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] I mean, if you are not using deep research in ChatGPT or in perplexity or in Claude, you're wasting your time.

David Leary: [00:00:14] Coming to you weekly from the OnPay Recording Studio.

Blake Oliver: [00:00:20] Hello, and welcome back to The Accounting Podcast, your weekly news roundup of news in the profession. I'm Blake Oliver.

David Leary: [00:00:28] And I'm David Leary. And Blake. Don't talk anymore. I can't have you jumping straight into stories about your love of Elon and Doge and tariffs. We have to talk about.

Blake Oliver: [00:00:37] Amazon.

David Leary: [00:00:38] The root of our podcast originally. We we spent almost every episode talking nothing about app news. And we didn't get to it last week. And so now we have to start with that. This episode today is okay fine.

Blake Oliver: [00:00:49] I, I know it's fair. I promise for two episodes we'd get to the tech stuff. And we did start this podcast originally as the Cloud Accounting Podcast, where that's all we talked about every week. So we're getting back to our roots this week. And the good news is there's plenty to talk about. We've got news from Xero, focused, Intuit, Paychex, pipe, Glen Lily, Google, PwC, Canva and I think some more.

David Leary: [00:01:15] So Canva is going to be on the show. It's kind of funny actually, to think about Canva.

Blake Oliver: [00:01:19] This is great. Excel and Google Sheets users now have something to hate together. Maybe this will unify us once and for all. Canva sheets is a real thing. It's an abomination and maybe we'll get to see it in action. Welcome to our early live stream viewers. We've got Big Four transparency, five coffees, Gator NYC with four and boring Accountant with three. What a nice countdown. Five. Four three. So, David, I'm going to let you pick where we start with the news about apps. Why not your favorite.

David Leary: [00:01:51] Let's first thank our sponsors for this episode. Okay. So our sponsors this week are pay Hawk relay cloud account and staffing and robo debit.

Blake Oliver: [00:02:00] Thank you to our sponsors for supporting us. Intuit is not one of them, but I think we should start there. David, because you spent 20 years at Intuit. What is new in the world of Intuit when it comes to AI dreams?

David Leary: [00:02:13] So there's two stories about Intuit. One is they acquired a company called I lost the company name. The company is called deserve. And essentially they were they are a one of those credit card API platforms. So you can spin up virtual credit cards. So if you want to add credit cards to your app or offer credit cards, you'd you'd use this type of a company. Um, they acquired them. The announcement was April 14th. They expect to close it in Q3 of fiscal 25. It looks like it's going to be a talent acquisition as much as it is technical. Um, but it it's interesting because this means now Intuit is going to have The ability to possibly spin up virtual cards and have credit cards as part of the Intuit bank. If you want to call it that, or QuickBooks checking if you want to call it.

Blake Oliver: [00:03:06] Quickbooks checking, right.

David Leary: [00:03:07] But because this company is like an API first, this now becomes something they can offer all the developers that are on the development stack of QuickBooks and Intuit. So it's an interesting acquisition, especially if I tie it back to some news that I've been sitting on for a little while is about green Dot Bank. So green Dot Bank powers the QuickBooks checking, and green Dot has been having a little bit of issues. Um, and when I say issues, they've been having more of a leadership changes and they've had some issues with, uh, their earnings. And let me click the article here.

Blake Oliver: [00:03:48] I feel like we've talked about green Dot in the past on this show and hasn't always been great.

David Leary: [00:03:52] No. Here it is. Sorry about that. Um, so green dot, they, uh, announced a review of their strategic alternatives in leadership transition, and they're considering a sale, and the CEO is exited. Um, they said in their February earnings release that they saw 3% decline in its full year adjusted EBITDA, and expect to see a 9% decline in its full year for 2025. And so they've had a lot of management upheaval. They posted a $26.7 million loss. Um, and they were fine last year for multiple violations for that basically deceptive practices that kept customers from accessing their funds. And they had a 2022. They had a contract dispute with Uber, and Republic Bank sued them in 2021 for a breach of contract when they backed out of a deal to buy Republic's had a tax refund processing unit they were going to sell to green Dot, and green Dot backed out of the deal. So things are. I so when I see Intuit buying a company that does credit cards, it seems like they maybe are they going to replace green Dot out of their tech stack? Because you do that, you either build it yourself, you partner, or you buy.

Blake Oliver: [00:05:06] Or if you're a big company like Intuit, you partner, you learn everything, and then you build it yourself and you cut out your partner. Yeah, right. So Apple does this too.

David Leary: [00:05:15] And we probably wouldn't talk about it if green Dot wasn't QuickBooks checking, because that's what QuickBooks checking is. It's exactly green Dot.

Blake Oliver: [00:05:22] Gotcha. We also have news from Intuit about their enterprise suite. They've announced some improvements. Intercompany allocations. Accountants now can perform intercompany allocations directly from bank feeds, expense forms or bills. That's important if you've got multi entity going on which is the big thing about Intuit Enterprise Suite default account mapping users can pre-assign accounts for client transactions across various entities, and custom task templates are new. You can now create reusable templates or choose from industry specific options. There are improvements to their advanced analytics as well. In the Multi Entity Hub, you can monitor key performance indicators across entities at a glance. You can now access revenue, expense and profit projections at dimensional levels. And you can generate precise forecasts up to three years forward using historical data. And in your consolidated reporting, you can choose which entities to include in reports with improved side by side viewing on the payroll side. You can now edit, backdate, and void past quarter paychecks without requesting support. That's a big improvement than having to go back and fix payroll by looping in support. Not so much fun. You can you can reverse employee direct deposit payments with no additional fees. And now you can monitor changes to employees, managers, departments, pay, and job titles. All of these features are available now in Enterprise Suite.

David Leary: [00:06:55] So it feels like you're finally seeing a. The road separating here between what felt like was just QuickBooks painted blue to now they're at. It feels like these real enterprise level things are now being added to the product. I feel like it was a marketing move at first and now the features are coming.

Blake Oliver: [00:07:12] Well, and that's why we heard from a number of accountants that they were kind of disappointed because it's all about the implementation, it's all about how easy it is and intercompany allocations. That's a big one. And if you can't do that from the bank feed and you have to go code stuff and then do the allocation, it really doesn't really save you that much time. So hopefully, you know, we'll see some good feedback. I'm curious if any of our listeners are using Enterprise Suite. If you have tried these new features, if you think it's going the right direction or not. And this is important because there really aren't a lot of good options at that price point for small businesses, mid market companies, very low end mid market companies that need all this intercompany multi entity stuff. So great to see that we've got news from zero.

David Leary: [00:07:53] Third thing from Intuit. Since we're on.

Blake Oliver: [00:07:55] Oh you do okay. Go for it.

David Leary: [00:07:57] Um, an investor for Strive Asset Management is pressuring Intuit to purchase Bitcoin as part of their, um, for their balance sheet in the same way he pushed GameStop to do it. And this led. So he wrote them a letter on April 14th. Some of it the letter half of it was about their anti-bitcoin bias. What happened? I mean, if anybody's done business with Intuit for a very long time, you can't use merchant services for guns, drugs, illegal activities, Bitcoin, crypto. You're just not allowed to use the Intuit tech stack for some of those things, right? Apparently there was a Bitcoin group at USC and MailChimp banned them from using MailChimp, and there was some backlash. And then later the decision was reversed. So part of the letter was him telling them that they need to be more open and embrace Bitcoin. And the other half of the letter was you need to buy bitcoin and he's pushing them to do that. I just don't like.

Blake Oliver: [00:08:53] No surprise there.

David Leary: [00:08:54] He argues that this is a way to hedge against AI disruption. But arguably Intuit is building AI. Intuit is deeply innovating around AI. It's not like they're just sitting there waiting for it to happen. Yeah, the argument's not good. And I don't want to see Intuit do this at all. Like, there's so many things they could put their money into. Take that money and buy engineers and build better stuff for accountants in the products.

Blake Oliver: [00:09:19] If your shareholders want to gamble on Bitcoin in the public markets, they can do it by buying MicroStrategy stock. But this is to me, this is just a strategy that the crypto lobby is using to try to push up the price of crypto is if they can get every public company to buy a little bit of crypto, that adds up and that pushes the price up. It's the same reason they're trying to get governments to buy crypto. It's the same reason they're trying to get all these like public funds to buy crypto. And eventually, though, you're going to run out of buyers. The reason they're pushing for all this is because they've run out of retail buyers. There's there's not enough money left in the retail side that wants to get into Bitcoin. People have either gotten in or gotten and gotten burned and got out or they're in and they're holding. So how else do you get the price to go up forever? Here's the problem.

David Leary: [00:10:07] Corporate boards to do it.

Blake Oliver: [00:10:08] You're going to run out of buyers someday. And when there's no more buyers of bitcoin, what can you do with it? We still haven't seen a real use case for it other than, you know, as a store of value, but it hasn't been a great store of value in all this tariff stuff either. So that argument is falling apart there. Gold. You know, gold has skyrocketed, but not Bitcoin. So if Bitcoin is digital gold tell me why hasn't it gone up too? All right.

David Leary: [00:10:33] If you think about that like I'm not sure. Maybe there's some corporations might grab a little bit of gold and they might diversify a little bit. But you never hear about some corporation buying a chunk of their balance sheet in gold, right? They keep the cash because you want to be liquid, so you can buy other companies and make decisions and move fast.

Blake Oliver: [00:10:55] Either invest in your business or give the money back to shareholders. Those are the two best options.

David Leary: [00:11:01] And historically, Intuit's always been a share buyback. They buy back shares and take them off the market to increase shareholder value.

Blake Oliver: [00:11:08] If you want to increase the stock price, that's the way to do it. David, let's thank our first sponsor. And then I will talk about all the zero news.

David Leary: [00:11:16] All right. Our first sponsor is Pay Hawk. Are you still drowning in month end expense chaos? Imagine getting multiple days back each month that you're currently losing to manual accounting processes. That's why I'm excited to tell you about Pay Hawk, a leading spend management solution that can automate your financial processes while giving you total control and instant visibility over all your company spending. Pay Hawk unifies your corporate cards, expense management, accounts payable, and procurement into a single platform. The best part? It works with your existing credit cards and tracks transactions as they happen, giving you real time insights insights into your spend. No more chasing receipts. Pay hacks. Automation handles that. No more end of month surprises. See exactly where your money is going, the moment it's spent, and with real time integrations to systems like NetSuite, QuickBooks, and Sage Intacct, reconciling expenses is faster than ever. Finance teams using Pathok are saving days of work each month while gaining better cost control, real time visibility, and the ability to focus on strategic priorities instead of expense reports. If you're ready to transform how your company manages spending and to see how payout can work for your business, head over to The Accounting Podcast that is The Accounting Podcast.

Blake Oliver: [00:12:33] And please do visit those promotional links. It helps our sponsors know that you heard about it on this show and supports the work that we do. All right, let's talk about zero. Zero came out with two innovations. One is something they should have done ten years ago or more, and the other is super cutting edge. I can't. They're like completely on opposite ends of the spectrum.

David Leary: [00:12:57] Ten years ago I'm trying to think you were you were actively using it with clients. Then what was this nuance that you hated about zero ten years ago that they finally fixed.

Blake Oliver: [00:13:08] When zero launched in the US? They did not have a traditional bank reconciliation like you would see in QuickBooks.

David Leary: [00:13:15] Oh yeah. That was my first interaction I used when you and I merged our stuff together. One of our entities is on zero, and I get in there and I'm like, how do you reconcile? I was just dumbfounded.

Blake Oliver: [00:13:25] And the answer is, well, you can, but you can't. Zero is built using 1 to 1 matching between bank transactions and the general ledger transaction. So in theory you don't need to reconcile once you've matched the transactions. They are literally linked 1 to 1. So as long as you can verify that the bank feed is accurate, which you can do with a certain type of report, or you can just go in and you can check to see if the bank balance matches the in zero matches what you see in online banking at a particular date, that is a reconciliation. But that was mind bending for us accountants because we're used to seeing it in a traditional reconciliation report like how you learn in school. And zero didn't have this traditional workflow or report. And they had trained all the accountants in Australia and New Zealand to adopt this new workflow, this new way of thinking. But they they did not and could not get us accountants to figure stubborn Americans. Yeah. And, you know, I always said to them, I said, guys, come on, you're already you already have an uphill battle facing QuickBooks with 80% market share. Do not force accountants to learn new terminology. Present it just like they're used to. And it was a similar thing with like the report columns being in reversed order. So in QuickBooks, is it like from left to right you see the oldest period to the newest 1 in 0. It's from left to right, newest to oldest.

David Leary: [00:14:48] At once to yes.

Blake Oliver: [00:14:49] Which just like blows people's minds. And there was no customization to that. Finally they built it. So here's the story. Zero now has bank recs US style bank recs.

David Leary: [00:15:01] You can try this out. You can assign me a task to do I can reconcile.

Blake Oliver: [00:15:04] I'm going to let you reconcile the books for March in Zero. Yes, you can define specific periods with date ranges and balances and you can identify the discrepancies. You can see uncleared transactions. You can see reconciling items. You can then lock periods to prevent transactions from being changed, which is actually a huge improvement over just having a locked date actually locks the transactions. And then you can generate traditional reconciliation reports. So finally and it took this long and I don't know, maybe that's because the US leadership, actually it was the global leadership that had to turn over. And the global leadership is now basically us people, right? People who actually understand the US market. So positive development here. Now there's another announcement from zero that is really cutting edge. They have launched a model context protocol. Here's a new acronym. Everyone gets to learn. This is your, uh, trivia question of the week. Mcp model context protocol. David, have you heard of this?

David Leary: [00:16:13] Only you quickly sent me a text and said, this is going to change everything. Other than that, I just have not really heard this term.

Blake Oliver: [00:16:20] So this is the new API. So API application protocol interface. That was the software language protocol that enabled cloud accounting, that enabled the cloud. All of these apps integrating with each other. Zapier. All that stuff right is through APIs. Well, MCP is like the API for artificial intelligence. It is a tool that allows large language models to securely access and interact with data. So Xero's API now has MCP, which means that it's possible to plug a large language model into Xero, and it can securely access and work with the data.

David Leary: [00:17:05] And the way this is built, like you can choose which model you want to connect to zero. Or is it, well, a proprietary language.

Blake Oliver: [00:17:11] I think that you could actually with this language you could now. Yeah. Build your own model, hook it up. You could have a local model potentially running on your machine and connect it to your Xero data. You could use a model hosted in the cloud if it's like a third party chatbot like ChatGPT or Clod. If they supported this MCP, then you could chat with that chatbot and it could work with your Xero data in theory. Now you might say, well, chatbots can already work with zero.

David Leary: [00:17:42] Zero has their own right. Didn't they create their own? Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:17:45] And Zapier has chat bots. And you could actually, you know, connect that chatbot to zero. But it's not that great. And I've tried it. I tried making a bookkeeper AI agent with Zapier and connecting it to zero, but it doesn't work that great because it has to go through so many steps where it takes your prompt and then tries to figure out how to do what you want through the traditional API, which is limited. So it really struggles to say, create an invoice through the API because it has to then program your request into an API request, and then send the request and then get the data back and try to figure out what it did wrong. It just it does not work great.

David Leary: [00:18:27] So there's like an orchestration layer. Yes. And this makes sense because if you think about imagine if you had to get a different cell phone for every app on your phone. That's the way we are currently with chat. I want to check on a QuickBooks Live. I go to the QuickBooks chat bot and if I go over here it's a different chat bot and now I have AC flow for my task. It's a different chat bot when ultimately what you want is one. Just you have one phone, you want one chat bot that goes talks to these other services. And so yeah, you're right, this is a good step in that right direction.

Blake Oliver: [00:18:56] So here's examples of what developers could do with MCP and zero. You could create invoices with AI assistants allow users to generate invoices through natural language commands. You could simplify creating and updating customer information. I could just chat with my chat bot, my my ChatGPT instance, it's connected to zero. It could update customers. It could analyze transaction patterns to reveal business opportunities. That's a funny phrase, right? Like seems that seems AI generated to me. Um, but you know, it could pull the data not through the API, but directly through this MCP protocol and then analyze it for you. And it could say help categorize, review and respond to invoice related tasks. So like send follow ups, update invoices with late fees, do all that kind of stuff. I think it could do a whole lot more, because now it has access to basically do whatever a human could do, maybe even more, because there's not always an interface for everything that a human needs to do in the Xero data set, necessarily. So I'm excited to see this. I would love to be able to build a journal entry bot, or a chat bot that can do journal entries for me in Xero, like maybe do our accruals and deferrals. That would be sophisticated. You could do that with this type of language. So all right, that's it for Xero news David you had some news about Paychex. It sounds like.

David Leary: [00:20:19] Yeah. So Paychex is acquiring Paycor for $4.1 billion in an all cash deal. So Paychex who is been around a long time. They're up there in Rochester, New York. It's been there. I haven't heard anything new from paychecks in a long time. Them doing anything exciting. And then Paycor is human capital management platform that also does payroll. So this is going to let Paychex get out of just processing paychecks and getting to that whole HR stack. If you want to call it an HR stack not HR tech if you whatever you want to call that. Um, and that's going to basically give paycheck stronger capabilities and talent services up market sales. And it should help grow paychecks. I mean, when you spend $4.1 billion cash, you probably want it to grow your company.

Blake Oliver: [00:21:09] News from Floqast, my former employer. The best tool for close management that I'm familiar with. But hey, I'm biased, I have shares. Uh, Floqast has introduced AI agents. They're calling it groundbreaking capability that allows accountants to automate complex, recurring workflows across closed management, compliance and reporting functions using natural language instead of code. Examples include a journal entry agent which automates the creation of journal entries. In the example that was given in a demo of this online is Coupa accruals. So if you're using Coupa. Yeah, David, you roll your eyes. I know some people are forced to use Coupa. The accountants that are forced to use Coupa also don't like it very much, because turning that into journal entries in your accounting system is historically a very manual task. So this agent that was demoed goes into Coupa, and it pulls all the data that you would need to massage in Excel. And it does that and generates the journal entry that then can be reviewed and posted into NetSuite, all from within Floqast. And the best part is every step of the process is defined and auditable, which is a really big point that if you're going to post all these complex journal entries, you need to be able to internally review it and confirm that it's accurate because an AI is working on it, but also your outside auditors, your external auditors need to be able to look at all of this chain of thought and review it and sign off on it. And so what's great about this is that if you're using Floqast, you use the AI agent to do this stuff. Now all of that is linked to the transaction in NetSuite. The auditor can click through from the transaction they're auditing into Floqast and see everything.

David Leary: [00:22:58] What kind of like from a if I was doing this manually before, how long of a process would this have been to get to complete this.

Blake Oliver: [00:23:06] In the demo? They said, uh, like a day.

David Leary: [00:23:11] So so it's.

Blake Oliver: [00:23:12] A whole.

David Leary: [00:23:12] Day of work.

Blake Oliver: [00:23:13] Yeah. And it looked like I was. When you look at the spreadsheet, the CSV file is downloaded and how it has to get transformed. I mean, it has to be they might be exaggerating a little bit, but it's got to be hours. I could see this being days of work in a big company to do.

David Leary: [00:23:28] This once a month, every month.

Blake Oliver: [00:23:30] Forever.

David Leary: [00:23:31] Forever.

Blake Oliver: [00:23:32] And now it's a click. Now building it all out takes time, I'm sure. Right. You got to basically document the whole process and, you know, teach the agent to do it. But once you do, it can do it over and over again. It's a repeated process done the same way every time. Another example is taking unstructured data and standardizing it. They call that their data transformation agent. And then you can also create your own custom agents. So a series of prompts that input take input data and produce an output in the accounting system like a journal entry. So a great example of that would be like payroll journal entries. Take the report you get from paychecks for example, that export file and write instructions in the tool as to what you need it to summarize how much detail you need, what accounts to use, give it all the mappings And then it will do that. It will review the report, create the workbook, post the entry.

David Leary: [00:24:32] And just to connect this back to the zero. So right now it has to create API calls to go post that entry. In theory it'll just communicate directly with the zero MCP.

Blake Oliver: [00:24:44] Yes.

David Leary: [00:24:44] Okay. I want to.

Blake Oliver: [00:24:45] See the MCP.

David Leary: [00:24:46] What's that derogatory term my kids call me all the time. Like like the Sims.

Blake Oliver: [00:24:51] Like a boomer.

David Leary: [00:24:52] Yeah. No. The non playable character. Npc. It's not an.

Blake Oliver: [00:24:56] Npc.

David Leary: [00:24:57] Yeah, it's not non-playable character. Okay. I almost said wrong acronym.

Blake Oliver: [00:25:02] They call you an NPC?

David Leary: [00:25:04] Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:25:04] But you have your own podcast. You can't. You can't be an NPC.

David Leary: [00:25:07] It's easy to happen. Kids will. Kids will do it.

Blake Oliver: [00:25:10] Um. Pipe and glean. David, tell me about what's going on with pipe and Glean.

David Leary: [00:25:17] So pipe is acquiring glean. I so pipe essentially is a API company for adding a finance loan type things in credit card virtual cards to platform. So if you want to add functionality like that to your app, you would use an app like Pip to do that. And Glehnii is really in that enterprise Billpay platform, not its competes with Bill.com in that space a little bit. So pipe is buying lean, which is interesting because glean is more of a front end user product, and pipe is an API product, so I don't know where the overlap is or how they what the next steps in that will be. Um, but I mean, if you're going to be in that virtual credit card business, you probably have to be in the billpay business because or business like, nobody wants to adopt two tools like you don't want to like, oh, we have this for procurement and we have this for credit cards, and we have this other tool for our Billpay people just want one encompassing tool for all this. They did not announce how much it was for.

Blake Oliver: [00:26:24] Good on that.

David Leary: [00:26:25] Very good.

Blake Oliver: [00:26:26] We've got big news from Google. Google has released a new formula for Google Sheets. Equal I equals I. Now I tried doing this in my own Google Sheets. It's a workspace. It's one of it's always one of those things they like show you this great video. Then you try to go do it and it's like, oh, you're not part of Workspace Labs. Please apply to be part of Workspace Place Labs. So I had to fill out a form. So hopefully we'll get access to it. It'd be nice if they could just like release stuff and then show it to us. Um, marketing folks always got to be way ahead. So anyway, I found a video on YouTube, Peter Horner, he is demoing the new function. So I want to show you what kind of stuff. Basically, what this function allows you to do is that you can um, type equals I. And then there's two variables. You point. The first variable is you just write a prompt Whatever you want to do, right? Like you would normally type into a prompt. And then the second is whatever data you want it to look at. Very simple. So an example would be. Equals I. And then the instruction is summarize the key themes from this survey data. And this is a table of survey data. Keep it to one sentence. And then you just point it at the multiple cells of the survey. And you can see right like so. So we're actually selecting a range of cells. So we have a survey data with a bunch of columns. And then we have all the answers. And now and that's.

David Leary: [00:28:02] Basically what you do. If you want to build a graph you'd go choose all the data. Then you'd go press the graph button okay. Yep.

Blake Oliver: [00:28:08] So now we have a one sentence summary. And this is a course review. Uh table. So it's like there was a survey sent out to people who took a course. And we know we've got a one sentence summary and it just generated it. And the example is the survey respondent rated the course content instructor and online resources positively, although some aspects could be improved. And then he just drags that down and it does it for every single row in the table.

David Leary: [00:28:34] This is really smart because nobody wants to, especially for accountants. Like this is super powerful because nobody wants to go to a different product type in what they want, somehow connect it back to data, get the results, paste it back in like you just want to be in the field. Like this is where accountants live. They live in that cell of the spreadsheet or whatever cell they're in at the time. This is really, really smart.

Blake Oliver: [00:28:58] No more having to pull in the sheet into into ChatGPT and then get an output. It just happens right inside of AI or right inside of Google Sheets using Gemini. So it's also secure, right?

David Leary: [00:29:11] And then in theory is this I'm assuming this is going to work as a permanent, um, formula even though it's not really a formula, but if I change the data, if I change the data in the table, I'm going to get a different summary. Is it going to give me the same magic that spreadsheets have given us for decades?

Blake Oliver: [00:29:28] Looks like it. So here's another example. I think the prompt there was just slightly different. It was um, summarized the key themes. From the survey data. Keep this to one sentence. And then he did it for all of the rows. And dragged it down. What would be another example? Uh, let's do one. Analyze the sentiment of these survey responses and then select the range. And so now we get a sentiment analysis. And you drag it down and you can see okay some of the sentiment is neutral. Some of it is positive. Some of it is mixed. That's really interesting. So you could then like Prioritize outreach to negative sentiment. Or you could prioritize outreach to customers with positive sentiment. Say, to get a case study or something like that. Um, here's an example of using this tool to generate emails. So the spreadsheet is now a list of students and their attendance and their scores in English, maths, science, history, art, Muggle studies. It's a Harry Potter data set and house points. And so, uh, this YouTuber uses the formula says equals I. And then the prompt is create a concise and positive email to parents summarizing the academic performance of their child. Include the subject scores and attendance, and then suggest the whole range of scores or and then selects you know, all that in the in that particular row. And then you can drag it down and you can generate it. And so like here's the example. Now it's one of those things where I think you have to like click run to refresh the data. So then here's, you know, here's the email. Dear parents, we are pleased to share Cedric's academic progress. He demonstrates strong performance across subjects, particularly in English 100, maths 99 and a commendable 96% attendance rate. His overall job, his overall performance is excellent, sincerely and then a placeholder. And it does this for every student and it personalizes it for every student in the table. Imagine just like how long that would take.

David Leary: [00:31:56] I really see where this, you know, there's all these features of Excel that you always forget. But you know, you but you use it and you have to go back and retrain yourself. Like when you want to separate a first and last name from one column into two columns, or strip out the domain from an email address, you'll be able to just say, say what you want, and it'll do it without you having to go find the formula and retrain all the syntax of trying to write that formula out.

Blake Oliver: [00:32:21] Here's the last example in the video translation. So take those emails that you just generated for each student and now translate them into Spanish. And the prompt is just translate this text from English to Spanish and it does it. And you have a Google Sheet.

David Leary: [00:32:36] That's amazing.

Blake Oliver: [00:32:37] Drag it down. It does it for every email. So that's really neat, right? That is making AI real for accountants. And uh, I'm very excited. Now there was another announcement from Google Agent Space. Google Agent Space.

David Leary: [00:32:59] Before you do that, let's jump into our next ad.

Blake Oliver: [00:33:01] Okay. Go for it.

David Leary: [00:33:04] Relay. Between Blake and myself, we now have three, four, maybe five business entities, 20 or so checking accounts, 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 is truly a part of the tech stack we use to run our businesses. Relay allows Blake and I to each have our own logins. We 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 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, just a few clicks and I instantly have access to my ACH info to give the 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 cards and set both daily and monthly spending limits on them. And when a team member doesn't need their card, I can freeze it until they need to use it again. Relay also has an automation features to sweep money automatically from one account to another based on dates, amounts or target balances, or even percentages. For example, inbound payments could be split daily to your payroll, sales tax, payroll, operating and savings accounts based on predefined rules. Learn more about using relay for your firm and clients. Head over to The Accounting Podcast. That is The Accounting Podcast. Thank you.

Blake Oliver: [00:34:29] Thank you. Relay. More big news from Google. Agent space.

David Leary: [00:34:54] Guys got some serious party in the back going on.

Google Agent Clip: [00:34:57] So for the next few minutes, I'm going to be a relationship manager at a bank. Starting with a quick tour. This is my homepage. Authenticated and personalized just for me. The agent gallery lets me see my company's approved selection of purpose built agents, including ones powered by third party models like Llama and Clod. You see, we've got some Google made agents. We have agents that my bank has made available to me, either ones we've created or ones built by partners.

Blake Oliver: [00:35:25] The most unrealistic part of this is that a bank is the one adopting this technology first. That's the most unrealistic part of this demo so far.

Google Agent Clip: [00:35:34] And then the best part, my own personal agents, which I can build directly inside agent space with this button over here, or even easier just from having a little conversation. Let's see how easy it is to create an agent to automate a daily task. Now, it's critical for me to stay on top of what's going on with my clients. So I start every morning with a portfolio analysis. And I'm going to use a clipboard because no one wants to watch me typing, run an analysis of my client portfolio and identify potential risks and opportunities. This only uses information that I have permission to access. It knows which clients are mine and summarizes top points from my data sources like OneDrive, Salesforce, or Dun and Bradstreet. If I have questions, I have a direct link to my sources here. And if I need even more control, I can refine that list of sources. But Agent Space doesn't just summarize information. It's interpreting my question and surfacing what matters most. For example, in this chart, I can see Agent Spaces flag that Acme General Contracting might have some cash flow problems in the future. Already it's given me a massive report which is going to save me a ton of manual research. And I can go ahead and read this later. But for now, let's set up an agent so I can keep an eye on Acme. Agent space automatically generates an agent plan based on our conversation so far. And this is good, but I think I want more. I'm going to have it generate an audio summary and send it to my inbox so I can listen to it on my morning commute.

Blake Oliver: [00:37:08] Uh oh. David. Audio summaries. Sounds like a podcast. We might be out of a job soon.

Google Agent Clip: [00:37:15] And just like that, I have built my own custom agent to use whenever I want without writing a single line of code. Now, agent space is identified. A cash flow problem with Acme General Contracting. I need to dig into that. Maybe this is a problem with construction in general and not specific to Acme. Agent space has already identified that possibility as a suggested follow up. So now let's go ahead and deep dive into general contracting industry trends. This activates Google's enterprise deep research agent, which starts by telling me what it plans to research and in what order. At this point, I could edit this plan if I wanted to, but it looks pretty good, so I'll start the research. Now I do want to call out we've cached the plan and the results here. Normally this would take a little bit longer. This agent is pulling in real time information from Google Search to build its report. But even cooler, it's also searching my internal enterprise data and adjusting this plan in real time, adding additional questions based on what it's going to find along the way. And again, an incredibly insightful analysis, including some source links. But thankfully here at the bottom, it also is going to give me a great, succinct executive summary. Let's take a quick look at this.

Blake Oliver: [00:38:29] Okay. And there's the executive summary there showing off all the deep research capabilities. But that's nothing new. You could do deep research with ChatGPT. You can do it with Claude now. You can do it with perplexity. But here's what's different, David. Why this is game changing. It's because it has access securely to all of the data inside of your business.

David Leary: [00:38:48] And that's where I was going with this. Like, I think this is a very genius product that Google is launching because right now I think AI companies is Wild West. Even our own like we have developers using this AI, we have course writers using a different AI. We kind of have a bunch of subscriptions. We don't have it consolidated into a place. And this reminds me of those apps like Okta, where you know your employee, all the apps they're going to, all the cloud apps that employee has access to have to be launched from an Okta dashboard of some type. It's kind of like that. Here's all the AI we're letting our our employees use. Presented to one spot. You as the employee still have freedom to use the different tools, maybe combine the different tools, create like all the stuff he's showing your own personal experience, but it gives it departments and companies, CTOs control and that's what they want at the end. Like you said, access, controlling what access to the company, data it gets, etc..

Blake Oliver: [00:39:42] And that's why, even though Microsoft and Google have been moving very slowly when it comes to AI, they could end up winning the whole race because these llms are open source and they're really good. So it's not like open AI has some amazing LLM that's any better than anyone else's. We saw a Chinese company, Deep Sea, come out with a better one. And we've seen Claude come out with better ones. So that's why OpenAI's crazy valuation to me might just be a short term thing. Because long term, the value is not in the LLM itself. It's in how it's integrated into your business systems and processes and your data. Agreed. I would not be comfortable giving OpenAI access to all of my company data, just based on what I know about Sam Altman and his ethics. So that's a big problem for OpenAI. They may be selling tons of $20 a month subscriptions to people who want to turn their dog into a human, or want to make money.

David Leary: [00:40:46] Make themselves a doll or a doll.

Blake Oliver: [00:40:49] Or turn photos into Studio Ghibli illustrations. But that is not long term enterprise value. I mean, maybe. I mean, they're making a lot of money doing it, but it's also costing them way more than they're making to do that. We know that because they had to limit it. So I want to play another video for you. This one is from OpenAI. This is OpenAI's, uh, CFO, Sarah, talking specifically about deep research and the feedback from bankers. This is going to really change how people do research on. I mean, it's already changing how people do research when it comes to investments. Um, and it's going to really change how people do research for tax. It's going to I mean, if you are not using deep research in ChatGPT or in perplexity or in Claude, you're wasting your time. So let's let's hear this.

OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar: [00:41:49] I'm just coming from a meeting with the CEO of another bank. I will not mention it. Um, and we had been asking them about GPU financing. Very top of mind for me. And so the team had effectively used deep research to go pull a report. His colleague sitting next to him, who's doing some of that work and looking and said, I read that report. It was much better than what we did as a team of two MDS, three six associates, ten analysts. I'm a little embarrassed that we didn't do the deep research report first, and then use that to help us ideate and iterate. I'm just coming.

Blake Oliver: [00:42:28] Did you hear that? What does she say? Like, you know, directors, analysts, like team of over a dozen people. And and OpenAI's deep research came up with a better result.

David Leary: [00:42:39] And that's the threat. Everybody's worried that AI is going to take away the grunt work, but not really. I think it's going to take away the reporting and that that that higher tier where people like, well, I'm so valuable. The analysts like these, these, these positions that have paid very well at corporations for decades may not exist soon because the time it takes that person, even if they're good, it's going to take them weeks to build what can be done in 20 minutes.

Blake Oliver: [00:43:06] Or it just takes one person now using deep research to do this kind of stuff.

David Leary: [00:43:10] What used to be a team of people at a corporation?

Blake Oliver: [00:43:12] Yeah, I wanted to try this for myself because I'm not going to take Sarah Fryer's word for it. She's the CFO of OpenAI. She's got, uh, you know, reasons to be very bullish on their product. So I tried this in Claude. Um, and I think this was actually even before Claude had deep research. I just used the regular Claude 3.7, and, um. I used an investment prospectus from Mother Road Brewing.

David Leary: [00:43:40] I think I sent this to you because, like, it's a brewery I like out of Flagstaff. I know you went there once and you liked it. And I saw that they were, um, trying to raise funds, and I said, hey, we should invest in this. And then you went and decided or processed this.

Blake Oliver: [00:43:55] I love Mother Road. It's my favorite local brewery. I buy the beer in our local supermarket, tower station. It's like my favorite local IPA. It's on tap everywhere and all the good spots, and they're raising money. They're doing some sort of equity crowdfunding campaign. I don't know exactly what the details are, but you can buy a share of motherhood for as little as as $250, and they've got it stamped on all their boxes. And you can go to the website and you can, um, you can invest. And I was thinking to myself, well, I really like the idea of this. I love the product, but I don't have the time to go read this giant investment prospectus. It's a typical like SEC filing, like an Edgar, and it's giant and it's got all the like the financials are buried deep within it. It's hard to read. I'm like, I wonder if Claude could help me with this. So I got it into a word document format, and I attached it to a cloud conversation. And actually I went one step beyond that. I created a project called investment analyst and I gave it custom instructions. I said, you are an experienced financial analyst tasked with evaluating investment opportunities. Your role is to analyze the provided documents thoroughly and provide a comprehensive assessment to help make informed investment decisions.

Blake Oliver: [00:45:14] And then I give it the aspects to consider six different aspects. I tell it to address any specific questions or concerns. I give it the format that I want for the comprehensive evaluation. Seven different points here. I'm not going to dig into all of them. And then I tell it to, you know, give me the analysis and recommendation in a clear, well structured format. And a few more things if you want to know how I made this. I didn't write this all myself. I used another cloud conversation to create the instructions to do a Q&A with me to get what I wanted. So anyway, I took these instructions. Once I was done with it, I dropped it into a cloud project, and then all I had to do was the investment prospectus. And I got this evaluation. And here is the, uh, let's see where is the recommendation? Here it is. This is a high risk investment opportunity with potential for modest returns. I recommend selective investment only for investors with high risk tolerance, who can afford to lose their entire investment, and who have a strong interest in supporting craft beer businesses. Invest only what you can afford to lose completely, and it goes through a detailed analysis of their financials, including their profitability, revenue, expenses, balance sheet, debt position, cash position, um, their financial condition raises serious concerns.

Blake Oliver: [00:46:40] Revenue growth is positive, but losses are accelerating rather than decreasing. The balance sheet shows a negative shareholder's equity, indicating the company's liabilities exceed its assets. This makes the 41.1 pre-money valuation claimed in the offering seem extremely ambitious and potentially disconnected from financial reality. And then it does a competitive landscape analysis. It does a market position analysis. Growth potential and future prospects. Risks and challenges. I'm scrolling through this so fast you can't even read it. It identifies the management team and corporate governance. Industry trends and macroeconomic factors, strengths and weaknesses. So it identifies that they have a strong brand. Decent revenue growth of 17.8%. That they have a forward looking product strategy. Then it identifies weaknesses seven different weaknesses, including financial performance, high debt levels, customer concentration. One customer is 68% of their revenue. I don't know if I would have pulled that out of the investment prospectus. And the limited cash reserves. And it makes a table of the risks. Risk factor. Potential impact likelihood and mitigation. Can you imagine how long this would take one person to do.

David Leary: [00:47:57] Eight hours.

Blake Oliver: [00:47:58] Minimums, minimum.

David Leary: [00:47:59] If you're good at it, that's if.

Blake Oliver: [00:48:01] That's if you do it all the time, right? Yeah. Wild.

David Leary: [00:48:05] What I like about it, it's surfaced something that was so obvious that you just can't see in the prospectus, which is they want to use this money to stop brewing beer, and they want to make a one of those fireball alcohol.

Blake Oliver: [00:48:19] So they want to make.

David Leary: [00:48:20] Water or something.

Blake Oliver: [00:48:21] One of their strategies is product differentiation expanding into nonalcoholic and other types of like beverages. And I'm thinking to myself, well, they're popular because they make really good beer. This to me is like a strategic issue. Now, I don't know, I don't think the analysis called that out, but by reading what I was able to figure out, yeah, that was me, right. So by reading it, I don't know. You know, I could figure that out. So it allowed me to get to what I think is the probably the most important thing, which is strategically, I don't agree with the direction. I think they should stick with doing what they're good at, not trying a bunch of new things, especially when you've got high debt levels. Right. Stick with what you're good at. Do it better. Cut costs, improve margins, get cash flow up. Reduce your debt. Get get into a sustainable place before you go off on adventures.

David Leary: [00:49:11] Agree.

Blake Oliver: [00:49:13] So and now again, that's not going to replace an investment analysis or an an analyst. But an analyst who has access to that tool could then come up with much greater insights. And I as an investor now oh man, I'm going to be using this for everything. Everything.

David Leary: [00:49:30] Did you say you had a story about more sheets? But it was Canva.

Blake Oliver: [00:49:35] Yeah. So Canva released a sheets feature. I have a video of it if you want to see the the video of the abomination known as Canva sheets. So this is going to unify us, David. This is finally going to bring us all together. The Excel lovers, the Google Sheets lovers. We can stop fighting and we can now in opposition to canvas sheets. Here we go. This is from their Canva Uncharted keynote, their customer keynote at their conference.

Canva Uncharted Clip: [00:50:06] Google suite is now all in one design.

Canva Uncharted Clip: [00:50:11] Yes, I might have heard that once or twice. And we are so excited about the Visual Suite 2.0. But there has been something missing, something that will make it even better. It's a missing piece that has something to do with data.

David Leary: [00:50:30] Wow, people got excited.

Canva Uncharted Clip: [00:50:32] Data is now a critical part of design. If you think about charts, forms, reports, dashboards, or infographics, this is all visual storytelling that starts with data.

Canva Uncharted Clip: [00:50:46] Data also fuels the best marketing content today. It makes it personalized, it's localized, and it's responsive across every channel. But working with data is still incredibly complex, and it's inaccessible to most people. And this is something we've heard loud and clear time and time again. And it's come through in all of your wishes and requests.

Canva Uncharted Clip: [00:51:11] Hi, everyone. Hi. My name is my biggest Canva with Canva. One thing I'd love to see with the Canva. I would like to see a creative way to polish up data visualization.

Canva Uncharted Clip: [00:51:23] And I can put formulas in my table and then it will auto calculate.

Canva Uncharted Clip: [00:51:27] I would love a way to visualize data quickly and on brand that's ready to go.

Canva Uncharted Clip: [00:51:32] And I hope this can also be expanded to page resizing.

Canva Uncharted Clip: [00:51:35] I'd also love if I could use AI to generate my Instagram carousels. Nice way to streamline creation that makes a single document and auto generates into all the materials I need and not have to use the other programs that make me fall asleep at my desk. Excel.

Canva Uncharted Clip: [00:51:55] As you.

Blake Oliver: [00:51:55] Know.

Canva Uncharted Clip: [00:51:56] At Canva.

David Leary: [00:51:57] So I watched a video of the actual product itself, the demonstration, and they Canva built a spreadsheet in their app, which is kind of crazy because that means now you have to get data into the app. And there's the only way to do that is to type the data in you want to see.

Blake Oliver: [00:52:15] Can we show can we show the video here?

David Leary: [00:52:16] I'll mute it. Get us to that part. Okay.

Blake Oliver: [00:52:19] Here's the here's the actual Canva sheets. Sorry for that build up. Oh, yeah. This is gonna be good, actually. And now we have to describe what we're seeing on the screen. Right. For our podcast listeners.

David Leary: [00:52:36] It's an emoji driven spreadsheet. That's the best way I would describe it. Imagine emojis all over your spreadsheet.

Blake Oliver: [00:52:43] Yeah. So it's sort of like workflow software, right?

David Leary: [00:52:48] Yeah, it's pseudo workflow. It's pseudo Airtable. It's a pseudo spreadsheet. But the there's a bigger story here that I think even Canva missed.

Blake Oliver: [00:52:59] Which is.

David Leary: [00:53:00] So Canva has templates for um, yearly financial, uh, financial reports. They have all these great graphs. They have all this stuff. And yes, now in theory, you could connect the graphs and those to a table you make in Canva, which is crazy. What they really need is a API to QuickBooks or Xero. They need to connect through the API to the accounting systems. And this destroys all these apps, like all these third party dashboard apps that exist. They will never exist anymore because you're going to have this amazing financials that you could give to you. Imagine delivering a financial report to your client that came from Canva with proper data in it, and that's the piece they're missing on this. Like I don't think people want to do their spreadsheet work in Canva, but if you can connect Canva to your actual data that's in the accounting system, etc., this could be a huge deal. And I think they've they've completely missed it. Maybe they've built this for their own customers. Maybe their customers are not heavy Excel users and they just need a little table to track, you know, some things they've built in Canva. I could see that. But I think they're missing the bigger opportunity here. They could destroy the entire, uh, what's what's that? Spotlight reports, all those, uh, fathom reports, all those those fancy iPad kind of dashboarding tools could all just go away because you will have these amazing Canva reports to give to your clients.

Blake Oliver: [00:54:24] David, let's keep going with app news. We got to get through it all. Uh, here's a quick one. Google's a monopoly. Yes. A judge has ruled that Google is a monopoly. Uh, basically 20 years too late. And now it's it's not going to be a monopoly anymore because I search is going to destroy its monopoly. So this is how it always works, right? Microsoft monopoly. But like it was already not becoming a monopoly anymore.

David Leary: [00:54:50] By the time the legal stuff catches up.

Blake Oliver: [00:54:52] It's too late.

David Leary: [00:54:52] The market stops.

Blake Oliver: [00:54:54] You had a story about a data breach?

David Leary: [00:54:56] Wolters Kluwer yeah, let's jump into another ad if you want to read the ad while I pull up the article.

Blake Oliver: [00:55:01] Okay. Great. Thank you to Robo Debit for sponsoring this episode. As an accountant, you know the drill. Constantly looking up account balances, then computing and posting.

David Leary: [00:55:11] To interrupt you. But you skipped one. Oh shoot. Accountant staffing.

Blake Oliver: [00:55:15] Stay tuned for robo debit later in the episode. Thank you to Cloud Accountant Staffing for sponsoring this episode. 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? 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. That's The Accounting Podcast dot. A.

David Leary: [00:56:22] So let's jump into this data breach. So Wolters Kluwer had a data breach and they're currently investigating this data breach. They didn't discover it themselves. The way it was discovered is a cybercriminal posted the company data on an auction in the dark web. They basically are selling 3 to 6GB of data starting at $15,000. And it includes full names, emails, phone numbers, addresses, and job info.

Blake Oliver: [00:56:48] It does not include passwords.

David Leary: [00:56:51] Does not include passwords. And they say no financial or tax data appears to be affected. But this is just what they were selling. That doesn't mean they don't have the other data. This is just what they bundled up to sell. It's not good. Um, it's funny because the company believes the breach is currently limited to contact data tied to its Health journals division. But. Again, like, if you didn't detect the breach and you saw your stuff being sold, that's the real concern.

Blake Oliver: [00:57:21] Yeah. This is like like you look on Craigslist and you see that like, your bike is on Craigslist, and then you go down to your garage and realize your bike's gone and you wonder what else is gone. You don't know.

David Leary: [00:57:35] That's a good that's a good way to relay that story?

Blake Oliver: [00:57:38] Yeah. So Wolters Kluwer, if you have information, we would love to hear it and relay it to our listeners, because I'm sure many of them are going to be nervous about this data breach. I sure would. Um, so yeah, if you start getting emails from Wolters Kluwer, I mean, basically just now, any Wolters Kluwer emails, be very skeptical. Like look at the domain sending domain because it could be a that that data set would be great to use for phishing attacks. Right. Uh, reset your password on Wolters Kluwer, click here. They've got the emails of all the users.

David Leary: [00:58:15] So two factor. Make sure you're using two factor.

Blake Oliver: [00:58:18] If they support it that's part of the problem sometimes. Uh okay. One more AI story here. Um, and this is not actually about a specific feature. This is about disclosure. So should you tell people when you use I.

David Leary: [00:58:38] In the same way, if I take somebody's tax data and I move it overseas, I have to disclose that.

Blake Oliver: [00:58:43] That's a requirement. Requirement for CPAs. For I, I think enrolled agents, like I don't know all the specific rules, but I know that.

David Leary: [00:58:54] It's an IRS data privacy thing.

Blake Oliver: [00:58:56] There are there are lots of rules about that disclosing it. What about disclosing I use and I'm not just talking about like from a legal perspective. Right. I'm just talking about personally is when you do something really cool with AI, do you tell people I use AI to do this, or do you just show them the really cool thing you did and then they think you're a genius? Because my experience is that when I tell people I used AI, they are not nearly as impressed.

David Leary: [00:59:24] That's true, because then they probably think, well, I could have done that myself, even though there is some skill to what's the word prompt jockey AI to get an impressive result. Yeah. Should you disclose it? I think if you're passing clients possible financial data through it, you probably want to disclose that.

Blake Oliver: [00:59:44] Sure, sure. But let's just say that none of that data privacy is an issue. You've just used AI to do some work, and.

David Leary: [00:59:51] Your manager and your manager are super impressed with you. But it's such a great employee. And then I found out you're using AI. I don't know, I think it's going to be a culture thing where you work at, right? It depends.

Blake Oliver: [01:00:05] On the.

David Leary: [01:00:06] Value results. If people value results, disclose it because they're not going to care. But if people value the lack of a better word time. How much time do you spend on this? They're going to get upset, right? If your culture is time driven, right. So it depends on the culture of the company you're at. That's when you should disclose.

Blake Oliver: [01:00:26] New research from HEC Paris reveals that employees who use AI tools like ChatGPT without disclosing it, also known as shadow adoption, tend to receive better evaluations from managers when employees disclose their I use. Their work was rated was still rated favorably, but managers undervalued the effort behind it. 44% of managers suspected AI was used even when it wasn't. So there's significant trust gaps. But managers also struggle to identify AI generated content. They couldn't tell the difference. This involved 130 mid-level managers at a major consulting firm. So these are the firms that should be using AI the most. Consulting firms like all that BS work that people are doing where they're like using templates and copying stuff into PowerPoints. Like AI, super effective at all that crap. And basically the result is if you tell your manager you used AI to do something, you're not going to get rated as highly as if you just kept it to yourself. And I'm willing to bet that in corporate America, this is going to be the case. People devalue the work. If you say you used a tool like AI. So what do you do? Do you keep it to yourself? Do you tell them? I've gotten I've found that if I just I don't say anything anymore. If somebody asks me, I'll say, yeah. Yeah, sure. I use some AI if they ask me how I did it, but I'm not going to. I'm not telling people when I do something incredible by prompt engineering a result, I'm not going to like, be like, hey, check out this amazing thing I did with AI. No, I'm just saying, check out this awesome thing I did.

David Leary: [01:02:08] Yeah, because to some extent it shouldn't like.

Blake Oliver: [01:02:13] It.

David Leary: [01:02:13] Shouldn't be about this a lot like, like growing up in construction. And I think about, you know, in the 80s, my dad had to swing a hammer to hammer a nail to connect two boards. And now everybody has, like, these wireless guns that just shoot needles or shoot needles, shoot nails into boards. And that's like the adoption of AI. So you're. Like, nobody was looking down on construction people that are not swinging a hammer and hammering in the nail, and they're using an automated tool to put the nail in.

Blake Oliver: [01:02:43] Maybe they did it first, though. Right. I wonder what your dad would say about it.

David Leary: [01:02:47] Oh, he's using all these tools, of course. Right. But, like, gadgets you got to buy.

Blake Oliver: [01:02:51] But your dad's an innovator. Like you.

David Leary: [01:02:53] Didn't know about that.

Blake Oliver: [01:02:54] Right? You inherited that. It's got to come from somewhere.

David Leary: [01:02:56] Somewhere, possibly.

Blake Oliver: [01:02:57] You know, I bet you that when all this, all these tools came out, there were like the old guys who were like, ah, these weaklings, they can't hammer like they used to.

David Leary: [01:03:07] I can hammer it faster. That's possible.

Blake Oliver: [01:03:09] Or I can.

David Leary: [01:03:10] Hammer. It's also very like building, and construction is very labor driven. And you have to be efficient and build faster. And the, the, the market conditions drive that. And I wonder if this is different though for knowledge work. People are less people. There's more of a there's historically been more of a badge of like, whoa, you worked really hard on that for days. Nobody's impressed. Actually, I'll give it a like.

Blake Oliver: [01:03:35] Like that. That analysis that I did of the, uh.

David Leary: [01:03:39] Brewery.

Blake Oliver: [01:03:40] The brewery financials. Right. Like, if I just given that to you, like David, you sent me that link to the investor website. If I just, like, created that, edited it, made it sound more like me, send it back to you. Your mind probably would have been blown, right?

David Leary: [01:03:57] Yeah. Yeah. You must have worked really hard on this for hours.

Blake Oliver: [01:04:00] And if I tell you. Oh, you know, like I. Now, look, I did a lot of work on that. I had to engineer a prompt, and that took time. And I took a lot of thinking, and I was able to get that amazing output because I knew how to prompt engineer. I knew how to use clouds projects. I have trained myself how to use all this stuff. So I'm not going to tell people, you know, when I use AI to do awesome things, like I'm not going to be like and I used AI to do this because I don't think it helps. I think. Actually, it makes people, you know, look down at the work.

David Leary: [01:04:33] It reminds me of an old video of Steve Ballmer. Who's the old. Do you ever become CEO of Microsoft, or was he always just the VP?

Blake Oliver: [01:04:40] No, no, he ran Microsoft. Remember? And then he ran it into the ground.

David Leary: [01:04:44] And he. But he used to talk about like at one time, developers were all judged. Everybody talked about clocks like thousands of lines of code. And it's fundamentally wrong because if a good engineer could write something in 50 lines of code to do what somebody else wrote, a thousand lines of code. And it's not about the effort. It's the result, right? Did you solve the problem the most efficiently way you could? And this is again, it goes back to the culture. Like what does your manager or what's valued at your company is going to determine if you should disclose this or not. But as society though might look down on you, it's like you're you're taking a job from somebody else. It's the lazy way to do the work. I could see some of that attitude.

Blake Oliver: [01:05:25] I bet you that the same thing was said about spreadsheets. When Lotus one, two, three came out. And I bet you that the people who love their ten key calculators were saying these lazy accountants using their spreadsheets, they don't want to learn how to do it the right way. And they're going like, watch me, I can go faster than that spreadsheet, you know, ticking away on that same thing. The tech changes, but the attitudes don't. All right, David, I want to talk about a mega merger of accounting firms. Can I do that before we go?

David Leary: [01:05:56] Yes.

Blake Oliver: [01:05:57] Baker. Tilly. Moss. Adams. They are planning to merger to merge. The planned merger would create a $3 billion revenue firm, making it the sixth largest accounting firm in the US. Baker Tilly is currently ranked number 11 and brings in 1.8 billion in revenue. They have 600 plus partners and nearly 6900 employees. Moss Adams is currently ranked 12 and would contribute $1.3 billion in revenue, with 400 over 400 partners and more than 4800 employees. The merged entity. Sorry, David. Go ahead.

David Leary: [01:06:40] Does this will basically make them pass Grant Thornton to become number six?

Blake Oliver: [01:06:44] Yes. It will surpass Grant Thornton. It'll be just behind the big four and RSM. It will make Baker Tilly the largest Non-big four firm in the Western region. And Moss Adams gets access to Baker Tilly's global network. The International Baker Tilly Network reported $5.6 billion in worldwide revenue in 2024. So, David, as always, when there's a big accounting firm merger, we got to ask what's going to be the new firm name. Baker. Tilly. Moss. Adams. Baker. Tilly. Moss. Adams. Tilly. Moss. Moss. Mosie. Baker.

David Leary: [01:07:24] Baker.

Blake Oliver: [01:07:25] Baker. Moss. Anyone got any ideas here in the. In the chat? Got any good names? I came up with one. I also.

David Leary: [01:07:35] Bat moss. Moss?

Blake Oliver: [01:07:39] Um. What about. What about moss? David.

David Leary: [01:07:42] Moss.

Blake Oliver: [01:07:44] Moss buns. Freshly baked financial solutions. I have to disclose. Well, you can see on the screen what I use to do this. I use ChatGPT.

David Leary: [01:07:54] You use AI to do this?

Blake Oliver: [01:07:55] I used AI to come up with the name. This is actually the first funny name that ChatGPT came up with. And it's it's my favorite now. Mossy buns and the the motto is freshly baked financial solutions. And David, would you like to describe the the logo image here?

David Leary: [01:08:13] Well, it looks like, uh, a bread roll bun, but actually it looks like a human buns in a bathing suit bottom with some steam coming off of it, which is the weird part.

Blake Oliver: [01:08:24] Yeah, and the thong bikini is mossy. That's.

David Leary: [01:08:28] That's true. It does look like moss. That's true.

Blake Oliver: [01:08:31] And they're hot, right? You can see the the little cartoon.

David Leary: [01:08:34] Some steam coming. Yeah. They're hot.

Blake Oliver: [01:08:35] Yeah. So mossy buns. I think it's better than forest, don't you? I mean, it would be funny to see if ChatGPT could come up with a forest, uh, image that represents four of us. Because you and I said we thought four of us sounded like, uh, like a robot butler.

David Leary: [01:08:54] Yes. That's right. That would be, uh, helping Iron Man. Or if you were going to have an AI tool, you would call it for service. So you could. Hey, for this is.

Blake Oliver: [01:09:05] For this is the AI tool, right? Well, maybe when accountants are replaced by AI, then four of us will have a real advantage because they can just embed a chat bot on their website and they can become an AI accounting firm.

David Leary: [01:09:19] Do you want to read our last ad, and I want to get to a story that's definitely worth covering. It's signs we're headed into a recession. It's kind of a fun story, but I think I want to definitely hit.

Blake Oliver: [01:09:28] A fun story about going into a recession. You have an interesting idea of what fun is, David, because I remember the Great Recession quite well, graduating and not being able to get a job at Barnes and Noble with a college degree that cost me, I don't even know how much money.

David Leary: [01:09:44] Six figures and what the article is. I have the tried and true indicators of proof that of a recession, so we'll go through those. But if you want to read the ad for robo debit.

Blake Oliver: [01:09:53] I will thank them. Robo debit, thank you. Thank you for sponsoring this episode. As an accountant, you know the drill. Constantly looking up account balances, then computing and posting those routine journal entries for loan interest, Cogs, estimates, commissions, or salary classes. Wouldn't it be nice if this just happened automatically? Well, now it can with robo debit. This brilliant new app automates the posting of daily, weekly or monthly journal entries, all based on an account balance that you choose. No more waiting until month end. Your financials will stay updated throughout the month. It's so simple it's genius. Imagine automatically accruing loan interest, pulling 5% commissions from monthly sales or reclassing 25% of wages to Cogs exactly when you want. Every day, every week, or every month. Right on schedule. If you know your sales data is ready by 5:00 pm, set the entry to post at 5:30 p.m.. Done. Robo debit launched its beta on January 1st, and you can be among the first to try it. As one of their robo groupies, you'll get early access discounts for the first four months of your subscription. Have a say in future enhancements, and even snag some cool robo debit merch. If you are ready to let your journal entries post themselves. Sign up as a beta user and become a robo groupie. To do that, head over to The Accounting Podcast debit. That's The Accounting Podcast dot promo forward slash r o b o d b I t. All right. Thank you.

David Leary: [01:11:25] Talk about signs we're in a recession or might be in a recession. So in general.

Blake Oliver: [01:11:31] I feel like we're going to have this debate now because last time we had a debate about whether or not we're in a recession for about six months, and then by the time the debate was over, the recession was over. Like, we never know if we're in a recession until after it ended, if it's a short one.

David Leary: [01:11:47] So a lot of times you can measure this by people, consumer behavior across beauty, fashion and entertainment. So here's some key points of indicators that I have one, two, three, six of them to go through brothel businesses down. So European brothel earnings are down significantly since 2024.

Blake Oliver: [01:12:05] European brothel business.

David Leary: [01:12:07] Yes. And US brothel revenue in Nevada fell 20% last quarter quarter. There's a stripper index. Strip club revenue in Vegas dropped 12%. And dancers are reporting lower tips in emptier clubs. There is the lipstick index, so sales of expensive lipstick items are down 15% at Mac and Sephora, suggesting people are wanting they want to buy cheaper luxuries. You don't want to spend the money on the premium lipstick. Men's underwear index men's underwear sales have dropped 6%, indicating men are delaying non-essential purchases. Underwear sales are down. Beer and dating behavior. Sales of craft beers decline have declined.

Blake Oliver: [01:12:48] Not good for our favorite brewery.

David Leary: [01:12:50] And dating app. Paid subscriptions have decreased, but the free app usage has increased by 12%. And then you see a lot of fashion and beauty shifts, especially with like, hair coloring. A lot of women start going back to their natural hair color, and they get cuts that are easier to maintain, so they can extend the length between haircuts. And they don't want to have to keep getting. If you get your hair dyed a lighter color, You have to keep going back and get the roots fixed. The roots fixed. So you see, these changes in these seem.

Blake Oliver: [01:13:19] To know a lot about this, David.

David Leary: [01:13:21] It's a whole article I learned about this. So all of these things are happening right now in the economy which are signs of recession leading indicators.

Blake Oliver: [01:13:31] Right.

David Leary: [01:13:31] These leading indicators.

Blake Oliver: [01:13:32] How would we describe these, uh, non-essential luxury purchases? Uh, uh, so you're saying basically like.

David Leary: [01:13:41] I mean, they're consumer it's consumer behavior. Consumer behavior is pulling back on many fronts right now in the economy.

Blake Oliver: [01:13:47] This is the stuff that gets cut first. Wow.

David Leary: [01:13:51] Well, I have another kind of fun story if you want to touch on it. Um, you always like these kind the salary to be financial successful in 2025 based on a survey of Americans.

Blake Oliver: [01:14:02] Yeah, we talked about something similar a few episodes ago. It was how much money you need to have in your bank account to be like, to be a success. And it was crazy. Like, uh, Gen Z had this insane idea that it was like, well, I'll let you go ahead. Tell me what the.

David Leary: [01:14:22] And I feel like we covered this about every other year, this survey, a survey like this comes out. So 51% of Americans say 100,000 to 250,000 a year. Is the salary needed to feel financially successful?

Blake Oliver: [01:14:34] 26 just about half.

David Leary: [01:14:36] Just about half. You have to have 150 to 250 K, 26% think 75 to 100 K is enough, 17%. I mean, you're getting close to 20%. Believe you need 250,000 to 500,006% think you need over $500,000 a year to feel financially successful.

Blake Oliver: [01:14:56] Secure or successful.

David Leary: [01:14:57] Uh, this is success. I mean, success is obviously subjective, but.

Blake Oliver: [01:15:02] Right. Because it's a difference to me between secure and success. Like, I feel financially secure, but I would feel a lot more successful if I made $1 million a year.

David Leary: [01:15:14] Yeah. That's true. There's a secure and success.

Blake Oliver: [01:15:17] But did they define success any further in this survey like any more you can tell us from the survey. I actually think this is, uh, pretty reasonable. So half of Americans are saying it's 150,000 to $250,000 a year is success. And, you know, if you look at what you can get in a lower cost area, not in New York or LA or something like that, you can live very nicely, very comfortably on that. So that's good. That's healthy. But not a lot of people are in that bracket. Not 50% of the country, that's for sure. Know that income bracket is probably well, it depends on where you are. But that would be a great question for perplexity. I wonder if I can do that right now. So, Um, what percentage of Phoenix. Let's just say Arizona residents make between 100 and 50 K and 250 K. Let's just say that 16%.

David Leary: [01:16:27] 16% in Phoenix. I bet.

Blake Oliver: [01:16:28] That's your.

David Leary: [01:16:29] Guess. Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [01:16:30] I said Arizona. So it's saying 13%. It's estimating 13.5% of Arizona households earn between 150 and 250 K annually. So that's a gap. How about nationally. Let's do that. So now it's searching for the percentage of US households earning between 100 and 50 K and 250 K nationally. Nationally it's less than 10% 9.32%. Only 12.66% of households earned over $200,000. So that is a big disconnect, right? We've got 51% of Americans saying, I need to make one. 50 to 250 K to be successful. Oh. So the estimate I got this. I didn't read the full analysis. So it's saying roughly 13.2% of US households earn between 150,000 and 250,000. So we've got 51% saying that's what they need. Only 13.2% get that.

David Leary: [01:17:30] Yeah. And that's where you have disgruntled voters eventually. Right. There's this pressure of this impression I need to be at this point. And I can't you know, this country hates me and there's no opportunity. And like, yeah, it does affect people when there's that disconnect.

Blake Oliver: [01:17:46] David, this has been a real pleasure. I gotta run because I have a lunch to get to. Happy Friday everyone. Hope you're all decompressing from tax season if you you know celebrate and.

David Leary: [01:17:59] And we'll see everybody next week next Friday at this time we will be at a movie theater watching The Accountant two premiere, which is? I'm super pumped about this.

Blake Oliver: [01:18:09] We're gonna.

David Leary: [01:18:10] Fill.

Blake Oliver: [01:18:10] The movie theater with accountants. Watching the accountant two. I can't wait to talk about it. David, I'm going to say it so that we have to get on our calendar. We are both going to rewatch The Accountant one this weekend. I think you already did. Right, David, I did.

David Leary: [01:18:22] I took a bunch of notes.

Blake Oliver: [01:18:23] Okay, so I'm going to rewatch The Accountant, the 2016 movie. And you and I are going to do a special bonus episode. I think we should live stream it too. That would be fun. And we're going to do a CPE course all about what we learned from The Accountant, the original movie, so you'll be able to earn CPE for learning about all the accounting theory or not discussed in the movie. And we'll we'll fact check it. Right. We'll we'll see if it's accurate. Hopefully we can fill a whole hour. If not, we'll do a half credit. So we're going to be a little.

David Leary: [01:18:54] Dated because the big investigation, the head investigator guy, um, that's FinCEN. And they didn't mention Boi once. So there's a little bit of dating issues going on in there. It wasn't a priority.

Blake Oliver: [01:19:07] But don't forget you can earn free continuing professional education credit for listening to this episode. That's Nasba approved CPE. Go to earmark app in your web browser or download the free earmark app from the App Store. You can earn one CPE per week for free, so there is no excuse not to finish your CPP requirement early this year. And if you want to support the work that we're doing with earmark, please do subscribe. It unlocks unlimited courses and removes ads, and we'll get you a whole lot of benefits in the future as we add them. See you all around here.

David Leary: [01:19:38] App you will if you. As soon as you go in the app you'll see the accountant two Premier. Click on it, click the registration button and you're registered for the movie. So we.

Blake Oliver: [01:19:45] Upgraded. We doubled the size of the theater because we sold out. So we have extra seats. So if you're in the Phoenix area and you want to go see the accountant with a bunch of accountants for free and meet me and David.

David Leary: [01:19:55] It's gonna be so much fun. I'm looking forward to it.

Blake Oliver: [01:19:57] See you there on, uh, next Friday. Bye, everyone.

David Leary: [01:20:00] Bye.