196 Remote Work Stipends for Accounting Firms?

What a week. All week we've been talking about office setups. Today we're going to wrap that up with a few loose ends. We're talking about stipends for people who are working remotely, phones, faxes, a few other accessories. I forgot to mention this week what happens when you drop food in your keyboard and how to get like other stakeholders, if you have partners and that sort of thing aligned on the approach to how you furnish people's offices. Like the value that you assign to the work experience of the people who you employ. So Q and A Friday, buckle up. What a fun week. I don't know about you, I had a blast this week talking about office setups. It actually felt great to talk about something not accounting firm related. And we may do more like week long things, situations where it makes sense, you pick the wrong thing and people are going to be like, I don't care about this for an entire week. But meaty stuff like maybe you know what you should be asking of your practice management system or I don't know, you got ideas for like bigger meteor deep dives we ought to do drop them in the comments. Maybe we'll do that once a month or something like that. One thing I forgot to cover is if you have a team, like how do you set expectations of what remote team members ought to be able to do? Because everybody's working in different kind of home setups or do you want that? Or do you actually want to be generous in the setups that you will help your team get so that you have a little bit more control over? Because everybody just rolls up with whatever they've got that actually creates a big headache for you. And oftentimes it's not the best conducive environment for work for your team. One thing that we always did with remote team members is we always gave them a co working stipend if they needed it. Because the reality is not everybody has a home environment that is conducive for work. But most places, especially mid to bigger market, like depending on where you live, there's somewhere you can at least go to work. And so that was the idea behind this space at home. Maybe that was kids, maybe that was, you know, not having a bedroom for that. Basically folks needed to be able to take meetings with clients at the drop of a hat. That was the expectation that we sent, that we set was basically that you ought to be able to get on video to meet with a client if, if they needed something in a pinch and if your home wasn't conducive to that. Then we wanted to support you in renting another space to be able to do that. Now a lot of companies have, have moved to a remote work stipend, basically an allowance, you know, fixed amount per month up to some sort of cap where they could spend on furniture, you know, whatever they need within their office. I generally like that stuff because much like we talked about with like office chairs, when it comes to office setups, it's very personal and you're not going to find a one size fits all solution for everybody. And that's sort of the beauty of the more flexible allowance setup is folks are going to buy what is valuable to them, which oftentimes may seem dumb to you or trivial, but ultimately most of the time that doesn't matter. What is more important is like, what do they need to create a calming and productive work environment? We had certain things that were like core, like they had to use this stuff and then we let them fill in the blanks around that. So the I shared the other day computer hardware, we were super opinionated on that. You need to be just doing work on our machines that have, you know, like disk level encryption and stuff like that. That's important. So the laptops and all that, like we would, we would always send that out before they started. Also monitors, we would generally let them choose between either a big high resolution single monitor or a lower resolution, dual, smaller monitor setup. Hopefully. I stressed this enough on, on Tuesday when we talked about it, but some people were just having this conversation on, on Twitter today around needing to get a bigger monitor or more monitors to be able to support like side by side. Size is not the thing here. I mean, size is part of the thing. The big thing to look out for is resolution. So if you're buying the more budget friendly monitors, they're generally going to be lower resolution. That is they have fewer horizontal and vertical pixels. And if you have just a 1080p display, which is what the cheap ones will be now, you generally can't fit two documents side by side. If you have a 2K display, you can fit documents side by side. That was usually the sweet spot for me was, was a 2K display and there's enough pixels there where in a single monitor you can put those two documents side by side. And so if you have a 1080 display, the solution isn't, isn't always necessarily going to be go bigger. What you need is more pixels. And so there's a number of different ways to get there. My main objection to A whole ton of monitors these days is they're just unwieldy with when you can actually get more pixels into a fewer number of monitors than you used to be able to do when you had 1080pmonitors that couldn't display that much stuff and they were 22 inches or 24 or 19 inches. Yeah, you needed a bunch of them cause you could only put a single document on each one. These days monitors are still high resolution in most cases. I don't think that's necessary. In fact, let me go back and find this comment. Also super thrilled that I've been out nerded in many of the comments in these videos. It's always good when you're feeling nerdy to be able to point to somebody that's worse than you. Right? Did I say worse? More advanced. I can't find the comment. Apologies of the person that posted it, but it was basically along the lines of for the type of work that I do, I need three monitors because I have current year, prior year and then this other thing open and kind of this third window. And that was the same way that I worked. But I started achieving that with a fewer. A smaller number of monitors. So back in the 1080pmonitor resolution days, yes, I needed a separate display for those. Today I would. And back in the accounting firm I basically just worked with two 2K displays usually because on each of those displays I can put two programs, two documents side by side. So if I have three things that I have to have open, I can totally achieve that with two 2K displays. I could not achieve that with two 10 ADP displays. So size is not the issue. When you're going higher on resolution on a 2K display or a 4K display, you generally want to go 27 inches or beyond a 24 inch 2K display, two documents side by side. Depending on how good your peepers are, that text then may be a little bit too small to work with. But think about the bigger office and your setup and all of that and the amount of stuff that you have on your desk. I super appreciated having a fewer number of monitors to fuss with, fewer cords flying around. That's why I ultimately came full circle to a fewer number of monitors to close the loop on the remote work stipends. I think people like to get caught up on the taxi of this stuff. Maybe it's because we're. Many of us are tax people and that's what you do. What ought to take the lead is what's going to be best for Our people. Like that's, that is needs to be kind of the main decision making framework. Absolutely. You gotta end that. But first and foremost, what ought to take the lead is what do my people need? You really can't underestimate the impact that a workspace has on a person's capacity to work. Like we spend so many hours and I try to be really mindful of this and it's something that didn't always sit great with me, that I'm in the business of running an accounting firm and employing folks in a job that is like they're going to be stationary for potentially decades. Like, is that something that I ultimately felt? And it was why for me, it was really easy for me to justify spending on better setups for folks oftentimes beyond what they had experienced before or even thought that they were, I don't want to say worth, but I've definitely worked with people before who are like, they've never had a great chair and they're like, oh, I don't. Why should I have this? And it's like you're almost trying to like tell like teach them the value of like themselves and their body and how important this stuff is. But the reality is like I've. I had to come to terms with the fact that I was paying people to be extremely sedentary, which is not something to take lightly. Like, I don't think we should lose sight of that. I'll jump to another related question from the YouTube comments from somebody who's an anonymous person. Jason, I'm curious. Did your partner see eye to eye with you on these issues when you were at your firm? Seems like a lot of accounting firms see these things as a waste of time or money. This is like investing in equipment in people's offices. Even if one partner values these things, it's still hard to convince the others to invest in it. Yeah, I mean this is the age old problem with really any sort of thing within an accounting firm that you're opinionated on. Uh, I only had one partner which was really nice. I'm not a, I'm not a big, I'm too much of a know it all to have a bunch of partners. Like is the reality that I've learned about myself. There's many things I have a lot of conviction on, but there's actually a lot of things that I don't that I have a below normal amount of conviction on where I'm perfectly happy, like not having an opinion. Like these days everybody seems to need to have to come down on one side or another on this or that, and I'm. I'm happy. I'm also perfectly happy being like, yeah, that's complex issue. And I know my brain wants to pack that up into a really bite sized, easy to understand thing, but it's just not possible in this case. But there are certain things, especially when it comes to firm running, where I became a real pain in the neck about. Because I spent so much of my time talking with other folks who run accounting firms, I became really opinionated about best practices and all that. And so I don't know, I would never survive in a situation with a whole bunch of partners like that. Just doesn't sound fun to me. Especially now going from running a small firm where you have a lot of authority to now running something even smaller where basically I've got like, you know, four employees or something like that, where it's, you know, much more agile. This is like something to know about yourself when you're thinking, do I want to do this thing on my own? In a perfect world, there's a version of running your firm with somebody else that's 100 times better because everybody's going to have shortcomings. We talked about the whole technician, manager, entrepreneur thing last week. If you are on one end of the spectrum or the other, there's a world where your life is made much better by the right partner who can be the yin to your yang. That's really hard to find. And the reality is virtually none of these relationships are going to be forever marriages. But there are things that are big problems and there are things that are small problems. And I would say that's something that my partner and I managed well is we had a tremendous amount of trust in each other and a lot of respect and on the core kind of foundational aspects of how you treat people and the right way to do business. We were totally aligned. And the things where we weren't always aligned were more about the ways that we genuinely thought, like this or that seems like the right answer or the right way to run the business. And to me, those were very different things. Those were. We have different lived experiences, we've had different conversations and our perspective as a product of those. And because we don't have those same experiences, of course we're not going to be aligned on that stuff, but we could be respectful about it. We could be open to each other, we could disagree and commit, I think, is a big deal. The fact that you don't always have to be in alignment, but you do have to buy in and give it, give it the old college try because you're inevitably not going to be aligned on everything, right? And this is, you know, one of the beauties of starting your own thing is, is total autonomy. But the reality is that can also be pretty darn isolating and you end up taking on all the jobs yourself. So, I mean, if you're in a position where you're trying to get folks to assign a greater value to people's office setups, like, for me, it was really a conscious, a conscience thing of, boy, I'm employing these folks to spend an outrageous number of hours sitting in a chair. And ultimately, you know, my, my legacy as I run a firm will be most felt long term, in my opinion, by the folks who I employ even more so than our clients. Like, if I'm going to leave somebody in a great and a better spot, at the top of my list, there are the people who I employ more so than my clients. And if those folks spend a decade working for me and they come out of the other side of that in really poor health, man, I'm not going to feel proud of that, you know. So for me, it was a conscience thing. It was, what can I in good faith ask of these people? If the executive needs a really nice chair, then why in the world does everybody else not need a chair that nice? Like, there is nothing about your gluteal chain that's more valuable, more valuable than everyone else's in the business. So for me, it was like a trying to be a good human sort of thing. Now, this is also very generational, you know, folks who are not of my generation, like, there was much more of an attitude of, like, you should be thankful to have a job that pays really well and has flexibility and stuff like that. And so I also understand that there's real differences there. But an unfortunate reality of white collar work is nobody's body was made to spend 40 years sitting in a chair doing a thing. And on the other side of that 40 years, you're going to come out looking different than you did going into it. So anything that I can do to, I don't know, help myself sleep at night, Is that what I'm saying? Anything that I can do to make that as manageable as possible, like, is a great investment to make. This episode is sponsored in part by Cloud Cloud Accountant staffing. You 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 100% 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 U.S. 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 going to stop being opinionated on this and just try to learn. And so I talked to the other practitioners, I talked to 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 you 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. Works with regular. 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. One thing I forgot to bring up phones. Okay. I'm not a fan of physical phones. Managing the hardware is a big pain these days. VoIP systems are really good. There was a time when they really weren't and they would go down a lot and the quality was really bad. These days VOIPs are totally fine. So our setup was we had like a standard headset that we would buy folks if they wanted, if they needed it. It was a fairly nice. What's the brand that does all the headsets? Jabra we get. We had some pretty good Jabra headsets we would get for folks. A bunch of different VoIP options out there. Even your IT company may have, you know, something that they recommend. RingCentral is probably the biggest, most mainstream one, but that one's pretty long in the teeth at this point. I was a fan of Openphone. That's just. I think it's openphone.com or openphone IO. It is phone and it is also text message and all in one and just a much more modern interface than RingCentral. Really nice thing for most of these is you can have a companion app so they can ring through to your phone if you want. VOIPs also enable a greater degree of control over how clients are allowed to bug you. So with that mobile app, for example, you can set up like do not disturb times. You can set up kind of custom calendars or windows of time for when stuff can ring through and when it can't ring through. There's a lot of people who I know are stuck with anyone and everyone having their cell phone number and don't know how to get out from under that. What I always tell people, go, great, go get a business line that can do text and phone. Go through your contact list, all of your clients who have your personal number, tell them, I'm switching phone numbers, this is my new number. If it's on open phone or something like that, you can still, for the first time actually you can set up boundaries around when people can call and text you, like when you'll get notified. I mean, just being able to turn that off outside of 8 to 5, like that's a massive win for you. And you can have other team members be able to get into that open phone account as well and help you. So if you got people texting you stuff, if you need to make notes from phone calls, there's a, there's a much greater level of transparency with VOIPs than there is with somebody just having your cell phone number. So tell all of your clients you've got a new number. If anybody continues to reach out to you at your old number, which is now your personal only number, ghost them there, reach out to him on the other number and make that transition. It is so worth it. Taking back control of your cell phone. Massive quality of life improvement so that folks can't bug you 24 hours a day. Between that and taking email off of your phone, or at least disabling notifications on email on your phone, big quality of life improvements. If you're a real dweeb like me. There's also some cool automation stuff you can do around VoIP phone systems. So most hilarious feature ever dangled by PM systems. Everyone says we're a CRM and you can log all of your calls in here. And if you've ever tried to roll that out on an accounting firm, you know just how adorable it is to think that a bunch of people are going to make call notes for every single client call they ever have. Cool thing about a service like OpenPhone is while all of these services lack native integrations with like cloud practice management systems, you can at least build some custom automation stuff around them with like zapier or web hooks, that sort of thing. So for example, Open phone can call a web hook every time a call ends or trigger a zapier workflow every time a call ends. That at the very Least in your practice management system, like logs a note to say, jim had a call with this client yesterday. Because oftentimes you need to know that if you're emailing a client or if you're trying to remember, when did we have that conversation? That's not as good as having the call notes, but at least you have logged that that call happened somewhere. And then if you wanted, you could even build a follow on workflow to keep prompting that user to provide notes from the call. But that goes for calls. It also goes for text messages. You could pipe those into another system. It's not going to happen magically. Like, there are no native integrations that make this work really well right now. But those are some cool kind of more custom functionalities that VoIP systems could enable. Faxes, Digital faxes, man, I don't. I don't know there's any reason to have physical faxes anymore. I was once on the call with an, an IRS agent and I said, yeah, let me fax you that power of attorney real quick. And I mentioned that it was like some sort of digital fax or online fax system or something like that. And the agent's like, oh, you can't use that. You have to use an actual fax machine. And I said, okay, give me just a minute, let me put the phone down. I'll walk over to the fax machine. And then I just sent it through my digital fax thing and he's like, got it ready to go. So there may be, I don't know if there's actual requirements to say it has to be a physical fax machine, but there's all sorts of fax services out there that are just software, super cheap to use and get you away from having to have a physical machine to do it. Something that didn't come up this week that people, some people are super into stream decks. It's two words, stream deck. If you haven't played with one or seen them before, they're commonly used by streamers, like video game streamers. But basically it is a little device on your desk that's just a grid of buttons. And it has some pretty cool software to let you map any sort of functions to those physical buttons. And I am a physical, like, button and knob guy. Like, my new keyboard has a, a little, like, physical volume knob on it, which is pretty cool. I don't know why there's something cool about, like, tactile buttons for doing things. This stream deck, like virtually everything you could do with keyboard shortcuts. I will say one nice thing about the Stream Deck is the software that comes with it is works really well. But for example, you know, having a button to like all of the programs that you use in the morning, having a button to launch all of the different URLs that you look at within a QuickBooks file. So like in a QBO file, each of the pages there have a static URL where once you're logged into a company file, that URL is always going to be, you know, the banking screen or the report screen or whatever it is for whatever file you're logged into. So you can map a button on that Stream deck to be able to push it and open all those things that you want to open. The company behind it is Elgato, who came up a few times this week, LG Ato and honestly, Elgato. They have pretty good hardware but really good software with all that stuff like their mic that I recommended. Part of what makes it great is the software that comes with it is really, really good. Same thing with their webcam, the software that they ship with that stuff is just way better than anything else. Same thing's true with the Stream Deck. I keep pointing at it if you're watching the video I have on. Admittedly since getting it, I haven't gotten a ton of use out of it. I haven't used it that much. But I also know folks that are like super, super into it. A good question, an important question. Button on Fuego brought up in the comments is button on Fuego or but one fuego? I don't know. When I was shopping for a keyboard, I needed one that crumbs can't get into. Yep, that's the selling point. Relatable. In college I once in college I used to make these humongous milkshakes that had every healthy thing you could imagine in them. But then you blend them all up and it was palatable. You know, isn't that funny how that works? You put a bunch of stuff together that doesn't taste very good on its own and somehow it's way easier to eat or drink in shake form. This thing had like, like oatmeal and peanut butter and spinach and egg whites like it was an abomination. And I knocked that bad boy over right across my desk, poured it out over a keyboard, and then I rolled down the desk and landed on top of my computer tower which had heating vents on the top, and then proceeded to glorp its way down through heating vents through the cooling fan that was there which then spread an even coat of that thick shake all over inside of my desktop. Like inside the case. Now I would argue the lesson learned here. Don't eat at your desk, bro. That would be my main advice to you. I was once watching so Ali Abdaal, a productivity YouTuber. I really like his stuff. Until I was watching a video and there was this like B roll of him doing different things and he was talking about getting takeout late at night. He pulls a slice of pizza out of a box, slaps it bear, slaps that piece of pizza directly onto his desktop. Are you kidding me? I've never been so enraged. Greasy piece of pizza just right like the as far as I'm concerned, the surface of that desk is never going to be the same. I'm going to be slip sliding around on that thing until the end of time. So I've gotten much more protective about the things that I'll do at my desk. I'm also because I'm old, trying to be more mindful of finding excuses to get away from the desk, get some sun on the skin, look at something far away, walk, not be at my desk. And eating is a good excuse. Especially as I work at home. I can go upstairs and eat and chat with the Mrs. For a few minutes or something like that. Like today went upstairs and had lunch. Found out my my 4 year old preschool boy, he's so my kids are such rule followers. I don't know where they get it. I do know where they get it but he got written up today, wife had to sign a thing and everything for the most adorably hilarious reason. But keyboard Chrome optimization reason I brought this up. You can get keyboards that don't have like the cavity beneath the keys. So an example a keyboard I used to use, the Corsair K70 Derek Foot. I saw that in the comments that you used to have that keyboard as well. Really cool thing about that keyboard is it's just a flat piece of plastic or metal or whatever it is with the keys on top of it like floating above it. So if you had like some canned air or something like that, oh that should have come up this week. Canned air. If you have some canned air and you hold that keyboard up, when you blow air on it, it literally just blows off the surface of everything under the keys. So there's no way for the keyboard to hang on to stuff. Let's make an addendum to this week. Canned air. That's an office essential. All it is a little aerosol can and guess what's inside. I'm not going to tell you. It is super handy for blowing out keyboards, blowing out your computer which like especially if you work at home and you've got animals, that thing will get packed up with so much animal fur but everywhere it'll get packed up with dust. So you really ought to be blowing that computer out like at least once a year. But that can there is super nice for just cleaning stuff out, especially your keyboard. So if you are a keyboard eater, consider a keyboard that has as a flush base where there's not like a cavity under the keys that can collect things. And if you think about it and we've all had those co workers where their keyboard is like one of the filthiest places on earth and you're like I don't want to touch that thing. I've seen the things that have happened to it. We never clean our keyboards. I mean the mo. The nastiest thing for me is the spittle on my monitor. Let's just end there. This has gone too far. This has been a super fun week. Any other like deeper dive, stuff like this that you think we ought to do, whether it's accounting related or not, would be fun. Let's do. This episode is brought to you in part by Team up, 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 Xero, QBO 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 ol 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. One more fun thing if you follow me on social media. You know I've been geeking out on this just a bit this week. The AI music creator that I've used for a number of things. Among them the Jason Daly House Band. Maybe we'll have to bring that back on past episodes where we've written little songs for whatever we're going through. Tool called Suno S U N O Suno AI they launched their third version of their music generation model and it is so darn good. As with most AI things, to get something really good, like the stuff you see online, it takes a lot of tries and some tinkering and oftentimes pulling that file out, like manipulating it and like Adobe Audition or like a professional tool to actually make it sound really good. So I wrote a song that was about following up with people for information and how they still haven't got any their info. I'll play the cut. Let me play the country one first, which I posted on social media quite proud of. But then what will blow your mind is I'll play two other genres of the same song and you can just hear how good it is. Okay, this is the country rendition. It's me again. Still need your. Still need your stuff. I'm sure you're busy. You're so busy, busy. But enough time's ticking by the deadline. Deadline's near. I'm just going to pause it right there. What kind of blows my mind about this is the ultimately the audio quality isn't great, but if you're like listening on Bluetooth headset or something like that where the quality already isn't great, I honestly think you wouldn't even know that this wasn't real music. Okay, I'll stop interrupting. Is not here waiting. So patient. Crazy how good that is. I'm not a country music guy, but I think a lot of the people that got excited about you can obviously tell who the country people are. Into March, it's time to get tough. You went on vacation, you lost in your span started and you stop. Now you. You got me. Okay, so I I spent probably an hour going through different generations and maybe two hours and like writing the scripts for the song and stuff like that. Like I wrote that, you know, word for word. I tried a bunch of different genres along the way. Country this model does country music particularly well. Like, that sounds better than most of the other ones. But to give you an idea of, like, how good this is in various different styles, you literally just prompt it, what genre you want it to. This is edm. The deadline's near. I look around and still your info is not here. Waiting patiently while you continue to. Get yourself and send it over. Whether that is your vibe of music or not, that's 100% AI generated from lyrics that is so wild to me. Like, I'm. My mind is still being blown at what is possible. And every time I see this stuff, I'm like, whoa, what's the, like, parallel for our profession? What's the thing that'll just blow my mind about the applications for our profession? I'm going to show you one more song and then a couple thoughts I have on that. Like, how do we get this to, like, what we actually do? Accounting and tax. Somebody replying to the country one said, how about a 90s rap version? I spent like 10 minutes on this. Got something pretty. It's a little janky, but also sounds very true to 90s rap. A little genial. A little song is my favorite part. The rapping's a little rough. So patiently while you continue to ignore me. I love the little jingle, though. Like, it just sounds so perfect. So 90s, too. Oh, man, I love that. I just love that. Like, it'll do. I mean, children's music, opera, polka, Oompa, like, whatever you want, ska. It blows my mind. And it's what I think is ultimately creating a lot of frustration for people in the profession right now. Because when you look at, you know, Mid Journey, which is kind of the. The best image generation model today, when you look at the progression of that over two years, it's like, okay, this. I hear that you want to train. I'm going to give you something that looks vaguely like a potato. Like, that's where it was two years ago to now. I mean, Midjourney is making images that are genuinely indistinguishable from reality. And now it's more of a question of control. Can I get exactly out of it what I want out of it? Because what it's making, nobody's ever going to be able to tell whether that's real or not. Like, we're midjourney so far past the six fingers thing. And when you look at stuff like that and you look at Sora, the video generation model that OpenAI announced the other day, that's just amazing. Those are so visual. And so easy to understand and easy to visually benchmark. Anybody can see the difference between the potato and the really impressive portrait, right? But when it comes to accounting, when it comes to tax and the ways that we apply AI, what is the equivalent that is so apparent, like, in terms of improvement? Because the same underlying tech has gotten better and better and better and ought to be more useful for the things that we do. But how do we benchmark it in a way that makes it like, oh, man, yes, it finally got over this threshold where we can do this or that with it, you know, like, it's not as easy as an image or video. I will tell you one thing that I'm really excited about that actually just dropped this week. I've talked about Claude some on this show, I think. So it's by a company called Anthropic Websites, Just Claude AI. They've always kind of been like the novel outsider in terms of, like, the company that's making cool AI stuff, but isn't really mainstream. But they just launched a model, actually a family of models, three models that are better than OpenAI's very best model in pretty much every way. And the one thing that they're really good at is being able to retrieve information from large bodies of text. And I've done some tax research, like benchmarking of this, where I will throw in like really big documents and IRS publications and stuff, stuff like that, and asked very specific, very nuanced questions. And what it is phenomenal at is calling out the right answer, but also calling out exceptions to the answer and even adjacent things that could impact the right answer if I didn't give it complete information. It is so darn good. So this is again, Claude, you get the best. You have to pay for their pro version to get the best model. It's 20 bucks a month, which hilariously now, Claude, OpenAI, ChatGPT, Google's Gemini, Microsoft, every single company. Now, to get the best model, you pay $20 a month. And to get the work version of it, you pay $30 a month. That's usually just with more privacy. But if there's, if there's one thing that's maybe closest to this, and it's a long ways off from image generation and just how clear it is, you can see those things getting better. If there's something close to this, it is being able to give an AI model a body of authoritative text and say, answer this question with it. In the beginning, it was rough, very rough. But steadily it has gotten better and better. The amount of text that a language model can handle at any given time. We've talked about this before. Has grown exponentially. And now Google's newest model, Gemini 1.5, which they haven't released yet, can handle. What did we decide? Thousands of pages of text. It can hold that in memory at any given time and you can ask it a question and it can literally know all of those things to over 2000 pages of dense text information. It's not like it goes and looks it up for you. It's like it is there ready to go and you ask it a question and it will immediately pull out of that whole thing. Anything relevant to that question, like technical research, man, like it is just going to get so, so, so much better and so much easier to find answers. But even things like searching an accounting ledger. How many years have we dealt with horrendous search functionality inside of accounting ledgers where it's like no, dummy, you ought to be able to figure that out when I misspell or, or searching for amounts has just always been astronomically difficult for some reason. Cue the guy that's like work QuickBooks Desktop. I just control F and amount equals. There's actually probably some truth to that. QBD probably had the best search compared to modern, modern cloud ledgers. But to be able to talk with an assistant that knows anything and everything that happened in an accounting file and to be able to instantly retrieve that and like give you qu, like answer questions about it, Good golly, that's exciting. The research and the release of the models is always going to be ahead of people implementing it into products in exciting ways. But if you grew up doing tax like I did, you think about stuff like Quick Finders, which is like this PDF summarized PDF of like all of the questions that like you most have to go out and look up as a tax pro. And it was a PDF that was hundreds and hundreds of pages. People are never going to use that stuff again. Like chat and conversation is just a fundamentally better way of doing that. To be able to ask and it just brings you an answer and points you to authoritative documentation. And interestingly, while we're still a long ways from AI being authoritative and being able to just say, well, this black box AI gave me this answer and I'm just going to trust it now. Interestingly, if you think about other examples of that, take that that Quick Finder resource, which is like a originally was like a three ring binder sort of thing. Several hundred pages of like summarized tax information. I trusted Quick Finder blindly. I did. And that was not an authoritative source of information. You know, like, I mean, technically, IRS publications aren't either. But if you think of things in our life that we have learned to trust that are not the true authoritative source, right or wrong, we're probably going to be trusting AI sooner than later. When you've had it research something for you a hundred times and bring back citations and it's been right or been complete every single time, it's probably not going to be that long before beginning to trust it. Because while it is a black box, there's also a lot of other examples of black boxes that we do. Trust me telling you something and you believing me, it's a black box to a degree. Right? Quick Finder, they've got a bunch of really smart tax researchers and they put it all together in this really helpful resource. It's a black box technically, at the end of the day, I guess still blows my mind that none of these folks are like on the bandwagon. Like, and I don't know if you look at people like Quick Finder and they're afraid of AI displacing their business model, but boy do we need to keep encouraging the ecosystem to invest in AI solutions for us. Biggest risk to the whole accounting tech ecosystem is the mainstream tools getting so good that folks are like, no, I'm going to go actually just all in on Microsoft because Copilot seems helpful. Like, that is the greatest existential risk to our software ecosystem, which would be a big time bummer because tools like, like Copilot are never going to go as deep as tools specifically made for accountants who have, you know, specific needs around tax research. And if I write emails in my practice management system and AI is going to start generating suggested replies for me, I want it to be able to see into the accounting ledger, to pull information from there, to help me answer questions, to see into tax research libraries, to give me a draft that pulls in something authoritative as a starting point for writing that email. Like, we need accountant specific solutions. I mentioned this in the newsletter last week, but really interesting thing and then we'll wrap up. Interesting thing that Superhuman launched. Superhuman is an email client. Really cool, like keyboard, shortcut, cut optimized, just super lightweight email client. They launched an AI feature called what is it, Instant Send or Instant Reply or something like that. Now every email you get, every email you receive, Superhuman will draft three proposed responses for you to use as a starting point. So every time you open an email for the first time, sitting there waiting for you are three Proposed responses and the visually how they, how they present them is visually you can see in a nutshell what the response is. Is it yes? Is it no? Is it put something on my calendar? And so it gives you that like very short one or two word, here's what the response is. And then you click it and it shows the full email that it drafted for you. And it does it in your tone of voice because it can see all of your email history. But man, that's a, that's a super cool example of using language models to make me more productive responding to client emails. And so super cool that that Superhuman has shipped this. The killer version for accounting pros is the one inside the practice management system. And we've already talked about this. I think Carbon has generative email replies. I think Canopy has this. There may be some others that have it. I know Client Hub is working on it. But the best version of this in my practice management system is the one that is building draft replies for me. But it can see into the client's accounting ledger. The client's past tax filings can see into Quick Finder, you know, tax research libraries. Oh my gosh, is that going to make us wildly more productive when you have this kind of assistant of your dreams that is fetching all of the peripheral information that you need to respond to an email instantly before you even get in to look at that email. Right. So that Superhuman feature launch got me really excited. I'm like, that is a great implementation of using AI to respond to emails. Just draft a few options for me that are like different responses before I even get in there. And theoretically it means you ought to never write another email from scratch again. Right? Like you at least have a starting point there. Now, devil's in the details of how true to my tone of voice is this. But if you think about how we've authored emails thus far, it is with no like contextual information being fetched. I have to go out to the accounting ledger. I have to go look up that thing to research. I have to write the email from scratch. Surely there's an assisted version of that that's better. And this is probably the highest ROI thing our practice management systems could try to nail right now. If somebody puts together a super novel email experience, that makes it way easier for us to track down answers on status of projects or send me my prior year tax return. Well, here's a drafted email that has the file I see in your file system. 2022 income tax return. I already attached it to this draft for you. Like if somebody nails that man, that's gonna be there's gonna be such a quality of life improvement and that stuff's just gonna keep getting better as AI gets better, as it gets better at reasoning and making connections between like different types of data, the same way humans do to go out and answer a question. Pretty wild time, but as you know, we will be plugged into it and keeping you abreast of the very coolest stuff out there. Thanks for coming and hanging this week. Geeking on office stuff. Any other ideas for for longer series we ought to do like that. Would love to hear about em in the comments. If you bought anything, I see you, I see people buying things. Hopefully this week wasn't too expensive for you and we'll have a cheaper week next week.