The Accounting Podcast

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Blake Oliver: [00:00:04] Oh, speaking of politics, can we talk about it? The misclassification of expenses at the heart of the Trump indictment. I just want to remind everyone that this entire this entire what do you call this circus act that's happening right now is all around the coding of a transaction in the GL of Trump, the Trump Organization.

David Leary: [00:00:30] Coming to you weekly from the OnPay Recording Studio, this is the Cloud Accounting podcast.

Blake Oliver: [00:00:38] Welcome to the Cloud Accounting Podcast. I'm Blake Oliver.

David Leary: [00:00:42] And I'm David Leary.

Blake Oliver: [00:00:43] And we are joined today by Adrienne Gonzalez, managing editor at Going Concern. Adrienne, it is so great to have you on the show. I have been reading Going concern ever since I started in accounting and I feel like I know you in a way from reading your writing, but I have never met you before. I'm so excited. Thanks for coming on.

Adrienne Gonzalez: [00:01:04] Yeah, no, thanks for asking me.

Blake Oliver: [00:01:05] So how do you describe going concern to people when they ask you, like, what do you do?

David Leary: [00:01:12] Well, should we tell? Should we say how I describe it and how you describe it? Yes, please. Yes. And then we'll let Adrienne do it. I tell people it's the TMZ of accounting.

Adrienne Gonzalez: [00:01:24] I say Gawker. So Gawker. Gawker.

Blake Oliver: [00:01:27] I mean, I feel like it's the I say it like it is irreverent, the irreverent take on the accounting profession, especially Big Four. And you got a lot of readers, right? Like, what's your circulation?

Adrienne Gonzalez: [00:01:43] Uh, that I don't know. I know in the last we've we've kind of blown up. This week there was a Google algorithm change, like two weeks ago. That kind of was a little bit of a bump. But I mean, we sometimes we get a million. I know at our peak we were getting 3 million a month, which is like there's not. Who are those people? It's not accountants.

Blake Oliver: [00:02:03] Yeah, I mean, there aren't enough accountants in the country to get those kind of numbers, so.

Adrienne Gonzalez: [00:02:08] But that was many, many years ago. The site has, you know, everyone will kind of mean we're old now. We've been around since 2009. The site has kind of gone through peaks and valleys. We're certainly not as cool as we used to be because there are, you know, a lot of people much cooler and much younger than we are. But when we came out in 2009, it was like it wasn't being done. Nobody was really telling it like it is now. Everybody is, which I think is fantastic.

Blake Oliver: [00:02:28] Thanks, everyone, who's joined us in the live stream. We've got Ian here. Ian says, Nice shirt, Adrienne. You want. Thank you. You want to show that off? Reagan, Bush 84. Nice. Oh, my dad would love that shirt. He was a big he was a big, you know, Bush senior guy.

Adrienne Gonzalez: [00:02:44] I went to A. I was driving cross country one time and I went to the birthplace of Ronald Reagan. I'm not a Republican, but I just thought it was cool. Yeah, you know, see that? And it was like a Shaq, you know?

Blake Oliver: [00:02:55] Adrienne, you know, it's great to have you on because we like to talk about all the news at the intersection of accounting and technology. And you've been talking a lot about, you know, I'm sure you're paying attention to it. It's all over the news. I feel like we've hit peak hype cycle with The Wall Street Journal writing about it basically every day. And I want to know, what's your take on all this? Like like is this going to is this going to really change things in accounting or is it going to be like it always is where there's some technological change, but then it all stays the same?

Adrienne Gonzalez: [00:03:26] You know, I always say that and you guys will agree that accounting is very reactive and not proactive. You know, looking at like the accountant shortage. We've known that was coming down the pipe for years and kind of it's like, well, let's wait it out. So I think that's kind of the same thing with like Chatgpt. It kind of came out of nowhere and I feel like accounting is not going to lead the way in, you know, adoption. But we are seeing KPMG and PwC both are using it now at work in an official capacity. So I think the profession is jumping in uncharacteristically. You know, normally it's like, let's see what everybody else does.

David Leary: [00:03:58] And it feels a little different this time. And what I mean by that is like you go back a year ago, even Blake's like, Oh, we're going to have meetings in the metaverse. Blake bought a virtual reality headset. I'm like, And firms were doing stuff with that. Oh, we're going to have. And then before that it was like, oh, blockchain and everybody like, But this one feels a little bit different. And I think the reason why it's implementable by an individual and one individual can use it and get a productivity boost anywhere from 10% to 50% just by getting this on their day to day activities, you know, something to interact with. It's like having a teammate like, you know, talk about developers will code in parallel. It's kind of like having a teammate so you can kind of brainstorm and I can't talk to Blake. I can brainstorm with Chatgpt just enough to give me a direction, you know.

Adrienne Gonzalez: [00:04:49] Is it smarter than Blake?

David Leary: [00:04:51] Well, it's it's not a it hasn't passed the CPA exam yet. Right.

Adrienne Gonzalez: [00:04:55] Have they done.

Blake Oliver: [00:04:55] That? Well, so I actually haven't seen all the reports are like it passed the bar exam. It passed the medical exams. It passed the AP test, but nobody put it through the CPA exam.

David Leary: [00:05:06] Still finishing. It's 150 hours. Like it hasn't finished that.

Blake Oliver: [00:05:09] Yeah, it can't get the 150. Yeah.

Adrienne Gonzalez: [00:05:11] So I would like to see what it does with intermediate accounting, you know, that being the point where people get weeded out, that might weed it out.

Blake Oliver: [00:05:19] Well, I was playing around with it with audit. I just had this idea the other day to, you know, ask it. I said, You are audit bot. Your mission is to help me perform an audit according to generally accepted auditing standards. I'm a CPA, but I have never done an audit before, which is true. So I will need your full guidance in conducting the audit. Our client is Earmark LLC. What do you need to know to get started? And it said, Hello, I'm audit bot and I'll be happy to help you conduct an audit for Earmark LLC. According to generally accepted auditing standards. To get started, we'll need some initial information about the client and scope of the audit. And it goes through this list. It asks me, We got to get an engagement letter. We got to get the business overview, the accounting policies, the financial statements, the prior audit reports and management letters, the internal controls. And then it says once you've gathered all this information and it gives me a description for each let. Me know, and we'll proceed with the next steps of the audit process. And I just kept going with it. You know, I said, okay, let's do the engagement letter. It helped me start to draft an engagement letter. It helped me come up with pricing on an hourly basis and on a fixed fee. And then I started to get into the actual collection of information like, okay, I need to do this business overview, I need to get an understanding of the business.

Blake Oliver: [00:06:36] What do I need to get? And it gives me a list of ten things, right? Industry and market company history, business model, organizational structure. I mean, we're not getting down into the weeds yet, but I feel like if I kept drilling down, it could help me do an audit because generally accepted auditing standards, it's just a set of procedures in the end, right? It's just follow the rule book, follow the guidebook, and I want to get down deeper and see can it help me actually like do the sampling right? It got into audit planning, it got into audit fieldwork, testing, internal controls. Can it actually or can it actually help me do the tests? If I gave it like a list of transactions, could it pull them and could it ask me which ones to sample, that sort of thing? I mean, help me calculate materiality. It it told me, you know, I said, you know, okay, let's calculate the materiality. It said, Choose a benchmark, determine a percentage, calculate the materiality. It suggested, you know, 0.5 to 5% of the chosen benchmark. And it gave me, let's say, 2% for revenue because earmarks, technology company anyway, I could go on and on. But like I feel like audit actually is something that GPT could do really well. What's your take?

Adrienne Gonzalez: [00:07:48] That's crazy. That is insane. Yeah, it's it's probably going to do better on testing internal controls than some of the firms, right?

Blake Oliver: [00:07:57] I mean, because if you think about it. Right, firms are using students who have, you know, just graduated. They've never had a job before or maybe they've done an internship and they're like a year or two out and they're doing all this stuff. They're just following a guidebook. They're just following a procedure that's been done year after year after year. Like, why can't I do that?

Adrienne Gonzalez: [00:08:16] And there's an Adderall shortage, so the work is suffering as a result.

Blake Oliver: [00:08:20] Hey, but you know what? There's good news, right? Good news is that accountants salaries are rising. Wall Street Journal reported this. They are really on the accountant beat like these days, right?

Adrienne Gonzalez: [00:08:31] They are beating that horse to death. Yeah, so are we. So whatever.

Blake Oliver: [00:08:37] So they said accountant salaries are rising, but it may not add up to more accountants. And there was an example, I think, of a starting salary of like 90, 99, $99,000, which is, you know, unheard of for that would be for a master's, a mac grad, and that was in Denver, not even in New York or anything like that.

Adrienne Gonzalez: [00:09:00] I want to know how you feel if you're the guy or girl who was hired, you know, two years ago at $52,000. How do you feel reading that story?

Blake Oliver: [00:09:07] That's exactly what I wanted to ask you about. Right. Because you have these new people coming in who are getting paid more than people who have been there for years.

Adrienne Gonzalez: [00:09:15] That's the feedback we're getting on like Twitter and stuff. People are saying, Oh, I got screwed. You know, I got hired five years ago. I got completely screwed.

David Leary: [00:09:22] But aren't people jumping to other firms and getting raises? Isn't that happening to turnover?

Adrienne Gonzalez: [00:09:26] Somewhat, yeah, somewhat. They're getting raises to, you know, beat inflation. I don't know what kind of money. I don't know if they're getting $99,000 money.

Blake Oliver: [00:09:36] We got some chatter going on in the live stream, Jeff says. I think the larger firms will take forever to implement things like chat, GPT and automation, but there will always be smaller firms who will embrace technology and will thrive. I don't know if that lines up, though, with what we've seen at KPMG. Just started using Chat GPT for sales for like proposals. There was a story about that that I had in my in my stack of stories.

Adrienne Gonzalez: [00:10:05] Kim Chat.

Blake Oliver: [00:10:06] Kim Chat is that that's what they're calling. So stupid. Kim What's it what are they doing with it?

Adrienne Gonzalez: [00:10:12] So the story that was in Australian Financial Review I think was about for now what it does and it's in in partnership with Microsoft. So they have their own custom and it's, you know, segregated and whatever. So let's say you have a client who needs help with leases. I'm going to use leases as an example. Could be anything. You go in chat GPT the program and you say, who's the expert at the firm on this particular topic? And it will tell you it will give you their contact information. So that's mainly what it's doing now. But they're kind of experimenting like, what else can it do?

David Leary: [00:10:42] So it's like an LinkedIn search engine.

Adrienne Gonzalez: [00:10:45] A directory, Right directory, right. Yeah, right. So they're not going all in.

Blake Oliver: [00:10:49] So not quite as impressive as as we thought.

Adrienne Gonzalez: [00:10:53] I mean, it's still cool that they're doing it. I think two months ago they, uh, they banned use of it on firm equipment. So I think it's a it's an interesting shift that, you know, two months later, like, oh, we have a use case for it.

Blake Oliver: [00:11:04] Yeah, yeah. That's the thing that I'm seeing a lot is, is internally a lot of companies are banning it or saying don't use it yet until we've taken a look at it, which makes sense from a security standpoint, right? You don't want your employees putting in trade secrets and confidential information and PII into an AI where, you know, there's no there's no agreement in place with that, you know, with openai. What are they doing with it? Are they mining that data? But at the same time, it's such a huge competitive advantage if you give it to your employees. I mean, for 20 bucks a month per person, you can really speed up a lot of stuff.

Adrienne Gonzalez: [00:11:41] And I think that's why what they're starting with is like the KPMG one, you know, it is not the open chat GPT. It is like, you know, whatever it is, it's a proprietary version of it that the firm can use. So I assume that they can kind of prevent that stuff from going out. But like you said, what is the data agreement?

Blake Oliver: [00:11:56] Yeah. Yeah. So I don't know. I guess I guess once once Microsoft rolls this out, it's part of the 365 suite. That's when it'll really hit mainstream with a lot of businesses because then it'll be part of all those SLAs, right? It'll be part of all that confidentiality. It'll be safe, secure. At least people will feel it is. And yeah.

David Leary: [00:12:15] I think just the impact, like they don't even have to roll it out on purpose just by getting it part of Office 365 is going to have a productivity impact. Cfo dive kind of covered. There was a study that was recently published by a University of Pennsylvania and OpenAI. Obviously the company OpenAI is behind it. So you have to, you know, keep it in perspective. But they're starting to think that like 1 in 5 employees could like have half their job replaced by Chatgpt. And now they're starting to figure out, like, this could be like a whole productivity boost to the gross domestic product in the country. Yeah, by embracing this, it's kind of it's but you also see, though, people are against it.

Adrienne Gonzalez: [00:12:53] Oh, that letter that Elon Musk signed and all them, they want they want to put the brakes too late. So the genie's.

Blake Oliver: [00:13:00] Out. The cynic in me says, the cynic in me says that they're working on their own projects and they want openai to slow down so they can catch up. I mean, that seems like a very Elon Musk kind of thing to do.

Adrienne Gonzalez: [00:13:09] Yeah, but there are like a thousands of other signers of that letter. As far as I know, there were a bunch of people, tech people who signed it. If it was just Elon, I'd be like, Oh yeah, he's trying to monetize this.

Blake Oliver: [00:13:19] Yeah. I mean, it is concerning, right? Like think about all the potential bad actors out there who could use this to do really terrible stuff.

Adrienne Gonzalez: [00:13:28] What do you think the top of mind, what do you think for bad actors?

Blake Oliver: [00:13:32] Well, just misinformation, right? Like that's been the big problem over the last few years. And now you can. Right. I mean, it was easy to spot misinformation before, if you like. Just looked closely. Right. It was hard to get. You could see it. But now we've got like midjourney creating that photo of the pope in the puffer jacket that totally tricked millions and millions of people who just thought the pope was, like dripping. Right. But it turned out that was not real. And now I actually wish it was real, but, you know, like it I saw it and I said I saw it. And I just sort of, like, went past it. But I didn't think, oh, this is misinformation, right? It just sort of like entered my consciousness and then I, you know, left it. I didn't reshare it or anything, but I could have and I would have been tricked by it, too. So anyway, I guess it's my point is, like, it's so much easier now to create misinformation. And then I think about in accounting, what is misinformation? For us, it's fraud. So it's going to be so easy to ask an AI image generator to make fake bank statements and fake invoices and fake transactions.

David Leary: [00:14:35] Yeah, you could just say, hey, create, create a fake invoice for $1,000 and send it to every one of the Fortune 500 companies. You just say it out loud. You don't have to put any work in. Yeah, and.

Blake Oliver: [00:14:43] If you plug the chat bot into like all these things through via Zapier, you can just ask it to do fraud, right? Right.

Adrienne Gonzalez: [00:14:52] So you think that's possible in the next year or so that.

Blake Oliver: [00:14:56] I mean, if you have access to the plug ins right now through GPT, assuming you can somehow get around the the rails they've put in place. Right. Which it doesn't do unethical stuff. But if you can trick it to do it, you know, say this is some sort of experiment. I'm white hat, you know hacking or whatever you I think it could do that. It could certainly write all of the phishing emails. I mean, it can train you on that. I mean, people have done that. They ask Bard to write phishing emails and Google's bard, and it does because it doesn't have the same security protocols or at least it didn't.

David Leary: [00:15:28] Mean I could see the the volume of fraud going up, but not the amount of fraud. And I don't even know how to like put that in perspective because on the other side of this, companies for the KYC, you know, Xero, QuickBooks Sage, they all have their little invoice networks now, you know where you create invoice and it shows up in the other person's QuickBooks automatically as a bill and that type of stuff. They're all using artificial intelligence to process all that and detect these things. So I just think it's just going to create lots of crap that lots of I like, like all this AI is going to be more efficient to deal with the crap that's on this side. Like, you know, and if you just get rid of it all the it would still be the same ratios. I don't think we're going to have more crap or the higher volume, but I don't think more fraud is going to happen. That makes sense.

Adrienne Gonzalez: [00:16:11] Yeah, totally.

Blake Oliver: [00:16:13] So the story that got my attention again, Wall Street Journal is all over this. The jobs most exposed to Chatgpt This got my attention because accountants are in the in the we're the first word in the story. Accountants are among the professionals whose careers are most exposed to the capabilities of generative artificial intelligence. The researchers found that at least half of accounting tasks could be completed much faster with technology. The same was true for mathematicians, interpreters, writers and nearly 20% of the US workforce. This is a study that was done by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and OpenAI is this one you were talking about?

David Leary: [00:16:49] David Does this have a little chart in it? Like somebody this was all over Twitter, all on all the socials. There's like a, I think a chart that's a part of this study. Yeah, because everybody was sharing and it showed, you know, which professions are going to get eliminated.

Blake Oliver: [00:17:05] Right? And we are accountants are like towards the top of it. But it's like this is the test taking exam results here. But like my first reaction was great, we only have one accountant for every two accounting jobs. So like this.

Adrienne Gonzalez: [00:17:20] They've been saying this forever. We wrote an article in like 2013. There was a big study that came out out of Oxford and it said that within ten years or something like that, 95% of accountants would be out of a job. And mind you, you got to remember, too, when they're saying accountants, they're counting bookkeepers, they're counting. I think they count sometimes, like, you know, AP people, clerks.

Blake Oliver: [00:17:39] Yeah.

Adrienne Gonzalez: [00:17:40] Right. So when they say accountants, they're talking about sort of the more low level kind of repetitive tasks. But yeah, they've been threatening. They've been threatening this for a long time.

Blake Oliver: [00:17:52] Yeah, I frankly, I'm excited by this. Like, I think this is incredible. I guess the, the worry I have is that we've got two thirds of accounting grads go into audit at big firms. And if the big firms automate audit with AI, what are those grads going to do when they're starting out? It's going to totally shift the beginning career of an accountant, and that's going to be very, very disruptive. And like the education has to completely change, you know, I mean, like this, think about like the changes to the CPA exam that are happening. This is like 100 times more than that. That needs to happen in terms of teaching people how to actually write, like write a prompt for an AI, how to ask questions, how to how to how to not just follow directions. Right? Because that's at least for me, in accounting, that's what I learned how to do. I learned how to apply standards, not how to question them.

Adrienne Gonzalez: [00:18:48] So like the same thing with like Googling, like Googling is a skill, right? Like you, you learn how to ask it something in a way that will get the answer that you want. I think we need to be focusing on that kind of stuff.

Blake Oliver: [00:18:59] Yeah. Brian in the chat says, Bring on the AI. We can't hire enough new hires, so maybe this will help us help our clients. Yeah, that's my take on this at this point, right? Bring on the AI. Jeff says one nice thing about using AI would be doing all the super monotonous tasks. Yes. And you know, I.

Adrienne Gonzalez: [00:19:19] Used I use automation recently, so we're redoing the Going Concern website. We have we've been around since 2009. We have about 16,000 posts going back to 2009. So I needed to create a spreadsheet of the individual titles, URLs, you know the date that it. Is published. So I was doing this manually in the back end. Copy paste, copy, paste. I automated this and I saved myself. I calculated how long each page took me manually and it was something like eight minutes or something like that. I automated it. It took all of ten minutes to set up the, you know, the formula and then it spit it out. And I saved myself about like 150 hours of work.

Blake Oliver: [00:19:57] So what exactly were you doing? You were reformatting.

Adrienne Gonzalez: [00:20:00] So I needed to create a spreadsheet of because some of our old posts, we went from WordPress to Drupal to WordPress, and some of the formatting on the very old posts is messed up. So I needed to create a spreadsheet of each individual link so that way as I go back through the archive, I can click on each of those articles and, you know, update as needed. So I was doing this manually in a spreadsheet title URL and the date that it was published, like literally in the back end of WordPress copying each one, pasting it into a spreadsheet.

Blake Oliver: [00:20:30] And this is thousands of posts, 16,000. Wow. Okay. And so you were able to automate that. That's pretty cool.

Adrienne Gonzalez: [00:20:38] And just, you know, once I did the formula, which took about ten minutes, then all I had to do was wait for it to spit it out. You know, 45 minutes later, I get a message done.

Blake Oliver: [00:20:46] So you asked Chatgpt for how to write the formula.

Adrienne Gonzalez: [00:20:49] I use something called Parse Hub, so because I know very little coding, so I use something called parse hub. And it's very much like if this do that, whatever, and you have to just put it in. I mean, it was fascinating. I'm like, because I didn't want to do it. I was dreading this project, you know, every day I'm like, Oh, I really need to do that. And come on, I don't want to do that.

Blake Oliver: [00:21:10] Yeah. And I'm using it to help summarize articles for myself because David and I, you know, we read hundreds of articles every week and I used to go in and I would like make notes in notion. I would, I would pull an article into notion and make notes. And now I've connected notion into Chatgpt via Zapier. And I tell it every time I add an entry to this database, send the text of the send the URL to openai and then summarize this for me and it puts back a paragraph that's like a paragraph summary of the article.

Adrienne Gonzalez: [00:21:49] So the tldr Yeah, exactly. That's incredible. Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:21:53] And you know, it's gotten better and I think it will get better and better and better at summarizing these things and it just makes, it makes my job easier because now when I'm scanning through my database, I've got a little summary of what is this story about? I don't actually have to read the whole thing.

Adrienne Gonzalez: [00:22:10] I need to do that. You know, I'm reading everything manually.

Blake Oliver: [00:22:14] Yeah. And that's like a big part. That can be a huge part of the job, right? Of being a journalist is just reading every day. Every day. Right. Reading and reading and reading.

David Leary: [00:22:23] So Blake gave you the link to the Intuit survey of accountants about technology over the next 12 months. While you're opening that up, I'll just I'll confess, I actually use. So my personal CRM added in Chatgpt under the covers, obviously through an API. And I replied to somebody just by clicking a button, I basically I set, you know, I said Absolutely. Or looking forward to chatting. I just clicked the one suggested button. I set the tone. If I want to be authentic or brisk, no way. Wrote the email and I hit send.

Blake Oliver: [00:22:54] What? What CRM is that I'm using?

David Leary: [00:22:57] Close. Close. It's like a personal CRM. I can just reply if I want and it'll write the email. So that's.

Blake Oliver: [00:23:04] Coming. That's coming to Outlook. When Microsoft integrates soon in the next few months, it's it's already sort of in Gmail with the autocomplete but not like it's not writing full emails, but you.

David Leary: [00:23:14] Can detect it because it doesn't have any personal it doesn't write like me, like I use a lot of ellipses when I type things because it's like email, it's like thoughts and all and all.

Blake Oliver: [00:23:23] Sentence and all caps, right?

David Leary: [00:23:24] And I don't use exclamation.

Adrienne Gonzalez: [00:23:25] Points here, do all exclamation points.

David Leary: [00:23:27] And so if it's not doing those things, somebody could like you could probably detect that it's not me writing, but somebody else doesn't know they won't right.

Blake Oliver: [00:23:35] Yeah. If you're just I mean and also if it's actually.

David Leary: [00:23:37] Impressed with myself, I was like, oh, that's so much nicer. It's softer than I would write. Yeah. Like I was like the, the softness out of my emails. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:23:47] I think that's one of the, one of the clear applications of this.

David Leary: [00:23:51] Yeah. If you scroll down in the this post to the wave of future automation and AI, we can go back and look at the rest of the survey and some of the other stats. But this is more on topic. What we're talking about at the second, and I need help reconciling this a little bit. If you get down into over the next 12 months.

Blake Oliver: [00:24:11] I think I think I'm on that chart right now over the next. Yeah, this is months. Do you foresee the business investing in any of the following technologies?

David Leary: [00:24:18] So they kind of have two two buckets of respondents, some people that A 2000 person bucket and then this 1000 person bucket and some of its firm owners employees. It's just in general accountants at their firm that they surveyed and I'm trying to reconcile this so. If I'm reading this correctly, 47% of the people they surveyed said in the next 12 months they're going to invest in blockchain technology. But at the same time, a whole 42% say they're going to invest in locally hosted accounting software. Like I'm not reconciling this this survey. Yeah, right. It just doesn't make a ton of sense to me. And then because of this, right, it looks like it's very impressive. And then I don't want to jump out, but there's a whole nother article on one of the Bitcoin bro websites, and they're talking about how accountants are going to embrace blockchain technology this year because of this stat. They quoted this article and it's just that that exploitation that happens. But I'm having problem reconciling with this bell curve of our accountants that are out there.

Blake Oliver: [00:25:23] Well, I always question surveys like this because I feel like the way they go out and Adrienne, you may have some insight into how these things are phrased. They say like they'll send out a survey to CFOs and say, are you investing in any of these things? Check all that apply and you're just going down the list. You're like, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, right. Whether or not you're actually really going to do it, like, how, how likely is that? I mean, everybody wants to seem cool and like, I'm on the cutting edge.

Adrienne Gonzalez: [00:25:49] That's exactly what I was thinking. The blockchain, that's just some, you know, older person or whatever, being like, Oh, blockchain. Yeah, we got to do that. Yeah, Yeah, 100%, definitely.

Blake Oliver: [00:25:59] So like what people say they'll do and what they actually do is very different. I mean, we see that in political polling all the time, right? Oh, God, Right. So, oh, speaking of politics, can we talk about it? The misclassification of expenses at the heart of the Trump indictment. I just want to remind everyone that this entire this entire what do you call this circus act that's happening right now is all around the coding of a transaction in the GL of Trump, the Trump organization.

Adrienne Gonzalez: [00:26:30] Is that what I've been purposely ignoring it.

Blake Oliver: [00:26:32] So I mean, I've kind of been ignoring it. But then I felt like I had to when I saw this headline in CPA Practice Advisor. So basically the summary of what's happening right now is that Michael Cohen, Donald Trump's ex fixer attorney, made a $130,000 hush money payment to Stormy Daniels, the the porn star to to prevent her from saying anything on the in advance of the election. Right. And he paid it personally and then the Trump Organization reimbursed him and called it legal expenses. And and the prosecutors are saying, okay, that was a improper deduction. Right. Improper classification of your expense. And I guess I'm not sure if like hush money is a deductible expense or not. Like and somebody on Twitter was saying, well, actually, you know, if you're Donald Trump, it should be you know, it's a it's a it's a business expense.

David Leary: [00:27:30] But so is this why So this is why on the on his supporters side, they keep saying, oh, it's just a bookkeeping error. It's just a bookkeeping error. It's just a bookkeeping error because they're just saying if they would have logged it against a different account or give a different.

Adrienne Gonzalez: [00:27:44] Where they can book it as porn star pay.

Blake Oliver: [00:27:46] Off. Hush money. Hush money expense. Right. That would be a good. You could add that account to your chart of accounts. Yeah, I know. Whether so, I'm actually not sure because the indictment is still sealed if it's like a tax thing or not. Because if they deducted it as legal expenses. Right. But it was not deductible, then that's it's in it. Funny how everybody gets caught.

Adrienne Gonzalez: [00:28:05] I was just thinking that Al Capone.

Blake Oliver: [00:28:07] Yeah, right. That's what ultimately gets you. But it's kind of crazy like, you know, in the big scheme of things, right? I'm thinking about it as an accountant. Regardless of how I feel about Donald Trump as a person, it's $130,000 in an organization that's doing, what, hundreds of millions of dollars?

David Leary: [00:28:24] Well, it's not even that, right, Because it was from wasn't it a political action committee money, though, to which which he's like the greatest fundraiser of. All right. It's close to billions.

Blake Oliver: [00:28:35] Oh, yeah. Was he using was he using fundraised money that was raised from donors to do the hush money payment? And then that could be a problem.

David Leary: [00:28:44] But still in the grand scheme, you're right. It's $130,000. Yes. Like the huge.

Blake Oliver: [00:28:48] And Ray in the chat says, quote, reasonable, customary and necessary in the pursuit of profit, unquote. Sounds like it hits all points. So I think there's an argument to be made that that a hush money payment to a porn star could be considered a reasonable and ordinary expense. We got to be we got to be fair in our we should.

Adrienne Gonzalez: [00:29:08] Ask chatgpt.

Blake Oliver: [00:29:09] Ask if somebody wants to open it up and ask chatgpt you can let us know the response in the chat here and I'll be I'll share it. Brian says, Isn't there also an issue with the type of expense and rules about how you can spend on a campaign? Yeah, I think that's what's going to is going to come down to right is like, did this violate campaign spending rules? I mean, either way, it was like. It's funny, though, like if he had just been open about it, it wouldn't have been a problem. Right. Like that's that's the issue here is it's it's somehow it always in politics ends up being lying about the lie. The lie itself is not the crime. But then lying about the lie is the crime. Or like, you know, you like lie to the FBI. And even if the thing you did was not illegal, lying to the FBI is illegal. Right. That's how they get you. Well, it's also.

David Leary: [00:30:00] This like because because, you know, he's always trying to make everything a business expense, Like just pay for your personal. Nobody knows it happened and it just goes away. But you don't do that and then submit the receipt for reimbursement. And that's that's wouldn't it be taxed if you just paid it? Right. Like, do you really have to get reimbursed for this? Like use some judgment on this. Certain things you don't get reimbursed for.

Blake Oliver: [00:30:20] Well, you know, speaking of silly things that businesses do, I just I saw this and I had to share it. The headline is Kirkland Church Forcing Employees to Tithe 10% of Salary. Lawsuit underway. And this is a really big church called Church Home. Church home. They like blend the church and the home. So it's one H kind of like PetSmart, I think church home. This is in King County. So I guess this is in like Seattle area, right? Washington. Washington. So apparently an employee of this Kirkland based church home was told her job was in jeopardy if she failed to tithe or donate 10% of her earnings back to the church. Tithing, The age old practice of donating money to a church is typically done voluntarily. And the employee filed a lawsuit. Church home has over 300,000 people watching sermons weekly online on the church's smartphone app or attending in person. So this is no small enterprise. It has multiple locations in western Washington, in addition to one in Los Angeles and is connected to multiple high profile celebrities. Former Seahawk Russell Wilson is listed as a member of the board of directors. And apparently this church had a policy where if you were an employee, you had to tithe 10% of your salary back to the church. Now, this was done outside.

David Leary: [00:31:37] Of payroll policy at accounting firms. They would do it via hours.

Adrienne Gonzalez: [00:31:41] United or the United Way. Donate to the United Way and you can wear jeans. Really? Although it's not. Yeah, they used to do that. They probably still do that. Wow Jeans Friday but you have to donate to United Way or whatever.

Blake Oliver: [00:31:52] Well I guess this is a lesson for us as accountants, right? To advise our clients that you cannot mandate that employees donate money back to the organization they work for. That is not okay.

Adrienne Gonzalez: [00:32:05] I can't believe anyone has to say that. It's just like the directions on shampoo. Like why does it have to have why do you have to tell somebody that?

Blake Oliver: [00:32:11] Yeah, well, because apparently there are people that don't understand. Yeah. Yeah.

Adrienne Gonzalez: [00:32:16] Were those deductible then as a as a donation? I don't know. To the employees.

Blake Oliver: [00:32:21] I guess. Uh, yeah, if they're making it as a donation. 10% of your salary. What's the threshold? I forget. Is there one? I'm not a tax CPE.

Adrienne Gonzalez: [00:32:33] Yeah, we need. We need to answer.

Blake Oliver: [00:32:35] I don't do audit and I don't do tax, so I'm kind of a useless CPA in many ways. I just do accounting. I'm a certified public accountant, not tax professional, not audit professional.

Adrienne Gonzalez: [00:32:47] You're definitely going to lose your job in a year.

Blake Oliver: [00:32:49] Yeah, well, no, the great thing is actually, yeah, probably like once I can just simulate my face and voice and have hot takes. This is. This show is actually David and I can retire because we can just license our voices to the AI and.

David Leary: [00:33:06] But they'll just steal it and use it. I don't think we missed that boat already. We have to lock down our entire catalog now.

Blake Oliver: [00:33:12] I mean, I want to say like like this big picture, right? This whole thing is super exciting because if it really delivers the productivity boost that we're talking about, this is going to drive the cost of almost everything to zero.

Adrienne Gonzalez: [00:33:28] Will it, though?

Blake Oliver: [00:33:29] I mean, it could I mean, it's going to it should. It should, right? Like and what that will do is, yes, it will create a lot of disruption. People will lose their jobs. But also a lot of things that are expensive now are going to become incredibly cheap. And, you know, just think about what like offshore automated manufacturing did for electronics between the 70 seconds and the 2000. Right?

David Leary: [00:33:55] That 30 year there was a pandemic and then you couldn't get anything and then all the prices went back up. Oh, that was awful.

Blake Oliver: [00:34:00] I mean, but you look long term like the price of a of a flat screen television. Right? Like every single person in this country, no matter what the amount of money they make, can afford a flat screen TV and a Netflix subscription. Now. Right. That's incredible. I mean, the the average American lives a higher standard of living than like any king of England in, you know, up to 1900 or something like that. It's just nuts in terms of like even though we have problems with medical care, right, problems with like all this other stuff, like it's still better, right? We still are healthier. We. Live longer. We eat better, you know? I mean, like, I can go to the store and buy an orange for a dollar. Actually, I don't know how much. How much is an orange these days? I haven't had one in a while.

Adrienne Gonzalez: [00:34:43] I'm keto. I couldn't tell.

Blake Oliver: [00:34:44] You. Okay. I can go to the store and buy an orange. You know, like that used to be a delicacy in the court of the royalty. Right. I mean, so like big picture, this is kind of incredible. I just want to say that.

David Leary: [00:34:57] So one of the arguments to now is because if you think about I look at like GAAP and using these tools, is it going to affect the digital divide like the people that know are going to have the time to learn these things and utilize them faster, are going to be more productive, and that's just going to separate the gap between the A employees and the A-plus employees and the employees. And is it going to separate that digital divide more? And then it goes back to that bigger question. Schools are having a big fit about this. English teachers, because people are using Chatgpt to write their school papers and do their homework. And it's you know, but should they get that skill right? Should the students that are going to use the word cheating by using chatgpt type tools to get their homework done, are they actually getting a real skill or are they not doing the homework right? But it's funny because when an article that's been bouncing around all week is an article is a headline from April 4th, 1986, Washington Post article, Math Teachers Stage a Calculated Protest. So there was a conference, 6000 math teachers and there was a protest because they did not want the calculator in school.

Blake Oliver: [00:36:07] This was in 1986, 1986. I wasn't allowed to use calculators in school in the 80 seconds or the 90 seconds at all.

Adrienne Gonzalez: [00:36:18] We had them in the 90s at my school, but the teacher would always say, You have to learn how to do this because you're not going to have a calculator in your pocket. The joke's on you, lady.

Blake Oliver: [00:36:26] I'm pretty sure my teacher said exactly the same thing. Isn't that. Isn't that ironic?

David Leary: [00:36:30] Yeah. You'll have it strapped to your wrist. It won't be in your pocket, right? You'll never put it. It'll always be in your hand. You'll never put it down. You'll just talk to it. They had signs like Beware, Premature calculator usage may be harmful to your child's education. And so this just kind of like, is this reaction by the education environment against AI? Like is it everybody's just getting really crazy about this. I feel like it's going to be the new vaccine. You know, people are going to take a political stance on this.

Blake Oliver: [00:36:57] Stuff on CPE can't stop it, though. Can't stop it. The genie is out of the bottle on this one. Marissa says the kids need to be taught how to use tech properly if they do not want cheaters. Teachers must teach their classes how to use technology such as AI. Calculators are a good example. Yeah, I'm all in favor of teach them how to use the AI. And if you need to evaluate students. I've actually always felt that like take home homework assignments are a crappy way to evaluate students and grade students. It shouldn't be graded because anyone can cheat on their take home homework. I used to be a tutor. I used to tutor like after I graduated from college in the Great Recession and I like needed to make money and I couldn't get a job doing anything else. I tutored kids, children of high net worth individuals in Florida. These are kids that came down from the East Coast from their boarding schools to go ride horses in Wellington. Oh, wow. Okay. We're talking like CEOs of I can't say the name of the company. I feel like it's still a violation of privacy. But like big time people, you know, like just bluebloods industrialists, like all that kind of stuff. And some of the kids were great and like, they actually learned and, you know, but other kids, it's like my job was to do their homework for them, essentially. You know, we didn't say that was what it was, but that's what I did. And they got great grades, right? I just walk them through it, you know.

Adrienne Gonzalez: [00:38:21] And I think that's what the that's what it's all about, is that this AI and automation is different, but it's kind of been it's always been happening just in a different form. And I think people are really freaked out about it because they don't understand it. And obviously people have a self-interest. You know, I could be out of a job easily in, you know, a year. But from the way I see it, it's like, okay, how can I work with this and what can I do to with this to improve, you know, while I'm here.

David Leary: [00:38:48] But I disagree that you could be out of a job like like, yes, The basic like, the basic people are just pumping out boring like payments.com. Right. So it's like that are just pumping out redoing press releases and putting them out. But like look at the article you wrote this week, right? About what you should do to help increase the pipeline. Where is your article?

Adrienne Gonzalez: [00:39:07] Please tell me you read it and not just the headline because no.

David Leary: [00:39:10] I did read it. And that's this is one of my argument is I don't think I can do this. There's a piece of this that you do, Adrienne, that I don't think I can do, which is you're kind of taking the truth and a fact. And then you're putting satire in a spin on it. And and that spin can only be done arguably from humans. Like it'll do it but it'll it'll be very obvious like this is trying too hard right. Like there's this wit that you can do that I don't think can be replaced now, maybe a decade from now you might be out of a job. But I don't think in a year you're going to be replaced because there's just this width of like, oh, on second thought, don't go visit a school and tell them what we do because you're all miserable. I don't think it's going to pick up on that. Right?

Blake Oliver: [00:39:57] I laugh. I actually did laugh out loud when I read this. Adrienne Yeah, you said you said, here's how you can, you know, basically, if I may summarize, you can why don't you summarize the argument?

Adrienne Gonzalez: [00:40:08] So it's basically like, what can you do? You know, do your part to help the accountant shortage. And I was on a panel with the New Jersey Society of CPAs late last year, and they were talking about how, you know, CPAs can go into their community if you want to. And that's like one of the best. And I've been talking about this with people on Twitter, like go to high schools and tell them what you do because kids don't know about accounting and you know, you can make a difference in your own community. But I was thinking about it. This article was totally a shower. Thought. I was like, Oh, you know, it would be funny if I'd just like, you know, things that you can do that like, you know, you really shouldn't do. And I was like, okay, just about every CPA I've met in the last 15 years is like super miserable. None of them are really excited about what they do for a living. Like when people ask me what I do, I'm like, Oh, I'm a writer. And they're like, Oh, that's cool.

Adrienne Gonzalez: [00:40:50] You know, I love my job. Then I tell them I write about accounting and they're like, Oh, but you know, everyone's always and there are people, of course, who are like, you know, happy. But overall, people are miserable. Reddit is just, you know, you go on our accounting and people are like, Oh, I'm pursuing an accounting degree. And I come on the subreddit and I'm really wondering if this is what I want to do. So I thought it would be funny to kind of point that out. Um, yeah. So what I did was say, go into schools, you know, and tell people what you do for a living. And I was like, on second thought, don't because you're all miserable. You know, I kind of was like, people need to you need to jack up your credit card debt and dress better and, you know, engage in conspicuous consumption. So people see the ski doos in your driveway and be like, Wow, that accountant is doing well in life, you know? So that was the whole premise of it.

Blake Oliver: [00:41:34] And I think that actually is a really good strategy. David made a joke in one of our episodes that if we want to get accountants to students to go into accounting, like get the young accountant at Deloitte, like on the Lamborghini, you know, talking about.

David Leary: [00:41:46] Making YouTube videos like that. Yeah, because a lot of accountants just buy the nice, perfect white Kia and then they replace it when it hits, you know, 40,000 miles with another exactly the same white model, Kia or Honda Civic or, you know, some reliable Toyota Corolla type car. And you're right, that's not that's not going to get new eyeballs and new interests.

Adrienne Gonzalez: [00:42:04] Which is exactly what I put in the article about. Parking lots at accounting firms are filled with, you know, 1999 Camrys and whatever, you know, to be. To be clear, there's nothing wrong with that. Think frugality is, you know, I am a I have a spending problem and I buy tons of stuff I don't need. I'm surrounded by it in my room right now. But I think, you know, project, you know, what what do you do when you want to project success Like I've just watched Halt and Catch Fire. If you guys have seen that Joe McMillan you know he had like $1,000 suit, a nice car, and then, you know, later they're like, Well, we need to borrow some money to start our business. And he goes, I don't have any. He's like, This is all I have is this suit and this car, you know. But he's projecting that success, projecting success.

Blake Oliver: [00:42:44] Yeah. I mean, I think we could do more of that as accountants, right? Like, if we're going to work our butts off, like, what's the point if you're not going to consume the fruit of your labor? Right. Like, like and and maybe even talk about it at your firm. I feel like in most firms, partners don't talk about their compensation because they're embarrassed by it. But if they.

Adrienne Gonzalez: [00:43:03] Should be when they're paying people $52,000 a year. Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:43:06] And you're making, you know, half a million. I mean, that's at the big firms, right? That's it. Like that's at the big four. But like in smaller firms, it's not such a huge difference. You know, maybe you're paying somebody like 70 K and you're making 300, Right? Okay, that's fair. And you worked 15 years to get there to do that. And so if you talk about it and you say, look, if you stick with this firm, here's what you're going to make, maybe they'll stay around. But nobody ever talked about that. When I was in public accounting, it was sort of like a secret, Right.

Adrienne Gonzalez: [00:43:37] And that was another argument I made in that article, is that, you know, 15 years ago, there weren't all these there wasn't us, there wasn't Big Four transparency, there wasn't you know, Reddit got started around the same time we did. People weren't talking about their salaries. You had to go digging around on the Internet to like these obscure forums to find out what people make, because that was always the mentality, right? In in friendly company, you don't talk about sex, politics or money. And I think that transparency, I think is great because now people can discuss that. You know, it's bad for the the profession because young people are like, well, those people don't make any money. But it's good that people can talk about that and know how much they're making.

Blake Oliver: [00:44:13] So there was another great story on going concern. And since we got you here, Adrienne, we got to talk about it. This is the this headline is the accountant shortage is so bad anime is it? Waifu girlfriends. The account shortage is so bad. Anime waifu girlfriends are taking up tax prep now give us.

David Leary: [00:44:33] Aged me out. I couldn't even read the article. I was like, what? I just. I'm like, I'm too old to read this. It's like my colleague going concern has a younger audience than than I'm not the demographic anymore.

Blake Oliver: [00:44:42] Well, so I'll just get this started and then Adrienne, please add the details. So basically this anime dating SIM popped up on the steam gaming platform and apparently it's like a dating sim where like the the person you're dating is helping you complete your tax return and you're like giving it your Social Security number and you're typing in all your information. And it's it's, I mean, if you don't know what a dating SIM game is, this is kind of like like I don't know if you're going to understand but.

David Leary: [00:45:13] So is this like a legit like product offering from someone and this is like the UI to do the tax return? Or is this like an imaginary thing?

Adrienne Gonzalez: [00:45:22] Well, it seems very legit, but it is. It was created by an art collective and they have beef with Intuit. If you look at the the description of it, like they go in hard on Intuit and QuickBooks and the lobbying to, you know, keep the tax code very complicated so that and nothing against Intuit. But you know so that's what this is a statement this is a political statement. Oh, basically. But it does supposedly it does actually do your taxes federal not state.

David Leary: [00:45:50] So this is that truth is stranger than fiction type thing. So I know for a fact in the mid to late 90 seconds, TurboTax hired hired People magazine editors. So that way it's easier to understand TurboTax get rid of all the so so it was written what is People magazine at a fourth grader level? I don't know. Third grade level. It's written so.

Blake Oliver: [00:46:12] Sorry. I don't mean to cut you off, David.

David Leary: [00:46:13] No, no, it's all right.

Blake Oliver: [00:46:14] I was just going to ask Adrienne. So like this, this game, I thought this was a scam. Like it was a scam to get people to put in their personal information and like they were going to harvest, you know, their data. And that's why it got taken down from steam. But you're saying it was more of a political like it was a parody 100%.

Adrienne Gonzalez: [00:46:30] If you go before it got taken down from steam, they changed the description on steam. And it literally is like accusing Intuit of, you know, paying steam off to get it removed. Supposedly it's not online. It's all local to your machine. I mean, I wouldn't use it, but that's what I thought too, that they're like, Oh, wow, this is a total scam. But no, it's it's a political statement.

Blake Oliver: [00:46:50] So I don't know if we mentioned the name of the game. It's called Tax Haven 3000. It's a one of a kind dating SIM experience that really does your federal taxes. It covers the 1040 tax eligibility for earned income tax credit, American opportunity credit, and more suitable for singles without dependents. That's appropriate given it's a dating SIM. That's hilarious. Right? Features multiple free.

David Leary: [00:47:10] Is it free file? Is it free?

Adrienne Gonzalez: [00:47:12] I'm pretty sure it's free.

Blake Oliver: [00:47:13] That's great. And so like it's, you know, the dating SIM idea is basically like you're presented with like dialog prompts. And if you select the correct one, you get closer to dating.

Adrienne Gonzalez: [00:47:26] The I've never played them, but I'm vaguely familiar with them.

David Leary: [00:47:30] Oh so so instead of going on a date and answering questions to your date, this is the tax organizer.

Adrienne Gonzalez: [00:47:36] And you can also date her.

David Leary: [00:47:38] Oh.

Blake Oliver: [00:47:39] Your goal is.

David Leary: [00:47:40] So it's like if you're going to.

Adrienne Gonzalez: [00:47:41] You shouldn't date, you shouldn't date your tax.

David Leary: [00:47:43] Preparer say that's probably a good policy.

Blake Oliver: [00:47:46] Actually wonder like how many tax preparers end up dating their clients. That would be an interesting survey.

Adrienne Gonzalez: [00:47:52] Can someone comment who's watching this if they've done that? Would really love to know.

Blake Oliver: [00:47:56] Has anyone who's listening right now in the live stream ever ended up dating a client? Or maybe maybe you married a client? I mean, stranger things have happened.

David Leary: [00:48:06] I'm sure it's true because I know there's a lot of divorce attorneys who wind up dating clients. So it's kind of it's got to be true in accounting.

Blake Oliver: [00:48:13] That's true. David Hall says AI needs to take my job. I have no time to study for the CPA. A lot of the accounting industry is still using paper forms and has not adopted automation. Maybe I will help update the profession. Yeah, that's how I feel. It's going to make. It's going to make those ten ex employees, 100 ex employees, and that's going to be really interesting, I think. I think actually I will be the end of the timesheet because how do you bill hourly for GPT?

Adrienne Gonzalez: [00:48:41] Oh, they'll figure out a way.

Blake Oliver: [00:48:43] I asked GPT like how I would bill hourly for it and it told me that it would be unethical for me to bill hourly for GPT because it's not a human being, you know.

David Leary: [00:48:57] They could shift it to a computing power or electricity. They'll figure out a way to do it.

Blake Oliver: [00:49:01] But Jeff says regarding this game, the IRS needs to back this as their free file option. I mean, gamifying tax prep is not a bad idea. I think it's a great idea.

Adrienne Gonzalez: [00:49:12] But Intuit is probably paying them off not to not to do that.

Blake Oliver: [00:49:15] Brian says we have been looking for ways to make the tax organizer more engaging. Ian says how long before someone outsources their job entirely and just collects the paycheck?

Adrienne Gonzalez: [00:49:25] I have a story about that, so I don't know if you guys pay attention to the Overemployment thing. Do you know what that is? Oh yeah. Yeah. So you have the remote work people who are taking on several jobs. If you go on the subreddit, there's people who have like three, four jobs. There's a lot.

David Leary: [00:49:40] During the pandemic. Yeah, And.

Adrienne Gonzalez: [00:49:41] There are a lot of people on there who now this hasn't been verified, but they're talking about, you know, they have their their one job. They have a second job that they have almost completely automated. They are collecting an entire full time check from the second job. And it's just completely automated. Don't know about any accountants that are doing this. Think accounting is not very overemployment friendly, but yeah, they're doing it.

Blake Oliver: [00:50:04] I mean, we do know. I mean, I know firm owners who complain about their employees having side gigs, like taking on clients on the side and they don't know about it. I mean, that's so easy to do these days, right? All you need is a laptop to have a firm and well, here's a story that's related in CPA Practice Advisor. Half of US workers earn money from a side gig. Those earning 100,000 annually are more likely to have a growing supplemental income, the survey found. Yeah, it says about half of employed consumers hold a side job or have some other form of supplemental income, such as selling artisan products. Data released Monday by Lendingclub Corp. in partnership with industry publication payments.com show.

Adrienne Gonzalez: [00:50:43] Your favorite David payments.com.

Blake Oliver: [00:50:46] That just prints what do they do they print press releases right. Consumers may be amassing more than $50 billion a month in cash through extra earnings.

David Leary: [00:50:54] So I just put a link that kind of ties into this. This apparently CEOs are starting to quietly backtrack on remote work.

Blake Oliver: [00:51:01] Yeah, I saw that one, too.

David Leary: [00:51:03] So so even Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, who was all all in on, you know, he was criticized, returned office mandates. Even now Salesforce is saying, yeah, it's probably better, you know, newer people if they come into the office, you know, it's probably better for them. And Yeah. And you can't it's hard. It's hard to work two jobs if you're in the office for one of them.

Adrienne Gonzalez: [00:51:25] I think it's because the the, you know, the economy is looking worse. And I think that the Great Recession is kind of easing. And we actually heard on the on the subject of accountant salaries, we're owned by a remote recruiting firm, accounting fly. So we hear from our recruiter that they are not being the employers are not being as aggressive in their offers. So the the job market is kind of turning a little bit. And I think that's what's kind of driving this is, you know, they were saying they were all about remote work when people were, you know, they were bleeding employees and people were leaving in droves and whatever. Now they're like, oh, the economy's getting worse. People are sticking around so we can force them to the office and not guarantee that they'll quit.

David Leary: [00:52:03] Yeah, the pendulum is shifting back to the employer again, and now the employer is also probably like, Hey, I don't have to pay you as much a salary or even hire you. I can just get chatgpt now I don't need you at all.

Blake Oliver: [00:52:14] So there is a bright spot in this data that I saw. I don't have the chart in front of me, but if you look at the share of companies that are fully remote that actually grew a little, little bit, it's like around ten, 11% and that did not shrink. What shrank was the companies that are allowing hybrid and the companies that allow some employees to be fully remote have shrunk. So basically companies, which makes sense, right? During the pandemic, they allowed employees to go fully remote, some of them anyway. And now they're calling them back to the office or they allowed employees to go hybrid. And now they're saying, no, you need to be in the office 100% of the time, which doesn't surprise me at all, because it's the same managers who want to do in the office three years ago, right. And there is.

Adrienne Gonzalez: [00:53:00] Something to be said, though, about because you mentioned young people and there is something to be said about. I see this a lot where people who came in to the profession during, you know, 2020, they missed out on some of that in-person stuff. And it's completely different being able to bother your superior at their job versus waiting for a response in teams. So I think that is a concern. I'm very pro remote. I've worked remote for many years. I thought it was so cool when the pandemic happened and everybody got to, you know, enjoy what I enjoy working in my pajamas. But, you know, what about those young people that are now three years into their career that kind of missed out on that?

Blake Oliver: [00:53:34] Yeah, I see that being an issue. Like starting out your career fully remote would be very challenging. It's much better once you know you're along in your career a few years and then once you start a family, it's just so much better to be like for me anyway, as like a parent. I'm so much happier not commuting. All right. Because I already got so much to deal with at home, Right. I got I got a lot of more responsibilities than I ever had. You can't beat that. So.

Adrienne Gonzalez: [00:54:04] And the firms are supposedly paying. Um, I talked to one managing partner recently, and they pay. They have a stipend that's not just for daycare, but they'll also pay for doggie daycare for people. They'll pay for elder care. I'm seeing more of that, you know, because now all our parents, you know, my my parents have passed away, but all our parents are getting older. That's a concern, you know, So the firms are supporting that. And I think remote work kind of encouraged that where people did reprioritize their lives and be like, I want to spend time more time with my family. You're going to have to pay me if you know, you're going to expect me to be away from them. Yep.

Blake Oliver: [00:54:39] Well, we've got a few more minutes left. David, you got anything? I've been. I've been kind of taken up a lot of the time with the stories here.

David Leary: [00:54:48] I mean, I think a follow up with the Silicon Valley Bank thing, there was an article in Sastre, which is Sastre is really like a you know, it's the going concern of SaaS based startups. Right. And they have training in well, they there it's slightly different, but there are media property focused on that. They do conferences and everything else. But they picked up a slide from Cruz Consulting, who's an accounting firm, and Cruz Consulting did. Cruz Consulting has lots and lots of startups very heavily involved in the silicon banking and I'll give you the link so you can pull up the graph. Essentially, they went and looked at where their clients had their money before and where their clients had their money after. Let me put this in the oh, after the collapse. After the collapse. And now they can just, you know, in QuickBooks. See, you know, what bank accounts people now have. And it's amazing. 50% moved to Jp morgan Chase if you click on that graph there.

Blake Oliver: [00:55:42] Okay. So 50% of Silicon Valley bank deposits went to Chase.

David Leary: [00:55:48] And what's interesting, so Mercury and Brex makes sense why they're a little bit high because A, they've been marketing probably at these Silicon Valley bank startups heavily for the last 3 or 4 years. So they're kind of on top of mind. And plus Mercury and Brex are 100% online, so it's probably quick to set up an account and get your ACH numbers to move that money out. But what's interesting about this is like how low? Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, like like Jp morgan Chase just dominated this. Yeah, it's unbelievable. I wonder why are we on the march to just have 2 or 3 banks in this country if.

Adrienne Gonzalez: [00:56:22] They're less likely to fail? Probably. Well.

Blake Oliver: [00:56:25] So I feel like chase of a Wells Fargo, though. They're all kind of they're all too big to fail. I wonder why so much money went to Chase. So like from SVB. And I wonder if it has to do with the online banking. I've always found chase of the big banks to have the best online banking.

Adrienne Gonzalez: [00:56:40] That was my experience too. They were really when between Chase and Bank of America, I would pick Chase any day. Wow.

David Leary: [00:56:47] And I think Chase also caught some of these tech companies as well, because they have their own payments, rails and things like that. I've never seen lots of apps. I mean, we talk about Emilio Amelio had evolved. Silicon Valley Bank, Jp morgan Chase is where they use the rails to move money. But I never see any tech company or tech app say, Oh, we're using Wells Fargo or they never have those other logos. So I wonder if technically those banks are falling behind.

Blake Oliver: [00:57:09] Wells Fargo is the worst for online. I was going to say.

Adrienne Gonzalez: [00:57:12] They're afraid that Wells Fargo is going to make up a bunch of accounts that they didn't open like they did a couple of years.

Blake Oliver: [00:57:17] Ago. Well, there's that. And then just trying to get access as an accountant or trying to set up user access at Wells Fargo is like it's a huge pain in the ass compared to Chase. Chase was always the easiest. Like, I need to set up another account and access. Easy. No problem. Yep. Ian says. I think it's the online banking, so let's just go through this chart for our listeners who can't see it. So half the money from SVB went to chase. This is according to Cruz Consulting's data from their startup client list. And Cruz is big in the startup world. So, you know, chances are this is representative. So half went to chase, 20% went to Mercury, 9% went to Brex, 6% went to First Republic, which is pretty funny because then it had to go somewhere else, right? Probably after that. Right. Didn't did first Republic get sold? I can't remember.

David Leary: [00:58:08] No. They kind of got some bailed out.

Blake Oliver: [00:58:10] That's okay. 2% went to Morgan Stanley, 3% to 2%, Wells Fargo and then other 8%. So yeah, huge win for Chase. Well, maybe this will inspire the other bigger banks to fix their online banking and make it easy to use.

David Leary: [00:58:26] And I guess other probably would be like relay probably fall under other online people could move those funds over And did you see the announcement from relay. It was actually last week yeah it's awesome.

Blake Oliver: [00:58:35] Relay is now the official banking partner of profit first and they're doing a whole webinar. They've got a whole bunch of features they're rolling out. We bank with Relay and I in my account saw now that we can set up automated transfers. So the first thing I did was I set up an automatic rule where whenever money comes into our income account, it gets swept into our operating account every night automatically, 100%.

David Leary: [00:59:03] You just eliminated my effing job, dude. Sorry. Is that, like, every 2 or 3 days, dude?

Blake Oliver: [00:59:09] And Jesus. And this is a great thing you could be doing with your clients, right? Because if if you, you know, for security purposes, you really don't want to be handing out your operating account number and routing number, right. Where you keep all your most of your money. So you give you set up an account just for inbound ACH payments and that's what you give out to your suppliers or to your customers, and they pay you into that. And then you sweep all the money into your operating account. And it used to be a manual thing for us to do this. So we only did it like once a week, but now we can automate it.

Adrienne Gonzalez: [00:59:38] That's awesome. Yeah.

David Leary: [00:59:39] And in my only comment I had, I just put no brainer because it's like if, let's say you discover profit first and you want to do that or roll that out with a client if they're using a different bank. That's a hassle. Like you got to go and sit these bank accounts. Why? You're going you have to physically go to the branch and it's just like click, click, click, boom, boom, boom. You could in a in a half hour, you could set your whole client up with all the account structure they need with real bank accounts, with real bank routing numbers, and just move on with life. It's such a no brainer that this is the proper partner for somebody like Profit first. Yeah, that's right. It's a lot of sense.

Blake Oliver: [01:00:13] That's all the time we have for this week. Adrienne if our listeners would love to follow you online, where is the best place for them to do that?

Adrienne Gonzalez: [01:00:24] Uh, my Twitter is inky wretch. Love that. The the going concern Twitter is going underscore concern, so feel free to swing by. Please don't leave me mean comments. Already got a mean comment today. Calling me an idiot. Um. I have feelings. So be nice in the comments. Be nice.

Blake Oliver: [01:00:42] Yes.

Adrienne Gonzalez: [01:00:43] Don't care. Well, I'm used to it.

Blake Oliver: [01:00:45] I mean, yeah, because the comments ongoing concern like. Think you guys cleaned them up a.

Adrienne Gonzalez: [01:00:48] While back but. Oh, they used to. It used to be a bloodbath. Yeah. It was no bueno and.

Blake Oliver: [01:00:53] Go to going concern.com read going concern subscribe to going concern David where can people find you.

David Leary: [01:01:00] I'm on all the socials and on LinkedIn if you let me know you're not a bot. I'd also appreciate if you let me know if you have a job because Blake's getting rid of my work. You can write for us.

Blake Oliver: [01:01:12] There you go. David, You got a job offer at Going Concern.

David Leary: [01:01:15] That's great. I like transferring that money between the two accounts every couple of days. Sweeping that over.

Blake Oliver: [01:01:19] I'm at Blake Oliver on Twitter. Find me on LinkedIn. And if you want to see me hiking in the Scottsdale Sonoran Preserve, follow me on Instagram, Jessica said as a bookkeeper with clients on Chase Wells Fargo US bank Waft Is that Washington? I don't know what that bank is, and many small cuz chase is by far the superior bank to work with. We have our first relay client starting next month. So excited for that. Awesome. Jessica and Brian says thanks. This has been great. Adrienne was a great guest. I agree. Adrienne Thank you. This is so much fun. We got to have you back again because like, you just, you know, everything that's going on, this makes this makes our jobs easier. Like to have you on as a as a guest co-host. Like, this was a lot of fun. Thank you.

David Leary: [01:02:06] Have a better idea? Thank you. Let's work with Adrienne on a Going Concern podcast. That's helpful. Have you ever thought about Cast Ever?

Adrienne Gonzalez: [01:02:11] Own had a podcast many years ago for my Go Fraud Me project. I did a project where I would I was tracking GoFundMe frauds and scams. I did a podcast very briefly. I used to read mean emails that I got was like the main content of it. That was many years ago though, so I'd be down. I don't know if I have time. I might need to get I to do some more writing on the site.

Blake Oliver: [01:02:33] We got to get to write the script, you know, or write the articles. That's a question to Adrienne. Like, do you feel like you have to disclose? When I assisted you in writing something?

Adrienne Gonzalez: [01:02:43] I 100% do. And I the article that I posted the other day where I asked Chatgpt about to write it from the perspective of an accountant losing their job to automation, I clearly disclaimed. I feel like you do ethically. I've never used a you know, I've never used AI to help me write. I love to write. I'm one of the few people I think, on planet who actually enjoys writing. But I do think you should disclose because, you know, the I don't know that you have to do it when you're writing emails or whatever, but I think for, you know, a place where people are going something that has my byline, you know, you expect that to be written by the writer.

Blake Oliver: [01:03:17] It makes sense.

David Leary: [01:03:18] And your tweets, my people's tweets. Don't be just just write the tweet people. It's 140 characters.

Adrienne Gonzalez: [01:03:24] I mean, maybe I'm old time, but I love being in the trenches and doing all that stuff. I can't imagine, you know, I don't judge anybody who would, but I can't imagine automating all of that and just having it speak for me. I like to be the one who kind of controls that.

Blake Oliver: [01:03:37] Well, that's going to be the big question in the coming months and years. Adrienne, great having you on. Thanks, everyone, for joining us live. Follow us on YouTube. We are The Cloud Accounting Podcast and subscribe so that you get notified when we go live. See you all here again next week. Bye.