The Accounting Podcast

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David Leary: [00:00:04] But you can sit at your kitchen table, spin up five e-commerce stores, get a little square dongle, run a business for months without ever talking to an accountant or getting an accounting software GL package. Right. And so I've always thought that this is a threat to Intuit. And this is probably why they bought MailChimp. Coming to you weekly from the OnPay Recording Studio.

Blake Oliver: [00:00:29] Hello, and welcome back to the Accounting Podcast, the number one podcast for accountants in the world and your weekly news roundup and analysis in the accounting profession. I'm Blake Oliver.

David Leary: [00:00:39] And I'm David Leary. And Blake again. You were traveling. You were at digital CPA for two days or so. I saw on socials.

Blake Oliver: [00:00:46] Nothing like Denver in December. David, I'm totally befuddled by the choice of that venue, but maybe I'm just weak now that I live in Phoenix. But yeah, it was great. Great to see everyone. Uh, we did a bowling event with, uh, AF fund and and Roe and Justworks. So we had about 100 folks from the conference there.

David Leary: [00:01:08] And it's really a much younger audience. I just really feels that way via social. It's not it doesn't feel like the AICPA engage event, if that makes sense. No, it's.

Blake Oliver: [00:01:18] Much smaller, focused on technology, a lot of cast practices, accounting, bookkeeping, outsourced accounting practices there, and they are growing rapidly. Um, and I've got a stat for you about that this week. Uh, cast practices are growing faster than basically any other segment of accounting, which is very exciting. And we also have news about the IRS commissioner, Trump's nominee. We're going to dig into that involved in Irtc claims after he was in Congress Billy Long. Uh, we've got news about Square's, uh, move into accounting software, potentially, And follow up on that Macy's employee. But first, let's thank our sponsors, who are our sponsors. This week we.

David Leary: [00:02:05] Have four sponsors. Two of them are brand new. So we have robo debit relay, cloud accounting, staffing, cloud accountant staffing and tax bandits. So we have two new sponsor ads. Stay tuned for those. I always like reading a new ad. Sometimes I stumble, but it's always exciting to read a new ad.

Blake Oliver: [00:02:20] Thank you to our sponsors. Let's talk about the new IRS commissioner or nominee to be the new IRS commissioner, Billy Long. Former Missouri Congressman Billy Long has been nominated, and it has generated significant attention and mixed reactions from various quarters. Billy Long is 69 and represented Missouri's seventh congressional district from 2011 to 2023. He was a certified auctioneer and ran real estate businesses before entering Congress. Long does not have a college degree and has never worked in accounting.

David Leary: [00:02:57] He also hosted a radio show. So I heard him on a podcast, and that's how he says he had a base of an audience, and that's how he's able to run for Congress already. Okay, so you have a you have a chance here, Blake, to to run for Congress, not.

Blake Oliver: [00:03:12] Run for Congress someday. No. Thank you. No. Thank you. Not not not in a million years.

David Leary: [00:03:17] And you might already be familiar with him. There was a viral video that was going around a year and a half or so ago. There's a protester in Congress, and this congressman just started going into auctioneer mode to to drown out the protester. And that was him. Oh, just like I think I do remember that, you know, the typical auctioneer talk now is that.

Blake Oliver: [00:03:39] The video that you've brought today.

David Leary: [00:03:40] That is not the video I brought today. I brought one of the videos of him, um, pedaling irtc and really claiming how accountants didn't stay on top of their game. Right.

Blake Oliver: [00:03:51] Let's give this a look.

David Leary: [00:03:52] We could play that first. Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:03:54] All right, here it is on the stage. Go ahead and press play.

Billy Long Clip #1: [00:03:59] Happens is we have far too many potential recipients of irtc that walk away from it because they're getting bad information from their accountants, their CPA's saying, oh, you won't qualify because of this or that, when in reality they probably would. And from the horse's mouth, that is actually the case.

Billy Long Clip #1: [00:04:16] That is exactly the case. And the thing is, a lot of CPAs looked at it for their clients back in 2020. And guess what? They didn't qualify because nobody did. But they didn't stay on top of their game and know that we went back in March of 2021, made another tax law change with eight amendments, and now virtually everyone qualifies. We don't turn down more than we take, but the cases we look at, if they don't qualify, we do not tell them they do and we do not try and get them through the process. And if you do qualify, we'll give you a good faith estimate of how much you'll be receiving.

Blake Oliver: [00:04:52] And I've got another video that I'd like to play for you here as well. Uh, David, this is Congressman Billy Long. Um, the name on the video is Mark. Speak or speak. Uh, but that's just because he was on that guy's computer when they were on zoom. And this is, uh, Billy Long talking about the employee retention tax credit.

Billy Long Clip #2: [00:05:12] Congressman, there's two things. Really? Well. Absolutely nothing. Well, we're reacting, and they laugh usually at both lines. And I said, that's exactly. Go get my hat. Mark, can you. It's on my desk. Either bring me a hat. Uh, and I point to my hat and I said, that's exactly what Ertc was on 2020 under Donald Trump. We and I'm the one that originated the phrase Trump train. So anytime you hear a Trump train, it came out of this pea brain up here. But, uh, I say that's what Ertc was in 2020. We did it. But you had to have three freckles on the left side of your face, two on your right. You had to have under 100 and you had to prove Covid adversely affected your business. Nobody qualified, so we were doing absolutely nothing. We go back in March, and this is where a lot of the CPAs missed out on it. Thank you. We go, we go, uh, in March of 21, we come, come in. And with eight amendments, we change the tax law again and we overreacted. So now everybody qualifies. I mean, from non-profits to my church has done it. Presbyterian church here in town, uh, economic development in Joplin. We got them 3.6 million. That's a not for profit, uh, funeral home here in town. You think funeral home didn't have a lot of business during Covid? I mean, people that have had the best two years of their life ever on income qualify. And a lot of these CPAs are missing out on that because they look, maybe they number one, they didn't know about it. So they're embarrassed. They badmouthed it. Number two, maybe they did look at it in 2020 when nobody qualified. And but they didn't stay on top of their game and follow up and March of 21 and realize that, hey, we, uh, you know, we do. Uh, we do quite. They did qualify now. And so, I mean, it's a constant.

Blake Oliver: [00:06:59] So there's Billy Long talking about how even if you had the best two years as a funeral home during Covid, you could qualify for the irtc promoting it. He started doing this immediately after he left Congress in 2023.

David Leary: [00:07:16] And tied to companies right that are you could label as URC mills, but it's not super clear. But at the same time, some of the warning signs that the IRS published about some of their websites match this. But there's four companies he's tied to. One is called Commerce Terrorist Consulting. Another one that he was on that podcast about was Lifetime Advisors, who was, interestingly enough, stopped doing irtc applications and that in the last three days vanished from their website. They had they had like a banner, we're not doing them anymore. And it's not there today. I don't know what happened. I should have screenshotted it. And then that's tied to a company called prophet Max, which is in alliance with lifetime navigators, which is tied to lifetime advisors. And it seems to be somebody's firm. Her name is Stacey Doge. Not not the Dogecoin, but Doge. And she's listed as an agent on the Lifetime Advisors website. So there's a lot of this, like crisscrossing multiple websites. I did look on the Better Business Bureau, and I did find one complaint. Somebody got the loan, they found out maybe they didn't qualify. They returned it in that forgiveness window. Remember, you could just give the money back. But the complaint with the B-b-b Business Better Business Bureau is that lifetime advisors would not give them the feedback, which is questionable. Now, there wasn't hundreds of complaints, but there was one complaint.

Blake Oliver: [00:08:41] Right. So these are not accounting firms. These are these consulting firms, these quote unquote irk mills that popped up just to process these ERC claims, and long boasted in a podcast interview that his clients obtained tax refunds exceeding $1 million through the ERC program. Um, he actually talked about how in Congress, he worked to help make the ERC easier for businesses to claim, specifically removing the requirement to prove a business downturn due to Covid 19. He encouraged potential clients to disregard their accountants advice when it contradicted their eligibility for the credit. Um, so like this does not make me feel good about this potential IRS commissioner. He has no experience in tax or accounting except in terms of promoting a potentially fraudulent tax credit. A very exactly.

David Leary: [00:09:40] He never participates participated in the House and Ways and Means Committee. He has no. But he did lobby when they were starting to think about shutting down Irtc. He lobbied for them not to shut it down, but outside of that, he hasn't really been involved in the tax game.

Blake Oliver: [00:09:57] So let's summarize for our listeners who may have missed it. The issues with the employee retention tax credit, the IRS so far has identified over 22,000 improper claims, amounting to $572 million in assessments, half $1 billion. They've initiated 450 related criminal cases, and FinCEN has also initiated 223 investigations involving more than 2.8 billion of potentially fraudulent ERC claims across the years 2020 to 2023. And many businesses filed improper or fraudulent claims for the ERC, often misled by aggressive marketing tactics. And I think you could say that Billy Long's marketing tactics promotion were fairly aggressive, saying to ignore your accountant's advice and saying that anyone could qualify for it. So the short story is that this program has cost taxpayers billions of dollars, probably. And, you know, this is the IRS commissioner.

David Leary: [00:11:03] In fairness, I don't know if it's fairness, but I did listen to the entire interview. The second half, he really talks about his experience in Washington because he's a little bit of an outsider, and he's actually kind of a funny guy. So like, it's worth listening to the interview and how he views Washington, D.C. and how he interacts. And he discovered, like, he can take anybody to the Smithsonian. So if you can't get tickets to the Smithsonian, he'll get you in. Blake, that type of thing. He's just it's worth as accountants because we're closely tied to what happens at the IRS. The more you know about him, probably the better. But we'll see where this goes. He's. It's where I think he's entertaining, but I'm not sure I want him running the IRS. It's kind of. Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:11:41] I'm not sure I want an IRC promoter running the IRS when the IRC cost is estimated to now be over $550 billion, and it's money that went to a lot of businesses that did not need it. And what he was talking about was exactly those businesses, the funeral home during Covid, getting an IRC, uh, check. It's just wrong. But and this is what like this is what really bothers me about like the the current situation with like Trump's nominees. The promise has always been from Trump. Drain the swamp, drain the swamp. And I love that message. That's a great message. But this is not draining the swamp. This is putting a guy who is like, knee deep in the swamp in charge of the Internal Revenue Service, and that gives me heartburn. Shall we move on or shall we thank our first sponsor?

David Leary: [00:12:42] Yeah, we'll do that. But the only thing they're not these these companies that are doing this, they're also involved in like lawsuit class action stuff. You know how for small businesses, the merchant service lawsuit against Mastercard and visa that's out there because people got overcharged for merchant fees? Apparently they'll represent you to get even more money out of that there. It's just questionable at best. And you're right. You don't want a person leading the IRS to be a questionable guy.

Blake Oliver: [00:13:06] No, and I'd at least like them to have some experience in tax preparation or accounting or be a CPA. Perhaps even maybe an enrolled agent should run the IRS. Maybe somebody who used to work there. I don't know. Let's thank our first sponsor, who is our sponsor.

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Blake Oliver: [00:14:43] Thank you. Robo debit. David let's talk about Macy's. We've got some follow up on that. And it looks like we now know the motive for why this employee misstated Macy's financials with these improper accruals.

David Leary: [00:15:01] And you were right I think you suspected that it was incompetence or a mistake. And they're trying to cover up a mistake that was made. And that, according to an article in CNBC, is the reason now.

Blake Oliver: [00:15:15] So what's the source for that?

David Leary: [00:15:17] Well, this is the problem of most media these days.

Blake Oliver: [00:15:21] An anonymous source- [CROSSTALK] familiar with the matters.

David Leary: [00:15:23] Familiar with the investigation but not authorized to share details from the probe.

Blake Oliver: [00:15:28] But somebody at Macy's, probably.

David Leary: [00:15:30] I'm assuming that's.

Blake Oliver: [00:15:32] Okay. So it's just somebody familiar with the investigation. We don't know where they are. Okay. Got it.

David Leary: [00:15:36] Exactly.

Blake Oliver: [00:15:36] But they're saying that. What are they saying?

David Leary: [00:15:38] There's what they're saying. The employee told investigators that a mistake was initially made in accounting for small parcel delivery expenses. Then the person made intentional errors to hide the mistake, according to sources familiar with the investigation. So it was like an incompetence. But then I'm thinking, like, what kind of work environment is that, where you can't just make a mistake and go to a boss and be like, hey, I screwed this up, let's fix it. It kind of makes you wonder, right?

Blake Oliver: [00:16:03] Well, and then as we talked about in that episode, the lack of internal controls to detect and correct this error before it ballooned into 150. Uh, what was it, $151 million. And that is now the number that we're being given. Macy's, uh, put out its quarterly numbers. Uh, I think it was yesterday, December 11th, and said that this employee had hid 151 million in delivery expenses over about three years, and they lowered their adjusted earnings per share guidance, and they also reduced gross margin protection. Projections. Due to these misstatements, the stock dropped almost 11%, wiping out about $380 million in market value. And something interesting that the CEO said. The CEO said, quote, not quote yet. Tony Spring explicitly stated that the investigation, quote, concluded that there was no material impact or restatements, unquote, required for Macy's previously filed financial statements. No material impact or restatements. He said that on the. I believe that was on the earnings call. And I'm thinking to myself, well, $151 million is material like I would I think that's material. And clearly the markets think that's material. So I'm wondering like what is the basis for saying that this is not material and that there are no restatements required. They are restating their consolidated historical financial statements now.

Blake Oliver: [00:17:42] Yes, it was spread out over three years, $151 million spread out over three years. And yes, they had $4.36 billion in delivery expenses. So the air represented about 3.5% of the total delivery expenses. And you could make an argument that 3.5% is not material when it comes to just that particular account. But as we discussed last week or the week before, $151 million is more than Macy's net profit last year. And I think that's quite material. So I just I don't understand how he can make this statement that it's not material when they're they're revising their financial statements. Now, you know, I went in and did a little research on this. And I guess there, you know, there are two kinds of restatements. There's the big R restatements, and then there's the little r restatements. So, um, the little R restatements are corrections to financial statements that are considered immaterial to prior periods. And I guess that is what management has decided they're going to do for this. And the big R restatements require more extensive disclosures and an 8-K filing. And they're not going to do that. But I mean, I think you're kind of splitting hairs on this one.

David Leary: [00:19:01] Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:19:01] You know, to say it's not material.

David Leary: [00:19:03] And I think the street's punishing anyways because they're just not happy with their overall sales.

Blake Oliver: [00:19:08] Yeah, well Macy's strategy like is basically the same as it's been in previous years, which is let's just close stores and get rid of the less profitable stores to increase profits. But is that really a long term strategy for growth when people are buying stuff online now and not going into stores like the stores that you keep are going to continue to decline in profitability. So unless you change your strategy, it's not. You're just going to keep closing stores every year until you don't have a company left-

David Leary: [00:19:40] Or you just have one novelty store left that it's a destination site and that's it.

Blake Oliver: [00:19:44] Just the one in New York. Like the original, right? It'll just become a Disneyland historical museum of department stores. Well, you know, the problem, too, is, like, a lot of brands that used to be in Macy's are now building direct relationships with customers online. And it's so easy to buy and return stuff on Amazon now. Like, why would anyone do anything else? I bought a pair of, uh, of earplugs online and I bought it direct from the the the company. I could have bought it on Amazon, but I thought, I'm going to do I'm going to do this company a solid. I'm going to buy it direct from them. But like there's something wrong with them, so I have to return them. I've been trying to return these this item for like a week, and I cannot get an RMA from their customer service. People like, they're broke. It's broken.

David Leary: [00:20:32] [INAUDIBLE]

Blake Oliver: [00:20:33] Yeah. Hey, welcome to all of our livestream viewers. Great to have you with us. Can't pay attention. Asks what is the starting wage of an accounting graduate in Los Angeles? You know, that's a great question for perplexity. And while David is queuing up his next story or laying it out, maybe I'll get you the answer to that. Can't pay attention. And the follow up is, is an accounting degree worth getting with advancements in AI? Oh, I can answer that question for you can't pay attention. Uh, yes it is. There are just not enough accountants, and it's going to drive up salaries for accountants who do use AI. Same thing I experience when cloud computing became a big thing 20 years ago. If you embrace it, use it to enhance your productivity. You know, there's all these accountants now who are like going off on their own. And David, you've talked about this over and over again, how easy it is to start your own firm. All you need is a laptop and an internet connection and you can be in business. Um, that's where I would be, is I would be like being a virtual, uh, bookkeeper, accountant, comptroller or CFO, whatever your ability level is for small businesses all around the country, and you can go live anywhere, so you can charge a decent rate, but it's still competitive and you can have a super high quality of life, just like the two people I have recently interviewed on my earmark podcast.

Blake Oliver: [00:21:56] Uh, that's the earmark podcast. Go to podcast, earmark Cpcomm or just find earmark podcast in the earmark app. And you can hear from two accountants who have done exactly this. Erica Goodey, who lives in Idaho, and Gary Kapilovic, who lives in new Jersey. They both are solo practitioners, making over $200,000 a year, and they are working far fewer than 40 hours a week in most of the year. They each work less than 20 hours a week and they pull in over $200,000 a year each. So that sounds pretty good to me. I don't need millions of dollars in salary. Living in a super high cost of living area, working 60 hours a week to be happy. I'd much rather have all that time to do fun stuff, and it's free to live in a lower cost area. You know you're good. So check out those episodes on the earmark podcast.

David Leary: [00:22:55] Are you ready for this story?

Blake Oliver: [00:22:56] Welcome, Drew. Almost. I'm just finishing up welcoming our [CROSSTALK] viewers. Uh, Sean Smith says AI is only as good as the person using it. It's a great tool, but you better know what you are after with it. That's true. To effectively use these AI tools, you have to know how to ask the right questions. And unfortunately, that is not what accounting education is teaching people how to do. Historically, it's just taught people to follow the rules. But you need to now know how to ask good questions. It actually makes it really easy to be an advisor. All this talk about moving to advisory in a firm, it's so much easier because you can learn anything almost instantly with AI now. But you have to know how to ask the right questions. You have to know how to educate yourself and not just be taught rules. Erica, in response to the IRS commissioner says, I think by putting these people in these positions, it makes it easier for Trump to fire them. It shows that they are trying to find the deep state people and the ones that follow them. So that's like the three dimensional chess argument here. I mean, yeah, I don't know. I don't know why. Like, it doesn't make any sense to me. Like and I just want to say like I don't have any strong opinions about like, Trump versus Biden. Like, they're both politicians, in my opinion. And they both do politician things. And we saw that, of course, with the Hunter Biden pardon. Like for all these promises that Biden was not going to do this, he went and did it anyway.

Blake Oliver: [00:24:25] And I felt like he was going to do it the whole time. So like, I'm not I'm not Partizan in this regard. But I also don't understand why Trump is nominating people who really like, don't seem qualified for the jobs like that. Just seems like why create extra friction when you're trying to get shit done? Um. Let's see. Argyle. Welcome, Argyle. Argyle says. Hey, Blake and David tuning in from sunny LA. Shout out to Dccpa had an amazing time attending it for the first time. I met progressive firm owners openly sharing tips. That's awesome. It was great to see you, Argyle. Welcome to the show. Night light says great job guys. Hopefully we don't put you to sleep. Night light. And Argyle says in regard to the Macy's discussion, I wonder if it's a material. I wonder if it's material from a tax provision standpoint, restating the financials means they have to amend the tax returns and adjust their deferred assets. Yeah. Me too. It's like I feel like saying that it wasn't material was like a big overstep on the part of Macy's CEO. Um, you know, the dollar amount, the need for financial statement revisions, the impact on earnings guidance, the market reaction like that all seems very material to me. Yeah. And is it really his job to decide what's material? Isn't that what the auditors are supposed to do?

David Leary: [00:25:47] Yeah, it keeps getting downplayed. And that's the suspicious thing about this whole thing. It just it keeps getting downplayed. Yeah. It's immaterial. It doesn't matter. You know, it was one employee. It just. That's the part that's really fishy. Fishy about this whole thread is this has gone on is Macy's keeps downplaying it, which tells me maybe there's something bigger happening and they want to distract everybody, but we'll never know.

Blake Oliver: [00:26:10] Raj in the live stream in the chat says do you have any tips for getting those 30 credits for cheap? This is regarding the 150 hour rule to get your CPA. I'm seeing a lot of masters of accountants for non accounting majors, but they are asking all of my wealth. Lol. Yeah, they like to charge a lot of money. Those those masters of accounting programs make a lot of money for those colleges and universities. And you know, somebody's got to pay for the high salaries of all those administrators who don't actually add any value. But, um, and those poor educators who, you know, like the professors, the adjunct professors who don't get paid anything, like I feel bad for them, but that's beside the point. Um, tips for getting those 30 credit hours. I did community college. I did Santa Monica College online, and then I did, uh, UCLA extension, which is, uh, you can just pay per credit. It's fairly reasonable compared to a master's. I think I spent about $10,000 to get my extra hours that I needed, and it was about 30 credit hours. But there are ways to do it even cheaper. Um, what was the university online? One that we-

David Leary: [00:27:23] Western Governors.

Blake Oliver: [00:27:24] Western Governors University has an all you can eat program, where you can sign up for a semester and just test out of as many classes as possible. So depending on.

David Leary: [00:27:36] Yeah, I just pasted the links, a link to a YouTube video where we interviewed someone who was able to get a CPA in three months. So watch that.

Blake Oliver: [00:27:46] The interview that we did. Yeah, that was amazing. He got his credits to sit for the CPA exam in like three months using Western Governors University. Um, but, you know, it really depends if you're going to do that. I wouldn't do that if you actually need to learn the material, if you already know everything you need to know and you're just getting the credits because it's this red tape, then yeah, blast through it. Right. Speed. Run it. But if you really want to learn. I really, really liked Santa Monica College. I thought that the online education there was spectacular and I really learned my debits and credits thanks to that. Um. So I check it out. Okay. What is our next big story? David.

David Leary: [00:28:30] So I've had this story in my bucket for a couple of weeks now. Intuit launched Intuit Assist for all us Qbo users, and frankly, I have not been very impressed. But yesterday I was impressed. Blake I was very impressed.

Blake Oliver: [00:28:45] So, back up for a sec- what is Intuit Assist?

David Leary: [00:28:48] Intuit Assist if we go back to the year long journey first, it was just this overly hyped press conference. Intuit did, uh, look at this new Intuit assist all the AI stuff we're going to do. Probably pumped up the stock price a little bit, but then they slowly started rolling it out. And first it felt like just a marketing gimmick. They rebranded all the features of QuickBooks that you could argue are partially AI, and they changed it to use little Intuit Assist logo. So the bank feeds all of a sudden now has the Intuit Assist logo. The scan bill. They started dropping this all over the UI of QuickBooks and Intuitive Assist is actually a bigger AI initiative for all Intuit products, but they've rolled it out now into the Qbo, and you get things like a business feed where it feels like you're just regurgitating information from other places that QuickBooks I try to use it to. We had some overdue invoices and it wrote stern letters. We still didn't get paid, so I don't know how good it worked, but I used it to create some stern collection letters. Right. And my background. Right. I worked with help launch Bill.com auto entry Hubdoc Dexter really early on. So I'm very involved in like, scanning of bills. I'm aware of how bills get scanned, how hard it is. And QuickBooks bills scan frankly has not been good at all. And every week, you know, I get a bill from our editor Zach, we've referenced before on the show and it never really works. I always have to go in and change the category to contract labor, and then I'm lazy. So I just in the item description field, I just type in editing, recording, meetings, Admin and move on with that-

Blake Oliver: [00:30:20] You don't put in all the detail from the-

David Leary: [00:30:22] I don't put all the details. And he gives us a kind of a complicated doc. It is a probably a word doc on page one, which is the invoice and that's on portrait. And then there's a two pages that are landscape from an Excel table with all the details he does for us. So I just dump it, dump it in. But I always have to fix it. Well, yesterday I uploaded it in the PDF and I didn't have to change anything into it. Assist scan the bill. Not only did it scan it perfectly, it actually made it better than what I would have put in. So in the description field it puts a sentence in invoicing for editing, recording, meetings and admin services provided by Zach to earmark for the period 1125 to 12 one 2024. I would I was lazy, I would only put those four words in. So have we now tipped with ROI where it's going to do things better than we did it ourselves. And I was very, very impressed enough to to talk about this on the show. It's really impressive what they've done.

Blake Oliver: [00:31:25] Well, what's impressive is that there are entire categories of tools that plug into Qbo to do this. And I it sounds like has just made those obsolete. So tools that we all use like Hubdoc and Auto Entry and Dext and name me some other OCR scanning and data entry tools. I can do this and it can it can do this without necessarily being coded to do it. It's just trained on data sets. You give it a bunch of invoices and bills and show it examples of how to code them. And it can follow the examples just like a human, but it does it perfectly, almost perfectly. Well, I guess it doesn't even have to do it perfectly. It just has to do it better than you would have. Right, David?

David Leary: [00:32:12] And I'll keep an eye.

David Leary: [00:32:13] Was this a one off? Will happen next week, but I'm impressed.

Blake Oliver: [00:32:17] When am I gonna see this in Xero? My biggest complaint right now is a Xero user, is that I can't forward bills and have them automatically entered into Xero, at least as far as I know. I have to use Hubdoc, and so I have to have a workflow where I go into Hubdoc and I process the bills and Hubdoc hasn't changed in years. So it's like not quick. I just want to be able to forward the bills into Xero and have it handled and the receipts, whatever it is, right? Like, why can't that all happen in the accounting system? It really should. If anyone knows that's listening, let me know. Maybe I'm just not up on it.

David Leary: [00:32:52] I only have- it's very low volume for me. But imagine if I had, you know, a thousand bills a month coming through. This is significant time savings. If it if it's at the point where the bills are rich and correct. That's amazing.

Blake Oliver: [00:33:06] Yep. Um. Raffi asks, can I currently complete a tax return 1040 without any human assistance? You know, that would be interesting to try. I think it can, but it depends on the complexity. If you have a simple W-2 and you just need to complete a tax return, I bet you that I could do that with ChatGPT.

David Leary: [00:33:30] I agree, if it's like high school kid working at Burger King take their W-2. I fully agree.

Blake Oliver: [00:33:36] That's why Turbotax and H&R block and the other simple tax return prep franchises are doomed because that's the bulk of their business. And that's why they're all trying to, like, go to businesses, small businesses, stuff that can't easily be automated with AI. But yeah, I think that like the the preparation of like a 1040, a simple 1040 for like 80% of people in this country is going to be automated by AI within the next few years. It's just a matter of like doing it at scale and integrating it with all the tools that you need to actually file the return. So it doesn't help if I fill out a PDF with ChatGPT, I need to actually transmit it to the IRS. I need to make the payment. There's all this stuff that has to happen and I need to verify it. So it's just going to take time for that to happen. But yeah, like the simple stuff, the putting numbers into boxes on a, on a form, I don't see why I couldn't do that if it can't do it already. Um, there's already a tool called tax GPT that claims to be able to do this. We haven't tried it, but maybe we should do that this year. David. Maybe we should try some of this AI stuff and see if we can get it to do our tax returns.

David Leary: [00:34:43] Business returns.

Blake Oliver: [00:34:44] Yeah.

David Leary: [00:34:45] We constantly eat the dog food. That's what we do for everybody else. Um, let's jump into our second ad and then you could get another story ready here.

Blake Oliver: [00:34:52] That's let's do it.

David Leary: [00:34:54] So our next sponsor is relay. So between Blake and myself we have three, four, five business entities, maybe 20 or so checking accounts and dozens and dozens of virtual cards. It would be impossible to manage all of this. We weren't using relay as our small business bank relay. It's truly a part of the tech stack we use to run our business. Really allows Blake and I to each have our own logins. We can grant access to our team and even our accountant without sharing passwords or two factor authentication codes. Relay allows us to grow and scale our banking needs without ever going into a physical branch. I recently added an account to receive inbound merchant services with just a few clicks, and had to create a payroll checking account. Again, a few clicks and I instantly had access to my ACH numbers to pass them over to my payroll provider. With relays virtual cards, we can issue debit cards to our team around the world for needed business expenses. I can instantly spin up new visa debit card and set both daily and monthly spending limits. And when a team member doesn't need the card anymore, I just freeze it until they need to use it again. Really also has an automation features to sweep money automatically from one account to another based on dates, amount, target balances, or percentages. For example, inbound payments could be split daily to your payroll, sales tax, payroll, operating and savings accounts based on predefined rules. To learn more about using relay for your firm and clients, head over to The Accounting Podcast dot promo Slash relay that is The Accounting Podcast dot promo forward slash relay.

Blake Oliver: [00:36:18] So I've got some follow up on Supermicro. We previously reported on the show that Hindenburg Research published a report alleging accounting manipulation at Supermicro, which makes high performance and high efficiency computer servers and software and storage systems for various markets, so equipment and software for enterprise data centers. So back in August, Hindenburg released a report alleging that there was a fresh evidence of accounting manipulation at Supermicro, which years ago was also charged by the SEC with prematurely recognizing revenue, understating expenses. And they paid a $17.5 million penalty. That was back in 2020. So Supermicro is no stranger to accounting manipulation. So Hindenburg Research published this. The short seller published this report in August, the day after Supermicro announced a delay in filing its annual report, the company stock dropped 19%. The Justice Department in September launched an investigation into Supermicro in an. Ernst and Young resigned as Supermicro public accounting firm and in October, which is pretty unusual, and the company's stock dropped 33% after that. And then BDO became Super Micro's new independent auditor in November. And Supermicro has now announced that there was a review by an independent special committee, which concluded that there was no evidence of fraud or misconduct involving management or the board. And but they're firing the current CFO, David Wiegand. So this is one of those stories that doesn't add up to me. David, why would he resign as the auditor of Supermicro? Why would Hindenburg Research publish a short seller report? And then why would an independent, a, quote, independent review board run by Supermicro itself, find no evidence of fraud or misconduct involving mismanagement or the board? Something is not. And why would they fire the CFO? Something is not adding up.

David Leary: [00:38:33] And the stock is all over the board. So they were going to get delisted from Nasdaq, and that's when they came out with their plan to file their 10-K disclosures properly. And that's when they hired BDO as their new auditor. And then they avoided getting delisted. And then the stock shoots up 27%. Then the stock's down. Then it's back up again. I think last week it went up another 18% in pre-market trading because of their internal investigation. There's I think that's the next step on this is if there's not accounting fraud. Is there a stock price manipulation happening here with the news.

Speaker5: [00:39:07] I know right up and down and up and down.

Blake Oliver: [00:39:10] Now, I don't know, should we be confident in BDO being the new auditor and rooting out any possible fraud or misconduct? Because let's remember, BDO, PCAOB deficiency rate in 2023 was 86%. 86% of the audits that the PCAOB inspected of BDO were deficient and so deficient that the auditor should not have issued its opinion. It's crazy to me that this is just happening out in public, and yet the stock price continues to like where where is Supermicro right now? So in the past year it's up 43%. But I guess that's because all this drama started since the drama started in August. The stock price has gone down from 63. Uh, it went down to 18, and now it's back up with this announcement. The company announces that their own investigation cleared them. And now the stock is up to $38. It's just wild.

Speaker5: [00:40:22] You know what's interesting about them?

David Leary: [00:40:25] At the end of the day, I think they actually have a real product. I guess their chips, their servers that are for AI. People are buying them. They have a real business here. They probably didn't need to manipulate numbers right at the end, but they did. It's never enough, right? It's never enough money for people. You always have to get more. You got to, you know, milk that cow?

Speaker5: [00:40:45] I guess.

Blake Oliver: [00:40:45] So. All right, what is next, David? I have a story about private equity. Uh, did did we talk about square?

David Leary: [00:40:53] We did not talk about square.

Speaker5: [00:40:55] What about.

Blake Oliver: [00:40:55] Square? You. So you have for years posited a theory on this show. That square will one day create their own accounting general ledger to compete with QuickBooks.

David Leary: [00:41:07] I've always said they're the number one threat. It's not Xero. It's companies like square, Shopify, probably Amazon. It's anybody who has a lot of businesses. And they're getting to them before Intuit does. And to set the table, if you think about the olden days of QuickBooks desktop, you would, on day one, start a business. Day two, go get an accountant. On day three, the accountant said, Go to Office Depot and buy QuickBooks. So very early in a business's life cycle, the accountant is involved and QuickBooks is involved. But now you can sit at your kitchen table, spin up five ecommerce stores, get a little square dongle, run a business for months without ever talking to an accountant or getting an accounting software GL package. Right. And so I've always thought that this is a threat to Intuit. And this is probably why they bought MailChimp ultimately. And also there was news yesterday, if you saw Intuit is now getting in bed with Amazon. I think previously Intuit kind of has a non-compete agreement with Shopify going on now. I think Intuit recognizes this threat, and we actually covered it on episode, I think, 219. So we're going back almost five years internally. Square released a blog post that covered their internal GL that they used. Right? And it was in a blog post. It was more of an engineering brag of a blog post, but it's like, oh, they're already doing GL stuff. They have the ability to do it. So what happened now? Years have passed, but Andy Schwartz, this is his LinkedIn will be in our show notes.

David Leary: [00:42:39] He started a years ago, a restaurant focused app and cost analysis app that was acquired by toast. He went on to start a new company called Profit Labs, which some sort of AI accounting play for restaurants. Unfortunately, it's already been shut down. There's no website up for that anymore, so I don't really know what that was. But this week he posts on LinkedIn that he's now at square and his title is head of Product Accounting Solutions and he has a description. I am running a new product and business area for square around accounting and financial management solutions for our sellers, accounting and more broadly, how sellers manage the profits, cost and complexities of running a business will be an area we hope to add more value to them in the future. And he also put a post about him, um, that he's now part of square. And this will be a new chapter for me as I will be leading a brand new accounting product area within square, across all verticals. As part of this, the learnings and efforts from last year at Profit Labs. So what he learned even more about accounting last year with his other startup. He's going to apply that to build whatever accounting product square is going to build. But this makes sense. It's the only thing they don't have at square. They have payroll, the merchant service. Yep. Marketing tools like the whole stack is there. So this is probably going to happen.

Speaker5: [00:43:56] And this is a.

Blake Oliver: [00:43:58] Problem for Intuit because SaaStr his goal is for into it to become the full suite of products that you need to run a small business on. He has that same vision for what square already is to a lot of businesses, which is, you know, you sign up for QuickBooks to do your accounting and invoicing and get paid and pay bills. You sign up for MailChimp, which they own, in order to do your email marketing and like, what are some of the other products in that suite, I forget.

David Leary: [00:44:27] Yeah, MailChimp has Calendly calendar stuff, so people can book appointments. You can charge for the appointments, e-commerce stores. It's a lot of similar stuff. And Intuit also has merchant service and the dongle and all that. So it's very similar offerings, right?

Blake Oliver: [00:44:40] But square has the advantage because that's what people sign up for when they have any in-person sales. And that's the first thing that they sign up for. So if square can expand to being the invoicing app, to the one that people sign up for in order to send their first invoice as like a service provider online.

David Leary: [00:45:02] Well, they already do.

Speaker5: [00:45:02] That, right? But it's not as it's.

Blake Oliver: [00:45:05] Not as full featured. Well, maybe it is. I haven't seen it in a while. I tried it, but like square has always been historically for brick and mortar because the dongle, that's where they started, right. But if they could expand into offering everything that you need to run a virtual business as well, which it seems like they're doing right. E-commerce is bigger and bigger. They understand that. And if you could do hybrid, if you can do both the in-person transactions and the online transactions, I think square has a huge advantage. And they could grab a huge chunk of the current QuickBooks market. And maybe that's why Intuit has been moving up market, because they see it happening.

Speaker5: [00:45:44] But I just.

Blake Oliver: [00:45:45] Want to give you credit, David, for seeing this coming years ago. Somebody should have you advising their, you know, freaking VC fund.

David Leary: [00:45:54] I remember when I don't know, I was I was 38 and I was they were asking what's the biggest issue for accountants to when I was on the 40 under 40 list. And I brought this up because I have a chart that I showed on some talk I did, and the chart actually was from toast, and they were showing all the apps in the restaurant ecosystem. And you know what wasn't on it? Quickbooks or Xero. There's like 100 apps in the restaurant ecosystem and the accounting like it's such an afterthought for many, many industries. And then you, Cleo law firm software, you know, they launched their own GL. Shopify now has Shopify.com slash finance which if you think about it has financial dashboards to manage your whole thing a bank account, sales tax, credit cards, loans, bill pay sales, tax reports. Sounds like an accounting system to me. And now Google. Sorry, Intuit just got in bed with Amazon yesterday or the day before where all the Amazon sellers, there's millions of them. These third party sellers as part of their Amazon account are now going to have QuickBooks. Now it's not clear if it's for free or not, but you're going to get Qbo built right into the Amazon Sellers dashboard here. Mid 2025. And that's probably to keep Amazon from just building a little GL product and offering these types of services.

Blake Oliver: [00:47:11] The barrier to entry for GL is going to decrease dramatically. I think the reason most companies have failed to do it is because building a general ledger accounting system sounds easy at first. If you don't understand the concept of debits and credits, and you just view it as like a single entry system, which is what most non-accountants think of when they think of accounting. Sure, it's easy, but as soon as you have to build a system that can automatically balance the debits and credits, and they can maintain all these multi ledgers and subledgers and like it gets it's a very accounting is a very simple thing that gets very complicated very quickly. It's like chess right. The rules are not that complicated but there's an infinite number of possibilities. And so, um, so it's been really hard to build a general ledger.

Speaker5: [00:48:02] That's FreshBooks.

David Leary: [00:48:03] Even if you build it, it's even hard to, like, get adoption.

Speaker5: [00:48:06] Exactly.

Blake Oliver: [00:48:06] And that's also because even if you build all the debits and credits, you have to build the controls in the system that prevent people from mucking up the books and keeping those debits and credits balanced, and then all the different types of transactions that you have to enter and all the different data fields. Doing that with humans is really time consuming to build and takes a long, long, long time. It's like trying to build tax software from scratch. But what is going to change that? I agents because you can you can give the rules for a general ledger. You can give the rules of accounting to an AI, and you could possibly even have it like give it access to an existing general ledger program. And you could have it reverse engineer a GL for you because there's nothing proprietary about GLS. It's just accounting theory in software. So somebody could take an AI agent and have it click around inside of QuickBooks, or have it watch videos of people using QuickBooks, and it could learn how QuickBooks works, and you could build another QuickBooks where that would have been really, really difficult to do. You know, it took Xero years to build a GL that was competitive, like ten years, I want to say, um, maybe longer.

David Leary: [00:49:33] And that was their primary focus. And that's the thing that's going to make this kind of hard. He's the one person on the accounting team at square right. It's not a priority for square in the grand scheme of all the things square is doing. The accounting is probably low priority and it probably will never get funded and always kind of be half assed. That's the that's the advantage Xero and QuickBooks have is these. It's not the primary focus the way it is at QuickBooks Live Xero. Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:49:58] We have a question in the chat from Shannon. Shannon says curious on your views for financial close automation softwares? Blackline Trintech Floqast. Do you think accounting teams will start moving away from Excel more with increased AI? I have thoughts on this. I used to work at Floqast by the way. I was the first product marketer at Floqast, the CPA on the marketing team. That's how I got into all this, doing webinars and stuff. Um, and the reason that I liked Floqast, the reason that I left public accounting to join, is because I thought Floqast had the best approach to building software for accountants, which was not to try to replace Excel, but to augment it, to layer on top of it and to connect it in a way that it isn't connected. And what that meant was you just put a little hashtag code in a cell in your workbook. And that was the the cue for Floqast to sync with whatever was to the left of that code. So you would do your work paper for your prepaid. Let's say you're at Macy's and you're doing your, you know, uh, prepaid small package delivery expense account reconciliation. You would put the little hashtag code for the GL account number in your workbook. You would upload it to your file storage system like box, for instance. And Floqast would simply be watching all the Workpapers and would sync that final balance with your trial balance and create the trial balance reconciliation. I forget exactly what that report is called, right? It's where you you have your trial balance from the accounting system, and then you have here's the amount in all the workpapers. And you want to make sure they match. And if they don't match then you got to go fix your work paper. It's a tie out. Your tie out.

Speaker5: [00:51:53] Sheet. Chicken ties. Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:51:55] And? And so it automated that, but with a very simple solution. We didn't have to rebuild spreadsheets. We just linked the existing spreadsheets into the trial balance. Reconciliation software into the close the financial close checklist. And that's the best of both worlds, right? Because you get the ultimate flexibility of spreadsheet software that's been around for 20, 30 years. And you don't have to rebuild it. So I don't think that, um, we'll be moving away from Excel because the best solutions are the ones that integrate with spreadsheets, because they are super flexible, and that takes a long time to build. But I guess if I just look at my argument, I just made, you know, maybe I will make it easier to build the spreadsheet tools. But the issue then is always like the portability of your information, the the ability to get it out of the system. You have to be able to export to Excel anyway, in order for me to save my data and to back up my stuff from your system, so why not just integrate with it in the first place? There's no point in trying to replace it. Um, but I do think that, like, I will do the work papers in Excel.

Blake Oliver: [00:53:05] So not just doing the tie out, but actually helping to complete the work paper or review the work paper, that's also a really great use. Like in the case of Macy's, I'm going to guess that nobody was reviewing the work papers. Maybe there was not even a work paper, but it's probably possible there was a work paper, just that nobody was actually looking at it to make sure that it tied out to the GL. So like closed management software like Floqast should have caught this. Um, now it's possible that the person was just putting in the number in the work paper and that there actually wasn't anything in there that backed it up, but you could use AI to totally catch that because you could have AI look at the work paper and spot any inconsistencies in formulas, in calculations, in overrides, that sort of thing like this is totally doable. Today. If I take a workbook and I pop it into ChatGPT 4.0 and I ask it to review that workbook for problems, it will find it will find it would find that.

Speaker5: [00:54:07] So we should.

David Leary: [00:54:09] Probably hit in our next two ads. And then any other small follow up stories on top of the hour here.

Speaker5: [00:54:14] Let's thank the third ad.

Blake Oliver: [00:54:16] Three and four. Yeah. If you could pop that script into the chat, I will gladly read our ad for Cloud Accountant Staffing. Thank you, cloud accountant staffing. In case you missed the last 100 or so episodes, David and I have been discussing almost weekly that there is an accountant labor shortage, regardless of the root cause. The problem is real. My social media feed is full of firms attempting to fill open positions on their teams, but how can anyone increase their staff size if everyone is attempting to hire during a labor shortage? That is where cloud accountant staffing comes in. They will help you hire full time team members for your firm that reside in the Philippines. How much would your firm change? Or for that matter, your life change? If you could add 40, 80, 120 hours of capacity to your firm in 2025? Cloud Accountant Staffing was founded by a firm owner who grew his firm using offshore talent, and now he is applying everything he learned to help you grow your firm. If your firm is in need of expert bookkeepers, accountants, CPAs or virtual assistants, head over to The Accounting Podcast dot promo slash CAS. That's The Accounting Podcast dot promo forward slash CAS.

David Leary: [00:55:34] And our last sponsor today is Tax Bandits. If you're feeling the pressure juggling 1099 W-2s and ACH 1095 forms, listen up. Tax bandits is the solution you've been waiting for. They've got over a decade of experience and support 100 plus tax forms, including everything from your 940 X series to those tricky state filings. Tax bandits handles both federal and state e-filing seamlessly, so you're all set, no matter how many states your clients operate in. Tax bandits is IRS certified, meaning they offer instant processing of your forms and provide real time status updates, ensuring accuracy and eliminating the risk of B notices for additional peace of mind. Tax bandits also offers tin matching and USPS validations to ensure your filings are precise in your IRS requirements are met. Plus, delivering recipient copies is a breeze. Go with traditional postal mail or give clients online access to their forms. It's all about flexibility. You'll love Tax Bandits intuitive platform, especially if you're managing a team or a large client list. You can assign staff roles, customize your client portal with your branding, and keep everything organized from one central dashboard. With this level of organization and Efficiency meeting that January 31st. Deadline becomes much less stressful. And when it's late and you're tired, you need a helping hand. Tax bandits support team is actually there via phone call, email or live chat whenever you need them. If you're ready to take control of tax season and join thousands of tax professionals and join thousands of tax professionals who trust tax bandits, head over to The Accounting Podcast. Promo tax bandits. That's The Accounting Podcast promo slash tax bandits. Thank you. Tax bandits.

Blake Oliver: [00:57:18] I've got one story to take us out. The AICPA is out with their 2024 CAS benchmark survey, and it's highlighting significant growth in client advisory services practices within accounting firms. Okay. Not client of client advisory services, client accounting services, whatever. It's just it's just outsourced accounting. Okay. But anyway, I really dislike the way that the ACPa characterizes this. But I love this report and it's one of those.

Speaker5: [00:57:47] Do they put.

David Leary: [00:57:48] The two A's? Is it can.

Speaker5: [00:57:50] They finally got rid of.

Blake Oliver: [00:57:51] That? That's that was really dumb. So now it's just CAS again. But now it's client advisory services, which is not what this is. It's not advisory. Most of these firms in this survey are just doing bookkeeping, accounting, closing the books. And maybe they do a little bit of advisory, but that's not the main thing. So I don't know why they call it that. But anyway, beside the point, this is one of my favorite things the AICPA does and I think it's really valuable. So thank you, AICPA for collecting this information. 17% year over year growth. These practices doing outsourced accounting experienced 17% increase over the previous year. And they are anticipating 15% growth in the current year with get this almost 100% projected median growth over the next three years. That means that these firms expect that they will double in three years, and they're doing it while making more money per employee, which means hopefully working employees less. So the net fees per professional in these practices rose 29%, reaching $156,000. About half of these practices are investing in technology, and the firms that invest in technology report higher caste revenue and serve 50% more clients, 50% more clients. That makes a lot of sense when you're increasing your productivity, and that is how you increase your fees per professional. So that was from over 200 US firms that participated. So that's a pretty good sampling. And Cpcomm is going to do a free webinar on January 30th at 1:00 pm eastern to delve into the survey results and insights.

Speaker5: [00:59:36] And I think these.

David Leary: [00:59:37] Gains are on previous years, the cash passes have been the most profitable and growing, fastest growing. So this is really a nice stack for almost a decade.

Blake Oliver: [00:59:46] Anywhere from 10 to 20% growth annually on average for like year after year after year. And you did that year after year, you're going to double every few years. So it's great to see that this is happening, because I really believe that these practices are the best. They're they're really the best that the the high point of accounting in terms of like the ability to have work life balance year round work, all that stuff. So.

David Leary: [01:00:15] And clouds really I think helped a lot of that because prior to cloud you always had to go to client sites. This wasn't a very profitable thing to do. But with cloud now you can take on clients anywhere. You can, uh, park, uh, partake in that or collaborate. Right? Because you both have access to the data in the accounting system, you can be on top of it anytime you want. It really just changed the financial paradigm of taking on clients like this. And I think early on, Intuit even had data where people that firms that had a cloud accounting clients or accounting cloud clients were more profitable than ones with desktop. Intuit and Xero both had data on this early on, so this is great.

Blake Oliver: [01:00:55] David, great chatting with you as always. I've got to go jump to another webinar. Thanks to our livestream viewers. If you want to join us live. Find us on YouTube. We are at The Accounting Podcast on YouTube. Subscribe! Hit that notification button and you'll get notified when we go live and earn free CPE for watching this or listening to this today. Go to Earmarked App and find the The Accounting Podcast channel. Get your free CPE credit. It's free to sign up and free to use for one CPE per week. And if you want to support our work, please do subscribe for the low, low price of $150 per year and you'll get unlimited. Uh, see you around, everyone.