The Accounting Podcast

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David Leary: [00:00:04] Do you understand how a stablecoin works in theory?

Blake Oliver: [00:00:07] Yeah, it is a cryptocurrency that is pegged 1 to 1 with a fiat currency like the US dollar.

David Leary: [00:00:13] What if I told you none of that is true? So what happened is Paxo accidentally minted. Sit down and hold your desk. 300 trillion worth of PayPal.

Blake Oliver: [00:00:25] Usd 300 trillion.

David Leary: [00:00:26] 300 trillion. The US deficit is only 2,000,000,000,300 trillion stablecoins, which is obviously means they didn't take $300 trillion in and then created the coins.

Blake Oliver: [00:00:37] They just made the stable. They printed the stablecoins.

David Leary: [00:00:40] Coming to you weekly from the OnPay Recording Studio.

Blake Oliver: [00:00:48] Hey everyone, and welcome back to The Accounting Podcast, your weekly roundup of news in the accounting profession. I'm Blake Oliver.

David Leary: [00:00:54] And I'm David Leary Blake. If you notice, I'm not in the studio today. You're somewhere else. New York, Buffalo.

Blake Oliver: [00:01:00] New York, Buffalo. What are you doing in Buffalo?

David Leary: [00:01:02] Unfortunately, I had a family funeral. I had an uncle that passed, so I'm traveled for that. But, uh, the show still goes on. We gotta record no matter what. We always record every week.

Blake Oliver: [00:01:13] For now, 458 weeks in a row, we have been bringing you news at the intersection of accounting and technology. And I think today is a very appropriate day to record because it is spreadsheet day. Happy spreadsheet day.

David Leary: [00:01:29] David, is this national spreadsheet day? World spreadsheet day. Is this defined?

Blake Oliver: [00:01:34] This is simply spreadsheet day. I'm going to say it's worldwide. It was first celebrated in 2010 and it was established by Deborah Dalglish or Dalglish. She is the owner of Contextual Excel, and the reason we celebrate Spreadsheet Day on October 17th is because that is the day that Visicalc, the first spreadsheet for personal computers, was released. It was released on October 17th, 1979.

David Leary: [00:02:04] Were you born then?

Blake Oliver: [00:02:05] Uh, no. I was born a few years later.

David Leary: [00:02:09] I'm older than Blake. Wow.

Blake Oliver: [00:02:11] Yeah.

David Leary: [00:02:12] Actually, that's kind of crazy to think about that. Spreadsheets are older than you.

Blake Oliver: [00:02:15] Well, I think I'm the same age as Microsoft Excel. So, uh, I think so. Or is it Lotus? One? Two, three? I can't remember. But anyway, it's crazy to think that I was born in that era. And that's the thing that has survived from that era is the mighty spreadsheet continues to thrive and survive. And I don't think it's going anywhere anytime soon. David, um, what's what's new with you? Uh, what other news you got.

David Leary: [00:02:44] Spinning off of your, uh, National Spreadsheet Day? I saw AOC, um, was being interviewed, and she just went off about companies dumping chemicals into rivers and she accidentally said Deloitte instead of DuPont. I think. And so I tweeted, I was like, Deloitte, stop dumping your Excel formulas into the rivers. So it's kind of related on Excel day. It's kind of spreadsheet day. It's kind of funny.

Blake Oliver: [00:03:09] Deloitte, DuPont, you know, I bet a lot of people wouldn't know the difference. We've got a lot to talk about.

David Leary: [00:03:15] The fact that I don't think Deloitte has chemicals to pour into rivers. Right. That'd be the big difference between the companies.

Blake Oliver: [00:03:22] We've got a lot to talk about. So let's get into it. But first, let's thank our sponsors, David, who are the sponsors for this episode.

David Leary: [00:03:29] This week we have on relay Bill and cloud account and Staffing.

Blake Oliver: [00:03:33] Thank you to our sponsors. Uh, let's hear from Tom Forbes.

David Leary: [00:03:39] And CNBC ranked unpaid number one for small business payroll on pay really knows how to get payroll done right for every client you serve, no matter how complex their software is, easy to use and backed by outstanding service levels, they handle new client onboarding for free, and experts are on call to keep you and your clients on track. The system includes multi-state payroll, local tax filings, integrated HR tools, and more with no hidden fees. And when you join on Pace Partner program, you get a custom dashboard to easily manage all your clients in one place. Plus, you gain exclusive perks like revenue sharing or discounts, free payroll for your firm, co-branded opportunities, premium swag, and more on pay helps you run your practice efficiently while providing exceptional payroll that your clients can count on. To learn more about using on pay for your firm and clients that may be farms, startups, restaurants, bars, doctors, nonprofits, gyms, franchisees, or dentists. Head over to Accounting Today Dot promo. That is The Accounting Podcast promo.

Blake Oliver: [00:04:38] And you talking about AMP. David reminds me of an amazing interview that I got to do at the Advisory Amplified Tour a couple weeks ago with Valerie Heckman from Onp and Lisa Gilreath from Acuity, which is now part of Sauron. And that whole interview was about, um. Well, it included a discussion of how to make accounting firms, um, more welcoming to employees to to improve the, the work environment and leave for bereavement. It was a as a part of that discussion, like the ability you have David to to pick up and go to Buffalo to be there for a family funeral. Like that's something that not every accountant would get to have this time of year.

David Leary: [00:05:29] And it seems silly that accountants can't do it. Like, I understand if you have a physical job and you have to physically be present because you're doing manual labor. But if an accountant can get internet, like I have internet, I'm able to pop in every morning and get things on track and make sure there's no emergencies. There's no reason to. Accountant couldn't work remotely with internet, right?

Blake Oliver: [00:05:47] Like, why not.

David Leary: [00:05:48] Let your employees have freedom?

Blake Oliver: [00:05:49] I agree. Welcome to our livestream stream viewers. Boring accountant is here. Number one fan three coffee emojis I am on coffee number three as well. Boring accountant. Although I remember to take my Adderall so I won't need as much today. We've also got Tate here in the chat. Thanks, Tate. Great to great to see you as well. And those of you who have, uh, have joined and are watching, you know, feel free to comment. Let us know what you think about these stories or anything else. Bring your friend the news. Yeah. Uh, and I want to talk about politics. I want to talk about Trump. So maybe that'll get some conversation going. The Trump administration is planning a major IRS overhaul to target left leaning groups. Normally when I see this kind of stuff, I, I think, oh, this is just another political, uh, article or something like that. It's it's, uh, you know, it's going to be in like a left leaning publication or whatnot. Right? But this was in the Wall Street Journal. And like when the Wall Street Journal is talking about how the Trump administration is planning to attack left leaning groups, like generally, I listen.

David Leary: [00:06:50] To believe it.

Blake Oliver: [00:06:51] Time to believe it. Yeah. This is a this is an initiative being led by Gary Shapley, who's an advisor to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Is he the one who's the new. He's not the one who's the new IRS CEO, right?

David Leary: [00:07:04] He's not the appointed one. This is just how do you even become an advisor to the Commissioner of the Treasury Secretary? Well, this is applied for a position. Like. How does he even get that?

Blake Oliver: [00:07:14] I mean, I, I don't know. I mean, you just you get a job, right? You know, a guy.

David Leary: [00:07:20] You donate to the Trump campaign? Probably.

Blake Oliver: [00:07:23] So they are planning to replace guy f I c c o the long time chief of the IRS Criminal Investigation Division. And they are aiming to install Trump allies at IRS criminal investigations to exert firmer control. Shapley, according to Wall Street Journal's reporting, has compiled a list of potential investigation targets, including George Soros and affiliated organizations. Major Democratic donors and left leaning nonprofit groups. Trump has directed investigation of groups he claims are creating anarchy in Democratic led cities. The proposal will weaken the involvement of IRS lawyers in criminal investigations, and there will be changes to the Internal Revenue Manual to reduce Chief counsel's role in these decisions. It would also eliminate extra procedural steps for sensitive cases involving elected officials and tax exempt groups. The IRS Criminal Investigations Unit is that unit that has armed IRS agents. They have over 2000 armed agents, and they investigate criminal tax code violations and also assist other agencies in financial crime investigations. David, I don't think I need to ask you to know how you feel about the weaponization of the IRS Criminal Investigations Unit.

David Leary: [00:08:44] So we moved from decades of of crippling the IRS through funding initiatives to now we're going to weaponize the IRS. That it's actually scary if you if you take that you take about the appointment of a CEO last week. Right. And then you take I don't know if you saw, uh, secretary treasurer, uh, Scott Besant's comments in, in recent Fox News interview. So he was in the interview to discuss the economic repercussions of the government shutdown, and he was specifically asked about the upcoming No Kings marches that are going to be taking place in Washington, DC. And this is what he replied. Um, you know, no Kings means no paychecks, no paychecks, no government. And I went back and because I was in the article. So I went and found the video. I watched the video. I was I was kind of wondering, like, is he advocating that we should have a king? Like, what the hell? That's ridiculous. Or is he being satirical and maybe poking at Trump? Like, maybe he secretly doesn't like Trump. But now after watching it, I don't think it's a passive aggressive dig. I feel like he's said it before, like it's just a common thing being thrown around in the executive branch, maybe at the white House. In Trump circles, this thought of no kings means no paychecks, which is the most un-American thing anybody could say. Well, it's.

Blake Oliver: [00:09:56] It's the it's the extreme hardball negotiation tactic that Trump is known for, which is if you fight me on this, I'm going to go nuclear on you. I'm going to take it to the extreme, which is I'm going to completely shut down the government. So either you give me the power that I want or I shut things down.

David Leary: [00:10:17] Yeah, but we don't need a king at the end of the day. It's a little. It's a little disturbing, right?

Blake Oliver: [00:10:23] No, I mean, that's that's that's the. I think we can all agree, I would hope I mean, maybe there's a small percentage of this country that wants, you know, like a fascist government. Um, but I think, you know, the vast majority of us want the system we have. And, and I don't think more executive power is the answer because it just comes back to bite you when the other side is in power. That's why we have checks and balances. That's why this whole thing about the IRS CEO is a problem. Because the IRS commissioner should be confirmed by the Senate. And that's a check on the power of the executive of the president. And if the president just creates a new role that has the same responsibilities but doesn't get, you know, doesn't get checked by the Senate, then that's just a run around the rules. And it's creating that, you know, monarchical executive.

David Leary: [00:11:18] And where's the AICPA on this? The AICPA they wrote a letter to the IRS to Scott Bessent this week about the shutdown and how they want, you know, retained so much of the workforce, give relief for taxpayers for at least 60 days after it ends. Blah de blah de blah. But like, how come the AICPA is not calling out this major. Uh, flaw in process of not of bypassing the The Congress because.

Blake Oliver: [00:11:44] They're.

David Leary: [00:11:44] Cowards. They're just not doing it.

Blake Oliver: [00:11:46] They don't. They they they are not willing to take a stand on something that matters because they're afraid of political blowback.

David Leary: [00:11:54] Like so. But what would the AICPA could Trump do anything to the AICPA?

Blake Oliver: [00:11:59] Well, I mean verbally make your life miserable.

David Leary: [00:12:02] Yeah, I guess he could verbally.

Blake Oliver: [00:12:04] Point his he can point his people at you, you know.

David Leary: [00:12:06] But the AICPA is not a government agency, correct? We've discussed this before.

Blake Oliver: [00:12:10] Yeah, they're a nonprofit. They can do a lot of freedom of speech. But I mean, maybe, you know, Trump would come at them with the IRS, uh, with the IRS and say, we're going to revoke your nonprofit status.

David Leary: [00:12:21] That would be amazing. If if the IRS was going after the AICPA, it'd be like, that's like, so meta. That would be crazy. Uh oh. Come on, AICPA, you need to step up on this. They bypassed Congress and appointed a CEO.

Blake Oliver: [00:12:35] So, Rafi.

David Leary: [00:12:35] Under under a person that says we should have a king. Let's just make sure we understand this.

Blake Oliver: [00:12:39] In the live stream, we had two comments I want to highlight here. Uh, here. First is actually Edgar, who said the Obama administration targeted right wing groups. This is why you don't want to give government too much power. The other side gets the gun eventually, then points it at the other side. And I feel exactly in alignment with that. Edgar, I totally agree. It will come back to bite them. And and we don't want the politicization of like, the tax code and the tax system. I mean, I know it is, but we don't want it more. We want it less, and we should not be using it to target groups that we don't like. Raffi, on the other hand, says payback is a is a bitch and says, so what should happen to the deep state? They're hired, not elected individuals who have enormous power. Well, you know, like I agree that there's also this unelected bureaucracy that runs a lot of the country and is incredibly inefficient and unaccountable. I mean, we see that ourselves in our profession with the National Association of State Boards of accountancy, which is unelected and yet somehow regulates, um, is unaccountable and unelected. I mean, they're slightly accountable, but not directly to the people. And they control a lot of what happens in our profession. So to me, like nasba is the deep state of the accounting profession. Now, the way that you the way that you fix it is not to shut down the government.

Blake Oliver: [00:14:09] And the way to fix nasba would not be to shut it down. Something there's got to be something else. It has to be a more nuanced approach to solve this problem. Uh, and I don't know exactly what that is, but, like, shutting down the government and and and causing all this, like, disruption, economic disruption, I don't think is the way to get what you want in the long run. Like, politicians need to be diplomatic. And that's the problem with the Trump administration is they're just not diplomatic. And so yeah, you can get what you want in the short term by bullying people. But in the long term you can't make effective change happen. And I say that as a Republican who cares about actually solving problems, not just creating political talking points and winning elections, you actually have to get stuff done. And that's my problem is, like, I don't think I don't know, can, can, can anyone name one thing that Trump has accomplished in all the time he's been in power that has stuck? Obama did. Obama got Obamacare through because he knew how to work the system. Whether or not you like that, I can't think of anything that Trump has done that has stuck, that has made a real lasting difference. And I don't think he will in this term either. And it's just because of the the way the.

David Leary: [00:15:24] Economy might go to hell. And that'll stick for a couple decades, maybe like we're on a crazy march of that that's stuck. Um, and then, you know, his his policies on crypto and stablecoin is definitely is probably going to stick for a while. Right.

Blake Oliver: [00:15:37] Which which is the foundation, which is the foundation for the future financial bubble that will be caused by cryptocurrency and stablecoins. Although I think right now everyone's saying that we're in an AI bubble.

David Leary: [00:15:48] I fully believe that.

Blake Oliver: [00:15:50] We're going to talk about that. But first, let's thank our next sponsor. And that is relay between David and myself. We now have three, four, maybe even five business entities. We can't keep track 20 or so checking accounts, dozens and dozens of virtual cards. It would be impossible to manage all of this if 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 David and me to each have our own logins. We can grant access to our team. They all have their own logins and even our external accountant without sharing passwords or two factor authentication codes. No more two factor. It's incredible. 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 and with a few clicks we created a payroll checking and then another few clicks and we got the info to give to our payroll provider. You can make bank accounts, savings accounts, credit cards, debit cards all in a few seconds and and provision them instantly with relays, virtual cards.

Blake Oliver: [00:16:56] We can issue cards to our team around the world for needed business expenses, and they can pay for those themselves. And we can spin up new debit cards. Virtual cards easily set daily and monthly spending limits. When a team member doesn't need their card, we just freeze it and relay even prompts the team member to submit the receipt for their expense. And we collect all those in relay and we can sync those into the accounting system. Relay also has automation features that will sweep money automatically from one account to another based on dates, amount or target balances or percentages. So for example, we receive all of our inbound payments into an inbound checking account and then we split those daily into different accounts for payroll and for operating expenses and to savings. And we can do that all based on percentages. And it all happens automatically. So if you're interested in learning more about using relay for your firm and clients, head over to The Accounting Podcast. Relay The Accounting Podcast promo.

David Leary: [00:17:58] And just I ran payroll on the airplane and transferred money to the payroll account and relay like you can use these on airplanes now, which is amazing, right? I could run payroll on on pay and then transfer money on relay on an airplane. It's kind of amazing.

Blake Oliver: [00:18:11] Let's talk about Nasba. Nasba the National Association of State Boards of Accountancy, which I just called the deep state of the profession deep state. Um, they need an audit. And that's just not that's not me asking for it. That's a professor who created the CPA Success Index. The CPA Success Index has been published by Accounting Today for many years, and it is created by Joseph Ugrin. And what it does is it takes NASA's candidate performance data on the CPA exam, and it reworks it to figure out what college programs are the most successful at helping students pass the exam.

David Leary: [00:18:55] Okay, so you're reverse engineers the passing metrics to where they went to school at, essentially.

Blake Oliver: [00:19:02] And they look at the likelihood of candidates completing all the exam sections within 18 months. So it's not just did you pass, but it's did you pass within the 18 months, which is the the window most states require in order to become licensed. And that's a big deal because you don't want to have to like take another exam section over because you didn't do it in the right time frame. Like that's a big deal. So, um, here's the problem. He wrote an op ed Bed in Accounting Today talking about how the Nasba data for 2024 is a mess. It doesn't make sense. He can't use it to do the CPA uh, success index this year. He's not going to be able to publish it.

David Leary: [00:19:50] So Nasba releases this data through CSV or an Excel spreadsheet or something like that. And then he's accessing the data and it's bad.

Blake Oliver: [00:19:59] Yeah, he's trying to reconcile it like a good accountant. He's going to check the data and he's comparing it to the data from the University of Northern Iowa. So that department at the University of Northern Iowa tracked all the graduates taking the CPA exam in 2024, and they collected the official score reports directly from the candidates. But 25 to 40% of candidate scores are missing from Nasba reports, depending on the section 25 to 40% of the data that they collected directly from their students is not in the Nasba data. So this raises huge questions about like, how is NASA collecting this data?

David Leary: [00:20:36] Well, my.

Blake Oliver: [00:20:37] Question is data.

David Leary: [00:20:38] Misuse AI to summarize this like is this an AI issue? What happened here?

Blake Oliver: [00:20:42] I mean, I don't I don't know. Like we don't know. Unlikely. I mean, maybe it is. Who knows. Right. Um, here's another issue. Iowa community colleges appear in Nasbe data, despite state law requiring bachelor's degrees to sit for the exam. So the Nasbe data is saying, like, this person went to a community college and graduated from there. But in order to sit for the exam in Iowa, you have to have a bachelor's degree. So they are missing the data on where they went to college, which means you can't do the CPA Success Index because you don't actually know where they went to college. So the the implication is that there is widespread misclassification of the institutions that the candidates went to. Um, there's also errors in reporting students from graduate programs. Um, apparently the graduate rankings were. The graduate data was always unreliable, so they never, never even like tried to analyze that. So and he even calls for an audit that nasba. Nasba should get an audit and they should fix this reporting information. They should reconcile reports with actual student transcripts. They should collect data properly. You know, Nasba has access to all the transcripts submitted by the candidates. So there's there's no reason why they couldn't correctly classify what schools they went to. It just seems to be like a massive error in, you know, it's a problem of internal controls. It's a problem of how they're ingesting and analyzing this data.

David Leary: [00:22:17] Does he bring up any points about can you trust his 2023 date or the 2022 date or any of historical data? Well.

Blake Oliver: [00:22:25] They didn't mention that, but it's just apparently something has happened in 2024 and the phrase used is garbage in, garbage out. And so we can't publish it.

David Leary: [00:22:35] Oh, that makes I.

Blake Oliver: [00:22:35] Mean.

David Leary: [00:22:35] It sounds like AI. This smells like somebody at Naspa tried to use AI to summarize some stuff and screwed it up.

Blake Oliver: [00:22:41] If that's true, David, that would be the funniest story we've covered this year after what happened with Deloitte in Australia. Yeah. Um, Ryan, in the live stream here on YouTube, Ryan says, uh, they will audit themselves and find no errors. Hey, Andrea. Andrea says two coffees from a plane somewhere over New Mexico. That's fantastic.

David Leary: [00:23:03] Well, that's where the internet usually goes out. Those flights. When you're about over New Mexico, it glitches out for a second. So we're like, Andrea might not be here very long. Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:23:10] West Texas, not a lot of coverage in West Texas. Um, I can't wait. I really wish that, like, more the airlines had Starlink. I just saw a video where it was like, um, somebody from, like CBS, like Nightly News or something, or NBC, like on a plane. Broadcasting from the plane thanks to Starlink. Like, that's my least favorite part of traveling right now is that I can get on the internet, but it's so slow. I just don't want to work. It's frustrating. We are now.

David Leary: [00:23:39] I feel like it was almost better when there wasn't internet and you could work with apps offline. Might be better than having crappy internet on a flight now.

Blake Oliver: [00:23:47] Yeah.

David Leary: [00:23:48] And I also think the internet is, like, optimized for people not to work like Facebook, Twitter. They're all paying to have their packets prioritized because we'll be on a flight. And the girl sitting next to me was trying to work, and we kept getting like, spinners in the WiFi wasn't working. And then she'd pull out her phone and do Instagram, and that worked every single time. I'm like, this makes no sense.

Blake Oliver: [00:24:09] What airline were you flying?

David Leary: [00:24:10] This was a delta on my last trip last week. Delta?

Blake Oliver: [00:24:13] That's funny because Delta is like they usually have good internet.

David Leary: [00:24:17] But Delta went free now and that's why you go free. Everybody gets on.

Blake Oliver: [00:24:22] This is the problem with free parking. You got to have like a pay lane so that people who like, need to actually get stuff done can get priority. Yeah. All right. David, um, I'm going to let you pick the next story. I think you would. Well, you talked about Bessant on the No Kings.

David Leary: [00:24:37] Um, we talked about stablecoin. I have two articles about stablecoin, if you're interested in that.

Blake Oliver: [00:24:43] I don't know, it's like our our data on, like, what our listeners like says, they don't really like hearing about crypto and blockchain. So maybe save that one for the end. How about we do this QBO AI rollout? I really want to hear his thoughts on this. Like so somebody wrote a wrote a review of QuickBooks AI.

David Leary: [00:25:00] That's not specifically about QuickBooks, but I think that's what prompted this person to write the review. So this was an article that was in market Mark tech org, which is a marketing technology website. And this is a CEO of an advertising company, and he writes an article talking about how companies are implementing and botching the rollouts of AI. And he talks about how apparently IBM mis rolled out something for oncology and that was giving out unsafe recommendations. And then Zillow was Zillow offers created some AI that basically lost them $500 million for a home. Because it was over, AI was overpaying for homes. Um, and then half the article, though, was just about their failed QuickBooks AI experience. So I'm going to read this word for word. And keep in mind this is a business owner of an advertising company, not an accountant.

Blake Oliver: [00:25:48] Okay. And before you do that, I just want to I want to make sure I understand what he's talking about. So these are the new AI agents that we've been talking about in QuickBooks.

David Leary: [00:25:56] Yeah, he gets very specific.

Blake Oliver: [00:25:58] Okay. I'm ready.

David Leary: [00:25:59] He just rails on. So. So I'll actually read what he wrote because he I think he he put the he put into words very well.

Blake Oliver: [00:26:06] And who is the author of this?

David Leary: [00:26:08] This is I forgot his name. I lost his name. But he is the CEO of an advertising company. So he's a marketer. He's a marketer, not an accountant. He's a small business owner. At the end of the day. All right. Um, like many small businesses, we rely on Intuit's QuickBooks online to run our operations. Recently, QuickBooks rolled out an AI powered version of the platform. For us, it's been nothing short of a disaster. Here's what we encountered. Forced adoption unlike platforms that let customers opt in or pilot new features, Intuit pushed the AI in this version. Faulty machine learning Although trained on transactions, QuickBooks frequently miscategorized payments based solely on dollar value. The vendor sent one $1,000 invoice. All invoices for that vendor were recorded as $1,000. Coding problems. Payments to contractors were recorded under QuickBooks payments instead of the contractor's name. Hallucinations and accounting categories were randomly assigned in ways neither neither us nor our accountants could explain or fix. Passing costs to customers. The issues became so bad that we had to pay our accountants thousands of dollars to troubleshoot with no resolution, so I guess it's good for accountants. Poor communication, no notice of the change, no documentation, no guidance on how to roll back broken workflows. Critical functions such as invoicing were disrupted at one point. Email addresses dropped off invoices altogether, including mine, and the client's emails started getting flagged as spam. The biggest sin is that QuickBooks sits as the sits at the heart of our business. Cash flow, payroll, and client billing are all dependent on it. When AI upgrades, it destabilizes that core and the consequences ripple across the organization. And this isn't unique to QuickBooks. These examples IBM, Watson, Zillow, Intuit are all reminders that AI implementation is not just technology. It's about trust, communication, and responsibility. He just really he just captured everything so well.

Blake Oliver: [00:27:59] So it sounds like the big problem was that these changes were forced onto this company and it was unreliable. Yeah, the AI is unreliable, which is no surprise because AI is unreliable right now. Wow. I mean, if this is typical, then Intuit has really screwed up.

David Leary: [00:28:21] I'm curious if it's typical specifically to intuit. I think this is just typical of tech forcing shit that's not done well enough down people's throats.

Blake Oliver: [00:28:28] Well, what I want to know is, is this the experience of accountants of business owners more generally, or is this just a unhappy customer, which can happen? So I'm curious from our listeners who have been using the Agentic, AI or AI agent features in QuickBooks. How are they working? Are they working? Are they reliable? Are they unreliable? Do you like them? Do you not? I want to hear from you. You can email us at The Accounting Podcast. At earmarks. To me, that's the The Accounting Podcast at earmarks. Let us know what you think. David's been too busy the last few months to even give a try of these new things in our QuickBooks.

David Leary: [00:29:10] Well, I can't tell if I'm using them or not. That's the problem. I'm definitely using the new bank feed stuff, but I'm always looking for these other. These agents everybody talks about. I'm like, I don't really know where they're.

Blake Oliver: [00:29:19] At, so they're just sort of like built into the sea. This is the problem and I don't.

David Leary: [00:29:23] Know what I'm using it or not using it. That's the problem.

Blake Oliver: [00:29:25] I will say it again and again and again. To all the developers listening, do not replace rules based workflows with AI. Use AI to define automatically the rules. Speed up the creation of the rules and the optimization of them. But don't replace rules with AI that's unreliable. Use AI to make rules. That's the best of both worlds and have a human in the loop to approve the changes. That's all you got to do. It's not complicated.

David Leary: [00:30:06] So I guess it leads to this other story I have. Um, docket, which is a AI automation add on for QuickBooks and Xero. They've launched a new initiative. Their goal is to help every account become $1 million account. And so my real question is can we've we've talked about this with developers. There's theories that because of AI you're going to see the first billion dollar company created by two people, $1 billion valuation company. So can AI I question, help a solo firm owner create $1 million cash practice? And the theory is Dockett. Dockett says it's possible because it's about 300 clients, each paying 2.99 a month. That's $1 million, right?

Blake Oliver: [00:30:44] With one person managing 300 clients.

David Leary: [00:30:47] So that's the question is this possible? Is AI going to actually solve this? And so what they're doing is they're using their they have their own AI agent. And it combines large language models and specialized accounting AI to automate reconciliation categorization anomaly detection and month end close. Yeah. But my $0.02 on this. At some level, I kind of believe you could build a CAS server offering of some type for 299 a month. I even wrote a blog post about this years ago for auto entry, right? You could build a tech stack that could help you be efficient and do a 299 task practice a month. But the other hand, I'm thinking all these AI plays are completely missing something, right? I highly doubt reconciling is the bottleneck at a cash practice, and that's what all these AI adapters are saying. We hope you reconcile faster. I think it's a nothing burger in relation to all the other tasks you need to do to get a client's books closed. The reconciliation is nothing. And then if something's wrong in the reconciliation, that research that you have to do AI can't do that. And that's what takes up most.

Blake Oliver: [00:31:48] Of the context.

David Leary: [00:31:49] It lasts the context to figure that out. Yeah. So and I'm not sure because if you if you use bank feeds at the end, it's time to reconcile. It takes like eight seconds of clicks into QuickBooks to do the reconciliation if you've been matching the bank feeds. So I'm not sure saving eight seconds is going to be this miracle efficiency these AI apps are bringing to the reconciliation process. Yeah, I think they're missing the bigger bottleneck at accounting firms. It's not reconciliation. No it's not.

Blake Oliver: [00:32:13] And you know what it is, right? I've said it before.

David Leary: [00:32:17] Communication with clients?

Blake Oliver: [00:32:18] Probably, yes. It's the number of relationships you can have with your clients. And that maxes out, theoretically, the upper range. I mean, it's not healthy, but you see it. It's in small tax practices where you have like a single tax preparer doing like a thousand, 2000 returns. Those exist. Those preparers have basically like the least relationship with their clients. That's the kind of that's kind of firm where like you come in, you sit there, they do your return, you're done. You never talk to them outside of that one hour interaction or something. And so that's the upper limit. And the you know, there is no lower limit. I mean, you could have just one client, right? Uh, but like, could you have 300 client accounting services clients with one person servicing them, I think. I don't think so. I mean, at that point, you would you would not be spending that. How much time would you really be spending with every client? Right. Let's say you. You'd have to have 300. You couldn't meet with them monthly because you'd have to have like 300 meetings a month.

David Leary: [00:33:31] I've talked to firm owners that I would argue are forward thinking cloud. They got their ducks in order firms and they're super efficient. And maybe they've said their bookkeepers are handling some of their best ones are maybe 45 clients a month. Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:33:45] My best all star bookkeeper could do twice as many as my typical bookkeeper, my typical bookkeeper. And we were just doing small businesses. This was nothing like super fancy, right? Cash basis, mostly a little cruel stuff here and there. But, you know, these are businesses that are doing like 1 million to 10 million in revenue. These are not big ones. Right? And a typical bookkeeper could do 20 to 30 on average. And my all star could do 40 to 60. You can't build a. This is just not possible. You can't build it this way. Practice. Let's turn 300 clients in one person.

David Leary: [00:34:22] Could you do it? Could Blake Oliver CPE go out tomorrow and start a new practice? Knowing your knowledge of AI and cloud, could you do it yourself, do you think?

Blake Oliver: [00:34:31] Well, the problem would be I. I would if I had 300 clients at that level, I would have too many questions coming in in emails, and I wouldn't want that kind of firm with me being the customer support for those 300 people. And I don't think there's an AI tool that can do that, you know? Um, and so I could automate I could automate a lot of the bookkeeping, but I would still need to hire people to communicate with the clients. So, you know, you could hire like a couple of people. I think you could do you could do $1 million firm with like Three people, maybe. And that would be great, right? That would be. $333,000 per.

David Leary: [00:35:18] Head.

Blake Oliver: [00:35:19] Yeah. But I think even that like maybe it's going to be closer to five in the end. Because the problem is you need redundancy. Like you can't be fully realized. You can't be fully productive every hour of every day. Right? You need breaks. You need time off, you need redundancy. So that's why you can't do it.

David Leary: [00:35:36] And that assumes all the AI tools you're building. Everything works perfect and seamless all the time. Yeah, be very, very difficult.

Blake Oliver: [00:35:42] So you know, firms I mean, it's like if I were building a firm today from scratch and it was just going to be me, I would be doing outsourced controller services, not CFO, because I don't want to do that level of advisory because I want to standardize it, and I could standardize, outsource Controllership, and I would do it for like ten companies. I would have ten clients and I would meet with them every week. So I would have ten hours of meetings a week scheduled out. I do two a day. And so I'd have two hours a day of work, like in meetings. And then the rest of my day would be doing the client work, you know, getting the books up, you know, doing all the doing all the accounting stuff. Uh, which would be highly automated. And they'd have to use my systems and my tech. Uh, and I think if I got that to a, like, a really solid point right at the beginning of the firm, I'd probably be spending. I'd be working, you know, full time, because I'd be developing business, bringing on clients, all that. Once I got the ten clients, I could probably do it in four hours a day. And that's the dream. You know, work 20 hours a week on a good week. And, uh, and make, I mean, with those kind.

David Leary: [00:36:58] Of clients, if you had the same clients and they were reliable and good, and you had the systems and processes, you never lost a client to onboard a new client, you could, in theory, do this. Yeah. But the reality is it's not going to happen. That's right.

Blake Oliver: [00:37:09] So you're going to end up working full time. But the idea is that you would never have to work more than 40 hours a week if you set this up right. And, you know, you could do it with one person. It could be just me. No employees to worry about. I mean, you still have the issue of, like, being able to take a vacation, but, um.

David Leary: [00:37:25] What's her name? Completely blanking on her name. She has 200,000. Um, you interviewed her?

Blake Oliver: [00:37:31] Oh. Erica goody.

David Leary: [00:37:32] Yeah. Erica Goody does too.

Blake Oliver: [00:37:33] Yeah. So she does that, right? She has like, um, I don't remember how exactly how many, but it's like around that, like number of clients. And she makes, you know, I think 200 K, uh, working 15 hours a week and it's it's doable. Uh, that's the kind of practice I would want to build. And you do, like light advisory, right? Mostly most of the work is just like getting the accounting done. Like talking them through the numbers, uh, working with the tax guy, that sort of thing. And then a little bit of advisory, um, handling stuff that comes up. You're there, you're there, you're there on call controller. Right on call accountant. So, um, Ryan says. Blake, are these recommendations in your new book? Well, it's been a while since I wrote the book, but, yes, uh, a good number of them are. And I should put the URL to my book in the live stream. I've been doing such a bad job of promoting it, but I promise you.

David Leary: [00:38:27] Can't sell your own stuff.

Blake Oliver: [00:38:29] Yeah, uh. That's right. I need to find. Where is my.

David Leary: [00:38:34] Well, you find that link. I'm going to get the next ad ready here.

Blake Oliver: [00:38:36] All right. Thank our next sponsor. Our next sponsor is Bill. Bill.

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Blake Oliver: [00:39:47] I realized I actually made an easy URL. You can go to @BlakeTOliver. Com @BlakeTOliver. Com book and you'll click the button. You'll go to bookbaby where you can buy my book directly and it'll get shipped to you quicker that way. And it's 20 bucks. That's it. For all of the knowledge that I've collected from interviewing people on the earmark podcast all of these years, you can get it along with my own experience as well. But it's not just me. I didn't want this to just be about me because my experience is just one experience, and so it includes the.

David Leary: [00:40:23] One hit wonder. Yeah, you did it once.

Blake Oliver: [00:40:26] It includes the expertise of like, firm owners who are way more successful than me, you know, all the way up to like, um, I think the, the biggest firm owner or the owner of the biggest firm is, um, Eric Frant of your part time controller. I mean, he just sold that firm to private equity for, like, I don't even. It was a lot. Excuse me. It was a lot. Um, their their, you know, their top 100, their huge firm. And he did it. And he shared his expertise with me. Um, Tino says. Is the shipping delayed? Yeah. I think the problem is that, like, there was more demand than anticipated, and so we ran out of the first run of copies.

David Leary: [00:41:07] That's a good problem.

Blake Oliver: [00:41:08] And so they're like, don't order it. It will get printed and delivered to you eventually. Um, yeah. Apologies about that. It is delayed, I think, on Amazon especially. But if you get it from Bookbaby, you should get it first because Bookbaby has to send it to Amazon and then Amazon has to send it to you.

David Leary: [00:41:23] Juventino I still don't have my copy yet, so just.

Blake Oliver: [00:41:26] Oh, I have to give it to you in person next week. David. When we are at the Women Who Count conference in Mesa, really excited to be there and we are going to be providing live CPE through the earmark app to the attendees. Very exciting. It's a new feature of earmark in beta. We this is our second conference. We've done live CPE for.

David Leary: [00:41:48] Third already I think.

Blake Oliver: [00:41:49] Third, yeah. Amazing. So, um, we're really looking forward to meeting everyone at the Women Who Count conference. We'll have a booth come stop by. David will be there on Wednesday and Thursday. I'll be there. Thursday. Friday. Work in the booth. Talk about CPE for your firm. If you want to get an earmark for team subscription or just hang out. And David and I are both going to be. Well, actually, I'm not sure if you're going. Are you going to Intuit connect?

David Leary: [00:42:16] I think I am. There's a confusing email thread. Apparently I haven't registered yet. I don't know where I plan on going.

Blake Oliver: [00:42:22] Okay, great. So David and I will be at Intuit Connect, which used to be QuickBooks Connect in Las Vegas. Uh, the following week, which is I don't even remember the dates anymore.

David Leary: [00:42:34] The 27th week.

Blake Oliver: [00:42:35] Of week of Halloween. Right. Will be will be in, in Las Vegas. So, um, let us know if you're going to be there. Um, come track us down. It's actually it's impossible to if you can, like, hunt me down at the conference, then, um, you know, definitely come say hi. I'm not easy to find.

David Leary: [00:42:54] I look at these conferences, I never book a coffee or book. I just it's impossible because I get distracted, I get sidetracked, I get stopped in hallways. Somebody tries to talk to me, and then I never make o meet somebody for coffee for five minutes. I can't put anything on the calendar. I just have.

Blake Oliver: [00:43:07] To. I don't either.

David Leary: [00:43:08] You just gotta bump into me on naturally.

Blake Oliver: [00:43:10] Yeah, you have to. You have to acquire my text, my phone number from somebody and then text me. Um, that's the challenge. All right. Uh, Tate says I got a copy of the book. Can't wait to read. Wish it was an audiobook, though. Got long commutes. That is.

David Leary: [00:43:24] Genius that we're not.

Blake Oliver: [00:43:25] Late. I should, um, I should seriously do the audiobook version of that, and we should offer CPE for it.

David Leary: [00:43:31] We can make it, Blake. We have. We can do it in-house.

Blake Oliver: [00:43:34] Maybe that will be my, like, uh, Christmas week project or something is like, have some downtime and read it. Um. Tate also.

David Leary: [00:43:44] Added, I'll use AI Blake to read it. You don't have to read.

Blake Oliver: [00:43:48] You'll have to give me a sample so I can see, you know, if I can tell the difference. Tate says how much is earmarked for firms?

David Leary: [00:43:55] David starts at 20% off, but then gets better prices from there, depending on how big a.

Blake Oliver: [00:44:01] Serious discount like if you have a big firm like we'll get you a really good deal for unlimited.

David Leary: [00:44:08] Really really good.

Blake Oliver: [00:44:09] Really good deal. It's like and you know, the reason we can do that is because we have extremely low costs, because we do this all, you know, with modern technology and podcasts. And so our goal is to, you know, get high quality CPE out to people that's affordable, accessible. We want to make it available to your firm. We give you really good discounts so everyone in your firm can have it.

David Leary: [00:44:29] We can give you a private channel.

Blake Oliver: [00:44:31] And that's the cool thing. Nobody else does this. You get a private channel for your firm and you can send us links to your internal trainings, and we will put those up as CPE courses for only your firm to earn CPE. And we can do it for that. And I think we can do it for IRS as well.

David Leary: [00:44:51] But we don't offer any of the content. Yeah, yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:44:54] Yeah. And it's just available to your team. So internal trainings, you don't have to go get a license. You don't have to pay all that money. You don't have to do all that record keeping. We do it for you internally. Um, Tate says even for a solo firm owner. Oh, the discount thing? No, it starts at five seats for the discount. Yeah. Um.

David Leary: [00:45:11] But hopefully we're gonna have coupon codes soon so we can grace people. Uh, listeners of the podcast, there's a coupon code for discount, but compared to other all you can eat CPE options out there, we are significantly less than all other platforms.

Blake Oliver: [00:45:24] And we're we know the gap with earmark right now is we don't have all the technical content, all the technical tax audit gap content that you need. Yellow book, um, we are working on solving that in 2026. That's a big part of our mission and we've already started it. We've got shows like Tax in Action with Jeremy Wells on the tax side. That's a subscriber only show. Um, I mean you can listen to it on podcast for free. But to get the CPE, you know, you have got to be an earmark subscriber. Um, we've got, um, audit smarter. So we want to hear from you. Who are the instructors that you want to hear on earmark? And are you an instructor? If you are creating CPE for accountants and it's technical, we want I want to talk to you about creating a show with you and making that a benefit to earmark, uh, members. Fantastic. All right, let's talk about the Chicago Teachers Union.

David Leary: [00:46:23] Okay.

Blake Oliver: [00:46:25] I mean.

David Leary: [00:46:26] I've heard about this. I have no idea what you're going to talk about. This is good.

Blake Oliver: [00:46:30] Okay, so the Chicago Teachers Union hasn't released the required annual financial audits to its members for over five years, despite paying nearly $80,000 for audit services in 2025 alone. The last time they released an audit was in September of 2020, for the year ending 2019. Their bylaws mandate that they have to get annual audits and publish those for members, but they have not released any audits for fiscal years 2020 through 2024. And here's the thing. What those audits show might not be very good for the leadership of this union. According to the teacher, go.

David Leary: [00:47:18] On for so long.

Blake Oliver: [00:47:19] Well, they're getting sued now, so it takes a while. Yeah, before people get pissed off. Right. Um, according to Ctu's federal filing with the US Department of Labor, only 18% of CTU spending in 2025 went to representing teachers. Only 18% of all their funding for this teachers union went to representing teachers. 82% was spent on overhead politics and leadership priorities. That is, you don't want.

David Leary: [00:47:49] Auditing.

Blake Oliver: [00:47:49] For a nonprofit to only spend 18% of its member dues and funding on member services. That's bad. So CTU members have sued through. Uh, yeah. They filed a lawsuit on October 8th of 2020 for, um. I guess they still haven't released the audits. And there's there's no reason, apparently, for them not doing it when questioned. Here's the here's the part that's crazy. When questioned about the missing audits, the CTU president, Stacy Davis Gates, personally attacked the inquiring member, calling demands for transparency a racist dog whistle.

David Leary: [00:48:29] Geez.

Blake Oliver: [00:48:31] So there you go. Um. I mean, it's amazing to me that, like, an organization can get away with doing that for so long. Like.

David Leary: [00:48:42] Uh, five years. How did it go past one year, exactly? That's my question.

Blake Oliver: [00:48:46] Yeah, I mean, I don't understand. Anyway, what are they hiding? That's what I want to know.

David Leary: [00:48:52] So I have to talk about this stablecoin. I have two stories about stablecoin. We've got to talk about them. Okay, so one of them is there's a stable. Well, a lot of these stablecoins are built, are created by services like we talked about last week. How f. Serve is the company that provide the technology for Wyoming and the other state. I forgot what second state was that. Now have stablecoins I think it's North Dakota.

Blake Oliver: [00:49:17] North Dakota.

David Leary: [00:49:17] North Dakota. They have stablecoins. So this company provides that technology. Well, there's other companies out there. One of these companies is called Paxos and they provide the stablecoin infrastructure for PayPal. And do you understand how stablecoin works in theory?

Blake Oliver: [00:49:33] Yeah, it is a cryptocurrency that is pegged 1 to 1 with a fiat currency like the US dollar.

David Leary: [00:49:40] So in theory, $1 goes in the machine. All right. I'm going to give you in return a stablecoin. That's how in theory it should work. Right. So I always have all the dollars Others are either.

Blake Oliver: [00:49:51] Yeah, the dollars are held in cash or in very close to cash. Liquid investments.

David Leary: [00:49:56] What if I told you none of that is true? So what happened is Paxo accidentally minted. Sit down and hold your desk. 300 trillion worth of PayPal.

Blake Oliver: [00:50:08] Usd 300,000,000,000,300.

David Leary: [00:50:10] Trillion. The US deficit is only 2,000,000,000,300 trillion stablecoins, which is obviously means they didn't take $300 trillion in and then created the coins.

Blake Oliver: [00:50:22] They just made the table. They printed the stablecoins.

David Leary: [00:50:24] Yeah. So essentially they don't actually have to peg these against the dollar. They just have to guarantee when they issue them, they just have to say they're pegged against the dollar value. Right. They don't actually have to do it. It's not there's no blockchain technology pegging this to a dollar. It's completely ridiculous.

Blake Oliver: [00:50:40] Yeah. There's no well there's no blockchain technology that is validating that there are. The US dollar is backing the stablecoin. Yeah, the only thing that backs that up is what the companies say, which is often not audited. So we're just trusting these companies. And so we're trusting the stablecoin issuers that they have the funds. So what do you think the odds are that they do all the time.

David Leary: [00:51:05] Not if they're just making if you make 300 trillion unchecked, they said they said this is a technical error that briefly appeared for 20 minutes. It was on the blockchain. And then they figured it out. And then what they did is they immediately burned the excess tokens. So you could just create these coins and just burn them and they just go away. The whole thing. This is it doesn't add up. It's really, really crazy. Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:51:27] No, I mean, so this is this totally tracks David. This is and people don't realize this is how it works. Tether. There was a point at which tether just printed up tether tokens and they were not backed. They had like it was obvious that they had just printed them or or minted them and that they didn't have the US currency to to support it. Then they claim to have fixed it later. Right. But it's. Yeah, it's totally doable. I mean, it's just it works the same as a bank the way banks used to work. Um, like in the Wild West, like Arizona is a great example. We're here in Arizona, the wild. During the Wild West, the 1800s banks were not federally regulated, and they were lightly regulated by the states, and they printed their own currencies. And so you would go and you would like deposit gold that you would mined at the mines here in Arizona, and you would get like a, a bank note. And it wasn't, you know, a US dollar. It was just that bank. And they guaranteed it. They said, oh, we've got enough gold. We've got enough US dollars in the bank to pay you back. And they could just mint as much as they wanted, though. There was no, there was no, uh, $300 billion. Yeah. So basically that's the thing about like, the crypto world is there's no central bank and there's no regulation. I mean, we're going to have it with the stablecoins. Uh, not sure if it's enough, but it's wild West. It's the wild West of banking all over again.

David Leary: [00:52:56] And here's why it's tying back to us in our show. So more so another company that does kind of the same services ripple. So ripple provides these crypto uh stablecoin services as well. Ripple just bought a Treasury app. So Ripple's acquired corporate treasury management firm GE Treasury for $1 billion, marking its third acquisition in 2025. So this basically puts ripple at the center of the fast growing trend, where corporations are increasingly managing crypto stablecoins and tokenized deposits with their treasuries. Um, so essentially, uh, g Treasury going to the website, this is where you're going to manage your, um, your AR, AP, uh, cash flow. Right. And so now as a company, you're going to be able to create crypto to do intercompany transfers, right? You're going to be able to a stablecoin. But what happens if the service creates 100 trillion stablecoins for your company? It's like it's being forced down your throat. And let's go back and rewind a little bit. So because there's an acceleration happening right. Two weeks ago that app Honeybook bought the AI vibing cool tool. Right. So there's kind of this collision last week. Remember we talked about how OpenAI was buying a personal finance app. Now this week a crypto stable company is buying an accounting app. Essentially it's an accounting app. This treasury app.

David Leary: [00:54:20] Right. So there's this collision happening. Um, I don't have any evidence that this is bad news, but it smells like it's not going to end well. And I'm starting to feel like these technologies aren't being adapted fast enough for the insane amount of investment that's going into these technologies. So in the end, these companies are buying the apps the end users are using, then shoving the AI into those apps and or the or the crypto and forcing it down people's throats like that's their business model now. Like, hey, we took all this money. People aren't buying our products fast enough. Let's buy the products they use and shove our technology in those products to show that usage goes back to being a bubble, right? This is what we're in, right? And this happened. Remember, we already talked about this a couple months ago about how, uh, investment companies are buying accounting firms and forcing them to use their AI investments. We saw this Red lobster. Red lobster. The P company owns red lobster is partially owned by, um, the Royal Saudi Family Fund, who has all these AI investments. Red lobster had to adopt this AI company to answer their phones. Like this is it all is very not good this forced adoption of these technologies.

Blake Oliver: [00:55:28] Yeah. Because it's not based on real productivity gains. It's like forced partnerships between your subsidiary companies to juice revenue.

David Leary: [00:55:34] Yeah. Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:55:36] And will it last is the question and we'll find out.

David Leary: [00:55:40] I mean, my like, even though right now QuickBooks, Xero, Bill.com, etc. we're not nobody. I haven't talked to anybody that's actually moving money around, like turning into crypto or stablecoin, then moving it somewhere else and then turning it back into the fiat currency. This is going to start happening this year. Accountants are going to be very, um, touching this stuff. It's going to be it's going to be here next year. So just be be very aware and be ready for this because I don't know if it's going to go well.

Blake Oliver: [00:56:09] One more story here before we go. Actually let's thank our last sponsor first. And that is cloud accountants staffing. If you're still on the fence about whether offshore staffing is right for your firm, I get it. It's a big decision. Here's something that should give you peace of mind and help remove the risk. Cloud Accountant Staffing just rolled out an industry first guarantee that shows just how much they believe in their process. If you hire someone through cloud accountant staffing and commit to following their proven success framework using their battle tested onboarding checklist, implementing their weekly Scorecard scorecard template, and setting up regular stand up meetings with your new team member. And for any reason it doesn't work out. Within 90 days, they will offer a full money back guarantee. That's 90 full days to work with your new team member. Integrate them into your firm and see real results. That's how confident they are, not just in the quality of their talent pool, but in their entire system for making offshore staffing successful. Think about it. They're essentially giving you a risk free trial to add 40, 80, or even 120 hours of capacity to your firm in this labor market. That's an opportunity you can't afford to pass up. To take advantage of cloud account and staffing, 90 day money back guarantee and finally solve your staffing challenges, head over to The Accounting Podcast. That's The Accounting Podcast promo. And that brings me right to my last story of the episode, which is about the talent shortage, which it seems like has changed recently due to AI. We we had that stat a couple of weeks ago about how the big firms are cutting entry level job hiring significantly, as much as half entry level auditor jobs fell by like 4,050%, I think.

Blake Oliver: [00:58:01] And I'm hearing this like entry level jobs. It's hard to get a job out of college now at the entry level. And why is that? It's because companies, not just accounting firms, but companies everywhere, are figuring out how to use AI to do the grunt work that we used to have those entry level people do. And so it creates this like illusion of accounting jobs going away, but it's just the entry level ones. Due to this, this what I would consider to be, you know, really poor decision making to like remove the entry level people, because who are you going to promote to senior and manager and director and partner someday? You cut out the bottom obviously. Ai bots. Yeah. Well, so here's here's a example of how the talent shortage still exists. Okay. It has not gone away thanks to AI. It's actually, I think, going to become worse. And the story is that there are 43 Arkansas cities and towns that continue to have state turn back funds withheld due to missing 2022 water and sewer system audits. So these cities have to get audits of their utilities, and they're not getting the funds that are available to them through the state because they don't have audits. And only five of the 43 flagged municipalities have since filed audits or provided engagement letters promising submission by December 31st. And why can't they get these audits? It's because in small towns there are not enough CPAs. There's not enough auditors. The auditors are retiring. They're not being replaced. All the young people have moved, you know, they go into bigger cities to start their careers.

David Leary: [00:59:55] Can I pause you as.

Blake Oliver: [00:59:56] Yeah.

David Leary: [00:59:56] Go ahead.

David Leary: [00:59:57] It feels like this is an article from like, three years ago. Honestly, like, is this is this current?

Blake Oliver: [01:00:03] Did I accidentally pick up an old story?

David Leary: [01:00:05] Sometimes the internet's like that. But. But it could be.

Blake Oliver: [01:00:08] So we we might have actually covered this. David.

David Leary: [01:00:10] Similar stories. Very similar stories about small towns could not get audits.

Blake Oliver: [01:00:13] Not being able to get audits. Yeah. Yeah. It's and it's, it's because, um, I mean, we might have actually covered this exact story. It's just continuing. Right. It's still going where they can't get the audits.

David Leary: [01:00:24] And AI is not solving this.

Blake Oliver: [01:00:27] I's not solving this because you need experienced people to be able to do audits you need like like you need a CPA with years of experience to come in and do an audit of utility, even a small one. And so we're not creating those people. They're not going out into the smaller communities and setting up shop. And so it's really Main Street America that is suffering from a talent shortage of accountants. And to me, this is the thing this is the problem that our leaders in the profession should really be focusing on is we are failing to serve Main Street America and small businesses because we are not creating enough accountants. We continue to invest in a traditional pipeline that is based on one way of becoming a CPA, which is to go to school and get an accounting degree and sit for the CPA exam while you work at a big firm in a big city. And that is falling apart because the big firm accounting model doesn't work anymore. The partner model and the billable hour model. And the in the pyramid shaped firm is disappearing, and you even see people going around with charts that show the pyramid becoming a diamond.

David Leary: [01:01:40] Not even.

David Leary: [01:01:40] A.

David Leary: [01:01:40] Diamond. It's like that weird hexagon.

Blake Oliver: [01:01:43] The corners, the bottom left and right corner of the triangle.

David Leary: [01:01:46] Are.

Blake Oliver: [01:01:46] Cut.

David Leary: [01:01:47] Away.

Blake Oliver: [01:01:47] And are being replaced by offshoring and AI. But if you do that, the pyramid falls over. It's no longer stable, and so you don't have the managers. And if you don't have the managers, who's going to go out and start a small firm and serve these municipalities. You see the problem. So it's up to us as a profession to figure out a new pipeline to augment the one that is failing. The old pipeline is drying up, and we need a new pipeline. Or maybe another way to think about it is that we have this funnel and it is like too narrow at the top, and we need to widen the top of that funnel That doesn't mean we widen the bottom of the funnel, necessarily. We can still keep standards high while allowing more people to enter the funnel.

David Leary: [01:02:43] Because.

David Leary: [01:02:43] Yeah, it's just it's a math game at this point.

David Leary: [01:02:46] But but really, I think.

David Leary: [01:02:47] Many people to drop out of the bottom of the funnel.

David Leary: [01:02:50] Yeah.

David Leary: [01:02:50] Are these experienced CPAs? You just have to fill a much wider funnel at the top.

Blake Oliver: [01:02:54] Yeah, and we need to get them from somewhere else. We need to make it possible for non accounting majors to become CPAs. It should not be so difficult. They should not have to take the equivalent of an accounting major. If you can learn the material outside of school or in a different class with a different name, you should be able to sit for the CPA exam. And we should work the exam so that it's less about being this like marathon type of activity. And we should like make it more about knowledge and skills. And actually, I was thinking about this the other day. The problem with the CPA exam. Um, it serves a purpose, right? Which is it's very difficult. It's a grind. It takes a long time and a lot of commitment to get through it. And that in many ways mirrors the traditional accounting profession. To be successful in public accounting, you have to be able to grind for 2 to 3 years in a large public accounting firm. So the CPA exam was designed to be a grind. Does that make sense?

David Leary: [01:04:05] Yeah. Yeah yeah.

Blake Oliver: [01:04:06] My argument is that you can test for knowledge without making people grind. And you will get people like me who don't want to grind.

David Leary: [01:04:18] So you can't argue.

David Leary: [01:04:19] It was a personality test before.

Blake Oliver: [01:04:22] Yeah. In many ways that's the filter. That's how the CPA exam filtered. And so the problem is it's it's still filtering that way. So we're getting grinders and we don't need grinders anymore. I mean we do need them. Don't get me wrong. We still need people who are willing to grind and do the work, but we also need people who are going to use these new tools and be creative and go solve these problems. We don't just need doers, we need thinkers. And the way the exam is set up and the traditional pipeline is set up is that it weeds out the thinkers. It was really hard for me to get through it, you know?

David Leary: [01:05:00] Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [01:05:01] And like I had extremely high test scores, but it wasn't because the material was difficult. The material was easy for me. You know, I passed all four CPA exams. No problem. First time easy. I got like a 96 or 97 on audit because that was the first exam I took, and I felt like I had to study my ass off for it. Yeah, I could do it, but it's the it was just like Grinding away was the way to do it. You know, if the if the exam was less of a grind, I could have done it very quickly. But it's designed to be a grind. And actually it was my music background that helped me do that because, like, I know how to go into a practice room and practice for six hours a day.

David Leary: [01:05:43] I can study for the exam.

Blake Oliver: [01:05:44] Two hours a day and do the grind. Yeah. But anyway, my point is that it is weeding out the people that we actually need in the profession. And it's not these incremental changes that we need to the exam. We need to rethink the pipeline. Rafi says why should we lower the standards in order to accommodate the mediocre class? Should the same strategy be applied to the medical field? I'm saying, Rafi, you don't understand. It's not about lowering standards, because I would say that grinding is not the standard we want. I'm saying make it less of a grind, and we could actually increase. If we did that, we could increase the skill and knowledge. We could actually make make the stuff that matters more important if we improve the exam, you could actually like I think you could do the CPA exam in one day. It doesn't need to be four parts. If we did adaptive testing, like the way the GMAT works, you wouldn't need four exams because you could. Basically, the way adaptive testing works is that if you get a question right, you get a harder question. If you get a question wrong, you get an easier question. And so the.

David Leary: [01:06:52] Test keeps.

David Leary: [01:06:53] Asking you questions about something to prove you don't know that part. And then.

David Leary: [01:06:56] Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [01:06:57] Yeah. And the CPA exam doesn't use any of that technology. It could be a lot shorter. Um, it could test for knowledge more than it tests like like a lot of the CPA exam two is about memorizing definitions. Um, it's not about like, you know, I mean, you.

David Leary: [01:07:14] Could.

Blake Oliver: [01:07:15] I think, honestly, like, uh, if I was designing the CPA exam, like, on the, um, on the accounting section of the exam, I would require every student to be able to construct an income statement, balance sheet, and statement of cash flows using both the indirect and direct methods from nothing but a trial balance. If you can't do that, you shouldn't be a CPA, and I know plenty of people who can't do that and still became CPAs.

David Leary: [01:07:43] So who would actually create the new test? Is that Nasba?

Blake Oliver: [01:07:48] It would be the AICPA and Nasba working together. Right. I think that's how so.

David Leary: [01:07:52] So if they do it so.

David Leary: [01:07:53] Full circle, right back to your very first story, one of the very first stories is like, how is this going to actually happen?

Blake Oliver: [01:07:59] Well, that's the problem is that the the AICPA has lost sight of its mission, which is to advocate for individual CPAs. It spends so much of its energy advocating for other stakeholders like university programs, professors, big accounting firms, people with influence, but not the individual. Cpas and the AICPA even went so far under Barry Melanson to create a competing designation and sell it. The Cgma can't. So this is the organization where their sole purpose is to grow the CPA, and instead of doing that, they create a new designation.

David Leary: [01:08:46] That they own.

Blake Oliver: [01:08:47] That they can sell and that that competes with the CPA. And they might tell you, oh, no, it doesn't, but it does, because all the new stuff that CPAs are supposed to learn, like the management accounting stuff, the advisory stuff, that's what they save for the cgma. So they basically just like cut off the CPA and said, this is going to stay the same when it really needs to adapt. And then he went and, you know, made the AICPA an international organization. So now it doesn't represent American CPAs. It represents accountants all over the world. Well, how is that good for American CPAs? Cps, I so I don't think it's going to well, it's going to have to be the AICPA. But I think that what it's going to be necessary is that the leadership of the AICPA needs to change, and it needs to start with the AICPA Council, that organization that like Congress of the AICPA. I don't think it's really representative of CPA's.

David Leary: [01:09:47] I think that's a problem.

David Leary: [01:09:48] Maybe that's the next initiative. Blake.

David Leary: [01:09:51] For Blake, for AICPA.

Blake Oliver: [01:09:52] Council, I think I got to become a member again. And what is the AICPA charge for their membership? You know, like hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of dollars so that they can sell you a life insurance policy at a discount.

David Leary: [01:10:07] But some people say that's.

David Leary: [01:10:08] The only reason to remember. Do you want to bring up Tate's comment? And I'll close it off with the one little story I have about.

David Leary: [01:10:13] What's.

Blake Oliver: [01:10:14] Tate's comment here that you want to highlight.

David Leary: [01:10:16] Is.

David Leary: [01:10:16] 1206 one here. I'll click on it. Show. Sure. Yeah. So Tate said once an audit can be done by AI and in real time, accounting won't need to be a profession anymore. Um, kind of say yes and kind of say no. So I don't know if you saw why release their earnings. And one of the major part of their new earnings is their consulting for AI is increased by 30%, the revenue for their AI consulting. This goes back to when we said when we saw these big four started spending billions on, oh, we're going to do $1 billion in AI this the other big four firm, we're going to do 2 billion on AI. It's not because they're replacing using AI to replace jobs in their companies. They're just doing it so they can spin up AI consulting departments to sell AI consulting to other companies. That's where the growth in AI is coming from. It's not because it's it's making the firm more efficient. It's not reducing jobs. It's not getting rid of the work. The AI is not going to get rid of this work. I just.

David Leary: [01:11:16] Don't see.

Blake Oliver: [01:11:16] And when it comes to audit, what a firm is paying for when they buy an audit, or the users, let's say the users of the audit, the audit letter. What are they? What are they buying? They're not buying like what the auditor did. We don't even get to see that those workpapers are all secret.

David Leary: [01:11:35] Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [01:11:36] What they're buying is the opinion. And, um, it's the company has to go get the opinion. And why do they go get it? It's because they need to go get a loan from a bank, or it's because they need to do it for their investors. And so the ultimate customer of that audit report is the bank. It's the investors, which are really the same thing, the owners of capital who are deploying that capital to that business and want some assurance that it's going to be used properly. So that is what is being sold. It is assurance. Ai cannot provide assurance. A human has to be the one who says, I checked all this stuff out and it looks legit, like I don't see banks and investors trusting an AI to do that. Now. They might trust an auditor who uses AI to do that. I would more than I would an auditor who uses old fashioned methods. So, you know, it's all going to be done by there's going to be a human signing off.

David Leary: [01:12:31] Yeah, they.

Blake Oliver: [01:12:31] Have to have a human in the loop.

David Leary: [01:12:32] They're doing it at very small scale. They're using AI to approve a mortgage loan, small things. But for a company, a business, I'm not sure AI is at that point yet and may not be for a while until like.

David Leary: [01:12:44] Look, dude, it's only like.

David Leary: [01:12:46] You think.

David Leary: [01:12:46] It's close. A lot of.

Blake Oliver: [01:12:47] Applications where it's like 50% accurate. I think I had a story here we didn't get to, but it's about vibe working with Microsoft's new, uh, agent Mode and office agent. And they said that yeah, their AI in Excel, their agent mode in Excel achieves a 57.2% accuracy on spreadsheet benchmarks, 57.2% accuracy is not going to cut it.

David Leary: [01:13:13] No.

Blake Oliver: [01:13:14] Not not even 98% accuracy is going to cut it. You got to get it to 100% or whatever. You know, effectively 100% is 99.99% before you can trust it. And that's that always takes a lot longer than people think. Remember self-driving cars? How long we've been talking about that? I remember talking about self-driving cars ten, ten years ago with you, David.

David Leary: [01:13:37] And we were like, it's.

Blake Oliver: [01:13:38] Going to come like next.

David Leary: [01:13:39] Year.

Blake Oliver: [01:13:39] A year later. And then getting it to the point where it's like people are comfortable that last literally like that last mile or that, that, that last bit of comfort. It's got to be so good before you can trust it with your life.

David Leary: [01:13:55] In the grand.

David Leary: [01:13:55] Scheme, based on the number of vehicles.

David Leary: [01:13:57] And number of people that have driven a self-driving car, they basically don't exist.

David Leary: [01:14:00] Like, yeah, see, I disagree.

Blake Oliver: [01:14:02] Now, Tate says audit will go from people to software, and we will only need to get SOC reports for audit software that uses AI and does it in real time. Sorry, Tate, totally disagree with you. Um, that's like that's like the same argument that the Bitcoin bros use where they say, like Bitcoin is going to supplant fiat currency.

David Leary: [01:14:22] Or the argument that.

David Leary: [01:14:23] Because of the blockchain, everything's instantly audible. They argue.

David Leary: [01:14:26] That or.

Blake Oliver: [01:14:27] Transparent.

David Leary: [01:14:27] Right.

Blake Oliver: [01:14:28] Transparent like you still you're so when you go from like a traditional money to digital money or crypto, you're trading trust in one thing for another. So with traditional currency or fiat currency, you are trusting the systems, the institutions and the people, the banks, the regulators, the government. When you go to crypto, you're trusting the technologists, the code, the algorithm. They're still trust. That has to happen there. And the only reason that people trust Bitcoin is because we haven't had a failure of it yet. But saying.

David Leary: [01:15:08] That, saying that Bitcoin.

Blake Oliver: [01:15:10] Saying that the Bitcoin algorithm will never be hacked and will never fail and will always recover. Is like to me, the same thing as when people said the housing market will never crash. Never say never. And I have not seen a good argument for how Bitcoin would recover from a catastrophic, uh, hack.

David Leary: [01:15:35] And I haven't. Everybody says, oh, bookkeeping jobs to AI is going to take those away first. We know a lot of accountants, a lot of accountants. Between the show and knowing personally, I have yet to talk to an accountant that says, oh, we implemented this thing and now we got we were able to let go of two of my staff, or I got rid of my controller department. No, it doesn't exist. And so when.

David Leary: [01:15:57] It's not in.

Blake Oliver: [01:15:57] The small.

David Leary: [01:15:58] Firms.

David Leary: [01:15:58] And then but then even. No, but I mean, even like people that work in private, we know accountants that work in private. I'm not. So every time I see these articles of like, oh, so and so is laying off 400 people in their accounting department to move to AI or these articles like that. I'm very skeptical. I just think.

David Leary: [01:16:13] That, yeah.

David Leary: [01:16:14] We're getting.

David Leary: [01:16:14] Rid of they're using.

Blake Oliver: [01:16:15] It as they're using it as an excuse.

David Leary: [01:16:17] Yeah.

David Leary: [01:16:17] It's an easy excuse to lay people off because I have not talked to one accountant in the last two years. It's like, oh, we implemented this AI thing and now we got rid of people, even our own company. Blake, we're using AI a lot. We're not getting rid of anybody. We just hired more engineers. Like, we're not getting rid of anybody.

David Leary: [01:16:34] That's right.

Blake Oliver: [01:16:35] It's just making us more productive.

David Leary: [01:16:36] Effective? Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [01:16:36] Um, I want to highlight a comment from, uh, juventino. Tino says that, uh, it's a sad day for me and my small staff of five accountants. We were furloughed yesterday. But the good news is I can get this honeydew list completed. I'm sorry to hear that, Tino. That sucks. Um, see, this is the real world impact of a government shutdown. Is like. And I hope that, like, our listeners who support it, um, understand that, like, these are real people. These are their livelihoods. And like, this is screwing that up and, like, just using people as a negotiating tool. A collateral is just wrong. It feels wrong to me anyway, and I think it should. I would hope it would feel wrong to you that, like there are people we may have disagreements about how to spend money in this government, but we shouldn't be putting people in the line of fire when it comes to that, economically or otherwise.

David Leary: [01:17:30] Well, it's.

David Leary: [01:17:31] People who are working for the government. But then even as citizens, we're not getting services that we deserve as taxpayers.

Blake Oliver: [01:17:37] Yeah, veterans are not getting their services. Flights are being delayed. I mean, think about all those, like air traffic controllers, really talented people who have dedicated their careers to keeping us safe. And the TSA people to being asked to come to work without pay, with no guarantee from the Trump administration that they're going to even get back pay.

David Leary: [01:18:00] Well, put it this way. So you have there are it's a very stressful job. I think air traffic controllers like one of the top most stressful jobs Now you have these financial concerns stressing you out at home because you're not getting a paycheck is yeah, it's not going to bode well for somebody.

Blake Oliver: [01:18:15] And we know that, you know, like half of people or more in this country live paycheck to paycheck. So you're really creating a problem for them. And, you know, maybe if you're a politician who's, you know, a millionaire because everyone in Congress is a millionaire, basically.

David Leary: [01:18:27] Seems to be it doesn't seem like.

Blake Oliver: [01:18:28] A problem to you. You're like, oh, yeah, I could I could go without a paycheck for a while. Most people can't. So I don't like this as a negotiating tool. And I just, you know, I it's just shouldn't be it's just the wrong way to do it. And I would I hope that we push back on that. Um. It's sad Tate wants to know where we get our data on what our listeners like listening to. We get that from a survey that we share out occasionally, which we should do again toward the end of this year. We have a survey that we do on what topics you want to hear us talk about. And funny enough, crypto came in at the bottom of the list. Last time we did the.

David Leary: [01:19:08] Survey.

David Leary: [01:19:08] And then people complained about AI. But I think I texted you before we did the show. I feel like I have a thousand AI stories that just all the news about AI. We're in a stock market bubble. These people got laid off because of AI. It's just it's everywhere. You can't get away from it.

Blake Oliver: [01:19:22] Uh, daddy and a caddie says, why don't you guys enable super chats? I've heard about this feature on YouTube. We don't stream live on YouTube, but maybe we should, like, look into super chats. We use another service that streams to YouTube for us.

David Leary: [01:19:38] So what do we get out of the chat?

David Leary: [01:19:39] Chat? Does that mean people can pay us crypto?

David Leary: [01:19:41] I don't know what. Give us a little. Give us crypto.

David Leary: [01:19:44] What does.

David Leary: [01:19:44] This mean?

Blake Oliver: [01:19:45] Yeah, let us know what it does. Ryan says great episode today. Thanks so much Ryan. Don't forget that you can earn free, free continuing professional education credit.

David Leary: [01:19:57] For.

Blake Oliver: [01:19:57] Listening to podcasts.

Speaker4: [01:19:58] Like this one with your app.

Blake Oliver: [01:20:02] Yes, that's the earmark app, available for free on the App Store or the Google Play Store, or in your web browser.

Speaker4: [01:20:10] Go to earmark in your web browser.

Blake Oliver: [01:20:14] Earn free CPE. Get it all done before the end of the year. Support the work we do for the low low price of one 6999. Yes, a penny less than $170. That'll get you unlimited CPE for the next 12 months.

David Leary: [01:20:32] Now's the time to do it. I mean, end of year is coming up like we will do.

Blake Oliver: [01:20:35] But you don't have to pay. You don't have to pay. You can do one for free per week forever. And our plan is to let you do that forever, because we want to make CPE affordable and accessible. And, um, yeah, that's it. We can we can wrap it up.

David Leary: [01:20:53] I think you were hit. I'm good.

Blake Oliver: [01:20:55] Oh, yeah. And if you if you bought if you buy now. Right. Like we keep your price the same when we raise the prices for all of our current subscribers, everybody who's been with us since the beginning, I mean, we've got people locked in at 99.99, and we don't plan on changing that anytime.

David Leary: [01:21:11] A philosophical belief and and being now that I think we're pushing like nine to maybe. No it's more nine. We might be pushing almost $20,000 a year we spent on SaaS apps, and I hate it when they just raised the price on you, even though you've been using it for years and years and years.

David Leary: [01:21:26] So yeah.

Blake Oliver: [01:21:26] There should be like a it's funny because we talk about raising prices in the accounting profession. Like you should do that every year. But there's also an argument that like if a client or a customer is really good, then you don't. And it's sort of like like a it gives them a discount for being like loyal. So I can see it going both ways. All right. Um, Tate says we all raise prices. Yeah, we did raise prices, but we we honored the existing prices for our.

David Leary: [01:21:53] New.

Blake Oliver: [01:21:53] Subscribers. Yeah. So, I mean, we're eventually going to take this up to 200 a year. So lock in, lock in at 170 and get that, um, I still think it's still a great deal, even at 200. And we're adding more and more content. We're going to get all that technical content. We want to get those state ethics courses in there. That's my goal next year, is I want to do the big states ethics courses so that we can be a one stop shop. We're doing live CPE now.

David Leary: [01:22:17] Rolling out our.

David Leary: [01:22:18] New UI, because when you have 2600 courses, even if we have the technical content, it's hard to find it. So we have a new UI coming out that's more, uh, more browsable, if you want to call it that.

Blake Oliver: [01:22:28] If you are doing a live event and you want to have earmarked, do the CPE for it. We want to get you in on that beta. I think we're booked up for the end of the year. Right, David. And but for 2026.

David Leary: [01:22:41] Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [01:22:41] We'd love to do your conference. And it's like so easy. Your attendees will just take a picture of a QR code with their camera on their phone and it'll they put in their name and email, and then it starts tracking. They can like they can log into the sessions or check into the sessions using their phone. Check out. It's all automatic. You don't have to do anything. As a as an organizer, except provide us the details of the sessions. All right. Thank you to everyone who joined us today. It was a big, big crowd. We got Tate and Boring accountant and Aaron and DD one and Ryan and Tino and, uh, as. Oh, as said, let's wait to see the impact of dropping the 150 credit rule. It will likely bring more people into the profession. Some of the computer science majors may also rethink accounting if jobs dry up in tech. I agree, I like the flexibility. Yeah, great to see you all. Sorry if I missed your name. Thanks to everyone who commented. There's a lot.

David Leary: [01:23:34] Going on, a lot of comments today.

Blake Oliver: [01:23:35] A lot of comments. Gator NYC, great to see you Andrea. Um, too many. Debra. Great to see you. Debra Zweifel hey, how are you? Uh Zeffie says I'm an advisor to all government officials. I give them lots of advice and they ignore it. Okay. Um, see you around here next week, David.

David Leary: [01:23:54] Bye, everyone.