The Accounting Podcast

Attention: This is a machine-generated transcript. As such, there may be spelling, grammar, and accuracy errors throughout. Thank you for your understanding!

Blake Oliver: [00:00:04] Technology. Mature firms can earn up to 39% more revenue per employee. Yes, you heard that right. Firms that integrate advanced cloud based accounting technologies report up to 39% higher revenue per employee compared to those less technologically advanced. Well, if that's not a good reason to modernize your firm, I don't know what is.

David Leary: [00:00:26] Coming to you weekly from the OnPay Recording Studio.

Blake Oliver: [00:00:30] Hello and welcome back to the show. I'm Blake Oliver, and.

David Leary: [00:00:34] I'm David Leary, and I noticed Blake, within seconds of you going live, you can see the little eyeballs climbing up of people tuning in instantly.

Blake Oliver: [00:00:41] Welcome. Thank you to our live stream viewers for joining us. If you are listening on the podcast feed, know that you can subscribe to us on YouTube, find The Accounting Podcast on YouTube, subscribe and hit that notification button and you will get notified when we go live. And you can join us and comment and, uh, let us know what you think. Tell us what you think about what we're saying, and give us the stories that you think accountants need to know. And, David, I have to ask you about this title for this episode. Pig butchering and mouse jiggling. What what is going on here?

David Leary: [00:01:14] Well, talk about pig butchering a little later in the episode because it's part of a follow up story. But the mouse jiggling is a new story. So last week, Wells Fargo was in the news because they fired some employees because they were mouse jiggling. Now, do you know what that is?

Blake Oliver: [00:01:29] Yes. I have never had to do this myself, because I've been privileged to never work in a company that monitored me in such a close way. But so so here's let me, let me, let me see if I get it right. Right. So so you're at work, you're working remotely. And your supervisor, your company is like monitoring how long you are at your computer. And they do that by tracking your mouse movements, your keyboard strokes. And so people have invented these devices that like, attach to your mouse, that move it slightly so you can leave your desk and go away and you'll still show as active on teams. Is that what we're talking about?

David Leary: [00:02:06] It's, um. It's judging your employees by the number of movements of a mouse in an hour. Basically, that's how they're judging the employees, not by the output. And so this is where it becomes an accounting conversation, right? Because it's it's a bigger issue of how to measure productivity. If somebody is efficient, utilizes AI, utilizes tools, gets their work done in an accounting firm, but you're billing by the hour. What are you going to do to fill up the hour? There's probably employees of accounting firms using mouse jigglers if you're billing by the hour. Well, we.

Blake Oliver: [00:02:36] Know lots of people are because you can buy these things on Amazon, you know, for like $20. Here's an upgraded raised edge and turntable mouse jiggler, which, uh, makes sure that your mouse will not fall off your desk.

David Leary: [00:02:50] Well, these are written high tech.

Blake Oliver: [00:02:51] Yeah, look at that. That's beautiful. Vedior is the brand here for this one?

David Leary: [00:02:55] How many ratings does that have?

Blake Oliver: [00:02:57] Uh, it's got 4.5 stars with 5715 ratings. It's Amazon.

David Leary: [00:03:02] They sold hundreds of thousands of these. Hundreds of thousands of these have been sold.

Blake Oliver: [00:03:06] Oh, upgraded more random pointer movement in this one here. Amazing. What will they think of next right. Innovation is just so spectacular.

David Leary: [00:03:16] But if you.

Blake Oliver: [00:03:17] Look in the pic I'm sorry I have to show this picture here. This is one of the images on Amazon. Upgraded ultra quiet mouse mover, low noise less than 20dB. So. And the picture is somebody this this woman, beautiful woman sleeping on her on her bed with the mouse jiggling over the screen in windows. All right, enough of that, David. Tell me what happened. I mean.

David Leary: [00:03:41] Ultimately, like like a good thing we don't have that. Because if you're if if you don't judge people by the output of the work, when the knowledge economy, right, how are you going to control it? And so this is just that old mindset of like monitoring what people are doing in their computer versus paying attention to the outputs.

Blake Oliver: [00:03:58] So who is getting fired for mouse jiggling?

David Leary: [00:04:00] They were, um, people from their wealth and investment management unit.

Blake Oliver: [00:04:05] At what firm?

David Leary: [00:04:06] Oh, it was Wells Fargo. Oh, Wells.

Blake Oliver: [00:04:08] Fargo. So this is not a Big Four thing. Good accountants don't have to worry yet.

David Leary: [00:04:12] No, but I'm. But. But accountants are falling in. This is how we judge people, right? Number of hours. Which it might as well be. Mouse movements. We should.

Blake Oliver: [00:04:21] It might as well be mouse jiggling. Yeah. And the the if we use that analogy. Right. That the time sheet is like the mouse tracking, then what are people going to do to game the system? They're going to fake their hours. They're going to inflate their hours. They're going to bill hours for work they didn't do. And it's inevitable. Like that's what people would do when you create that incentive.

David Leary: [00:04:43] And actually it seems crazy if you build your client, you send them a bill for the number of mouse jiggles that you performed while working on their work. They'd have a fit and not let you build them that way. But there's no there's no difference between a mouse jiggle and a billable hour. Maybe that's the conclusion here.

Blake Oliver: [00:05:00] That's your, uh, TikTok for this episode, David. Now, I got to ask you about pig butchering.

David Leary: [00:05:05] Pig butchering. So I have two follow up stories. Um, uh, last week we talked two episodes ago, I guess we talked about synapse, right. And how they were the middleman tech app that all the they basically took all the Neobanks would use them to talk to a real bank, right? Yes. So there was a bit of collapse.

Blake Oliver: [00:05:23] They went bankrupt and $85 million in customer funds are unaccounted for.

David Leary: [00:05:27] They can't figure it out. And, well, one of the reasons why it came out in the bankruptcy court that they were a co-mingled in accounts like the funds. So multiple Neobanks had multiple customer funds, all co-mingled in a fund. Chances are, even some of Synapse's funds could have been commingled in there. So it's just it's basic accounting 101 that was not happening at this company and it's stacked over years, right? I saw an interesting quote, and I kind of agree with it. I've always argued even with earmark, we've talked about this earmark is software as a service. And arguably when you have a tech company, that's almost the most important thing because you don't want them to ever cancel, except for when it's banking, when it's banking as a service, maybe the banking has to be more important than the service. Is that basically all these companies worried about building the service and nobody actually worried about correct banking. And in the end, that's what was the downfall. But so in synapse is tied to evolve Bank and trust right there. One of the partner banks will evolve bank and trust. And a whole different unrelated to synapse also got in trouble last week with the Federal Reserve Board penalizing evolve for compliance violations, and they told them to stop engaging new partners or offering new services.

David Leary: [00:06:40] Wow. And a lot of it was tied to anti-money laundering protocols, risk management norms and customer compliance standards. So the bank directors now have 90 days to build a comprehensive plan. And the Federal Reserve Board also put this out as a warning to all banks like stop! You better get your ducks in order if you're going to partner with tech companies, right? Stop making these these ties well evolves. Had a rough year. Um, they were actually tied to the FTX stuff. They were being used by the FTX stuff a little bit. And then earlier this year they were tied to incidents involving, uh, pig butchering scams, where 28 Chinese nationals that reside in California and New York and regions in China used all these neobanks to create accounts that evolve, right? Essentially, I'll read the definition from an article what a pig butchering scam is and a pig butchering scam. Threat actors use social media, dating websites, and various apps to lure victims into online relationships and subsequently convince victims to invest specified cryptocurrency trading platforms. Such scams tend to occur during the holidays, when people are feeling especially lonely and experience a heightened anxiety in being single, such as Valentine's Day and New Year's Day. Bad actors exploit vulnerable individuals in a heightened state of mind. So that's what a pickpocketing is.

Blake Oliver: [00:08:00] So I'm lonely. I get an online girlfriend. Turns out the online girlfriend is some dude in China who's going to steal crypto from me.

David Leary: [00:08:10] To get you to buy crypto. Yeah. And then then, you know, the article had this whole chart from the court records and yeah, the money's moving around. This account goes to this neobank to this bank. But the feds had to seize $7 million from evolve. That was part of this pig butchering. So evolve has had not a lot of, uh, good due diligence on business partnerships and relationships. They've been making.

Blake Oliver: [00:08:34] Boring. Accountant in the live stream has a response to the mouse jiggling story. Boring accountant says staff let go for use of mouse jiggling likely have other problematic performance benchmarks. No one is letting go of their best staff over mouse jiggling. You know, that's probably a good point there. And we've seen this with return to office mandates, where there was a story about how return to office is really just a way to get people to leave on their own accord. This was a story in Going concern. A recent survey by Bamboohr revealed that return to office mandates were strategically used by companies to increase voluntary employee turnover, confirming suspicions that those policies were intended to prompt resignations. And this is what I always thought, right? If you don't want to lay people off, you just make them come back to the office and, you know, a certain percent will leave. The survey found that 40% of managers and executives believe layoffs occurred because fewer employees quit than anticipated during tow, with a significant portion of senior executives admitting they hoped for voluntary turnover. So it's really a workforce reduction strategy. And but but it has serious consequences. Right. Because employee dissatisfaction with tow policies is high.

Blake Oliver: [00:09:48] Over 25% said they would consider leaving their jobs if they were forced to return to the office. And I think this is a terrible way to pare down your staff because similar to the mouse jiggling, because what's going to happen is you are going to push out the best employees because those are the employees who don't want to go back to the office. A lot of them are really good at what they do, and they know that they can find jobs working remotely elsewhere. I would say, actually, that the mouse jigglers could be in a similar situation. Somebody who's using mouse jiggling is actually really smart, right? Because they're overcoming this stupid requirement that they have to sit at their desk all day. And if they're really efficient, they can use the mouse jiggler like I'd be using the mouse jiggler if I worked for Wells Fargo, for sure. Right. Right? I'm not going to sit at my desk for eight hours a day. If I can get my job done in six and go take an extra long lunch or whatever. So you're actually doing worse for your company with these policies?

David Leary: [00:10:43] Yeah, because you're gonna in theory, yes. I'm going to know who my best employees are, and I'm going to be flexible on the way they want to work. But the reality is, I'm not going to be like that because I'm going to monitor if I'm an outstanding employee, I'm going to be pissed. If I have to install some stupid app to my computer for to track my mouse jiggles, or if I have to go into the office an extra day of the week just to have birthday cake or whatever it might be, right?

Blake Oliver: [00:11:06] Right. The best employees think that stuff's stupid and they're not going to do it, so you're actually risking pushing them out. So that's my counterpoint to you boring accountant. All right. So David, last week I talked about Zapier, Central's new Chrome extension, And I want to play a video for you and for the audience that explains a bit about how this could work, because I believe that AI agents like Zapier central are the future, the near term future of accounting that in a few years controllers, senior accountants, managers, we are going to be managing a team of bots in addition to a team of people. And so we need to figure out how these things are going to work. What what are what are they capable of? How can they help us now? So here is a bit of a demo of Zapier Central. What can you do with the Zapier Central Chrome extension? You can draft a cold.

Zapier Central Clip: [00:12:01] Email based on a LinkedIn profile. You can summarize the transcript of a podcast and save it to a Google doc. Or you can automatically add data about a sales lead to your hub, your HubSpot CRM. Let's show you what it can do. Here's Wade's LinkedIn profile. Let's draft a cold email to him.

Blake Oliver: [00:12:22] So we're typing in to the Zapier central extension. Let's create a draft cold email to Wade in Gmail. And this is on the sidebar of Chrome. And we've got Wade's LinkedIn profile right there. Now we've got a draft popping up here. We've got a subject line. We've got a body. This is in the chat bot.

David Leary: [00:12:42] So because this is a browser plugin, instead of you having to go and copy this person's LinkedIn profile, paste it back into a GPT tool, say, please summarize or write an email based on what's on his LinkedIn, because browser plugins get to read everything you're doing in the browser. And it's just it's just you're eliminating so many steps out of this process.

Blake Oliver: [00:13:02] Exactly. We're eliminating the copy paste, and basically we're eliminating the copy paste of the LinkedIn profile into ChatGPT or into Claude. And so when we ask it to draft the email, it's using that data from the LinkedIn profile. And it drafts this email which has relevant information about the prospect here. And then it asks, shall I proceed to create this draft in your Gmail account? And because Zapier Central can be connected to your email, it can do that. And Andy in the video says yes.

Zapier Central Clip: [00:13:30] To create a draft in your Gmail account.

Blake Oliver: [00:13:32] So now the tool is doing that. It's creating the draft and it's been successfully created.

Zapier Central Clip: [00:13:38] Let's refresh my email. This is incredible. It'll save so much time and cold outreach. Let's show you one more example. I'm a big fan of Lenny's podcasts. I'm also friends with Logan, who's a PM on the Gemini team at Google. I haven't had time to listen to this episode yet, but I'm going to have central give me the key takeaways from the transcript and save them to a Google doc.

Blake Oliver: [00:14:04] Oh, this is not so good. So he's going to create a summary of a podcast episode from a transcript. David, does this mean people aren't going to listen to our show anymore?

David Leary: [00:14:11] Do not do this with our podcasts.

Blake Oliver: [00:14:14] So he's got the podcast. Open the page with the transcript, and he's typing. What are the key takeaways from the podcast transcript? Save them to a new Google doc. And now the plugin is working in the sidebar. And it's making a list of key takeaways. Bulleted numbered 1234, five six. And now it's creating a new Google document. It's asking for a name of the document. So we give it the name. And then it's going to go create that document. And it's able to do this because Andy has given the agent access to Google Docs, and it saves it to a new document and provides the URL. And you can click that. And there you go.

Zapier Central Clip: [00:15:02] This blows my mind every time I do it.

Blake Oliver: [00:15:05] So, you know, limited use cases right now right. But imagine when you can use a tool like that in your ERP system. And arguably you could now we could try this right. Open it up with zero or QuickBooks for our own data and see if it can. I don't know, what could it do? What what do we imagine it could do?

David Leary: [00:15:29] Well, I'm imagining this. Like it kind of. We have a tool like this already. Hector Garcia built right tool for QuickBooks. So it's a browser plugin and it not only adds buttons and things to the UI of QuickBooks, it can see what it has context of what you're looking at in QuickBooks because it's a browser plugin, which in theory is a bigger advantage over all these third party AI tools like Hector has an opportunity to kind of build this functionality into its existing browser plugin because you need everything, needs context, and the best context is what's on the screen right now. Yeah, right. Because then there's no question of what you want it to focus on. You don't have to explain. And then it guesses. Well, I saw this other invoice. This looks interesting. It's really locked into the data on the screen at that time.

Blake Oliver: [00:16:15] And we're not doing that copy paste. That's why a lot of people aren't doing this right now because it's it's a lot of copy paste. I've been doing copy paste my whole career, David. I don't know if it's ever going to go away. Control C control control v o.

David Leary: [00:16:30] Every time I replace a keyboard it's always control C. Control V, it always goes out.

Blake Oliver: [00:16:35] So speaking of AI, the Wall Street Journal had a story. The headline is AI doesn't kill Jobs. Tell that to freelancers. And the key statistic from this article is a study from the Harvard Business School and Washington University in Saint Louis that found that freelance job postings in areas where AI excels have dropped by up to 21% since the introduction of these AI models, especially copywriting. And we experienced this ourselves. David. I went out to Upwork, and I hired about a dozen people to write articles for us from podcast transcripts, and then I did the same thing with AI. I asked AI to write articles and created some prompts to create articles from podcast transcripts, and the AI quality was way better and much less expensive. So that's what we're using. I tried it with the humans first. I just want everyone to know, you know, I tried and the quality was bad. And what surprises me is that none of these humans who I was, uh, buying articles from, were using AI, because if they had been, the quality would have been way higher. I couldn't believe it.

Blake Oliver: [00:17:46] Like $2,030 a month and you could be writing amazing content. Now, what's interesting about this story is that they identified some freelancers, particularly those in more specialized and demanding roles, who have seen an increase in demand for their services because AI generated content often fails to meet quality standards. So while it might eliminate some jobs outright, the kind of jobs that I can automate like drafting first drafts of articles, it's not going to eliminate the editing of those articles, which is the part that's really hard. And I would love to find somebody who could edit these articles. Right. I'm doing it myself right now. Um, I just thought that was an interesting little microcosm of what's going on. And if we apply that to accounting, I think we're going to see the same thing that demand for jobs in like bookkeeping, reconciliations, payroll, accounts payable, rote work at the staff level, that's very easy to automate with AI agents like we saw with Zapier Central. That's going to go away, but demand for people who can supervise those bots is going to skyrocket.

David Leary: [00:19:03] Yeah, because you can't have a rogue bot just start doing data entry. Somebody's got to babysit the bots a little bit. Yeah. I wonder if those numbers are a little, um, worse, or they might be worse than their study. And the reason why is I heard a story on NPR that about ghost jobs. So ghost jobs are these jobs that are just posted online on the online services like indeed, and all the other job LinkedIn jobs, etc.? And the reason that but there are no there's no intention to hire people in those positions. And the reason they exist is if you go to on indeed to post a job posting, Blake, the plans are like, well, you could post three for the price of this versus one. And so then people just buy the three plan since Since you buy the three job plan, you might as well just post two other jobs, even though you're not going to hire them because you're paying for a job posting. Right. And so it might even be there might be job postings out there for those positions that nobody intends on ever hiring either. So the numbers might be a lot worse. The decrease in people trying to hire those positions.

Blake Oliver: [00:20:08] I'm going to keep going down my I list. Did you see that HG has bought audit board in a $3 billion deal? Private equity.

David Leary: [00:20:18] Hg.

Blake Oliver: [00:20:19] It's just the name of the firm is just. Oh, it's a.

David Leary: [00:20:22] Capital private equity.

Blake Oliver: [00:20:23] Firm G okay. It's a private equity firm. And they bought Audit Board, a provider of risk management software, in a deal valued at over $3 billion. Audit board will continue to operate independently as a wholly owned subsidiary of HRG, which aims to support the company's growth in cloud based audit, compliance and risk management solutions. Audit board was founded in 2014 and serves over 2000 enterprises, including nearly half of the fortune 500, and achieved 200 million in annual recurring revenue by late 2023, so 200 million in annual recurring revenue, and they were acquired for 3 billion. So what's that? 15 times are not a bad exit. The last funding round for Audit Board was a series B, led by Battery Ventures in 2018.

David Leary: [00:21:17] And they must have some moat or stickiness to their customers then. Because it's not it's not I mean, there's so many of these AI plays that are just popping up now. Private equity doesn't play with those companies, right? They play with companies that are real companies that they think they can squeeze a little bit more out of them. So the board must have a enough of a future roadmap of functionality they're building, possibly AI, but they obviously have, like you said, this recurring solid revenue that for whatever reason, obviously this private equity doesn't think it's going to go away any time soon.

Blake Oliver: [00:21:51] Well, like the article said, they're in 50% of the fortune 500. So once you get up to that level of enterprise, you get very sticky, right? It's it's not often that you get swapped out unless there's something way better comes along. So what is audit board used for? Operational audits. Risk and controls management Sox compliance and ESG program management. Internal audit. All of that kind of stuff. It's basically cloud based audit software. So this is like the maturation. This is the the the this is like a sign that we have reached full cloud in a way that this company got a $3 billion exit. You got any more eye news, audit news, tech news. David, I got I got more, um.

David Leary: [00:22:45] Uh, materia. They just had a $6.3 million raise. They are going to be the AI copilot for audit and accounting firms. Now, what's interesting about this? The founders, they met together at Facebook. They were building AI Blake to parse and understand journalism content. He was reading news articles, but one of the founders, Kevin, he used to work at Big Four at KPMG. And he was like, why can't we do this with all the work I used to have to do when I was a staff accountant and doing audit work. So essentially what this is going to allow firms to do. So obviously we've talked about the big four. They're building this stuff in house that's going to, in theory, be off the shelf. Even though they don't have any pricing. It's going to allow a firm to store all their knowledge base stuff in a secure hub. And then you can go in and ask questions, and then it's supplemented with, uh, accurate external sources. Right. To give, give you more confidence. Those answers, the only thing I thought was kind of interesting about it is I went and looked at their team on LinkedIn. They only have one CPA at the company, so I'm like, if who's really making sure the external information is really solid and tight, right? Or is that just going to fall on the firm's like, hey, you launch it. The firm, you upload your information and the teams that are using it at your firm are the ones you have to report this up. Who are we talking about?

Blake Oliver: [00:24:06] I missed the beginning. Oh, the company.

David Leary: [00:24:07] Name is materia. Materia.

Blake Oliver: [00:24:13] And what do they do?

David Leary: [00:24:13] Best name? It's, uh, a ChatGPT, but for public accounting firms.

Blake Oliver: [00:24:19] Huh.

David Leary: [00:24:19] So? So so it allows you. I'm based on the product. It looks like this is probably going to be like the top 50 to top 400, where you don't have the resources to build your own internal GPT tool. Right. You can get one off the shelf. It kind of similar to what Lightworks is doing with spark. Yes, it's a GPT tool just for accounting firms to use to give you that siloed data area and then external tax docs, audit docs, tax law.

Blake Oliver: [00:24:47] So here's the website. The headline is generative AI platform for Intelligent Accounting. And use cases include analyzing client documents. Understanding guidance. Searching through engagements. Yeah, it's basically a wrapper for ChatGPT.

David Leary: [00:25:07] With the promise it's going to keep things siloed out, right?

Blake Oliver: [00:25:11] Keep them safe and secure and that sort of thing. Yeah, yeah, I think there's going to be a lot of room for this kind of tool. Um, and there will be a lot of them.

David Leary: [00:25:20] Unless this functionality is just built into the apps. Like that's the big gamble, right. But but I do still think, like you've talked about this before, if you could take all the partners and put their knowledge into some place, the partners won't get interrupted so much. Right? So so they vested interest to to a buyer to build something like this.

Blake Oliver: [00:25:40] Hey, Argyle, welcome to the show. Argyle is tuning in live. He says, good morning fellas. I'm definitely going to check out Zapier Central and see if I can integrate it with Live Flow. Thanks for sharing. Uh, yeah. If Zapier connects to Live Flow, then you could potentially take actions in Live Flow. I don't think you can use it as a data source yet. They've got limited data sources that you can pull from, but you can pull from Google Sheets. So if you've got client financials in Google Sheets, you could use you could connect Zapier central to that. Create an agent that connects to your client financials Potentially, uh, one of our listeners, z. Z fail. I'm not sure how to pronounce that. Username says how will CEOs bully I auditing results? Well, they won't, will they? Somebody's got to present those. So there's there's still going to be a human face that, uh, that gets that gets the pushback. Uh. Here's another interesting story that's been on my list since May. Technology. Mature firms can earn up to 39% more revenue per employee. Yes, you heard that right. Firms that integrate advanced cloud based accounting technologies report up to 39% higher revenue per employee compared to those less technologically advanced. Well, if that's not a good reason to modernize your firm, I don't know what is. That's from the Right Work's 2024 Accounting Firm Technology Survey, which involved nearly 500 leaders from the accounting sector. So, yeah, you want to make more money? Modernize.

David Leary: [00:27:16] Did they talk about, like, what that means? Like, what is a tech enabled firm or modernize? I mean, are they comparing this to like people still doing paper on boarding paper forms. Like. Like what defines this?

Blake Oliver: [00:27:28] Uh, you know, that's a question I don't. Oh, here we go. There's a maturity continuum. The modern firm maturity continuum. Of course, there's a continuum. Uh, so we have followers. Followers have disconnected software solutions. A blend of paper and digital documents, inconsistent business processes, and mostly compliance work reacting to client requests. Then we have initiators. They're using connected software in the cloud, standardized workflows, clarity around who you want to serve and what you want to sell to them. Well-defined connected technology stack standardized workflows with digital documents and consistent end to end processes and clarity. Collaborators. They have a standardized client technology stack. Standardized workflows. That sounds very similar to the initiators and then the leaders. These are using, um, I guess what's the difference? I can't tell a centralized data strategy, leveraging technology and AI to drive insights and identify client advisory opportunities. So there you go, David. That's your it sounds like.

David Leary: [00:28:36] If you could just get out of that follower bucket. Oh, yeah. You don't have to be the leader. If you just get out of that follower bucket, you're going to see vast improvements, because that's a big that there's a lot of differentiation between that lowest tier and the next tier.

Blake Oliver: [00:28:49] And what's the biggest reason that firms don't do this? It's a lack of technology expertise. 44% say that's the reason that they don't modernize. And my answer to that is hire a chief operating officer in your firm. Hire a tech person who can do this for you and make them a partner, right? It doesn't have to be technical accounting experts and tax and audit people running the firm. Bring in somebody who knows how to do business processes and you'll you'll see it happen. It's going to be amazing. And your your profit per employee or revenue per employee will increase 39% potentially. And amazing to me cost slash budget is the reason 43% of firms say that they have trouble. And I'm thinking to myself, well, you got to spend money to make money, right?

David Leary: [00:29:35] And that's very logical because there's lots of data that, you know, you could spend $10,000 here and it saves you from hiring an employee, right? Technology spends usually going to have a big benefit on your cost side. But now you're proving the model that if you have tech spend, you actually are going to make more revenue. So that should never be a point of contention. Tech spend ever.

Blake Oliver: [00:29:59] We got some commentary here. Argyle says perhaps I can automate the monthly emails to clients summarizing their financials from Google Sheets. Yes, I think that's possibly the number one use case right now for this type of tech is doing the financial statement analysis for clients. The the. Here's the five things you need to know about last month. It can do that really well. I think it can at least prep it for you right. Prep the variance analysis. Figure out what the biggest changes are. Highlight discrepancies that sort of thing. David H says I'm sure the SEC will love to use I on SEC filings. I'm sure the number of comment letters will go up drastically. It could. It could help them. They are, uh, at least according to the SEC people we have spoken to a bit understaffed. They got a lot to do. Not a lot of people to focus on these things. Um, and we're seeing the IRS do the same thing. They're going to be using AI. They've already started using AI to help them with really complex investigations, uh, partnerships, that sort of thing. All the stuff that gets really nested and really difficult. So I wouldn't be surprised. What else do we have in the world of AI? I'm burning through my stories here, David. Um, here's an incredible statistic. According to a survey by Microsoft's 2024 Work Trend Index, 75% of employees across various industries are utilizing artificial intelligence in their workplace 75% of employees.

Blake Oliver: [00:31:38] A significant trend noted is the bring your own AI b y o AI, where 78% of AI users are introducing their own AI tools into their work environments. That's particularly prevalent in small and medium sized businesses, and this is a call to action for all the chief technology officers at firms. If you don't give employees secure tools, secure AI in your firm, they're going to use it anyway. So you need to get on board with this. You need to set up a team account or something like give them access because the productivity bump from these tools is so great that employees aren't going to be able to resist using it, and they're going to do it on their personal devices or on personal accounts if you don't enable them. And that creates a security gap for you. So so the answer can't be any more. No, don't use it yet. It's too late for that. You need to get on board with a security policy and tools that employees can use. So that's why, like, David, that app, uh, what was it called materia that you mentioned? They're just going to do great. Right? Work spark. They're going to do great. All these rappers designed for firms to manage these AI apps are going to do great because off.

David Leary: [00:32:54] The shelf they just buy it.

Blake Oliver: [00:32:55] And yeah, provide the security off the shelf.

David Leary: [00:32:59] So efficient employees are just so 75% of all employees that they surveyed. So are these, I'm assuming, are knowledge workers, people sitting at computers? Yeah, I'm.

Blake Oliver: [00:33:09] Guessing, yeah.

David Leary: [00:33:11] Are using it and getting more efficient. So we should invest in mouse jiggling companies because you're gonna have employees everywhere knocking the work out so much quicker. Mouse jugglers, they're going to go through the roof. This is the this is the this is the big investment bet advice I give you from the the show. People people go invest in mouse jewelers.

Blake Oliver: [00:33:30] Another survey data point that's stuck in my head here is, uh, from a KPMG survey that found that 72% of companies are currently exploring or using AI in financial reporting, with expectations to rise to 99% within three years. So within three years, we are going to have AI in financial reporting everywhere. Now who's actually doing it right now? Right. Because that 72% included exploring, not just using 30% of companies are experimenting with or implementing generative AI in their financial reporting processes. So we've got about a third, a little under a third of companies doing that right now. But it says experimenting with. So how many are actually using it. That's what I always wonder. And based on my recent trip to the IMA conference, I think it's going to be far less than 30% that are actually doing it, because only about 20% of the accountants in that audience had even used AI tools yet. And why is that? It's because most companies are taking a wait and see approach, because nonpublic financial information is something you really got to think about putting into an AI tool, but it's going to change really fast, right? In the next three years, we are going to move across that tipping point. I think everybody's going to be using it. We just need a few more of these tools, these security tools. We need the the tech people. It has to get on board with this. Right? It's a slow moving process, but we're going to get there and and it's going to be it's going to be game changing. This is going to this is the next internet.

David Leary: [00:35:05] And you have three trains going 200 miles an hour right now on three fronts. Right. So you have the closing of the books, the revenue wreck. There's all these AI tools. There's apps that are handled that are trying to reduce the time that does to close the books. You got all these apps in the middle for the auditing type stuff, right? And then you have all the apps that are coming out to help you in the AI to, uh, do the finance, the reporting. Right. So this is, this is being attacked in three spots all at the same time. So, like you said, it could be even sooner than three years like these, these efficiency gains.

Blake Oliver: [00:35:38] So this is why I tell accountants everyone I talk to. You can't just wait. You need to start using these tools now. You need to join the 75% of people who are using this personally, at least, so that you know what to expect when it hits in your company. And here's a great resource for you. Wall Street Journal did a I challenge. They stacked up all the bots and ran them through prompts and figured out what's best for what. Because as you and I have experienced, David, there is no number one chatbot for all use cases. There's a bunch of them, and they're good at different things. And Joanna Stern, who is the tech reporter at the Wall Street Journal, was involved in this. And she's just amazing and super smart. And so I recommend everyone take a look at this, but we can go through it now and kind of give everyone an idea of, of what are the chat bots you can use and what are they good at? So there are five models that the Wall Street Journal investigated. There's ChatGPT, there's Claude, there's copilot, Gemini, and perplexity. So ChatGPT, we all know that's OpenAI. Claude. That's anthropic. Copilot that is just a ChatGPT inside of windows that Microsoft is licensed. Gemini is Google's I used to be called something else.

Blake Oliver: [00:37:08] Then they rebranded it very quickly. I forget, I already forget what it was called. And perplexity is like the new search engine that I've been playing around with. So what are the different use cases? What are the different prompts that it got run through? Health advice. That's important because health advice from chatbots could be harmful to your health if it's wrong. Uh, Wall Street Journal asked five questions dealing with pregnancy, weight loss, depression, and symptoms both chronic and sudden, and they determined that the best result actually was ChatGPT. That came in first, followed by Gemini perplexity. Claude and Copilot did the worst. So ChatGPT is the winner for health advice. Uh, they mentioned that they used the recent GPT four zero for that finance. Now, this is relevant to accounting. Who did best in finance? Uh, they asked questions about interest rates, retirement savings and inheritance. So mostly personal finance. And they found that Gemini did the best. I'm surprised at that. Uh, because I've not had a good experience with Google's AI, Gemini best answered a question about when to withdraw funds from an inherited $1 million IRA. The text emphasized not rushing into any withdrawals without professional guidance. That's nice. In cooking, ChatGPT takes the cake. Work writing.

David Leary: [00:38:38] I have to I have to go back to that one. I must say, copilot is the way to go for cooking. Like, really? I'll use copilot on my phone instead of like, you know, to, like, I don't know, my smoked ribs or whatever it might be. And it's really good at taking three, four, five, six recipes and coming back with like a merged up recipe. And then you just pick and choose the pieces you like and just run with it. But I've been using copilot. That's probably the number one function I use Copilot on my phone for, like the copilot app.

Blake Oliver: [00:39:06] Oh, you're using it in the edge browser on your phone?

David Leary: [00:39:08] Oh, I just use the app. I installed the.

Blake Oliver: [00:39:09] Copilot app so you can.

David Leary: [00:39:10] Yeah, you get to do that on Android. You can install apps if you're choosing.

Blake Oliver: [00:39:15] I think I how do I0I actually I accessed it through the Bing app on my iPhone. So but I've kind of stopped doing that because I use perplexity a lot now. But we'll get to that. Uh, work writing this doesn't surprise me at all. Writing emails, writing a job, posting. Claude takes first place, and I have found that when it comes to writing content for any purpose, Claude nails it. It does a few weird things, like it loves to use the phrase here's the kicker, and I have no idea why it uses that all the time. I have, even in my pre-written prompts, told it to not use that phrase. Something about the training that just makes it use the phrase. And here's the kicker. Very strange. Um. Perplexity is second when it comes to work writing and ChatGPT comes in fourth and copilot fifth. So, like, this is the thing that's interesting about ChatGPT and OpenAI is that it's good at analysis and code and, and certain tasks like I mean also the image generation you can't do in Claude, but Claude just nails it when it comes to natural, human sounding writing. Uh, same thing with, um, actually, there was a bit of an upset with creative writing. They found that copilot did better with creative writing, and Claude comes in second. Now, I haven't tried copilot for creative writing. I find this to be an interesting, um, change, but I guess they're talking about fiction here and we don't.

Blake Oliver: [00:40:45] I've never tried writing fiction with AI, so, uh, summarization perplexity does best with summarization. Now, perplexity AI is like, um, if you took Google search and you just applied all the best AI stuff to it, that's how I describe it. Where if you think about a traditional Google search, you have to put in your search terms, you put in your search phrase and you get all these results, and you have to click through to every page and kind of mentally figure out what the answer is by, you know, your brain is summarizing the information on all those pages and trying to come up with an answer. Perplexity does that for you. Essentially, it goes and it looks through all the results and gives you an answer, and it cites its sources. So we have perplexity come in number one for summarization, which makes a lot of sense. Um, and then current events, perplexity also. And that makes sense, right. Because it's a search engine based AI coding perplexity also one on coding speed. Chatgpt wins. It is very fast. The new GPT four super fast and overall the winner overall, surprisingly, is perplexity, then followed by ChatGPT, then Gemini, then Claude and then copilot. And here on the screen for our live stream viewers is the overall rankings and then the rankings for each category.

David Leary: [00:42:19] It'd be interesting. These are a little bit more, um, home focused, if that makes any sense.

Blake Oliver: [00:42:24] Personal?

David Leary: [00:42:25] Yeah, personal. Home focused. It'd be interesting to, to do this either business focused or, um, accounting focused. Right. Even.

Blake Oliver: [00:42:33] Well, if, um, if, if you're using any of these apps through the APIs, the only ones I've tried using through APIs is Claude and ChatGPT through Zapier, and I haven't tried any other way of accessing those, uh, tools. And I will say that ChatGPT has much better options for the models. You can choose for the parameters you can set. And they even have built in tools through Zapier, like extracting structured data where you don't have to write a prompt to extract the structured data. It's just already configured. There's like a model built for that, and you can just specify what types of structured data from a prompt you want to extract and give it definitions of each one. And it will do it like that is fantastic. And Claude, it's really just like send a prompt and get an answer and you can decide if you want to maintain a conversation thread. There's not a lot of options. So ChatGPT on the back end I think has, I assume has the most options, although I haven't done it as a developer with code.

David Leary: [00:43:40] I think at a personal level at your house you might commit to one of these, and chances are it's probably going to be Siri. Right when Apple releases the AI in Siri. But I think from a business perspective, like these things are so cheap, just buy all five. Think about it as a team, right? You have a team of chatbots. You're going to use them here and there in different reasons. And if you don't like what you're getting from the one the vibe, go jump into the other one. It's still more efficient than it was doing things the old way. Right? And that's kind of the perspective I would keep on all these different tools. I have a funny story on my experience with copilot recently.

Blake Oliver: [00:44:15] Before you get to that, I want to highlight a comment in our live stream Aaron Patrick says I did a review of the chat bots doing account reconciliations. So far, copilot was the best option. Good to know. Thanks, Aaron.

David Leary: [00:44:30] And this is what triggered me when he talked about copilot. I hadn't. I needed to get a bunch of dates and I just create a formula. And I had the first date and I said, next cell is plus seven. And I just ran all my dates down in a column because I wanted to copy those and paste them somewhere else. Well, now that copilot's like built into Excel, every time I click the highlight the cell with the dates Copilot's like, do you want to create a meeting? Do you want like it's almost like, okay, now we've we've crossed the line already where it's annoying me. I'm like, you're in the way. It gets the new Clippy. It's the new Clippy. I was like, just because it's a date in a field in Excel doesn't mean I want to create a meeting invite. So that's, uh, this is going to be I think it's going to go through a nuisance period here where it annoys you.

Blake Oliver: [00:45:13] Uh, you know what, David? We're almost at the end of our show, and I've gone through almost all my AI and app stories, so I'm just going to finish it out. I'm going to actually clear out this category for the first time in years. Is that okay with you?

David Leary: [00:45:26] Just burn through.

Blake Oliver: [00:45:27] It. Okay. Uh, numeric. An AI driven accounting automation firm, secured $10 million in seed funding from various investors, including Founders Fund and Menlo Ventures, to enhance product development and expand its team. The company numeric was established in 2020 by Parker, Gilbert and co founders, and their goal is to revolutionize accounting tasks such as technical research, data discrepancy checks, and month end close processes through AI technology. They've got clients including Brex, Plaid and Wealthfront that are using Gnumeric to streamline accounting operations and reduce manual workload. Parker Gilbert, the CEO of Gnumeric, envisions a future where accountants will primarily function as editors and strategic advisors thanks to AI's ability to automate routine accounting tasks. Congratulations, Gnumeric on your $10 million seed funding.

David Leary: [00:46:21] So there was another accounting firm that I would say that goes into your eye bucket that raised $35 million. Now they've had a total raise of 55 million. The company, the accounting firm or the company is called Finish Loop. F I n a l o o p. They claim to be the first AI driven reconciliation engine. They have 70 million transactions they've done 94% of those have been automatically categorized and reconciled. But what caught my attention about them is they came really hard at accountants and bookkeepers, for example, on their Shopify app store. Replace your generic accounting software, e-commerce, retail and bookkeeper today at the fraction of the cost per their website. Finally replaces your software bookkeeper inventory spreadsheets and they do a full book to tax service. Right? And they even price it against accounting firms. Hey, for $395 a month, we'll do what an accounting firm is going to charge you $1,400 a month, right? And then poking around on their website, something just felt off, right? Because they have a bunch of applications they list. And I was looking because I was like, well, if they're doing books, like did they build their own GL? Like, how are they doing this? How are they offering accounting services. So I start poking around, start poking around. What gave it away for me was they have a list of integrations, and one of the apps they integrate with is QuickBooks payroll, which QuickBooks payroll Blake does not have any way to integrate with it, because the only thing that talks to QuickBooks payroll is QuickBooks. There's no API's, right. And but nowhere on the website does it say they use QuickBooks or any GL. So I start poking around, poke around. Well, I open up their terms of service and it says we use Intuit QuickBooks online to provide services. You and your use of QuickBooks online will be governed by Intuit's Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. This is the second bullet in their terms of service, like they've gone so out of their way to be an accounting firm and hide the fact that they're actually using QuickBooks under the covers.

Blake Oliver: [00:48:19] Okay, so this is another accounting firm masquerading as a technology company. Yeah.

David Leary: [00:48:27] And they're focused in the e-commerce niche. Right. So they talk to all the e-commerce websites and pulled the transactions down and categorize them and all that dance. But they go out of their way to hide the fact that they are just using QuickBooks. Wow.

Blake Oliver: [00:48:41] So it's like, do they have any of their own tech or is it all just using other technology?

David Leary: [00:48:48] This is always a tricky thing. When you go to a website and they kind of have these videos and you're like, is that the actual product or is that like a simulation of the product? You never really always know. Um, but they have a full it's truly a bookkeeping. It's an accounting firm. Right. With with engineers. It's a pilot. It's a scale factor. It's an indinero. It's a bench. It's the same thing. It's just again, here's another race. So if you again I say if you're an accounting firm that uses Zapier, uses QuickBooks online, maybe uses Process Street, go get some money if you're an automated account, if you've automated anything because the money's there. And. Right. Well.

Blake Oliver: [00:49:23] See, my concern is that in order to raise that kind of money as an accounting firm, you have to promise returns to your investors. That might be unrealistic because services, businesses, businesses that provide services with humans, you can only expect 2,030% annual growth. Yeah, sure, maybe you can do more than that at the beginning when you're smaller, but eventually you hit this wall. It's really hard to grow because it's people based and growing up, people based business. They just grow slower than software companies. They're not as scalable and they're not as profitable. So if you're selling a people based business as a software, as a service model, you're never going to be able to deliver on those expectations. And so failure is inevitable or disappointment is inevitable.

David Leary: [00:50:19] And this is where it said this is the secret or what screams it's probably still not a tech company, so it's priced super cheap, but they adjust based on your volume of transactions, which in theory, if you have tech volumes, should not have to. You shouldn't have to increase prices that much based on the volume. But if you have humans doing a lot of work, still you've got to charge more, right? Like that's kind of a giveaway that there's more work in there.

Blake Oliver: [00:50:46] Well, this is kind of crazy. Yeah. This slider here on their pricing page. So basically if you have their lowest price is $65 a month, if you have a if you have no revenue basically. And let's say you go up to like, you know, half a million in revenue, then they're going to charge you $245 a month. And they're saying that it would cost you, you know, a little over 1000 for a traditional bookkeeping company and then $1 million, it's at still at 245 a month, like a company that's making $1 million a year in revenue, only paying $245 a month for bookkeeping. I mean, to me, that indicates offshoring offshore labor.

David Leary: [00:51:29] Well, I tried to find that. I couldn't find that I looked and.

Blake Oliver: [00:51:32] Looked, but also still seriously underpriced. And then look, the scale goes up to like it goes up to $200 million where they don't say pricing. But like if you go down to 10 million, 9.9 million and a business doing $9.9 million in revenue annually can get a loop bookkeeping for 9.95 a month. That's insane. It makes no sense unless they have put this on rails to the point where it is completely standardized and they figured out a way to automate. But I have a hard time believing that there's any $10 million a year company that's going to be happy with that has their bookkeeping.

David Leary: [00:52:17] They're going for e-commerce direct to consumer companies. Right. So there they could build some efficiencies in there. But I just it's it's just fascinating to me is like these companies go, they're just an accounting firm with engineers, and they go so far out of their way to hide the fact that they're an accounting firm.

Blake Oliver: [00:52:34] Right. So they they will do your PNL balance sheet and statement of cash flows. Okay, fine. And you can just generate that with QuickBooks unlimited app and bank integrations. So that mean I can have as many bank accounts as I want. It's not clear they will do cash and accrual for that price. They will do inventory for e-commerce and wholesale. They'll do three way sales reconciliation. So they'll reconcile reconcile order to pay out to your bank invoices for wholesale and retail bill issuance and reconciliation, sales tax liability tracking. I mean that's a lot. I find it hard to believe. Yeah.

David Leary: [00:53:14] For what they they offer, there's a lot that they offer.

Blake Oliver: [00:53:17] 24 over seven e-commerce expert support. Well yeah, they're offering a lot. It seems hard to believe. But hey, if anyone from Vindaloop is listening and wants to, uh, address our skepticism, we'd be happy to talk to you. How are you doing it? How is this possible? What is the magic? What is the secret sauce? Is there a secret sauce? Or is this more offshoring? Low quality automated work in India paying people $5 an hour?

David Leary: [00:53:53] And I tried to find that, like by looking at people that worked there in their LinkedIn. There was nothing to indicate there was ties like somebody's management team, but you could always spin up a whole separate company to, you know, have that. And so, yeah, to to hide that type of stuff, I think this could be one of those like that, you know, the fake it till you make it like they're going to use this and like even bookkeeper bookkeeper in what, six months, three months ago finally has something automated they, like, hit the dream, right? Five years. Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:54:20] Somebody invented AI.

David Leary: [00:54:22] So they built the thing. So? So there could, I don't know. And I don't want to, like, knock. I love startups, I love accounting firms, I love the space, but I just hate the fakeness. Like, just be who you are. Like, hey, we're an accounting firm trying to be better at this like everybody else, right? Right. Don't hide the fact that you're using QuickBooks. Like it's just silly. You're trying to pretending you're so much better. You're like, but you're just using QuickBooks, just like 99% of all the listeners here that have cash practice. Mhm.

Blake Oliver: [00:54:53] Well, this whole episode has been about innovation. And I wanted to end on a on a positive note about innovation at the federal government level in the United States starting already, US travelers can now renew their passports online, eliminating the need to mail in their applications. The online renewal program was tested in 2022 and 23, and is now in beta mode each day. This is the. This is the weirdest beta I've ever seen, David. So here's how it works. If you want to renew your passport online and I need to do this, so maybe I'll try it each day at 1 p.m. eastern time, a limited number of renewal slots will be available. So if you go online and try to renew before 1 p.m., you can't. You have to go on at 1:00 pm eastern and try to get in to this online renewal.

David Leary: [00:55:48] This is a lesson they got from Taylor Swift. Like it's like a ticket sale or something, right?

Blake Oliver: [00:55:51] But why? Why do it that way? Why not just set up a waitlist where you can enter your email address to get on the waitlist, and then they email you when slots open. This makes no sense, right? Like, am I? I'm not going to go on the website at 1:00 pm every day to try to get a slot.

David Leary: [00:56:10] Or like, check in for your southwest flight, right?

Blake Oliver: [00:56:12] Yeah, exactly. Yeah. The worst part about southwest is that check in and they hustle. They they shake you down for 25 bucks if you don't want to do it because you forget all the time, like me. Um, anyway, here's the thing too, is the online renewal process isn't any faster than the mail in application. It takes the same amount of time and it's not available if you need to update your information or if you're a first time applicant. So so so.

David Leary: [00:56:36] Basically they've eliminated because I had to renew mine about a year ago. So I had to I kind of fill out a PDF online, print it out, I print it out. But I had to go to the post office who reviewed everything, stapled it. I wrote the check to the post office. They put an envelope, they mailed it off. Passports came, but I had to make an appointment to do that. So they're just eliminating the physical appointment with an online appointment at 1:00 pm every Tuesday, or whenever they offer this. Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:57:03] Well, no, it's just to upload. I think you just upload your stuff instead of mailing it in, because when you renew, you don't have to do an in-person appointment. You just mail in your stuff like a form. This is a.

David Leary: [00:57:14] Revenue thing for the post office. And they there's like scratching backs here happening. I don't know who knows. It's very illogical. Like why only at certain times you can do this.

Blake Oliver: [00:57:23] Well, David, that's all the time we have for this week. Thank you everyone who tuned in live. Subscribe to us on YouTube. Search for the accounting podcast. Uh, hit subscribe, hit notifications. You'll get notified when we go live. You can join us. You'll get the episodes before anyone else does. And don't forget, you can earn free continuing professional education credits for your CPA and CMA license renewals. If you're a chartered accountant abroad, you can use our certificates. Most jurisdictions, all the foreign jurisdictions that we have investigated have allowed it go to earmark Cpcomm. You can actually just go to the app directly now on the web earmark app, sign up for your free account, find the accounting podcast channel. The course for this episode will be available within about a week of the live stream or the podcast episode dropping. I can't remember how it works, but basically, if you watch this episode, just stay tuned on earmark app on our channel and eventually the course will pop up and you can take the quiz and get your CPE. So we have one more comment. Um, finish loop financing 9.95 a month until they get popular. Then it's that much per hour. Maybe that's the trick. We'll see.

David Leary: [00:58:42] Uh, we also launched a new podcast, a new podcast. So we're building a podcast for 2 million. Um, this is a host, Isaac Heller. He's going to talk to leaders in the accounting industry and talk about, really, the impact of AI on the accounting industry. Brand new podcast. The first guest is Jodie Pedder. Please jump in, download it. Give it a listen.

Blake Oliver: [00:59:02] Accounting in the AI era. Great episode. Give it a listen. Accounting. Intelligence. Do subscribe and you'll be able to earn CPE for listening to that as well. Yes, as well as many fine accounting tax audit podcasts on the earmark app. Go to earmark app. Get your free CPE. It's convenient. It's anywhere. And if you want to support us and what we're doing at earmark, do subscribe. It's only $139 per month that will be going up this summer, so lock in that price if you lock in the price. We have not increased it for anyone who has signed up so far. So you'll get that for I can't say forever, but for we have no plans to raise prices on existing subscribers.

David Leary: [00:59:46] And one more thing, Blake, because people who are watching the video or might see they're probably like, that's not Blake's office. What's going on?

Blake Oliver: [00:59:53] I'm on, uh, I'm on vacation. I'm well, not on vacation. I'm relocation. I have relocated, uh, for a little while because of the heat in Arizona. So I'm in LA right now. I'll be traveling around a bit and, uh, just enjoying some cool weather here in California.

David Leary: [01:00:10] So. So you're there for like, 4 or 5 weeks or something?

Blake Oliver: [01:00:12] Yeah.

David Leary: [01:00:13] So what if we had to return to office policy at earmark? This would not be possible.

Blake Oliver: [01:00:17] No, but good, good thing that, uh, you're not my boss, David.

David Leary: [01:00:21] So good thing you're not monitoring me.

Blake Oliver: [01:00:24] Anywhere, anytime company. You know, I could never go back to a company that made me come into an office five days a week. Like, it's just. It's just so beyond where I'm at at this point, I don't I get it, I get it, like. But it only works if everyone does that. And what company can do that these days? You know, what knowledge economy company.

David Leary: [01:00:45] So it's been like that for a very long time. When I worked at Intuit and I was going to the main campus in Mountain View a lot for a decade, a decade more than like 15 years ago, you'd go and then people are just calling in on a zoom and you're physically in the that's worse.

Blake Oliver: [01:01:01] Having to go to the office only to sit on zoom meetings is worse.

David Leary: [01:01:04] It's far worst. Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [01:01:05] Oh, Deborah from earmark is correcting me. The current price is one 2999. It will be going up this summer, so lock in that price. You can subscribe on the web now we just built a stripe integration so you can actually put in your corporate card subscribe on the web. Um, and you can also do it on Apple and Google of course.

David Leary: [01:01:24] And if you bring a team email me, I'll give you 20% off your seats.

Blake Oliver: [01:01:27] So 20% off for your firm email David David at earmarked me. Oh, and if you want to let us know what you think, email The Accounting Podcast The Accounting Podcast at earmarked me. We'd love to hear from you. And we got a bunch of listener mail and we forgot to get to it again. David, we might need to do like an extra episode or something to.

David Leary: [01:01:46] I think we'll be able to. It's going to be 4th of July week next week. Things are going to quiet down. Won't be a lot of accounting news. We'll be able to get our we'll get to that knocked.

Blake Oliver: [01:01:54] Out because we didn't talk about it in this episode. But the California Board of Accountancy is doing a survey. They are investigating changes to licensure in California. And a bunch of listeners sent me this survey, and I want to go through it with you. And we didn't get to it because we were doing all the.

David Leary: [01:02:07] You got the survey. Survey.

Blake Oliver: [01:02:08] Yeah, yeah. Like I actually like run through it and take the survey together.

David Leary: [01:02:12] But let's do that in the next episode. Don't let.

Blake Oliver: [01:02:14] Me forget. All right. Thanks everyone. Great to well, I didn't see you, but great to see you, David.

Speaker4: [01:02:20] You as well.

Blake Oliver: [01:02:20] Thanks for listening. Bye.