544 Are Accounting Firms Sleeping On This AI App?

Are accounting firms sleeping on this AI app? Today we're talking about Google's Notebook lm. It's been around for a couple few years now, but it continues to get better and they can continue to ship some interesting new features, everything from infographics to video explainers. And with the recent release of a new image model from Google, it's a big step up in the quality of what it will produce. I tested this with some examples of like month end financial statements and the results did pretty all right. It's pretty interesting, may actually paint a picture of it like a near future where the deliverables how we're sharing information with our clients may start looking a little bit different. And there is one killer feature in here that I want to see in our reporting tools. Some pretty cool stuff today. Let's get into it.

You may remember maybe a year ago we did an episode on Notebook LM talking about their audio overview or podcast feature. And gang that has it is still really really good and has continued to get better as Google's new AI models are even stronger. I'm going to play you an example of just how strong this feature is a little bit later. But first, if you're not familiar with Notebook lm we've got a link to it down in the show notes. Anybody can have a play with it for free. It's a Google product, but even with a personal Google account you can hop in and have a play with it. It's kind of the like study tool of your dreams. Basically how it works is you can put any documentation into it that you want, however much subject matter you want and then you can chat with all that stuff. So you know, you could put 10 IRS publications in there and then ask it questions. And the power here is it's only pulling from the sources that you give it. But it will do other really interesting things like create reports, create quizzes, create flashcards, create a slide deck, create a mind map which is kind of like a branching logic sort of visual overview. It will create an audio overviews like a podcast. We'll talk a little more about that later. It will create a video explainer and did I say infographic. It'll create all these different resources from whatever material you give it. And the way that I test this, what I love about this is I can give it financial statements and it will actually produce like pretty interesting useful things from it. Even a very basic example of putting the balance sheet, the P and L and the general ledger into Notebook LM and then sharing this Notebook with a client gives them the ability to ask questions like, like see the original documents, but dig into those financials in a way that is probably going to be much more accessible for a normal business owner than just looking at those static PDFs, right? I think when most people look at Notebook LM, they think of it as sort of a research platform because I think that was what it was originally developed for and it can certainly do that. In fact, I would say the user interface lends itself a little better to research than Chat GPT does because it's kind of the whole idea of a notebook is like a library of the sources that you choose. And if 80% of your, you know, say, tax research is done around a consistent set of sources, you can load all of those, those sources into here and have a really cool, really useful AI assistant that's just pulling those sources. Now these days Chat GPT is pretty darn good for research. In fact, I would say if you're a big time AI nerd, these AI assistants will get you still just as far as a dedicated research tool. Right now, I would say the place for research apps, you know, your Blue jays, your tax GPTs, that sort of thing is more for the people on your team who are not the big time AI nerd. It makes it much easier for them to get to high quality research answers faster. So for tax research specifically, there are better tools on the market just for doing the tax research thing. But how often have you been like, hey, I got a hundred client transcripts from meetings. What do I do with these? Where do I organize these? Especially if you work on the Google Workspace Notebook lm, it's a pretty solid answer. You'd have a notebook for each client. Inside of that you put all the transcripts from those client meetings. You could have a notebook by type of meeting. So you could have a notebook with all of your onboarding meetings. Then all you got to do is you hop into that notebook and you can, you know, query it, poke around in there, have it kind of analyze those meetings and maybe help you get to a more consistent structure for how to do those discovery meetings. It's a very handy app. But of all of the things that it will create for you, what are the most useful? So again, it will create eight things. An audio overview, a video overview, a mind map, reports, flashcards, quizzes, infographics and slide decks, and creates those things based on whatever documentation you put into it. And you may have heard the news recently of Google's new Nano Banana Pro image model. Basically it is a new state of the art image generation model. It is pretty impressive. You can give it a absolute mountain of instructions and it will follow them like in a very detailed way. You can actually give it up to 16 characters that it will then present inside of a scene. But it can also do stuff like create infographics. So that was one of the first things that I tested here is can I give it a set of financial statements and it give me an infographic that is good enough to send to the client? And I would say right now the answer is we are so, so close to it being good enough. The example file that I use here is, what is it? Craig's Design and Landscaping. The. The sample company inside of QuickBooks Online. Yeah, Craig's Design and Landscaping Services. And if I have it generate an infographic of the P and L results. It creates this really cool image that is like themed around sort of a landscaping business. It's a little bit cheesy and the whole thing like the numbers it presents, everything is accurate, but there's like just a couple examples of it kind of bungling the text. Like it's very, very close to actually being pretty cool. Like I could put that image in front of a client as part of a monthly deliverable. And I'll admit I'm a little bit on the fence of like, is this even a good use case for generative AI like to let it create images like this in an open ended way or are we better off using tools that give us a more structured way to create consistent visuals? I'll admit I'm a little bit torn on that. Like I'm never going to ask AI to generate a profit and loss right? Like that needs to be a specific format. I want it the same every single time. And so using generative AI to create a profit and loss like that is not a great use of generative AI. On the other hand, an infographic like a simple visual that's tailored to that client, designed to be simple so a small business owner can understand it. Maybe. I tell you, the one I was more excited to test is slide deck generation. And right now notebook can create a whole like you know, 20 slide deck overviewing all of the financial results. And the deck like it's fine. I think if I have any objection to what it generated, it is more along. It is more just because maybe all of the things that were presented there are not what I would present. But that's something you can tinker with. You can actually give it a custom prompt when it generates that slide deck to provide specific instructions. You can give it an outline, what sort of slides you want to see. You can provide some context around, like who's it for? Like what is the name of your accounting firm and what is the name of the client? How do we address the person that we're specifically sending this to? So we can't nail down specifically. So we can't nail down more specifically how we want it to present that slide deck. We can also give it a length, do we want it short or long? Something in the middle. And then they have two modes called detailed decks and presenter slides. Detailed is just like much more text heavy slides, whereas presenter slides are kind of high level. You could see a world where every time you deliver something to the client, you're going to generate a slide deck here as a starting point. Many of us do this already. And then that slide deck is part of the deliverable that goes to the client. Now still my favorite thing here by a mile is the audio overview. And we're going to get to an example of that. But the other couple interesting things here, one, the mind map that it creates, and I had to generate a mind map based on the financial results. And I'm like, honestly, I don't even know what that's going to look like. And basically what it did was create this branching flowchart of income, expenses, other income and expenses. And then each time you drill into, you know, you drill into income, for example, and it sort of opens up all the different income accounts and then you can click on any of those income accounts and it gives you the amount. It's actually kind of an interesting way to visualize financial statements. If you've ever seen mind map tools with using your meeting transcripts, I think that's probably a cooler use case of mind maps because it gives you kind of this like networked view of what were all the topics that were covered and the subtopics within that and across, you know, a 60 minute meeting where that meeting went all sorts of different directions. It just gives you a more organized view of what were kind of the main talking points and what you got through. Now Notebook LM1 will generate video overviews and in some ways they're kind of like the slide decks, but just an animated version of that. I don't know if like that's cool, they're definitely harder to modify than a slide deck. But I can tell you I had the experience of buying a home and the lender at the end of everything when we'd closed on the home sent me this video that was like this, congratulations on your new home thing. And it like pulled in all these figures and details from the closing process and some pictures of the home and all that. And it was like this two minute video. And when I saw it, I was like, this is super lame. Like, this could have been an email. And I think that's maybe the risk with video overviews is. Is a video, like actually the most interesting way to consume this information? It's one thing if it's a person, somebody you know, presenting over video and delivering the information, but if it's literally just a machine created by video that someone just sends over, I'm a little bit allergic to that in the same way that I'm kind of allergic to like people responding with anything that is very obviously AI like, I'm like, I almost feel, I don't know, duped or it feels cheap or something like that. And video, like, video is just kind of an inefficient way to consume anything, I think because you have to be fully focused on that, watching it, looking at it, as opposed to a podcast, which is much more passive. And that is still Notebooks LM, and that is still Notebook LM's party piece. They call it Audio Overview. It's basically, it will generate a podcast about any of the content that you give it, including financial results. You may have heard this in the wild before. It's like two people having a conversation about whatever. You get it, and it sounds incredibly realistic. Now, since we talked about this on the podcast maybe a year ago, we've got a bunch more customizability on how it can produce those podcasts. So you've got four different podcasts that can create a deep dive, a brief, a critique, or a debate. You can give it a custom prompt, so kind of custom instructions for how to generate this podcast. And then you can give it a length, short, default, or long. Also very cool. You can do it in a bunch of languages. I'm going to stick with English today, but here's the custom prompt that I used to generate a short podcast about 10 minutes about this company's financial results. The. The output exceeded expectations. I think you'll be impressed. But the prompt I gave it was. And I'll put this whole prompt in the. In the show notes if you want to swipe it. The prompt was your two CFOs breaking down a company's last month's performance. Have an enlightening convo about the financial results in a supportive tone, speaking to the Business owner. You work for Jason's tax and accounting firm and are creating this resource for the client, the business owner. Main discussion should focus on the profit and loss totals, but look into the general ledger for transaction detail where necessary to deepen the discussion. And this we're back to me now. The depth of this discussion, like super exceeded my expectations and gives me a bunch more ideas for how you could use this. Because if part of the monthly delivery to your client is something they can listen to passively. For people who are are podcast consumers, which I know is going to be most of you, that's pretty interesting. Like to be clear, this is like a 10 minute overview of financial results. You got a lot of clients where if you gave them this they would dig into it because they could do it when they were on the elliptical or doing something else. But let me just show you how good this is and then I'll share some more ideas of how you could use this.

So if you follow my main YouTube channel, you know that about six months ago I ditched my traditional bank for Mercury. Mercury, now sponsor of this episode. I actually made the move before they sponsored any of our stuff. Mercury. Over 200,000 companies now trust them for banking and managing their finances. It's everything that you wish traditional banks were like good access management, not having to do two factor authentication Olympics to get into your client's banking stuff, which is by the way like a major security risk to your firm. When the strategy to get the info we need is to tell the client to forward you the code that came to them in a message that says never share this code with anyone. And we, we feel dumb about it, right? We're like yeah, no, really sorry for the convenience inconvenience. Don't be sorry. Tell them there is a better way. Mercury. It gives you firm level access where then you can give the members of your team granular access to whatever they need even down to like specific bank accounts. Much better from a security standpoint but also like from a workflow standpoint is going to make your life, oh my gosh, so much better. Now Mercury, they will literally pay you money to put your clients on Mercury. Thousand dollars referral bonus per eligible client. Terms and conditions apply. Of course you get Mercury Pro for your firm. It's worth checking out. It's really good. Mercury is a fintech company, not a bank. Terms apply for bonus eligibility. See Show Notes for details. Totally worth checking out. I really like Mercury. Get all that down in the show notes. So I'm out of some live Events that we're hosting this week. And I was talking with someone the other night. We were actually at a table. They were sharing with some other firm owners stuff that they were doing, from like different pricing methodologies to some of the tech that they were into. Some of the folks around the table were like, using some of the old, like, traditional legacy tech and stuff like that. And then they got to offshoring and everybody sat up and they're like, hang on. What? Tell us exactly how you're doing this. And you know who they were using. This episode sponsor Team up. No lie. They were using. Team up is basically just a recruiting group that works exclusively with accounting firms to go out and find you the most talented accountants in the Philippines to go and work directly with you. You pay the accountant directly. No middle, middle folk taking their own cut. Team Up's just going to be there to help you find a super talented accountant, place them into your firm, usually 4,000 bucks for a placement. Compare that to Robert half charging you quarter million dollars and actually heard the other day somebody had to pay a body organ to get an onshore accountant. That's not a lie. Team up 4,000 bucks. They're going to find you a super talented and capable accountant. My last four hires in my accounting firm were in the Philippines and they were fantastic. Honestly, it totally changed how he staffed in our firm and got our stuff done. I actually talked with another accountant the other day who's like, I think I'm going to go start a Philippine staffing agency. Because we are having so much luck with the folks we're finding in the Philippines. I know you're like, not another one. Anyways, there's a reason people are doing this. Because it turns out accounting is a universal language. Kind of in some ways, yes, in other ways, no. But people don't hop over the border and then all of a sudden not know how to do what we do in our accounting firms. Am I making sense? You know what I'm saying? If you haven't done this before before, you're gonna have a whole bunch of questions. Just hop on a call with the people who have done it. More than anyone else, the folks placing accountants in affirms would encourage you to do that with Team Up. Check out the link down in the show notes. So everything that you're about to hear is generated with AI. The only information I gave it was the prompt. I just ran you through the profit and loss and the full general ledger detail for the month.

All right, welcome back. We're diving into your October 2025 numbers.

Yep.

And? Well, if you've just been looking at that bottom line, you might be feeling some serious anxiety.

Yeah, I would imagine so. It's a bit jarring at first glance.

Right. So we're stepping in here as your partners from Jason's Tax and Accounting.

Yep.

And our mission today is really to cut through that anxiety. We're going to get under the hood.

Of the P and L. That's exactly right. Our job is to move past those high level figures and connect them right to the general ledger, to the actual transactions.

So you can see the story.

Exactly. To give you some actionable insight.

Give it to me.

And the overall finding is it's a bit of a paradox.

A paradox? How so? Well, October income of negative $1,891.56.

A genuine loss. And if you stopped reading there, you'd think the business model was fundamentally broken.

But it's not.

Not at all. That loss is almost entirely driven by, let's call it financial timing, not poor business activity. We just need to separate those two things for you.

Okay, so let's unpack this.

Let's unpack this.

Let's start where every business starts. Revenue.

Yep.

The top line.

Your operational activity was really solid this month. You brought in.

Is it crazy?

This is $962.02, which is great.

That number tells us you had consistent demand for your services all through October.

And when we look inside that number, the real engine is landscaping services.

It is.

That brought in $2850.72. But what's really fascinating is how that profitability is structured. A huge chunk of that $2,149.42 came from what we call job materials within income.

So that's the markup on things you sell for a job.

Exactly. Soil, lumber, all of it. It shows you're not just selling labor, you're selling the whole package.

And that's a huge component. I mean, it tells us you're excellent at managing material markups.

Oh, absolutely. I mean, look at this. Plants and soil income alone was $1,742.62. That is a high volume, high margin category for you.

And that speaks to efficiency. Because the flip side of that is your actual cost of sale.

Right. What you actually paid for those items, and it was only $228.75 for the whole month.

So you're spending $230 to generate over 2,000 in materials revenue. That's an incredibly healthy markup.

It proves the Pricing model for materials is totally sound.

That's a great call out. The fact that it made the association down to cogs and. And up to like the related revenue. It assumes the bookkeeping's done correctly. Right. But it's pretty interesting to made that call out on its own.

So that's great. But you know, we also see other strong revenue too. Design income was at what, $637.50?

Yep. From Inv. John Melton's. And then you had services income, so installation hours and labor at $503.55.

That's a good mix.

It is. But speaking of the mix, we did spot one. Let's call it a nuance that made us jump right into the general ledger.

Okay.

The pest control services income account, it ended the month with a negative balance.

What negative?

$65.

Wait, how does an Ingram account go negative? A refund.

Precisely. A refund wiped out more revenue than came in for that category, which we dug in. And on October 23rd, you issued an $87.50 refund. It's transaction 1020 to Pies Cakes.

And is there a note?

There is. The memo says refund. Pest control was ineffective.

Ah, okay. That's a critical detail. It's a quality control issue. But it also shows your.

Okay, so it actually went into like the notes on the transaction itself, which I think in this case it could have seen from the general ledger. I mean, that's a good call out negative revenue account. Right.

Prioritizing customer relationships. You made it right instantly.

You did. And that's great long term practice. Even if it creates a small hit on the P L for the month.

Sure.

But zooming back out, even with that refund and your cost of sales, that $228 expense from Hicks Hardware, your overall gross profit was still exceptionally strong.

It was. It landed at $3,733.27. So, you know, the operational heart of the business is beating very, very strongly.

This is very friendly because in the prompt we had something about like, we're looking for a friendly and supportive tone here. It's maybe a little more complimentary than I would like and even a little bit funny because the numbers aren't that big, but that's something you could dial in. In the prompt.

Profit was still exceptionally strong.

It was. It landed at $3,733.27. So, you know, the operational heart of the business is beating very, very strongly.

Okay, that leads us perfectly into the other side of the coin then. The operational spending.

Right. How efficient Are you at running the business?

We know the revenue works. The markup is sound. Your total operating expenses for October were $2,708.83.

And here, this is the first huge indicator of success. After covering all those day to day costs, your net operating income was positive, a positive NOI, a positive $1024.44. That figure right there is the cleanest signal that your core business, the services, the materials, the labor, it's profitable, it's self sustaining.

This is the number we celebrate over a self. It's. I mean it's only $1,000 team. This is where like in the prompt you could add some context of like, hey, here's what the goals are, here's what the targets are. Actually, here's even our most recent transcript. That could be. You could put that in a notebook. LM as well. And I can see from those past conversations like what are the things the business owner is thinking about? What are. What is some of the advice that we've given them in the. So that their conversation is more reflective of maybe our guidance.

Thousand dollars in profit just from the operations. That's fantastic. So let's look at where that $2,700 in spending went. What were the big categories?

Number one is always the big fixed cost. Rent or lease. That was $900.

That was the bill payment to haul properties on the 18th.

A recurring commitment. Can't avoid it.

And it's about what, 22% of your revenue. That feels manageable.

It's manageable, but it does mean that maximizing your service volume is always key.

Okay, what's next category?

Number two is directly tied to all that revenue you brought in. Job expenses total was $602.63.

So these are project specific costs that aren't necessarily marked up and sold back to the client.

Exactly. Like sprinklers and drip Systems. That was $215.66 from Hicks Hardware. But the biggest piece was for decks and patios, which hit $234.04.

And that included that $103.55 bill from Norton Lumber. Right?

It did. And the fact that you're investing in deck and patio materials, that suggests you're taking on bigger, more complex jobs, which.

Is a great strategic move.

It's a definite shift into higher tier work. Then the third major cost is of course, mobility. Your automobile and fuel totaled $292.82.

And the general ledger on this one shows you were busy. Fuel alone was $232.85? Yeah.

Tons of transactions at Chin's Gas. Your crews are always on the move.

What I liked in the detail here though was the. The vehicle upkeep.

Me too. We saw three separate $19.99 charges for squeaky clean car wash.

So that's about 60 bucks just on keeping the vehicles looking professional.

It speaks to consistency.

Yeah.

To brand image. It's smart spending.

What else? There were a few other significant chunks.

And professional fees were $250 total. That was split between accounting, your lawyer Tony Rondanu and counsel from Pam Sites.

Standard stuff.

Hold on.

And utilities.

250 bucks for all three of those. Increase your rates.

$244.95. PGE in Cal Telephone. And one last one. A one time equipment rental of $112 from Ellis Equipment Rental.

The note said that was a five day rental.

Right. Suggest a big job that needed some specialized tools you don't own.

So to just sum this part up, you netted that $2,708 in expenses against over $3,700 in gross profit.

And you still came out ahead with.

That $1024 of $44. Noi, the operational machine is working. It's sound.

Which means the P and L story really should have ended right there. But it didn't.

And this is where we get to the critical part of this deep dive. The. The anomaly that we promised to explain. How did that wonderful thousand dollar operational profit just completely vanish and turn into that negative $1,891.56 net loss?

The answer is.

Okay, they sound. They sound a little bit buzzed. I will. I will give it that.

Found entirely in one place. It's in the other expenses category. Specifically a sub account called miscellaneous.

Okay.

That Miscellaneous category totaled $2,916. Yeah. This single block of expenses is what completely overwhelmed your healthy NOI. It's the whole story of the month.

$2,916 is. That's a massive number for miscellaneous. So let's break it down. What's in there?

Okay, so the single largest item. Accounting.

I'm just. I'm just. There's something. Something really funny and simultaneously dumb and interesting to me about the notion that these blessed AI not real people are just having a deep, deep nuanced conversation about your financial results. Almost as if there's like this matrix or other dimension within which all these people are doing like a college game day. Or like, you know, a. Like. Like there's a world where you could generate an MSN channel that is just commentary on your own business. And just leave that on the TV in the office all day. And it's just people commenting on, oh, just got that email from Gladys. What are they gonna do with that today? And it's hard to find that balancing act between like what's dumb and pointless versus what's useful. Like, also like traditional tv, you know, like what is, what is the TV that's just being created to sell ads versus the version of this that this is like actually worthwhile. And that's kind of the hard thing with this is like, is this useful or is it just like novel? And we'll never think about this again. After a couple of years. We, we roasted one firm on the podcast maybe six months ago where with every month end deliverable, they were giving them this podcast, this audio overview. And the really interesting thing is if you combine this with. I'm so far off track. We'll get back to, we got like two or three minutes left on this. But if you combine this with a tool that will let you do private podcast feeds, of which there are many, because a lot of people do like paywalled podcasts. And so you can't just publicly go out and find the podcast. You have to pay something and then you get a private link to add it to your podcast player. There are a bunch of tools that would enable you to do this with your clients. There are even like enterprise level, like very secure ways to do this. I wouldn't look for, you know, like I use transistor to push our podcast to all the feeds. A tool like that, it's not pushing that information out in a secure way. But there are podcast tools that will let you do that securely and it will, you know, push to someone's podcast player. We're talking about like a month end example here. You could go fully the other way. What would it look like to send a client an automated like daily summary of everything that went through the company accounts or went on in the accounting file or something like that. That person, you know, has sort of a morning routine where they're walk the dog or something like that. Man, that's honestly, that's something that a lot of people would probably use yourself. Think about this. What if you had a 10 minute audio overview of everything that happened in the practice management system in the last 24 hours and you could get up to speed in a passive way and listening. Listen to that 10 minutes every morning. Like that's kind of interesting, right? Like, would you. I don't know if the whole two people talking back and forth is the most useful version of that, although it is kind of a fun listen versus just a single person delivering that. But the reality is many of us, we listen to podcasts because we do it while our hands are full with other things. And so it's kind of an interesting way to get caught up and consume information. I would actually love to know, but Drop a comment if there's a way you can get a, you know, 10 minute audio overview of everything that happened in the firm. This is especially relevant if you're running a team and you're not always plugged into every little thing. If you get a 10 minute version of those highlights every day, would you? When I was running my firm, I absolutely would have done that. I actually would have really liked that. I think I would at least try it out. I don't know, maybe it would make me mad if I think about the different situations where I'm like pushing a stroller or exercising or something like that. A lot of times I don't want to be in work frame of mind during that. Hard to say. I'm curious. Your take though. Leave a comment Is that something you would be interested in or not? We did a bunch of cash reporting for our clients where we sent them these kind of templated emails every single day and we had clients that paid really good money for that. And there's kind of this concise, visual, dense view. This is kind of what I mean when I say like is the novelty of this new way of consuming things something just that a novelty? Or in some cases is it actually better like the video generation? To me that feels like a novelty because who wants to sit down and watch a machine generated video that has to have all of your attention and you have to sit there and watch it for the duration versus this podcast a little more interesting to me because you can do it passively, but a lot of different ways you could use this. All right.

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About two thirds of it was a huge bill from Brosnahan Insurance agency for $2,000 recorded on October 22nd.

A $2,000 insurance bill. That's gotta be an annual or semi annual premium that just hit the books all at once.

Almost certainly. And that payment alone wiped out your entire month's noi and then some.

It pushed you into a loss of nearly a thousand dollars before anything else.

And that wasn't even the only large infrequent bill. We also saw a significant one from Tim Philip Masonry for $666 on the.

24Th, probably for a specialized subcontracting job, something like that.

That's my guess.

Yeah.

And then to rounded out another bill from hicks hardware for $250 on October 4th.

So when you look at those three things, insurance, masonry, a big vendor bill, they clearly are not part of your regular recurring operational spending.

Not at all. These are large, non operational or at least very irregular costs. And this gets to the fundamental takeaway for you as the owner that the.

Net loss isn't a failure of the business.

It's not a failure in your service pricing or your efficiency. It is strictly a timing issue. These big bills just happened to land in October.

Which raises a really critical question for us as your accounting firm. If that $2,000 insurance bill covers a whole year, should we be booking it all in one month?

It's the perfect question to ask.

I mean, by putting it all in October, we're distorting the monthly picture. We're making a profitable month look a disaster.

They're absolutely right. Structurally, that cost belongs to the subsequent 11 months too. For this.

This is something you could dial in with the prompting like assume the bookkeeping is correct. Don't challenge the correctness of the bookkeeping.

View under the current method. It landed here, but it points to a strategic discussion we need to have.

And it wasn't just an accounting entry. Right. This hit your cash flow hard.

Felt this in your bank account.

Immediately you felt it.

The checking account GL summary shows a net change for the month of negative $2,389.76.

And you can probably pinpoint the exact day.

You can. On October 22nd, when that $2,000 Brosnahan check cleared, your checking balance plummeted down to $1,852.51. It creates an immediate very real cash crunch.

Okay, so let's bring this that's super.

Interesting if you think about what happened there. This tool, it went through the profit and loss and it picked out the most interesting things and they're right. Like the big weirdest thing on the P and L is there's like a $2,000 miscellaneous expense that's in other exp and that puts the whole bottom line into a loss. And so they, they dig into that. They, they identify that on the P L as kind of the big weird thing. But then they go to the GL and they look up the detail of everything that was inside the miscellaneous expense. That's what they just went through. But then they went to the bank account, the checking account in the GL and looked at that like the day over day change when those big expenses hit. It did all of that on its own. Like it's connecting all those dots by itself. Really interesting. Like it's pretty good right now. But if you continue to consider where eyes AI is headed in that like a year from now it's going to be vastly better. Three years from now it's going to be way, way better. Like I mean it's a pretty solid analysis of the results. And so I guess we've been talking about this through the lens of here is what we could put in front of clients, but is there a version of this that's even useful for us? And we talked about the practice management situation like that. You know, if you're thinking about the stuff you got coming up for the rest of the week, you look at the calendar, you look at the emails I got coming and you look at the projects on the practice management system. There's almost a world where this digest could be like play a bit of coach, especially if it's a little more proactive. And it's like hey buddy, like a couple things to look out for coming around the corner.

Bring this all full circle to give you the clarity you need from this deep dive. October showed that Craig's Design and Landscaping is operationally profitable. You achieved a net operating income of over $1,000, which means the business on.

Its own merits day in and day out is functioning extremely well.

The net loss of almost $1,900 is attributed entirely to that $2,916 in, let's call them non recurring or infrequent bills that just happened to land this month.

Exactly. So you can move forward with confidence. The revenue model is working. The loss is purely an issue of cost, timing and liability management.

Which I think leaves us with a really critical.

Don't forget about the car washes, doesn't it?

It does.

Since these huge expenses like that $2,000 insurance bill skew the monthly picture so dramatically, what do we do about it?

That's the challenge.

Should we start budgeting for these things differently? Maybe set aside, you know, $166 a month for insurance to smooth out the report?

We could, or we could create a separate reporting category, something below the NOI line, just for these large non recurring expenses.

So your monthly P and L truly reflects the consistent health of the business.

That's the goal. That decision on how we manage the timing of these liabilities will be key to making better strategic decisions as you move into the new year.

A great topic for our next session then.

Absolutely. We look forward to diving into November's results with you next time.

Okay, well, I would appreciate it if the conclusion isn't that maybe we should do the accounting a different way, because that's our call team. You're, you're literally the cfo. Pretty interesting, right? Think about other sources of context there. We talked about pulling in recent meeting transcripts so the conversation could be more directed around like things that we've talked about lately, pulling in their goals and KPIs. And so the overview is a little more oriented on what they're trying to achieve and, and where that happened and where they fell short. You could do this on a different frequency. We've talked about this on the podcast a bit. We haven't actually recently how I'm kind of like, I think in a bookkeeping business where your inevitable constraint is how many sets of books can you get out by kind of the month end deadline. I actually think we increasingly need to move towards not real time reporting, but more like week over week and less reliance on this big month end close. Because what I mean, what we often do is we promise this date that the financials are going to be delivered and everything kind of builds up to that and you send it over to the client and they look at like two numbers. There's, you know, they, maybe they're following advertising spend or whatever it is. And these days if what the owner cares about is like a specific subset of these items, there's a vastly faster and more efficient way to get them those items on a regular basis than the full month end close. The full month end close. It still has to happen. But if there's six metrics that they're tracking, in all likelihood there's a near real time way we could get them those metrics like week over week. And when you're able to do that. It depressurizes the month, end, close and how quickly they need that because if they don't get those details until the 12th of the month, like they're already, you know, at least 12 days old and up to 42 days old. Because we're reporting on the last month clear back to the beginning of the last month. So I'm more of an advocate of let's nail down what our, what our goals and our KPIs are. Does the month and close still matter? For sure. But what's the tightest turnaround? We can get them these metrics on an ongoing basis to sort of depressurize the urgency around delivering the month end financials. And the notion of like giving them, you know, weekly reporting or something like that, that's probably a more interesting version of this audio overview. Like if they are podcast folks, that's what they do and that is just a thing they're subscribed to on their podcast app and that comes through every week. That's kind of cool, right? I don't know, I'm curious. Your take. I'm still stuck between are we just creating stuff for stuff's sake or is this useful? I think this is a case where it's useful in situations where a human wasn't doing this previously. So we've got all these different ways to generate, you know, AI avatars of ourselves and all of that. And I think it's kind of risky, the notion of you sending over a video of an AI avatar of you doing something. Because if previously you did that yourself, that sucks. Like that's just not as good as working with you. But if it's a situation where there previously was nothing and like no human was delivering that thing, in those cases, AI might be an opportunity to deliver more. Yeah, the example in our podcast is we've got, you know, this chat bot that is connected to all episodes of the podcast and you can ask questions of it. That thing can work 24 7. If you lived in my guest bedroom and you could come and ask me a question anytime and poke your head and be like, hey, you take a look at this three tier proposal for me real quick. I'm like, yeah, Yep, be right there. Then if I came to you one day and I'm like, you got to use this AI assistant now. You'd be like, ah, come on, that's not as good. It's bad analogy. But if it was something a human did before, it's very risky to replace it with AI. If it's something that nobody was doing, plug an AI into that. Like an AI deliverable to the client. It might make sense. And weekly reporting, if you're not having a weekly with the meeting with the client, like giving them an an overview. This audio overview week over week. It's worth testing. I would say it's worth testing to see if your client thinks it's interesting. It's going to take dialing in that prompt. So adding some more details. Like by the way, the bookkeeping is correct. Here's the person's name, it's Laura. Here's the most recent meeting transcript. Like pull that into the notebook as well and then the conversation will be more focused on what you and that person would actually discuss. This, you know, this may even just be interesting for you. Like if you're trying to keep up with what's going on with the client. There's a version of this where the summary might also be interesting to you in the situation where you want the version that can be consumed passively. To me, that's the novelty of podcasts is that it doesn't require you to sit down and stare at a screen. You can instead do it while doing something else. Exercising, running, something like that. And when it's intensely about your thing, that feels kind of novel, right? Because podcasts are about. Nobody's talking about you on a podcast. And so to hear a podcast about you and what's going on and if it's a way of like passively getting caught up for a busy person, something interesting about that to me. You want to have a play with it. I've got a link to Notebook LM in the show notes. I also put the full prompt that I use down there as well as you can kind of use that as a starting point. The only thing that I gave Notebook LM in this example is the profit and loss on the gl. Curious to know what you think of this. Is it just a party trick or would you say it's useful? And what other use cases could there be here? Could it make sense of like a tax return? Could you send somebody a 10 minute overview of like, hey, here's everything that went on in your tax reporting this year. Is that something you know, a human should be doing? Is that a. Is that a use case where you really have no business pulling in AI because a person ought to be doing it? Certainly. Cool. Cool party trick. Google. Got to figure out how to make those podcast hosts sound just a little less buzzed though, when they're saying numbers that's kind of the only crack in the realism, I think. Gang, that's it for today. If you play around with Notebook lm, let me know how it goes. I'll catch you in the next one.

Foreign.

Hey, real quick podcast friends. I'm coming to a city near you running a bunch of live events before the end of the year. We're going to be at Intuit Connect in Vegas. We're going to be in Toronto, in Atlanta, Austin, Oklahoma City, Phoenix, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Louisiana, Atlanta, Nashville, Chicago, Washington, D.C. philadelphia and Boston. If you are there or anywhere near there, within a half tank's gas up there buddy, I want to see you. We put together some super cool events that I'm very excited about all around getting you and your team aligned. Heading into 2026, the biggest problem I had running a firm was I had an abundance of ideas but was always blocked by trying to get my team bought into those ideas and everybody working in the same direction. And it's why I believe the biggest way I can help you is actually getting your team inspired, getting your getting everyone energized for the year to come. So it's not just you, but also because these are live events, you're going to meet a whole bunch of other local practitioners as well, which can almost certainly unlock some cool things for you. I'm especially looking at you solo firm runners and side hustlers where your team effectively is the people you meet along the way, the relationships that you build, the people you can go to with questions when you get stuck on this or that. Going to be a super fun experience. Including for some of these events we're recording like a live interactive version of the podcast where you'll get to be part of the conversation. Very, very excited for these. I want to see you there. To learn more, head over to jasononfirms.com events and I hope to see you there.