ChatGPT for Accountants: Essential AI Prompts to Boost Productivity

Right, let's dive in. Let's get into the content. And our content today is essential AI prompts for productivity. So essentially what we're going to cover today is I'm going to look at really four areas. We're going to start with this idea of what are prompt templates and what are the big benefits of prompt templates. We're going to then look at the idea of how you can organize your favorite prompts, and we'll talk about the concept of a prompt library, how you can build it, how you can organize it. Then we're going to look at a lot of different examples, practical examples of prompts, particularly prompts that you'll want to turn into templates. We'll look at quite a few different examples in overview, and then I think one or two we'll dive into a little bit deeper and I'll open them up on the screen and we'll walk through them. If you are listening to this on my podcast, then that's great. But if you want the visuals, you might want to head over to my live stream YouTube channel. Right. And then what we'll also do, number four, is we'll look at some, some tips, tricks, techniques for building into your prompts to get better responses. So there you go. That's our agenda. Four things. And so we'll kick off straight away with what are some of the big benefits of prompt templates and what do I mean by that? Well, I'm a big fan of automating as much stuff as possible, systemizing things. I remember way back in 1998, when I was running my accounting firm, I came across Michael Gerber and the E Myth revisited. And that just made so much sense to me. I realized back in 1998, being a sole practitioner, every single system, everything that happened in my accounting firm was carried around in my head. I had no systems whatsoever. I had to do absolutely everything. And after I came across Michael Gerber In 1999, I became obsessed with systems, wrote systems for my accounting firm.

And I've always been fascinated with how we can increase productivity, how we can get more stuff done for. For less effort. And so when I came across ChatGPT for the first time, which was the end of February 2023, which is about three months after it was released to the public, I saw it and thought, wow, this is going to make life. It's going to change everything, and it's going to make life so much easier. And which is why I've been for over two years now, fascinated by ChatGPT large language models, AI large, learning everything I can about prompt engineering and how we can use it to save time. I use it every single day. We have a teams account, my entire team, which is six of us, my three daughters, my partner Sarah, her daughter Emily, and me. There's six of us, we're on a teams account. So we all have access to ChatGPT. We all use it every single day. And I would guess that for me, I would be amazed if it doesn't save as least at least five hours every single week and possibly more than that. I mean, I've done some things today. Sarah asked me to write some synopses, some copy for three different live sessions I'm doing in the next few weeks. And whilst that might have taken me at least 30 minutes for each one to write, it took me about 10 minutes to do all three. Because I have some standard systems, some templates for doing exactly that. So a prompt template, what I mean by that is a prompt for doing a particular task that you turn into a template that you can use over and over again. Think of it as. And this is where the systems thought was going with Michael Gerber. Think of it as being a mini system, a little system. So we have big systems like our onboarding processors. Hopefully you do your systems, your standard operating procedures, you might have an onboarding process, a process for doing tax returns. These are systems. And I think of a prompt template as being a mini little system that does something very specifically, consistently, over and over again, saving us time.

Which is a big thing. As I said, I probably save at least five hours every single week. And not just me. I noticed that my team, my daughters and Emily, they get so much done, their productivity over the last 18 months has just gone through the roof. The things that they can do makes them so valuable to the business, which is why I would suggest to any accounting firm that hires has a team of people. You want to get your entire team using AI because of the time saving. But it's not just the saving of time with these little mini systems, these prompts, it's also the fact that it gives us more consistent results. It's more predictable what we'll get, because if we're running the same prompt every single time for the same specific task, we know that we'll get some consistency in the output. Now, of course, there are other ways to systemize with ChatGPT. And so, for example, I mentioned earlier that one of the things that you could use is custom GPTs. And if you were to go into chatgpt then on the left hand side, if you have a paid for plan, you have the ability to build custom GPTs and they are extremely powerful. I've just done a full, I think, two and a half hour training course for accountants on how to build custom GPTs. They are extremely powerful and save a huge amount of time, but they take a little bit of time to master using them and a bit of time to build them. Whereas a prompt template is much simpler, much quicker. And so I use prompt templates for most things. I use my GPTs for the things I use perhaps the most frequently. So sometimes it's using the right tool for the right job. So think of them as a prompt template is like a mini system and if you're comparing them to custom GPTs in ChatGPT, then think of them as a simpler alternative to a full blown custom GPT. So we're going to, I'm going to look at some and talk you through some examples in a short while, but that's really the first thing that I want to talk about.

What do I mean by, by a prompt template? Because I presume you all are aware of what a prompt is. And I talk about prompts sometimes as being two types. There's the prompt template and there's the quick prompt. Sometimes we just want to do a quick prompt. We just want to ask ChatGPT a question or to do a quick task. And that's fine for many things a quick prompt will do. But if we're going to do something where we're going to use it frequently and we want to get consistent results, then building a series of templates.

Are things then that we could just take whenever we need and use them. Now the second piece to this then is okay, it's great building all of these prompt templates, but where do we put them? What do we do with them? How do we organize them? And I remember way back in 2023 when I started learning prompt engineering and building some prompt templates for our own business. Originally I had them as a series of WOR documents, which is fine, you could put them on a Word document. But I found that soon became unmanageable as I built more and more templates and realized I needed a better system for doing that. So I'm going to give you four solutions to building a prompt library. I'm going to give you three now and then a bonus one later on because we are currently building a prompt library for our community which may well include you. And we're going to give that prompt Library software away for the grand total of zero. It's going to be a free gift to people in our community. More on that later. I'll show you it. But there are three other solutions that you might want to use. Firstly, I know some people use a tool called Notion. Some people love Notion. I've looked at it, I've tried to get to grips with it. I find it too complicated. I'm a simple person and I prefer simple stuff. But I do know people who run their prompt libraries through Notion. Personally, I prefer Trello. Why Trello? Because I'm a visual person and I find Trello boards much, much easier to understand. So I'm going to show you my Trello board in a bit and walk you through it. As to how we could create a prompt library in Trello, there is another option. Essentially it's a database. So you could build a prompt library in any database tool. A great database tool that we use and that I love is airtable. Airtable is really cool. You can build all sorts of tables and databases. And so.

I have on the screen right now an example of what that could look like with just a handful of prompts in there. And so you could search on prompts, you could categorize them, and then when you're ready to use them, you could grab them, copy and paste and put them straight into ChatGPT. So Airtable is a cool tool as well. And you can get a free. There is a free account with airtable if you start with that. Also Trello, you can get a free account. So there are lots of solutions for building a prompt library, for storing your prompts, organizing them, and being able to find your way around and find just the right prompt you want. So once you decide what tool you're going to use, are you going to store them in Notion, in Trello, Airtable, perhaps another database tool, even Word Documents, But I wouldn't recommend that or the tool that I'll share with you later that we're building very, very soon, and we'll be giving free versions away. Once you've chosen your tool, then you have to think about, okay, so how are you going to organize your prompts so you can find the ones you need really easily? And so I suggest that you think about a way of categorizing your different prompts. Let me give you some examples to make this practical. And this will give you some ideas of different types of prompts that you can build with in your business. So I'm going to do it by showing our Trello account. In fact, this is a Trello version. This, this is a cut down version. This is the one that we make available to our Mastery member firms at the Value Pricing Academy. I've written over a hundred prompts specifically for the owners of accounting firms. And if you're not familiar with Trello, essentially it's a board where you build a series of columns and add cards. And so I create columns for each category of prompt and then within that you add a card for each specific prompt template. So let me talk about some of the categories that you could use for your prompt library. You could have prompts that are ideation and learning, the prompts for getting ideas for certain things. So if there's certain things you want to get ideas for on a regular basis, like for example, perhaps once a month, you want to get the latest tax and accounting regulations, you could run that as a prompt every month. Just copy and paste it into ChatGPT and let it do its stuff and it'll come up with you, come up with a report for you. So ideation and learning is one category. It's one area where you could use ChatGPT. Another way you could use it is marketing. I think it's brilliant for marketing. If you find yourself too busy for marketing or you don't know how to do marketing very well then which is understandable. I remember when I was in accounting firm owner, so busy doing client work it was hard to find the time for marketing. Well, the great news is chatgpt is really good for marketing and so we can use it for things. We could build prompts that help us build customer avatars, improving headlines and much more, building our positioning statements, so many marketing options. And then as a subset of marketing, content creation, whether you want to write blog posts, social media campaigns, there are any form of content of which content marketing is a form of marketing, arguably the most powerful type of marketing. We should be doing content marketing because as well as raising awareness of us, it also helps position us as experts. And so any form of marketing, sorry, content creation, whether it's blog posts, social media posts, doing live streams, YouTube videos, writing an ebook, we can build prompts that automates the process.

With an ebook, we could build, as well as having specific prompts, we could build a series of interlinked prompts. So I've written, for example, I've taught people how they can write an ebook, a really professional ebook, using a series of prompts. I teach value pricing, as you know, and of course it's great for helping you build your pricing systems. And so think about all different prompts that you could build in that category. For example, how to add more value, how to communicate value better, how to identify different ways of pricing particular services. We could have prompts for things like role playing, the pricing conversation. I also teach the importance of communication with value pricing and the importance of creating really professional brochures that we can use to access our scripts, our agendas, our aid memoirs when we're meeting clients or prospective clients and building up the value. And one of the things that we can do is we can use prompts to help us build up all of the text for pricing brochures we could use prompts for. My favorite use case. One of the things it's most powerful for is if you want to start helping other businesses, strategy. It's brilliant at strategy. And if you want to do business advisory, which is something I highly advocate in this world of AI where compliance work will be being replaced very quickly over the next few years, then we can use ChatGPT and standard prompts to help us with advisory. Obviously, fine. Through data analysis, we can also have prompts for text analysis and writing and also client communications. We can have prompts for systems and processors. We can have perhaps other miscellaneous prompts, personal things. I have a lot of prompts I run personally. For example, I recently updated my will. It was a bit out of date, hadn't done it since moving to Portugal. And I designed a prompt that got chatgpt to act as a will writer. I fed it my last will. I had a detailed prompt, I asked it to analyze it, ask me questions, and then write a brand new will. Wow, what a simple process it was. And I've got my will now without having to involve a lawyer to do the process, which you don't need in the uk and they charge a lot of money. So they're the sorts of categories when you categorize your.

Prompts. So think about where do they fit? Are they a pricing prompt, a marketing prompt, a an SOP prompt, because that will then help you once you've categorized, to find those prompts later in your prompt library or your database. Also think about a name so you can identify which prompt is which. And I would recommend as well that you, for each prompt, if you're going to share them with your team, have some instructions so they know how to use them. So when I write a prompt, if it's Trello, for example, I will add to the bottom the instructions as to what the prompt does. So somebody coming to this prompt for the first time they can read the instructions, it'll tell them how to use the prompt, what it does, and then they can run the prompt. So.

Let'S look at some specific examples of prompts that we can use. I've kind of touched on some already, but let's go a little bit slower with some of the examples and let's look at a couple in a bit of detail. So going backwards across those categories, if we think about systems and processes, then we could build a prompt for creating an onboarding process. If you don't have an onboarding process in your accounting firm, then you could have a prompt that does that. Now, you will notice that the prompts that I'm going to show you are very long. Why is that? The reason they're long prompts is because we know from prompt engineering that the number one principle is if we want to get better results, then we have to focus on specificity and clarity. The more clear we are, the more specific we are in our prompt, the better the result we will get. Also, we learn from prompt engineering that, that there are a number of key elements that we should build into a prompt to get better results, and I'm going to share some of those with you.

Later on. We'll come back to some tips for prompt creation. And so I write long prompts. Now, that might sound scary. You might think, well, Mark, I haven't got time to write such long prompts. But my view is that it's a similar argument that I've heard and I used to use myself many years ago is that sometimes people think I ask the question of someone, why do you keep doing that task over and over again? You could delegate that. Oh, but I don't have a system. So why don't you write the system? I haven't got the time to write the system. Well, if you don't find the time to write the system, you'll always have to do that work. And so writing the system might take a bit of time initially, but then you can delegate to somebody else. And it's the same with writing prompts. If we're going to do something frequently with an idea, then let's write a really good prompt because then we can pass the work on to somebody else and they can do it. Then they don't need us because we've built into that prompt, We've built our specific instructions. We've built in our ip, for example. And one of the things that makes my prompt long is because I include examples in there. Examples and templates. I'll talk about why later. But examples really powerful. They also make the prompt seem really, really long. So if I just go back to the one for onboarding, for example, if we look at that particular prompt, which is a long prompt, the reality is I've got in here an SOP template which is a fair part of this prompt. The SOP template is probably 50% of the prompt. And the way I created that template was really easy. I ran the prompt, I got an output, I tested it, I got an output I really liked. And I then said to ChatGPT, please turn this, this system into a template so I can then put the template into the prompt for next time. So I get chatgpt to create me the templates. Really simple once you know why. And that's why my prompts are longer than because I have examples and templates built into them because they then help you get a more consistent result. So you could have a system for writing onboarding systems. You could actually create any system SOP in your practice. When we think about client communication, you could have a prompt for answering client emails. That's this prompt I used to find was amazing. Saved me so much time. I then built a custom GPT called Email Responder, which I now use for answering my client. My customer emails, anybody that emails me, I will just simply run my GPT and it saves so much time. But you can have a simple prompt that does that, a prompt for answering client emails. And all you would then do is copy and paste that into ChatGPT and run it. We'll look at two in a bit more example, two in detail soon. Another one I really like. If we think about text analysis and writing, we could have a standard prompt that writes a software training manual for a client. So let's imagine, for example, that you've. One of the things you do in your firm is you recommend certain pieces of software that people use in their tech stack that could be using QuickBooks online, that could be any kind of app you might be recommending expensify to them. They use that for managing their employee expenses. Any app that you recommend, you perhaps even charge a fee to help them install it. Well, you could then write a training manual for them and you could have a prompt that does all that, where you just. All you do is you specify in the prompt what's the software Expensify, let's say, and you specify what you want the manual to teach, which aspect, so how to claim expenses, whatever it might well be. And it will write a little software manual which you can then send to the client and it takes seconds to do. Really powerful. The client will think you spent hours writing it and it took seconds because you've got a great prompt that will do exactly that. Okay, let's move on to some more examples. Of course, financial and data analysis. You could analyze financial data like a P and L and balance sheet. If we're talking about business advisory, we could do financial trend analysis. We could also do I have lots in this category. I'm going to show one in a second called the Customer Journey and Frustrations. This is so powerful. We're going to look at this in more detail so we'll come back to that.

Pricing could be things like building out your brochure. You could have prompts for coming up with how you can add more value, how you can communicate the value of what you do. And you can have standard prompts that do that really well. We've talked at length about some options for content creation. For example, you could have a standard prompt that you run every month for building out your social media content for the month. I know my team do that as part of our social media plan.

And we could then use standard prompts for evaluating ideas. Particularly powerful if you're using some of the latest advanced reasoning models like O3 that has just come out with ChatGPT. Okay, with that all said, let's look at two in more detail because I think that'll then start to if you're a bit confused about this idea of a prompt and a prompt library, then this will perhaps make it a bit clearer. So let's. Let's take a marketing one. Let's imagine that you struggle sometimes with writing headlines. Perhaps you want to send out an email to people to invite them to come to a workshop with you or to have a meeting with you to explore some possibilities. Perhaps you want to use a headline for ebook or the landing page that promotes your ebook. Perhaps you want a headline for a webinar, a livestream, a workshop. There's all sorts of headlines that you would need to write. And as you probably know, when it comes to marketing, the headline is the number one important thing. Because if your headline isn't compelling, then it doesn't matter how good the rest of your marketing copy is. If the headline doesn't grab them, they won't read the rest of it. But particularly important, of course, with an email subject line, because when somebody sees an email in their inbox with a headline, a subject line, that's the first thing they see if it grabs their attention they'll click on it and they'll read it. If it doesn't grab their attention, they won't read the email, they'll just delete it, file it somewhere. So the headline, the subject line, is the most important thing. And therefore what we should do is have a process for improving headlines. So let's imagine, I'm going to.

Let's imagine that something new has come out in the world of tax, some new stuff with research and development reliefs. And you want to do a headline about saving tax with the latest R and D release and you want some ideas for some better headlines from that. For that. So we would go to our prompt library, we go to our marketing. And if we were using ChatGPT, then, sorry, Trello, if we're using Trello, we would just hit the edit button. And one of the things that's neat about Trello as a prompt library is with every prompt you can view the markdown. I'll talk about that later. You can view the markdown, which is really powerful with prompt engineering. And then there's a copy button. We just simply copy the prompt. Simple as that. We hop over to ChatGPT, we start a brand new chat.

And you might want to change the model, but I'll go with 4o. And then we just hit control V and there's our prompt into ChatGPT. And in this particular prompt, if I just go, I've got the role for it in here. In the prompt I have my task description, which is, which is to create three variations of the headline that incorporate the four us. This is, by the way, a marketing technique, a headline generation technique. There are many techniques and frameworks for headlines. I've been teaching copywriting for years and obviously we're not going to that today. But this one incorporates one of the headline generation frameworks that we could then use. It's called the 4 US. And so I've specified that in the prompt there's a good chance that ChatGPT knows what the four us are. But I wanted to create clarity and specificity by explaining what the for use framework is. And then I give it an example of the output that I'm looking for, the specific format of the output with some expectations.

And then what I do when I create prompt templates is I always have variables because when you copy and paste your prompt, then.

Because it's a mini system. A mini system, obviously every time you run it, something will change in the prompt. In this case it's a. It's the headline that will change. Sometimes it Might be, it could be the subject. It could be that you are using ChatGPT or a prompt to do market research on a client or potential client you're meeting. And it could be that.

The two things that might change the variables might be the client's website or the business website and the industry they're in. And that's the only thing that will change. And then it will create a research report. So variables are really important or powerful. And so that just means that all I need to do with this prompt, once I've copied and pasted it, is add in the specific headline. So headline to improve going to go with Save tax with the latest R and D release. So just to recap in terms of, just so you can see the time saving here.

It'S simply a case of going to my prompt library. I want a marketing prompt. I want one for improving my headlines. That's my prompt. I would go into my prompt library, I would grab the prompt and copy and paste it, which probably will take you less than one minute if you've got a prompt library. And then having pasted it in here, all I have to do is at the end of the prompt where I put my variables is specify what they are. In this case, saving tax with the latest R and D release. And so when I run this, let's just see what this one does. So it's coming up with three headline variations. Three, because that's what I specified in the prompt, it will always give me three, three variations. And we'll always do it in this format because it's what I put in the template and the example inside the prompt template. So it's telling me that rather than this boring Save tax with the latest R and D reliefs, my headline could be final week to claim 2024 R&D tax breaks. Don't miss thousands in savings. Now, why is that a better headline? Because we're using the word for final week to create a sense of urgency. That's one of the four US we've got focus on the ticking clock for 2024 claims. So we're making it unique, useful. It promises substantial tax savings and ultra specific because it mentions the tax year and type of relief. So this compared to save tax with the latest R and D reliefs, this is a better headline because it has urgency, uniqueness, usefulness, ultra specific. Or we might prefer, unlock hidden R and D tax reliefs before they expire. Save up to 50,000 this year or only days left. Discover the three R&D tax changes that could slash your 2024 tax bill. They're all great headlines. Now, of course, I didn't specify things like whether there is a deadline or not, so you might want to tweak it, but there's three great headlines and that will have taken.

Less than two minutes for sure. Probably less than a minute. If you've got a great organized prompt library, you can find the prompt easy. You can cut and paste it. And probably the most time consuming bit is probably simply just putting in what is the variable typing in in this case, save tax. With the latest R and D release. I'm hoping that's made some sense because I'm doing commentary as well. It's not always obvious to see the speed at which you can get something done. Less than two minutes, I would guess. And you've got three great ideas for a headline. I write headlines a lot. I have a variation of this that I use every time I need to create a headline. Saves me so much time. Let's look at one more. Let's look at one that I think is, I love this next one I'm going to share with you. I put it in the business advisory. I call it.

The Customer Journey and Frustrations. So let me just grab this one copy. I'm going to go to ChatGPT. I'm going to start a brand new chat because it's a different topic and I'm going to paste it in. And I have in this case just one industry to put in and I'm going to go with bookkeeping.

And then I just hit the hit send and it's done. And you probably noticed there, that was probably all of about 20 seconds to grab that prompt, stick it in here. And what this is going to do, this prompt is it's going to research and analyze the industry. That's the variable of which, the variable in this case is bookkeeping. It's going to research the industry and what it's going to do is once it's analyzed it, it's going to list the most common customer pain points in the industry. So the idea of a customer journey, by the way, is if we want to improve our business or any business, we want to think about the touch points. At what point does the customer interact with us, the business? And if we can identify all the touch points and for each touch point, figure out what are the common frustrations people might have. And if we can then fix Those in our SOPs, our systems, we can build a better business. So I'm going to run this for bookkeeping. But the reason I Put this in the business advisory case is because you might only run this one once for your business and you certainly should do something like this. But if you then want to do business advisory, you could do this for every single client. All you need to do is just put in as the variable the industry they're in and it will go and give you a roadmap of all the touch points and and the common frustrations. Imagine the value that you could create for your clients if you were to give them advice on how they could improve every touch point. Let's just see what I mean with this. Let's run the prompt quickly. And so this is a bookkeeping business. You might be a bookkeeper, if an accountant, it may be similar. It says the customer journey, which.

Step one of the prompt is, is that customers typically have awareness. They'll soon realize they'll need help with managing finances. Then they do research and evaluation. That's when they find you. Then there's an onboarding process, then there's the ongoing service delivery, there's reporting and review, and then there's renewals or retentions and exit. And so it's broken down the six core areas of where there would be some sort of interaction. And then for each of them, what it's done is it's explained the typical sorts of pain points people would have. Let's look at. So slow or unresponsive communication, clients feel ignored when their queries go unanswered or response are delayed. The explanation is here. Clients, especially small business owners, may not understand financial terminology and need reassurance. A lack of communication creates frustration and anxiety about their business health. So in insight, an action might be to set clear communication SLAs.

Like response within 24 hours, offer client portals or schedule review calls to keep them informed. And so it goes on with all these possible pain points with why they're a pain point, why people find them painful, dealing with that industry, in this case bookkeepers, and what we could possibly do to fix those, which of course we could then build into our SOPs so that we consistently impress and wow clients. So if you're running a business, a bookkeeping business, there's 10 ideas for how we could solve pain points and improve our SOPs to really wow clients. Imagine doing that as an exercise with every one of your clients to add value. You could then take that 10 ideas and turn into a nicely designed little report for them. Don't give away for free. By the way, advisory work should always be paid, charged for. It's one of the most powerful things you can do, one of the most valuable things you can do, and one of the things I love about biz advisory is ChatGPT. I think it's its real strength, strategizing and using that for using that for.

Helping us add more value. Right? So I've shown you now today we've gone through lots of examples of what you could build into a prompt library. So a few quick tips and then we'll get to questions. A few quick tips. When you are building your prompts, your prompts, some of the things to consider when you're creating your prompt templates are give ChatGPT a role to play. Every single prompt I create, I give Chat GPT a role because we learn from prompt engineering that when we ask it to play a role, we get a better answer, we get a more nuanced answer, we get the sort of answer we'd expect from that sort of person. In other words, in the systems prompt, ChatGPT plays the role of a helpful assistant. And that's the same with Claude, with Gemini. Wherever large language model you use, they are playing a default role. And as a helpful assistant, it gives amazing responses. But if you want to, for example, analyze financial data, if you specify to the model to act as a financial accountant skilled in analyzing financial data, the sort of output that you will get, the response will be the sort of response that you'd expect from a financial accountant as opposed to a helpful assistant. In other words, usually a better response, more detailed response. And so I always, in every prompt template that's a component I'll have every time right at the start, the role. What I also do in my prompt templates is I will almost always have at least one of either a template or one or more examples. These are really powerful because that means you can specify, I talked about specificity, you can be really clear to the model exactly what you're looking for, how do you want it to format the report, what chapter headings do you want in there, what sections do you want? So we can create a template for that and, or we can give it examples of the sort of report that we're looking for. If you're building a standard prompt for answering client emails, then find three to five emails that you've written in the past that you particularly like that represent the style of writing that you use, the formatting of your emails. And if you give it those examples inside the prompt, every time you run that prompt to write a brand new email, it will use those examples. Because large language models look for patterns. That's why examples are so powerful. And when you give it examples, it will spot the patterns and the output you will get will be consistent with the way that you write emails, for example. So templates, examples are really powerful.

Third, fourth thing, fourth thing in your prompts, because they're little systems, you can think of your prompts as being a series of steps. You don't have to necessarily have a prompt that does just one thing. It can do a series of things. So in the customer journey one I described, it was a two step process. Step one, I want you to think about the industry and think about the different touch points, the customer journey, on the different parts of the journey where there'll be an interaction with the business. And so what it did was in the response, it said, step one, the customer journey. And then step two, I want you to then identify all the pain points with an explanation and a suggested solution to that pain point. So the response was in those two parts we have the journey and then dealing with the common frustrations, pain points. And then my fifth tip for you when creating prompt templates, which would argue is the most important if it's a prompt template, is to use this idea of variables. So we can create variables, which means that we just copy and paste the prompt and we only have to change the things that are specific to this particular case that we are using it for, like the headline, if it's using a framework for creating headlines. And what I always do when with my prompt templates is I always put the variables at the end. Why? Because it makes life easy. I copy and paste into ChatGPT, I scroll to the end, I answer the variables and I hit send. I don't have to search. If you do it like that, you could have your variables at the start. I prefer the end. If you put them at the start or the end when you run that prompt, it doesn't matter how long it is, you, your team, they don't need to read the prompt. It's a little mini system that we've got that you've proven just works. All we have to do is scroll to the bottom overtype or type in the answers to the variables, hit send. Done. So I'm hoping you can see the power of this, that when you start to think about standard things that you can do and you start to build standard prompts, prompt templates using those techniques and you start to build them into a library, a prompt library, then you've got them there, you and your team can access them in seconds. And just run them. They are really powerful systems. So I did say to you that I'd mention a fourth way of building a prompt library. I talked about notion, I've showed you Trello, I've talked about using a database tool like Airtable and they are all great tools to use. But also there's a fourth option which you are going to be the very first people to see this. And we are about to release in, before the end of May 2023, a new piece of software to people in our community which will do a number of things to help people build a more successful accounting business. One of the things that we are building into it is a prompt library and we will be putting our prompts in here. This is just the test version at the moment that I'm showing and it's just got some sample data, some initial prompts. But you will be able to, when you have access to this prompt library, you'll be able to access prompts that we've created for you. You'll be able to find ones that you want very easily. There's a search box or you might want to just search on the marketing prompts, for example, and then when you found the prompt prompt you want, or you might want to, for example, choose just the favorites, the one that you particularly like the most. And once you've then done that, you can click on the prompt, you'll see the instructions, you'll then see the prompt itself, and then you'll be able to view it in markdown if you prefer, and then just copy it to clipboard and paste it straight into ChatGPT. So we're building, building this prompt library for members of our community so that you can find prompts really fast and make it as simple as possible to grab those prompts, copy and paste into Chat GPT, add the variables, and that then just that will get your results super fast. Okay, we have 10 minutes left. We have 10 minutes. That was a bit longer than I expected, but I was keeping my eye out open for questions and there weren't a huge number of questions I don't think, at least.

Not that I could see from a quick glance. Let me just go back and see.

Actually there are some people who've asked questions without the QQ in front, so forgive me if I do miss you, but Ronald was the first to answer. I promised Ronald I would get to you. You were the first to ask, are you using agents, multiple agents? If so, what automations are you using with them? Okay, so people say a lot of the Experts are saying that 2025 is the year of agents agentic AI and there are several tools for that. This is a more advanced level and agents are things that will do specific jobs and ChatGPT or OpenAI, when they launched their custom GPTs in back in November 2023, it was their first step towards agents. So custom GPTs are a form of agent and so yes, I do use those and we know that OpenAI are really into building agents, but there are other ways of building agents. You can build agents using Zapier, which is probably the most common one. I think that from what I've seen make is more powerful. What I've been playing with is N8N that's it's much more advanced but I'm loving it. It allows you to build complete workflows and automations and build AI into it so it can call on your. Your OpenAI. OpenAI's.

Background API. That's the word I'm looking for. OpenAI's API so that you can hook up an agent to your ChatGPT and then you can build in AI into a particular workflow. So going back to Ronald's question, are you using agents? Yes, I am. Multiple agents, yes, if you're talking about GPTs. But also we're starting to work on agents that are much more sophisticated using tools like M8N. Okay, next question.

We have. I think Mustafa says please accept my joining. I think what you mean is when I shared the link earlier to join the community, just bear with me a second. If I just hop across to here. Yes, I can see 13 membership requests pending. Don't worry, if you've requested access to our community, we will let you in. Please don't worry, that is going to happen. Oh, and I then forgot as well. One other thing I want to tell you about is that community is completely free, so make sure you do join. We shared the link earlier, but also if you want to go deeper with AI, if for example you've enjoyed today, and if you have enjoyed today, by the way, please just hit the thumbs up. I'd really appreciate it. It helps us to know which sort of topics you like. So please do hit the thumbs up if you've got something from this session. But if you want to go even deeper still, if you've enjoyed this, you want to learn more then we did build about five weeks ago and launched another community on the same platform called the AI Academy. And I'm going to ask Sarah to put a link to this in the chat so you'll see the link if you're listening on replay, it'll be in the description. And this one is where we then go deeper on on things. There is a small.

Monthly investment. It's very small and the way it works is that the current investment, it will go up in the future very soon. But this is for founder members. When you join today, you will lock in the price. When you join the AI Academy, you'll get access to again, a community of wonderful people sharing stuff around the AI space in the profession. But even more important, you will get, you'll get access to some exclusive live sessions. Not just these sessions, but you get sessions once a month with my colleague Emily where she goes deep for 90 minutes. But also we have many, many more video training programs. So I think the most essential one is, I filmed a couple of weeks ago, privacy and security, what you need to do in your accounting firm. I think that's about a 55 minute training on how to make sure that you're on the right side of the rules when it comes to client confidentiality using AI. What else have we got in here? I did a tool, a tutorial series of videos on the brand new AI image generation tool that's I think about a two hour class that you can work through. I've just filmed today and yesterday almost three hours of training on how to build custom GPTs for your accounting firm. That's going to be uploaded into the AI Academy within the next seven days as soon as we can. And there's many, many more if you want to learn prompt engineering. I've got my whole course on prompt engineering in the AI Academy. So this is for you if you want to go deeper on AI with specific training. We only launched it five, six weeks ago. I have so much more training coming. I want to help the accounting profession really master AI, save hours of time. So that's the place to be. If you're not sure, join the free community first, that's fine. But when you're ready, you can upgrade to the AI Academy. The advantage of doing it now is you get the best price ever before it goes up. Okay, next question. There's no QQ here. What does GPT stand for? It stands. It's a generative pre trained transformer. Okay. That's what a GPT is. It's a standard. It's standard. But of course, OpenAI then called their model chat GPT generative to pre trained transformer. It's a generic term that Open I use in the name of their product. Right.

Amanda says Trello looks similar to Asana, I believe Trello. Oh, someone's just joined. I got. Ron's just joined the AI Academy. Welcome, Ron. Amanda says Trello looks similar to Asana. I think Trello is owned by Asana, but I might be wrong.

Michael says OneNote would work as well as a prompt library. Obsidian. Okay, great. There's lots of other tools you could use for a prompt library. Essentially you just want a database. Jeff, please provide a list of the tools with their advantages. Jeff, I'm not sure what tools you mean. If you mean tools, as in which ones to use as a prompt library, let me know. And obviously I'll have to go and do some work to do that and I'll read the comments and see what other people say. But I've mentioned notion, I've mentioned Trello. I've used airtable. Some tools will give you a free version. Most of them give you a free version. Some free versions are limited, some are really good. And then I may well do that, Jeff, because we will be launching very soon our prompt library.

Oh, somebody said if you go to my blog, loads of prompts. Thank you for that. Ronald says, where can I find Mark's blog? It's on our website, so valuepricingacademy.com There should be a section called the Blog. You should find our blog there. Jeff asked the same question.

Okay, Jeff, I'm not sure what you mean by Trellin Spelling. Oh, I think that's probably Trello. I think you're referring to spelling. T R, E L L O. Strange name. I know Trello. That's the tool that we use in our business. We love Trello and it's great as a prompt library. We have our own. I showed you a prompt library for VPA members earlier, but we also have our own internal prompt library with many, many more prompts and some we haven't released yet to accountants but are coming soon.

Then let me see.

Are there standard prompts available in our resources for VPA Level 2? Two members, as I did hear you say a while ago, this would be made available to us. Yes. If you are in the value pricing academy, then yes, you have a prompt library we have built for you on Trello and Sarah can share the link to that with that. The one I showed was the mastery level one which showed all the prompts we released so far. But there is a version that we've created for you as well at level two which does have all of our marketing prompts on. So if you're a value pricing Academy member and you want help with finding it, you can message Sarah. She will tell you where to find the prompt library. Okay. Kathy. Hi there. How effective is ChatGPT at creating prompts to prompt itself? Is this a good way to go? Yes, it's called meta prompting and I use metaprompting all the time. We can use it to help us craft our prompts. I was doing that just today in one of the videos that's going live soon on how to build custom GPTs because I was teaching a process where you can use ChatGPT to help you build the instructions for your GPT. And when you know the process of doing it, it makes building GPTs what might take several hours down to just a matter of minutes. Minutes. Right. We have. I think we're actually out of time.

Ral asked a question about.

Okay. It's about the AI Academy. No, Raoul, the AI Academy actually is going to be. Is separate because it's run through a different company and there is an. There is. I think Sarah will tell you more and we have. I mentioned it last week in my Leading Edge session. So if you want to catch the recording of that, I explained why and why you don't need to be part of the AI Academy if you're in VPA3 mastery unless you just want even more stuff.

Right. I think that was. I think I have answered all the questions. I am one minute over. I apologize. I always keep these to 60 minutes. I think that's. Yeah, I dealt with the questions. If you've lost any links, we will post them. Any of the links I shared today. Four links in total. My next live stream I believe is in two weeks time and my next live stream is I'm going to do a session on custom GPTs for accountants.

And we're going to go and look at how we're going to. Basically it's taking today to another level. If you've enjoyed what we talked about in terms of how we can improve automations productivity with prompt templates. If you want to go to the next level, then make sure you join me in two weeks time and I'll share with you how you can build custom GPTs for your accounting firm. Okay, I'm going to say goodbye. I'm going to play out with some music for a few minutes before we close things down. Gives me a chance to read your comments. Thank you for the nice comments coming through so far and I will see you all soon. Bye for now.