The Accounting Podcast

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David Leary: [00:00:04] Microsoft cut off its engineers from AI because the bill got too big. So Microsoft, remember, they invested $13 billion into open AI, and they're using AI to write 30% of its own code. But they turned off and cut off the engineers from AI coding tools because the costs spiraled out of control. Coming to you weekly from the OnPay Recording Studio.

Blake Oliver: [00:00:29] Hey, everyone, 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.

Blake Oliver: [00:00:37] Today we're going to talk about what CBA's stock price decline means for private equity. Cba's is the only publicly traded public accounting firm. And that matters for private equity because we assume private equity is going to want to take firms public or offload them someday. And those Investors who invest in the next round. Eventually they're going to want to take it public. Uh, is there room for more accounting firms in the public markets? Also, Starbucks has killed off its AI inventory counting tool. Not a good sign for AI in accounting. And it's funny because we talked about how inventory counting is one of those things that, uh, will not passage. Right? Exactly. Right of passage for auditors and will not be easily automated. So maybe this is a sign that our jobs are secure. We'll talk about that in a lot more. But first, David, let's thank our sponsors.

David Leary: [00:01:34] Our sponsors. This week we have canopy on pay, CSR consulting and maxima. Let me ask you something. How much of your day is actually spent doing accounting? If you're like most firm owners, 30 to 40% of your time is eaten alive by the work around the work. We're talking, chasing client documents, drafting up the exact same emails over and over again, manual filing and trying to remember what a client said on the last call on Tuesday. It's an administrative tax and it's killing your profitability. That's where canopy comes in. Canopy actually delivers an all in one practice management promise. It handles everything from proposal to payment and all the steps in between. Smart client intake workflows, month end, close automation and billing are all in one unified platform. No more duct taping ten different apps together. Plus, they now have Canopy Coworker. It's a secure AI assistant that lives right inside the platform and actually does real work. It drafts context to where emails, summarizes client histories, takes meeting notes, and turns them into tasks automatically. Early access firms are already seeing what's possible when AI works inside your workflow instead of alongside it. To see a truly modern automated practice looks like, head over to The Accounting Podcast dot io slash canopy. That is Accounting Today dot io forward slash CANOPY.

Blake Oliver: [00:02:53] Here is the stock price of Cbiz, Inc. today it is at $34.68. That is down 51% over the past year.

David Leary: [00:03:07] Can you just for illustration purposes, can you also add Intuit in the S&P to this chart? Well can you do things like that.

Blake Oliver: [00:03:15] Intuit stock price is right here. And if we look at one year it's down 5354.

David Leary: [00:03:24] Similar similar chart. Okay.

Blake Oliver: [00:03:25] Yep. S&p 500. Let's take a look. That is down. Let's see. Oh that's up 28.

David Leary: [00:03:32] Yeah. The last couple of months.

Blake Oliver: [00:03:33] Over the last.

David Leary: [00:03:33] Year we've had a bump.

Blake Oliver: [00:03:34] Yeah. But I mean I mean we'd have to break it out. But we know that uh, that's due to like the, the AI boom boom that's been going on the bubble perhaps as we've discussed. I mean, I think it's a bubble, at least for some of these companies. Um, but yeah, Seb is getting hammered. Gary Schamus, the CEO of winding River consulting, wrote an article in Accounting Today and the title is What Can We Learn from Cbis? And in this article, he argues that Cbis is sharp. Stock decline should be taken seriously by accounting firm leaders because it's one of the clearest, clearest public tests so far of the private equity backed growth thesis in accounting. It's not necessarily that private equity has failed, but that the market is now openly pricing in execution risk, specifically around integration leverage and slower than expected growth. So let's go back to when Cbiz, uh, acquired Marcum. Cbiz acquired Marcum at the end of 2024, and its stock was at $78, and it rose to $90 in early 2025 and then fell to just under $27 by the end of March of this year. Now it's since recovered to say, $35. But you know, that's way down from 90 bucks in 2025. Uh, and, you know, um, way below where it was when it acquired Marcum, it's like half.

David Leary: [00:05:06] So, so you said the peak was March or April of 2025.

Blake Oliver: [00:05:09] Yeah. Uh, in, uh, early 2025, $90.

David Leary: [00:05:13] In early 2025 is when a lot of these PE deals were had high velocity. I feel like we haven't, we haven't covered any recent big ones in a long time.

Blake Oliver: [00:05:22] So that was at the peak of, say, the the PE deal making. He. Gary Seamus cites the main reasons for the drop as, uh, missed earnings expectations, difficulties with the Marcum integration, and then investor concerns about the CPA sector's leverage, limited organic growth and small market capitalization. And CBA's is 2026 guidance is only 2 to 5% revenue growth, which is like not great. I mean, that's, that's inflation less than inflation, right? So it basically it's if you if you consider that, then it's like no growth. So why would investors be excited right about a stock that is basically with a company that's that's not really growing much.

David Leary: [00:06:13] Imagine it's also getting that lens of, well, AI can do this just in the same way. Intuit stock and zero stocks are getting punished. Accounting firms AI can just do what an accounting firm does, and it's probably getting that same lens and punishing the stock that way as well.

Blake Oliver: [00:06:28] And I agree with that thesis. I think there's a lot of opportunity in accounting for AI to increase productivity, increase billings, increase the value of what we do. But in order for that to happen, you have to reinvent the business model of your firm. And traditional firms, large firms like Cbiz are billing for time. Yeah.

David Leary: [00:06:51] And if you're going to be successful rolling out AI, your guidance on earnings has to be 1% because you probably don't see any path to have higher earnings. The billable hour is going to go down right.

Blake Oliver: [00:07:02] And you have to switch tax and audit and consulting from these hourly models into a fixed fee or value based model in order to capture any of that additional value or the time savings. Um, and as we've seen, it's in accounting anyway, still really, really hard to eliminate headcount. Ai is not cutting jobs in accounting. We haven't even seen the job market for recent grads decline. As we talked about in the last episode, the job market is steady. There's a shortage of accountants. So we're not cutting headcount and that's not saving them anything. And remember, the larger the organization, the harder it is to change a business model or to integrate new technology. And so I see a real threat to the large accounting firms, from small ones that are more agile, that are able to integrate AI into their systems, switch their billing models, switch the pyramid structure of their firm to something else, and then win work away from the big firms. So it's not like their clients are going to start doing it themselves. But I think that smaller firms are going to be able to win work that used to only go to the midsize firms, because you get that productivity boost that allows your ten person firm to work like a 100 person firm or your hundred person firm to be more like a thousand person firm.

Blake Oliver: [00:08:31] And it's not like these midsize firms, like a cbis are going to take work from the big four. I mean, it's possible, I guess, but I think it's going to be more likely that they end up losing work to the smaller firms that are more agile, and they're going to have a hard time retaining managers, directors who would become partners, who can now leave and have their own firms and satisfy serve clients that they used to work with at a at a firm like Cbiz. So I think investors are starting to understand that risk. And I think that's a big risk to the private equity investors in this space, is they're buying into an old business model and private equity. When it comes to large firms, they're not really interested in reinventing the whole model. They tend to be interested in squeezing the lemon or what do you call it. It's like.

David Leary: [00:09:24] The diamond. You get that last drip of blood.

Blake Oliver: [00:09:26] They find. They find the efficiencies, right? They they figure out how to get more efficient, like marginally, but not like completely reinventing things. That's not what private equity is all about.

David Leary: [00:09:37] So, so, so Cbus is in a weird spot where they're not doing like tons of audit work and fortune 500 stuff that the Big four is doing. So they can't go get that. They're not going to get that revenue. They don't have it. But the services and stuff, they offer lots of small to midsize firms. The next 300 sized firms all can offer that.

Blake Oliver: [00:09:57] Yeah. Or thousands. Right.

David Leary: [00:09:58] Thousands of firms.

Blake Oliver: [00:09:59] They have thousands of new competitors potentially. I mean, if you are a solo CPA and you are using cloud Cowork, now, you can do the work of a firm that's dozens of people. You could never do it before. And so my theory is that, like, if you're a firm of like a few dozen people, you can now compete with firms that have hundreds of staff or dozens and dozens of partners because you can use the knowledge that you can get from cloud. It expands your knowledge and capabilities and research abilities and the ability to, to do these complex spreadsheets and analysis without having to have an expert in each niche area. So it allows these smaller firms to, to do lots of specialized services now and provide a lot of different things for their clients. And that's been the value of larger regional firms. Midsize firms is they have an expert for everything and we can handle everything that you need. And now smaller firms might be able to do that as well. That's my thesis. So it's going to be interesting to watch what happens. Um and I'm curious what's going to happen in the next round of private equity. These firms that have private equity investment they need to roll over, right. Or they need to find a, the private equity firms want to like invest for 5 or 6 years and then get out. That's how their funds work. So they're gonna have to find a buyer.

David Leary: [00:11:31] So Eisneramper, they're a top. Oh, what are they on the list there? Number 15 C business number seven. Eisner's number 15. Eisner was one of the very first in 2021 to take private equity. But the reason I'm bringing them the show this week is they had a it's actually a paid sponsored article on private fund CFO, which is like a magazine for CFOs of private equity funds and things. And their partner, Nicholas Tesar TSAFOS. He gave this interview and it struck me as odd, the narrative. A lot of the narrative is US law is too complicated for AI there's a risk of hallucinations. Any K one form prepared using AI requires a tax professional to meticulously check its results and manually supply additional information. And I just find it strange that, like a partner at Eisner is out there hammering how AI can't do these jobs that I think I think you were at black or we've seen we've heard about basis. What are some of the other ones that are out there? Uh, accrual. They're handling these tax returns with K-1's. So I just I just don't understand the the why Eisner would be taking this stance, right. Is it is it fear based is it not understanding what's in the market? Are they are they right? And the rest of us are observing things wrong. It just it's I find it a very weird article that Eisner would be coming out like anti protectionism. Right?

Blake Oliver: [00:13:03] Yeah. Well, things are changing so fast and maybe that would have been true a year ago, but we're seeing the tools get so much better.

David Leary: [00:13:12] I checked the date of the article like five times because I thought that it it's from June 1st. The article is new.

Blake Oliver: [00:13:17] Well, I mean, it makes sense. There's still a lot of accountants who haven't tried Claude Cowork yet. When I gave a recent presentation at the Pennsylvania Institute of CPAs annual meeting, I asked, how many of you have used an AI chatbot to do research? And it was virtually everyone in the room. They're we're all now doing tax research, asking questions of chatbots. But when I asked, how many of you have tried clockwork, which is the AI agent tool that Claude has released, which came out a few months ago, there was hardly.

David Leary: [00:13:48] Anyone chatting.

Blake Oliver: [00:13:49] Like a handful of people. And if you're just using chatbots, like advanced work is very difficult and unreliable. But if you're using co work, you can do very advanced work, spreadsheet creation, all that. And, and it works. I mean, it is, it's, it's shockingly good. So if you haven't tried it, get the cloud desktop app, switch that co work tab and try something that didn't work in the regular cloud or the regular ChatGPT before, because you'll be amazed at the ability of it to do this more sophisticated work that takes multiple steps. All right, David, let's go ahead and thank our next sponsor. And that is on pay. Are you tired of payroll headaches getting in the way of client experience? 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.

Blake Oliver: [00:15:09] There's seamless QuickBooks and Xero integrations. Eliminate manual journal entries, and they support any type of business. You serve farms, restaurants, nonprofits, you name it. On pay can handle unique requirements without adding complexity. And on pay keeps pricing simple, too. Everything your clients expect from multi-state filing to off cycle pay runs. It's included. No hidden fees and no surprises. To book a demo. Head over to The Accounting Podcast dot com slash on pay. That's Accounting Today dot promo forward slash ONPAY. And welcome to our live stream viewers. Hey, boring accountant. Hey, Knowles. Knowles says hi, Knowles says. Afternoon, guys. Glad I saw the notification to tune in to the live stream. Thanks for joining us, Knowles. Uh, by the way, if you're listening on the podcast feed and you haven't seen us on YouTube, go to our YouTube channel, The Accounting Podcast subscribe, hit that notification bell icon and you'll get notified when we go live and you can tune in. We've also got nerd mommy, nerd mommy waves. Hi. Hello. Welcome, David. Do you have the story about the New England Society of CPAs? I have never heard of them before. Yeah.

David Leary: [00:16:18] So this is it's kind of crazy. So you have five state societies Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont. That's all the states in the corner up there, right? They've combined together like a Voltron ring, and they formed the New England Society of CPAs. Effective, believe it or not. July 1st. So that's like 30 days away. When they all merged together, they're going to have 14,500 CPAs at launch. Uh, some of their goals is they want stronger advocacy and influence on accounting issues, expanded professional education and learning opportunities, broader networking, peer connections, and greater resources for accountants and financial professionals. Now, when I saw this reminds me of what happened in Canada. So if you if you're going by the memberships. So the Massachusetts has 11,500 of these members. Vermont has 800. Maine Society of CPAs has maybe 1000. Right. So you're looking at Massachusetts that has 8 to 10 times more than these other states they're merging with. Well, we saw this in Canada when CPA Ontario and CPA Quebec pulled out of CPA Canada because they're like, well, we have all the members, we should make the laws, we're putting all the money, we should control the budget. And is this going to put a situation in where Massachusetts is now really running the show for five states? We don't know yet. Obviously they didn't fully launched yet, but I think that's a risk of this. It almost reminds me of the colleges now, the way they merge together, these super conferences. The big 12 has 20 teams. It makes no sense. Right? It's kind of that same thing. Is this where we're headed now? Now California, Arizona, Texas will form something. Are we going to come down to like four Uber societies?

Blake Oliver: [00:18:04] I mean, it makes sense for the small states like these little tiny states with only, what, a few hundred, few thousand members at most? I mean, I can't even imagine how do you how do you have like a executive team? How do you how do you how do you employ the people that need to work at these state societies with that few members? I mean, it's an indicator of the declining CPA license, the fact that they don't have enough members, they can't get people to join the society. So if anything, that's what this is. It's it's like we need to do more as a profession to attract more CPAs into the profession, but also create more value for them at the state society level. What is the value of joining your state society? It used to be getting CPE, but now you can get CPE anywhere. Oh right. You can earn CPE with the earmark app. Don't forget for listening to this episode and many other accounting and tax podcasts for free. You can earn one free CPE per week. Just go to earmark.app and your web browser, or get the free earmark app on the App Store. And if you want unlimited and subscriber only content and no ads, you can subscribe for the low price of $170, which is going to be going up. So subscribe in June and get that $170 per year unlimited CPE price.

David Leary: [00:19:22] So do you think this will help make mobility easier? Like, hey, if I'm in one of these five, I can go to the other five. I never have to reregister. I don't have to do anything. I'm just in.

Blake Oliver: [00:19:30] Well, I mean, the state societies don't make the rules, but they lobby the boards of accountancy, so New England could. The the new unified Society could make sure that it's easy for their members to work in the different states around by lobbying the legislatures to keep mobility, uh, keep mobility among those states. Yeah. I think that that could be an advantage.

David Leary: [00:19:55] What could be interesting about this? If you see a couple other of these mergers happen, you know, big states merge and you have these 4 or 5 large organizations now they have a lot more power with Nasba and the AICPA. Well, this could be we could be seeing a power shift of who's in control here.

Blake Oliver: [00:20:14] Yeah. Because that's basically what Nasba purpose was. It's to unify the states. Right. The state boards of accountancy created Nasba to handle all this cross-border stuff and CPA exam stuff, like the stuff they can't do on their own and bigger state societies. You know, a few bigger state societies could kind of take that power back.

David Leary: [00:20:35] Every five states is 10%. If you think about this, 10% of the state societies have just merged together.

Blake Oliver: [00:20:42] All right. Let's talk about Starbucks and their AI inventory accounting tool that they just killed off. I spotted this in Going concern. So Starbucks had this automated counting inventory tool that they implemented for about nine months in their North American stores. It was introduced as part of CEO Brian Nichols effort to reduce store level product shortages that were affecting sales. But Reuters reported in February that the app often miscounted or mislabeled inventory, including confusing similar milk varieties or failing to recognize them. And I believe this was some sort of app on your phone where you could like take pictures or video. Some sort of.

David Leary: [00:21:28] Image to the website. So the company that provided this service was a company called Nomad Go. And if you think about if I'm holding up an iPad and I'm walking across the shelves in a grocery store and just filming, then I go to the beginning of the line and I just walk across the shelves and it's taking inventory as I walk by. But not only that, everybody's been to subway, right? And they have all the sliced up tomatoes and everything in the little, little dishes so they can make the sandwich, right? It can supposedly do inventory doing that and a bucket of beans. It can it can count this inventory just by holding an iPad and moving it around. That's, that's the premise of it.

Blake Oliver: [00:22:04] So they had, they had claimed 99% accuracy. Nomad go. But despite that claim, the employees at Starbucks reportedly experienced enough practical issues that the company decided to discontinue it. And the stores are going to go back to counting by hand people doing the work. So it's a cautionary story. Story where first of all, don't believe the hype of an AI company necessarily test it out in the real world before you implement it. And then it shows how important accuracy is when it comes to accounting, like inventory counting, you need accuracy. Um, and it's, I think it's a good sign. Like accountants are going to be employed, you know, when it comes to like inventory accounts for audits, right? The statute requires that humans do it. And if the AI tools aren't accurate, like humans are going to keep doing it for a while.

David Leary: [00:23:08] And that's, I think there's this bit Starbucks in two places. Like, yes, inventory is kind of like a close the books thing, right? Yeah. It's like a snapshot in time of what the inventory is, but it's also how do I make sure I have enough milk and coffee beans in my store to service customers? And I think that's what really bit them as they were getting product shortages because, well, we thought we had coffee, but we don't have coffee to sell. And that's where this really adds up and take a financial hit.

Blake Oliver: [00:23:34] All right. Let's go to some follow up. We mentioned Nasba a few. Was it last year? A few months ago. Last year on the show, we covered some reporting problems at Nasba. When it comes to the CPA exam. Joseph Ugrin is a professor and the head of accounting at the University of Northern Iowa, and he wrote in accounting today about how Nasba CPA exam reporting was basically broken. They had material inaccuracies tied to the transition of the CPA evolution exam and the related reporting system changes, and it caused universities to report incorrect rankings for their CPA exam results, for example, of 61 University of Northern Iowa CPA candidates active during that time period, 28 were missing from uni. Reported results. That's nearly 46% of the total. And then Nasba did a review of this and confirmed that candidates had been misclassified. 19 had been assigned to a community college instead of uni, six were shown as having no degree and three were attributed to another institution, which created a material distortion of the outcomes at uni. And Joseph Ugrin, of course, was like, this doesn't make sense and dug into it, figured it out.

David Leary: [00:24:57] One person taking this initiative of running reports on this data every year, this would never bubble up.

Blake Oliver: [00:25:04] No, I mean, you know, somebody actually looked at the data that was being reported from Nasba for their own school and realized it didn't make any sense and then pointed out that they had this issue. So here's the thing is, like Ugrin wrote this follow up And he said that NASA's leadership has acknowledged the problem and is taking corrective steps, but they haven't fixed it yet. It's still a problem. And so what they're doing is they're just they're discontinuing the institution institutional rankings because the underlying data is flawed. So there's was no longer going to report ranking data for universities.

David Leary: [00:25:43] So basically instead of saying we have a problem, we're going to figure out what went wrong. We're going to fix it going forward in the future. They said, forget it. We're just not going to do it anymore.

Blake Oliver: [00:25:50] Well, they're not doing it for now. And I guess they're going to try and fix it.

David Leary: [00:25:54] Okay. Okay. So they suspended it temporarily for who knows how long that'll be.

Blake Oliver: [00:25:58] And they're bringing back custom institutional reports so that you can actually get the information on your specific school. So you can check to see if it makes sense, right?

David Leary: [00:26:06] Which is like, you can a subscriber pay for a custom report?

Blake Oliver: [00:26:09] I don't know if they're going to charge for it, but you can actually get a report. Um, and so yeah, they're still working on it. They have to fix the underlying data collection process. So basically, the problem is that two years after the CPA exam changed, we still lack reliable public program level data. Nasba hasn't been able to deliver it, so. All right, David, I'll let you choose the next story. You've got a story about Microsoft cutting off AI access. Yeah.

David Leary: [00:26:42] Jump into that one.

Blake Oliver: [00:26:43] Their employees but also something about jobs here in Phoenix going away due to AI. Where do you want to go?

David Leary: [00:26:49] Let's talk about the Phoenix jobs because I think it really hits home for both you and I. So the title of the article was really headline grabbing. And this is in the Wall Street Journal. Phoenix built an built an empire of cubicle jobs. And the AI is coming to tear them all down. So Phoenix and this is true for Tucson too. A lot of call center jobs. That's how I got into this industry. I started a call center because land is cheap. You can build big buildings in Tucson and Phoenix. You can put up a bunch of cubicles and you can put bodies in there to take phone calls. Basically, you just needed bodies to take calls. I know in Phoenix, Wells Fargo, Bank of America have huge call centers close to the airport there. And but the jobs are falling. So in 2021, there was 92,000 customer service jobs in Phoenix. Now it's down to 68,000. So it's a 26% decline in four years. Wow. It's only going to get worse. And the interesting thing is on the west side of Phoenix, I don't know how much time you've been out there. There's nothing but these distribution center warehouses popping up. You know, Amazon Prime, all these companies like that have to ship stuff around. You know, all those are going to be staffed with automated AI warehouse bots. Right. And then the new jobs, like because Phoenix is building big chip plants. Well, you can't just work at a call center and then now go work at a chip plant. And it gives an example that even janitorial positions at a chip plant, you need special certification. So so you can't just reskill these people and say, oh, now you're going to work in these other industries that are popping up in Phoenix. So this is this is interesting for Phoenix, like how they're what they're going to do. I mean, there was one wave before, and I remember even in Tucson, a lot of call center jobs moved to India, but now the ones that remain are probably are now going to be taken away because of AI. Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:28:36] A lot of the fear mongering about AI jobs or jobs being lost, AI has been in white collar professions saying that accounting is going to get automated, that I don't know what else. Like all these all these office jobs are going to get automated, but we haven't seen that. And I've got a story here from Ezra Klein in The New York Times arguing that basically an unemployment crisis due to AI is not the most likely outcome. And I tend to agree with that, although I do wonder if like at the Uh, below the white collar level, like call centers. Like you said, warehouse employees like these jobs don't require a lot of like judgment and robotics and AI. You know, chatbots, voice bots could like seriously reduce those jobs because those, those AI agents, whether or not they're in the physical form or virtual can, can do basically the whole job.

David Leary: [00:29:43] And to some extent, at those companies that have these call centers, they look at them just as a cost center and they want to get they've been wanting to get rid of them for 40 years. Yeah. Like now they have the opportunity to do that.

Blake Oliver: [00:29:52] Yeah. So I, I wonder if like the AI job, job, apocalypse is coming for, for those jobs. Um, I mean, truck drivers too, right? That's when we've been talking about for a while, there's all these companies working on automated like fully autonomous trucks, which now that we have all these Waymo's driving around Phoenix, I don't see that as being that far off, because if you can get a Waymo to be safer than a human, I feel like you could get a, a, an automated truck to be safer than a human. It's just a little riskier because you're on the highway. So it's just going to take a little more time to get the regulators.

David Leary: [00:30:33] All these humans are driving around on the highway, unpredictable humans.

Blake Oliver: [00:30:37] So but I mean, like, I think we would all love to have like a highway system where we've got these. I mean, I would love to have self-driving trucks because I feel like, you know, the, the human drivers can fall asleep and lose focus. And also some of these truck drivers, man, they just they don't know how to drive. Right? They're trying to pass, right? They're blocking us in the fast lane trying to pass one truck. Like it's so dumb. Like, why don't we just have all these self-driving trucks sit in the slow lane and just get there when they get there, you know, let us all get there faster. So let's talk about this, um, this idea about like AI job apocalypse, right? I mean, we saw this in the past with spreadsheets. When the electronic spreadsheet was invented, it did not reduce the amount of accounting work. And there was a lot of work at accounting firms just making spreadsheets by hand. And what happened is that the number of bookkeepers employed at accounting firms dropped by about half. We lost like a million bookkeepers over a generation.

Blake Oliver: [00:31:41] And what happened? We had more accountants and in particular, we had a whole new category of job financial analysts, which like didn't even exist before the spreadsheet. So my theory is that we're going to have the same thing happen where actually, yes, the number of accountants will drop. We won't need as many. That's good because we don't have enough already. We have a shortage already. This is why we haven't seen the number of grads getting accounting jobs decline because there's already a steep shortage. So we're going to that's going to decline slowly over decades, maybe faster, I don't know. It depends on how quickly AI gets adopted, but there will be a whole new category of job that's invented. And I think we're going to see more controllers because as accounting gets cheaper, just like as bookkeeping got cheaper, there will be more demand for accounting and somebody will have to oversee the AI and the systems. And that's a controller controllers or CFOs. Small businesses will be able to afford controllers and CFOs. They've always wanted them. They could never afford to hire one.

David Leary: [00:32:50] And that is more important than ever because you're like, hey, look, I'm getting my bookkeeping done for super cheap. I have AI doing my bookkeeping. I have AI doing this, but it's out of control. It's still out of control. Exactly. Come help me. Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:33:02] And I don't know how to interpret it. Yeah. So somebody's going to have to watch it over. It's the same thing we saw in cloud accounting, where companies that were doing bookkeeping themselves could now afford to hire an outsourced accountant, because we automated 80% of the bookkeeping work with rules based automation and API connections. So I was able to build a firm where I was the outsourced accountant for hundreds of businesses that could never have afforded that before. Before all they could afford was a hourly bookkeeper, and now they're getting an accountant for the same price. So I think we're going to see small businesses hiring controllers and CFOs. And the bookkeeping and accounting is basically 80, 90% automated. And that's where I'd be betting my money if I was building a firm again. All right. Let's thank our next sponsor, David. And that is C and R consulting Group. If you're running a mid-market accounting firm, you know the struggle a shrinking, a shrinking talent pool, rising labor costs, and your best people buried in routine work instead of high margin advisory services. It's a production bottleneck that's costing you growth. That's where CNR consulting Group comes in. For over 15 years, CNR has been the go to outsourcing partner for accounting firms across the US, Canada and the UK. Long before offshoring became a buzzword. Founded and managed by professional accountants with four decades of domain expertise, CNR isn't a generic outsourcing shop. They customize an engagement model for your firm, whether that's tax prep, bookkeeping, CAS or CFO services so you get a plug and play extension of your team. Not a one size fits all headache. Their client list includes top ten CPA firms and boutique practices alike, and every engagement is backed by the same enterprise level infrastructure. The biggest firms use in their captive offices. To see why mid-market accounting firms choose CNR consulting Group as their outsourcing outsourcing partner. Head over to The Accounting Podcast dot com slash CPE. That's accounting podcast.io/letter C. Letter n. Letter R.

David Leary: [00:35:08] Y'all jump into this Microsoft story here. So the headline and probably the reality are not fully reconciled. Microsoft cut off its engineers from AI because the bill got too big. And then it goes on to say a subtitle y AI might not take your job after all. So Microsoft, remember, they invested $13 billion into open AI, and they're using AI to write 30% of its own code. But they turned off and cut off the engineers from AI coding tools because the costs spiraled out of control. And it's not just Microsoft. This also happened at Uber. Uber's CTO said that in four months, they burned through all their tokens. They had budgeted for cloud code and cursor in just four months. Now, what's what I don't understand about this is, in theory, writing code is one of the most efficient uses of your tokens, your AI tokens. Right? So what I think this is really one of those bean counter things. I think this is the accountants, right? Big companies like Microsoft have to they have to manage the street's expectations. So they have to have a budget. So they budgeted for X, and by the power of Grayskull they're going to hit their budget. If infant means turning this off from engineers from utilizing more tokens. So I don't think this is a oh, they're pulling back because it's not aligning with cost expectations. It's just flat out we set the budget at X and we're not going to change it even if we're wrong. I think it's the bean counters.

Blake Oliver: [00:36:31] And they're having trouble tying the AI spend to specific ship features or functionality. Yeah, it's really hard to attribute all those tokens. And part of the problem is that the pricing of these tools is usage based now. So people are starting to use the tools so much, we're exceeding the threshold for our monthly allowance. And a lot of this is due to Claude Claude's pricing model is genius in the sense that they give you so many tokens included in your subscription, and then the overages you have you got to pay for. And now that we've got cloud Co-work, we're starting to burn through a lot of tokens because we can do this complex work where behind the scenes cloud is spinning up multiple conversations that you don't see with AI agents that are being organized by the one you're talking to. And so it just can spiral like.

David Leary: [00:37:27] Yeah, every day, every day, I swear I'm going into some one app I'm using and I have to give it more money. I have to feed the machine because I burned up tokens on something.

Blake Oliver: [00:37:37] Anthropic's annualized net dollar retention exceeds 500,000 or 500%. Sorry, 500%. So what that means is that like when someone signs up for anthropic, they end up spending five times more than they expected because they're using it so much. Yeah.

David Leary: [00:37:58] As soon as you're an established user, I could easily see this because then you're just like, well, I can pay human to do it. It's still cheaper no matter. But that's where they got you, right? You're in that trap now, that cycle.

Blake Oliver: [00:38:08] Well, and we get addicted to it. It becomes so easy now to do things that we would have done ourselves with cloud. We're using it for everything.

David Leary: [00:38:15] Use it for more.

Blake Oliver: [00:38:16] Yeah. So and it's making your employees lives easier. It's making their jobs more fun, but it's not necessarily creating more revenue across your organization.

David Leary: [00:38:28] I still insist this like master the tokens, like virtual token CFO, like somebody should be managing this for clients, like, because it's really hard to know where I'm just like 20 bucks here. And I'm like, I sign up. I'm not, I know we're not optimized. Like I sign up for a monthly plan. It says it's going to give me 20,000 tokens a month. It feels like enough. And then, you know, I'm six days into the month and I'm like, I have to spend another 40 bucks for more tokens. Like nobody knows what they're buying and you need that assistance. And this is where honestly, accountants have an opportunity here.

Blake Oliver: [00:39:00] And how you how you use these apps, how you configure them, how you build your prompts and then also skills really makes a difference. So Claude can go and do something in a really inefficient way and burn a lot of tokens, or you can teach it to do it in a much more efficient way. And this is not obvious to your typical user. And if they aren't responsible for their own token spend, they're not necessarily going to like think about conserving those resources. And that's why I agree with Donnie Shimamoto, that CPA firms, every CPA firm that's big enough should create an AI architect role. He wrote about this in accounting today, and I view it as it's basically the same as when we went to cloud. All the firms that were leading in this created these technology roles that were not it, that were like basically The operations roles, COO roles where the COO is responsible for the tech stack and the workflow. Picking which apps to use, integrating them together. Teaching the team.

David Leary: [00:40:08] At your.

Blake Oliver: [00:40:08] Firm. Yeah, a cloud champion. And now we need that for AI, because that person is going to be able to learn how to do stuff more efficiently, monitor the token spend, and set things up so that you can watch the spend across different workflows. So for instance, in cloud, you can, through the API create different keys and you can name the keys and you can plug them into your different systems and monitor the spend for each integration. So I can see what we're spending on our Zapier integration with a particular token. And I can see what we're spending on our integration. And I can figure out and spot overages before they happen. But if you're not doing that as a firm, if everyone's just doing their own thing, you're probably going to spend a lot of money.

David Leary: [00:40:51] Individuals. Yeah. Because then you're, you're right in the middle of something. You're like, fine, here's my credit card. Just just give me the tokens. Like I just need to get done what I was doing. And there's no like clients and accounting firms need that overarching. It's really an architect, right? And you call it.

Blake Oliver: [00:41:09] A AI architect.

David Leary: [00:41:10] Architect. Yeah. You need, you need.

Blake Oliver: [00:41:11] You need them to review security, right? You need them to figure out how to build systems that are scalable. Cloud cowork is awesome, but it's not really scalable from a security standpoint. So you need to evaluate these AI agent builders that are available now that are not cloud cowork and figure out what's going to work. You're probably going to try a bunch of things and they're going to break. You're going to switch. Like, this is a whole reinvention of our tech stack for firms, and you really need somebody who's going to own it. So if you want a job.

David Leary: [00:41:42] Yet.

Blake Oliver: [00:41:42] If you want a job and you're like a student or you're young, you're young accountants like learning this AI stuff, man, every firm is going to be hiring an AI architect.

David Leary: [00:41:52] We haven't seen it yet, but I'm sure we'll hear it in the next six months to a year, because we definitely have talked to firms that are like, we're using AI and everything. There's going to be some firm that's like, oh shit, we spent way too much on AI tokens enough to where like it shocked themselves. You know, some of these, some firms are going to be like, oh, our five person firm spent $300,000 on AI tokens, and we didn't know it until it was too late. We're going to hear a story like this in the next year.

Blake Oliver: [00:42:18] David, let's go ahead and thank our last sponsor, and that is maxima, and I'll let you read this one.

David Leary: [00:42:23] It's the 15th day of the month in. Your accounting team is still scrambling to close the books. Sound familiar? Comptrollers and accountants everywhere are stuck in this cycle. They're pulling data from dozens of systems, reconciling transactions line by line and racing against deadlines just to get accurate financials. While AI is transforming every other part of the business, accounting teams are still drowning in spreadsheets and manual work. That's where maxima comes in. Maxima is an agentic platform built specifically for record to report operations. Their AI agents actually understand how accounting works. They pull data from your entire finance stack, apply your accounting policies, draft journal entries, reconcile accounts, and get everything prepped for human review. Companies like Rippling and Zendesk already use maxima to cut their clothes time by up to 80%, while automating 95% of repetitive work. Which, honestly, is kind of hard to believe until you actually see it. Imagine closing your books in days, not weeks, and actually having the time to analyze the numbers instead of just assembling them. That's what it looks like when AI handles the prep work and your team handles the judgment calls. To see why accounting leaders are making the switch to maxima, head over to The Accounting Podcast dot com. Maxima, that is accounting podcast.io/max.

Blake Oliver: [00:43:34] I'm a quick follow up on the Trump IRS lawsuit settlement. A federal judge has just reopened the $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS after she said the deal to close it may have been, quote, premised on deception, unquote. After Trump voluntarily dropped the case, the Justice Department quietly released agreements, creating a $1.8 billion fund for people claiming they were the victims of democratic weaponization. The deal also gave valuable tax benefits to Trump, his family and his businesses, which included a guarantee that Trump would not be examined for any of the previous tax returns that were under examination, that that would all be dropped. And the judge is asking whether Trump colluded with his own government to settle the case and dodged judicial review. She wants his lawyers to respond by June 12th. So I didn't I didn't think this was going to stand. And it looks like there's going to be a fight over it in the courts. Like you said, David, one of the issues is that Trump basically settled this with himself because he is the executive of the federal government and runs the IRS.

David Leary: [00:44:52] And who's the AI AG on this? Like his former personal attorney or something? I'm not positive, but the whole thing does not pass the smell test in any way, shape or form.

Blake Oliver: [00:45:01] Yeah. So no surprise there. Uh, another bit of little follow up. The AICPA is throwing its support behind a bill that would limit beneficial ownership reporting to foreign owned companies only. I was confused when I saw this because I thought that was already the case. And it is all that beneficial. Ownership reporting got limited to foreign companies only by FinCEN, but that was a rule that they made. They just made that rule. And Congress never passed a law to change the law. So technically, Congress needs to pass a law. And so the AICPA is, is backing this, uh, backing this law. Let's see what else.

David Leary: [00:45:42] I have follow up that ties back to the, uh, the Trump slush fund, if you want to call it that. The the Trump lawsuit.

Blake Oliver: [00:45:50] Well, that's that came out of this lawsuit.

David Leary: [00:45:51] It came out of this lawsuit. So, uh, Governor Gavin Newsom, California governor, who's actually at this point, you just call him like the whatever Trump does, he's going to do the opposite, right? Like, that's kind of his M.O. lately these days. So he is threatening to impose a 100% tax on any Californians who receive money from the Trump's controversial 1.8 anti weaponization fund, which I find ironic because essentially that's even more weaponization happening, right? Like he's weaponizing by taking this right back out, which basically makes it a null proposition, right? So if you feel like you've been weaponized, the government's been weaponized against you. You go get this money from this fund. A different government is now going to weaponize and just take that money from you like it never happened. Uh, so we'll see. Obviously, it's going to need to pass the legislature and probably have lots of legal challenges, but it's an interesting take to to tax anything 100% seems kind of crazy. Do we have 100% taxes on anything?

Blake Oliver: [00:46:52] Well, that would just be taking money from people.

David Leary: [00:46:56] Yeah. Essentially, yes.

Blake Oliver: [00:46:57] So, um, switching gears, KPMG's CEO in Australia has resigned. Andrew Yates has resigned. Audit and assurance leader Julian McPherson also resigned. This is after KPMG Australia acknowledged shortcomings in how it handled a whistleblower complaint. The firm said its treatment of the whistleblower and the investigation into the allegations fell short of the standards expected by the firm, the whistleblower and the public. That's after they had previously said that the whistleblower's claims were unsubstantiated, even though it disciplined staff in April. What is this all about? They. The claim is that KPMG staff accessed and shared confidential audit information in order to help win new business. This was made public in Australia's Parliament by Senator Deborah O'Neill. According to her, KPMG staff used confidential board papers from lend lease and audit client while pursuing work with other companies. Those companies included Westpac, whose contract KPMG won from PwC in 2020 for additional claims, raised concerns about the integrity of KPMG's bid for Macquaries audit contract, which was also won from PwC, and a broader inappropriate sharing of data inside the firm. So this is a big no no. Taking data from audits you're doing and using it to win business from another firm like total ethical violation, violation of audit standards. You cannot do that.

David Leary: [00:48:37] Yeah. So if you're doing the audit and you see, hey, they spent this much at firm X, we should get some of that money. What's vermex providing them in services so we could try to provide those services?

Blake Oliver: [00:48:46] Yeah, definitely. Definitely not. Uh, not not kosher there. So, uh, the whistleblower was described as a former KPMG audit employee. They first raised concerns in 2024. Kpmg conducted an internal investigation that did not substantiate the allegations. The firm says that in review, in hindsight, the review lacked the necessary rigor. An external legal review supported the internal findings, but continued outreach from the whistleblower to independent board members led to a third investigation, which is still underway and being handled by another external law firm. So, um, don't don't use your audit client information other than for doing audits, I guess.

David Leary: [00:49:35] Do you want to jump into app news? I want to make sure we talk about, uh, zero zero force.

Blake Oliver: [00:49:39] Oh, I know it's so good. Uh, so interesting. I mean, if it if it ends up living up to expectations, tell me about what this zero force app is.

David Leary: [00:49:48] So and the funny thing is, when we were at QuickBooks connect last year, I was like, Intuit should launch a no code thing, right? To help people build reach. Because what's good about launching something? No code, you could build something. It's reusable, right? Versus just chatting with an agent one time, give me a graph of this and doing the whole thing over again next time. So zero launch, zero force. It's a no code AI agent builder that lets small businesses and accountants automate repetitive financial tasks using plain language, no technical skills required. So it's going to launch early access actually opened in May at the end of May. Broader rollouts coming out. And you can build agents that run across zero and third party apps. So you don't have to just have this one time, give me a graph of this. And then after you do that, it just goes away and you never have anything you can actually say. I have, you know, the way I think about no code is I have this problem. I would like to solve it this way, and I want it to run every week. And you could build it with plain language like that. And then now you have this agent. I have not seen it. I haven't touched it. I haven't tried it. But the way it's it seems like it's a smart thing to build. And I would not be surprised if Intuit launches something similar as well.

Blake Oliver: [00:51:02] What it sounds like to me is basically what we're doing in cloud Cowork, but this would be inside Xero and connected to your Xero data. So if these agents can actually do everything that we can do in the Xero web interface, but do it via prompting, that would be amazing. And if it can go out and connect to other apps, that would be incredible. One of the examples is going to be music to every Xero users ear, which is setting a workflow to request clarification on uncoded transactions on a specific day each month. So I can see how you could easily build an agent like this. Create the agent. Tell it to. On this day, every month, look at my zero file and pull a list of all the Uncategorized transactions that are saying that you know, Ask My Accountant account or Uncategorized transactions, Uncategorized expenses account and email them to a particular user, to somebody, and then wait for the response, right? And then categorize transactions based on the response.

David Leary: [00:52:11] Which is a whole category of apps. There's like ten apps that have at third party apps that have done that, that maybe now you won't need because you have an agent.

Blake Oliver: [00:52:17] Or here's another dream, right? And I would love to be able to build this is on every week. Look at all the transactions over $75 in any expense account, and then search my email for receipts and attach those receipts to the transactions. That's a whole category of apps right there. Just receipt management tools. I mean, so I think this is an incredible thing. If Intuit isn't building this, they need to build it. If Xero gets there first, I think it's going to really increase the value of zero. And it's basically what all these AI gels have been building. So this is a way for zero to stay competitive. Quickbooks needs to do it too. If they don't, then they're going to lose business.

David Leary: [00:53:06] And it lets you build custom solutions for your clients. Like I insist, accountants have engineer brains. You just don't know how to write code. And if this can let you create permanent, quote unquote code that runs routinely for a client on their inside of zero. And you don't have to, you don't have to spin up a server and all this other crazy stuff you have to do. It'll help you scale and scale that client. And there's value to this. So it would be really interesting to see where this goes next. Maybe we could try to get access to it. Blake, have you tried it?

Blake Oliver: [00:53:38] Well, so there's a waitlist, and you can ask to get on the waitlist. But like, at this point, because it's in Alpha, you have to like commit to doing, um, feedback sessions and stuff. And I just don't have.

David Leary: [00:53:49] Feedback publicly on our show.

Blake Oliver: [00:53:52] Maybe I'll join the waitlist. But, but anyway, it's, it's an alpha now, but beta is expected in the coming months, so I'll definitely join the beta when it's there. Um, I'm really excited for that since we're talking about zero. Let's talk about their results for fiscal year 2026. They reported a 31% jump in operating revenue. They're up to 2.75 billion net profit. However, net profit after tax fell 27% to 167 million, which is attributed to costs tied to Xero's acquisition of Melio. Is it Melio or Melio? David? I never remember.

David Leary: [00:54:38] I always said Melio. But.

Blake Oliver: [00:54:40] Melio, which is that, uh, bill pay platform that they acquired us to gain parity with QuickBooks on bill pay. So now you can pay bills inside of zero like in QuickBooks because of that, but it really hit their, uh, net profit due to that.

David Leary: [00:54:56] Is, is it the one time acquisition cost that their net profit or is this like ongoing?

Blake Oliver: [00:55:01] It says cost tied to Zero's acquisition of Melio. So not necessarily ongoing.

David Leary: [00:55:06] Because I thought they actually, um, did additional financing to make this happen, if I remember correctly. Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:55:13] I don't know how the accounting worked. Zero had zero added half a million net customers, bringing its total global customer base to 4.92 million. Their annualized monthly recurring revenue rose 37% to $3.27 $7 billion. That's monthly recurring revenue and free cash flow increased 9% to 554 million. The average revenue per customer is only $55.44, though that's low.

David Leary: [00:55:49] That's really, really low.

Blake Oliver: [00:55:50] Well, and.

David Leary: [00:55:51] That's I don't know what it is for Intuit, but I think it's a lot higher.

Blake Oliver: [00:55:53] I think it's because they're global. And I think it's because Xero does not have all the add ons that Intuit has here in the US.

David Leary: [00:56:01] There's no payroll product. That's why they got bill pay. So they get some revenue from that.

Blake Oliver: [00:56:05] And Xero has payroll but it's not in all the markets. Right. And it's not here in the US. They gave up on that. Um now here's the thing though. Um US growth has been good. Their revenue surged 240% in the US. And that was supported by the acquisition. So like if that continues to drive growth for them in the US that's a potentially a great acquisition. They added 110,000 US customers. So that's interesting because they have such a small US user base compared to.

David Leary: [00:56:36] Or is that the year.

Blake Oliver: [00:56:36] That was in the year? So they added 110,000 US customers and their revenue surged most.

David Leary: [00:56:41] That's so many. Yeah. Like historically this might have been their greatest year ever in the States.

Blake Oliver: [00:56:48] So I mean maybe that integration or acquisition will be considered like a great deal. Um, they also talked about how they have partnered with anthropic to incorporate cloud AI into their platform. I assume that's what they're going to be using for zero force. And if they do zero force, and it works really well and it integrates with all these apps, and you can automate all this stuff in zero and they can do it before Intuit does. I think that could be a real winner for them. And I think into it, you know, I don't know, into it just seems to struggle sometimes with the obvious.

David Leary: [00:57:29] Both have. I mean, sometimes I feel like they're like, Amelia, I'm sorry. Amelia Zero also announced they're doing a stock buyback just like Intuit is right. They I feel like there's even, there's been a lot of Intuit people that have went to zero, like they're very similar companies. There's not a lot of differences, not as much as the color is different. But and I think people that are zero exclusive people think they're so different from Intuit, but a lot of it is the same. And they're doing the same strategies, the same playbook. I don't think they're as different as people think.

Blake Oliver: [00:57:59] Zero shares have fallen 53% over the past year. So it might be.

David Leary: [00:58:03] Pulled up into it 53%. Same exact stock. Both stock.

Blake Oliver: [00:58:07] Declined. They both might be a good buy, although zero doesn't make money from tax, at least here in the US anyway. So I'm more bullish on zero than I am on Intuit at the moment because Intuit's revenue is like so heavy on TurboTax. But I don't know, you said last week you don't think it's going to take a hit because it's going to be, uh, the small tax shops that end up having their tax work eaten by AI as opposed to TurboTax.

David Leary: [00:58:36] I mean, I do believe like Intuit only needs a 1 or 2% efficiency somewhere. And it's a big, they get a big ripple effect from that. Yeah. A small tax shop needs a 90% improvement to make a difference to compete. They're competing. So it's just the it's just different. Right. And obviously it's a slower boat to turn, etc.. But if anybody's going to benefit from this, it's going to be a company. Xero and Intuit from the AI.

Blake Oliver: [00:59:03] Thanks to everyone who joined us live for this episode. Tate. Great to see you, Tate. Tate says, hey, what's up guys? Feel like I know you guys personally. I've played around with the no code stuff. I have not done anything groundbreaking yet. Accountants don't have time to experiment. That's the big problem. That's why you need an AI architect. Because you need someone in your firm that has the time just to sit around for a whole day and experiment like you did. David.

David Leary: [00:59:32] Yeah. So I, on Memorial Day in my office, closed the door, didn't open up email and I vibe coded a problem. Now, it doesn't have to be groundbreaking. Like, don't don't put pressure on yourself. Just solve a simple problem that you have to deal with week after week after week after week. And what I basically did is I built a production assistant. So before I would have to, every time it's time to do the show, I filter through 1500 articles. Then I have to read them and summarize them and type the summary into a Google Doc. And it was very stressful getting ready for the show because it's a lot of, frankly, just a lot of copy paste to get ready for each show. And so I built a production assistant that can take all the articles I think are for the next episode. And it does all that copy and pasting and summarizing for me, so I have it ready to go. I can still make notes, and as I read articles, I used it for the whole show today and I used it for the show last time. But what allowed me to do this is I had to set time aside. I'd been wanting to build this for a year, so I was like, what if I in my brain, I was ready to build it. I just couldn't, I didn't have the code skills to do it. But now with AI, if you can just give yourself a day and don't try to build anything groundbreaking, just solve a problem. It's all groundbreaking. If you solve the problem and you never have to deal with it again. I'm probably saving myself four hours a week now and it adds up. But you have.

Blake Oliver: [01:00:54] To. You have to set aside the time. And that's the problem. Set aside the time when you are so busy in production or managing a firm, you just don't have time to mess around with this stuff. And I have a similar story and I can't wait to show this. Like on a future episode when we have some a slow news week. I built a cloud skill that reconciles all my bank accounts in zero. All I have to do is give it the PDF bank statements and it does it. And it's almost to the point where it's perfect and it's doing it through the UI, through the web UI.

David Leary: [01:01:30] We should do a webinar show and tell where we just show kind of these things we built.

Blake Oliver: [01:01:34] I know just those, those two things would be amazing. It took a while though. Like I had to do it like on two. Basically it's taken two months, right? I had to do it the first time chatting, create the skill, then test the skill the next time and update the skill. And Claude can like learn and update. And then basically, I think when I do may, I think it's going to be rock solid and it's going to save me a lot of time because I can just set it and it works for like 30 minutes and it does all the rest.

David Leary: [01:02:08] Somebody's just going to use zero force and create it like this, and not have to spend two months refining it like you did. Which goes to my theory that AI procrastinators are the ones who really win. Well, you.

Blake Oliver: [01:02:18] Don't know, but they don't. Here's why they don't. Because if you don't experiment, you don't understand the principles.

David Leary: [01:02:23] Yeah, yeah.

Blake Oliver: [01:02:24] You need to know, like how these tools work and where they are effective. That's why you have to burn some hours on stuff that doesn't go anywhere.

David Leary: [01:02:33] Yeah. And be okay with that.

Blake Oliver: [01:02:34] Yeah. All right. David, this was a real pleasure. Thanks to everyone who joined us live. You can earn free continuing professional education for listening to this episode and past episodes of the Accounting Podcast, plus amazing shows like Tax in Action and Oh My Fraud and Federal tax updates. And she counts and the unofficial QuickBooks accountants podcast and more and more. Get the earmark app, go to earmark.app and your web browser. Get the free app on the App Store, create a free account and earn one free CPE per week. You can subscribe as an individual for the low price of $170. That's going up to 200 at the end of this month, July 1st. So get that price lock that in for this year. You can also get a team account for your firm. So if you have more, what is it I three.

David Leary: [01:03:27] I let people set up a team of three or more. So three, five 1015, 20.

Blake Oliver: [01:03:32] If you have three CPAs or EAS or just anyone who needs CPE at your firm, you can create a team account. You can do it on the web app@earmark.app, and you can get 20% off. And if you have a firm with how many 20 or more users or something like that.

David Leary: [01:03:51] 20 or more, you get a way bigger discount.

Blake Oliver: [01:03:53] So we have volume discounts for large firms. Email us at sales at earmark cpe.com, and we will get you set up with an enterprise account. Everyone at your firm gets a an upgraded earmark account on a. If they're on your domain, they get upgraded. It's that easy. And we can also create on demand CPE courses available to just your team from your internal trainings. So if you do like Zoom trainings or webinars internally or even externally, you can send them to us and we will convert them into on demand courses. So your team can get CPE anytime, anywhere. They don't have to actually attend the live session.

David Leary: [01:04:36] They don't have to attend, but sometimes you want them to attend.

Blake Oliver: [01:04:39] You do. But like people are busy, they have client meetings. It's really.

David Leary: [01:04:42] Hard to miss.

Blake Oliver: [01:04:43] If they miss, or maybe they have to drop off or something. They can get the on demand CPE and that can be a private channel just for your firm. Nobody else sees that except people at your firm. And you can also, if you have public CPE you do, you can distribute it through us as well. We create a public channel for your firm and you can send that out to your clients. So email sales@cpe.com. If you want to get set up with a team account. We're really excited about all of that and we'll see you around here next week, everyone. Thanks, David. Bye.