The Accounting Podcast

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Blake Oliver: [00:00:05] Kind of wild to think that here we have a situation where basically the biggest bank in cryptocurrency has a token with a circulation of 185 billion, and the company that issues it and controls it has never undergone a full financial statement audit.

David Leary: [00:00:24] Coming to you weekly from the OnPay Recording Studio.

Blake Oliver: [00:00:30] Hello and welcome back to the Accounting Podcast, your weekly roundup of news in the profession. I'm Blake Oliver.

David Leary: [00:00:36] And I'm David Leary. And Blake, if you saw the news. But it finally happened. The thing you've been fearing about you were. You were scared of. You were so scared of this that you almost became pro-Trump and pro dosh for a little while there.

Blake Oliver: [00:00:50] Oh, I forgot about that.

David Leary: [00:00:51] You're afraid that the country was going to collapse or why civilizations collapse. And the reason why you've always said is because the government becomes insolvent.

Blake Oliver: [00:01:01] That's right.

David Leary: [00:01:02] It's official now.

Blake Oliver: [00:01:03] Based on the.

David Leary: [00:01:04] 2025 financial statements, the US is now in a -4.1. -$41 trillion deficit. It's official. We are insolvent.

Blake Oliver: [00:01:16] Our balance sheet we are way way upside down. And we'll talk about that after. We thank our sponsors who are our sponsors for this week.

David Leary: [00:01:24] David sponsors this week we have cloud accountants staffing on pay and UNC Kenan-flagler Business School.

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Blake Oliver: [00:03:17] And when your own government, the accountants and your own government, say that the US is insolvent, we need to pay attention to it. And it's crazy that this didn't get reported widely in the press. We saw it thanks to an article that was in fortune, and the headline is Treasury just declared the US insolvent. And here's the financial picture. This is from the Treasury Department's own consolidated financial statements for fiscal year 2025. The numbers 6 trillion in total assets against nearly 48 trillion in total liabilities as of September 30th, 2025, and that 48 trillion in reported liabilities doesn't even include the unfunded obligations of social insurance programs like Social Security and Medicare. Those we report separately on an off balance sheet statement of social insurance, our consolidated balance sheet position. Excluding these off balance sheet items deteriorated by about 2 trillion from 2024 to 2025, reaching that staggering -$42 trillion total liabilities. Now, nearly eight times the value of reported assets. Largest drivers, 2 trillion increase in federal debt and interest payable, which is now 30 trillion, and a 439 billion increase in federal employee and veteran benefits payable. That's now about 15.5 trillion. The off balance sheet picture. The Social Security Medicare that surged by 10 trillion in a single year, and now it's at $88 trillion. So if you add the 88,000,000,000,000 in 75 year off balance sheet obligations to the 48 trillion in official balance sheet liabilities, total federal obligations are now 136 trillion, which is five times the US annual GDP.

David Leary: [00:05:26] You could argue it's even worse than that because if you think about the Social Security obligation, that's you're spreading that 88 million over 75 years. But 2024 to 2025, the whole the debt got worse by 2.7 $2.2 trillion times 2 trillion times 75. Now we're at $140 trillion over the next 75 years. If because obviously Doge didn't work. Nothing got cut. This is this is the reason people voted for Trump. A huge number of people, because they wanted the deficit to stop deficit spending. And it just keeps going. I don't can it be stopped? I don't know.

Blake Oliver: [00:06:03] These numbers are really big. So let's put this into perspective. If you divide every number by 100 million, you can get a picture of what this would look like if the US were a typical middle class family. So what would the U.S. be in that case? Like if it was a household, the household would be earning about $52,000 a year and spending 73,000. So running basically a $21,000 a year deficit. Borrowing that, and it would owe about $1.3 million. So imagine a family making $52,000 that owes like $1.3 $3 million in a line of credit.

David Leary: [00:06:53] Nobody would give that person credit anymore, but obviously.

Blake Oliver: [00:06:55] Well.

David Leary: [00:06:56] You could just print more money.

Blake Oliver: [00:06:59] Well, we can borrow right now and we can print money right now. But how long can we do that? Inevitably, the merry go round will stop eventually. Other countries, investors in other countries are going to stop buying US debt. Our bonds and then interest rates are going to go up if we don't solve this. And when interest rates go up, economic growth slows and you get into this stagnation kind of situation that happened in the UK after World War Two. So this is not like something new. This is something that has happened to many great powers over the last hundreds of years. Um, and we can see it coming, but it seems like there's, there's no political will to do anything about it.

David Leary: [00:07:48] And so the part I thought was interesting in the article, they mentioned how the Government Accounting Office issued a disclaimer of opinion for the 29th consecutive year. So I had to go look up what is this disclaimer of opinion? And so like to rewind, if you think about a clean opinion means these look good. The books look good. Qualified opinion means mostly good with some issues. Adverse opinion. These are wrong. Disclaimer of opinion is we can't tell. We have no idea if the books are correct or not. And a lot of this is because of the the military Department of Defense, Department of War, whatever we're calling it these days, has yet to pass an audit because exactly how do they audit the rest of the government? How can you depend on the numbers?

Blake Oliver: [00:08:30] Do we even know that these numbers are right? Could it be even worse? It's hard to tell. All right, moving on. Let's switch over to App News. I'm so excited to talk about this because we've had all these releases from these AI companies, Claude and, and Anthropic and OpenAI that have enabled now reliable workflows. And we have another AI tax company that has that claims they have released an AI agent that can complete tax returns from start to finish without the preparer touching a keyboard or mouse. This is tax GPT, and they say that their tool can work with any web based intake onboarding. Tax prep and delivery software without requiring firms to adopt a new portal or system of record. So this is similar as it's described. It seems similar to what Claude Cowork can do, where you can create an agent that works both with files on your computer and in the cloud by connecting to your web browser. So Claude Cowork can open up a tab and you can give it permissions and it can go and work in any of these apps without having a direct API connection.

David Leary: [00:09:48] So I'm the client. I use whatever portal to upload my stuff. And on your firm, on that side of the firm, you just turn on this agent, this tool, whatever they're calling it, tax, GPT. I think it's what it's called. Is it? Yeah. And that does the whole return. I don't have to do anything and just collect the money for the return. Charge the client.

Blake Oliver: [00:10:06] It pulls in the information from the source docs from that portal. The W-2s 1099 K-1's Excel trial balances. Those can be in local folders or in a cloud portal as long as the agent can access them. And then it takes those numbers and puts them into the return. And then it has another agent, they call it Agent Andrew, which is a review agent that then reconciles the source documents against the prepared return, identifies items that may be sensitive from an audit perspective, and then sends the flagged issues to a a human for review and sign off.

David Leary: [00:10:43] So what's the what's the URL of this company? Because I know there's another tax GPT AI that exists and I don't think it's the same company. If somebody wants to go the URL.

Blake Oliver: [00:10:52] So it's it's just tax GPT comm.

David Leary: [00:10:56] Techsupport.com. Yes. So there's another company that's dot ai.com.

Blake Oliver: [00:11:01] So this tool is optimized for form 1040 returns individual returns. They say that 1065 and 1120 are on their roadmap. Um and they've tested the product with platforms such as Intuit Proconnect Pro series, tax Slayer 360 systems, Google Drive, Safe Send, Hub Sync, Short Prep, a lot of the tools that tax pros are using already. Um.

David Leary: [00:11:27] So why go after tax pros if you can do this, just, just get in bed with the, the portal companies and just put your own portal and just go after TurboTax, go after the TurboTax market. If this is individual returns.

Blake Oliver: [00:11:41] That I think is a great question for our guests today. Kenji Kuramoto, welcome, Kenji, to the accounting podcast.

Kenji Kuramoto: [00:11:50] Hey what's up guys? Glad to be here. It's been a while.

Blake Oliver: [00:11:53] Kenji is the new managing partner in residence at basis, another AI agent company for accountants. We reported in a previous episode that basis had built an AI agent that can complete a partnership return at 1065 from start to finish. Kenji is also the founder of acuity, one of the leading modern accounting firms in the US based out of Atlanta. Kenji, I'd love to get your take on that question from David about, well, what was it? David, why don't we repeat.

David Leary: [00:12:23] Just why I'm on their page for Techsupport.com. And they have a whole thing about using this in your firm tax and accounting firms. But if they can really do this, just bypass the firm entirely.

Kenji Kuramoto: [00:12:34] Like I mean, it certainly I think we're certainly seeing people go out there and do this on their own, right in using ChatGPT or using Claude themselves. So will people do that? Likely. I don't know what their strategy is going to be there. I mean, I think there's definitely still opportunity and room for accountants here. I mean, to actually be there to help on the review side. And I think some people are just going to always feel that way of like, I'd like some level of judgment, some segregation of duties here beyond just an agent doing the work. But it is I mean, it is a crazy interesting time in the profession right now. And which is, I think I've loved listening to the show and you guys talk about and just seeing how many new pieces of technology are coming up, but we're going to talk about a bunch of them later on the show. But like, it's just a incredible how much is happening in the space right now from a tool standpoint.

Blake Oliver: [00:13:27] Yeah. And I'm imagining that these tools are going to automate, you know, 80, 90% of the return, but there are going to be exceptions. And somebody has to look at those and figure those out. And that's going to be a human. And like you said, Kenji, our end users, taxpayers who have complex situations going to be comfortable just letting an AI do it. Maybe, maybe the simple returns. Yes. Right. But complex stuff I wouldn't want to bet on, you know, just trust the AI when we know that it can only get, you know, so, so far. It might not be able to get to 100%.

David Leary: [00:14:06] I saw an article.

Kenji Kuramoto: [00:14:07] Yeah. Go ahead.

David Leary: [00:14:08] I said I saw an article on payments. Com this week about how, you know, the common folks are just using AI before they ever talk to a tax pro. They're doing their taxes with just, you know, the off the shelf, so ChatGPT, Gemini, etc. and what caught my eye was the reason for them doing it. And it's the appeal. And like what I always say about me working with a tax pro now, it's more work than it used to be when I did it myself with TurboTax. Right? And the difference is QuickBooks or sorry, Intuit understands experience and the TurboTax gives you an experience that you don't get from a firm. Well, this is why people are using these tools. The appeal is speed and simplicity. Ai can explain tax concepts, organize the documents, and suggest deductions. These are things you are not getting from your tax professional, right? So if tax professionals don't provide an overall experience, people are going to keep using these tools. They're not using this tool to avoid paying a tax professional. They're doing it because it's convenient. At the end of the day.

Blake Oliver: [00:15:08] So Kenji, I want to hear more about your new role at, uh, at basis. What does it mean to be managing partner in residence at a AI accounting and tax agent builder?

Kenji Kuramoto: [00:15:21] Yeah, yeah, it's, um, it's a different title and different role for sure. And I don't know that it's, um, I've seen it anywhere else, which kind of was appealing here. I know it's, um, I've had a few people. David, you being one of them were like, wait, what is going on?

David Leary: [00:15:34] Like we're on the loop. I just saw your wife post your moving to New York City. I'm like, what is happening?

Kenji Kuramoto: [00:15:38] What's kept you doing? What is he up to? I mean, it was interesting because. Yeah, I, um, for those who've listened before, you know, we came on the and put some things in earmark and we talked about us selling our for me and, and my other colleagues that was happened a little over a year ago. So we actually sold our cars and advisory and tax practice. And honestly, I took a year off like I was, I was quote unquote retired. I thought I might stay that way. I was most of my accounting friends like you guys were, you know, I'd see you at conferences, like, what are you doing here? I thought you were retired. Why are you here? And I guess, um, I guess I maybe need a broader friend group than just accountants, but, like, those are all my friends are at events, so you guys know how that goes. But also, like, it was a fun time to step back a little bit. I mean, when you're running a firm, when you're working in accounting, it can be a lot. And so I was able to step back and just kind of observe what was happening. I was doing some angel investing in this space too. And I mean, it just kept getting more and more interesting out there of like, you know, when people were talking about agents doing work and moving beyond using, you know, LMS just for research and just for helping with, you know, be a thought partner. All of a sudden, this leap into now we're watching AI become agentic and actually start doing work, like you mentioned, like ten 40s and 1065. And so I met the crew over here from bassist, the two co-founders, gosh, three years ago when they were just getting started, I'm always a curious person in the space with tech.

Kenji Kuramoto: [00:17:07] And so we kind of just kept up and we kind of reconnected again last year and just were talking more and they were asking me some questions and they kind of like, hey, we, we have been so focused on building great product, like really world class products specifically for accountants. Um, we've been really fortunate to get some great customers at some of the top 25 firms globally. And all of our efforts really been going on to serving those two things like we think we need. We want to start interacting a bit more with the profession, and we'd like to do it a little differently. We'd like to do it really with someone who has the lived experience, who sat in the chair, walked in the shoes of other accountants to make sure that, you know, the voice of the profession is being heard inside of basis. They felt that was very important. And I think it's I was kind of helping him a little bit, workshop the idea of it. And next thing you know, I just became so much more obsessed with what they were building. It was so impressed with watching these agents do work, some of the grunt work that we've had to experience as accountants that I just couldn't like. I couldn't shake it. My wife even said to me, she's like, I haven't seen you this excited about something in so long. And they're all there. Yeah, they're up here in New York is David, you mentioned, um, it's kind of a cool thing.

Kenji Kuramoto: [00:18:23] We were a remote firm forever, so I'm used to being remote. They're all onsite here in New York. But literally it was so compelling and interesting. I'm like, all right, I'm willing to kind of come out of retirement. And just this is too fascinating, I think, for me to sit on the sidelines, um, and just observe the fact that they wanted me in this role to kind of be a party that would kind of communicate to and from the, the accounting profession was just really intriguing. So it's been, I've been here about a month now and I've been kind of on quiet. This is the first place right here with you guys. And I'm really sharing the news because I wanted to come in and just absorb and like, learn and see what's going on. And it's, it's fascinating. It's just fascinating what's happening in the profession to every single day, seeing new companies pop up and new solutions for accountants. I mean, it's certainly challenging navigating an already kind of busy app ecosystem. It feels like it's getting even busier, but it's also really exciting too. So yeah, it's a, it's an interesting role here. Uh, folks will probably get tired of me anyway. Like we'll see me back, I'll be back out doing the conferences and speaking and things and spending time with accountants. But that's, that's just the community I love. That's the community that's been good to me. And um, as fun as it was like being on like a year of kind of vacation. I mean, it's just, I, it was too exciting what they're building over here, what's happening in the space to just sit on the sidelines?

Blake Oliver: [00:19:40] So let's talk about what basis is building there was that 1065 agent, but I think there's like a lot of different kinds of agents. That basis is building for accounting firms and, and larger firms, right? Like mid-size, uh, big firms. Like what have you seen that has gotten you excited in particular?

Kenji Kuramoto: [00:19:58] You know, the first place they started? So we, we do have agents that can cut across all practices, um, audit Cass tax, um, which is exciting. Um, but they started in Cass, which is my kind of background, my firm acuity really specialized in that. So I got to see, I got to see some of the how agents were working inside of Cass. And it was fascinating to really look at things like whether it was certainly categorization of transactions or bank reconciliations. But even taking complex things like more complex things like payroll. Messy payroll entries and being able to think through like, hey, I'm going to get this entry booked for you in your GL system for you. I'm also going to do an accrual because the pay period doesn't match up to the month end. And I'm also going to book you the reversing entry next month and document all that clearly and build you a set of work papers. And I saw that and I was like, this was before really all of us were messing with cloud code. I saw this like last year, and I was like, wait, what? And it just kind of got me like thinking so differently because as a, as a CAS leader and, you know, we, we grew our firm a good bit. Our bottleneck was always just team members like, right. You couldn't find plenty of people need help getting their books cleaned up, but like, it's unrealistic to think of like one accountant or even a team managing massive numbers of clients from a cost perspective. And so this right away I was like, oh my gosh, what a unlock this is for some of just the transactional work. This could be, and they could have team members now actually interfacing with clients and doing more complex work. So that grabbed me right away just because of my background and seeing these agents take actual steps and work, not no longer just the research still that's and so yeah, that's one of many workflows we've done. But yeah.

David Leary: [00:21:48] When you say unlock. Kenji. So I know like previous, I've talked to some firms that are super efficient and they might be able to have one, uh, one bookkeeper handle 45 to 60 clients, right? A super efficient, a really good bookkeeper on their team. And then I don't know what your ratios were at acuity before, but when you say unlock, like, is this going to be like, hey, now one person can do 200 clients.

Kenji Kuramoto: [00:22:12] I mean, that's the hope, right? I think we're seeing early, early gains. We're trying to, you know, by within a year, get folks up to, um, hopefully 60 to 80%, you know, increase in efficiency rates. And I think it'll improve even from there. But it's I just think it's amazing when you think about agents, like almost from a different perspective. The other thing that's cool about being here at basis is we are truly an AI native company. And so I'm getting the benefit of like one serving the customers that I care most about, which are fellow accountants. But two, our company's a native AI company. We have agents working all around us here at basis and helping us. We have a team. It's cool. It's called the Atlas team and it's not it. It's like Atlas. All they do are build agents for the benefit of each of us internally. They they look for places where they can make all of us individually more productive. And that that team has a goal of making every individual at basis 100 times more productive. And so I don't know, all of us are there yet, but that like view of where agents can wrap around an individual and make them more productive, same one we're going to have for accountants too. So it's just an exciting it's a super exciting time. Um, because I think if you think about cars too, David, I think, um, it's probably compared to audit and tax, it's still got the most addressable market left to go out and get cars is kind of the newer practice on the block a little bit.

Kenji Kuramoto: [00:23:38] And you know, the firms that have the companies are getting audited. They're, you know, getting audited. We're going to find one of the firms to do it tax work. But Kaz, a lot of companies are doing the books themselves right now and could probably benefit from accountants doing it and running their processes. So it's just a huge upside in the market, but it's fun also watching it to work in tax working audit like the 1065 you mentioned. So it's nice that I think people start really clicking with it when we start thinking about agents, whether they're IRAs or people are building themselves. I mean, Blake, I was listening to you talk about filing that tax return in California. You know, building some things there. Like it's just amazing thinking about these agents are actually now becoming a component of our workforce, right? You've got accountants and you've you get agents. And this is, I think, the future state we're moving into. And it is a little complicated because what does that do to the shape of our firm's the work we do?

Blake Oliver: [00:24:29] Yeah. I want to talk about that after we thank our next sponsor and that is on pay. Are you tired of payroll headaches getting in the way of the client experience? You want to deliver manual workflows, creating bottlenecks, compliance nightmares, and endless support calls that go nowhere. There's a better way for your team and your clients on pay. Is the payroll partner that accountants and bookkeepers actually love. Why? Because it's easy to use, packed with value, and backed by support that actually supports you. Their team gets rave reviews for being fast, expert, and actually reachable when you need them on pay handles the heavy lifting. You get a dedicated onboarding coordinator who sets up worker profiles and transfers year to date data from previous providers, all at no extra cost. There's seamless QuickBooks and Xero integrations. Eliminate manual journal entries, and they support any type of business use. Serve farms, restaurants, nonprofits, you name it. Amp can handle it. Handle unique requirements without adding complexity. And Onp keeps pricing simple to everything your clients expect from multi-state filing to off cycle pay runs is included. No hidden fees. No surprises. To book a demo, head over to The Accounting Podcast. That's The Accounting Podcast dot o p a y. And to your point, Kenji, about this changing firms, we've got a couple of stories here that David and I spotted that point to exactly that. And one of them is about how AI in accounting job postings is up 67%. David, you had this in your list. That is a lot.

David Leary: [00:26:05] Yeah. So if you if you go back to 20, 25, 18% of job postings for accounting jobs said the word AI skills required in the requirements, but now it's up to 30%. So one third of all accounting related jobs are saying they want some AI skills for that job, which I mean, that's one third of all job postings. So, you know, there's some old job postings that have been refreshed or people just use their old template and they copy and paste. So it's probably actually higher than that. It's just people are behind on updating their postings. The requirement is the real world requirement is probably 50%. I imagine half of all accounting job. Job interviews, job postings, job help. Wanted boards are probably want AI skills, at least for half the jobs. Now there's zero doubt on that.

Blake Oliver: [00:26:49] And also, I saw a story in Bloomberg Law about how AI is pressuring accounting firms to move beyond the billable hour. So we're finally seeing big firms, not just small ones, think about what are we going to do when AI is automating the work that we've been charging hourly for? These are not small firms. Large firms like PwC, KPMG and RSM are exploring new pricing approaches because they're realizing that AI is going to cut those billable hours. And I'm wondering, does that mean that we are finally, in our lifetimes, going to see the end of the billable timesheet? And maybe, if we're lucky, even the end of the timesheet as it stands, I don't know. Kenji, what do you think?

Kenji Kuramoto: [00:27:38] I mean, I've heard this from a few firms already who've talked about like, this is accelerating that pace of change around like we got to get off the billable hour because you're exactly right. This this may be the thing that finally gets us there, like real incentive of like, where, oh my gosh, if I just used AI to help me get my work done and I'm cutting down my hours and I bill by those like I'm losing revenue, like, what am I going to do? Like, so that's, that's, there's a motivation right there for sure.

David Leary: [00:28:04] And I kind of agree in 100% disagree, disagree based on the week we had here at earmark, like, yes, I totally agree. Like use AI, use less hours. You can't build for our right? But guess what? You can bill for tokens. So you're going to be able to have a billable token time and you're going to. And so firms are going to mark these up. So if I think about this, like take a step back at earmark, we're burning tons of tokens. Our course writers are using Claude burning tokens. Our developers are using cloud code and or cursor and or GitHub copilot burning tokens. I'm burning them in retool. Like we have an AI agent in retool that can pull data from our database. Um, I'm burning them in ChatGPT prepping for the show. Our email program missive is burning tokens. Uh, God knows how many Blake are burning. Blake's always burning tokens on all kinds of stupid shit. I don't know what he's burning tokens for. Um, I'm on my phone. I have Microsoft copilot, Google Gemini. I vibe coded an app a while back, and it's still burning tokens. I don't even know why I'm not even working on it. And it's still I get charged for tokens.

David Leary: [00:29:05] Right? And so two days ago, we had some automation stop working at earmark and then we're trying to figure it out. I'm going to pay ten bucks here. I put 100 bucks here. I'm trying to. It keeps saying there's not enough tokens. We text Blake. Blake finally gets in. Blake fixes it somehow through this other website part. So. But we spent five plus people hours trying to increase our tokens and get our automation working again. The only platform, in my opinion I've seen that has clear token usage is 11 labs. It has like a counter in the corner. You have 50,000, you've used 35,000. It just shows you what your tokens are. But in general, there is zero visibility to what a token is, what you're being charged for, right? I went and searched on Twitter. If you look at like Claude and Token on Twitter, people accuse Claude of burning extra tokens on purpose. It's really just the Wild West. It's all confusing, right? Actually, even your company Kenji basis, there's no prices. What are you guys charging for? Use. If I use a lot of AI agent tokens, are you going to charge me more?

Kenji Kuramoto: [00:30:04] Yeah, right now they're not. But I mean, I think this is a great question for anybody. And all of us are going to be using AI is like that pricing model has got to change for everyone, right? Because this is I think people have used these models as if, um, you know, they're just limitless. Like, oh, I can just burn as many as I want. Or I see people sometimes who are like, I'm going to use cloud Cowork for a simple question. Like, you don't know, you don't need to do that. You can put that in just regular chat. Right? And so people will always pick, why shouldn't I pick the best model? Well, because in many cases they're going to burn more tokens. You don't need that. So there's that's I think you're right, David. That's going to come to a reckoning where this is going to very much impact the cost to deliver a lot of these services. And I think it's just the beginning where people are going to have to start, whether even modeling it in their financials and start pricing and charging people for it. So yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:30:53] Well, let me add some context to this.

David Leary: [00:30:55] Two, I saw two things kind of bubble up from this two terms. One was this concept of token anxiety, right? You can't really track the tokens. And then this other term I saw fly by kind of is this concept of AI finops. And that's where my brain's at. This is an opportunity as a firm to offer outsource. If you can become an expert on how tokens get burnt, how how to how they work on every platform does it differently. What it means and if you can help. If we're a small business and we're having this issue with these tokens and the tokens spend and what's going on. No control over it. All your clients are that are using AI. There's an opportunity here for firms to become a token expert and offer it as a service. Go ahead.

Blake Oliver: [00:31:36] Blake, we have a question in the live stream from Jerilyn who asks how much is a token? And it's not a dumb question. Jerilyn it's a great question.

David Leary: [00:31:45] It's part of the problem.

Blake Oliver: [00:31:47] Part of the problem is that all the different vendors charge different amounts. A token is, you know, this roughly equivalent to like a word. It's the mathematical representation of a word or a phrase or a number. And so every time you, you know, prompt an AI, you're, you're inputting tokens. That's your prompt. The words get converted into math. And then some sort of token number is calculated and you're charged for that. And then when the model spits back its response, whether that's, you know, images or words or numbers, those are then represented as tokens. And you're charged a lot of these services when you use the API. They charge you per use, not a token.

David Leary: [00:32:29] They charge, you reuse. So if you have a thread, it goes and rereads the thread and charges you for all the other thread again, over and over and over again. That's the issue. Nobody has any visibility into this.

Blake Oliver: [00:32:39] But here's the thing is like, the reason I don't care as a founder right now is that when I had to go fix Claude, because all of our internal automations broke, because I forgot to change the credit card in the console and the platform. And I saw what our monthly spend is for all of the Zapier automation that we do with AI, which is like our entire course drafting process at earmark, it was $70 in the last 30 days. That's how cheap it is right now. Now, I wonder if that's just a temporary thing. Like when Uber was new and everything was really, really cheap and you could get like.

David Leary: [00:33:14] Subsidized.

Blake Oliver: [00:33:14] Uber rides? Yeah, it's subsidized right now, but all these billions going into these AI companies. But will that last forever? I doubt it, right.

David Leary: [00:33:22] Eventually I'm starting to see reports where people are it's exceeding an employee's salary, like an employee, like a developer is using so many tokens. If you're paying the developer 150,000 a year, they're doing another 150,000 in token calls.

Blake Oliver: [00:33:34] I could see that. I could see that.

David Leary: [00:33:37] Which in theory might make that developer worth ten x. But you don't know.

Kenji Kuramoto: [00:33:40] But then you get the ROI. But if not like that's yeah, that's a really expensive proposition otherwise.

David Leary: [00:33:46] But for firms though, you could charge for this because now you have this measurement. Well, I use this many tokens to do your your return. I'm going to bill you for that time.

Blake Oliver: [00:33:53] Now you know.

David Leary: [00:33:54] What.

Blake Oliver: [00:33:55] I mean. I the value pricing folks. You know, Ron Baker would probably hate this, but I'm going to say it's better than timesheets, that's for sure. Like, hey, if we got to go to something else, let's go to tokens.

David Leary: [00:34:06] Tokens are the new billable hour shirts.

Kenji Kuramoto: [00:34:10] That's right. My efforts.

Blake Oliver: [00:34:13] Hey, let's stick with app news. Since we're talking about all the tech stuff. I've got some follow up from our story last week about delve, the fake compliance as a service platform, allegedly fake. We talked about that Substack that somebody put up alleging that delve is basically just, uh, like creating fake soc2 reports and their CPA firms signing off on these, but the work was never actually done. We got an email, I think it was the same day that we live streamed that episode that afternoon.

David Leary: [00:34:44] Yes.

Blake Oliver: [00:34:44] Yeah. We got an email from Avalara that is asking vendors that used delve to get their compliance reports to prove that their audits were actually independent. They sent a questionnaire. We got one because we've worked with Avalara and they want to know if any Soc2, ISO 27, oh one or other reports shared with Avalara were generated through delve, and they flagged several audit firms by name as part of their due diligence, including a Corp glossary, dcpc, and gradient certification. So those may have been firms that were working with delve and the CPA firms that actually signed off on these reports. So I think we're going to see big vendors and some.

David Leary: [00:35:30] Ways it has some legs.

Blake Oliver: [00:35:32] Hopefully the AICPA or boards of accounts, whoever has authority here. I think it's the AICPA because they created Soc2. Looking into these firms and hopefully like taking away their licenses if this is what they've been doing. Because I mean, yeah, these are Soc2 reports, but like they're attest engagements, right? Imagine if we had firms doing hundreds and hundreds of fake financial statement audits. That would be a really bad situation. So, you know, if we want to protect our franchise as auditors in the CPA world. We got to get on top of this really fast.

David Leary: [00:36:08] And Blake, I don't remember in the email that did we get was it from the accounting department or was it from the risk department?

Blake Oliver: [00:36:14] I don't know.

David Leary: [00:36:15] Who was signed by from Avalara.

Blake Oliver: [00:36:17] I have no idea. Um, all right, let's go to, uh, new features, new tech. We got lots of stories that have piled up about what apps are doing. And my top one here is from zero zero was on the show recently because they released online bill payments. Now you can like pay your bills in zero. Uh, that was thanks to their acquisition of, uh, Melio. And so, you know, you can go into zero. Here's the bill pay. Pay the bill. Big improvement with that. And that was just like a workflow thing, right? No AI in there really. Uh, they've also now on the AI front announced a partnership with anthropic. It's a multi-year partnership that brings cloud AI directly into zero. So it's going to integrate with their Jax chatbot, and you'll be able to inside of zero ask questions powered by Claude. You will also, and this is the exciting part in Claude directly in the Claude chatbot, be able to connect your zero data and work with it directly in. Claude. Uh, and.

David Leary: [00:37:33] So it sounds exactly like the Intuit deal with.

Kenji Kuramoto: [00:37:35] I was just going to say, right. Intuit.

David Leary: [00:37:37] That was very similar.

Blake Oliver: [00:37:38] Yes. And I think this is a great move because like you and I have talked about, David, nobody's going to want to go to a bunch of different chat bots and a bunch of different apps to do their work. They're going to want to do it all in one. And it makes sense too, because then that AI has all the context for everything else you're doing.

David Leary: [00:37:55] This could be good for us because we have some of our, some of our orgs around zero and some of our orgs are on QuickBooks. And maybe this is a way for us to get consolidated answers.

Blake Oliver: [00:38:03] Yeah, maybe we can even get like, Claude Cowork to do a consolidated financial statements. I mean, build the spreadsheet. That would be an interesting experiment to see if we could do it. So that's exciting. Well done for to zero.

David Leary: [00:38:20] So I keep seeing over and over again, and I think I saw comments from Rod Drury about this afterwards. The founder of the creator and founder of zero. Great grandfather of zero that it's this AI race for accounting stuff is who owns the data and I don't like I, I kind of agree with that. But at the same time, I'm like, as soon as you let them have access, you kind of lost control of your data, right? I don't think QuickBooks and Xero have to control the data they think they have. As soon as they let these AI models in, I think they're kidding themselves. I think they say that to give the market reassurance. I think they're kidding themselves. Well, I just don't buy it.

Blake Oliver: [00:39:01] Well, but sure, you can pull the data out using these AI tools, but where are you going to put it? What are you going to do with it? It still needs to live somewhere. And these AI agents aren't databases.

David Leary: [00:39:15] But what's confusing about this, right? They start both have started to charge for their API access because they had to stop companies like digits and stuff that are just sucking data out to build dashboards and reports and train their own models. Why we don't believe they don't think Anthropic's doing it too, and that OpenAI is doing it too. I think it's fairly naive on their.

Blake Oliver: [00:39:35] Well, zero does say in their press release that the agreement that they've reached says that anthropic is not going to use data access as a way to train its models.

David Leary: [00:39:44] Of course, they're saying that this is like of course they're going to say that. But I think this is what you trust them like, well, what what what have we learned from tech companies? Break the law first get sued, and then eventually you still get to keep doing it right. I think we're going to have a surprise one day. Like, oh, they were storing all the data and they're gonna it'll go to court just like they took all the Disney videos. And this is what they do. This is what these companies do. So Zero and Intuit are being very naive about this. They did it to everybody else's data. What they're not going to do it to because the press release says, give me a break. I think they're very naive and this is very risky.

Kenji Kuramoto: [00:40:24] I think historically, GLS used to have a really big moat, right? That was really kind of a protected you. You owned you, you could really claim that you were the source of truth. And there's probably some real challenges to that today, just even in terms of how many new GLS have spun up recently, how much data is getting dispersed, you know, throughout other places. So yeah, I don't, I don't know David on that point, but, um, it definitely seems like it's just not nearly what it used to be. Like things went inside your GL and they just lived and were protected there forever. It's hard to move them out. Um, I think it's a better place for accountants to be in when it's a little easier to kind of get control of your data. But there is some questions. It's moving through a lot of different systems now, for sure.

Blake Oliver: [00:41:07] Here's another update. Ramp has released an accounting agent that can streamline bookkeeping. Ramp is a self-described financial operations platform really well known for their corporate spend cards, their treasury management products. Put all your spend on ramp essentially along with bill pay and that sort of thing. So they've launched an accounting agent designed to automate the manual parts of bookkeeping and month end close the product reviews and auto codes transactions as they occur, and then escalates exceptions that need human attention. So it's trained on millions of transactions and tailored to each business's coding behaviors, and will learn from feedback and corrections. It'll determine how to code each transaction, whether it's ready for sync to the accounting system and when human review is required. Ramp claims that finance teams can deliver clean books three times faster, on average each month with the tool, and that customers are saving 40 plus hours per month due to reduced manual review and transaction coding. I mentioned some of the features already, but I'll dig in a little bit more. Ai coding so that auto codes, transactions and bills across fields. It'll do the GL code, the department, the class location, and even custom fields. So this is way beyond just picking an expense account. It can code invoices at the item level and it will improve based on customer coding and sync behavior. So I think that means if you change it after the fact, it can learn from your correction.

David Leary: [00:42:46] Well, plus doesn't wrap have like kind of a, a rule. You can add rules. So it's, it's this combination of AI. But you have these guardrails and these rules of where things should be coded at.

Blake Oliver: [00:42:59] It's also going to do something called smart review, which are background checks for policy adherence and accounting field accuracy, completeness across 100% of your spend and provide suggested actions such as you need to review this or this is ready to mark to sync. It can do real time sync so it will auto approve and sync routine low risk spend to the accounting system with audit logs. So the stuff you don't need to review, you can just sync it in automatically. You don't have to review those transactions. And then they've also added accruals and reconciliation. So it can automatically create and post month end accruals. Schedule reversals reconcile against your accounting system and surface mismatches without doing that in spreadsheets.

Kenji Kuramoto: [00:43:46] David Blake, back when you were running your firm, I mean, did you have to go through? I know you were a zero. You were kind of a zero org. Like, were you building all kinds of like rule sets for transactions? Like if you, you know, I used to, I used to think that was like a really cool automation, like, oh, we're just going to build all these rules, right? To try to get transactions. Was that what you were doing?

Blake Oliver: [00:44:04] Yeah, yeah, we, we used rules in, in, in, in zero. And you know, you can use the rules to do like expense accounts and, and what they call tracking categories. And we could do that for like 80, 90% of the transactions.

Kenji Kuramoto: [00:44:17] Yeah. But just so I just think this is where just things are just getting really cool, where you don't have to have those rigid, like determinate sets of like, if it sees this vendor name, please put it here right now with AI. You know, it's able to kind of go out and do research and take a look at transactions and histories and internet searches all together. And just it just, again, those are the areas I get excited for accountants because man, that stuff just used to eat up time.

Blake Oliver: [00:44:41] Well, like, here's an example, like, let's say we had a client that was spending a lot on Amazon making a lot of Amazon purchases. We couldn't set up a rule for that because or if we did, it would be very simple, like, you know, uh, purchases or supplies or office expenses, but the rule couldn't look at the receipt that was attached and then determine what type of expense account to use. But these agents can. So you can get way more detail with automation than you could before, right? We were sacrificing detail to get the automation, but now you don't have to necessarily. So it's exciting. Um, ramp also launched a product called Ramp budgets, which it's a real time budget tracking product and it will connect your company's budget directly to live spending. You upload your budget and then AI will format it and automatically map transactions to correct budget lines in real time. So that whole process of trying to line up your GL to the budget, they're saying that the AI can just do all that mapping. And then budget owners in ramp will get dashboards and alerts. So it's a way to like control your spend linked to the budget because that's always been a problem where you create this budget, but then you have the spend management solution and people have to look at their budget and make sure they don't overspend. But there's no way to actually like control that in the spend solution. So like, if this works, I think that's really exciting.

David Leary: [00:46:16] And unless you have somebody always running the spend management program, managing it full time for your organization, don't even implement these things because there could be like, we were just in Dallas two weeks ago and like the text, I can't use my credit card got declined again because I have to go into ramp and I have to pull levers to give me a little, you know, little elbow room here or whatever it might be. It's unless somebody is managing that, it's really for slightly bigger businesses. You cannot put this on all your clients.

Kenji Kuramoto: [00:46:41] I was imagining the same thing, David, like us being out, whether one of the conferences in Vegas or somewhere and you can see like happening, someone getting a little loose with their card and spinning and all of a sudden like it being like reported right there in the middle of swiping it or, you know, like, sorry, you're at your limit. Like, oh, crap, like I'm what am I going to do? But yeah, you can, I can, I can visualize this happening as things like escalate in the accounting world and people start spending too much. And anyway, it's.

David Leary: [00:47:05] Usually it's, you're trying to book an Uber and it just won't go through. And then you can't book your Uber because you have. And then I gotta increase my spend. Yeah.

Kenji Kuramoto: [00:47:12] Yeah. Yes. Blake's got a walk home from the Omni back all the way to, you know, Aria.

Blake Oliver: [00:47:18] I need my steps. Hey, let's thank our final sponsor of this episode, and that is u n c. Let's face it, the job market is especially tough right now, but every industry needs accountants and accountants are always in demand. In fact, employment for accountants is projected to grow 10% through 2026 faster than most other professions. That's where uncW Kenan-flagler is. Master of Accounting program comes in. It's one of the top ranked Macc programs in the country, with 98% of students accepting a job offer within three months of graduation and earning more than those with just a bachelor's degree. If you're currently working full time, raising children, serving in the armed forces, or living halfway around the world, they're highly flexible. Mac program can also fit your lifestyle. You can choose their 12 month on campus program or their online only option, where you have up to 36 months to complete your degree. Plus, you'll join the powerful 46,000 strong UNC Kenan-flagler alumni network connections that will serve you throughout your career. If you want to set yourself up for a lifelong career, pick the Mac program with proven ROI. To see why you should get your Master's in Accounting at the UNC Kenan-flagler Business School, head over to The Accounting Podcast.

Blake Oliver: [00:48:27] That's The Accounting Podcast dot promo for you. Nc. Canopy is launching the Canopy Bookkeeping module directly inside of its practice management platform. The idea is to give CAS firms, bookkeeping firms the ability to use specialized close automation tools and, uh, and speed things up. Um, it's going to provide real time general ledger visibility inside daily workflows, helping firms close faster. Continuously evaluate client financial data and show data health in real time. Flag issues as they arise and create tasks tied to specific underlying transactions in QuickBooks and zero, and then centralized client collaboration inside canopy, aiming to reduce back and forth and rework during the close. They're also going to embed AI that continuously reviews the books. The module includes configurable reports and reusable templates, which canopy says can help firms move beyond static financial statements toward more narrative, insight driven reporting. So canopy, I guess, started really more focusing on tax. And now with this bookkeeping module might be worth a look. For firms that are both doing tax and client accounting services.

David Leary: [00:49:52] And you're seeing this go both directions. So Canopy's headed the one way they started in tax. They're going towards SaaS. And then uh, the keeper right. Which was formerly. No it was formerly keeper. It's now double. They started being a CAS month end close product, but now they've they've added tax related stuff. So and I guess as a firm you'd want that right. If you, if you offer all these shifts, you don't want one tool to manage your tax clients and tax work, another tool to manage your CAS work, especially if you sell the client a plan where you do both for that client.

Kenji Kuramoto: [00:50:23] Sure. We used to do that too. And it's so much more helpful when like the tax team could kind of take a look at what stuff was coming down the pipe from CAS. Like, hey, we got to get these returns done. How are things looking? So it makes sense that we're seeing people consolidate those canopies.

Blake Oliver: [00:50:36] Also adding an AI tax preparation platform integration with filed. So Canopy and filed are integrating. And it's going to add AI powered tax prep capabilities called Smart Prep to Canopy. How does it work. The integration connects canopies existing smart intake system. That's the document collection client reminders the portal to files AI tax prep capabilities. So there's going to be an end to end workflow from client intake to review ready returns. So taking that information from the portal, putting it into the tax prep software, and then you get to review it instead of having to do all that manual work yourself. It's currently in a pilot phase and they are expecting broader availability after this tax season. The initial launch will include basic and advanced 1040 returns, with expanded return types planned for later in the year. David, you mentioned double. They've released a feature called AI Journal entries, where you can create a month end close task that will automatically create and post a complex journal entry. So you can you can upload a source document like a payroll processor, export a loan document, a settlement statement, and then you, you instruct the AI how to handle that document. And it can post the journal entry following your instructions and you can reuse.

David Leary: [00:52:08] It, move funds between our entities or something like that.

Blake Oliver: [00:52:10] Yeah. And you can reuse it over and over again. So complex, repetitive journal entries that are time consuming to recreate monthly. We've all experienced those. I think this is a great use case for AI. You can save the prompts, right? You reuse them over and over again for consistency, and then a manager can verify that and then delegate that to staff. So that's available now in double. So I want to give that a try. Uh, I have to think of one of the. Luckily, our most of our accounting is pretty simple right now because we're in startup mode, so we don't have a bunch of complex accruals or anything like that, but I'd love to give it a shot if anyone has who's listening, let us know.

David Leary: [00:52:52] I have a use case for us though. What's that? We talked offline, but I mean, because we're going to we have employees in two companies and we need to roll them into the same company for payroll. Yep. To get health insurance. So we're going to have to have some journal entry to get money from one company to pay the other company. So we're going to have a use case for this.

Blake Oliver: [00:53:08] Okay, maybe we'll do it with that. Ai agents are everywhere. Bill has announced new and enhanced AI agents aimed at reducing day to day busywork for accountants and finance teams. What do they do? They have a new invoice coding agent, which will automatically extract and code complex multiline invoices. I remember that always being an issue, right? Having to you could automate coding of the whole bill, but if you had all those line items in a bill, you had to go manually do that. I think AI could do that really reliably. Bill is saying that it reduces coding steps by 89% and increases automated multiline bill coding by nearly 50%. Another agent is their smart response agent. This is coming soon in beta. It will draft responses to routine bill payment questions from vendors and stakeholders. So that question where's my payment David. Yeah. Remember we get that. We get that all the time, right?

David Leary: [00:54:07] You know, Bill should build AI for we have two profiles and Bill.com. And people pay the wrong company all the time. And then where's the check? I don't know, we don't know where the checks at like they build AI. So when people onboard me as a vendor, they choose the right vendor. That's what we need. Ai for like a response email, like give me a break, like, like response email generators, even QuickBooks, QuickBooks has that. I generated an overdue letter for you. Oh, great. You could just use a template. It doesn't have to be different every time to every client. It's stupid. I want it to be more strict this time. It's just dumb. Like build real AI that's useful and solves real problems. Apps we need that. We don't need responders, auto responders. Sorry. I'm done.

Blake Oliver: [00:54:50] Now, off your soapbox. The, uh, the last agent that I want to mention here is the W9 agent, which will collect W9 that you need to get from your vendors. And I assume follow up on that to make sure you actually get them. I think that would be, that would be helpful. Very helpful. That'd be great. Right?

Kenji Kuramoto: [00:55:07] Like that one. Okay.

Blake Oliver: [00:55:07] Yeah.

David Leary: [00:55:08] Yeah, that'd be really helpful.

Blake Oliver: [00:55:09] Uh. Here's a fundraising story. Two brothers in their 20s just raised $4.1 million to modernize financial audits with AI. This was in Crunchbase news. It's a YC backed company called Denki d e n k I, based in San Francisco. And they're building AI.

David Leary: [00:55:31] Powered went to work for them.

Kenji Kuramoto: [00:55:34] I shed my audit days there too far behind me.

Blake Oliver: [00:55:38] They're building software for financial audits at public companies. Uh, the round was co-led by Base10 Partners and Shine Capital, with participation from Y Combinator, 20, VC, and others. Uh, it was founded. Denki was founded in 2025 by brothers Felipe J. Felipe Jin Lee and David Jin Li, and they went through Y Combinator's Fall 2025 cohort. The company's pitch is that audits should rely less on spreadsheets and manual evidence gathering, and more on software driven workflows that improve documentation, testing and regulatory compliance. So it seems like more and more of these tech companies are getting into the audit space.

Kenji Kuramoto: [00:56:22] Counting is a hot market. I mean, everyone thought everyone thought we were boring. There's nothing going on in accounting. I work in accounting. Like, look at this. Like all these Y Combinator companies spinning up and fundraising announcements and agents everywhere. I mean, come on. Exciting.

David Leary: [00:56:37] Speaking of announcements, it's not really an app per se, but like you're familiar with tether, correct. The cryptocurrency.

Blake Oliver: [00:56:44] Yeah. The the largest.

David Leary: [00:56:45] Usd, largest digital.

Blake Oliver: [00:56:47] Coin, largest stablecoin issuer in the world.

David Leary: [00:56:49] Yep. So they have roughly 200, 192 billion in reported reserves. But the issue everybody's always had with them, Blake, if you remember, was they've never had an actual audit.

Blake Oliver: [00:56:59] That's right. They've never had a full audit reports.

David Leary: [00:57:02] And that was it. Right.

Blake Oliver: [00:57:03] Yeah. They've had a like an attestation on their reserves. But all that is, is a, is, is confirming the value of the reserves at a single moment in time and nothing else about the company.

David Leary: [00:57:15] Yeah. And so they say that they finally engaged a big four firm to perform its first full independent audit of the reserves backing USDt. Well, now, and.

Blake Oliver: [00:57:25] Not just the reserves, David, it's a full financial statement audit.

David Leary: [00:57:29] Okay. But they're still refusing to name the auditor, which is just weird. And I found the timeline of when it'll be done. It's just strange.

Blake Oliver: [00:57:36] I found it so. Found it. The Financial Times reported that it's going to be KPMG that does the first full independent financial statement audit. And so KPMG is going to do the audit. And then tether hired PwC to help get them ready for the audit. So should.

David Leary: [00:57:52] We.

Blake Oliver: [00:57:52] Be fix up their internal.

David Leary: [00:57:53] Watching the prediction markets and all the bets on tether because it's a KPMG, it's a KPMG audit. We should pay attention to that.

Blake Oliver: [00:58:02] So tether was banned from the US or I guess what is it. The legislation that passed would ban them if they didn't do this. So now they've been forced to uh, and they want to expand in the US and do a fundraising round. So yeah, this is critical. Financial times previously reported that tether is seeking to raise 15 billion to 20 billion at a $500 billion valuation, which would be kind of difficult to do if you didn't actually have an audit. I don't think I don't think investors hopefully investors wouldn't stand for that. Um, the flagship token USD T has a circulation of 185 billion and serves as a major reserve asset within crypto markets. So kind of wild to think that here we have a situation where basically the biggest bank in cryptocurrency has a token with a circulation of 185 billion, and the company that issues it and controls it has never undergone a full financial statement audit.

David Leary: [00:59:08] So and and they haven't done the audit yet. This is an announcement. They're going to do the audit. And they selected a firm based on a competitive processing process of onboarding, blah, blah, blah. But if you remember, in 2017, they kind of made the similar promises and then it failed.

Blake Oliver: [00:59:25] They've been promising for years.

David Leary: [00:59:26] P, right? So this still could not happen, right? They're saying it's going to happen. But they told us that in 2017 as well.

Blake Oliver: [00:59:35] Oh, and the the one that you were talking about the reserve report that's Deloitte and that's for their new US regulated stablecoin US a t not USD t. What else? Um, I got a little follow up here. We talked about tariffs episodes ago. And now that the Supreme Court ruled those Trump tariffs illegal. All these companies are scrambling to get refunds. And some people are also mad that they got charged up charged for the tariffs. And they're not going to get that money back. So the only companies that can actually get the refunds are the ones that paid the tariffs in the first place. And now a Costco shopper is suing the company for passing tariff costs on to customers through higher prices. It's a class action, and it claims that Costco raised prices on certain products to reflect costs from the iipa tariffs.

David Leary: [01:00:34] Coffee, coffee and sardines just keep getting more expensive.

Blake Oliver: [01:00:38] Oh man, I bought coffee today and it was $15 for a pound. And this is not like fancy fancy coffee either. Oh.

Kenji Kuramoto: [01:00:45] Nice and easy.

Blake Oliver: [01:00:47] Yeah. So the argument in the lawsuit is that Costco may be positioned for a double recovery. First, they recovered the tariff related costs from customers through higher prices. And then they are going to potentially receive court ordered refunds from the government. Now, the plaintiffs are saying that if Costco obtains tariff refunds, customers should receive restitution for the overcharge as they allegedly paid, or at least a proportional share of any refund.

David Leary: [01:01:14] Costco companies that might do that, it would be Costco of all companies like because they piss people off, they they cancel their membership. If you cancel your membership, that's how Costco makes all their money. They're the only company that I could see possibly giving their members this refund. The only company I can imagine doing it.

Kenji Kuramoto: [01:01:32] I could see, um, I mean, gosh, trying to think of the logistics of how they would even attempt to do that is kind of mind boggling. But, um, or maybe you just get automated some kind of rebate check or something in your, I don't know, in your.

David Leary: [01:01:45] But they know, they know. Kenji, if you ever return something to Costco, you don't have your receipt. They just scan your card. Oh, you bought it on this day. They have all the data. They could totally calculate this.

Kenji Kuramoto: [01:01:55] I could see a lot of B2B transactions for sure. Like around this to where you go back either.

Blake Oliver: [01:02:00] Kenji. Maybe, uh, maybe bassist could create an AI agent to help Costco issue individual refunds to all of its millions of customers.

Kenji Kuramoto: [01:02:07] Yeah, correct. Aw. I thought you'd just jump back into, you know, cloud copilot again, like they're Blake. And you seem to be pretty adept at that these days.

Blake Oliver: [01:02:16] All right, well, that's all the time we have this week. Kenji, thanks so much for joining us. We've been talking with Kenji Kuramoto, managing partner in residence at basis, founder at acuity. Keep us posted on what's going on.

Kenji Kuramoto: [01:02:28] And.

Blake Oliver: [01:02:29] Can't wait to.

Kenji Kuramoto: [01:02:29] Bring me on. And we're looking forward to our our founder. Matt's a big a big fan of you guys. He's looking forward to showing you the 1065 and having you dive into it. Anyone else who's around, any other accountants, I'd love to have you come by and come up and visit New York City, come check out the cool office. We got a whole bunch of other accountants here, so welcome again.

Blake Oliver: [01:02:46] Uh, well, I don't think I actually did it yet. Welcome to our livestream viewers. Thanks for joining us. Boring accountant Alison, Sarah root, vegetable daddy and a caddy, Keisha J. Roddy. Uh, Chris. Uh, Chris. Penny. Light him up. Jerilyn. Brenda. Wow, we got so many. Marcus.

Kenji Kuramoto: [01:03:09] Look at.

Blake Oliver: [01:03:09] That. Reconcile financials. Aaron. Light them up. Yeah. Thank you for chatting with us. Um, if you haven't seen us on YouTube, go to YouTube, search for The Accounting Podcast, hit subscribe and that notification bell icon, and you will get notified when we go live and you can join us and chat with us. Don't forget. Also, you can earn free continuing professional education for having listened to this episode. Watch this episode and our past episodes. Go to earmark app in your web browser. Create your free account. You can earn one free CPE per week. Nasba. Approved. Get your CPE done in the first half of the year. Not over Christmas and New Year's.

David Leary: [01:03:47] Do it this week. Yeah, you have a lot of time.

Blake Oliver: [01:03:49] Oh, and if you want to support the work we do, an annual subscription earmark is only $170 a year for unlimited CPE. What a deal. Listen to all sorts of accounting and tax and audit podcasts, not just ours. Uh, lots of great content coming out on the earmark app. We've got thousands of courses to choose from. All right. Kenji. David, great chatting with you. David. I'll see you here next week. Bye, everyone.