194 Computer Peripherals for your Accounting Firm

Peripherals are the interface between you and your computer. That thing you're using all day long, how you get stuff from your brain to that thing. It matters. It really does. And too many of y' all are rolling that stanky old free. Like, throw in Dell keyboard and mouse setup. That's just disgusting. I'm telling you. You will get people who will spend thousands of dollars on a computer and then be like, what stuff? What buttons do you want to push to actually use the comp? And they're like, any. Anything will do. That's fine. Doesn't make any sense. Okay, it matters. Today we're talking about keyboards, mice, webcams, speakers, microphones, all that stuff. Come on in. Let's do it. This is going to be pretty nerdy, but if you don't geek on this stuff, you will learn a few things, actually, that help you better, like, pick better stuff that works for you. But apologies in advance if it does get a little bit nerdy. Okay, we're gonna start with keyboards. Obviously, everybody jumps here to mechanical keyboards. You big. You big dweeb. Listen, who should, like, I don't get. Accountants should be into mechanical keyboards. I didn't really make the switch till a couple few years ago. But accountants love their 10 keys, man. Those are mechanical. Like, the tactile feedback, the sound, the like feeling the power of that 10 key in your hand. Dude, accountants totally get off on that. But they're not into mechanical keyboards. Like, I just. I don't get that. So to demystify some of this stuff, different types of switches and keyboards. The switch is when you push down on the key, the thing that registers the key input. Most keyboards are gonna be membrane type, and it's basically just a little rubber dimple. And when you push down, you're, like, depressing that little rubber dimple. Now with laptops now we have, like, scissor switch membrane keys. And so there's a little mechanism in there that basically just makes it so that the total, like, throw length of the key is less so that that key doesn't have to be quite as thick inside of the laptops that are getting increasingly thin. Those are the. Those are the two kind of main types of keyboard switches that you see out in the wild. And then you have everything that falls into the mechanical category. And an upside of mechanical keyboards is really just, like, customizability. There are tons and tons and tons of different types of switches for mechanical keyboards. People are gonna have different preferences. When people think mechanical, they think big, loud, noisy, like, big thock energy that's not how all mechanical switch types are. There are many switch types that are pretty quiet. Not as quiet as membrane, which is just like a little rubber dimple which isn't gonna make any noise. But you can get pretty darn quiet mechanical keyboards and you can get very loud ones and all sorts of stuff in the middle. So. So all these different switches have different things, like how far does the key travel before it starts to get resistance. And at what point in the total key throw does the keystroke like register. If you have a place by your house, the best way to get a feel for this stuff is. I know in California they have micro centers. In the Pacific Northwest they used to have Fry's. If you have like one of those big box like computer nerd stores, oftentimes they will have a display that has a whole bunch of keys side by side. And this is the big best way to just like feel a whole bunch of different switches and figure out which one you like best. Every computer peripheral manufacturer you'd expect now has mechanical options. If you're going to weigh down the mechanical stuff, like, the easiest way to know that you're getting something really good is to buy Keychron. It's K E Y C H R O N. Without getting into the super, super bougie stuff, though, these are still pretty bougie. They are kind of like the go to premium really well built mechanical keyboards these days. In fact, I kicked off this series saying, I got a keyboard. So this is a. It's from their Q like Pro series. I think it's a Q6 or something. Specifically, I use yellow switches. I like them because they are a good balance between lots of tactile feedback without being mega, mega loud. The typing experience, to me, like, you can buy this, buy this on Amazon, whatever, wherever you're gonna get it, and never customize it at all. And to me, the big difference is just typing experience. Like there is no thought or love put into those awful, like little itty bitty low profile keyboard things that you get from Dell. And this is just like. There's just a different level of satisfaction, in my opinion, to something like this. I won't go into that anymore. Only other stuff I got here on keyboards, there's actually a whole ton of different key layouts. You may have seen different percentages referenced. You might have accidentally bought a keyboard before and you're like, wait a minute, this doesn't have my keys where I want them. So 100% keyboard layout is probably what a lot of accountants have 104 keys. 100% has the 10 key off on the right. That is the full quote unquote full size keyboard. Small end of the spectrum is the 60% generally going to be 61 keys. Have you ever seen like a multimedia keyboard? Like something that you could use from a couch or something like that? That is the itty bitty one. It doesn't have a 10 key. It doesn't have the insert home page up, page down, delete end. Doesn't have any of that stuff. It doesn't even have the arrow keys. 65% you have the arrow keys and then a single column to the right of the enter button and all that. Anyways. Various different layouts. Most accountants are probably going to go for the 100% because they want the 10 key. The 96% also has a 10 key but it is a more compact layout. You may have seen this in the wild. It basically just doesn't have all that dead space around your arrow keys. Some people like this. If you want to have a 10 key it is the most. It's. It's a much more space efficient way to do it. It actually trims quite a bit of length off of your keyboard if you do this 96% setup instead of a hundred percent setup. So if you're worried about your keyboard being too big, take a look at 96%. Everything below that doesn't have a 10 key. And that's usually where you lose accountants. One other thing. If you're buying fancier keyboards to look out for ANSI versus ISO layouts. So ansi, ansi. This is the layout that is the most common in the US The ISO layout is when the Enter key is like an L. You have one more character button then to the left of the Enter key and then your left shift is actually there's a character button between the Shift and the Z. This is standard in many countries. In the US most keyboards are antsy. If you are buying a somewhat nicer keyboard, oftentimes you'll see an ANSI or an ISO option. In the US what you're probably used to is ANSI gang these days. Like you could try this stuff. Free returns. If you've never like taken a mechanical keyboard for a spin for a week. Highly recommend. The majority of the folks that are super opinionated like anti mechanical keyboard people have never actually used one as is the case with most things. Right? Custom keycaps, man. If you just go like Etsy and search keycaps some freaking cool stuff like wood milled Keycaps that are like wood grain. People do this can do like unbelievable like custom sort of acrylic designs and like really cool stuff. If you have a mechanical keyboard, most of them, you can replace the keycaps. Some people like keycaps that are contoured different ways. But if you're geeking on that stuff, you can definitely do some wildly creative things there. This episode is sponsored in part by Cloud. Cloud Accountant staffing. You all know I'm a big advocate of hiring offshore. One of the biggest changes I made in my firm, we transitioned a Legacy firm from 100% onshore local hiring to a hundred percent distributed US and then 100% distributed globally. Hiring and honestly is the best thing we did. It virtually alleviated all of our hiring pains, completely changed how we thought about staffing projects and the type of work that we wanted to bring on. Because you know what, the folks we hired offshore, really freaking good. A lot of misconceptions around the type of people that you hire offshore. Because your enterprises will oftentimes use offshore folks for like menial work. Absolutely not the case. There are tens of thousands of people working for big four accounting firms. You know, offshore outside the US you can get folks that can do anything from tax to junior level stuff to super senior level stuff. But try to do that yourself, figure it all out yourself. That's going to be hard. It's going to be scary. Really good place to start, Cloud accountant staffing. They will hold your hand through that process. Their story is super simple. An accounting firm in the US hired a bunch of people in the Philippines, fell in love with them, but didn't fall in love with the fees they were having to pay to the staffing companies that were managing these employees. So they built their own solution and now they're starting to pull other accountants in. I'd encourage you. A big tipping point for me was when I was like, I'm gonna stop being opinionated on this and just try to learn. And so I talked with other practitioners, I talked with some of the vendors that that would like help you get into offshoring. That really opened things up for me. So if you've been on the fence, I'd encourage you to at least learn about it and start heading down that path. Consider Cloud Accountant staffing. Today's episode gang. It's sponsored in part by the fine folks at Live Flow. Did you know Live Flow has over 100 spreadsheet templates that anyone can just go out and swipe these templates. They've built out In Google sheets for all sorts of things. I'm looking at it right now. We got a four week rolling cash flow forecast, a 13 week cash flow forecast board reporting template, breakeven analysis, template budget, the actuals, consolidated AP dashboard, business KPI dashboard. All this stuff you can just go swipe on the Live Flow website. Literally just copy the template and if you want you can just make use of those. But here's the problem. Those spreadsheets, they're not just going to magically update with the information from the accounting software, right? You're going to have to go, you got to go look over there, you got to get the thing, you got to bring it over there next month, you got to do the same thing. Something changes, you got to do it again. So if you want, yeah, go swipe those spreadsheets and spend the rest of your days keying in figures manually or swipe the spreadsheet. Get started with Live Flow which will automatically sync from QuickBooks Online that data into those templates. Works with the templates they'll give you. It works with, frankly, any old spreadsheet you use. If you already got one that you love, you can make it smart by connecting it to QuickBooks. They rolled out a bunch of stuff in the last year from budgeting. You can sync budgets in from qbo. Big thing they did a couple months back was launch consolidations. So you can roll up groupings in like a visual way whether those different companies have the same chart of accounts or not. So if you are ready to make some big brain, auto updating spreadsheets or even if you just want to swipe some templates, get a taste of what it's all about, Check out Live Flow in the link in the show notes. Let's talk mice. I will say I don't personally, I do not have any physical needs that require, you know, different keyboard layout, different mice, setups, that sort of thing. I'm fortunate in that regard. So this is like my thoughts here are purely through the lens of here's what works for me. But the reality is like some folks are going to have needs where different types of layouts and setups are better layouts. There are actually a whole ton of different keyboard layouts that are not the S, D, F that you're used to. Interestingly, if you get into the mega nerdy stuff like the keyboards beyond Keychron and like really into the fancy stuff, you get people that will like my brother, he uses the, I think it's called the workman setup and all the Keys are in different places and you got to totally remap your brain. The keys generally are not going to be in like these flat horizontal rows. So if you think I'm a nerd for using mechanical keyboards, man, that rabbit hole goes so much deeper. Okay, mice, not a whole ton on this ergonomics. There are mice that are for little hand people. There are mice that are for big hand people. If all you have ever used and this is less common now, but a decade ago, most folks had only ever used the rolly ball mice that had come from Dell. Those are little hand mice. I don't have anything against people with little hands and my hands are really more like middle of the road. But the first time I used a bigger mice, bigger mouse, I was like, oh my gosh, this is so much better at like fills your hand. So be aware of like a mice that is optimized for the size of your hand. Biggest thing here, honestly, I think is buttons. Additional buttons can be super, super helpful for all sorts of stuff. Not all mice have great companion software that will then let you like remap those buttons to do different things. I have and this is we're putting my on full display my bougie ness on all things computer this week. I I've been a longtime G502 user. Very nice mouse from Logitech. One nice thing with Logitech is the software that comes with it is pretty good for letting you like customize what those different buttons on your mouse do. Really not to like understate that. If you can save having to go into a submenu or something like that for something that a button on your mouse, like that button can do it for you instead. Like that's really nice. That is how many times they send to the computer what they're doing. To be honest, only really matters with gaming. So if you game and you're going to be using the same mouse for both gaming and work, do some reading into polling rates. It does matter for gaming. Doesn't really matter for work stuff. Wired versus Wireless gang. I only recently went wireless. The reason is I have always had, as long as I had a wired mouse, a little weighted thing on my desk that holds the cord so you're not like tugging on the cord when you're moving it around. I'm not super opinionated either way. If you do have a wired mouse, just invest like $12 in that little weighted stand that like hangs onto the cord so that you've got some slack in the cord and are not like fighting Your cord. But these days most folks are just rolling wireless. Okay, one off the wall thing here that's more common among Mac users. So Mac has the magic touchpad. It's just a little triangle because Macs make very good use of like multi touch and like gesture support where you can do fancy stuff with your fingers. And I know a good number of big brain people who. I'm trying to call out all the people who are more nerdy than me to make me feel better about myself. I know a good number of big brain people who actually use a mouse, a keyboard, and a magic trackpad because they can be browsing around on the web or whatever with the mouse in one hand on the left side of their keyboard. They're generally using the trackpad and can do like gestures with that. So they almost have like a mouse in each hand. And it's actually fairly common. And that like, if you look at PC laptops versus Mac laptops, that is one thing Mac has done really well is like making the most of those track pads. And they're humongous. The touch pads on MacBook Pros. Something to think about, especially if you're a Mac user and you like the touchpad on laptop. Okay, real quick, mouse pads. Don't get them. Don't see the point of them. We're not using mouses with balls anymore. You're going to need them on like a glass, a desktop, because like some of the sensing stuff doesn't work on glass. So historically, I never used a mouse pad. Recently I have gotten into. Not recently. Last couple years I have used desk mats and they're basically just like. I guess they're technically gamungus mouse pads. And so they've got like, kind of almost like a neopremy kind of feel. I don't know if that's what they actually are. But like, the mouse pad I use is enormous. It covers most of the depth of the right side of my desk. I know a lot of people that use desk mats that cover like the full width from like from their left hand to their right hand and your keyboards on there and all of that. And it's almost just like a more warm kind of padded surface area for doing stuff. And I can get behind that. So I actually kind of like desk mats, not just for, for mousing on, but like, it's just kind of. It kind of gives kind of a nice different tactile feel to the top of your desk. Okay, webcams. Here's the thing with webcams. There's no Such thing as a webcam that's going to look as good as dslr. It did not work that way. Webcams have itty bitty sensors, which means the dynamic range of light that they can take in is very limited. Which in normie speak means if you have both very dark and very bright in a shot, it can't do both. So the best way to get really good output from any webcam is, is to make all of the light within a frame. I don't consistent, don't have a bunch of really dark darks, don't have a bunch of really bright brights. So I'm sitting next to a window or if I'm in front of a window, super bright out there, your face is going to be super dark or the window is going to be super blown out. If you're sitting in front of a white wall, it's going to struggle. If you're sitting in front of a black wall, it's really going to struggle. I've got it. Sometimes I'll have to take meetings in this room on this. On a Logitech C920 webcam, I've always got this black backdrop behind you and my face, I'm just like an angel of the Lord. You can just see my eyeballs peeping out. So best, best practices with webcams avoid like really extreme like contrasty areas if you can, where it's going to be really bright or really dark because the range of light that it can like handle with that itty bitty sensor is not going to be good. Another really easy thing, as long as you have overhead lights on, the lighting on like a person's face, like it's just not going to be great. Like you just, you have the lights coming down over your or the shadows coming down over your eyebrows. Like you just, you don't look good. Impressive looking video stuff online, it's done with like studio lighting. So right now like I have a big light that is filling, you know, 75% of my face and then you have to fall off the shading on the other side. So it makes it look kind of, I don't know, cinematic or something. But if all you have is overhead lights, which is most offices, it's not doing you any favors. A really easy win is be facing a window or have a window on either side of you. Pretty much anywhere 180 degrees in front of you have a window and turn off the overhead lights and check out how good you look in that webcam. It is way better than having the overhead lights on in terms of hardware on the cheap end of the spectrum. I mean, the only thing that's like, I guess it's only worth talking about what is going to be a step beyond your built in like laptop webcam or something like that. I mean, the Logitech C920, that's been the thing for like the last five or six years. It's still fine. It depends on your room. If your room has bright light like coming in the window and stuff like that, you're going to be asking more of a webcam. But that's kind of like, I don't know that Logitech is kind of the old tried and true Opal C1. This one came out a year or two ago. And the, the marketing around that is like it's a DSLR quality inside a webcam. And it's not, it's not a dslr, it's still a webcam. It's a pretty good webcam. It's definitely a step up from the C920. But I've also been on a lot of calls with folks where their opals just like broke and like the autofocus just goes totally wild and. But it's, it's a, it's a step up. I think it's 200 bucks. The Elgato face cam. Don't be, don't be scared of the brand Elgato. They make stuff for like streamers, but it's genuinely pretty good stuff. The hardware is pretty good and they're really good about shipping software with the hardware that gets the most out of it. For example, the software that ships with your Logitech is awful and it does like auto contrast and auto coloring stuff that'll like make you look like a tomato and just, it'll totally screw up the shot. The software that comes with Elgato stuff is really good. Elgato is a little bit more premium without like, it's not way out there, but it's a little bit more premium than like the entry level Logitech stuff. But their webcam is pretty good. The Elgato facecam, the Insta360 webcam. This one was hot like six to nine months ago. The party trick here is it's actually like a webcam on a little. What's it called? It's not a gimbal. I don't know, it can look around. Basically it will track you around a room. So the actual like camera will rotate and move around to track you wherever you are. Which in my experience is kind of just distracting like it's an interesting party trick. But why are you running around a room when you're in a conference? And does that really add anything for it to be able to track, you know, you around? The quality of it's actually pretty darn good, but you may have seen that one around. You don't need 4K goodness gracious. You don't need 4K from a webcam. Your video conferencing tools don't support 4K, so the person on the other side they're not going to see in 4k. I don't even shoot in 4k on like my cinema cameras. If Mr. Beast is doing just fine with 1080p, that crappy old webcam doesn't need to be. 4k won't make you look any better. This episode is brought to you in part by TeamUp, helping you recruit top Filipino accountants without any ongoing monthly fees. The difference between Teamup and all the other offshoring options is that Team up helps you hire staff directly. No middleman. You work directly with your new hire in the Philippines. Hire the person, not the company. Guys, gals, gang. Here's just a few reasons to hire directly. You have access to higher level talent. Makes sense. You have complete control over team culture and training. They keep 100% of what you pay them and it's a lot more affordable for you so you can retain your team for the long term. Team up can source accountants with experience working at US or Australian firms familiar with tools like Xeroqbo and Dex. Also recruit specialist roles. Team leaders, tax specialists, administrative assistants. Thought experiment. What if you had an executive assistant for the first time this tax season? Just. Just throwing it out there. What would they do? Start at that email video I did on the main channel recently. Get help with that stanky old inbox. I digress. Team up recruits these talented folks for a flat one time fee of 4,000 US American dollars. That's it. 4K one time. Somebody at Robert Half just did a spit take. Robert Half reference. We ever gonna get Robert Half to sponsor this podcast? Not anymore. And they can connect you with an affordable employer of record if you need help with payroll and compliance Once you hire that person. Big fan of hiring in the Philippines. You know I did a bunch of that. Check out the link in the description to learn more about Team Up. Okay, Speakers slash headsets. Hopefully this is just headsets. Do people use speakers? Does anyone use things that make sounds anymore? With the exception of like speakers in your living room or like that bluetooth speaker. When you're, you know, out throwing the frizz with the boys, increasingly things that make sounds are just rude. Like if somebody's smartphone makes a sound, I'm just, I'm enraged. There is no reason why anybody's smartphone needs to be making sounds anymore. These things will rumble all around. Turn all of your sounds off. All you need is the rumbler. You got that thing on you, you make sound, it bothers other people. Like phones, I'd be perfectly happy if they didn't. Like, like if I were to start a country and we create all of our own rules, I would be perfectly happy if speakers were completely outlawed on phones. Now at your computer, man, growing up as a kid, when would this have been? High school, I had a, I had a banging set of speakers and I'd sit in my room listening to music. But these days, I don't know. That's the thing. Because you got air bobs, you got over your headphones. I can't think of why you would need speakers in an office environment. That's just kind of weird over ear headphones. They're great. Particularly if you have loud children that are directly above me right now by the sound of things jumping off something very high. I wear noise canceling headphones almost, almost all day when I work just because it drowns out the screams. So this one's gonna be, it's gonna be workplace specific in ear though, like earbuds or you know, non Apple alternatives if you can find good ones that don't hurt your ears. Pretty nice. There's still the problem with Bluetooth where when you're talking to somebody the audio quality that you get is awful. And frankly like the mic quality of Bluetooth is still just doo doo. Like it's not good. I will say like the most streamless, seamless, stormless, the most screenless in ear experience I've had definitely has now been on Mac with AirPods but it's still Bluetooth. So like the earbuds are still only going to get you so far. I will say never. Gaming headset. Never in a million years buy a gaming headset thinking that's going to be the solution. Quality on those things are just awful. If you want high quality headphones, wired headphones and like I'm not anti wires here. Like there's a lot of situations where wired stuff still makes more sense. Look online for like the best studio headphones and for 100 bucks, 150 bucks, you can actually get phenomenal quality studio headphones that'll blow the door off $400 gaming headsets are going to be way better than anything you're ever going to get on Bluetooth. If you listen to music during the day, like, honestly, like that's still pretty darn good option. And last, microphones. This one is device dependent because the built in mics and speakers on laptops have gotten so good lately. Freaking MacBook Pro speakers blow my mind how good they are. And so like with the input built in mics getting better and better, the bar's being raised for what hardware is even worth buying for an input mic. But if you're using a PC, there's not gonna be anything built in there. For the longest time, the Yeti was kind of the standard. And I used a Yeti for years. The big kind of pill shaped one. I don't know that the Yeti's the move anymore. There's been a lot of really good USB mics that have come out since then, particularly since COVID Like there were an unbelievable between 100 and 150 bucks. There's a huge number of USB mics that came out that were better than the Yeti. So that's probably not the move. If you're going 150 and beyond. The best move is probably the Elgato Wave 3. That's 150 bucks right now. Big thing here is it comes with awesome software to get the most out of the mic. That's actually a really big part of this. So if you want to spend 150 or more, Elgato Wave 3 is probably the place to go there. And then the Shure MV7, the Shure SMB, like what I'm using here. This is like the podcasting mic. You see everybody use, they have a USB mic. The this the one I'm using, it is not usb, it's xlr. It requires a whole other thing to pipe it through your computer. Not worth the headache in a work context. So they have this MV7 which is just a USB mic. Not as good as quality as the SM7B, but that's fine. That's 250 bucks. And that sure MV7. Like I've seen people use it for podcasts a ton. It's almost kind of the like standard if you want to drop that much money for really, really high quality audio. Beyond that, like it's really probably more about your room than it is the hardware. Just like with your webcam, you know, lighting and making better use of the room is going to give you a better shot more so than Spending another hundred dollars on a webcam. But if you want to go 150 bucks and beyond, the Elgato Wave 3 at 150 bucks, a really good mic, and then the Shure MV7 at 250 bucks, probably the best USB option. Beyond that, you're getting into more like pro and music stuff. That's all I got for peripherals. The whole like peripherals. If you think about the way that we interact with our computers and like how high latency they are, the fact that I have to, I have to press a button for every letter and every word for the thing that I want to like get my computer to do or to record, it's kind of amazing that dictation doesn't get used more like, I don't know, I just don't find myself using it all that much. Like on Mac I just double, double touch control and it will do a dictation like, like, you know, like it does on your phone. For some reason we don't use that all that much though. I will tell you what's pretty wild, is on the Apple Vision Pro, quite possibly the most impactful thing that could bring to us in the next 30 months, 36 months, is really good eye tracking. Because the way that you interact with things on the Apple Vision Pro is you look at it and then you touch your fingers together. And we've had eye tracking for a long time. Like there's been ways to do that where it sees where your eyes are looking and then on the screen it can figure out, okay, you're looking at this, you're looking at that. And that's a fundamentally better way of doing input than having to like move a cursor over to here and do this and move a cursor over to here. They absolutely nailed eye tracking on the Apple Vision Pro. And if Apple brings like a really compelling version of eye tracking to macOS and actually be pretty darn interesting because it's amazing that somebody at some point was like, how are we going to talk with these computers? And they made this rectangle that was a giant collection of buttons and then they made a mouse a little bit later and then it was like, well, this is good. As good as it's going to get. That's, I mean like, you know, Neuralink, Elon Musk's company where they're putting things in pigs brains and now evidently a single human actually has this in their head. The whole idea behind that is like to let us interface with computers more efficiently so this stuff could actually change a lot. It'll be interesting how LLMs and AI potentially accelerate this stuff too, because it's much easier. It's much better at just understanding what we're saying and what we're trying to do. But for the tasteful, discerning accountant, that throwaway free Dell keyboard and mouse gang, that's not going to cut it. Okay, now tomorrow we are talking about everything else in the office, from your chair to to lighting, how that impacts your brain plants where you position yourself relative to the window, close vision versus far off vision. Like oh, can you tell I geek on this stuff? This has been a fun week for me. I don't know if anybody else will listen and enjoy these. I don't know if it will be for anybody else, but I'm having a great time. See you in the next one.