The Accounting Podcast

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Blake Oliver: [00:00:04] You know, it is. It's focusing on appearances rather than focusing on the root problem. And that is my tie in to the accounting profession's problem. You can't market your way out of a product problem. And we have a product problem in accounting.

David Leary: [00:00:25] Coming to you weekly from the OnPay Recording Studio.

Blake Oliver: [00:00:31] Hello and welcome back to the show. I'm Blake Oliver.

David Leary: [00:00:34] And I'm David Leary.

Blake Oliver: [00:00:36] Today we are opening up our listener mailbag. We have many emails from you, messages from you, and we haven't been able to get to them in recent episodes. So we're just going to kick off with that. We're going to talk about compilations, the talent crisis, Aesop's 120 versus 150. TurboTax quote-unquote experts. But before we open up our mailbag, David, any burning stories on your side in the accounting world?

David Leary: [00:01:05] Two caught my eye this week. Like that. Want to make sure we cover. One is a follow-up for last week, I think, when we talked about all the QuickBooks connect coverage. We heard something about the ProAdvisor program, but neither of us had any real information on it. Murph, an insightful accountant, wrote a great article about it with images and screenshots. So we're going to share that and we'll go over that. And then the second piece is news was a UK accounting firm got hacked. Ransomware whatever you want to call it. And the data that was exposed was very interesting. And we'll talk about that.

Blake Oliver: [00:01:33] Well, I'm eager to hear that. We'll do our listener mail first, then we'll get to that. But first we just got to talk about what's going on at OpenAI because we're always using ChatGPT. We're talking about ChatGPT. You told me before we started recording that your wife was asking you about it, and Sam Altman getting kicked out of OpenAI is a big deal, but I think it's actually less of a of a. It's like less of a story than it is, if that makes sense. Like, Sam Altman is a the leader of this company, but there's all these other companies that are developing LMS. It's not like they have something that's super proprietary. And so I'm not really that worried, especially because my favorite chat bot. Chat bot right now is not ChatGPT, it's actually Anthropic's chat bot. Claude I think it does a better job of writing, which is what I use it for mostly, so, you know. We have to put things in perspective.

David Leary: [00:02:31] But is it Anthropic employees that quit OpenAI to start Anthropic? And then I think I saw in this flurry of headlines this week, there was considering merging those two companies together. And then, yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:02:42] There was like some proposal to merge the companies, which yeah.

David Leary: [00:02:47] When I told my wife I was like, this is just like, because, you know, Musk is even involved in this whole thing. I mean, it's just a bunch of rich dudes that all know each other. They kind of started this company together, and now they're all bickering publicly. And I thought that was interesting, though, is the Microsoft mood, because now he's as of today, he's now leading the AI stuff at Microsoft. Or did he go back?

Blake Oliver: [00:03:08] I heard they're using I heard that might not necessarily be happening that Altman would. He was going to go to Microsoft and it's all changing very rapidly. But but here's my take on this. Here's my take on this. Google is the dominant search engine in the world today. It was not the first search engine. It was not even in the first handful of search engines that were developed. You know, don't don't forget AltaVista.

David Leary: [00:03:31] Altavista, Yahoo, excite.

Blake Oliver: [00:03:34] Yeah. And Google ended up taking 80, 90% of the market share. So the chance that OpenAI and ChatGPT is going to be the LM that takes the market is very unlikely. It's going to be somebody who's not the first mover. And maybe this shakeup there, all this drama. There is a sign that they're really not mature enough to do it. And it'll be somebody else. So that's my take on this is like because because OpenAI is, you know, worth billions and billions of dollars. This is getting a lot of press, but ultimately it's not going to affect you all that much because other LMS will come out and ones that are tuned to accounting. There's people working on this right now.

David Leary: [00:04:14] So yeah, I think one thing I look at this story and a lot of the complication is it's like it's a nonprofit that has this profit wing and the board argues and you know, Microsoft when there's billions of dollars involved and profit, right, like cash, things are going to get messy. And then it makes you kind of think, and I know I texted you this because I'm like, what else is set up that way? I'm like, oh, the AICPA, which in theory is a nonprofit organization, has a for profit division, CPA. Com and I'm like, how could that not get messy one day? Or is it messy right now? I don't know, but it's just I just and this probably happens a lot where nonprofits have a profit wing. But it just that seems like the root cause of all this. If there was not a profit wing and a nonprofit arguing this would not be an issue.

Blake Oliver: [00:05:05] Thank you to our live stream viewers who have joined us. Don't forget, you can subscribe on YouTube and get notified when we go live. We've got Stacey and David Hall in the chat. Stacey Feldman says may not have a big impact on AI, but the scandal can be a major lesson in change management and the importance of company culture. Hey, actually, Stacey, that is. That's brilliant. Agreed. Yeah, and I saw an article. It might have been in the The Wall Street Journal or the New York Times about. This is a great example of the key key person problem that a lot of CFOs, if they're good, will focus on. You don't want to have one person in your company that is critical to the company's continued existence. You want to figure out how to. Make sure the company can survive without them. And clearly OpenAI has that problem. Without Sam Altman, it appears. That's a huge risk. Right. And so same thing in accounting firms right. Small accounting firms especially are reliant on that one person. A lot of times even big ones might be. So thanks for joining us in the live stream. Feel free to chat with us and let us know what you think. So let's move on from AI to the mail.

David Leary: [00:06:21] Jump into the mail.

Blake Oliver: [00:06:22] So I have a I have a news story that will bridge us into the mail. So. The trial of the Trump Organization continues in court in New York. Jeffrey Mcconney, the controller for the Trump Organization, was on the stand for the defense on Monday. We are recording on Tuesday. So this happened just yesterday. And the headline from his testimony in CPA Practice Advisor is controller for Trump. Org blames Mazars accountant for financial statements. So this appears to be the core defense argument. They're blaming the accountant. They're saying that David Bender over at Mazars put together these financials and therefore is responsible. Now they actually used the word compilation in this article. I was very happy to see this, although they didn't explain what it meant. They used a quote from Bender who said Trump's execs were, quote, not giving us all the documents that we needed potentially to compile the compilation, unquote. And in a compilation engagement, you do not audit the numbers. You simply put them into the correct format. If something and this is where it gets fuzzy, if you get the picture, I forget what exactly the terminology is, but it's like if you get the idea that something might not be right, you have a duty to look into it, but otherwise you don't. So of course, when you're doing a compilation, you're not going to look into stuff because it's not your job to do it. So look the other way, right? That tends to be how this happens. And so the reason I brought this up is because we got an email from a listener about compilations, Anthony said. I wanted to respond to the comments made on last week's podcast on compilations being unethical. I said. I said, I think that this service, this, this compilation thing is something that we shouldn't be doing as a profession anymore. Do you remember that, David?

David Leary: [00:08:22] Yes. You've seen this numerous times.

Blake Oliver: [00:08:24] Numerous times, as I tend to. I tend to repeat myself. Right. And I feel like it. It is unethical because we are putting our brand, our, our firm name on financial statements that we are not standing by. And I understand there's all these disclaimers, but we have to realize that people don't understand these disclaimers. They don't look at them. It's like fine print. And I think it would be better if we just didn't do them. So continuing on, I'll just start again, Anthony says. I wanted to respond to comments made on last week's podcast on compilations being unethical. There are many small businesses that need GAAP compliant financial statements for loan covenants, but they lack the accounting knowledge to perform any accrual adjustments. Compilations are very useful in this instance perspective from a CPA who performs many compilations for smaller entities. Thanks. So. I understand that. I guess that is a good argument, right? Like that. The smaller entities provide you with information, but they don't know how to do the accruals. And so you put together the financial statements in accrual basis I guess, and you issue those. But couldn't you do that without putting your firm's stamp logo on these financial statements like, why can't you just do that for them in their accounting software and they can send the financial statements to the bank?

David Leary: [00:09:44] Like. So you're saying just assist them in making the journal entries, right? Giving them guidance on how to do it. Does that separate you from the liability though? If you tell them here's the journal entry to make. And you need to do this. And then they just print the statements out themselves.

Blake Oliver: [00:09:58] Well so. I did this in my firm, and we actually never issued financial statements because we didn't want the liability and we didn't, you know, as a CPA once I was a CPA, I didn't want to, you know, be held to the the standards of issuing, you know, putting out actual financial statements, according to AICPA and whatever. And so we would issue management reports and we would do accruals in the accounting system of the client and then let them issue financial statements or send financial statements to whoever needed them. So that way we didn't have liability on our end because we weren't preparing any financial statements. We were just assisting our clients. And like you can don't understand why you can't just do this service.

David Leary: [00:10:41] So if I go to a bank to get a loan, are they going to require that my financials be stamped off by a firm?

Blake Oliver: [00:10:48] Some banks require compilations and I don't understand why. I guess what I, what I'm trying to get at is and I don't have a perfect answer, but what I'm trying to get at is that when you put your firm's logo on financial statements, even if you have all these disclaimers, you are in the mind of the consumer or the user of those financial statements. You are offering implicit assurance. And so there's a difference between what they perceive and what you are saying with all these disclaimers like, why would a bank want a compilation from an accounting firm if it didn't provide some sort of assurance?

David Leary: [00:11:27] Yeah, because I'm the bank, I get this. It has ABC firms stamp of approval on it. That's why I'm reading it is a stamp of approval.

Blake Oliver: [00:11:34] Well, it's not a stamp of approval according to Fine print.

David Leary: [00:11:37] But that's why I'm reading. That's the way I interpret it. Right? Right. I'm the banker. I see it as a stamp of approval. I'm assuming the bank account balances are correct because you went and verified those because you looked at their bank statements. I am assuming the R is correct. The the AP is correct. I'm assuming the inventory is an actual real number because you're putting your name on all these numbers, not just oh, we made the three adjusting entries. Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:11:59] So anyway, those are my that's my thought on this. I just I don't think we should be doing compilations this way. Don't put your firm's logo on these things unless you're actually going to dig into the numbers because you're really misleading whoever's using those financial statements because they don't understand. And this whole Trump saga fraud thing is really an evidence of that. The public doesn't understand a compilation.

David Leary: [00:12:24] So is this a way to tell clients like, hey, I won't do that for you, but you can become a client. I could do on a monthly cast Pro plan and do everything.

Blake Oliver: [00:12:32] You go, right, that's better.

David Leary: [00:12:34] But you know that works. This whole industry has to take that stance, or they're just going to find some other firm that will do the compilation well.

Blake Oliver: [00:12:41] And that's why we have professional standards. Right. So like AICPA should should change this should make it more clear.

David Leary: [00:12:47] Like a formal recommendation. Yeah. Exactly.

Blake Oliver: [00:12:50] Yeah. We shouldn't be doing this kind of service or whatever. Moving on through the mailbag. Nathan Nathan wrote. Blake and David, you have heard from me many times through social media. I finally have a message I wanted to reach out about. I am not a recruiter. We have just found freedom and much greater joy in making the choices we did three years ago, and I want to share it with people. I previously worked in Startup World and my business partner worked for the big four. We now run our own firm. I believe that the best way to increase salaries in accounting is to make people aware of contract positions that exist within the auditing profession for senior and manager roles. Typically, these contract positions pay $75 to $100 per hour. If you are going through a recruiting firm much more outside of a recruiting firm, firms value the time contractors spend on audits because it costs them money. They don't capture the and burn out the individuals. Contractors could work for three months out of the year, 60 hours a week, and make similar as self-employed after taxes. As an individual working W-2 for the entire year as a contract, you can also choose to take on smaller clients to help them in off season, giving more ability to learn actual business functions. State and national CPA societies would be forced to value these individuals as infrastructure of the CPA profession, rather than following the lobbyists of the big four. So basically, the the idea is we need to make people more aware that you can work as a contractor in audit, and you don't have to be working for the firm the whole year, and you can make good money.

David Leary: [00:14:24] Like an audit mercenary. They just bring me in, knock out the audit. I'm there temporarily and I'm out.

Blake Oliver: [00:14:31] So I think that's great. I know of a firm that's doing that audit club. They're doing, like, you know, that kind of support. I wonder if we'll see more of these, like outsourced audit teams that just come in and do a job. And then they're out. It would certainly be a way to control your life more.

David Leary: [00:14:52] But if you have all that skill set, that team want to just do audits and charge more, like.

Blake Oliver: [00:14:59] Don't do it yourself.

David Leary: [00:15:00] Yeah, just just go after the full the the full pie.

Blake Oliver: [00:15:04] I don't know. Here's a here's a message about the BDO. Esop interview that we did with Wayne Burson, CEO of BDO. They're becoming employee owned. If you haven't heard that, dear listener, go listen to that episode. I found it very enlightening. This is from Chris. Chris says, hey, very nice job on the BDO. Esop. There were just a few questions I wish you had asked. Maybe you could do a separate session with or without the CEO? One are the India employees going to participate in the ESOP? India turnover is much higher than us, but how would you do this without creating PE? Could you do something similar with the India firm? So to answer that question, no, the ESOP is only for the US entity at this time. Question number two. I'd like to hear someone talk honestly about the disconnect where the US employees are supposed to be on track with 150 hours and sitting for the exam, but there is no such requirement for the India workforce. Typically, you are not even required to be an enrolled agent until you are ready to be promoted to manager, and a lot of firms have even dropped that requirement. A mere MBA with finance. And this is not at all equal to a US master's in accounting or tax is good enough to get you in the door, with the result that the India workforce is way less technical than the US folks. At least this is true for tax. If this is an acceptable solution for the India workforce, then why are we hiring only CPA candidates in the US? Why aren't we hiring enrolled agents to do the grunt work of preparing tax returns? This is a really good point. And this is shameful that we have a situation where we are forced to firms are forced to offshore work to India and in India or other countries and in India, the requirements are not the same as here. To be a CPA, to be hired.

David Leary: [00:16:57] To be hired in.

Blake Oliver: [00:16:58] A firm, to advance in the firm. Right. And we require 150 hours of our CPAs here, which is why we don't have enough of them. And then we go offshore and send the work to people who are less qualified. Question number three from Chris. Long term, we can all see that India will be heavily affected by climate disasters. Is planning on moving its India team to Canada. That's a good question. And like I don't know I don't know what their plans are for that. I doubt they're thinking that far ahead, like most accounting firms don't think more than a few years out. Right. So are they planning for climate change in the in the scale of like ten, 20, 30 years? Probably not my speculation here. Number four, did BDO make an selection. Is that why the tax benefits are so awesome? Is all the income flowing to the ESOP? I don't know, I'd be curious to know how like why that? Because he did mention that like the tax benefits were really good. And then five if the tax benefits are so great, what about pillar two? Is BDO planning to pay minimum tax in other countries? And I don't even know what that is. So if any of our listeners know if you can.

David Leary: [00:18:09] Answer, this listener has a lot more knowledge of BDO. Like maybe it could be a BDO employee or BDO partner? I have no idea. It just feels like there's a lot of questions that I don't know. Did we do a follow up interview one day and we bring those questions in, right.

Blake Oliver: [00:18:24] Maybe we should send those over to we can clip this and send those questions over to Wayne and see if he'll record a response.

David Leary: [00:18:30] That makes sense.

Blake Oliver: [00:18:32] We got a message from Cheryl. Cheryl, thanks for listening. Cheryl said listening to your podcast and agree with you guys on the 120 credit hours versus 150, I got licensed with 120 and two years of work experience. I have managed people that have no work experience and licenses. No one became a better driver by sitting in driver's ed classes versus getting behind the wheel. I think that might be the best argument for going back to 120 plus two years. Nobody became a better driver sitting in driver's ed class versus getting behind the wheel.

David Leary: [00:19:10] Yeah. It's impossible. That's a good one.

Blake Oliver: [00:19:13] Yeah. I've never met anyone who said that they would prefer a with an extra year of education versus an extra year of experience. Everyone wants the CPA or the candidate with a year of experience. You know, another issue with this whole 150/120 thing is, is really just this idea that you should be working and studying for the CPA exam at the same time. And there was an opinion piece I want to say it was in accounting today. Maybe I can find it. Oh, no, it was CFO, CFO, dot com. Asked a bunch of CFOs what they think about the accounting talent shortage, and one of the CFOs said, blamed the change in the CPA exam from being a two day event to being an all year thing. Because it used to be you would study accounting, you would go sit for the CPA exam, you get it done all in two days, right? And you go to work. And that makes so much more sense.

David Leary: [00:20:17] That does make a lot of sense. And we even have data on our own, on our own earmark app when courses have multiple modules, lets people complete the course. So if a course has just one video to watch or one podcast to listen to, people, listen to that one and they get the course done, they pass the course. If it's 2 or 3 smaller podcasts, they have to listen to all three or watch three separate videos. They tend not to finish the course, so that makes it a lot of sense. It's human nature right to if it's stretched out for a year, you may not ever get to the finish line.

Blake Oliver: [00:20:50] D-hall says in the live stream, if 150 hours is needed and required, all existing CPAs should be given four years to get and comply with the 150 hours requirement. I agree, if it's so beneficial, I think everybody should do it. Here is an email from Kurt. Kurt said hey guys, just wanted to make a quick comment based on your last episode when you were discussing the enrollment at Purdue. Et cetera. So this is regarding Purdue's increased enrollment due to changes they made. Which include better events. Like networking events. And then also they created a course that introduces students to alternative paths in accounting. Other than Big Four, enrollment has spiked. Kurt continues. I attended undergrad and master's program at BYU in Utah, which consistently ranks in the top three ish for accounting programs in the country. The undergrad had roughly 350 students, after a huge group of students getting turned away from the program. Similarly, the masters had about 250 after more students left or got turned away. So it's a very competitive program. I don't know if this is still the case today, but it was only about three years ago that I was there at the time. They were adding more sections slash seats to the undergrad to allow for additional students to be accepted into the highly competitive program. There was essentially 100% job placement. Unfortunately, most to Big Four and tuition is extremely affordable. I'm dragging on now, but I'm curious why my experience seems so different from others that you have talked about.

Blake Oliver: [00:22:26] Why are there students getting turned away from BYU's program while Purdue can't even fill a few classrooms? I know you interviewed professors from UVU, Utah Valley University, and it might be time to take a trip down the road to Provo to interview some from BYU. Love the podcast and would be happy to facilitate an intro if you want to look into this more. Disclaimer that BYU is a private, church owned university, but is definitely not exclusive to members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints. Take care. Kurt. So. Byu is one of the best programs in the country that I've known ever since I got into accounting. And so, to answer your question, Kurt, I think the reason that BYU does so well is simply because they are at the top. And like you said, 100% job placement. It's a great program. It attracts the best candidates. Many of them. And so there's plenty of recruitment that happens. Where we're starting to see the real problems is the programs like at the bottom or the middle, where. They don't have the big four coming in recruiting and. That's where they're starting to struggle. They're struggling to fill classrooms. Right. So it's not going to be evenly distributed. Right. The pain is not evenly distributed. And actually I think that's why we haven't seen the pressure for change, because the big four have not felt the same pain as the mid-sized or the small firms. The small firms are feeling the most pain because.

Blake Oliver: [00:23:57] Well, let's think about this. The BYU grads, they go work at the Big Four, they get dream jobs. They work there for a few years. They burn out. In the past, they would have gone to a smaller accounting firm, perhaps. Now they're just quitting accounting entirely. So the pipeline of talent going from universities to the big four and then down, trickling down into the smaller firms is drying up the trickle down economics of accounting staff. And it's just not it's not working anymore. So the big four, though, they don't feel the pain because they can still get all the top talent they've always been able to. And so they're also the ones who have the power in our profession. They're the biggest firms. They have the most money they donate to these universities. I would argue they probably control the associations. And so they don't they don't feel the pain yet, so they don't feel the need to change. Not to mention that the people who are making the decisions are boomers, who also are completely out of touch with what's happening on the ground, people at the end of their careers, not at the beginning. Same problem we have in Congress and in the Senate, you know, got 70 and 80 year olds who really ought to be in like nursing homes, making the decisions for how to run this country that are affecting those of us who are in our 20s, 30s and 40s.

David Leary: [00:25:21] I'm still hung up on the story. Them denying people to join the undergrad or the master's program. Like you have to have more seats or move it to a bigger classroom like it's I don't see the the why is there a barrier to entry there or how are like like obviously it works with these, you know, this part of the pipeline. Like aren't they upset that you're denying people from becoming accountants?

Blake Oliver: [00:25:49] Well, exclusivity is good right? If you want to maintain. Demand. You've got to have people waiting to get in the door. Like a popular restaurant. You got to have that waiting list, right?

David Leary: [00:26:03] It feels like this is an anomaly. I don't think it's it's reflective of most accounting college experiences.

Blake Oliver: [00:26:10] It's the top. It's the top one of the top three programs. Right. But like think about all the other hundreds of programs or maybe even thousands. Those are the ones that are suffering. Okay, here's one about TurboTax. Ryan says, hi, David and Blake. Here's a good one for you. Just got off a call with a prospective client. I had gone over her 2022 tax return and needed to discuss some potential red flags on her return, mainly the even number of mileage and cost basis for her vehicle. Her return reported a 25,000 yes, 25 K even cost basis for her vehicle, as well as 17,000 business miles, 3000 personal miles for 20,000 total miles. All even numbers. I asked her about this and it turns out she doesn't do much business driving other than back and forth from her house to her business location. Commuting miles are not allowed for business use. She then told me that she used one of the TurboTax live experts, and that before working with the expert, she owed money for 2022. This expert asked her about how much she drives for business each week and then put these mileage numbers into her return, and miraculously, she had a refund. Mind you, this client has never so much as tracked one single trip for business mileage, let alone have any sort of log that is required. How ridiculous is that? TurboTax live experts are just dropping fake numbers into returns to get people refunds. This is what we have to compete with. Love the podcast and keep up the good fight to abolish the 150 hour requirement. Ryan.

David Leary: [00:27:42] So this goes opposite of stories I've heard from TurboTax live reps where, you know, clients are saying, hey, I need you to do this, or I want to put this number in and they push back. The TurboTax live rep has a lot of freedom to push back and not do things for the client, but at the same time, if there's 10,007 to 10,000 TurboTax live reps, we're going to hear stories like this. Right there. They're not all going to be at the perfect bar quality. Yes. Right. And so we're going to hear stories like this just because it's a numbers game. I'm sure whoever you are, if you have 10,000 people at your firm pumping out tax returns all tax season, probably some members of your firm are probably going to we get a story about your firm as well as my guess.

Blake Oliver: [00:28:26] Yeah, I would agree with you. This is less of a TurboTax expert issue and more of a profession wide issue where you have unethical or uneducated or both tax preparers who are willing to bend the rules and some are willing to bend them more than others. There's very few preparers who. Do everything completely by the book. I know they exist. It's really hard to run a business that way, because if you do, you're at a disadvantage. When clients come in to you, they they don't want to necessarily do everything by the book. They hear that they've got, you know, buddies who are doing tax shenanigans, right? They want you to do them too. This is one of the real challenges about tax, and it's one of the reasons I'm kind of glad I never had to deal with it because. I don't know in bookkeeping. In client accounting services, which was my area. I would just ask the client, like, how do you want to code this, right? We do our best to code the transactions and then let them decide. And it was up to them if they wanted to put something that to me looked kind of personal into a business expense account, but I didn't worry about it ethically. I didn't have to have liability for it.

David Leary: [00:29:40] That's why I was loved about payroll. When I saw the tech support for payroll, and a lot of people didn't want to do tech support for payroll because the calls were kind of tough. But I loved about it. It's always black and white. There's only one proper way to deduct a 401 (K) from a paycheck. There's no grayness there. There's there's no wiggle room. And that's what I always loved about payroll is just there's just the right way and that's it. Like there's no, no inventing or well, maybe this and there's interpretation of this, but there's zero of that exist in payroll.

Blake Oliver: [00:30:08] You mean you never had anyone ask you how they could pay somebody under the table?

David Leary: [00:30:12] Oh, you have all that stuff. Yes. All of those questions come in or they'd argue on where the how the well, that shouldn't deduct from there. It should be deducted from here, you know, on A41 retirement plan or how to give an employee a loan like everything is always very black and white. How it should operate.

Blake Oliver: [00:30:27] I'll add one more thought to this discussion, which is, you know, we're talking on our last episode about systemic cheating or systems that encourage cheating when it comes to like ethics exams, like what happened at Ernst and Young in Texas, where they got fined $3 million for. I don't know, 50 or something. People cheating on the ethics exam for CPA. And while I do believe those individuals have responsibility, I also believe that the people who create and maintain the system that incentivizes unethical behavior are also to blame and actually more to blame because they created a system that allows you to cheat easily. And so I would say the same thing here. It's that the system of taxation in our country is so complicated and allows for so much of the the funny business that goes on that it is a unethical system. So to be an ethical tax preparer is really challenging and really difficult, and it requires you to often sacrifice revenue to be ethical. Now, you could say that about any profession, but I think it's especially true. Or it's even more difficult in tax than in many, many, many, many other places. You have unethical doctors who can go out and prescribe, like we saw, opioids, to people who shouldn't have them and get them addicted and become pill mills. Right. But I feel like that that was harder than it is to be like it was easier. It's easier to be an ethical doctor than it is to be an ethical tax preparer, if that makes sense, because so many people come and want you to do the wrong thing constantly. That's what I hear from our friends who do techs. It's like never ending.

Blake Oliver: [00:32:15] And because the IRS is under-resourced and doesn't audit, you're the one who has to stand up to the client. And the threat of audits is not what it was. So it's. It's really tough and I sympathize and it's just not right. And why can't our. Why can't we have a system that encourages people to be honest? Here's a message from digital accountants on Instagram. I think the username is gradient accounting. This is for you David. Hey David, I have a topic that our firm is always pondering and I would love your thoughts or to spawn a podcast conversation. Not a lot, but a handful of tax clients every year seem to want to play with the IRS. Some want to commit blatant tax fraud and record large expenses that never happened. Backdate invoices or go through. I can't read that something. How to justify expenses that are clearly personal. Most times we have to end up firing the client in protection of our own livelihood and ethics. But it seems that a constant battle to explain to our clients that the IRS is not something to be messed with. I feel like solo entrepreneurs are dismissive of the IRS and threats of an audit that they are, quote, too little, unquote, to be caught. This has to be a topic for every accountant, right? I feel like it's only creating a market for sketchy accountants. And honestly, it's just exhausting and discouraging. Like, what's the point of all this schooling and hard work if we're going to be ignored anyway? So like, I didn't I didn't plan on reading that right after I gave my little soliloquy that just that just happened to be next.

David Leary: [00:33:47] Yeah, it ties in to what you're saying, but I do think you're right. It's a bigger. Career thing. When you don't feel valued like you do all this training, you do this education, you become an expert and then people don't value you because. Threat of anything going wrong just isn't there, right?

Blake Oliver: [00:34:08] Yeah. You're trying to protect them. It's like you're trying to protect people who? This must be. How? Like all the doctors felt who were trying to tell people like, you know, take precautions with Covid, right? Like all these people who had health.

Speaker3: [00:34:24] Conditions or.

David Leary: [00:34:25] Stop smoking or don't eat McDonald's or whatever, whatever.

Speaker3: [00:34:28] The. Yeah. And like.

Blake Oliver: [00:34:29] They ignore you and then they get sick and they die. Very frustrating. And again. You know, I'm glad. I'm glad I don't have to do it. Hall says. How do I give myself a 100,000 bonus in payroll? That's for you, David. Asking you a payroll question.

David Leary: [00:34:50] What? Did you already take the money? Because that's the case. We have to create a gross up paycheck to get you to the 100,000, which is a hard concept for a lot of people to deal with.

Speaker3: [00:34:59] I think you could you.

Blake Oliver: [00:35:00] Could start like a payroll advisory firm and just like, get all these questions outsourced to you from all these firms, you've got such experience with it.

David Leary: [00:35:08] I possibly could. The only difference is I used to know line by line that 941 and like could recite it sleeping, but I think they've changed the 941. So I don't know which line numbers match what numbers, but a couple of weeks could wrap back up.

Blake Oliver: [00:35:23] All right. Continuing on, we got a message from a listener who asked to remain anonymous. And normally, by the way, when our listeners write in, I know, like I see your full name, like your email signature, and I don't know who wants to be. Quoted who wants their name associated with this? So if you don't tell me otherwise, I just use your first name because I don't know if you want your whole name going out there. And if you want to remain completely anonymous, please tell me like this listener did. So this is regarding our discussion in previous episodes about the makeup of professors in accounting programs. And I was. Pointing out and complaining about how a lot of these professors don't have practical work experience. They went on this PhD path. Maybe they did like a year to get their CPA, and now they're teaching, or they were Big Four and they've been out of the game for like 20, 30 years, and they're still teaching like it's 1980 when it was their heyday or something. So here's this message from Anonymous Listener. I wanted to help explain a factor that plays into how schools determine who their professors are. I know you talk a lot about the fact that accounting faculty should be more real world, but to some extent it is not that simple.

Blake Oliver: [00:36:41] Like anything, there are standards and rules that schools must follow. Business schools, and in many cases, accounting programs are accredited. The biggest accreditor of the major schools is Aacsb. One of the standards that schools must follow is the makeup of the faculty. That makeup is a complex ratio based on a faculty's degree, what they publish, what their other roles are at the school, and their work outside of the school. I am not an accreditation expert, but I know that I do not hold a PhD, only an Ms. in accounting, and my CPA is 15 years of practical accounting experience. As such, I fall into a classification of faculty that is on the lower end of the ratio. There is more weight given to those with terminal degrees, i.e. PhDs in accounting, resulting in a makeup of faculty that is more heavily weighted to PhDs. As a generalization, traditional PhDs may not have their CPA and limited nonacademic work experience. And if your school is a research focused school, then research and academic work is an important factor. I am only familiar with this set of rules for Aacsb.

Blake Oliver: [00:37:47] There are other accreditation boards. There are other. Is IT accreditation boards? Yes. Accreditation boards. And they may be more flexible. But you see, the rules the schools have to play by. Could cause them to lean more heavily to those with an academic background and not practical backgrounds. There are faculty that have that have both, and schools try to work in the balance of academic research with practical but per this report below. Many schools get dinged if they are not properly balanced. And then there's some links to the state of accreditation report by the Aacsb. So at the end of the day, there are many levers that have to be pulled to balance all this out. My school supports all the practical experiences I bring to the classroom, and the students love it, but they also continue to primarily focus on their hiring of research slash tenured faculty to help maintain the proper ratio. Unfortunately, you cannot just hire anyone into a college based on these rules and requirements. So. It's it's it's it's standards, accreditation rules that you have to have a certain number of PhDs on your staff, on your faculty, in order to be accredited.

David Leary: [00:38:55] It. It's the old guard. Right. And this is why we'll talk to people that are not allowed to teach QuickBooks at their university, because it's not in the the upper standards of whatever rules are laid out. And but somebody can go to community college and teach it all they want or learn about it. And that's the the bigger issue is we're trying to operate this industry with rules that were set up 60, 70 years ago, 40 years ago, and it's just not working. It's not working. It's very clear it is not working anymore.

Blake Oliver: [00:39:25] Well, it's clear to you and me that it's not working, but I think that the people leading the profession are in denial about this.

David Leary: [00:39:33] I think it's clear to them. I just think they're digging their heels in.

Speaker3: [00:39:37] Well, but why?

David Leary: [00:39:38] You kind of got caught when, you know, you got caught and you just like, you dig in more in your argument.

Blake Oliver: [00:39:43] I mean, do they think are they are they is it they see the numbers going down like if accounting if the accounting profession had a scorecard full of KPIs. They're all going down. It's all red arrows, right? Number of accounting students. Number of accounting grads. Number of CPA candidates. Number of CPAs. All trending downward.

David Leary: [00:40:03] Salaries based on inflation like.

Blake Oliver: [00:40:06] Yeah. Salaries based on inflation trending downward for 20 years. Number of jobs unfilled. Number of firms 42% of firms can't find enough. Staff are turning away work. Give me one positive data point that I can point to in accounting. So are they even looking at the numbers? And if they are, are they wishful thinking? Are they hoping that it's going to turn around magically when we start promoting the profession as like, I don't know, more sexy? As Roger Phillips said in our interview with him and Peter Olinto. Nothing's going to change until. The the business model changes and it's this educational professional association. Well it's the it's the educational Big Four industrial complex.

David Leary: [00:40:58] So anyway, we talked about this in the airline industry. They're struggling to get pilots and they're bypassed. And so United Airlines is bypassing the traditional channels. And they're just going to train. They're setting up their own pilot school and training pilots themselves. I saw a commercial for it. I could not find a YouTube version of it because I would have brought it to the show. But I saw a commercial that was during an NFL football game, and they were the commercial was targeting that program. Come be a pilot and look, you could start on this little plane bigger, bigger, bigger. And it showed all the planes and it showed a career progression. And that might have to be the answer. Some firms are just going to have to bypass the educational system.

Blake Oliver: [00:41:31] You want to know what the biggest barrier to becoming a pilot is? Flight hours. Yeah, they have the same problem, right. Because they have this rule arbitrary. You could argue it's arbitrary that in order to be a pilot, you have to have a certain number of hours in flight. And. I mean, I understand that, right?

David Leary: [00:41:51] Well, again, that goes to the we don't want you just to read 10,000 hours of reading books about flying planes. We want you to fly a plane.

Blake Oliver: [00:41:58] Right. But also, is it good flight experience? Right. Like like is it is there a better way to measure whether somebody is a good pilot other than just hours in the seat in the sky? Maybe there's a way to do it with, like, simulations. Where you can prove that you can handle these emergency situations, because that's when you need the pilot. You don't need the pilot. The planes fly themselves. Okay. When you need the pilot is when the plane. When the autopilot doesn't work. People don't realize, like these planes can land themselves. They can take off by themselves. The pilot can just watch everything happening and take off. But they have to be able to take over when.

David Leary: [00:42:37] This is why accountants will always have jobs, no matter how many. How much automation comes, you get to you just get to watch it.

Blake Oliver: [00:42:43] Hazardous items said in the chat employment amongst accountants are low. That's a positive. Okay, you got me. That's true. Yes we have we have a positive. And I would say actually the. Yeah the job opportunities. If you know where to go. Are unlimited, but the challenge is that the traditional education system is not teaching accountants the skills they need to get those jobs. So like to become the CFO, you got to go outside of traditional education to get what you need. You got to learn all the all the ERP stuff, the operational data collection, the data analytics skills that are not being taught in accounting programs.

David Leary: [00:43:26] Technology or open a cash practice. Pretty much you're not going to get those skills in college-

Blake Oliver: [00:43:32] No. I learned I learned very little. I mean, I guess, you know, it was my accounting 101 and intermediate that were like the most valuable for me in terms of CAS. And then all the advanced stuff was completely irrelevant because I was just working with small businesses and there was no technology, so I had to learn all that on my own. Luckily, I love technology, but like all the stuff that like Main Street businesses need to be successful, that CPAs need to work with Main Street businesses. We don't learn that in accounting school, because all the accounting programs are geared toward working as a CPA for the big four, auditing or doing tax returns for fortune 500 companies. And it's that like that leaves out a huge chunk of the country, which is Main Street businesses. And that's that's the funny part about this whole thing is like, we have all these accountants leaving the profession, but I think it's because they don't know about all the great opportunities that are available to work remotely. I say this, I got into accounting because of the flexibility. It's so ironic that it's considered to be one of the least flexible professions, and has the worst work life balance. I got into it because of that. I love the work life balance, but you have to be in one of these virtual firms and it's not that much of the profession, probably. I mean, it's got to be less than 10% of the profession is fully virtual. In terms of these firms, right.

David Leary: [00:44:58] And we talk about these virtual. And a lot of them are listeners of our podcast. And we meet them at the conferences. And you you talk to all of these virtual firms and these cast only practices that exist. I'm willing to bet money that if you go looking at the PhDs at some of these accounting accounting programs, they don't even know that there's a whole market that exists this whole up and coming new world that's actually been existing now a decade plus.

Blake Oliver: [00:45:20] Yeah, I bet they have no idea what CAS even is or client accounting services. And they would refer to it derogatorily, you know, as bookkeeping, low margin bookkeeping work. I mean, I still hear from listeners who say, I want to start a CAS practice at my firm, but the partners don't want to invest in bookkeeping. I'm just like. I'm for our for our podcast listeners. My palm is on my forehead.

David Leary: [00:45:47] Or they want to offer virtual CFO services but not actually control the books.

Blake Oliver: [00:45:50] Which is really stupid. And everybody who's tried to do that ends up doing the books, because if garbage data, you're going to get a garbage result. Same thing with the tax. Yes. And when I say cast, I mean outsourced accounting, I should just say outsourced accounting. I should just say accounting. We should just call it accounting. It's really sad that we have a situation in our profession where only like 10% of the profession actually does accounting. We call it the accounting profession. But 90% of our profession is doing tax and audit. Now, don't get me wrong, I understand there's lots of value in tax and audit, but come on, like we should be at least like an equal leg on the stool. A three legged stool. Right, right. Now that stool is like, teetering over. And that would provide such a great, you know, opportunity for all those accountants who don't want the busy season and to even out the busy seasons. And that's how you that's how you make work life balance in your firm, is you do the books and you do the tax, and you do less tax and you do more books. And the bookkeeping work is done all year round, and the advisory work is done year round, and the payroll work is done year round, and the bill pay work is done year round. And then you uncompressed your your life.

Speaker4: [00:47:02] Hmm.

Blake Oliver: [00:47:05] I don't know if I actually called this out in the in the audio, but we got a good comment from all pro Leamington who said a lot of the professors. I had only had two years of Big Four experience, which is basically just testing cash and inventory, very basic work. Another teaching people how to be future accountants. This is how I felt about many of the PhDs in the music program at northwestern, which is a top. I'd argue it's a top ten classical music program especially, you know, the brass, because Chicago brass is just like Chicago Symphony. Brass is amazing. And we would, you know, like my buddy Matt Monkey is plays trumpet in the New York Philharmonic. And I conducted his senior recital, you know, like, these are, like, all star musicians and. We had PhDs, though, who were like studying to get their PhD at northwestern that had like never performed in a professional orchestra. And they were teaching. They were teaching. They were supposedly teaching us how to get, you know, how to do that. But they had never done it themselves. There's a big gap there, if you ask me. Uh, fortunately, in music programs like they don't, I don't know how they get around it, like. This tenured versus or PhDs versus like practical experience. But like my professor, I think he had maybe he went and got a master's in order to become a professor, but they didn't make him go get a PhD. And he was, you know, principal cellist of the Houston Symphony for a while.

David Leary: [00:48:38] Well, I'm sure the requirement is the same as the rest of academia where the they have to publish, they don't have to perform. Right. They probably have to publish some paper about music, but they don't actually have to. Like instead of publishing, maybe it should be you're required to perform some music.

Blake Oliver: [00:48:52] Have you ever gone and like, looked at some of these papers that PhD accountants write? I mean, how much accounting research can there really be when accounting standards really haven't, you know, like changed that much in 100 years? It's like I think they really have to dig for topics. I'd. You would think that these PhDs would be working on like updating accounting theory to match what is happening in the market. But there I don't. I don't see that.

David Leary: [00:49:23] Or the or the study or the paper on accounting education.

David Leary: [00:49:28] Makes sense.

Blake Oliver: [00:49:30] Hazardous says. I also feel that the accountants in and are out of touch with the pipeline because they're no longer actively working in the industry. Yeah. And that's the problem is that while you are working in the industry or in the profession, you're too busy to actually volunteer on any of these committees in any of these organizations. So the people who have the time are the ones who are on the way out or retired, essentially. And they haven't worked in accounting in many cases for like decades. And so they're not in touch with the younger folks and they're not really talking to them. And I think that's I mean, I want to say it's not it's not malicious. Right. It's just it's just and it's the same way in Congress. Right. These I don't think that most people run for Congress because they just want to enrich themselves. There's a lot easier ways to do that, right? If you just want to.

David Leary: [00:50:22] You're very rich by being in Congress.

Blake Oliver: [00:50:24] You can get rich by being in Congress. But like, I think there's less painful ways. Okay. And so I think they come in with good intentions. But then like, you know, they're just out of touch. And then the system, you know, forces you to spend all your time fundraising. And not actually doing the work. Because it's like this giant, you know, money machine.

David Leary: [00:50:47] Do you have any more listener mail or do we catch it all?

Blake Oliver: [00:50:50] That's it. That's the whole mailbag. We spent the whole episode on mail.

David Leary: [00:50:54] Yeah. So? So I have a story. I can tie in this hacking story to this. At some level, a lot of these listener mails, either with the professors or the pipeline, I think it's all tied to. What's important, right? The focus on what's important is not there. Or maybe there's a disagreement, like we think the focus should be on teaching people how to actually do the job.

Blake Oliver: [00:51:16] Practical work experience.

David Leary: [00:51:17] Practical work experience. So so we have a story. This happened. This was recorded or reported on data breaches. Net. So there's an accounting firm in the UK called Greenhall, chartered accountants and business advisers. They were compromised hacked whatever you want to call it. And 168GB of files were released, and what's interesting about this data that was released is there's a lot of files that were just called patient. The patient dot csv.

Blake Oliver: [00:51:49] Oh, that doesn't sound good.

David Leary: [00:51:51] And one of the files has first names, last names, postal addresses, zip codes, phone number, and social security numbers. No treatment information, but just demographic information, which included the Social Security number. A lot of these patients addresses were in Mississippi. Right. And so data breaches.com was trying to figure out are these real not real. They are able to verify a lot of the Social Security numbers are real. A lot of these people are truly patients. They're all tied to lots of people in Mississippi. They've even figured out possibly who the US entity is. But they they reached out. They did not get any response. And so I'm like, all right, let's go to this company, this this firm's website. So we go to the firm's website. And you know, they do they specialize in health care. So it makes sense why they have all these files, right, that are on their things. But weirdly, and this is going to get me I'm on a soapbox here for a second. You go to their website and what do you get. You start getting all because they're in the UK. You get prompted. Do you accept cookies? Would you like to customize how your cookies are going to? We're going to track you on a cookie. You get all this crazy stuff about the cookies. We've all experienced this on many websites, you know, because God forbid there's a cookie in your browser, right?

Blake Oliver: [00:52:57] Yeah. All thanks to that European Union law, GDPR.

David Leary: [00:53:01] Yeah. So so a firm has to invest it money, resources, all of these things to track the cookies properly and at the expense of not actually making sure privacy files, they don't have policies to make sure people aren't creating these files with people's Social Security numbers saved on their hard drives getting stolen, it's again, it's the what's important. And over and over again, that's the whole example of this show. I think we're showing over and over again. What's important maybe isn't what really should be important.

Blake Oliver: [00:53:31] Yeah, we're focusing on the wrong things.

David Leary: [00:53:33] Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:53:34] And. So. So this is a UK firm. Uk firm presumably doing accounting work for US company.

David Leary: [00:53:45] Yeah. So they, they I think they probably implement systems and have expertise in health care, probably rolling out Sage or Intacct or whatever. They're rolling out for systems. And, and this could be test files, who knows what these are. But the fact that. It's just for me. It's upside down priorities, right? But man, their website had all the privacy cookie stuff popping up everywhere. And, you know, very clear on that. It's the first experience you get when you go to their site. Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:54:14] Well, I think that that is a good example of the wrong focusing on, you know, it is it's focusing on appearances rather than focusing on the root problem. And that is my tie in to the accounting profession's problem. You can't you can't market your way out of a product problem. And we have a product problem in accounting. The job of most staff coming out of school working for these big firms is not that great. The pay is low, the hours are long, the work is unsatisfying. Until we address that issue. Until we either fix that. I don't know if the big firms can be fixed. Better yet, we funnel those students into mid-size firms where the work life balance is better. Or we send them into corporate like. Until we address the job, we can't solve the problem and the professional associations are afraid to tell their members this. I think they are. They want to do the right thing. But you know the. The partners at these firms don't want to hear it. Right because they want the gravy train to keep on pouring. And they're not that long from being out of the out of it. Right? They don't want it to stop. They don't want to change. This is something they've been doing for 20, 30 years. Why would they change now? So it'll keep working until. It breaks. And that's the question is when will it break? Will there be a sudden braking point or will it just be a slow decline? I imagine there might be another major fraud, like an Enron type of situation that could happen due to the lax auditing that's happening. You know, half of audits fail. So at some point, maybe we'll have another Enron, and then maybe we'll reevaluate how we do audit in this country. And that could shift things. But I wonder how long-

David Leary: [00:56:10] Does it have to be a fraud? Did you see. Well, this is in our own backyard. The University of Arizona, their athletic department, can't find $240 million. And a lot of it is probably just misreporting and budgeting type stuff. Not really a fraud, but it just. These were mistakes in the accounting department that have occurred. And people thought they had more money than they did.

Blake Oliver: [00:56:31] Yeah.

David Leary: [00:56:32] That's a quarter of a billion dollars. Nobody stole it. It's just bad, probably understaffed accounting departments.

Blake Oliver: [00:56:39] The Great Depression is what created the current regulatory regime for audit in this country. Will it take another massive, you know, situation like that to change it? The problem is when you have all these entrenched interests, the establishment, right. They don't want change. We will see. But you know what? I'm. I'm ready to make, like, a New Year's resolution. David. And I think I should save it. But, you know, like I'm going to flesh it out more, but I think it's okay.

David Leary: [00:57:11] This is good. This is a preview, a preview.

Blake Oliver: [00:57:14] So over this year, you know, we've had the rise of artificial intelligence. I have become very positive actually about accounting because I think I can solve a lot of the drudgery work, which will make accounting more appealing. And I've also started to reach like the acceptance phase. I think of my problem with the profession, which is. I mean, we'll see in May when the pipeline committee comes back with their recommendations, if they will do anything dramatic, but just based on what I've been hearing. What I know I don't I don't think they're going to do anything big. Like, why would they write? In all their history, they've never made any big changes. It's always incremental.

David Leary: [00:58:00] So you're keeping your expectations high.

Blake Oliver: [00:58:02] Expectations are extremely low. I mean, it could be like basically, you know what? They've already they've already shown they have this plan, which is mainly like it's a marketing plan, right. And I said, you can't market your way out of a product problem. So. That's going to continue to be how they deal with it, not to really acknowledge the root causes, not to really address those and just try to paper it over and it's okay. That's fine, because it's a really big profession and we don't have to fix the whole thing. And I'm just going to narrow my scope and think, how can I highlight what's going on in the parts of the profession that are really thriving? And that has always been these small firms, like going to QuickBooks connect was really great, because it's a totally different experience than going to any other accounting conference, because the people there are excited to be alive and to be working and growing firms and and they're just happy to be there. And, and there's so much opportunity. Um, it's a really bright point, outsourced accounting. So I'm just going to focus on that and do what I can to highlight that. And you know what? Maybe we can attract those people that are unhappy from audit and tax. And again, tax is complicated because you have the big tax and you have the small tax. And so like actually in tax I think you have the best options because you can do it anywhere. Right. But it's those poor auditors. And we don't want them quitting the profession. We need them coming into our smaller firms and working with us. So maybe that's that's my mission in 2024 is like, how do we get that message out to those folks who are maybe not on social media, you know, who are crying when they come home from work every day?

David Leary: [00:59:49] Are we going on the college tour like we're going to hit the campus every week?

Blake Oliver: [00:59:52] Actually, you know what? I think that's a great idea. David, we should go. We should volunteer to do presentations at colleges, even if it's just virtual, and highlight all the cool opportunities outside of the traditional path.

David Leary: [01:00:07] Yeah, because we have lots of examples, lots of people we know, lots of listeners.

Blake Oliver: [01:00:11] All right.

David Leary: [01:00:12] Let me just show the QuickBooks ProAdvisor badges.

Blake Oliver: [01:00:16] Oh yeah because- yeah, we might as well cover that. Right.

David Leary: [01:00:18] We talked to it.

Blake Oliver: [01:00:19] Yeah. So in our last episode, we weren't really prepared to talk about the changes to the ProAdvisor program the QuickBooks announced. So give us the details, David.

David Leary: [01:00:28] So so thank goodness for Murph at Insightful Accounting because he somehow got Ahold of some slides, which gives us visual content to show on the screen here. And they talk about all the changes. So previously you always had certified and QuickBooks online certified in QuickBooks payroll, certified in QuickBooks Online Advanced, or your advanced QuickBooks Online Certified. But they've added two more. So you have banking knowledge and now reporting knowledge. They're kind of like a sub badge per se. I'm assuming banking knowledge is your your expert on all the bank feed and automated ways to bring data into the product. And then obviously reporting is kind of self-explanatory. They're also letting people badge themselves. Now if you're in the Intuit Writer Trainer Network or if you're on the Intuit Accountants console, console, console right now, that's an interesting one because there's a badge for that, but that's a rotating position where they're always rotating every quarter, 25% of the members out. So I wonder if there's going to be a historic member badge or something like, like a former, you know, Intuit Council member. And then they have a tiers, right? So there's new tiers. And these tiers are probably the most important or impactful silver, gold, platinum and elite. And depending on where your firm falls or where you fall in as an individual, it's going to affect some of the benefits you get from Intuit. If your gold or higher now, or you have to become gold or higher to even be listed in the finder ProAdvisor website. So you have to get your firm has to get enough points to even be listed there.

David Leary: [01:01:55] With platinum you get this. Oh, and you also get discounts at gold on products and services. With platinum, you get additional discounts on Intuit Proconnect and Intuit Tax Advisor that Intuit Tax advisor product they've they've created. And then elite. You get firm growth consultation. So you're getting a dedicated support management or manager and from the management team. And then you also receive special events discounts, sweepstakes contests, networking opportunities. So they're really taking care of those elite partners at a bigger level. And I'll scroll down a little bit for those of you watching at home. And basically they have a new point system. The points are very, very graduated, very high. You have to get thousands and thousands of points now to become so a premier or or platinum or elite. But the base of the the different levels of points. So if you activate a feature like contractor payments or 1099 and a clients file, you get 25 points if you turn on. A client and you flip them over to become a QuickBooks Online Advanced client, you get 75 points, so it's tied to the activities in. The features you turn on for clients will get you more points. And then if you finish training, for example, if you do certification for advanced certification or or the payroll certification, you get 200 points. So you get you can really start adding up points based on what you're doing with your clients. And so it's so it's activity based, the way those tiers are going to be not just educational based.

Blake Oliver: [01:03:18] So do these programs really work like they must they must incentivize behavior or a company like into it wouldn't do it right. But like for me I was always too distracted running my practice to even think about this. Like this. This made no. It was nice when I hit a certain tier and I liked getting the perks, but it never made a difference to me anyway.

David Leary: [01:03:40] Well, historically speaking, I think Intuit always had. The freezing math. Let's just say 100,000 QuickBooks Proadvisors, but only some like 2600 like a super low number ever became advanced certified. And so they're trying to get people to take the extra steps to get better at QuickBooks. And the way to do that is to somewhat gamify the system. And the other smart thing I think Intuit does versus other products like this is all built into QuickBooks Online Accountant Edition. You're not having to go to some other website maintained by a third party company that gamifies it, or tracks your certifications and the points and all of that, and you're logging in. It's just right in the QuickBooks Online Accountants Edition product, so you're not having to travel somewhere else to go and keep track of your points and where your status is. It does feel a lot like an airline miles program.

Speaker3: [01:04:33] And that's the other thing.

Blake Oliver: [01:04:34] I gave up on, David, is I used to do the airline Miles program. I had like a Chase Sapphire, whatever card. You know, they got all the different things and I just found it so cumbersome. I just switched to a cash back. And I love it. It's like simple life is easy. I just book whatever's cheapest. You know, I don't I don't worry about using miles, but I guess I guess it works, you know, like the same way airline miles programs work. People. It's gamifying it so.

David Leary: [01:05:03] Well, what if only elite members get to go to QuickBooks connect? Right? People will-

Blake Oliver: [01:05:08] - get a free ticket after.

David Leary: [01:05:10] You get those points. Or a free ticket. Yeah, you get into the best parties.

Blake Oliver: [01:05:15] Oh, we got a hot take from Ray. Those who chase these types of incentives are not the accountants you want working on your stuff.

David Leary: [01:05:22] It's kind of true, but the biggest incentives. Are you getting trained? Like that's the most points. Yes. Right.

Blake Oliver: [01:05:28] I would say I would err on the side of like, don't let. These can be fun programs, but don't let this in any way determine how you run your practice. Run your practice based on what's best. It's like the same. It's the same argument. Like, don't make business decisions based on the tax code. Don't let that be your primary decision maker. Like, oh, I'm going to get this sweet deduction if I buy the g-wagon. You shouldn't buy the g-wagon in the first place. You know, you're you're not making money.

David Leary: [01:05:56] Yeah. You should always have to solve what is right for each client. Right. And for some clients that might be into payroll for the next client, maybe it's not Intuit payroll. You know, maybe it's on pay, but you have to solve properly for your clients. Yeah. The other big observation is this you only get 100 points if you get a desktop certification [CROSSTALK]

Blake Oliver: [01:06:12] So that's good. They're incentivizing people. Well, and that's been the problem for years, is that the incentives on like selling desktop enterprise as a reseller, you've made way more money doing that than you did if you put people on QuickBooks online. So for all of these years and years and years, you had, you know, accountants putting people who shouldn't be on it on QuickBooks enterprise, making them overpay for software.

David Leary: [01:06:34] And we're going to get hate now from the the Vars, the QuickBooks desktop enterprise Vars. But I've always thought that was the biggest hindrance to people adopting QuickBooks online. Yeah, and people are getting fat commissions on that product.

Blake Oliver: [01:06:45] And I think they've started not pushing. They phased that out. Right. Like it's not there. It's not as good as it used to be. Right.

David Leary: [01:06:52] And I think they've gotten QuickBooks Online Advanced with enough features now to charge two. So if you're if you implement QuickBooks Online Advanced you might be getting a similar commission.

Blake Oliver: [01:07:01] It's a better it's a better. It's it's good enough now where it's like like years ago a couple of years ago, Hector Garcia, he used to be one of the top desktop resellers he switched to only he switched to online because they changed the incentives. As they should have a long time ago. So. All right. I got to go do some work, David, because it's Tuesday before Thanksgiving and we got a you know, I want to take some time off. And I'm sure our listeners have grown tired of hearing us drone on for over an hour now. How much can you take? I can't believe you're still with us. We got quite a few people here.

David Leary: [01:07:38] So we have a solution for this. If you don't want to hear Blake drone on and read every single listener email, call or send us a voicemail and we can play that instead-

Blake Oliver: [01:07:48] Oh, we love the voicemail So here's how to send us an email or a voicemail. Email. The accounting podcast at earmarked me. That's the accounting podcast at earmarked me. You can record a voice memo on your phone and email it to us there. Or you can just send us your message and I will do my best to read it.

David Leary: [01:08:10] We do a third option. What's that?

David Leary: [01:08:11] Somebody just record a Zoom and then send you the link to the.

Blake Oliver: [01:08:14] Yeah. I mean, you can record a zoom video, a zoom you could whatever. Just send me send me your video however you like to do it. Just the best thing is to email it to the accounting podcast that earmarked me. Because then both David and I get it and I don't have to like CC him, you know? So it saves me a little click, you know, a little time. Aaron in the live stream said, Happy Thanksgiving Blake and David. Happy Thanksgiving to you, Aaron and Abby. I am thankful for you for listening. I am thankful to all of our listeners. Don't forget, CPE deadlines are coming up for a lot of people. If you need to earn CPE quickly, earmark CPE is one of the best ways to do that. Download the earmark app on the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store. We know that most people earn their CPE in December, and I can see it from the signups we got, you know, half a dozen signups yesterday, new subscribers. I can't even I don't even know how many new users we got. It's crazy. Um, earmark is taken off, right? We are. We're raising money. I think I can say that now. It's happening. The the paperwork is done. We are, you know, getting our legal stuff in order, and we're raising money and we're going to take earmark to the next level. Just look out for the app in 2024. We got all sorts of cool new features coming.

David Leary: [01:09:33] And this is the perfect weekend. People have either long car rides, they're taking airplane flights. Yeah, go and download oh my fraud Fedex updates. Unofficial accounting podcast. Unofficial QuickBooks podcast. Go download our show, write the accounting podcast, download those. Come up on your phone. Listen to them while you're driving the car as soon as it's safe. Yeah. You know, and at the time, actually at a rest stop, family gets out of the car to use the restroom. You can you can fill out the quiz. You got CPE quiz.

Blake Oliver: [01:09:59] Takes, you know, five minutes, maybe ten minutes if you. The beautiful thing is, if you get it wrong on the first try, you can take it again. Let's see what's new on the earmark app. I'm opening it right now. We've got tax chats, taxing the things you buy, a conversation with Whitney Afonso about sales taxes, live flow, empowering CAS, how to consolidate multiple entities. So if you're using live flow, you can actually learn how to use it and get CPE for listening. Today has a new course. This is audible with Frank Oberto. Oh, is that audible the company that's cool. Strategic finance and at audible.

David Leary: [01:10:39] So you can find us on Audible. So you could listen to these podcasts. Inaudible. And then come back and take the quiz in your mind.

Blake Oliver: [01:10:44] That's super meta. So you can listen in Audible. About the Fpna director at audible talking about FAA and then go to earmark to earn CPE for it. Oh, your part time controller has a course frightening fraud, fraud trends and anti-fraud tips. Those are always popular. Fintech Flo podcast by Floqast accountants returning to the office but not the profession. I need to go listen to that episode. Ramp has a course why finance teams are shifting away from reimbursements. Let's see what else. Oh, our own show, of course, is available on earmarks. So if you listened all the way through this whole hour, you can earn CPE for it. Lots of good stuff. All right. Thank you everyone for joining us. We will see you here after Thanksgiving. Happy Thanksgiving. Enjoy your turkey or whatever you choose to eat on Thanksgiving. And that's all I got.