How to Create a Custom Chart of Accounts with ChatGPT

In this video, I'm going to share with you how you can create a specific chart of accounts for a particular client ready to put into your cloud accounting system. Whether that's qbo, whether that's Xero. I'm going to show you how to use ChatGPT to do exactly that.

Welcome. My name is Mark Wickersham. I help accounting professionals around the world build more successful accounting businesses through helping with value pricing, but also how to help them build a more successful firm through using tools like ChatGPT. And one of the amazing things that you can do with it is to help you with creating a chart of accounts. So when you are in QBO or Xero and you get a brand new client, you might want to create a chart of accounts that's specific to their business. And one of the ways that you can save a huge amount of time with coming up with that particular client's best chart of accounts is using CHAT GPT. So I'm going to show you how you do it. We're going to go across to ChatGPT and I'm going to show you the prompt and I want to illustrate just a couple of things that you need to know about when you are creating prompts. So let's go across there. Now here I am in ChatGPT, I'm using ChatGPT for at the moment. It does tend to give better answers than 3.5. And I put in a prompt here already just to save you a bit of time. So let me just read the prompt to you because I want to illustrate a couple of things. So it says, could you generate a table representing a chart of accounts specific to a business type, trading as a entity type based in country.

Now let me explain what's going on there in that prompt, because one of the key skills of getting the best out of ChatGPT, GPT even, and any large language model is the way that you craft your prompts. The better you craft prompts, the better your responses you get. So firstly, it says, could you generate a table? Okay, this is very important. You can ask ChatGPT to create the output, the response in a table format, which can be useful for so many reasons. In particular, if you want a chart of accounts that you can upload into your cloud accounting system, such as qbo. So we want the output to be in the format of a table and it says a chart of accounts specific to a business type, entity type and country. You want to be specific. And one of the things about prompts that's really interesting is you'll see. I've just put those into square brackets because you can create a standard. This could be a standard prompt that you use for any different type of business. Where you want to create a chart of accounts. And then what we can do at the end of the prompt as part of the prompt is we can then say business type colon. And I've chosen an online training business that uses external trainers country uk because I'm in the uk entity type sole proprietor, which means you could use this prompt for any business and you just change the answers to those last three lines. The prompt can then just stay the same. So we've got. Could you generate a table representing a chart of accounts specific to an online training business with that uses external trainers Trading as a sole proprietor business based in the uk? It then goes on to say the chart should be compatible with QuickBooks Online. QBO should utilize QBO's account type and detail type categories. If you use Xero, for example, you just change the wording there. And if you're a different cloud accounting system, you can just change that wording. But if you're a QBO user, you will probably just use that as your standard prompt. And then it says the table should have columns for account name, account type and detail type. Again, we want to be specific with, with our prompts. Now if you left that last sentence out. Usually when you ask ChatGPT to create a table, it's usually pretty good at knowing what are the correct columns and even the column headings. But if we can tell it, we're going to be making sure that we've got some control over the response. Okay, so there's our prompt and let me. Now let me just hit the return and let's see what it comes up with. So off it goes. It's now going to create a chart of accounts for this particular business and.

It'S now just building the table, as you can see that. Now here we go, here's building in the table. So we're going to have cash on hand. It's going to be an account type of a bank. And the detail type is cash on hand, which, yep, that's I think, pretty good. Now as it goes through here, you will probably know it's not perfect. And that's one of the things you must be aware of with ChatGPT. It doesn't always get things right. And so this is one of the reasons why it's not going to replace you, at least just yet, which is good news. This is where you need to use your Particular expertise, your knowledge of the particular client, your experience to and apply judgment to what comes out of ChatGPT. So let's go back across to it right now and see what we have. So as I scroll through, we can see you can start to see some things it's come up with. I think most things are pretty good. Now I have to give a disclaimer at this point in time. I'm a qualified chartered accountant, but I sold my accounting firm as a sole practitioner back in 2006. And so I haven't, I never used QBO because back in 2006, guess what, cloud accounting systems didn't actually exist. So I'm not an expert in qbo. However, as I look at, I see that the, I think it's the fifth item down says office supplies and that's account type, other current asset. Now I'm fairly sure Office Supplies is an expense account, so it seems to have got that one a little bit wrong. But as I go through it, it's done a pretty good job. So that's the first point I want to make that we have to be very clear in the prompts. The second point I want to make is yes, sometimes it makes mistakes and you can either correct it later in the process when we look at what you do next, but actually we can also start to educate and train ChatGPT. So let's say for example, you may decide that you regularly want to ask it to create chart of accounts for different types of clients. Then what you could do is you could use this chat and keep coming back to it. Just call this chat. If I just hit on the, the pencil icon, I'm going to hit CTRL A and hit the delete and I'm just going to call this chart of accounts. So what you might decide is you want to keep this chat and every time you have another client you just come back to here because what you can do is you can train it, you can correct it. So I might say in this particular case.

That'S great. Can't quite spell it. That's great. However.

Office supplies. Supplies is an expense. What's the word in category? I would say category, but let's just use an expense type and if I hit the return key it will probably apologize or something. You're correct. Thank you. Yes, I'm correct. I apologize for the oversight. Office supplies are technically classified as an expense, not an asset because they are consumed in the normal course of business operations and don't provide a long term benefit. And now it'll go and do. I've not asked it, but it's going to go and do the whole table again. Not that we need it just for that one change, but the point I'm making is that sometimes it makes mistakes. We have to treat. You have to think of a large language model like ChatGPT as an employee, as a brand new employee, they will make mistakes. So what you do is you correct them and hopefully they'll remember that. And so next time, and every time that you go through this process, you will find it will then start putting office supplies in the right place. So it's worth spending a bit of time correcting it because it'll then learn. Okay, I'm not going to wait for that to get done because I now want to show you what you would do next. Because if you want to upload this into, let's say QBO as a chart of accounts and then you need to have it in a CSV format in for example, an Excel spreadsheet. And that's really easy because we've asked it for a table format. What we can do is simply grab with your mouse or whatever you're using, you can grab the table and control C. That's copy. And if I switch across to is here somewhere.

An Excel spreadsheet Ctrl V then there we go.

Okay, I think I've probably just selected too much stuff in my. I'm not using a mouse. It's a trackpad. I'm not too good with my trackpads anyway because I've got lots of other stuff. I must have picked up the other stuff. So I'm just going to delete that. Delete.

And here we go. Here's the table. Let's just. Let's just tie this up a little bit. There you go. There is your table in Excel that you could then just import that straight into qbo. You might want to tidy it up. You might want to add some more things.

But there you go. It's one of the many uses of ChatGPT. So if you found this valuable, if you've learned something in this video, then of course please just give it the usual the thumbs up just so I know you like it. If you've not subscribed to the channel, please subscribe. And also if you click the bell icon, you'll get notifications of new videos. I have also put some links to some free stuff below, so make sure you check out those links, including I have an ebook you can grab on how to get Started with Chat GPT. It's full of tips and tricks and ideas to help you get more out of it. Okay. And let me know in the comments as well. Let me know in the comments how you're using ChatGPT. What are some of the prompts that you are using? Thanks for watching. I'll see you on another video sometime soon. Bye for now.