The Accounting Podcast

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David Leary: [00:00:04] The CEO is going to get asked by a board one day. I see you spent all that on tokens. What was the result? And they're not gonna be able to answer it. Coming to you weekly from the OnPay Recording Studio.

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

David Leary: [00:00:26] I'm David Leary.

Blake Oliver: [00:00:28] David, we're going to start with the World Cup this week. I've been watching, uh, this is my first time really like watching the World Cup. Seriously. And I've been trying to catch all of the semifinals a bunch of games before that. I'm maybe I'm like over half a dozen, I don't know, but I feel like I'm finally starting to understand soccer.

David Leary: [00:00:48] I maybe, but I also feel like we are in that gap of like, unless you're a baseball fan, there's really not a lot of sports to watch right now. And so that's filling a need temporarily.

Blake Oliver: [00:00:59] That's great. The England versus Norway game was incredible. Um Bellingham's like goals were just spectacular. And those are like fun to watch. It's just hard because you know I have Add and I have you have to you have to watch where you're going to miss a goal like you. You cannot look away from the screen for a moment. Yeah. That's the hardest part for me. Uh, we'll talk about that. There's a tax story here about the World Cup and, uh, there's coverage from both Accounting Today and CPA Practice Advisor about it. The taxes the payers play, the the taxes the players pay, and then the taxes that you might pay as a better on sports depends on where you're betting, uh, and, uh, whether you're on one of those like, uh, polymarket type apps or a call, right? We'll talk about that. Um, there's also zero con coverage, zero con was it London happened and.

David Leary: [00:01:53] Zero con London was this week or last week, however you want to count it.

Blake Oliver: [00:01:56] There's a big AI announcement from zero. We'll talk about that as well. But first, David, let's thank our sponsors.

David Leary: [00:02:03] Our sponsors this week. We have canopy on pay value builder system and cloud accountant staffing. 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 the exact same emails over and over again, manual filing, trying to remember what a client said on the call last 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, tax workflows, month end, close automation and billing are all in one unified platform. No more duct taping ten different apps together. Plus, they have Canopy Coworker. It's a secure AI assistant that lives right inside the platform and actually does real work. It drafts context aware emails, summarizes clients histories, takes meeting notes, and turns them into tasks automatically. Early access firms are already seeing what's possible in AI works inside your workflow instead of alongside of it. To see a truly modern automated practice looks like, head over to The Accounting Podcast dot io slash canopy. That is accounting podcast.io/canopy.

Blake Oliver: [00:03:23] And please use those URLs. Visit those links. That's how our sponsors know that you heard about us through the podcast. And if you don't, just let them know when you're checking out a demo, let them know you heard about them on the accounting podcast. It really helps us out, helps them track.

David Leary: [00:03:40] And if you're not using any AI yet at all, pick something, just start using it. And this is a very good way to get, you know, you kill two birds with one stone, you're getting some AI agents, but you're also getting practice management if you don't have that either.

Blake Oliver: [00:03:52] Yeah. And we've got news that we'll cover in the app news section. Hopefully we'll get to it. Canopy has close automation now inside of their practice management solution. So really exciting to see that out of canopy. All right. Let's talk about the World Cup. So at this World Cup just because of this World Cup, Messi could owe nearly $28 million in U.S. federal taxes. And that's way more than other stars of the show. Mbappe. He's going to owe 22.2 million and Harry Kane under a million. And the difference comes down to tax treaties and where the players live. Messi he owes so much that $28 million bill, potentially because he's a US tax resident and he plays for Inter Miami. So there's no treaty that he's.

David Leary: [00:04:45] Living in the States right now or has been for a while.

Blake Oliver: [00:04:47] Yeah. And he's a foreign tax resident. And nonresident athletes they they pay a flat 30% US tax, but there's treaties that slash it. But some states don't honor those treaties. And then California has a jock tax of 13.3%. So if teams are training in California, the players are on the hook for that jock tax. But if they're in Florida or Texas, there isn't one. The real winner, though, is FIFA. Fifa is selling tickets and has broadcasting rights, but they're tax exempt. They're treated like a nonprofit in the US since the 1994 World Cup. Now, national teams actually can apply for tax exempt status, too. But there's like a lot of requirements for that. That's according to a new policy.

David Leary: [00:05:42] So so FIFA, this wildly profitable corporation, you could argue has nonprofit status.

Blake Oliver: [00:05:50] Yes. So yeah, they've got a is it 501 C three. They're they're they're nonprofit. They don't they don't pay tax. There's a lot of money here. The tournament is expected to generate 11 billion in revenue and will draw a record 6.5 million fans. Um FIFA has approved 727 million in distributions, including 655 million in prize money, and that's a 50% increase from 2022. So yeah, it's it's crazy. Um, you know, I mean, obviously tax professionals know that tax treatment, the taxes you pay vary widely depending on where you live and the different tax treaties between these countries. This is just a great example of how different that can be, you know, adding, uh, you know, a zero to somebody's tax bill, basically.

David Leary: [00:06:46] Well, and so FIFA is not a U.S. nonprofit. They're a global nonprofit. Yes. Out of Switzerland, $13 billion was their budget between 23 and 26, $13 billion.

Blake Oliver: [00:06:57] Wow. Now, there's also a tax story for those who are watching the games and enjoying betting on them. Um, this was a story I spotted in Accounting Today by Caitlin Riley. If you are betting on the World Cup through a prediction market, you may face a lighter tax burden than people who are making similar wages through sportsbooks like DraftKings and FanDuel. And that's because if you're betting on DraftKings and FanDuel, your wagers are treated like casino winnings, and the losses are deductible only for Itemizers. And because.

David Leary: [00:07:35] I think all those limits, the gambling apps are partnered with casinos and the money moves into a casino.

Blake Oliver: [00:07:41] Ultimately. Yeah. So, you know, you have to give up your 16,100, $100, $16,100 standard deduction. You can't deduct more losses than the winnings, you are limited to deducting no more than 90% of losses. But see prediction markets like Kalki and Polymarket, and I've seen ads for both of those in the World Cup. They're treated differently. They are regulated federally by the commodities, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. And so there's two different approaches. You could treat payouts from Kalki and Polymarket as capital gains, which allow you to offset and up to up to $3,000 against other income if losses exceed gains using, uh or using section 1256 treatment. And under that theory, 60% of your gains could get long term capital gains treatment and 40% would be taxed at ordinary rates. But there's there's confusion about this because the IRS has not issued guidance as usual. So it's fascinating that, you know, in this situation, right? We have these major sports betting apps, and then we have the prediction markets. And even though basically the prediction markets are gambling, like that's what it looks like. Yeah, it's treated different.

David Leary: [00:09:07] There's gonna have to be major regulation coming in on this because every time you turn around, the prediction markets keep flying under some other law. Like first, the fact that 16 year olds can gamble essentially with these is kind of ridiculous. They're bypassing all gambling laws because we're not gambling app now it's the tax treatment. It just somewhere some state, it's going to probably take some massive ban by one state that has some guts to do it. You know, actually, I'm surprised like Nevada, like somebody doesn't because Nevada wants to probably keep their casino people happy. Yeah. Like you'd assume a state like Nevada would go after these, these markets first in their state.

Blake Oliver: [00:09:47] So David, let's go ahead and move on to Xerocon coverage. Xerocon, London there was some big announcements, including Xero's new AI builder Xero Force. Yeah, I'll let you take this.

David Leary: [00:10:00] So for starters, happy birthday zero. You've hit your 20th anniversary, which is a big milestone. Like 20 years of doing anything is a very long time. So which is crazy to think in the grand scheme of like, zero is the baby of these AI gels, if you want to think of it that way. And now it's now zero is 20 years old. It's kind of crazy to think about that. But, um, one thing that the big thing I caught was a Co, um, it's Sukhinder Cassidy right. That's how you say her name I think. I think so she's, she's leaning into what she's calling quote unquote, the builder class movement. And when you say think builder class, this is your, I sometimes say citizen developers or accountants who can write code accountants that can do development because there's vibe coding. But remember two weeks ago I covered how the The Zero Developer team created a new YouTube channel called um, is everyone a developer now? And I was like, why are they doing this? Are they trying to chase everybody? But now after zero con yes, that is what they're doing. And they're already seeing it move numbers. For example, since January of 2026. So since they started connecting Claude and these copilot, these other agents to zero, their API usage has increased 400%.

Blake Oliver: [00:11:18] Wow.

David Leary: [00:11:18] So, so people are connecting these things in 2000 customers connected zero to Claude within the first 60 days of the announcement. Um, apparently Jax, that's the just zero built in AI agent. They have 500 000 users. Um, now if you think about this, you know, the product adoption bell curve, you've probably seen this. And on the two ends, it kind of starts with like your not even your early adopters, your innovators. So those are the people that like, they'll try anything new. They want the beta. Blake, you're one of those people, right? Oh, yeah. Like. And then it splits, goes into a bell curve. You have then you have your early adopters and then you have kind of that mass adoption. And then you have the laggards and tech. Arguably accountants have always fallen into that second half of this bell curve of product adoption. They are they tend to fall into the laggards. Right. Let everybody else use windows 95 for a decade. Then accounting firms will install windows 95. That's kind of the business model. Right. Um, but we're so early. Like it's not if you think about the numbers, right, 2000 if connected zero to cloud, that's that's 0.04%. Hardly anybody has done it in.

Blake Oliver: [00:12:28] 0.0% of zero users.

David Leary: [00:12:30] Of 5 million zero users or 5 million businesses. Almost nobody has done it. And that's going to keep in mind because it feels like for all the talk, like don't get FOMO, like you should be using these things and trying them out, but don't get FOMO because the number of people actually doing it is so, so teeny, teeny, teeny.

Blake Oliver: [00:12:49] We're so early still. It's very, very AI stuff.

David Leary: [00:12:52] Um, and so a couple announcements, they had products. I definitely want to talk about this zero force product before we do that. One of the other things that kind of flew under the radar is they've announced Zero Ultra is going to launch in the UK.

Blake Oliver: [00:13:05] So zero zero ultra, this is a big deal.

David Leary: [00:13:07] This is mid market product. They're going up market.

Blake Oliver: [00:13:10] This sounds a lot like Intuit Enterprise Suite. Is that how you're reading this.

David Leary: [00:13:15] Yeah. So I mean there's and I'm sure it's similar. They're probably zero sitting in the same boat that Intuit was. Eventually you probably start to outgrow zero. And then you move to a Sage Intacct for 15 to $30,000 a year, or you go up to Oracle NetSuite, possibly spending 45 to $100,000 a year. And if you're zero, what zero's most if zero gets all the money from you in a year, what's the most they could make off of you? Three grand, six grand.

Blake Oliver: [00:13:45] I don't know. I mean, it's like, well, look at what Intuit is charging for QuickBooks now. I think what's our subscription costing us.

David Leary: [00:13:52] Like 130 a year? Yeah. But, but let's say.

Blake Oliver: [00:13:54] 130 a month, right?

David Leary: [00:13:56] Yeah. If Intuit got us for everything, at most we're spending five grand. But then. But now our customers are leaving and spending 15 grand somewhere else. So there's a room in there for zero and Intuit to build a 10 to $12,000 product. And that's probably where this is going to come in at.

Blake Oliver: [00:14:11] Yeah. They're saying on their blog post that Zero Ultra is designed for medium sized growing businesses managing increasing complexity. Here are the key capabilities within zero ultra advanced financial intelligence. So you get sift advanced reporting sift they acquired to do all of this, which includes multi entity consolidated reporting, scenario modeling and AI powered insights and four way cash flow forecasting. And I was curious how they were doing this multi entity consolidated reporting whether it was going to be true multi entity like ledger, or if it was going to be a bunch of zero files.

David Leary: [00:14:53] Separate books.

Blake Oliver: [00:14:54] Stitched together. And that's what it looks like it is. It's taking a bunch of separate zero files and consolidating them at the reporting level using Syft analytics.

David Leary: [00:15:04] So basically they're just doing exactly what Intuit's doing.

Blake Oliver: [00:15:07] Exactly.

David Leary: [00:15:08] Like how do, how do we, how do we tape this together to keep people on our stack longer?

Blake Oliver: [00:15:14] You're also getting faster support. You get front of queue access to zero specialists, personalized onboarding and migration support, and targeted data restore, which is a high priority service helping businesses to restore specific data errors without requiring a full file rollback.

David Leary: [00:15:32] That's actually important because zero is now introducing zero force. And essentially this is a no code AI agent builder. Now stepping back and looking at this. It looks a little like a Zapier. Tool. You connect zap zero, then you're like, all right, connect my gmail, connect in a Google sheet, connect in who knows what the suite of apps will be. And then I can use a prompt to say, every time an email like this comes in, pull the attachment PDF and put it into my Xero as a bill or whatever. But that's the gist of it. And I do that through plain text. But then it, it basically crafts it out as a workflow, which I'm assuming you could click into each workflow and modify that step further, not just use the AI prompt. So there, that's the march there on. And I always thought Intuit and back in the early days of cloud accounting and the part, you know, building the Intuit partner platform, there was talks about Intuit buying Zapier early days because it made sense. You could see that this was the writing on the wall, this connecting of apps, letting people that aren't developers connect data and move data around. And then Intuit wound up buying a different integration platform. I can't recall the name of it. And then in hindsight now as well. Quickbooks Intuit should have kept Quickbase. Were you ever familiar with Quickbase?

Blake Oliver: [00:16:49] I remember hearing about that, yeah.

David Leary: [00:16:50] What was it? It was a it was a database that was in the cloud. It was super early, but you could just build anything on top of that database. In a weird way, it was like not an amazing Airtable, but it never got the proper investment. But in hindsight, that's something probably very valuable to a company like QuickBooks or Xero. Now to have this database layer to build apps on top of, because that's going to be your biggest struggle with accountants. They can build an app, but if there's not a place for it to live, and how do you host it? Where should it live? And I think there's an opportunity for Zero and Intuit to get into that game, right? Because that's going to keep you on the zero stack. And if you think about it, you have all these startups building this QuickBooks competitor, Xero competitor, AI GL, but you have to have the, but they don't have the rest of the stack, right. And so if Intuit and Xero can stay ahead on the full stack and then obviously go up market, it's going to be hard for people to I'm just going to use this new AI GL when that the zero is running your whole entire business now, not just it's not just there being more than a GL, it's a way to think about it.

Blake Oliver: [00:17:56] Now, if you're excited about these two new features or products from 004 and zero ultra, just know that Zero Force is currently in Early Access. In Alpha phase, it's available on an invite only basis for select small businesses, accountants and bookkeepers. So it's not something that you can get right now.

David Leary: [00:18:16] Yeah, like an eight week window. They're keeping it very limited I noticed.

Blake Oliver: [00:18:19] But should be rolling out this year. Same thing for zero. Well not the exact same thing for Xero Ultra. Xero ultra is available in Australia and it is now. It's now available there. It is priced at $500 per month. So I would expect Xero Ultra to come to other markets as they roll it out. They're going to start in Australia, which is their like core core market for this.

David Leary: [00:18:45] And the sweet spot for that's probably ten grand a year.

Blake Oliver: [00:18:48] Yeah. So I mean you're paying 500 bucks a month. I wonder how many entities you can have on it. Right. Like, can you have like, is that, is that as many as you need? Or is there a limit to that?

David Leary: [00:18:59] I, I'm sure I know that for QuickBooks enterprise, either do you have to do you pay the QuickBooks enterprise fee the same amount if you have two entities? I don't know, but see, that thing is they're custom pricing that stuff too. So it's not really clear like what people get for that.

Blake Oliver: [00:19:16] Oh, here it is. It looks like you can get 5 to 8 entities. Those are traditional Xero organizations. On the Xero Ultimate plan. Xero Ultimate plan. Is that different than Xero Ultra.

David Leary: [00:19:28] Apparently that's yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:19:30] Um, yeah I'm not it's not clear to me on that. If anyone knows, let us know. David um, any more news out of Xerocon? Uh, you know what? Actually, I have one more story. But first, let's thank our next sponsor, and that is on pay. And I'm wearing their shirt. 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. They're 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 on pay keeps pricing simple to 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 promo slash pay. That's The Accounting Podcast dot promo forward slash ONPAY.

David Leary: [00:20:57] I had one more story that I saw at a zero con as well, is they're expanding their bank feeds API to non bank feed data. And I'm trying I they didn't give any specific examples. I'm trying to wrap my head around it, but I think it's a way to eliminate CSV uploads. So if I'm some app and I have like a CSV exporter and I don't want to fully integrate with the zero API and send data truly in through the API, I can basically turn that data into a bank feed. And then that's a way for people to add that bank feed and suck that data in. Now it is only for, uh, approved developers are working with. So this could be one of those things where it's just going to be like stripe data, Amazon data. The same way Intuit got in bed with 3 or 4 high level partners to bring data over. Um, I wish they had examples of this. They just don't. Um.

Blake Oliver: [00:21:50] Here's some more zero news for the US market. Zero has made standard ACH bill payments free for all US business plan customers. This is the bill pay that they integrated into zero from the Melio acquisition.

David Leary: [00:22:05] Wasn't already free. I'm so confused.

Blake Oliver: [00:22:07] Well, Melio was I don't know if it was inside of zero. It must not have been. There's going to be no transaction fees, no extra subscriptions. You don't have to, you know, deal with any of that. Um, which, you know, I think is a, is a nice change. What is it? Do you know what the is there a fee in in QuickBooks to pay bills. $0.50 $0.50.

David Leary: [00:22:27] It's just not enough to keep track of or worry about.

Blake Oliver: [00:22:30] Well, uh, I guess Xero is hoping that this will make them more competitive in the US. So that's great news for us. Small businesses paying their bills in Xero. Also, Xero has integrated with Microsoft 365 copilot through Jax, which is the name for their AI agent. You can ask questions about cash flow, invoices, expenses, etc., without leaving Microsoft Copilot. And so that is similar to their integration with, uh, with zero or not with zero with Claude. Right. All right, David, let's go ahead and, uh, where do you want to go from here? We want to do some more app news since we're talking about apps, do some quick hits on this.

David Leary: [00:23:19] Yeah. And then I'll come back because I definitely want to talk about this story eventually here too. So yeah, let's jump over to apps. That feels makes sense.

Blake Oliver: [00:23:25] Well, since canopy is a sponsor. Thank you. Canopy. Let's talk about their, uh, new tool that wants to kill the month end scramble. They have released. Well, it's in beta. Open beta. It's called canopy close automation. And this is an expansion of their canopy bookkeeping launch into broader closed management and bookkeeping workflow. Its goal is to automate key parts of bookkeeping and month end close work, such as monitoring the ledger and identifying issues and reporting. It currently integrates with QuickBooks online, and they're planning more GL integrations in the future. So what do you get with it? Um, it's bringing together different features so you can get live health scores tied to client books, period closed task templates, custom data monitors, client workflow and communication tools. Um, I really like this idea of like monitoring the status of your client's books as part of the practice management solution, because the challenge I always had when I was scaling my practice was as I got out of the day to day client work and was doing more and more review, how do I actually do that review in an efficient way?

David Leary: [00:24:47] So basically this giving you kind of a I'm imagining it's something similar to QuickBooks online accounting, where I could see my clients and like, this client has not reconciled in this many months. They have this many outstanding transactions. They put this many transactions in the accounting bucket. Like that's kind of the way it would imagine would be inside this product.

Blake Oliver: [00:25:06] I'm yeah, we're, I'm just, I have no idea. But that's that, that, that to me, the live the health check score is and could be very powerful. Of course you got to do it right. But that's I think what we really want as managers, directors, partners, we have to do all this review, make that easier for us. And this sort of goes back to a broader Uh, story about the way AI is affecting accounting, that a lot of it has been focused on automating the work of staff accountants, and we haven't really seen the productivity gains from that because you automate that work, but then you create potentially more work for the reviewers in the process.

David Leary: [00:25:53] And that's where the bottlenecks are happening at firms, right? Because there's just not enough reviewers or people with the skill set to do it.

Blake Oliver: [00:25:58] Yeah, there's not enough qualified, you know, managers, controllers, those mid-career professionals. So I would say that's the place to focus on AI in your firm. Um, more practice management news. Tax dome has introduced tax dome kiosk. It's, it's a, it's interesting because this is focused on in-person client visits. It's designed to handle signatures, payments, document review and scanning during office visits with those actions feeding directly into tax domes, automated workflows.

David Leary: [00:26:35] Because this tax dome essentially is like practice management for tax workflows, but then they have a front end portal, right, for your clients to sign in and do stuff with.

Blake Oliver: [00:26:44] But if they come in in person, they're not using the portal. So this is a software that you install on a tablet at your firm in the office.

David Leary: [00:26:55] And the counter, and you just have it up there.

Blake Oliver: [00:26:56] And then clients can use this tablet interface for common front desk tasks. So they can sign there and they can scan documents in and that sort of thing. Um, I think that's really neat. I mean, it kind of reminds me of the tablet that I get when I go to the dentist now, and I need to update my information and check through all those forms like that giant paper.

David Leary: [00:27:19] I hate doing that more than anything in my whole entire life. I hate, I hate filling out those questionnaires and all this paperwork and the HIPAA thing and sign the paperwork. I'm like, I just can't stand it.

Blake Oliver: [00:27:31] So moving on, more, more updates. Rippling now has a checking account product tied directly to payroll. So rippling is a payroll platform automation platform. They now have business banking. It's a business checking account embedded into their workforce management platform that offers 2.25% interest and enables same day payroll through their rippling payroll product. So you can load that up with your payroll funds, use it as your payroll account, and then earn interest on it and you get same day.

David Leary: [00:28:09] They also do expenses and bills as well. Bill pay. I think.

Blake Oliver: [00:28:13] Um, you know, I, I think they do as well. It's sort of like all of these apps are sort of crossing over at this point.

David Leary: [00:28:19] So now you basically, it's not just, you wouldn't just get a checking account for your payroll with rippling, you're basically going to move your banking there and probably do everything from there.

Blake Oliver: [00:28:28] Well, I don't know. I mean, I maybe or but if you think about it, right, if you're just let's just use the payroll example, right. Companies have money sitting in a payroll checking account to fund their, you know, next couple payrolls or whatever they whatever.

David Leary: [00:28:41] Yeah. Whatever they've processed.

Blake Oliver: [00:28:42] Yeah. Like we do the same thing, right? And so like, you know, if you have it inside of your payroll system, then, you know, you're not dealing with the delays or issues that could happen from payroll draft, say, you know, being slow or, or.

David Leary: [00:28:57] Plus you're getting. Yeah, you don't have to do the transfers if you have it in there, it's getting interest in that account for your if your payroll accounts paying interest, you don't have to play that game of like, leave it in this account until the last day, then transfer it over for the payroll. Like, yeah, there's risk to that.

Blake Oliver: [00:29:12] Let's go ahead and thank our next sponsor. And that is value builder system. Are you ready for today's magic number. It's 12%. That's how many of your clients received a written offer to buy their business last year. Unsolicited out of the blue. And when that offer lands, it triggers a wave of high margin advisory work like tax planning, estate planning, and quality of earnings. These engagements often run into six figures. The problem is, to most of your clients, you're the tax pro. So all that lucrative advisory work goes to someone else. The estate plan goes to an attorney. The wealth work goes to a financial advisor. You only find out about the deal when the K-1 hits your desk. The end game conversation is upstream of everything. Whoever has it first wins all the work that follows. That's where Value Builder comes in. It's the exit readiness platform built specifically for accounting firms. You can assess every client across operational, personal and financial dimensions benchmarked against data from over 80,000 business owners. You'll spot who's closest to a transaction in exactly what gaps need fixing. Ready to start leading the end game conversation with your clients? Head over to The Accounting Podcast dot com slash value. That's The Accounting Podcast dot promo forward slash VALUE. Mindbridge is urging clearer PCAOB guidance on AI audits. This was in IT brief. Uk they're reporting that Mindbridge submitted formal comments to the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, urging clear guidance on AI assisted audit procedures. The company, which makes AI powered audit software, argues that current oversight frameworks don't fully explain how firms should document, assess and defend technology assisted work during inspections, especially when we've got these audit tools that are analyzing full transaction populations now instead of doing sampling. The regulations have not caught up with what is possible these days.

David Leary: [00:31:16] And and just to pause there. So the regulation still you must do sampling and you must follow these procedures to do sampling, but there's no regulation.

Blake Oliver: [00:31:26] That's what they're built on, the old methods. Right. So and now like we could not sample the entire population of transactions before it was just not even possible. So the regulations don't even talk about the concept of.

David Leary: [00:31:40] Checking every transaction was not even a concept.

Blake Oliver: [00:31:43] And so the unresolved questions include how auditors should set investigation thresholds when every transaction gets a risk score, and how lower risk items should factor into judgments about sufficient audit evidence. And they say that the ambiguity can produce inconsistent inspection outcomes and push firms into doing duplicative work. So in my bridges view, their argument is that audit teams can run AI assisted procedures alongside traditional manual tests. And well, that's why they're doing it because not because they know whether because they don't know whether inspectors will accept the technology based work on its own. So they're they're doing the new audit methods using the tech, but they're still running the old system as well because they because they.

David Leary: [00:32:36] Need the check box.

Blake Oliver: [00:32:37] They have to pass the inspection.

David Leary: [00:32:38] They need the check box.

Blake Oliver: [00:32:40] They also want Pcob to publish aggregated, anonymized inspection information about technology assisted procedures and related deficiencies. And they're calling for broader standards review, covering supervision, documentation and quality management. When software performs part of the audit work. And one more piece of story before I hand things back to you, David. Pcob has voted unanimously to seek public comment on easing parts of QC 1000. That's the Audit Quality Control Standard adopted in 2024. They are considering possible elimination of the external quality control function. That's a requirement for firms that audit more than 100 issuers. Under the current rule, those larger firms have to include at least one independent person to assess major judgments and conclusions related to the firm's evaluation of its quality control system. Audit firms and the US Chamber of Commerce had strongly objected to that feature, arguing that it was problematic and not a logical outgrowth of the earlier proposal. And firms are having trouble finding qualified people to serve in that role, according to Pcob staff. The board is also proposing to remove the requirement that all registered firms design a quality control system, even if they have not performed, and do not expect to perform engagements under Pcob standards. And that's important because a lot of firms are registered with the Pcob, but they actually don't do any public company audits. So if they change that, then the QC 1000 would only apply to firms that actually have to comply with professional legal requirements for a pcob covered engagement. And then there's several other miscellaneous changes. So basically, the story is that they're looking to roll back some of these audit quality standards, uh, to make them, uh, less burdensome for audit firms. Okay. David.

David Leary: [00:34:42] It's dangerous. I understand the spirit of this. We're going to roll some things back because they don't make sense in this new AI world. But it also, I feel like when you roll, like, are we thinking about this long term enough, right? Just rolling it back may not be the right word move here either.

Blake Oliver: [00:34:57] Well, you know, I mean, it's complicated because it seems like these rules about creating quality control systems are designed to improve the quality of audits. But having a system doesn't necessarily mean that your audit is going to be quality.

David Leary: [00:35:18] Yeah, because it makes it just adds complexity, which probably actually reduces quality long term.

Blake Oliver: [00:35:22] You think of it sort of like, what are these like wisps that firms have to do, these written information security? What is it, protocol? You have to look at your firm and design this like security.

David Leary: [00:35:35] You don't have to be secure. You just have to have a plan. Exactly right.

Blake Oliver: [00:35:40] So it's like if we want to improve audit quality, I'm not sure that burdening firms with more checking the box rules about audit quality is actually going to improve it. There probably is a better way to incentivize higher audit quality like looking at the outcomes. If you think about it, this is very much an inputs based approach to regulation as opposed to an outcomes based approach. All right. David, you had this story about CBS and an activist investor. Cbs. Cbs is for our listeners who are not familiar. Cbs is the what The one public accounting firm.

David Leary: [00:36:23] Yep. You cover what? Two weeks ago. For the last year. Their stock is down almost 50%. It's up a little bit this last week, but it's but I think during this year it's fallen below 50%. Their stock. Well like most companies when the stock really falls low what do companies tend to do. Stock buyback to provide value to the shareholders. We're going to buy some stock back. Well one of the investors a reference equity that owns a decent chunk of Cbiz, is 100% against this stock repurchase. They want Cbiz to get more financing and buy more firms. And I probably and it's fine. I saw the headline kind of go by, but what really caught my eye is they've spun up an entire website dedicated to this. It's called Cbiz flywheel.com and it has slide decks, a one pager. All the argument for this case, they really walked through the whole thing. But the bigger story here is, is like, this is the new world of accounting firms. Like historically speaking, accounting firms didn't face pressure like this on what they should or should not be doing at their firm. And now this is here and this is a public company. Now imagine the same, the pressure that's happening to accounting firms that are private that we don't even see, right. For sure. There's pressure on how to run. The business is going to be there from the money. You take money you don't get to drive the car anymore.

Blake Oliver: [00:37:52] I've got the website here up on the screen, that flywheel.com website. Yeah. It says, here's the case. Uh, it says the situation has grown over decades through disciplined, repeatable program, a disciplined, repeatable program of accretive acquisitions. Today, the business acquisition strategy has been paused in favor of share repurchases. The problem? M&a is an essential aspect of CBI's business model. Acquisitions grow CBI's talent pool, add advisory capabilities and drive margin expansion via scale. Cbi's status as an acquirer of choice in the industry is now jeopardized by the company's overleveraged balance sheet and prioritization of buybacks over reinvestment. The proposal raise equity as an acquisition facility to immediately recapitalize the balance sheet and reactivate the M&A pipeline. This strategy will simultaneously return Stephens to growth, deleverage the balance sheet, and reestablish the business as a credible acquirer in a consolidating market. So this activist investor is basically saying, go back to the traditional growth model of a large accounting.

David Leary: [00:38:58] Firms put AI in and that's how you create shareholder value.

Blake Oliver: [00:39:05] David, we have a listener comment here that ties in well to your next story about vibe coding. This is from Tate. Tate says small firms can now develop their own software for less than the cost of getting software. So let's talk about that. Building your own apps as an accounting firm. I saw two stories this week and you saw them as well. And you had something about Starbucks. How does that tie in.

David Leary: [00:39:31] At the highest level? Like this article from Starbucks ties into this concept of vibe coding. So Starbucks has made a decision or announcement they want to eliminate or slash their software spend, which is now at $400 million a year. You know, now they're spending with Microsoft, IBM, these massive types of contracts, but they want to start building stuff in-house, right? And you're seeing this in many, many places, right? And even you and I have discussed this. I've said it on the air. Accountants should vibe code their own software. And now this is getting a little bit more real. Um, like firms are saving, you know, thousands to maybe $30,000 a year to code your own practice management suite or whatever it might be. Right. So it's going to versus entering this new world of building your own stuff. And then then you have zero coming out with like, hey, we're not going after traditional developers anymore. We're going after people, just accountants, users. We're going to give you tools to vibe code your own code, automate workflows. Like I think we're, we're definitely tipping in this direction. It's just people have paid too much for software, even ourselves. One of our biggest expense behind humans is software.

Blake Oliver: [00:40:42] But there's a problem with coding your own apps as an accounting firm. I spotted this in a accounting today, and the headline is software vendors aren't losing sleep over vibe coding yet. And there's an example in here, uh, from this article by Chris Gaetano, Randy, Neil know Randy nail. He's the CEO of top 100 firm. Hogan Taylor needed a financial reporting tools for a new audit method and Buying this from a vendor would have cost around $200,000 annually for this top 100 firm, and instead, his team used AI Word in Excel and they built their own. And it worked. So they they vibe coded a solution that would have cost $200,000 a year and kind of built it in Excel essentially, which I think is actually like the best way to vibe code. It's not to like vibe code, an app that lives somewhere, uh, on like a server, right? That you have to then understand the code like you're.

David Leary: [00:41:51] Like, you don't own or whatever it is, right? If you're going to do it, build it in what you're most familiar with, get the data, manipulate it in Excel.

Blake Oliver: [00:41:58] Like exactly. Um, so that's, that's a, that's a good solution, right? Um, now in another story on Accounting Today, they mentioned, um, a, uh, CEO of a firm who was trying to build some software for A was trying to buy some, like audit software, and they quoted him $300,000 a year. And then he, he built, uh, an app that costs that cost under $30,000 using vibe coding. So they saved hundreds of thousands of dollars, right? Claude and retool that sort of thing. Um, but the catch is that he's the only person who knows how it works.

David Leary: [00:42:45] So yeah, that that's the Achilles heel is many times this is going to be just one person. The person that prompted the app into existence kind of really understands the whole thing. But I don't know if that's actually so true because if you really mess with these AI coding tools, they're really good at documenting in the code. You know how you can put comments in code that nobody ever sees? Yeah. They're really good at like putting sentences and comments of what that code is. And you can actually flip over to an Ascii mode and just summarize how this feature works.

Blake Oliver: [00:43:15] Yeah.

David Leary: [00:43:16] Right. So because I do that, sometimes you forget yourself how something was that you built it when you vibe coded it. And so I think that's, that's like on the surface feels like a problem, but it may not be an actual problem. Well, because you can have the vibe code, tell you what the code does.

Blake Oliver: [00:43:32] Right. But the issue still is that the person who built it, even if there's notes in that code, if if they're the only person in the firm that knows how it works and can fix it, you have a a redundancy problem. And so if you don't have developers on the team or other folks in the firm who can fix it, you are the one who's going to do it. And this happened to us last week.

David Leary: [00:43:56] This happened to us.

Blake Oliver: [00:43:57] Yeah. So, you know, we have a fairly simple well, I guess, I don't know. In my mind, it's not like super complicated because it's no code. But, you know, our, our AI course generator at earmark runs on Zapier, and it's like 75 steps in Zapier that I built years ago at this point and still works great. And it broke and nobody else could fix it but me. And, you know, that's an example of a no code tool that nobody else could fix. I mean, I don't even know what you would do if it was something you actually had to go in and like, look at the actual like, you know, software code that would take even more skill. I'm sure you could have figured it out, David, at some point, but.

David Leary: [00:44:39] Nobody told me it was broken, so I didn't know to go in there and look at it.

Blake Oliver: [00:44:41] Yeah. So it's sort of like the equivalent of like, you know, let's say you have some sort of like, uh, Excel complicated Excel sheet that you use for, I don't know, some sort of thing you do at your firm. And there's like one person, right, that knows how crazy, like financial models are like classic examples of this where a financial model gets so complex and there's interlinked workbooks and stuff that only one person in the organization knows how it works.

David Leary: [00:45:05] And everybody else is afraid to do anything because they're afraid. If I click in the wrong cell the wrong way, I'm going to break this entire spreadsheet.

Blake Oliver: [00:45:11] So that's the benefit of buying software from vendors that have teams that maintain it and can fix it, and support staff if you build your own. You don't have that. So you need a backup if that's the way you're going to go. Right. You're saving money now, but you're creating risk potentially in the future.

David Leary: [00:45:27] Arguably, that risk is there with the companies you pay for that software. We just went through this with the host. This is running on right now. Streamyard, our podcast recording streaming platform. We lost a bunch of data because they had a poorly designed interface, and they just go round and round how it's our fault. I'm like, it's not really our fault. It was your fault. And it actually, I just put this on LinkedIn. I was thinking about this because I'm basically interacting back and forth with a chat bot and I'm like, if I have to use an AI bot to get support for your product, I might as well just chat with a different AI bot and have it build me a replacement for your product. Like I'm going to be talking to AI anyways, why am I talking to your chatbot. That's fair enough. Getting crappy support. I'll just. I'll just go to a different chatbot and say, hey, I'm using this app. I want these features and just have it build me what I need and not pay for that software anymore.

Blake Oliver: [00:46:18] So that second example was, I want to credit that to Mike de Kock, who's the founder and CEO of MJD advisors. He's the one who had the audio solutions platform, quote him $300,000 a year. And he built up his own version of that with retool. That costs under $30,000 annually. But again, he's the one who knows how it works. He's the one who can.

David Leary: [00:46:40] That seems very expensive. Still 30. If he tried to do that in today's world, he probably could do it for cheaper. Like 30 grand. Still, that's a pretty good chunk to spend to build a tool.

Blake Oliver: [00:46:51] All right, David, I'm going to go ahead and thank our final sponsor for this episode, and then we'll hit on a few more stories here. And that sponsor is cloud account staffing. Are you tired of the endless search for qualified accounting talent? You're not alone. Growing accounting firms are struggling to find available and affordable team members when they need them most. Cloud accounting staffing has the solution with their revolutionary candidate portal. Unlike traditional staffing agencies that waste your time with sales calls, paperwork, and deposits, the Cloud Accountant Staffing Candidate Portal gives you instant access to highly vetted, qualified accounting professionals. There's no waiting, no hassle, just top talent right now. What makes this different? Speed and simplicity. While other firms make you wait weeks or months with Cloud Accountant staffing, you could interview someone as soon as tomorrow. Their boutique support ensures you're getting quality talent that's both available and affordable. Exactly what growing firms need. The candidate portal puts you in control. Browse live candidates, make selections on your timeline, and build your offshore team without the traditional headaches. To find, review and book interviews with potential team members, all in less than ten minutes. Head over to The Accounting Podcast dot com slash CAS The Accounting Podcast dot promo forward slash CAS.

David Leary: [00:48:08] So I have a quick small story that I tried to bring up when you were talking about it, but I couldn't find it in that time. Um, you're talking about how the rules for the audit, right? They having the rule in theory makes things better, but then it doesn't actually improve the situation. And you mentioned the wisp.

Blake Oliver: [00:48:25] Yeah. The information security plan.

David Leary: [00:48:28] Exactly. So all firms have to have this wisp. Right. But there was an audit a cybersecurity audit of 275 Australian accounting firms revealed that 76% have no protection against email spoofing.

Blake Oliver: [00:48:41] Ooh.

David Leary: [00:48:41] But I bet you 100% have a wisp, right? Like like this is that this is a great example of that, right. Like the you must spend all this time to build this document about your security plan instead of investing that time and resources into actually being secure.

Blake Oliver: [00:48:55] That's true.

David Leary: [00:48:56] Right.

Blake Oliver: [00:48:58] Um, what about this remote work story that you brought, David? Remote work is, uh, is not dropping.

David Leary: [00:49:03] Yeah. So despite all these crackdowns, we're going to get rid of remote work using it as ways to lay off employees. It felt like the pendulum swung away from employees having the power back to employers. But it turns out, um, it's holding steady at about 22%. The US workforce that's remote and that's only down a little bit. It's about, uh, in 2024, it was 23%. Two years later. Now in 2026, it's only 22%. So the headlines make it seem like this should be at 7% now, right? All the threats of remote work, it doesn't work. We're getting rid of it. Um, it's really not showing up, but the demand from employees is still there. So it gives an example in the article about one company had a 1500 zero square foot Denver office and they ditched it and moved to WeWork. Now liberty work remotely, and they saw their job applications move from 170 to 4000.

Blake Oliver: [00:50:00] Wow.

David Leary: [00:50:00] So employees still want to work remote. They want as an option. So so as your firm, if you think about that, this is how you're going to get the most applicants, which in theory, if you get the most applicants, you should be able to find the better applicants.

Blake Oliver: [00:50:13] Let's go back to tech. Now, David, I spotted a story in the register by Lindsey Clark about a KPMG survey. And it has to do with this shift from fixed monthly fees per user to usage based pricing for AI. And I feel like this is really hitting accounting and finance right now, but all areas of companies because as we've seen in clod, they have improved what these AI agents can do in cloud Cowork, but they're now much more expensive because all of these prompts are running in the background and you're getting charged for tokens, and you might ask it to do one thing, and then it goes and chugs away and chugs away and chugs away. And that's costing so many tokens. Now you go over your allotment and you hit your limit very quickly, and then you have to pay extra. And that's usage based. And this is creating havoc for cost accounting and the C-suite. And actually this might be the next great area of cost accounting is trying to figure out where are these tokens being burned, how much are they costing and where are we seeing results? Because when the spend is increasing like this and you don't know.

David Leary: [00:51:32] Yeah. Because the CEO is going to get asked by a board one day. I see you spent all that on tokens. What was the result. And they're not gonna be able to answer it exactly.

Blake Oliver: [00:51:41] So KPMG, they surveyed over 2000 senior leaders across 20 countries. And they found that 29% are struggling to understand operating costs as they scale enterprise AI only 29%. Well, I mean, that's still I mean.

David Leary: [00:51:56] I think there's a percentage of people lying in there of the people that say they do have.

Blake Oliver: [00:52:00] A third of. Senior corporate leaders cite limited understanding of AI costs and economics as a barrier to deploying AI agents. Nearly half of organizations have rephased AI deployments. When costs exceeded expected value and lower cost, high fidelity models have become the fastest growing influence on AI strategy, up seven points from Q1.

David Leary: [00:52:24] And these would be models you're going to host inside. You buy a Mac mini, you host the model inside your office, your back room with your data.

Blake Oliver: [00:52:31] It could be that, but it could also just be like the more efficient models from these providers.

David Leary: [00:52:37] Like, oh yeah, because the new models come out, the other one gets a little cheaper to use.

Blake Oliver: [00:52:40] And yeah, like Claude has, uh, you know, Claude Opus, but they've also got Claude Sonet, and then they've got Claude Haiku. And it's like just how ChatGPT has many versus pro and trying to figure out which one to use for each use case is a A challenge. I mean, we do that at earmark in our course, you know, writing AI workflow. I have to choose are we going to use a simple model or a more a model that does more reasoning? And it depends on the task that I'm given.

David Leary: [00:53:14] It could be the step in the workflow. You don't have to use one model for the whole workflow. It could just be a piece.

Blake Oliver: [00:53:19] And I think that one of the big opportunities for software developers building workflows around this AI stuff is to create some sort of automated way where based on the prompt and the complexity of it, there's some assessment and the, the software just decides what model to use.

David Leary: [00:53:40] So there's stuff like that popping up for end users where it'll, they're calling routers. So at your organization, you basically give a version of a GPT that's out there. People type in their question or what they're trying to do, and it'll route them to under the covers, which GPT model to use, which brand, which company to to to maximize the token spend. We call it that because you don't need you don't need to blow $100 for a $0.02 answer that a different AI will give you.

Blake Oliver: [00:54:13] All right, David, I want to hit on some listener mail before we wrap up this episode. And we actually got a voice mail. Uh, we haven't talked about it on a show in a while, but we have a phone number that you can call into. It is 202695 1040, that's 202695 1040. You can leave us a message. By the way, you can also email us at The Accounting Podcast at earmark.me. That's the accounting podcast@earmark.me. We read all those messages, and I want to play this voicemail that we got from a listener. So this is about Trump accounts, which we were talking about in the last episode.

Listener Voicemail: [00:54:49] Hi, my name is Courtney. I'm calling about the July 8th episode. Episode For 95. Specifically, I wanted to respond to the information that you shared about Trump accounts. Let me start by saying this is not criticism. I love you all's show. It's great. I listen to it every week, but the information you shared about Trump accounts wasn't technically all the way correct. So one Trump accounts it isn't. It isn't the case that they're taxed when you take out distributions and use those distributions for college. It's what's more accurate is that they are actually retirement accounts. They aren't meant to help your child pay for college. They're meant to help your child get a head start on retirement, which is why they essentially automatically convert to traditional retirement accounts at the end of the growth period. Additionally, anyone can open a Trump account. You only get the $1,000 if you're born during the pilot period dates, which is January 1st, 2025 through December 31st of 2028. However, anyone under the age of 18 with a valid Social Security number can get a Trump account. I wanted to make sure that that was clear because on the show you said you could only get one if you were born from 2025 to 2028. That isn't true. I'm somewhat of an expert on Trump accounts, because I have had to take a deep dive into understanding their complexities. I posted a video on TikTok about why people should consider Trump accounts, and it blew up. It's almost at a million views right now. I have a second video about it that has a little over 600,000 views. So I'm literally getting hundreds and hundreds of comments a day from people, questions from people about Trump accounts. And I've had to look up answers to those questions.

Blake Oliver: [00:56:26] All right. Thanks, Courtney, for that message. And we do love getting feedback on the show. If we make a mistake.

David Leary: [00:56:32] And being corrected.

Blake Oliver: [00:56:33] We want to know about it. Yeah. Um, that's a very good point that anyone can get anyone under 18, right. Can get those, uh, Trump accounts, but it is, uh, you only get that, uh, contribution from the federal government if you were born within those specific. Yeah.

David Leary: [00:56:47] Because I remember early in my career, I wasn't 21 yet. And I worked for a company that offered a 401k and they did not let me participate until I was 21. And I always thought that was like, not fair. Like to do. But. And is that still true? Like, you have to be a certain age to even open a four one K.

Blake Oliver: [00:57:06] I don't know, David. Don't ask me. I'll get it wrong on the show.

David Leary: [00:57:08] Oh yeah, we'll get it wrong on the show because I'm thinking like, I'm trying to think of why do you need to go get a Trump account? Yeah. If you're not getting the free money because you weren't born in that special time period. Like what's the point?

Blake Oliver: [00:57:18] Well, the, the point is that the money grows tax deferred. Right. It's like a retirement account. So you only pay.

David Leary: [00:57:26] Just open up a retirement account. That's what you do.

Blake Oliver: [00:57:29] But you can't, like you said, right. If you're under 18. Okay. That's I think that's the difference. But you know, my my biggest concern has nothing to do with any of that. It's the fact that the account becomes owned by the kid when they turn 18.

David Leary: [00:57:42] And I we've all been 18 before.

Blake Oliver: [00:57:45] Yes, exactly. So do you really want to be funding all this money that becomes, say, hundreds of thousands of dollars in a in a retirement account that your kid can access as soon as they turn 18 and then take it out and pay those penalties and not save it for retirement. I mean, that's the.

David Leary: [00:58:06] Well, it's our the 2045 Stimmy that's going to happen to the economy.

Blake Oliver: [00:58:12] In 18 years when all those kids get their get their IRAs. You know.

David Leary: [00:58:19] It's a stimulus to the economy.

Blake Oliver: [00:58:20] Then they go and blow it. That's funny. Um, I've got a listener, uh, email that I'd like to read from Caleb Bancroft. Caleb says, Blake, I just wanted to share a win that I had with AI. The Florida board requires me to enter information for each CPE course separately in their web portal. So this was a real pain last year since I had to manually type approximately 80 different courses to make sure all my required hours were reported. This year, I utilized cloud Cowork to handle this task for me. I created a folder on my desktop and saved all my CPE certificates. Mostly earmark, although I had one from Becker for my state specific for our ethics requirement. Will earmark offer this soon. I also saved the CSV listing of the courses to the folder as well. I then pointed Cowork to the folder and first asked it to create a consolidated Excel listing of the CPE courses categorized into the Florida reporting categories. I then had it validate the list against all the PDF certificates to make sure I had everything required to report. Next, I logged into the reporting portal and instructed clod to enter everything from the list it created. Clod entered everything and then again validated its entries against the Excel list.

Blake Oliver: [00:59:35] It initially deduplicated several entries, but it caught the. I think he means duplicated it initially duplicated several entries, but it caught those automatically and made the corrections without me having to provide instruction. It also recognized the file upload feature in the portal only allows for one at a time, so it came up with the solution to combine all the PDFs certificates into one file and upload the single file as well. After I confirmed this was okay. So at the end of the day, Cowork took care of this tedious task in the background while I caught up on the show. Severance on Apple TV. I love this example of cloud coworkers capabilities to organize all those certificates into a single Excel sheet, and then enter them one by one into the reporting portal for the Board of Accountancy. I'm sure that many CPAs have had to deal with that pain, and now an agent can do it for you. And it's a relatively low risk activity, right? You're not doing it with client data. It's just your own CPE not much to worry about there. And David, I, uh, let's, let's unmute you here. Oh, wait, hold on. There we go.

David Leary: [01:00:44] I'd probably wanted to, if I was him, I would definitely look at the Florida's, uh, CPA site. Look at the terms and the license agreements because you might be breaking terms at the website too. There's because I think about older, older terms used to be built pre AI always had things like you can't use bots or scrapers and things like on this website, you might have been breaking the, you know, the.

Blake Oliver: [01:01:09] Terms of service.

David Leary: [01:01:10] Terms of service. So just be careful about that.

Blake Oliver: [01:01:13] Well, David, that's all the time we have for this week. Don't forget, dear listeners, that you can earn free continuing professional education. Credits Nasba CPE for listening to this podcast, our back episodes, many other fine podcasts such as Oh My Fraud, Tax in Action, federal tax updates. She counts the unofficial QuickBooks accountants podcast, uh, the earmark podcast.

David Leary: [01:01:40] Audit fundamentals.

Blake Oliver: [01:01:41] Audit fundamentals, our new, our new series for auditors on earmark. Uh, you can get all of that@earmark.app in your web browser, or get the free app from the App Store. Earn one free CPE per week, or subscribe for unlimited CPE for $200 a year. It's the best way to earn CPE anytime, anywhere in the profession. And with that, David, I'll see you around here again on Friday when we record our next episode. We're almost at 500. It's crazy.

David Leary: [01:02:15] Almost at 500, almost 2 million. It's almost going to hit the same time. 2 million downloads.

Blake Oliver: [01:02:20] 2 million downloads on the podcast. And that doesn't even include YouTube.

David Leary: [01:02:24] So does that include YouTube? And it doesn't include when we are on the our old platform before we moved over to the new platform, which is like 60,000 downloads from the olden days.

Blake Oliver: [01:02:32] So thanks to everyone who's been with us since the beginning. It's been quite a ride. And we'll see you here for episode uh, four, nine, seven later this week. Bye, everyone.