Chat GPT for Legal Accountants

Welcome to Accountants Law Pod, where accounting professionals and law firms converge. Hosted by Lynda Artesani, Sarah Prevost, and Stephen Libhart.

Welcome back to the podcast, everyone. And today's topic is probably one that people look at as clickbait, 'cause anytime you see it, it's almost like we're almost sick of seeing, well, how do you use ChatGPT and what are the right prompts? It's like all over the place, but we are gonna talk about it. In respect to what we do for a living and how it can be used. It's an interesting tool and it can be used in many ways and a couple of ways that you probably shouldn't use it. We'll probably talk about that too, right, Sarah? We know about those ways. And Steve said he's really just going to be an observer, but we're going to rope him into talking. So with ChatGPT, I found for our purposes. It's great with helping me write an email. It gets— it tends to be really wordy, and I haven't quite found the right prompt. And I know there's one out there where if you ask it to do something, like if you ask it to write a blog, for example, I was like, oh, I could have this help me write blogs or give me blog post ideas. It's good for that somewhat. You have to have the right language because it's a generative product. So it's— it tries to please you. Basically, ChatGPT, the way it was explained to me, is this— it's a product that they've created to help you work and give you information, kind of like Google. It actually swallowed up everything that Google knows, and then you, you can ask it questions and it will give you an answer, and it's gonna try to please you. So it's almost like the robot on, um, what was that cartoon with the robot way back in the '60s? The that it was just trying to please the person all the time. It's— that's what it tries to do. So it might try to please you and give you an answer, but the answer might not be accurate. Just ask that attorney who used that because he didn't do his research, and he, he went to ChatGPT and asked for— did research there, asked for a good use case study, and it gave back a case to use in his response, Smith and Jones or something so odd that you should have looked and gone, is it really a Smith versus Jones? And it wasn't. ChatGPT made up the whole story, then the judge called him out on it. You're familiar with that one, Steve?

Yeah, I've heard of it.

Yeah, definitely.

Yeah, so you got trouble for it. So, um, what do you think, Sarah? What would you think is a good use case for ChatGPT?

Well, it's, you know, uh, what you were saying before, what is it? So there's a piece that I'm reading and it's— it clearly says out, it spells it out, Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer. It's a mouthful, so that's how it got shortened to that. GPT acronym, I guess you could say, ChatGPT. But the use cases, I know that it's kind of really helped us in sometimes in workflow processes, new training of way of thought process of how would you build a checklist for this. Some of it helps you if you're having a hard time starting a presentation style. Mm-hmm. It could potentially give you like a good outline. And then from there, you really— like Lynda warns all the time— you've really got to tailor. It's got to be your words to be able to make it all of your own. Like you're saying, email responses to tone down. Maybe you're frustrated. You don't want that sort of tone. You want it to come across in a different way. And there are—

I like that. I like that.

Like that.

Okay.

Emotion out.

It does a good job at that. It does a good job.

Grammarly does a great— I mean, all of these behind-the-scenes tools are inside of other products now, right? So Grammarly has it now. I mean, it's been learning your writing styles for so long. I mean, we've been contributing to this massive world of the way that we search things. Like, you see all the time, what are the top searches? What is the most— you could do all of the stuff. Well, this tool now is more of like a— what it feels like is more of an avenue to how to find that information in a more concise way. But it is dangerous too. It has— there are some things to it that you have to be careful about. Like in the beginning, like last June when we were at Scaling New Heights, there was a lot of conversation about please don't put client financials in there or take names off, how to construct that, make sure you're validating the data that comes out of it. There was that. There was also—

Because it's a free tool, right? So this chat sheet, there's two chats. One you pay for $20 a month, which is not a lot, and the other one that's free. So you can use the free version. But as you know, anything free is not really free. Like Google, free, not really free. It's analyzing and using you for marketing purposes. Exactly. It's, you know, using the data. So the same thing here, it, it's gonna use what you've asked it and it asks you to help it. So if you, I could say, write me an article. In fact, I did this to test it. I, I know how complex 1099s are for attorneys. I've wanted to do like a, flowchart. Veronica Wasek does a beautiful flowchart for just straight up regular ones, and I wanted to do one for law firms. So I had asked it a few questions about 1099s for attorneys, particularly personal injury attorneys, and it gave me the wrong answers. And I asked it and I told it to look at the IRS website in regard to that, and it still— I referred it to an article and a website to use as data, and that just shows you how complex it is.

Mm-hmm.

It couldn't even figure out what that stupid website was saying. It gave the wrong answers back on a lot of it. And so if you were gonna want to be like, I'm going to be the law firm accountant and I'm going to ask ChatGPT for these things and I'm going to write articles, you better know what you're talking about because it might give you an answer, not the right answer. And then what?

A lot of people are using it too, to your point, Lynda, like some of those are good examples, but I'm also seeing a lot of our colleagues and a lot of people in general using it for code. There's little plugins that you use for maybe code on a website or social media and/or formulas in Excel.

Yes. Yes. I've seen that.

Yeah.

Somebody used— somebody at like Sanyo and he threw it at his— he was having trouble with his code for the firm he was working at, Sanyo. So he dumped his data into ChatGPT and said, fix this for me. And now ChatGPT has all the data for that corporation on whatever he was trying to—

That's so scary. That's the scary thing, right? Is what you put in. Like you said earlier, it's Nothing's free.

Nothing's free. Your mother told you that when you were a little kid, but it's true. So I think that you have to look at that. And we had the most fantastic presentation by Rob from Digit. So was it Rob or was this— no, it wasn't. It was his colleague, the CEO, I think, of Digit. And he did a presentation at Scaling New Heights.

Oh, yeah.

He went up there and did this whole thing. He took some balance sheet, took the data off, threw it in, gave all the data for every, every month. And all he asked, it was a simple question. What's the average revenue for this client using 12 months of data? And it spit an answer out right away. And he said right to the crowd, he said, there, there's your answer. But if you do the math on a calculator, that's an incorrect answer. It gave an answer, but it didn't give the right answer. And if people are starting to use this tool and it's gonna get better, I mean, it's not, not that it'll never get better. It's learning. It's, it's a, it's a learning system. But you have to— Like the internet was in the beginning. Exactly. It's exactly that. Remember all that stuff back in those days? Back in my day. But you gotta just be careful with it. And I think that there's other things around ChatGPT too. I mean, there's things you can wonder and worry about because anything in the wrong person's hands, right, could end up being something bad too. So—

What about the image stuff?

I mean, exactly that stuff.

Steve, have you read about this, the image stuff for like creating images? Have you heard about—

I have not.

It could take your likeness. So it could say, oh, this is a cool podcast. I'm going to take their likenesses, use all the video.

Oh, yes, I have. I'm sorry.

Okay.

Yeah.

That's scary. That's scary to me.

Very.

Yeah.

Replicate your voice. In fact, I was using Jasper for a bit and I gave it my website to swallow up my writing style. So when, if I asked it to write an article, it could write in the form of me, but it didn't really do that very well. And it didn't do it to my satisfaction. I, I could have it write an article, but I still had to go in and fix it. It still wasn't the way I wrote, and it still looked like that generic. Like if you ask ChatGPT, the 3.5 one, to write an article, it's gonna write a paragraph to start. It's gonna spit out a few generic paragraphs. It's gonna give 'em all headers. It's gonna give a conclusion which restates everything above. And it's very vanilla, and it's, you can tell right away what it is. And there's a lot of people out there doing it. We just had this week, somebody took one of our articles. They didn't even try to make it look like anybody else's. They took my blog article and copied and pasted it into there and said it was theirs.

Yeah.

And that's going to happen. You know, we have to be careful about that. And, you know, and then fortunately, we called them out on it. And—

I'm curious. I'm very curious. And I don't know what— maybe I'll throw this to Steve, what your thoughts are. Copyright, trademark, all these attorneys.

Yeah.

When this gets whatever, how it gets formalized, what does this new landscape look like? Because I feel like that's a new firm.

The new frontier.

You know, with that said, I think we need to look at bringing in a copyright trademark attorney to talk about the future of protection in ChatGPT. You know, just watching that or listening to the flow of this conversation, I can think back to 2 or 3 years ago when this was starting to bubble up just a little bit. And politically, you would see posts like on Facebook with, you know, one political person and another political person, and you would look at it and you'd go, that's not really them, you know, and creating these dialogues and you'd have to filter, you know, and I feel, you know, I'm like an aviation buff. And so you know, I'll follow all this aviation stuff and I'm starting to see a lot of things that are massaged and I'm looking at it and I'm like, is that really a picture of that airplane or not? You know, and, and I'm— and to your point, Lynda, I'm seeing things about certain aircraft that are not true. And I'm like, so somebody made this up and they probably use ChatGPT. This is resonating with me now. Okay, got it. So I've, I've been like the kid in front of the candy counter at the store and I'm just standing there pointing at things, but I haven't got to touch anything really. Yeah. Yet. But I wonder, you know, would ChatGPT, just like Grammarly has really helped us in the past decade or so, what would it look like to use it for your LinkedIn posts and things like that for your marketing? What are your thoughts on that?

I think like what Lynda was mentioning is it— you can have it as a tool, but you need to—

You really need to check it. Yeah.

Validate it. I mean, the court case situation, that's a complete embarrassment. I mean, unfortunately, that's what that person—

but I think too, that attorney, even talking about this with our friend Matt from CoolBox, he was talking about, have you played around with— what's that?

The Midjourney one that we were talking about. Cool.

You can play with it. It makes beautiful pictures. You ask it to create this. And I tried to do it and I'm like, it must be what I said to get it there because the hands were weird. And he said that he had the same.

Yeah, that's the thing.

So where are we, where are we going to find all these different versions of, you know, where, where does the layperson go to find all the different things like you're talking about then?

Google it. Like, I think, I mean, I just Googled today. I just kind of Googled like, uh, the most recent news on what is ChatGPT, to your point, Steve, because you're like, I'm not as— and I get that. There is in this piece, and maybe we can link it, there is a piece on here where the company— let me find it— is Pulse Labs, a software company that has recently been conducting research on how people are using ChatGPT and other generative AI tools. So I'll grab this link for our lovely Tiara to link it. But it talks about what it is, where it's a little bit of where it's going. And this is a more fairly recent article. It's not very deep. It's pretty short. It's like maybe a minute to 2.

Well, how do you know? How does a— how does— forget me. I mean, I'll get there. But how does somebody know whether they can trust what they're looking at when they go in there? I mean, you know, that it's not just a spam site or a— Kind of.

Kind of like how you—

Uh.

Like World Wide Web news articles. You have to, you have to be analytical enough to want to sift through. Is like, is this relevant? Is this really news? Is this fake news? Am I on social media? Is this concocted in such a way that's framed to my— that's the fear of this frontier of this piece and why it's so confusing, I feel, when you read articles of like the people that were part of the creation and warning about it. I'm like, well, okay, what the hell then?

Well, and so, and you know, we're appealing to bookkeeping in the legal field. What's— how is— how are some of these folks going to protect themselves from putting data in there that they shouldn't? And they're trusting this platform to give them information based on what they put in, like you said, the balance sheet. And then all of a sudden, here's Joe Attorney's balance sheet out on the internet. And we're like, oh, I mean, how easy could that happen? And how Very easy.

Very easy.

I feel— People always wanna trust the internet and you've gotta really be careful.

Yeah. I found a website, AI Tool Report, and I just follow that every day. It sends out like an update of all the new places that AI is being incorporated in some of the software. And it's, I just find it fascinating because a lot of times it's so new that it, they have a free version for a bit. There was that one we were just talking about, which I don't think is free anymore. They had that AI assistant that, remember when I watched the, Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Jason. Yeah.

He mentioned tools. So I had everybody in the team was playing with it. You put it on your phone and it was like an assistant. I don't think it's free anymore, but you can catch it free when it first— a lot of this beta stuff comes out. But remember, it's beta. So it's—

And it's free. So what are they grabbing from you?

So be careful what you put in it, for sure. Put in it. Yeah. I think you have to really always— that's just, you know, and then also, if you start to use it, make sure that you've vetted it. You know, like, hear about it from your colleagues, I think, is the best place. And it was a big buzzword at Scaling. And it wasn't as much at the last conference we went to, but it was a big deal at Scaling that they— everybody was talking about all the different places. But it's starting to be incorporated into all, all the software. I mean, LeanLaw had it. Intuit's been talking about this, this since 2018. So that means—

A long time.

Yeah. And then some of what they're doing with their AI, you know, they had— what did they have one a long time ago that— remember they had that little box up? It was beta up in that little gear, and you could ask the AI, it was Intuit Assist or QuickBooks Assist or something like that, or Assistant. I can't remember, but it was up in that thing. It was beta. You had to turn it on and it didn't really work very well. You could ask it where's the balance sheet report and it would pull it up. But that's coming. I mean, you know that that's going to be part of the system.

Lynda, we talked about it. One of our, one of our QB Connect ones we saw, they had the whole tool and do this and do that. We brought this up in another show where, hey, tell me how much revenue I had. Oh, in the car, the guy got the lady it in the car.

Yeah, in the commercial.

But that was what, 5?

That was it.

They were called QB.

Yeah, that was 5, 6 years ago. Yeah, here we are now. It's— this is where it's coming out. But it's obviously a tool. It's, it's like anything. It's the data research behind how to aggregate all of this information that we've been putting in.

Well, look at— aren't the bank feeds in that genre?

Yeah, they're allegedly getting smarter. I don't know how many people— allegedly.

How many, how many new bookkeepers have you seen that go into the bank feeds? Or an attorney? Who does their own books and then messes them up and comes and finds us. They just, they trust what they see in the bank feed.

Yeah.

They don't look at the description. They don't, they don't follow that trail and they just accept it. And then they wonder why the books are a mess.

Yep. And then they think that's reconciling because it came from the bank, it has to be right.

Right.

And it's not. And I think, I think what you're going to see too is you're going to start to see a lot of the software where we've been typing away all these years to get things done, right? Clicking on browsers, that's all going to probably get all compiled into one. And then a lot of what we're gonna be doing going forward in the future, which you see with Amazon already, when you ask it, like my husband asks it to tell it when to give the cat the shot 'cause he's a diabetic. Remind me, Alexa. You're gonna find that you're gonna be doing a— oops, sorry, Sarah. You're gonna find, you're gonna find that what we're gonna be doing in the future is we're gonna be telling it what to do. It's gonna do a lot of it on its own. And then some of the things we're gonna be prompting. So we're gonna have to get really good at prompts and figure out what the right words to say. Are, which is why it's good to play with it now. And while it's free, play around. Don't use real data, but play around. Check out what comes out of it. It can be— I mean, it can be used for marketing. I think that's a safe place to create something, but you're still going to make it your own and you're still going to have that knowledge up here.

What did we ask it about each other? It was so funny.

We had fun with it one Sunday. So I had played around with it in the morning. And so when Sarah came on, I said, I wanna ask it to tell— give me the biography of Lynda Artesani. And then it went through it. It had me going to like, like Harvard, and it had me going to like, it had this long— I mean, it made me great. I'm like, that is not— there's not a lot of Lynda Artesanis with the name spelled like me. It was talking about me. It had my address. It had all those details that pulled from the web. Yeah. But it had me, it had me like running some nonprofit or it made a whole story up. And then I said, Sarah, you do it. And we started putting people's names in and it was hilarious.

We were cracking up. We had somebody make a poem out of it for us. Like in the fun ways of utilizing it, Steve, as examples, let's say. Sure. Those are fun examples. Poems.

It's good at poems. Honestly, it is very good at poems. If you try to have it write you a poem, remember Fred at Lila made us a poem, remember? He made us each our own poem.

Yeah, but I mean, like any tool, I guess, is the way I think of it. It's a tool. And then I'm using it. I mean, we obviously— the adoption rate, it's one of the fastest moving things. I mean, all those stats that they've put out on it, it's shocking and scary, but it's also like, wow, okay, I was using it. I have a 17-year-old. I'm using it with this child of mine. And he was like, You mean it can do that? And it's like, wait, have you not put your time into that?

That's kind of reversing roles there.

I know. She's telling me.

I know. I'm like, wait a minute here. So that was kind of interesting. There's also like, if you're wanting to get better at it, we have colleagues in our industry that offer courses and such on how to do that. There's a lot of stuff out there. But I— Lynda brought this up and I know I've kind of said it is the diligence behind it. It's hard to know. You just have to cautiously do it as best you can with the forethought.

Especially with all the hacking and stuff. You just gotta vet your software and make sure you get the right one. Yeah.

You just don't want software.

And I think as everybody's dumping it in and it's how— who does it successfully? Digits definitely does it successfully. It's beautiful what they do with it. Have you played with that at least, Steve? Because you're playing with ChatGPT in some form or fashion, that type of, you know, AI because it—

I love Digits. We embrace Digits early on.

Yeah. Do you see how what it does now though with you can write in the chat box and all that?

It's pretty cool.

And I love how I'm seeing things travel over to QuickBooks from Digits now.

Yes. Yes.

I can see on transactions, I can see the comments from us and comments from the clients. And the day I stumbled on that, I was like, oh my gosh, look at this. This is awesome. There it is. Instead of us having to type in the memo field, everything just came over from Digits.

I loved it.

Nice. Yeah.

So, and that's got AI in it. I mean, that's a good use case for AI because they're actually, if you tell it to add math and math up or whatever, it will do it for you. It does it right. So that's the difference in your, you pay for that. So I don't know, it's just, that's the difference between software that it does work in, software that it doesn't. I know LeanLaw was looking into making it, and I don't know where that went, but they were looking into making it how the law law firm emails, law firm billing is so long, you get 12 pages of all this phone calls, and it was going to summarize it for a client. So it would come up in the top box where it was summarizing.

That could be good and dangerous.

Well, yeah.

Dangerous.

I haven't seen it. Yeah.

I mean, that sounds cool in theory, but when you've got certain types of billing requirements for carriers and stuff, or Well, different states have different things as far as what you're required to put in the client bills and your contracts.

And again, to your point, you've really got to know what you're dealing with, who you're dealing with, and how it's going to apply.

Exactly.

Is Clio doing anything with AI at all, Sarah? I guess we'll find out in a couple of weeks.

I guess we'll find out in a couple of weeks when we attend. A week. Yeah. Oh, what?

ClioCon is a week away from Monday.

Oh my gosh. Okay. And Steve, we'll have to plan on your, you looking at next year with us?

We're, we're, we're attending virtually this year, so.

Oh, awesome.

Okay. We got our tickets, so we'll be doing it remotely.

So. Awesome. Okay. That's cool. Yeah. Well, we, and we just were with a product we use at the Proper Trust. We were just on with one of the founders and we're discussing how the AI worked to our benefit and worked against us in creating workflows. So how to refine that? I mean, it back to the whole simple thing of like, like Lynda said, you've gotta learn these prompts. You've gotta learn how to ask it in such a way.

Oh, yeah. To, to— you just made me think with the word workflows. I mean, my goodness, how could it? How could it possibly give you a workflow? Because they're so tailored to each client.

Well, if you get the general sense to me is get a good base, an outline. And then from there, you—

From there, massage it.

You gotta do your homework still. You've gotta do your work in that. So— Yeah.

It's not gonna take it, but it's definitely making things— you have to wonder what the world will be like in 5 or 10 years because it really— Exactly. It is taking away some of the thoughtfulness and some of the thinking. I mean, this morning, just writing that email, I just hopped in and I wrote what I wanted to write, and then I asked it to rewrite it in a professional tone, but I was serious to— I forgot how I worded it, but I was like, I want a serious tone. I want that person I understand I mean business. And it wrote, but then it wrote 5 paragraphs. I'm like, look, I want this to be a short, concise. So I just took pieces out and made the email. But it was, it was written very well and it does do that well.

So I like that.

And if you have to disengage with a client, that's another place that you could probably go to because it's pulling from all different places.

Now, have either of you used it for an application in Excel?

No. No.

I would really love to talk to somebody who's had success with that because of course you have to check the formulas and everything.

You have to do a plugin. It's a plugin for that. So I pay to play on the ChatGPT one.

The 4.5?

Yeah, the 4. And then you go in the backend, you add these plugins and then you have like, there's some things about the plugins that I was learning. At the class that Heather was teaching.

Heather said—

Interesting. And Michelle Long, which was very interesting, very well done. It was just a lot of questions and it needed to be redone and she had to do a couple of times. I think she did that. She plopped that in again. But I— it would be interesting to add the plugin, connect it and see how it writes that for you.

And ChatGPT is owned by Microsoft. So remember that Google has Bard. So there's two B-A-R-D, Bard. Is Google's. ChatGPT's more well known. And wasn't that developed by like, well, Elon Musk was involved in it and then it got somehow got sold because it was supposed to be like a nonprofit kind of thing and then it got sold and then now Microsoft owns it. So you gotta remember where it is. I had a few conversations with it that were exactly the opposite of— I had a few arguments with it at one point because I was like, what is this? And Sarah laughs. She goes, you're fighting with ChatGPT. I said, yes, I am.

No, I was like, wait, we don't have time for that one. Let's move on.

No, I was doing it at night.

Yeah, I know, I know you were.

But like, just for example, so I pulled up my AI tool report and they have resume writing. It creates an ideal resume in under 3 minutes. Nimbus, it streamlines content creation at an agency level.

Mm-hmm.

VIP Score is your AI copilot for market analysis. So SquadGPT is ChatGPT for your team. So that's some of the things that it, it does. That you can pick up these new things. It's, yeah, and then like Midjourney, you can make these. So they have like, they'll give you a tip for like a Midjourney prompt and you can go in and ask it to do like a whale falling from the sky, dash weird 3000, and it will actually make this picture of a whale falling from the sky like a painting. And it's just, that's an odd one, but that kind of gives you, so you could make the pictures if you wanted to start to use that. Um, yeah, it's interesting.

It—

we'll all see how this will all go down. But OpenAI is raising funds to reach $90 billion valuation.

Wow. It's got— it's— there's a lot of power behind this. I mean, it's, um—

And then you wonder how the government are— you know, how the governments are going to control it.

Well, the EU is already starting to do that, so it's trying to call for some AI regulations. And that's something I think I've seen Elon Musk and a few others that Maybe the guy from Google, they all went there to the government. So we got to put some parameters on this. We have to start to control this because it won't take long, right?

That'll— No, I mean, it could take over so easy.

Yeah. So Italy, didn't they ban it for a bit? And then they, it's, they brought it back or something. There was something about countries looking at the, because it's dangerous in how you use it, I guess. And if it depends on how you use it, I guess, I don't there are benefits to everything and cons to everything. Yep.

Yep. It's, it's interesting. So I just like to follow that AI Tool Report because it gives you kind of like all the places that it's in and it kind of gives you a prompt a day so you can understand some of the prompts you could use if you can't think of them. But it's just, it's just fascinating to me. They've got one, it was one too that Jason Stats had where it was like a voice thing where you could give it a PDF and it would read it back to you. And he was doing that for like when he was creating whatever he was creating.

Oh, we get that from Misty in our newsletters.

Yeah, that was in Microsoft in PowerPoint. But this is something else that's— I forgot the name of it, but you could just put your PDF in and it reads it back to you. And he said, sometimes I'm writing and it sounds good, but when I hear it read back to me, it's like, oh, that's not It doesn't sound like what I was—

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

So it's got a lot of good purposes to it. But like I said, so in the wrong hands, it could be bad.

It could be bad.

Yeah. Code for sure. You think code is one of them that it can be used for? Yeah. It's a lot of different things. It's interesting all the places that you can, all the places it's being used. And I think it's just gonna, we're in its infancy. Like Steve said, we're in the beginning of it and like Google was in the beginning. So we're really looking at a whole new world and not that long. I mean, you remember the world before Google? You remember Yahoo? Or was it AOL?

AOL.

AOL. I remember when eBay started.

Oh my God, eBay.

I remember the girl sitting next to me and she was purchasing and selling things on eBay and I'm like, what are you talking about? And you know, but—

And now it's just commonplace.

Yeah.

Is it still around? eBay?

Yeah.

It's huge.

It's huge.

You never hear about it anymore.

Yeah. Well, this was an interesting conversation.

I think it's— I just want to go crawl under the bed.

I know. Under your covers and like— I know it is. To your point, Steve and Lynda and I talk about this. It comes out and sometimes it depends on you as a person. You adopt it or it's prickly. You're not ready for it or you're ready at your own time with it.

I'm ready. I just don't know.

Where to start.

It's daunting.

It's big.

I mean, there's people— there were people in Google and the internet. I'm not going on the internet. You've heard of those people that live out in the woods without electricity or whatever they do.

They're about the banking situation too.

I have a client like that. They're still in Desktop 2012. They don't want to connect to the internet, their accounting. They don't want to connect to the internet for their online banking. I'm like, well, your online banking is there whether or not you connect to to it. So we wait for the thing to come in the mail, and then we do our appointment. I mean, do we really want to live in that way and type everything in manually in 2023? Do we know?

Sometimes there's such beauty in simplistic ways, and then there's benefits to this new generation of things. And sadly, I think when you say that, Lynda, about this desktop, I'm like, oh my God, wait till it burns on fire and it stops working.

I'm waiting for that day.

Yeah, but that day is going to happen. You know it. Told you so. Yeah. 2012.

I told you so.

And you hate to be the I told you so as well.

I just don't understand. I don't understand the mindset. I don't want to be that person. And there's a ton of people out there that are still in that antiquated software and they, well, it works. Why should we change? I'm like, because there's a lot better stuff out there. Why do you want to spend time doing— I don't want to spend time. I remember bank feeds. That was my biggest driver to move to QuickBooks Online was the bank feeds. Does anybody remember how bad the bank feeds were?

Oh, they were horrible. Yes.

How many, how many times, Steve, have you gone in and put fill— you're like on a roll. Oh, I'm putting all the vendor in under that. And then you forget, oh, that vendor's not in here. You start to add it and everything you did at the top is gone and you have to start all over again. How much swearing happened at that point in the day? I remember doing that. I'm like, it's all gone. Oh, I forgot. I can't add the— those were the awful parts of it. And now we just kind of take it for granted that we have the bank feeds doing all that stuff in the background and You know, and then it's still not perfect.

Yeah. It's still not perfect.

I mean, you have to still do your due diligence, but— Yeah, for sure. So someday, if you can look in the future and look in that future lens and think about QuickBooks, someday the bank feeds will be perfect. Someday the bank will be reconciled on its own. We don't have to do that. I mean, these are the things that are coming. A lot of the stuff we do today will not be here in 5 years. That's just a fact of life. And I say, hallelujah, bring it on and we'll do something else. That's better, more suited for.

Well, it frees us up more to be the trusted advisor role to our clients. And you know, what will ChatGPT look like for us as a tool then? You know.

Mm-hmm.

Exactly.

And that's where we're— Plan ahead.

Mm-hmm.

So bring it on.

Yeah. Well, okay. Where in the world will you be, Steve?

Oh, I'm leaving Saturday for Ouray, Colorado for the Fall Colors Airstream Rally.

Ooh, that sounds pretty good.

So Saturday I'm going up to the mountains to a day spa on Sunday.

As he clears his throat.

I'm going.

Going to sit in some vapor caves, have a massage and a facial and all that stuff.

Oh, lovely.

Yeah. And I'm going to go ride the train from Silverton to Durango. I've always had that on my bucket list. And this will be the last Airstream trip of the season. Then you're stuck with me. Me all winter. So—

Oh, bring it on.

I love you.

I love that picture that you sent us with looking down from—

Oh, the aerial shot.

Oh, the aerial shot. Yeah, yeah, that was fun.

That was awesome for sure.

We were at 10,000 feet camping this last week in 32-degree weather. It was awesome.

Oh, that is not Lynda weather.

How's that speak to you, Lynda?

No, no, no, no. I'll take my '90s.

Well, we are going to be— Lynda and I and Nicole will be at ClioCon.

Tennessee.

Tennessee, yeah. Which, that airport is—

oof.

But anyways, we'll be there.

I don't like country music, so I'm really in trouble when I get there. The worst music ever invented.

Get into a honky-tonk, Sarah.

Yeah, I was like, you know, to be honest, I really like the old stuff, so I mean—

When you travel with Sarah, she— you're probably the same way because you two are so much alike. She finds the best places to go. She finds the best place to go out to eat. She's never let me down when it comes to that stuff. It's always like everything's perfect.

I don't— thank you. I don't know if it's perfect, but I do my best because I want to. I'm a foodie. I love it. I mean, I just— some just things about life.

It's an out of the way place. We don't go to the place everybody goes to. We go to some oddball place.

That's the way to live.

Yeah, that's the way to live. So I love, I love places to go. Boring. Um, but yeah, it's, uh, so anyways, but we're going to be doing that. That's going to come up in a few weeks. So, um, and we'll probably have some special recordings from that because we have some colleagues in the industry that we'll be with.

Yeah.

Um, that, that do what we do but also have their own podcast, and we, we're going to enjoy that, that time with them. So we'll bring you in. Don't worry. I know I'm stuck with you, but I want you to to be stuck with me.

We want you stuck with us.

Yeah, but—

I'm loving watching you right now with a cat head bobbing up over your shoulder.

I know.

Walter's back. He hasn't been around in a while.

Walter. He tends to be the end of the show, I've noticed, and my mom tends to watch him. There he is. It's a cold day.

Yeah, he's gonna—

Yeah, anyways.

Until next week, thank you everybody, and we're going to let Tiara take us away.

Yay, Tiara.

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Awesome, awesome.

Thank you.

Until next time.

Bye-bye.

Thank you.