075 2023 New Tech For Accountants Roundup - Part 1

It has been a banner year for tech. Maybe like a, like a doubly banner year for tech hype. Hot take. Maybe not actually that hot of a take. We're going to talk about it. So every week I do a newsletter that is the sum of like three to four hours of research and it is the tech stuff that you should care about that happened that week. We're doing a two parter here of the most clicked on, engaged with most interesting things in my newsletter the first six months of this year. It is a redux super compressed version of just what that top stuff was. So come on in. Shiny Object Alert. We're gonna look at a whole bunch of stuff on Jason Dal. For video podcast Peeps. I'll pull this stuff up as we're talking about it, but you definitely don't need to be able to see it to understand what we're talking about here. I'm gonna do a main channel like very condensed version of this that probably just shows a few tools but there was just way more to get to than I could cover in that video. So this is basically just a like condensed version of the last six months of the the most clicked on stuff on my newsletter is the thing there's if you're not on my weekly newsletter yet, put a link to it in the Show Notes newsletter. Jason cpa okay, first up, Macro AI powered document workspace. So macro is like a novel. Is a novel. It's a different way to work with PDFs and many of us with like when it comes to work paper prep we're still doing so much PDF hustling and it just feels like that hasn't gotten any more intelligent in like the last 10 years. Right. It's just some form of bolting on an add in to Adobe Acrobat and trying to link one page to another and it all just seems kind of unintelligent. Well this is all a web based PDF editor that does like manual but also automated linking and associations between different things within a doc but also across different docs. So it does like the linking that we've kind of, you know, strapped onto Adobe Acrobat, it does a better version of version control so like you can roll back to previous versions of documents. It has like some built in automations where it will like do automated document generation. Maybe that's useful for like boilerplate work. Paper generation, I don't know but I just thought it was a. They raised some money. I think that's how I found them. And they have an entry level Plan that's free, but I just thought it was an interesting spin on what is a real pain for us. That is just doing way too much stuff with PDFs, you know. So that's macro.com I'm gonna have a link in the show notes to all of these things if you wanna check em out. Next up, guide guide with 2D's guide.com magically creates stunning whatever you want with AI. So I've talked about Scribe quite a bit in the past. That is scribehow.com, it's a Chrome extension where you have it start recording and it records all the clicks you do in the browser and then makes a handy little step by step with screenshots of each of those steps. In fact, why don't I just pull it up? Scribehow.com super easy way to make step by step guides. You literally hit record. You just click around and do the stuff you want and then hit stop. So for example, if you need a client to invite you to their QBO file, hop into a QBO file, hit record. It'll record all the clicks and then the result, what it outputs is this step by step instruction, PDF or webpage, whatever you want with screenshots of where to click each step along the way. I started talking about Scribe a couple few years ago and it's like one of the, one of a few tools that like a ton of people went on to pick up and use in some form or another. Guide is similar, but it will actually generate like a little video. So it does the same thing where it records all of the steps, but you can have it like put a voice in, put a video and there's, I think there's just more customizability on the output of what that little how to looks like. And building your own little library of how to's in an accounting firm. Absolutely gold. Because we answer so many of the same questions over and over again. How do I make a payment to the irs? How do I make a payment to the Oregon Department of Revenue? How do I e sign this 8879? How do I hop in and grab a copy of my June financial statements? Building up a little library of those things. Massive time saver. Okay, receder receiptr. AI. I'm just not gonna spell stuff. You can just look in the show notes, extract receipts and invoices from emails with AI. So you bolt this bad boy to your email inbox and it will automatically detect receipts, invoices, all that stuff and pull those goodies out now we'll do all that stuff within the platform. At the time I shared this, they were working on an accounting system integration. I don't know if they have it yet. But what I like about this, like we have receipt and invoice management apps already, right? You've got your decks and stuff like that. But this is just connected to the inbox and it will auto pull that stuff out for you. And I'm not familiar with like any of those standalone tools. Like, my understanding is basically you have to forward any emails that you want to be processed. Like, that was how I always did it. But I like the idea of it actually being like connected to your inbox because it's going to happen automatically whether it gets forwarded or not, and it will happen right away. And I was having this conversation with somebody at Scaling New Heights the other day when it comes to doing client work. UNCAT. We've talked about UNCAT quite a bit. UNCAT.com they help you collaborate on uncategorized transactions with your client. Basically anything that goes into an uncategorized expense account in your accounting file, the client automatically gets notified and they fill in the details on what that was. And one of the beauties of that product is the fact that you can create bank rules to automatically put things into uncategorized expense. For example, client has a purchase from Amazon, you got a bank rule. Every time an Amazon purchase comes through the bank feed, it immediately goes to uncategorized expense and the client gets notified. If you want them to get notified right away, like, you can schedule that stuff. And the beauty of that is I could actually hop into that bookkeeping file once a quarter. But. But my client thinks I'm in there every single day because the bank rules are sending that stuff over. So they're like, oh, wow. They're like really on top of it. Like the day after that transaction, they'll get notified. If you need more information to categorize it. This to me is interesting through that same lens, the idea that it could actually be pulling all that stuff over to the accounting system based on when those emails come in. It's not reliant on somebody hopping in and pushing that receipt over manually, which maybe you do once a month or every couple of weeks. Since this is connected to your email inbox, it could happen automatically. You could even pair that with like the uncat workflow where like if an Amazon purchase comes through, it pulls out invoice over to the accounting system, automatically categorizes it to uncategorize I don't know, maybe you don't need to do that because you have the invoice detail at that point. But in my firm, one thing we we did in our back office service is like managed managing company accounting inboxes where for a company we set all the vendors to go to accountingdomain.com Receipts, invoices, all that stuff goes there and then we manage that stuff for them. And a tool like this that is connected to the inbox would do that. Boom. The moment it comes in and not be reliant on someone logging in and doing it. Super cool. Ultimately, what is the best version of that is like the best version of that, you know, Dext building that on top of email inboxes, I don't know, but seemed like a novel approach. Hey. This episode is sponsored in part by Canopy, the practice management system. Canopy unlocks the firm that you always wanted. Think about it. Close your eyes, lean back in that chair. What is the firm that you always wanted? Oh wait, Canopy unlocks it. And they do this by unclunking accounting firms with an end to end solution that makes your tech stack feel a little less stacky because it's end to end. Putting our customers first with world class user experience, support and education and innovation rooted in customer feedback. Working and working well anywhere and for any size or type of firm, wherever you are now and wherever you're going, multiplying your efforts so your practice requires less proverbial midnight oil. You know, sidebar, if you go to the conferences, Canopy's got like, they always do some like really good little like sorta, you know, the stuff that they use to like trick you into coming to the booth. Well, this year they've had like Legos out there, maybe, maybe a double down on the midnight oil thing, you know, maybe like, I know, give away a little, little, you know, little actual midnight oil. I guess it would need to burn too, but that one's free. I think it's a good idea delighting your clients with a modern, easy to use portal that helps you get the info you need when you need it. That is Canopy. Check out the link in the show notes to learn more. This episode is sponsored in part by Client Hub. This week on Tales from the Hub. Let's talk about, let's talk about partnership. Okay. Last week, super smart accounting firm. They were at scaling new heights. And while they were there, they got to meet Judy and Sarah from the Klein Hub team. They had a booth and let me tell you how good it was to connect, learn that There's a real team behind the tech that you use. Actual squishy human beings. And you know what else? They felt that there was a real partnership there, a real bond between their firm and the folks at Klein Hub. They realized client help was about three things. Being great listeners, being forward thinkers, and third, being community builders. By listening, they could be genuinely interested in what the firm told them about their clients needs. By being forward thinkers, they were blown away with their vision of your firm on GPT. What? And all the magic features Client Hub is working on. Okay. What a tease. And finally, by being community builders, Client Hub could connect them who other with others who were happy Client Hub users. They had a great time at the conference, hanging with the Client Hub folks and told everybody about it, told everybody to get on Client Hub because partnerships, what it's all about the end of the day, you know, you know, just bringing people together. That's it for this week of tales from the Hub. Check out Client Hub at Client Hub app or the link in the show notes. ChatGPT plugins. Big deal is crazy. How much has happened in the last six months? A lot. ChatGPT was one month old at the beginning of the year. We've got ChatGPT plugins, we've got GPT4. So much has happened this year. When we first talked about plugins, there were like 40 plugins. Now there's well over 500 plugins in ChatGPT. If you think about like the QuickBooks app ecosystem and how useful that is, this is going to be that. But on another level that we have never seen, the rate at which plugins are being developed is unbelievable. Really interesting longer term is whether we see this consolidation around Chat GPT as like an app that we go to to do work and we interface with the other apps that we use simply via plugins. So like, there's a lot of folks, as we've talked about, that say UIs are going to go away. We're moving more towards natural language apps that you just chat with and maybe talk with over voice. And that seems like a weird paradigm shift. I can't imagine not having all those buttons and menus and submenus. But some people think that we're just going the way of those things going away. What? And like the analogy that comes to my mind is like I want my keyboard, I want my physical keyboard for my BlackBerry phone, but they're going to make me, you know, use the touch buttons on, on phones. Like that's just the norm now. But if we start stripping away user interfaces from the programs that we use. If we use 30 programs, then am I logging into 30 different things just to chat with a different chatbot? No, there's probably one chat experience to rule them all. That's where I work. And all my other apps plug into that. And that may very well be what ChatGPT becomes. That other ChatGPT plugin episode. Check that one out if you haven't heard it yet. Really interesting to see where this stuff is going. We're now like, interestingly, you can also enable several plugins within a conversation. And we're now seeing people begin to stack plugins in interesting ways where maybe it does something technical and then you have another plugin that does web browsing, another plugin that creates like visual flowcharts and can pull all those things together into like a single conversation. Either this week on my newsletter or next week on my newsletter, I'm going to run through an example of that that I think is interesting. Still very early days for ChatGPT plugins, but this will be super interesting to follow. The gist. The gist AI really interesting. A kind of different approach on the web browser where you've got all the tools that you use down the left hand side of the browser and then the home screen for the browser surfaces all the things from those underlying apps that you need to see. So the example they have here is like a high priority Slack message. You need to sign a document. It's like bubbling up from all the apps that you use, the important things that you need to do regardless of what app they're from. So this is like the homepage of your browser now it has bubbled up all of these things from the other apps that you use. You can click on them to resolve them individually and then down the left hand panel you have all of your commonly used apps. Some interesting innovation happening around browsers right now. I had this conversation with Logan on Twitter the other day, but a really good browser for teams where I can get a new person set up. And all of the commonly used apps are like right down the left side. There's a few versions of these browsers out there right now, but that will be really handy for employee onboarding and giving employees like a more common web kind of interface that we're all using, rather than somebody just going out and picking a browser and having like different extensions and all these things that are kind of hard to control right now. Just AI generated QR codes, if you use QR codes at all. Visually, there are some really cool New things you can do with how QR codes look, make them look much more appealing. App that does this really well is Barcode. So Dropbox Universal Search. So Dropbox is pushing the envelope on just how good AI enabled search can be. And it's the stuff that we've been talking about. It's embeddings and it's vector search. If you been through some of those past really nerdy episodes, you know how that stuff works. The same thing that's going to drive fully automated bookkeeping. Dropbox is enabling like a much better, like deeper version of search not only across your documentation, but across like summaries of your documentation, even across external data sources. So like you can connect it to an external thing that may change an update over time. And that is all part of like your own sort of personal search library. When we talked about how our practice management systems are gonna get way better thanks to AI, this was one of the really core things to it is imagine one search to rule them all. Across organizational email, across all of your files and the file contents, across projects, across meeting transcripts. Think about all the different places we have to go right now to find the things that live in all of those places. The tech is here. It has been since the beginning of the year. To do this in a centralized global search, that's going to be absolutely killer. And then the holy grail is layering that in with generative email replies so that when a client asks for a certain thing, because that practice management system can already see into everything, can see into past meeting transcripts and file contents and all that. Then when somebody asks you a question, that suggested email reply is wicked smart because it can see all of the stuff that is inside your firm. Super exciting. But this, this Dropbox AI stuff, like, is kind of the mainstream first peak we're seeing of what an implementation of that tech looks like. Okay, Rose AI. So Rose is like a new age skinny jeans wearing spreadsheet tool that has been innovating a bunch of cool stuff, some of which the mainstream spreadsheet tools have gone on to adopt and some have not. But this is basically how can you juice up your spreadsheet to the max with AI? And so it'll do like analysis, analyses, analysis of the data that is in your table. It will give you like quick insights of trends that it identifies. And how many times have we heard, oh, AI is going to be great for identifying outliers in our data and all these different things where it's like, okay, nerd, cool, like show me a really practical way to do that. Like I don't have machine learning supercomputers sitting in my office. I don't know what that actually means. This to me was like a really cool visual example of that. Like being able to select certain fields and it will give you insights and say this one's like a big outlier. There's something very different about this record that maybe you should check out. I'd encourage you to check out. I'll put a link to specifically their AI features and there's a little video of what it does and it will get you really excited about not only how good this tool is, but how Excel and Google Sheets and those things can be improved upon relative to where they are right now. Okay, I said this was the most clicked upon stuff from my newsletter. In the top five was interdimensional clown wrestling. And if you're watching the video version of this podcast, you know exactly what I mean. It is AI generated video and it is alarming and we're going to move on. This episode is sponsored in part by Zero. Because you know what? The roadshow. Gosh darn it. The Zero Roadshow accelerate. Did I do that? Zero Roadshow accelerate 2023. That is a freight train that is barreling right into your town. Specifically if your town is Atlanta, Georgia. So they did. Austin, July 27, Atlanta August 3, Los Angeles August 17. The Atlanta one is at the Georgia Aquarium. Whoa. Like fish stuff. If you've never been to a Xero party, folks from Xero, they know how to throw a party. Roadshow is a great chance to meet other forward thinking accounting practice runners. Other folks run in using Xero, learn more about recent Xero product updates, even meet some folks from the app ecosystem. But if you've ever been to a Xero party, you know these people know how to put on an event. Okay, case in point. How many accounting things have you been at at an aquarium? Sounds promising. I'll put a link in the show. Notes to go out and register August 3, Atlanta, Georgia at the Georgia Aquarium. Be there or be square. This episode is sponsored in part by the fine folks at Cloud Accountant Staffing. Do you hire accountants? Bless your little heart. Not the best part of the job, in my opinion. Not something I ever enjoyed. Well, listen, you can build your accounting dream team with talented offshore accountants in the Philippines that work a hundred percent off full time for your firm. Their accountants aren't freelancing or contracting for multiple firms. They're all yours. They work exclusively for you and are incentivized to stay with you and your team long term. They're not going to get swiped. Cloud account staffing is 100% dedicated to the accounting industry and founded by a former accounting firm owner that understands your business, knows your pain points. They had to hire some accountants and they said you know what, we're going to build our own pipeline in the Philippines, going to pull in some super talented people and then open that up to other firms. Basically that's the story I've been talking about a lot about staffing, building more resilient staffing pipelines for your firms. I had staff in the Philippines like totally red pilled me to like oh geez, like we need to globalize the way that we get our work done. Check these folks out link in the show description Cloud accountantstaffing.com digits Transaction Review they launched this earlier this year. This is Digits Digits Digits is like uncategorized transaction product. So it will do its best to, you know, if you have an ambiguous transaction that comes through, it will do its best to figure out how it should be categorized based on past activity. But the big deal here for digits was this was like the story here is it's transactions review. But I would say the bigger story behind the scenes is this is when they launched a client facing mobile app so that your clients can resolve these things on a mobile app. So client opens it up, they've just got a feed of little things that they need to resolve that are from you if you push that transaction to them. They did a little bit of GPT sorcery here or I'll say language model sorcery where it will also semantically like ask a question like what was this transaction from Target? What customer is this stripe transaction for? Is this a business expense or personal? It will like generate that stuff for you. Notion projects more and more accountants using Notion in some form or another. I know a good number of accountants now that are using Notion to like manage the nuts and bolts of their entire firm. There are certain people in this world where when you bring up Notion with them, their eyes just light up and they click their heels because they just love it. But Notion launched projects which is kind of a different hierarchy from which to like organize your tasks and your to dos and all of that gives you like roadmap kind of like timeline views for the first time. I'm on the fence about like whether this over complicates things. Like I think the to me the beauty of Notion was like the simplicity of it all. But projects definitely if you are a notion user. Check that one out. Macrosoft365Copilot this might be the biggest, I don't know, maybe. Was this the biggest AI launch of or announcement of the first six months? Potentially. So this is like a woven fabric of all of your Microsoft ecosystem apps being able to talk with each other and having a chat assistant on top of all of that. So you get into work on Monday and say, talk to your chat assistant and say, what did I miss? Give me the most important stuff. Or maybe you were gone for a week. It can respond with the emails that look like they're the highest priority. It can respond with the Microsoft Team messages that you got that look like they're the highest priority stuff from your task management system that might be late. It is like this unified fabric across all of your Microsoft documents and apps where you can basically all those things can see into all those other things. So like generative email replies are really interesting there where a client asks for a certain thing, it finds a related spreadsheet and it tries to answer that question for you. Or it finds a file in the file system and it suggests attaching that file. This is Microsoft's approach to how AI will like combine all of these things together. If we go back again to this is your practice management system on AI, it's all built on the same tech here. So we were having that, we were having that practice management conversation before Microsoft announced all this stuff. This is the Microsoft like first party version of that, which is really cool and really powerful. And the day it comes out, because it's still not in general availability, the day it comes out, it will probably be the most version, most interesting and compelling version of this thing that exists. So the question is, why would I then use an accounting industry specific tool for any of this stuff? Long term, ultimately I would say the ceiling is much higher. The ceiling ultimately, how good it can be is higher for tools within our ecosystem because Microsoft like this can do a ton of really cool stuff, but it will never ultimately solve the really nuanced problems that we have as accountants. And then second, longer term, the really powerful implementations of AI will be around agents. And so we've done a couple episodes now around agents. Agents are things that actually go out and do work. If you think about how you assign a task in a project management system to a human user. Now we will assign tasks to AI agents who are capable of going out and doing things, whether it's reconciling a bank account, whether it's fetching a file or printing a report. AI agents that understand what we do are ultimately like kind of the holy grail of AI. In fact, at scaling new heights, Digits did a demo of an agent that goes in and does stuff in an accounting system that was really impressive. I may actually have their head of machine learning on to talk just about what that was and how we should be thinking about agents. But Microsoft 365, when that thing ships, it'll be really cool and probably the best version of that on that day. But ultimately will not solve the very accountant specific problems that we have. And I think I'm hopeful this isn't just me shilling for accounting category tech. Like I genuinely believe that like long term those will be the better solutions for us. And honestly have been impressed at how quickly people have shipped shipped stuff. So like Carbon Canopy, we have Generative Email before you're able to get it for Outlook, before you're able to get it for Gmail. Like we do have people moving on this in our space, which is great and is why we need to keep continuing this conversation to encourage our tech partners to be investing in it. But that is Microsoft 365, honestly, big deal. Speaking of Canopy, up next, Canopy is Generative Email. They were the first practice management system to ship AI enabled email. What it does is basically helps you to draft an email from scratch based on just a few prompts. It is built into Canopy, built right into that email editor. There isn't really anything there that's fundamentally not possible to do in like chat GPT. But the reality is most people are not using chat GPT and this puts it on rails a little more, it makes it a little easier and it's right there inside of your email authoring experience. Bravo to Canobie for being first mover on that. Excited to see what they do next and how they keep investing in a mad woman media. So this is Laurelin Wilson's creation. What it is basically is it simplifies the process for you to create content for your clients. So if you struggled to find the time to like put a weekly newsletter out or something like that, every week Laurelin is doing a few like really high quality write ups that you can white label and use within your firm. I think we've all seen the bad versions of that when like, oh, there's like, you know, posts like several accountants, Twitter accounts posting the same things. And like we all know how bad the optics of that is. This is like here are some topics that you can choose from. And I mean you could you could reword it in your own voice, or you could just use that and publish it like through your own channel, I guess. But the upside is, like, you're not creating all of that stuff yourself from scratch. And right now it's 25 bucks a month, which I told Laura Lynne that scaling is stupid cheap to increase those prices. So go sign up now. We'll see if she takes my advice and increase the price on it. Okay, so this was most clicked on things in my newsletter. This is just something that I made. I call it Research Buddy. It's a swipeable prompt that actually turns the browsing model of ChatGPT into a really helpful research assistant. So the prompt is basically, you're a research assistant and there's a link to this in the show notes to just copy paste. I'll provide a single URL for you to reference when researching. Don't click on any links on the page or navigate to any other pages. You'll provide me with three things. One, a section called Excerpts. That is a bullet point list of 10 excerpts from the URL I provide that are most relevant to the question I asked. Two, a section called Answer. That's an answer you provide based on the excerpts that you pulled out. And three, other considerations, any other adjacent details that if I didn't provide them, could have impacted the answer. And then all you got to put in there is a URL and a question. And so the URL could be like a web domain. It could be like, you know, the page for an IRS publication and then the question you submit and ChatGPT will give you like a helpful, logically built response. And what this does, we talked about chain of thought prompting back in the episode about it passing the CPA exam. Turns out chain of thought prompting, making the language model think in steps gives you a way higher quality output. And so that's what this prompt does. It says, Give me verbatim 10 excerpts from the source material that are relevant to my question. List those out, and then give me an answer based on those things. So it's not making up an answer off of some, like, arbitrarily large amount of information. It's pulling the most relevant excerpts, writing those things out, and then making an answer based on those excerpts. The result is, from a research standpoint, the like, the quality of the answer is much, much better. In the case of the CPA exam that led it to score 9% better on the test when it did that chain of thought prompting. So this is just a prompt that you can SWIPE for, like, looking up stuff in IRS publications or whatever's useful. Okay, one more parseo. We did an episode on email parsing. Hugely valuable for accounting firms because as we talked about with that receipt thing, there's just like. That is just where we get invoices and receipts these days is email. And so you need a way to extract things from email in an automated way. But the word parsing, like, I get that scary. Like, you're not a. Maybe you're not a total tech nerd and all that. Ultimately, it's just pulling something off of a document in, like, a recurring way. Like, I have so many emails that I get that are recurring emails. Receipts that I get every single month. And the more things I sign up for, the more, like, that floor of my email management work goes up, and it's a real pain. This is a way to beat that down and automatically, like, take the details that you need from those emails, send them to the accounting file, forward them to somebody else, whatever needs to happen with them. It lets you automate the handling of those recurring emails that you get. Boy, that was a fire hose, right? Lot of new stuff. Hopefully. I just completely derailed your day. And you know what? We're halfway through. We're gonna do a part two tomorrow. I'm sorry. Kind of. But what an exciting year for tech man. A lot of stuff's happening. Okay, see you tomorrow.