm like, I want to get paid more. I'm going to apply for this job. I know the hiring manager. I feel like a lot some of the work I'm doing relates to it. So they hired me and I've been in Fpna ever since. So I worked for American Express and Business Travel and then in their prepaid division, doing budgeting, forecasting, business partnering and all the all the things. And then I went to work for a global automotive company in the SaaS space called Solara and worked for them for about five years, managed a couple different divisions in the automotive space in both aftermarket and dealerships. Then I went to work for Digicert, a digital certificate company. They're global cybersecurity for about a year. And then a little over a year ago, I started my own business. And today, you know, I host a podcast, as you mentioned, and today all things Fpna. I also do a lot of content creation work with a number of different vendors in the software space, particularly planning platforms, tools, EPM, CPMs, whatever you want to call them. You know, I've seen demos of probably 70 over the last year tools. I've talked to 50 plus CEOs, and then I also do training. I do Excel and A and data visualization primarily awesome.

Blake Oliver: [00:06:08] And I'm putting the link to the Today podcast in the live stream. Thanks everyone, who's joined us live. As a reminder to our podcast listeners, you can subscribe to us on YouTube, get notified when we go live and chat with us and ask questions. So if you've got questions for Paul, put them in the chat.

David Leary: [00:06:25] Like you missed the opportunity for your very first question to Paul because you have a you can get a data point here. Paul decided he wanted to make more money. So your question should be how come you didn't go get your CPA? Oh yeah, yeah. And he's supposed to say because of 150 hours required.

Blake Oliver: [00:06:41] Oh, I see. I don't know. Did that have anything to do with it?

Paul Barnhurst: [00:06:44] Paul I toyed with getting my CPA when I was working for American Express just because there were some opportunities. I'm like, Oh, that role would be interesting, but I didn't have a CPA. But for me, it came to that point. I was already in my 30s. I'd already done an MBA, I'd already done a master of science and information management. I'm like, Do I really want to go spend all the time to, you know, study and prepare when it's not needed for most the roles I have, right? So for me, if I started my career over, I might I might have gone the CPA route because I can see some benefit doing a couple of years of audit, all those type of things. I am like both of you. I don't really quite understand the 150 hour rule. You know, I've heard you guys talk about it. I've known about that for a long time. And I don't know, it's odd the way the CPA works to me compared to other professions and how they typically do it. And it sounds like it's creating some challenges in the field.

Blake Oliver: [00:07:33] But are there certifications in Fpna that people go get?

Paul Barnhurst: [00:07:38] There are so I mean, not not a lot of people get them right now, but there is the best one out. I don't know the best one, but the accredited one out there, which is very good, is from the Association for Finance Professionals. So they have two certifications. They have the the certified Treasury professional, which is very common. They have over 10,000 people that have that. And then they did more recently one for Fpna, which they have a work requirement. You take two tests. I'm actually studying to do the certification right now. Take the first test at the end of this month. You know, in addition to that, you know, you see some people that go get the FMI, if you're familiar with that financial modeling institute, they have a modeling certification, some are CPA, some do CFA. But there's really not an industry standard out there. The closest to an you know, like I said, the accredited is the AFP, which is becoming bigger. They're growing as an organization.

Blake Oliver: [00:08:32] Got it. And so you're working on that one right now. What do you have to do to get it?

Paul Barnhurst: [00:08:38] There's a work requirement and I'm trying to remember if it's 1 or 2 years and then there's two tests. You have to take the first test. They waive if you have your CPR. Okay. And you only have to take the second test. If you don't have your CPR, you have to take both tests.

Blake Oliver: [00:08:54] And this is the certified corporate professional. Yeah, it's called.

Paul Barnhurst: [00:08:57] The FEMA certification, I think now is the acronym.

Blake Oliver: [00:09:02] Afpak. I kind of like that's that's catchy.

Paul Barnhurst: [00:09:04] Yeah, they changed it. It used to be something else. I think it used to be certified finance professional or something.

Blake Oliver: [00:09:10] So I guess since we're a current events show, we talk about accounting and technology and now it's finance and technology because you're on the program what what is hot in the intersection of technology and finance?

Paul Barnhurst: [00:09:21] Well, you know, I think what's really interesting right now is to watch what's going on with Silicon Valley Bank. I mean, you've all seen the news. The one the latest I read about an hour or two ago is they couldn't raise capital, so they've already hired a firm to sell them. And they're starting talks of who's going to buy them. And so I think that's huge just in the technology space because there's so many start ups and CFO technology right now. You know, how does that all play out? How does that impact them? What, you know, how does it spook the market? So it'll be really scary to watch.

David Leary: [00:09:53] I feel like I was looking at that this morning and it put me back to sitting in my car in the Home Depot parking lot in 2008 when I realized like, Oh, this is kind of a big deal that's happening. And, you know, Silicon Valley Bank. Yes. Lots of the they're the darling and British companies will foreign companies, when they come here to be a startup, they'll go get a bank account there and they'll get their San Francisco cell phone number. Right. So they have a US presence. So not only do they do their banking with Silicon Valley Bank, right. And their their true banking, Silicon Valley Bank offers rails and APIs and technology. So a lot of these apps that we use, payments apps, Emilio's running on part of their rails that were uninvolved. They're on Chase and they're on Silicon Valley Bank. So there's apps that are out there that are running on this tech stack as well. And that's what really worries me is like if something goes down, like are people actually asked on Twitter today, like, are there going to be issues like are people seeing money movement issues anywhere? Because there's lots of apps that are built on their tech stack as well. It's not just a banking relationship.

Paul Barnhurst: [00:10:54] Yeah, no, it is fascinating. I've seen Peter Thiel has recommended all his portfolio companies pull their money out because there's no harm in doing it. Just be safe. I know a few other.

Blake Oliver: [00:11:04] So arguing for a run on the bank. Great. Yeah.

Paul Barnhurst: [00:11:07] I thought about that as well. I'm like, no, there is some. Your portfolio companies may be fine, but there's a contagion that happens, right? If the bank has a run, how does that spill to the overall market? And that's what will be interesting to watch. And how does that, you know, freeze capital? Are people a lot less likely to invest in tech companies? It's already slowed down, You know, So is there even a bigger concern around runway? So I think, you know, what will be interesting is to watch this unfold, see how quickly they can find a buyer. Right. Because I'm sure markets want this to be resolved as quick as possible.

David Leary: [00:11:39] So like I put a link in the chat for you to bring up and maybe Paul can help us digest this a little bit. Essentially, it's a breakdown of some of these medium post about what's going on with Silicon Valley Bank and they have great graphs of how a traditional bank is versus what the way Silicon Valley Valley bank balance sheet was. And maybe Paul being the guy can explain the lack of planning here or maybe what's going on.

Blake Oliver: [00:12:04] So there's a chart here. I like this. Tldr how banks work and we've got a chart showing assets with cash investments and loans and the cash is actually a very small amount. Yep. And then we've got the liabilities, which is equity debt and customer deposits and customer deposits are the largest amount. So yeah, you want to give us like a little refresher on how these, how these entities make money, how they work, why, why they're what the risk is. Yeah.

Paul Barnhurst: [00:12:34] I mean typically a bank, right? They're going to pay you something for your money a lot less than they're going to loan it for. And they're going to also loan more than they have to keep. So typically a bank might keep 10% of those deposits. You know, there's some kind of ratio. The bank, the federal government says you have to hold so much in reserve, the rest you can lend out, we're seeing of the cash. So. Right. If let's say I give them $1,000, they can lend out 900 of that. And so they'll lend that and they'll keep $10. And so they can keep growing those loans with having a very low amount of deposits being held. And so that's where the run concern comes, right? Look at the cash they have. If that cash all goes away, they got access to markets. And if they can't access the markets, that's what you have a bank run or, you know, the bank either goes under, somebody acquires it or the government steps in. I mean, if we all remember 2008, that's what happened with a lot of these, is they ran out of cash. They had bad investments. They were going belly up and they couldn't meet their obligations.

Blake Oliver: [00:13:36] So Peter Thiel tells his portfolio companies, pull your money out of SVB. They go pull their money out. Now SVP SVP is out of cash, so they have to sell investments to raise cash. And they sold at a huge loss. Apparently they have all these bonds that they've issued, I imagine, to tech companies, right?

Paul Barnhurst: [00:13:55] Yeah. So actually, mostly what they sold were treasuries. Oh, really? They had like 30 year treasuries and they sold them. They sold them before Peter Thiel asked for a run that came after. So what spooked everybody is they decided to take a loss. They wanted to, you know, get some more short term capital. And so they sold a bunch of bonds at a $1.8 billion loss. Wow. And then the market got spooked and at the same time, they tried to raise some capital, they issued some securities and they couldn't raise anything. And so that's when they announced this morning they are looking to be bought because they recognize, you know, it's scaring everybody right now and they're shut off to the market.

Speaker4: [00:14:35] Mhm.

Blake Oliver: [00:14:36] So how do you think this is going to play out, Paul? Do you have any, you know, crystal ball you can peer into? I mean.

Paul Barnhurst: [00:14:42] Right. My crystal ball is probably as murky as anyone else's, but my guess would be in the next 24 to 96 hours, they get acquired by another bank. I mean, I don't think there's a scenario where they collapse and they just go away. I think the impact is too big and they have too valuable of a portfolio for that to happen. But I don't I don't think they survive this. I think there'll be a new entity.

Speaker4: [00:15:06] Mm hmm.

Blake Oliver: [00:15:08] Well, David, I like always getting listener mail, so I wanted to share one of these tweets that we got. Todd Shanel Shanel said at cloudaccountingpodcast.com One of the most important things owners, partners and managers can do to retain talent is to stop doing business with clients who are disorganized, unresponsive, excessively whiny, unreasonably demanding, and or abusive. Protect your staff. And I wanted to call that out because I.

David Leary: [00:15:38] Got fired from my.

Blake Oliver: [00:15:39] Firm. Is that why you got fired from your firm? Yeah. I don't know. David, were you a difficult client? Were you unreasonably demanding? Were you excessively.

Paul Barnhurst: [00:15:47] Whiny?

David Leary: [00:15:47] David Lots of cap, all caps, emails all the time. Did.

Blake Oliver: [00:15:51] Did you, did you? Yeah. Did you use your podcast voice when you were talking to them?

David Leary: [00:15:57] Well, I'm gonna ask for some money back now that I know that it doesn't matter. The CPA is an equal now. Could get some money back. Continue on. Sorry.

Blake Oliver: [00:16:07] No, no, that's all right. I just wanted to share that to make sure we got to it. And of course, you can always send your emails to cloudaccountingpodcast.com earmarked.com. You can also tweet at us. We are at Cloud Act Pod on Twitter and we love hearing from you. David, what else is top of mind for you? Like, I didn't have time to go through my articles like I normally do because we were in that interview with Ken Bishop. I do have stories about remote work. I've got Oh, here's a really good one. Fraud. And Paul, this might be a good one for us to discuss with you. Financial crime, white collar crime. Most corporate fraud goes undetected. Yes. This is a story that caught my attention on CFO Brew, which is A.

David Leary: [00:16:52] That's because most of the CPAs are one year of experience doing the audits.

Blake Oliver: [00:16:56] Well, that's one way to think about it, right? I think that's definitely a theory. Cfo Brew is a subsidiary or a sub newsletter of morning brew. So you can subscribe to this, get their their emails in your inbox. And this one really caught my attention. So the story here by Drew Adamek is I'll just read the beginning. A steady, constant undercurrent of fraud and dubious accounting tricks seem to run through the corporate world, possibly destroying 830 billion of equity value a year, according to a new academic study. The problem appears to run deep. According to the study, 41% 41% of companies allegedly misrepresent their financial reports. That's 41% allegedly misrepresent their financial reports. 10% of large publicly traded companies are allegedly committing securities fraud and two thirds of corporate fraud goes undetected. I mean. That's kind of crazy, right? 10% of large publicly traded companies are allegedly committing securities fraud, according to the study. And so you wonder, well, how did they figure this out? Right. Because saying that fraud is undetected is like proving a negative. How do you know how much you're not finding? And the way that this study did it, the way these this researcher did at Alexander Dyck, professor of finance at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. They looked at what happened after Enron. So when Arthur Andersen collapsed, you know, because the auditors didn't totally miss the massive accounting fraud going on at Enron, there were new auditors and investors that came in to analyze the firms, former clients. And so they compared what the situation was before Enron with the Arthur Andersen clients and the ones after, because the new auditors were, you know, more rigorous, Obviously, they realized, oh, we'd better check these work papers. And then they they use the differences to estimate the amount of fraud in the economy at large. So just think about that. 41% of companies are engaging in or are misrepresenting their financial reports and 10% are actually committing securities fraud. So, Paul, I want to get your reaction to that.

Paul Barnhurst: [00:19:13] You know, really high numbers, it's surprising that they're saying 41% of companies, you have to read more into that. But definitely, I mean, I've seen things in my career that are questionable at best, right? I can remember and sometimes downright, I would say, illegal. I remember having a leader of one of the businesses I worked at saying you have to pick and choose what payments you recognize so you could hit budget and hold things over for the next year. And I'm like, No, no, that's not quite how accounting works, you know? Yeah. Or so I've seen. I've seen things like that. I've had contracts hidden from me so they could recognize the money the next year. Didn't find out until the next year because they only wanted to recognize a portion of it so they could hit budget. So there's I mean, I think there's a lot of planning that goes on because. Right. You're incentivized to hit the budget, not to follow the accounting rules. You're incentivized to hit the quarter numbers. And if a lot of people if they think they can get away with it, unfortunately, we'll do it. You know, and I've had to raise more than one issue over my career. I've been asked to do journal entries one time that I wasn't comfortable with. And I said, No, I won't do them. Someone else wants to process them and put their name on them. And, you know, Controllership wants to sign off on it. That's fine. But I'm not I refuse to put my name on those journal entries.

Blake Oliver: [00:20:25] Unfortunately, not everybody is as ethical as that, and they're willing to do it or overlook it. I think the thing about that 41% number that kind of goes to accounting is, well, so these companies are misrepresenting their financial reports like the auditors are missing. It is what that's saying. Right. That that like you said, David, these auditors with one with no experience, sometimes write 80, 80% of the work in audit is done by people with like less than two years of experience. And that was from Chris from Audit club gave us that stat, which makes sense, right? Because, you know, most auditors are right out of school. They don't know what they're doing. How are they going to find any of this stuff? And so you wonder. Sorry, go ahead, David.

David Leary: [00:21:13] Oh, so that article because this just ties back to breaking news. So that article said how many corporations are putting securities fraud?

Blake Oliver: [00:21:21] 10% of large publicly traded companies.

Paul Barnhurst: [00:21:23] Publicly and 41% overall.

David Leary: [00:21:26] Okay. Silicon Valley CEO.

Blake Oliver: [00:21:28] Okay, this is important. The 41% number is not that they're they're not committing fraud, but their their financial reports are misstated or.

Paul Barnhurst: [00:21:35] Sure. Yeah. Which is different. Yeah. There's there's misrepresentation.

David Leary: [00:21:39] All right. So then this is going to tie back to this article. So four weeks within the last two weeks, the CEO of Silicon Valley Bank sold 3.5, $7 million worth of stock. And as of a half hour ago when we were recording. State regulators officially closed Silicon Valley Bank.

Blake Oliver: [00:21:55] Oh, wow.

David Leary: [00:21:56] It's a failed first FDIC insured bank to fail this year.

Paul Barnhurst: [00:22:01] Oh, wow. They shut them down. That's cool. They are out of California. And I know there are a lot the state regulators there are a lot stricter.

David Leary: [00:22:09] But this is FDI. This is this is oh, this.

Paul Barnhurst: [00:22:11] Is FDIC that. Wow.

David Leary: [00:22:14] And in my you know, this goes to that game, right? Like, how convenient that he got this cash out, you know, two weeks ago.

Blake Oliver: [00:22:20] So this could this could be a real problem for startups because FDIC insurance, standard insurance is only $250,000 per depositor per bank. And there's a lot of startups that could have millions of dollars at SVB.

Paul Barnhurst: [00:22:36] Yeah. And what I'm reading, it says so the you know, the FDIC said on March 10th, the closure was ordered order was issued by the California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation.

Blake Oliver: [00:22:49] Oh, and they made FDIC the.

Paul Barnhurst: [00:22:50] Which is all named which is also named the FDIC as the receiver. Right. Because they're federal deposits. So they're the one who's going to have to step in and manage it all. But California is the one who made the decision.

Speaker4: [00:23:01] Interesting.

Blake Oliver: [00:23:03] Yeah, this could be a real problem.

Paul Barnhurst: [00:23:06] It I can't imagine it won't be right. It's just a question of how big of a problem is it going to be.

David Leary: [00:23:12] You said the second largest bank failure after the 2008 collapse of Washington Mutual.

Paul Barnhurst: [00:23:17] I was wondering if it was Wachovia or Washington Mutual. I couldn't remember which one was bigger. Those were the two big ones, right, from 2008, I think.

Speaker4: [00:23:23] Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:23:24] Man. I really hope that none of the critical apps in the accounting and finance ecosystem are, you know, lose access to their deposits because of this. That could create some havoc for us. I wonder I mean, I know that I worked for a company that had SVB. We were banked at SVB. I think everybody does pretty much right. All the it's like all the Silicon Valley startups, all that. I think they said.

Paul Barnhurst: [00:23:51] 43% of startups have a relationship with Silicon Valley Bank. Now, if you go to tech, it's probably like 90%, right? 80. It's much higher.

Speaker4: [00:23:59] Yeah.

David Leary: [00:24:01] Well, I mean, in the last 8 or 9 years, that's decade. Any time you've gone out with any startup and they offer to buy dinner or pay for drinks, they always pull out an SD card because it's kind of like the thing to have like, look, we're tied to a Silicon Valley bank, right? Like, it's so many.

Blake Oliver: [00:24:19] So going back in our ADHD manner to the discussion of fraud, Trinity says the young auditors might find it, but they might be gaslighted into believing that they can't possibly that can't possibly be what that means because they're not confident in their own abilities yet. Right. And this I.

Paul Barnhurst: [00:24:38] Have a story, too, that if I can real quick. Oh, yes, absolutely. I worked I worked with somebody I, I know somebody that had mentioned one time, you know, a company that had been public. Some people were like, how would you know? How is the company ever public because of some of the, you know, controls and things they had. He goes, the company was real careful what they showed to the auditors. And I thought that was really interesting. When you talk about gaslighting, like, you know, trying to present what they wanted them to see because, you know, there were some real challenges with this organization. And I think if you had very experienced auditors, they may not have been able to pass. Right. And so I definitely think that happens. The gaslighting. I don't know if, you know, gaslighting is the right word, but there's a certain amount of trying to be very careful in what you see and how you present it and whatever you want to call it to allow you to, you know, look better than you may really be when you truly pull back all the covers.

Blake Oliver: [00:25:31] Yeah, well, so I this is not the same, but I was part of the team responding to an IRS audit, and the CPA leading that engagement said, Do not give them anything. They do not ask for. Do not volunteer anything, Do not say anything. Only exactly what they ask for and no more. Yeah, right. And if you do that to a young auditor, they don't know what to ask. They don't know what's missing.

Paul Barnhurst: [00:25:58] Yeah, right, exactly.

Blake Oliver: [00:26:02] Well, staying on fraud, I'm just going to go through my list of fraud stories here. This is a fun one. I saw this on NPR. There is no whiskey in bottles of fireball cinnamon. So customers are suing for fraud. Now, if you thought that fireball actually contained whiskey, I question your cognitive abilities. But to be fair, they did advertise it as such. Here's the story. Consumers are suing Sazerac Company, Inc, the makers of Fireball Whiskey for fraud and misrepresentation, as the mini bottles of the alcoholic beverage don't actually contain whiskey. The smaller bottles named Fireball Cinnamon are made from a blend of malt beverage and wine. Oh, that's gross. While the whiskey based products are called Fireball cinnamon whiskey, according to the company website, these are 99 cent bottles sold in 170,000 stores, including gas stations and grocery stores. And it prompted some customers to wonder what products they presumed to contain liquor were doing there. So a combination of, I guess. I mean, is it fraud or is it false advertising? It's more false because.

David Leary: [00:27:09] They basically they had they had to brew a different product to sell in those stores. Uh, and that's basically what they did. I think it's.

Paul Barnhurst: [00:27:16] More on the line of false advertising. I mean, they're still providing a product. They were people aware. It's like, were they really trying to deceive people thinking it really was whiskey or was it just a marketing scheme and they really shouldn't use that name.

Blake Oliver: [00:27:33] I guess the takeaway here is that often fraud is used out of the technical meaning of it, right? The meaning that we understand anything that is deceitful can be called fraud in in the public eye. But it is not often. And that's how it got into my feed. David.

David Leary: [00:27:52] I have a story and I got Paul. It's a little bit of a news story, but I don't want to shift straight to AP News, but I think with Paul here, I wanted the opportunity to ask it. I'm going to put this in the chat here. Okay. So Ramp is a company they basically it's like expense tracking, right? Yep.

Paul Barnhurst: [00:28:07] Like divvy other companies like that.

David Leary: [00:28:09] Right. Well, they just raised $5 million to build a user and revenue forecasting platform. And so one thing and you said you've spoken Paul to 60, 70 apps. I have. When I was vetting actually the QuickBooks App Store. I know I spoke to 50 quote unquote dashboard or FBA style type of apps. And the part I never could get my head around is the revenue part because unless they're a subscription business, which most the vast majority of, let's just say businesses on QuickBooks or Xero are not like, you don't know what invoice is. If you can't see the invoices coming, how can you project the revenue as an app or as an app and a person like can you kind of speak to like, what are they going to build with this $5 million? Yeah, if you could speculate.

Paul Barnhurst: [00:28:52] I will speculate that they're going to go SaaS some kind of revenue forecasting tool around SaaS, But we'll see. But I mean, yeah, it gets difficult, right? Forecasting. There are some things you can do if you're any kind of sales business where you have a sales leadership team, you're going to make assumptions around, okay, what is each sales person? What can they realistically sell? What's their quota, What's their ramp time? You're also going to make assumptions around, okay, how many marketing, you know, if we spend, you know, 5 million on Facebook that results in 5000 qualified leads and you can kind of, you know, come up with different metrics if you're an e-commerce site, right? If I spend this much advertising, I should be able to drive this many people to the site. Here's my click through rate. So I think.

David Leary: [00:29:35] It's data that's not accounting data, though. You're using other data, correct?

Paul Barnhurst: [00:29:39] Yeah, A lot of it's going to be other than accounting, you're not rarely Do you mean outside of using historical to project forward, which I would argue is not the best way to do it in most cases, especially with all the uncertainty you're using other leading indicators. You want operational metrics, not accounting data to forecast your revenue. In most situations, not always the case, but I'd say 95% of the time or more. Give me the operational metrics all day long over the accounting data to forecast.

Blake Oliver: [00:30:07] And this to me is why nobody in accounting has built an automated forecasting tool that actually works. Yet I have not seen one. Yeah, Excel is still king. Now there are tools that basically take what Excel does and put it on rails, but it's essentially the same concept. But nobody has built, you know, QuickBooks has tried to do it. Xero has tried to do it. They've tried to build these cash flow forecasting tools and they don't work. And the reason they don't work is because they're not bringing in the operational data. And if you're just forecasting based on revenue that came in last month, last week or whatever.

David Leary: [00:30:42] Look at my old invoices.

Blake Oliver: [00:30:43] Yeah. And it's not like revenue in most businesses follows the historical trend, right? Yeah, exactly. So you have to bring in the operational data, but doing that is really challenging.

Paul Barnhurst: [00:30:54] So and that's why you're seeing more and more tools do it. If you look at what's called third generation tools, you know, most of them are bringing in CRM data in addition to your ERP and your HR data. I just saw one the other day, a tool, I think it's called Bainbridge, if I remember right, there's another one, Blue Copa, but there's a couple specifically focused on e-commerce. I know one of them brings in your Spotify data, right? I had another one. Korm Software does a tool for oil companies, and so they bring in the data around your all your different drills in your sites, which is similar to CRM data. So you're seeing more and more bringing in whatever that key data is that you need to forecast revenue because it's not always the CRM, right? For most companies, it's the CRM. But you have, you know, different companies that need different things brought in to understand that from an operational perspective. And without it, you know, outside of doing top down, it's really or just using a historical trend line, which usually gets you in trouble. It's just a question of when, not if it's really hard to forecast.

Blake Oliver: [00:31:56] So that's interesting. It seems like there's an opportunity there to create these forecasting budgeting tools that are specific to a particular type of business and and just nail it for that business. Like you said, oil and gas, we've seen a lot of them focus on SaaS, which makes sense, right? Because they're SaaS companies themselves. It's very easy to build for yourself. The general purpose tools are really hard to build because they have to be super flexible. You know, to be as flexible as Excel is. Well, Excel is a 30 year journey to build, right? Yep. So I mean, yeah. What are are there any other like specific industry GAAP tools that you see that are really cool?

Paul Barnhurst: [00:32:36] Yeah, there are definitely some specific industry tools. So, you know, even stepping back just a little bit to add a little color to this, right, Excel is always going to be more flexible than a purpose built tool because one Excel is on structured data. As soon as you had a data base, you bring structured data into the equation. You give up some flexibility. And so that's always been the challenge with planning tools. But then speaking industry specific, you know, you have Mosaic, which is very much a B2B tool, very specific on that. You got a focus software which really focuses on manufacturing, retail. You have a few different tools that focus on companies with heavy transactions, lots of products, transactions. Farseer is an example, like I said, Blue Koopa. There's one. I was talking to somebody, I know he's building it. I don't know where he's at, but he was building one for nonprofit. There's one out there for government, but the vast majority say they support pretty much they're industry agnostic, which yes, you can do that. But there's some challenges, right? Every industry is unique. And so what they'll say is, yeah, we can bring in whatever data, we can use our API or figure it out with the CSV or whatever the process may be. They can always bring in the data, but there are some benefits to sometimes just going with that purpose built tool that's really good at what it does, right? Like I can add any ERP I want, but if I'm a startup I'm going to go with, you know, a Zoho or a QuickBooks or A Sage because that's what their, you know, or zero, no, Sage zero or whoever, right? Because that's what they're good at. I'm not going to implement Oracle or SAP. Sure. Could I if I had the money. Yes. But why would I do that?

Blake Oliver: [00:34:13] So, David, I want to talk about Chatgpt, because it's never going to I mean, this is going to be a trend that goes on for a while. I saw a really cool use case for it that I wanted to highlight for our listeners. This is a tweet thread from Greg Eisenberg, who is I forget where he works. He's an advisor at Reddit. He said, Imagine a multi billion dollar client who refused to pay you for good work rendered. Most people would turn to lawyers. I turned to Chatgpt. Here's the story of how I recovered $109,500 without spending a dime on legal fees. So lawyers watch out Chatgpt is coming for you. Last year we did some design work for a mainstream brand. They loved the work and kept asking for more. We kept on under-promising and overdelivering and life was good until the communication stopped. Our design agency had has completed hundreds of projects with millions in revenue, in design and engineering, and had never once had someone completely ghost us on payments.

David Leary: [00:35:13] So these are his tweets. These are not AI you're reading. You're reading his tweets.

Blake Oliver: [00:35:17] I don't know. Maybe he used AI to write them, but this is his story about using Chatgpt. Gotcha. Gotcha. So basically, big corporate client did 100 hundreds of thousands of dollars of work or at least 100. Right. And ghosted them. Right. Which, you know, like you don't really expect that to happen with a big corporate client. No. So Greg had to step in and instead of sending another email that might fall on deaf ears or hiring an expensive lawyer to initiate debt collections, I had an idea. What if Chatgpt could draft a bit more of a scary email to draw attention? At the very least, I'd learned something. The cost of Chatgpt is $0. The cost of our lawyer to send this notice $1,000. So we asked Chatgpt to present pretend to draft a scary collection email so we can recover the $109,500 owed to us. And he posts the prompt. The prompt is pretend you work in the finance department and your job is to collect payments from clients. Draft a scary email that gets XYZ client to pay for the services rendered but hasn't responded to five emails. The invoices are five months overdue and the response is just outstanding. I'm going to read the response that Chatgpt wrote. Dear client, we regret to inform you that despite several attempts to contact you regarding your overdue account, we have not received any response from you.

Blake Oliver: [00:36:31] Your account is now five months past due and your outstanding balance is blah blah blah for the services rendered. As a responsible company, we have always given our clients the benefit of the doubt and provided ample opportunities to make payments. However, your lack of response and failure to settle the outstanding balance has forced us to take serious action. We remind you that failure to pay the amount owed may result in severe consequences, including legal action and damage to your credit rating. We urge you to act immediately to avoid any such consequences and pay the amount owed within the next three business days. If we do not receive payment or satisfactory response from you within this time, we will have no choice but to escalate the matter further and all costs incurred will be added to your account balance. We understand that you may be going through difficult times, but we have a responsibility to our shareholders and employees to ensure the timely payment of all outstanding balances. We hope that you understand our position and take immediate steps to settle the overdue amount. Thank you for your attention to this matter and we look forward to receiving payment as soon as possible. Sincerely Sender. Is that just not incredible?

David Leary: [00:37:29] Like I think we've shown this now. It's really good at creating letters.

Paul Barnhurst: [00:37:33] Yeah, it.

David Leary: [00:37:34] Is. It's very, very good at that. We've shown that for ferrying your clients, you prove that concept, onboarding letters like it's very, very good at those types of things to the point where you almost shouldn't do it yourself anymore. It's worth even. What are you paying for the subscription now to? The professional one, Blake.

Blake Oliver: [00:37:52] Well, I've still been able to use Chatgpt for free, but I also subscribe to Jasper, which, you know, layers more tools on top of OpenAI tech.

David Leary: [00:37:59] It's all cheaper than QuickBooks. So whatever you pay for QuickBooks, this is cheaper.

Blake Oliver: [00:38:03] Yeah, And just think about that. $0 versus $100 for a lawyer. 1000. 9000 for a lawyer. $1,000, right? Yeah, you can. You can do your. Your threatening communication through chatgpt. And the thing that's, you know, amazing is that it worked, right? He got paid. The CEO was scared and and paid him. So how much of that routine communication is going to be automated by chatgpt? I think like 90% of it is going to be automated and we're just going to check the output and send once the email programs get this built in, once you've got it in outlook and you've got it in Gmail, it's going to draft most of your communications for you. And just think how much time we waste on email every single day, right? Hours. Some people are sending in emails.

David Leary: [00:38:47] I don't reply to you anymore. It's just automated.

Blake Oliver: [00:38:49] It's just automated.

David Leary: [00:38:50] You're just getting automated responses.

Blake Oliver: [00:38:52] Now. David's I yeah.

David Leary: [00:38:55] This is another one we can tie Paul into here because, you know, it's, it's about cash burn, okay? And it also ties to, you know, the like, you know, the, I mean, the paying cash is really discouraging for our industry right now. Here's another discouraging report that came out. Blake. If you click on this article. Okay, I'll get it.

Blake Oliver: [00:39:13] Go ahead and I'll I'll get it going.

David Leary: [00:39:14] But essentially, finance companies, fintech, you know, which is the space we're in, burned $12 billion in cash in 22, 22, 20, 22. And just according to this report, they came out only 17 of the 91 newly listed tech companies that have reported results this year have shown a net profit with cash burning firms spending 37% of their IPO proceeds last year. So it's like these these fintech companies and these are these are basically the public ones, right? Like you think about all the thousand unicorns in the fintech, right. That exist that have taken, you know, billion dollar valuations. They've taken hundreds of millions of dollars of VC money and they've blown it on, you know, hoodies and these other things. Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:39:56] So, well, look, David, you know, we've, we see it ourselves, right? We see companies that are clearly, you know, spend happy, that have a lot of people they don't necessarily need. And that's why we see the big news is Xero laid off 15% of their workforce. You know like that's a lot of people and I believe that's. Do you know if that's globally or was that just in the US? I think it might be.

David Leary: [00:40:21] It looked like it was globally. I and unfortunately I haven't seen I've been trying to look at, you know, Twitter or LinkedIn to see who we might know that's affected. But my unfortunately, my hunch is it's going to be a lot in the US only because the market share has been so small, which is really disappointing. And and I just think we're things are getting very real. It was like the tech layoffs are starting to come into our space very deeply and this is the perfect example of it. Xero getting hit by this.

Blake Oliver: [00:40:51] And I wish they had gone harder into the US to begin with, right? Like this is going to go down in maybe not in the MBA textbooks, but definitely in the world of fintech as a as a huge mistake to make these big moves ten years ago to come to the US and challenge into it, but not to give the resources to the US team they actually needed. And then it just gave into it 510 years to catch up and look at what happened, right? Quickbooks Online dominates and.

David Leary: [00:41:20] Intuit will be the story in business schools, right? The shift from desktop to cloud. Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:41:23] Yeah. They saw they got poked right there. The bear that got poked and woke up and said, oh, crap. And they they moved huge. Like that doesn't happen a lot where like the, the entrenched player actually disrupts their own business and to the point where they're ending support for their desktop point of sale. They're just giving that business to Shopify. I bet you the end of QuickBooks desktop is not that long away. I bet you they're going to force everybody over because.

Paul Barnhurst: [00:41:50] I would imagine so.

David Leary: [00:41:52] Well, the party for that. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, like, you don't want to see news like this. No, You know, it's hitting very close to home and I suspect it's not over. And I also have seen some, you know, articles like there's probably going to start seeing a lot of consolidation, these start ups that are going to be money hit hard are going to be gobbled up by Intuit and even Zero. I mean, them doing something like this puts them in a stronger cash position, right? Absolutely. You're going to see these companies get purchased over and over again. I even saw an article that was like saying you should short Bill.com because now that Intuit's going to build their own bill pay and the the contract ends at the end of June 2023 or something like that, that maybe you should be the whole article. Make an argument to short Bill.com Oh, wow. You know, like things are getting very tight and interesting out here right now.

Blake Oliver: [00:42:39] Well, you know, it's good because this it's creative destruction, right? When there was all this free money floating around essentially or cheap. Not free, but super cheap.

Paul Barnhurst: [00:42:47] Virtually free.

Blake Oliver: [00:42:48] Yeah. That, you know. Voices could make investments that were not really thought out. And all these startup founders got money. And we saw we saw companies pop up that are essentially vaporware, spending $100 million on marketing, on vaporware, and now they're going to go away and the money is going to go to the companies that are really building tools to solve problems. And speaking of tools that solve problems, Paul, you posted this link into the chat. The headline is a startup CFO used Chatgpt to build an RPA tool. Here's how it went. What's the deal with this? Yeah, so.

Paul Barnhurst: [00:43:24] I actually had this guy, his name is Glen Hopper. He'll be on my podcast next Tuesday. I interviewed him a little over last week, last I think it was Friday. And so what he did is he's an AI guy. He's written a book about kind of AI and modern finance, and he decided to see if he could build basically a tool using Chatgpt. So what he did is he came up with the three financial statements. He put them in a CSV file, everything else he used Chatgpt. He said, write the script for me to load this to an SQL database. Use Google collab. I think so. It was free and it wrote the code. He loaded it, then it asked him to write the scripts to create all the different ratios he needed to analyze the data and it wrote all the scripts and stored it. And what he finally ended up doing is he went all the way to build a bot that he could ask questions for different ratios and he printed a 30 page report on it. And so it wrote all the Python script and he just followed the different scripts and basically built a basic tool that he could use to analyze this set of data that it had created the database for basically, you know, created all the instructions.

Blake Oliver: [00:44:30] So, you know, I want to know what's my current ratio. And you could drop a bunch of data into this tool and it'll tell you.

David Leary: [00:44:37] Well, and so I know people are using Chatgpt to get back, you know, code. Can you is anybody using Chatgpt? If I'm like, write me an Excel formula for X? Yes. And it gives you in context is we heard any stories?

Paul Barnhurst: [00:44:50] Oh, I've seen a ton of that. I've seen someone who's even built Leila Garani has a video on YouTube where what she did is she via the API. So it's chat three. It's a I think it's Chat three versus GPT, which is their API. She incorporated the API directly in Excel so she could ask it questions and it would return the data in her Excel file directly. But yeah, you can have it. Write formulas for Excel. You can analyze it like I've tried and I'm going to do some more of this as I stuck in some data and said, What's the best graph to use for this data set? You can only do up to a thousand rows, so it's not going to do any large data sets. They've limited it for obvious reasons, you know, how many people have on it. But it immediately turned back what I would have considered the number one answer for that data set of how it should have graphed it. And so you can do things like that. You can ask it, you know, you can put in a A and ask it to analyze it, and it will give you trends because it's small enough.

Blake Oliver: [00:45:42] So just imagine what it can do when you've got the Excel plug in for OpenAI and it can access all your data in that sheet.

David Leary: [00:45:48] Yeah, that's the next step, right? Microsoft's putting it into Bing. The next step is office. Yeah, they already.

Paul Barnhurst: [00:45:53] Have it in teams. They have an AI, they incorporated it into their AI note taker. For teams, it's a premium subscription. It's like $7 a month or something extra.

David Leary: [00:46:02] But in Microsoft pay 20 billion, 40 billion. What did they did? They bought they made it right.

Blake Oliver: [00:46:06] They made a $10 billion investment, $10 billion. I don't know what that got them in terms of equity.

David Leary: [00:46:10] But it's going to be a microsoft office or Oh, yeah, well, they did a second.

Paul Barnhurst: [00:46:14] Investment where they basically got like they own like the second investment gave them 80% of revenue until they're paid off from it and they have an exclusive right to use it in any of their products.

Blake Oliver: [00:46:26] I think the exclusivity is what's the real value there?

Paul Barnhurst: [00:46:28] I agree. The revenue is it's the exclusivity 100%.

Blake Oliver: [00:46:32] Yeah. I mean, we've already seen Microsoft do some pretty cool things with PowerPoint I've been using for the last few years. The automated slide formatting in PowerPoint where you open up the tool and a little sidebar opens and it says, you know, you've typed in the headline and the bullet points and then it creates this, you know, layout for you. Yep. And that's AI and it's great. It's like so good. I use it in my presentations when I talk about technology and I say, By the way, this entire slide deck was designed by Microsoft's AI and they're just getting better and better and better at this.

Paul Barnhurst: [00:47:02] Yeah, exactly. No, I use it all the time. The designer. I use it some of Excel's AI, Right. You can have it analyze data sets today. Really? You can, Yeah. If you put in a data set and you ask it to analyze it, it'll give you a bunch of things it found from it, like on the right hand side, like 20 or 30 different things to look at.

Blake Oliver: [00:47:20] That's so cool. And it can like, yeah, I've seen it, you know, suggest charts. I guess that would be basically the same thing. Yeah.

Paul Barnhurst: [00:47:26] Suggesting charts or saying, hey, you know we noticed this is the highest so it does it does do some of that you know Flashfill is really a simple form of kind of AI or machine learning, you know, fuzzy logic with power query. So there's I think there's five different areas, 5 or 6 areas in Excel today that use some level of that type of stuff.

Blake Oliver: [00:47:45] And in Google Sheets I've seen autocomplete start to show up in Google sheets now. I'll start. I'll press equal to write a formula and then it will just suggest one based on the data that's in the surrounding cells. And often I'm not like a super great Excel Google Sheets user. So the formulas are super basic that I'm doing. You know, it saves me time though, not having to write the sum function, right? Not having to not having to like do any of that stuff. It just automatic. It sort of it reminds me of the autocomplete that you get in Gmail now. Yeah, you get an outlook as well.

David Leary: [00:48:18] Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:48:18] And they learn from that, right? Whenever I use the formula, they learn that this was a good situation in which to use it. We got a question from one of our live stream viewers. Amir said, Which girl do you think will be the first to execute well in embedding AI and LM into their software? David, I'll let you take that one first.

David Leary: [00:48:38] I mean, like bank feeds are essentially that, right? It's there already, the automatic coding, the promise of it, you know, I mean, we were at Corpus Connect five years ago and they had this little thing called QBO or whatever, and it was like this chat thing that come up and and they would show like this conceptual video of driving in the car and be like, in this, I would talk to you and tell you, oh, you need to order more flour because, you know, you just got this order for the loaves of bread. That probably will happen faster now that there's this open API and these can be built because I don't think Intuit was going to build that level on their own. But the concept like the march is there. And, and if for all the companies that are spinning up versions of this on top of the open API, I don't necessarily know if it's like when I say somebody might do it first, like we're talking three weeks ahead of somebody else, I think they're all going to have it in the next quarter. Every single GL is going to drop some some integration of this built in. They have to. They have to because the Street demands it to some extent.

Paul Barnhurst: [00:49:38] I've already seen a few tools incorporate chatgpt and I know of others that are working on it just from conversations. So I'm sure. Right. Everybody has a strategy. If you don't, you're going to get left behind.

Speaker4: [00:49:49] Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:49:49] And like you said, David, the bank feeds the automatic coding of transactions into the correct accounts. Like that is something that Chatgpt is just going to do so much better than what these what Intuit has built themselves.

David Leary: [00:50:01] Well, especially if they allow if Intuit can retrain some of Chatgpt based on Intuit's data set. Yeah. Go into the billions and billions and billions of transactions. That gives them a competitive advantage. Oh, huge. Yeah. Nobody's going to be able to have their chatgpt do that as well as Intuit because they have the data.

Blake Oliver: [00:50:20] I'm also thinking like expense reporting. That's a hugely time consuming process. It's probably the thing that employees touch the most across. You know, it's the accounting and finance function that impacts everybody and. You can automatically approve expense reports now with certain applications using rules. There's no reason why Chatgpt couldn't do a really good job of reviewing expense reports and approving them. Yeah, I.

Paul Barnhurst: [00:50:43] Mean, trying to think of a company like Apple or something, right? Train it with all its expense reports for the last couple of years and imagine it would have a 99%, you know, pretty quickly, a 99 plus percent accuracy.

Blake Oliver: [00:50:54] Yeah. I mean, it would probably do a really good job of figuring out which of those steak houses are actually strip clubs. Right?

Speaker4: [00:51:00] Like so.

David Leary: [00:51:05] So I want to pivot us to one other good tech.

Blake Oliver: [00:51:08] Oh, sorry, David. Can I. Can I do one? Go ahead. We're going to we're going to do our flip flopping across fraud, auditing and then back to tech, if that's okay with you.

David Leary: [00:51:16] Yeah, mine's IRS. So I can pivot off of this because you have the word government there.

Blake Oliver: [00:51:19] So so we're talking we're talking earlier about how 41% of companies, it's estimated that 41% of companies are misleading with their financial statements and 10% of large publicly traded companies are committing securities fraud right now that we're not we don't know about. This is an article in accounting today. The headline is Study finds Selecting Auditors Randomly Leads to Financial Improvement. Really? Wow. Amazing. So you're saying that when companies don't select their own auditors, we get better financials? Go figure. When a municipal government loses the ability to appoint its own auditor and is instead assigned one at random, financial performance tends to improve. This is the conclusion of a recent working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research. The study drew on detailed data on all municipal budgets provided by the Italian Ministry of the Interior, including information on municipal government spending and revenue sources such as local taxes, current expenditures, investments, debts, debts and transfers. So it was based on the Italian market. But I think we can probably assume that this would make an improvement here in the US too. So I think the evidence is there that if we want to get better financial reports, maybe we should be assigning auditors randomly. You know, the SEC could assign auditors randomly to companies or the maybe the stock exchanges could do it like Nasdaq and, you know, could assign the auditors. If you want to be listed on the exchange, you got to let them do it. I know that wouldn't be popular with the bigger firms, but I can't see I can't.

David Leary: [00:52:55] See a reason not to take all CPA candidates. And they could use this as like an apprentice program, apprenticeship program and Naisbitt could manage the whole thing. And that's part of your deal. You can't become a CPA until you work for. It's like the Peace Corps or something. Like you go to work for NASBA for two years doing these audits independently. Hey.

Paul Barnhurst: [00:53:13] I like it. Make that happen. I'm on board.

Blake Oliver: [00:53:16] And you know what? Then we'd have control over the salaries, right? Because you could raise salaries. The big firms aren't going to do it because they want their partners making half $1 million to $1 million or more every year. I mean, it's just crazy like you think about that, right? You get entry level auditors in like New York City making 60 to $70,000 a year can barely afford to survive. And the partners there are making ten, 20, 30 times as much.

David Leary: [00:53:42] So speaking of something that's 20 fold or 20 times as much, So the IRS, you know, we've talked about this before. They've had their digital intake scanning initiative. So already in 2023, which we're only, what, not even a quarter in, they've scanned more than 120,000 paper form 940. This is 20 fold increase over all of 2022. Nice. And they plan on expanding this to 1040 income tax returns for individuals and 941 soon as well. So like kudos to the IRS like finally like catching up. Right? They truly are making an impact.

Blake Oliver: [00:54:19] I wonder what that operation looks like. Do you think they've got like, you know, a thousand people sitting in a big room with scan snaps, Fujitsu scan snaps, opening up mail and putting the 1040 there's hi.

David Leary: [00:54:31] I went to the Kodak Alaris, which is they make a scanner. Kodak bought this company Alaris or whatever and I went to their conference to do a talk. And yet this document scanning imaging thing, there's these high volume machines that you just stick in thousands of pages and they're just scanning way like faster than any Xerox copy machine you ever seen in your life. Like it's pretty impressive that the high volume, the way they do these. But this is a big deal like the fact that they have made this progress. And then also, speaking of the IRS or the Treasury, did you see Danny Werfel finally got approved?

Blake Oliver: [00:55:05] Oh, yeah, the new commissioner.

David Leary: [00:55:06] Commissioner. And it's not Danny. Danny Warfield, the old Florida State quarterback. It's not that guy.

Paul Barnhurst: [00:55:12] Yeah. Danny Wuerffel. Yeah, that's the old Florida State quarterback.

David Leary: [00:55:15] Yeah. Florida State. Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:55:16] What is it with these IRS guys having the same names as as football players? I feel like this happened before in one of our stories.

David Leary: [00:55:23] Well, that was a movie, right? Johnny Utah from a point point blank. No. What was that movie?

Speaker4: [00:55:29] I don't remember.

Blake Oliver: [00:55:30] Well, David, we are just about at. The top of the hour. Anything else that we got to discuss now before we go?

David Leary: [00:55:38] I think I was just checking Twitter to make sure like apparently Wells Fargo is trending because you can't move money at Wells Fargo right now. And they're saying it's a glitch. But kind of interesting because all the banks are tied together. All the banks are tied. We might be witnessing the collapse.

Blake Oliver: [00:55:53] Like right now. We're live streaming the collapse of the US economy.

Paul Barnhurst: [00:55:56] Excuse me, guys. I'm going to go pull my money out of my bank. I'll be back in a moment.

Blake Oliver: [00:56:00] Yeah, I'm going to. Let's see. Uh, can I log into Bank of America? All right, Well, on that note, David, I hope that I'll see you here next week. And, Paul, if our listeners want to follow you online, you know, where should they go?

Paul Barnhurst: [00:56:15] Yeah, probably the best way to find me is on LinkedIn. I'm the guy they look up Paul Barnhurst. I also have my own website, VFP, Guide.com. And then last, if anyone's interested in listening to the podcast, it's FPA today and it's on all your different platforms Apple, Spotify, etcetera.

Blake Oliver: [00:56:30] And David, where are you?

David Leary: [00:56:32] I'm just on all the socials @DavidLeary Assuming these companies still exist next week.

Speaker4: [00:56:37] I am.

Blake Oliver: [00:56:38] I am at Blake T Oliver. Do follow us on YouTube. You can join us live. We always love that. Next week we've got Matt Foreman joining us. He's a tax lawyer. We're going to learn what tax lawyers do, get his hot take, hopefully as hot a take as he gives on Twitter. We'll get on this show. Should be a lot of fun. And yeah, thanks, everyone, for joining us.

David Leary: [00:57:04] I have to say. So what people are reporting is Wells Fargo. People did not get their paychecks this morning from direct deposit.

Speaker4: [00:57:11] Oh, no.

Blake Oliver: [00:57:12] Like the Wells Fargo employees or.

David Leary: [00:57:14] People who bank with Wells Fargo, like money's not. Wow.

Paul Barnhurst: [00:57:19] We had that happen when I worked at a company. Once they switched banks and nobody got paid. And, you know, most of us were fine. They got it figured by like Saturday, I think. But check. But the call center, they were literally the guy was the head of the call center, had to go and get cards and put people so they could pay their bills because some of them would be short. And he's handing out and trying to make sure because it took them like a day to resolve it. When they switched banks, somehow they mess things up. It's a nightmare when that happens.

David Leary: [00:57:43] Oh, boy. Well, this I don't think this is a one. It's not like one company made a mistake or changed banks.

Paul Barnhurst: [00:57:48] Yeah, no, this is much.

David Leary: [00:57:49] Bigger than very bad. Here.

Paul Barnhurst: [00:57:51] Imagine the.

David Leary: [00:57:51] Scale. We probably should just, you know, disconnect and go into this on our own.

Blake Oliver: [00:57:56] Yeah, well, this might be our top story next week. All right, Paul, don't go anywhere. After I end the stream, we need to upload the files by everyone.