Revolutionise Your Practice: Harness ChatGPT for accounting firms

And, but let's get started because we have so much to cover again and we only have 60 minutes. We finished dead on the hour with these Sessions. They are 60 Minutes. And today we're talking about ChatGPT. I have my very special guest, Emily Cross. Many of you know Emily, she will be joining us later to share some powerful insights into where this whole stuff is going. And we're going to share with you, we're going to share with you some, also some practical ways to that you can use ChatGPT in this session. So before we do that and answering your questions as well. So please, if you have a question at any point in time, just ask, put it in the comments box. But please, and someone will help me out at this point in time when you ask a question, please put two capital Q's in front qq. And the reason for that is, as you probably noticed, sometimes the chat goes crazy, which is great. Please chat away. I will try and give as many shout outs as possible, but, but when I answer questions, I'll be specifically looking for the questions with QQ in front. And sometimes we run out of time for questions. So the earlier you ask your question, the better. I think last time somebody asked a question with about one minute to go and I didn't see it until we ended the show. So I apologize. But anyway, Sarah's helping me out. That's what two capital Q's look like. Just so you know, put the two Q Q's in front. It just helps me to see the questions and hi there, Brian from the UK and Ida is here from Dallas. Great to see you too. Okay, before we start, one very quick announcement. If you're a regular, you know this. One of the things that we do is to help make the world a better place for everybody that shows up live to one of our live streams. That's of course you. If you are here live rather than recording, then we get reported the numbers afterwards. And for every single person here live live, we make a contribution to a project somewhere in the world. A worthy cause for the month of April. We are in April. Yes, for all of our live sessions in April, for everybody that shows up live, we will make a contribution through the B1G1 organization to help children who don't have access to sanitation, which is something we take for granted. But there are some people in the world that don't have access to sanitation. So you will be helping a child somewhere in the world which will help with their health. So thank you, thank you so much for coming along. Live today. So what are we going to cover today? What are we going to cover? We're going to talk about Chat gtp. I'm going to give you just a quick overview of it. We'll talk about some of the latest news, what's some of the new stuff that's been happening, because there's a lot happening right now with AI. And then we're going to start talking about some practical ways that, that you can use it. Both Emily and I have got some stuff to show you and talk you through. And also Emily's going to be sharing with you in a little bit More detail how ChatGPT ranks up against Bard. So quickly, if you missed the session, which I think was about two weeks ago, and if you did miss it, then you can catch up with the recording. It's on the YouTube channel, so catch up with that. One of the things we did was gave you a bit of an introduction to what is ChatGPT. And by the way, if you have questions, if you have no idea what it is or any questions, please ask. If you've got questions, ask. And Emily and I, later on, we will be answering your questions. ChatGPT is. It's a form of AI. It was created by OpenAI back in 2015. It was founded by a number of people founded it. The main names you'll know is Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and collectively they invested a million, Sorry, a billion. A billion dollars to create this chatgpt. So OpenAI is the company and it's what's called a large language model. And I won't go into technical detail right now. We talked more about it on the last session. So go and check the last session if you missed it and you want a bit more background to what it is. It's a large language model and it became publicly available in November of last year, 2022. And it took the world by storm because within, I think by the end of the year, it got to 100 million users, which is the fastest growing piece of technology ever. It smashed the record of TikTok. So it's hugely popular. So much so that in January of this year, in January this year, Microsoft invested $10 billion in ChatGPT, which is interesting because that's caused all sorts of issues which we'll talk about in a short while. ChatGPT version 4 was brought out in March of this year, just last month. To pro users, you have to subscribe to get access to ChatGPT4. At the moment, I strongly recommend that you do so what did we talk about last time? Very quickly, quick overview. Last time, if you missed it. We talked about some of the threats of AI and some of the threats of ChatGPT. You do need to be aware of some of the threats. We'll talk about a few of them in a short while. But we also talked about the strengths. What's it good for? And it's got a huge number of strengths. I think the single biggest one is it's going to save you hours of time. And I mean, if you use it, it will save you hours of time. We're going to show you later on some practical use cases of things that we've been doing. Something I did this morning saved me so much time. So time saving is probably the biggest strength. There are other things as well that are great. We talked about it in the last session, so catch up with that. We also talked about some of the weaknesses and the restrictions which you must be aware of. I talked about last time around what I see as being the three essentials of ChatGPT. Three essential things. Number one, you have to understand the weaknesses. It's not always going to be correct. And so you have to fact check, check everything. You have to take everything with a bit of a pinch of salt. You have to bring your own professional judgment to it, so you can't delegate everything. Think of ChatGPT as your new employee. It's incredible what it can do. But just like a brand new employee, you do have to just double check some of the things that they do. So that's the first thing that I think is essential with ChatGPT. You need to understand its weaknesses, be aware of the limitations. The second thing that you need to, which I think is really important is a lot of people. And this was me when I first looked it. I thought, well, what can you do? What can I do with it? I had no idea. And what we're going to be helping you with later is giving you examples of how you can use it. Practical examples. That's where it unlocks the power when we start to figure out different ways that you can use it. And the third thing is we have to understand prompt engineering. There's this idea of garbage in, garbage out. If you ask a better question, you'll get a better answer. And so we have to learn, it's about a bit like a new language. We have to learn how to ask better prompts. When you ask better prompts, you'll get better answers. And again, we'll give you some examples of that as we look at some of the practical use cases and we talked quite a bit about that last time around. We talked about last time use cases for accountants and particularly we talked about how you can use it to make content marketing so much easier. And then we did some demos for you. We showed you how you can train it on your business and how you can train it on on your own personal writing style. So that was last time around. Make sure you catch up with that if you missed it. Let me just give you a few things, some new bits of news, things that you need to be aware of and if you're not aware, by the way, we do have a Facebook group that we invite you to join. Many of you are in it. I'll ask Sarah in a minute to put the now if Sarah could put the link to the Facebook group. We have created this Facebook group of ChatGPT and AI for accountants and bookkeepers. It's a place that, where we can have a community to share best practice, how we are using the software and latest news. And so there's a lot of great stuff going on in there already. Let me share a few things. So one of the things we have to be aware of is, and this is a big issue at the moment is security issues, data protection. So one of the interesting news pieces that I recommend that you check out is and you'll find it in the Facebook group. Sarah will give you a link to it if you're not in it yet. I'd strongly recommend you read this interesting article about how Samsung workers they made a major bundle. I won't tell you what it is. I'll invite you to read it. It's a short little article but I invite you to read that because you're professionals. You need to be aware of the things that can go wrong for your own benefit. And so you can advise your clients as this is a big opportunity for you to add value to your clients by advising them how they can use this tool. But also they must be aware of the problems, the pitfalls. So that's an article I strongly recommend that you check out. Now I can't remember if I mentioned it last time around. I think I did. There is a few weeks ago ChatGPT was banned in Italy and again you can read the article and it's worth reading. It's a short article and you'll want to know the reasons why Italy banned it. That was a couple of weeks ago, that was announced. Now interestingly, Sarah and I have just come back from vacation. We did a Cruise for about 10, 11 days, got back on Tuesday of this week. But we start off in Venice. I got to Venice, which, for those of you that don't know, it's in Italy. And we got to Venice and I thought, oh, I'm going to check out this on ChatGPT. And I went on and I couldn't get in and it came with a message, it's not allowed in this area. So it's. We did find out firsthand that, yes, in Italy you cannot get on to ChatGPT. However, just to give an update on that particular issue, they've then just in the last few days announced that.

Italy have come up with a list of things that if ChatGPT do these things within a couple of weeks, they will unlock the blocking. So we need to watch this space and we need to watch this space because also Europe generally has now set up a privacy watchdog to check chat, to look at ChatGPT. They're monitoring it about data security, data protection. So I'm in Portugal, I'm keeping my fingers crossed that Portugal doesn't follow suit with Italy. Who knows? Europe's looking into this and I think I noticed this morning that the US are also doing the same thing. So personally, I don't think it's right that governments to decide whether to turn something off or not, but we do have to be aware of the reasons behind it. It's all to do with security. And when you read that Samsung article, you'll start to see some of the scary things that can happen. So let me tell you about another piece of news that you need to be aware of. And this is a kind of a big. There's a bigger picture here to do with AI. So.

You may have seen that one of the founders of OpenAI ChatGPT back in 2015 was Elon Musk. Now, Elon Musk left ChatGPT in, I think it was 2018. And the reasons, I think at the time was cited because he wanted to focus more on Tesla and some issues they were having. But the real reason was that he didn't agree with the direction that ChatGPT was going in.

So he left in 2018. And, and right now it's just been reported he's about to. He's threatened to sue Microsoft.

These things are starting, you'll see these threads starting to come together. He's currently about or considering suing Microsoft because Microsoft have used.

Twitter's data in ways they shouldn't have done. Now, Elon Musk, about last time we did this session, about a Month ago, Elon Musk and a group of other people, I think there were a thousand people, wrote an open letter saying that this AI is scary dangerous, we need to slow it down, we need to have a six month sabbatical and that we shouldn't go beyond version four of ChatGPT for six months. There should be a pause in it while governments consider and look at.

How we control this. And it's interesting because Elon Musk, so he wants to sue Microsoft. Well, Microsoft, as you know, they bought into ChatGPT in January and Elon Musk has left ChatGPT. And also it's just been announced that Elon Musk is now having just said this stuff's dangerous. He's now about to consider creating a ChatGPT rival called I think it's TrustGPT. So that's all interesting. It's worth watching this space in terms of what Elon Musk is doing and some of the rivalries between Microsoft, Google and Elon Musk himself. I have something just popped up on my screen. I just have to turn off. Just bear me a second. I'm going to be about two seconds.

It's gone. It was a pop up annoying thing. Okay, final piece of news is. And again, you need to be aware of this and somebody mentioned this in the Facebook group. So do join the Facebook group. There is a. If you like podcasts, it's a long one, but there's a great interview with Sam Altman. He's the guy, the main guy now at OpenAI. He was one of the co founders, two and a half hours long, worth reading. One of the things that I found was the most scary thing when I listened to what Sam Altman said is he was Talking about with ChatGPT, they've built in a number of restrictions so we can't do stuff like we can't ask it things like how can I kill a human being? Quite rightly so, that's been blocked. It will not give you the answer to that. But he said the worrying thing is though is potentially somebody else who's less ethical could use it to create their own version of ChatGPT. And the reason why that might be possible is one of the things it's very, very good at is help you create code. In fact, I was talking to my developers just two weeks ago, the people that create our software, effective pricing for effective pricing. And the developers were saying that they find it brilliant for helping them improve their code. So ChatGPT, one of its strengths is helping writing code. And my Good friend Renny Evans posted a link to an interesting article in the Facebook group just the other day called the Genie Escapes. Stanford University copies ChatGPT for less than 600. $600. Now bear in mind that originally back in 2015, the founders invest a billion dollars and now a university has created a version of it which performs pretty good compared to ChatGPT for just $600. And so as you read the article, it opens up some really scary stuff potentially. So you need to be aware of the. This is moving at such a fast pace. So make sure you join the Facebook group to see how accountants are using it, but also to be aware of the things that can go wrong. Okay. Having got some of those kind of the bad news out the way, some of the things to be aware of, I'm going to just check for questions and comments and then I'm going to bring in Emily and Emily's going to talk to us a little bit about ChatGPT versus Bard. So when ChatGPT was bought by Microsoft in January, that scared the life out of Google because potentially ChatGPT means Google is no longer.

It pretty much kills off Google. It could do. And so Google have been racing against the clock to get their version of ChatGPT, which was announced a few weeks back. It's called Bard. So which one's better, ChatGPT or Bard? I'm going to bring in Emily in about a couple of minutes to share with you the differences between the two, the pros and the cons. But before I do that, let's have a quick check in to see who's here. If there's any questions. Mike Wexler is here from Ohio. Karen Christie from New York City.

Yeah, Question. So Jaz says, why is there a paid version? What differentiates the difference? And just bear me a second because there's a follow up question. The paid version up to date, year to date, and not just 2021 as the generic one is positioned. Okay. Okay. So ChatGPT has been trained with information up to.

Emily might correct me, I think it's November 2021. What that means is that, is that you can't use ChatGPT like you can with Google, for example, to tell you what the weather is today because it doesn't have the access to current information.

So it's not up to date information. The difference between the paid version is and the. So there's. It's free at the moment. It's free anyway. I don't know how long it's for. There's A free version, and there's a paid version. The paid VERS version, I believe, is extremely inexpensive. If you consider that this can save you hours every single week. And if you value your time, which you should do, it's something like $20 plus tax per month, which is crazy low for the time it will save, you'll get an instant return on investment. And what you get with the paid version is access to GPT4. GTP4 is more sophisticated than 3.5. It can give you better answers. It's a little bit slower because it's more. It's got a more involved algorithm, but it will give you better answers. You can use both, but I prefer ChatGPT4. There's a couple of. There's some extra features you get, but the most important reason for upgrading is the fact that if you're on the free account, you will often find you can't get in because there's too many people using the system and it won't let you in. So if you want to start using it regularly, like we do every single day, then it's worth paying extra. Jazz so I hope that helps.

Stephanie says Facebook link isn't working. Did we crash it? Who knows? Possibly. I don't know. Hi there, Keith. Great to see you. I've done Keith for many, many years.

What's this? Nina says hello, Mark and team. Please send a recording replay link. I greatly appreciate you and your team support. Thank you. Take care. I'm guessing that's because you have to rush off, Nina. Anyway, well, thank you for the nice comments.

We don't plan to delete this. You can catch up afterwards with the live stream. It'll be on my YouTube channel. And I think Sarah said that. Yes, she got that.

Okay. Does ChatGPT work in Spanish or other languages? Yes. And on that note, let me share with you something that I think is really, really cool. And then I'll bring in Emily. So let me just bear with me just a second. So this is just. There is. There are some business cases, some business uses, which is what we're going to focus on for ChatGPT. But there's also lots of great things you can do from a personal point of view. So if you are learning a foreign language. I live in Portugal, so Sarah and I are learning Portuguese. And in the past we've used Google Translate. Google Translate, we found, is okay, but it sometimes gets things wrong. And so I have. If I just switch across to here, I have in ChatGPT, I have one called Portuguese. It's Just one of my chats. So if I do a writer that you can see, I use it a lot. Okay. If I go to the start, I wrote this prompt.

No, hang on. I think I have another translator. Just bear me a second. I've lost my prompt. I think I changed it.

I'll find it. Yes, here we go. So once I found it was working quite well, I've now just put into here, if I type something English, translate it to European Portuguese as opposed to Brazilian Portuguese. And if I type something in European Portuguese, translate it into English. Do you understand? And it says sim, yo intendo. So yes, it understands. So here's the big thing. For those of you are new to ChatGPT, one of the big things over using Google is it remembers things in the chat. It's like a conversation. So having told it once that if I type in English it will give me Portuguese and if I type in Portuguese it will give the opposite. So if I ever want to work out to say something, I just type it in English. I did earlier. It typed, it then converts into Portuguese. For example, when I sent somebody an email earlier, then they just turned into Portuguese. And if instead I get an email in Portuguese and I can't read it, I copy and paste into ChatGPT and it'll automatically turn it back into English without me having. With Google Translate you have to remember to change the switch otherwise it gets does it wrong. So. Yes. Who was the question?

Naila. Is that you pronounce it Naila? Yes, it works in other languages. It works pretty good in European Portuguese and my playing around with it over the last few weeks is I think it's better than Google Translate. Okay. There's more stuff coming in into the chat box, but I know I've got Emily waiting, so I apologize. Emily, Let me bring Emily on. Hi there. How's it going?

Hi. Good, thank you.

Awesome. So, Emily, you're going to talk a little bit about for a few minutes the difference in ChatGPT versus Bard. You got a screen share, haven't you? To share?

Hopefully you have it.

Yeah. Yes, I have it. So just for other people, just so you know, we had a technical problem earlier. Emily couldn't get a screen share to work. She sent me a slide. So I'm going to go across to that scene now, Emily. But the screen share won't be there immediately. It'll be in a few minutes. Which one am I showing first?

Well, let me just kind of talk about some of the pros and cons first and then we can get it when it's relevant so that you can see what I'm doing.

Perfect. You do that.

And then just tell me when you want to go to the screen share. And then if it's the right one, put the thumb up and I'll switch to that. But it'll take me a second to put it on the screen because I have to. It won't take long. We'll be there. Okay.

Okay. So a lot of people asked us last time, kind of, what is the difference between ChatGPT and Bard and which one's better? And kind of there are pros and cons to both, but I personally haven't used both. Now, I would say ChatGPT just has that bit more of an edge in using it in a professional sense for your business. So a lot of the. Some of the differences then are that.

Kind of are as a fact of what, as Mark mentioned earlier, the release of ChatGPT and putting that into Bing kind of forced Google to release this AI thing that they weren't fully ready yet. It wasn't at its most advanced level yet, so they kind of pushed it out really, really quickly. And it's maybe not quite as good as ChatGPT because of that. So some of the reasons that it's different. So Bard, one of the main things is that it doesn't retain the conversation that you have. So in the example that Mark just showed with his Portuguese, he's got that open, and it remembers that he's asked him to do this. You know, if I put it in English, translate it for me. And then anytime he puts it in that language, you know, a week, two weeks later, it remembers it. But with Bard, it doesn't retain the conversation that you've had. So you can be having a conversation with it, you can be trying to get it to write a blog post for you, for example, and you'll say, please write me a blog post with this example. And I think Mark, I do have a screenshot of that one. I asked it to write a. Just a short article on accounting and bookkeeping.

Yeah, okay, that's a social media post. Yeah. So I asked it to write. Write something like this. And I then nuanced it and said, okay, can you add emojis and hashtags and things? And it doesn't. It sometimes doesn't quite remember what you've asked it or it doesn't kind of carry through the same information. So what I would do with ChatGPT is I would give it a. Give it a prompt and say, Write me this blog. And then I might say, okay, can you now write that in a conversational tone or can you add some humor? And it would, it would do that. But with Chrome, with Bard even, sorry, it doesn't quite remember what you've asked it before. So if I've said in my first prompt, can you write me with emojis and hashtags? And.

I might nuance that even further and say, can you use 200 words and can you put bullet points for the key points? It would then kind of change it every single time and it wouldn't carry through the information in the same way. So it's not quite as efficient as ChatGPT.

So in that sense it's not going to remember that information and it's not as useful as Mark showed with his Portuguese example to come back to over time. You can't give it something and say, I want you to remember how to do this thing. It's going to be a fresh conversation every single time. And you can't store either. You can't store the conversations that you've had. If you want to start a new blog or new social media post or new thing, you have to reset the chat and scrap everything that you've already made. So if you're wanting to use it in a long term sense, it's not quite as good as ChatGPT for that. So another point in relation to the comment that someone just put about, does it, does it have different languages? Chat GPT does have. You can take that screenshot down now, mark, but. So ChatGPT does have. It has several languages, I think it has about 10 or 12. So not every language is in there, but quite a few languages are in there. But Bard only has US English. So US working in the uk, there's some slight differences with little bits of language, sometimes as an S instead of a Z or something in a spelling, it's going to only work in US English, so it can't really do the same thing in terms of translating things for you.

And then another point.

Actually, just, just to add about the language thing, you can, you can add a plugin with your voice as well and then you can have a conversation with it in your chosen language as well, which would be a cool thing to probably discuss at another time, but that might be a level up and then you can have a conversation with it in your chosen language. But that's chatgpt. So another thing about Bard is that it is connected to the Internet in a way, but.

It doesn't perform Kind of exactly what you want it to. So if you said, here's a link, can you go and read it and give me some information? It's not really going to deal with that very well. I've seen people ask it. Here's a link to my website. Can you summarize the key points and write a post.

Highlighting the offer and the benefits? And it just kind of does generic offers and benefits and it doesn't actually go and read the website.

So there's that kind of issue. You can play around with it and it might do some things for you, but it's not necessarily going to go and read that page that you give it, which puts it on the same level as ChatGPT, because ChatGPT is not connected to the Internet either, although they are thinking of releasing some plugins in the future of giving it some level of access to the Internet. But it does have this feature. It has a button at the bottom that says Google it. So one of the things that they are a little bit concerned about is because it's not very advanced yet, they have this disclaimer at the bottom that says the thoughts and opinions that come across, they might be incorrect or they might be offensive. And it doesn't represent Google's views. So they have this button at the bottom that says Google it. So that if something it gives you an answer and you're not really sure, you think that looks a bit sketchy. I'm not sure that's quite accurate. You can click Google it and it will just send you back to your normal Google kind of browser and you can go and research whether that is actually accurate. So that's a feature that they have added so that in a way it does have that connection to the Internet so that you can go and fact check the stuff that you're doing. But again, you are fact checking on Google, which isn't always 100% accurate, but you're back to the same kind of level with ChatGPT. So they're on a par with that kind of thing. One of the things that Bard cannot do is it cannot help you with code, which is one of the really strong parts of ChatGPT. So Bard doesn't work with code. And another thing is that it's not as creative in its responses. So.

I'm not sure if I have one of the those screenshots is the right thing. But what I asked it to do was.

I asked it to write a blog and I put them both in chatgpt and Yep. So this is a Social media one. So I think there's another one mark where I asked it to write a blog and there was two kind of versions of it. So I asked it first to say, can you just write a blog about accountants and bookkeepers?

And yeah, can you write a blog on how value pricing, how accountants and bookers can use value pricing? And it would write me a blog. Both of them would. ChatGPT and Bard would write me a pretty standard blog. 500 words with a few bullet points and it was pretty decent. They were alright. What I then asked it to do, both of them. Can you now rewrite that with a bit of humor, make it more conversational in tone and maybe add some quotes to it. So what ChatGPT would do was it would rewrite that article and it would embed those different things. It would add the different, you know, the things that I'd ask for. It would, it would give it some kind of funny little quirky lines or whatever. But what Bard would do is it would just give me the same article again and then put some bullet points at the bottom that says if you wanted to add a joke, you might want to add this. Okay, so it wasn't quite the same, you know, it didn't do the work for me. And another thing that you can notice in that screenshot there as well is that it did this thing where it says headline 5 practical users body 5 words. It's not exactly copy and paste efficient. And I did at one point try and have a bit of a back and forth with it and say, can you remove those things and just give it me in a copy and paste version? And it didn't, it didn't understand how, how to do that and it started giving me it in a very weird format. So ChatGPT gives it to you so that you can copy and paste it in a really nice way. And Bard just isn't quite up to the same standard. I think it does, it does have its uses, you know, it is really, really useful if you just want a quick answer, if you want a quick kind of back and forth with it. You want to ask a quick question what. It does work really well, but I think in the sense of, you know, one of the large purposes that we use in ChatGPT for is content creation. And in that sense where it's dealing with large chunks of text, ChatGPT is definitely the winner in that sense.

So that's about, that's about it. Another point I just maybe is an issue with both, you know, all of these language models is this idea of hallucination, which means that sometimes it will just not know what the answer is and it will make it up and it will give you something that's not true at all and it will make it up. And apparently Bard has had a lot of instances of it doing that and just making stuff up more so than ChatGPT. But they do both have that issue, which is why Bard added this Google button to say Google it to double check that that was right. But that was an issue that Bard was having as well. So stacking up against each other. I would personally prefer to use ChatGPT in business, but Bard does have its place probably on a more on a smaller usage and maybe for more personal things that are not quite as important if it gets it wrong.

Awesome. Thanks, Emily. Now, we're not going to have a Google bashing session right now. I mean, ChatGPT works there, so Microsoft is winning against Google there. But this isn't a Google bashing session. But I have to say as well, the reason why we couldn't Emily couldn't do proper showing you all of it. She had to send me two screenshots is because just before she logged on, Google Chrome would not let her share her screen. It's never been a problem before, but something wrong with Google Chrome. We can't share the screen. Hence that. So a quick question for you, Emily. Do you want to come back and talk about some of the use cases that you had planned or is that too difficult without sharing screen? Would you rather wait?

I can just talk about them. I don't have anything to show you visually, but I can talk about some use cases.

Great. So what we'll do, Emily, is I've got a couple of things lined up to show people. I'll do those and then I'll bring you back. We might answer some questions and then you can talk through some Any other great stuff you want to share with people for the last five, ten minutes? Okay, See you soon.

I forgot earlier. Most of you know Emily, but a few of you don't. Those of you that don't, Emily is our head of marketing at the Value Pricing Academy. She's a genius with marketing and she also helps some of our members in the Value Pricing Academy with their marketing. And on Monday, for those of you in the academy, then on Monday she's teaching how to build a perfect landing page, like an opt in page, for example. And as part of that, she's going to show you how you can use ChatGPT to do some of the heavy lifting. So there you go. There's a sneak peek if you're in the academy for.

Monday's session. And also.

Just to give you an, just to give you an indication of how important I think or we think internally that ChatGPT is and how it's going to revolve, revolutionize the way that we do things in terms of time saving and so on. We now have internally an AI lab. What I mean by that is we have. Our team spends, we spend one day a week just researching AI ChatGPT. We have a weekly hour long meeting that was today we had an hour long meeting to share all the different things we're learning. Partly so we can use it better internally and partly because we can help you. We can help you through these live sessions, we can help you through the Facebook group which hopefully you've now joined. And those of you in the academy we're going to be doing, rolling out a series of more in depth training videos because this is, I think it's so important and that's why we give up a full day a week, the team to just research this stuff. I find it fascinating. So what I'm going to do now is I can see some questions come in but we'll deal with the questions in a bit. I'm going to show some other practical things that you can, that you can do. So I showed the fun one Portuguese which will probably relevant to sue and Chris. So they're probably setting their prompt up right now.

Let me just give you the backstory for this. So another great thing that you can do with ChatGPT is answering people's questions. So one of the things, and there's various places where people might ask questions. I was watching a video by my, my friend Hector Garcia. Some of you know Hector, he has a great YouTube channel. He was doing a session a few weeks ago where he's talking about how you could use ChatGPT if you're a QBO pro advisor to answer questions from QBO users. I mean just general business owners can ask questions about qbo. And if you're a pro advisor, if you're a QBO user, you can go in and answer those questions. And he was showing how you can do it from that point of view, but also if you want to answer questions in Facebook groups. So one of the things that we talk about from a marketing point of view is you want to build up your expertise. If you want to win more clients, you want to be seen as being the expert. And one of the ways that you can do that is either have your own Facebook group of business owners or join other Facebook groups of business owners and just add value by answering people's questions when you can. Of course, that's quite time consuming, but when you do answer people's questions, you're adding value to them. Other people will see you in the group as being someone who adds value, which is going to build up your position in the marketplace. And some of those people will reach out and say, hey, you're a switched on accountant, a switched on bookkeeper. You're the sort of person I'm looking for. So that's one of the ways you can add value and build up your reputation by answering questions in Facebook groups. So this morning I got. Let me see if I can just pull it up for a second. I got a notification on Facebook that I was tagged. I was tagged in another Facebook group by a wonderful lady called Laura Saba. I don't know if Laura's here or not. So thank you to you and thank you to anybody that tags me in other people's groups where there's something I can help. So if I just go across for a second. This was a lady called Yadira. I don't know if you're here or not, but if you are welcome. It was in Veronica Wasek's Facebook group and Yadira said, hello everyone. First time asking about something. But really, I hope you guys can help me out. I will have a phone call with a possible client. This client is in the real estate investment industry, has four different LLCs. My question is about pricing. Honestly, I don't have idea on how much I should charge. Should I charge him like charging for each LLC individually or charging for all 4 LLCs? I live in Florida, possible client, lives in the Miami area. Does anyone in the group have any ideas on how much I should charge him? Please help. Thank you in advance. Well, yes, I teach pricing. As you know, I have loads of ideas. But I've just come back off vacation. I haven't got the time to answer a lot. I'd love to help you dear out. I just haven't got the time to write something I could write forever. That's a big question. How do I price that? So because I'm busy, I'm catching up from 10 days of vacation. I thought should I leave it? And I thought, hang on though, let me use my new friend, our latest employee chatgpt. So.

I went into. Just bear me a second while I pull it up. Yes. So I went into a particular chat that I got. And if you came two weeks ago, you may recall that I shared with you an idea of how you can train up ChatGPT in your particular writing style. So I have this, this, this chat where I have trained it in my writing style and it's pretty good. I'm not gonna go through that now because that was last time. If you want to know how to do that, check out the. The last time we went live. But what I then decided to do this morning is I just put this. Here we go. Let me hide it. How? All I did was I just took that question, I copied it, I said, how would I answer this question posed in a Facebook group? Pace. Okay. And within about five seconds, this is what it came up with. Hi there. It's great to see you reaching out for advice. When it comes to pricing for accounting services, there's no one size fits all answer. But I can offer some guidance that may help you determine the best approach for this potential client. Number one, understand the client's needs. Number two, value based pricing. Number three, bundle services or charge separately. That was the issue with the four LLCs. Number four, research local rates. Five, factor in your experience and expertise. Six, communicate your value. I'm not reading it all out, but ultimately the right pricing strategy will depend on your specific situation and the client's needs. Be sure to consider all factors and communicate openly with the potential client to ensure a mutually beneficial arrangement. Good luck with your phone call. So I read that now you have to use your own judgment, your professional judgment. As we've said many times, it doesn't always get things wrong. But I read that through and I thought that's actually a pretty good answer and it's in my writing style pretty much. I'm happy with it. To put my name to that, apart from one thing, there was one point I did not agree with. Out of those six, I'll come on to that in a second. But all I did is I copied all of that and I simply pasted it in here. So there's my answer to Yadira. It took me probably two minutes to cut and paste put into ChatGPT. Put a little prompt in front of it, get the answer, paste it back, two minutes tops. And if you're listening, Hedera, you have said Mark Wickham. Awesome. Thank you so much for your help. Oh, I did add to the end of it, just so you know. I hope that helps. If you want some resources, connect with me on LinkedIn and I'll then send you some free stuff that might help. And if anybody's new to me, what happens is when an accountant or bookkeeper connects me on LinkedIn, I have a standard message with a link to all sorts of free stuff that I send out. And many of those things are let us have your email address, your name, so I know where to send them to. It's part of our list building our marketing strategy. So if you want free stuff, connect on LinkedIn if you're not already connected with me. So anyway, it took me two minutes to give out to really help that person. And.

Also that will help not just her, but everybody in that Facebook thread as well. They'll see that and think, all right, Mark's done. You see, I've done the most comprehensive answer of anybody and it took me two minutes. But let me just pick up on one final thought on that. Not everything it says is correct. You have to fact check things. Now I read that and I know a fair bit about pricing as some of you know. And the one of those I didn't agree with was number four. It says research local rates to ensure your pricing is competitive. I thought do some research on the rates other accountants and bookkeepers charge in the Miami area and similar services. This can give you a benchmark to help set your fees. So as Emily said, you can use it and have a conversation. It remembers things. So I then said, that's a great response. Thank you. But I don't agree with point 4. The problem is most accountants and bookkeepers are too cheap. So benchmarking against other local firms and basing your price on the competition is likely to mean you end up being too cheap as well. The only benefit of benchmarking is to make sure you're in the top 10%. Please reword point number four. Now, I didn't put this into the Facebook group because I did this afterwards as a bit of experimenting so that research local rates became I understand your concern and you make a valid point. Thank you, ChatGPT. Here's an updated version 4. Consider the value you provide, not just local rates. While it can be helpful to have an understanding of what other accountants and bookkeepers charge in your area, basing your fees solely on the competition could lead to undervaluing your services. Instead, focus on the unique value you provide and ensure your pricing reflects that value. If you do choose to benchmark, aim to position yourself within the top 10% of pricing in your area, as this can signal the premium quality and expertise you offer. By emphasizing the value, bring to the table and differentiate yourself from the competitors, you'll be better positioned to set prices that truly reflect the worth of your service. Much better answer. I was happy with that. So had I had a bit more time, I'd have probably copied and pasted that into the Facebook post. But I was experimenting anyway. Point is, it's one of the great things you can use it for is answering questions. So when you get questions or see questions in other people's social groups, Facebook groups or whatever, you can answer really quickly. Just make sure you do your due diligence, make sure you read it through, don't blindly copy and paste, read it through, apply your professional judgment. And if you need to change something, then you can change it. And you can, as I did, you can ask ChatGPT to change it. Just give some guidance and it will then do that. Okay, I've got another thing I want to share with you and answering questions as well. Let me just see how many questions I've got.

I think we're okay. Yes, let me share one more thing because.

It relates to someone called Craig who's actually here, I now know. So again, just to give an idea of time savers, as well as answering questions, you can use it to, you can use it to help you ask emails. So just to give you the backstory on this, an accountant I know very, very well for many, many years approached me recently because he's moving. He wants to move his practice to the subscription model. If you have no idea what that is, check out the interview conversation I did with Ron Baker back in December. We were talking about the subscription model and how it can be really powerful for an accounting firm. Anyway.

I got an email. I was on vacation, I got back and when I got back yesterday, one of my emails to clear was from Craig. He said, yes, I want to move to the scripture model, but I need to sort these three three things out first. Can you have you any thoughts on those things? A bit more to it. I'm paraphrasing now. I had to catch up with 10 days of emails. I've only got two days this week to work today. I had to focus on my prep for this session. So it had been easy just to dismiss the email, not answer it, leave it or do a short answer, not give much advice. But one of the questions was one of his points was before I move to subscription model, like many accountants, I give too many things away for free. I ought to get my accountant, my clients paying for things properly before we move to subscription model. Any thoughts on that? I had loads of Thoughts. I had thoughts bubbling through my head. I'm thinking, yes, what you want to do is you want to use that as an opportunity to tell clients that yes, you're changing the way you're pricing and get their feedback on moving to a subscription based model. So what I did and just bear me a second, I'll pull it up.

So I had all these thoughts and what I wanted to do was to give Craig an email template, an idea for what he could send to his clients. And Craig, I know you're listening and when we get to stage we're starting working together, I'll happily spend more time and make this email much, much better because I didn't write it. Okay? But what I did was the prompt. So I had these ideas so very quickly yesterday morning. Oops, wrong thing. Where am I going there? Sorry Emily. I said please help me write an email to my client. So I put myself in the accountant's shoes. Please help me to write an email to my clients. The email is coming from an accountant and the clients are dentists and dental practices. It needs to be a professional tone. I want to explain that in the past they have received many services without charge as part of their accountancy and tax work. I want to explain that we now have a standard pricing system for separate services which will need to be paid for separately. I want to list a few of those services with prices. By way of example, I also want to tell them about a new service model we will be offering to our select clients. The subscription model. This new model will be a monthly subscription that gives the client unlimited access to our firm which means they will not pay extra for other services. Focus on the benefits and the overall benefit of giving the client unlimited access to all of our services and our goal is to help. The help should have been them build a more profitable dental practice safe tax and eventually help them maximize the sale proceeds when they come to want to sell. That's what I put. Within seconds it came up with subject important update Introducing standard pricing and new subscription model for our valued dental clients. I probably wouldn't go with that email subject line, but it would be given. It would give me some some prompts, some ideas. I hope this email finds you well. As your dedicated accountant, we are committed to providing you with the best possible service to help your dental practice thrive. Over the years we have been fortunate to serve you by offering numerous services as part of your accountancy and tax work, often at no additional charge. In our continuous efforts to enhance our service offerings and provide greater transparency, we are introducing a standard pricing system for separate services, etc. Etc. It lists a few. Obviously you need to give it some better prompts and it goes on to talk about the new subscription based model and the benefits of it and how it'll help them. Our focus is to help you build a better business, save tax, etc. Etc. So.

It took me as long as it took to write that short prompt, which was probably about 60 seconds. It came up with that and I read through it and thought it's not perfect. There's a lot of things I would change about it if I had time. I'd be thinking about a better form of language. I'd probably have added it to my other prompt where I trained it to write in my style. But it gives you a great start, something to start with which you can then adapt. So anyway, Craig, I know you're watching and now you know how I managed to answer quite a long email in a short space of time and hopefully that helps and puts you on the right track. Reach back out to me if you want further help. Okay, we have a minutes left to answer questions but also I want to bring Emily back as well in a second. So Emily, just hang on a second and then we'll get some final thoughts from Emily. Stephanie just says.

I was very confused when trying to set it up. Are there simpler instructions available?

I'll let Emily think about that one. I think the answer is no, but my advice would be Emily might have some thoughts. My advice is, Stephanie, make sure you are in our Facebook group ChatGPT and AI for Accountants and bookkeepers and ask questions there and me, my team, Emily and other people will help you out. Okay, so ask away. And it may be Emily. Perhaps we might do a video sometimes. We were talking about it earlier today in our team meeting about some of the features and how to use them better. Mindy, I don't know the answer this one. I don't think Emily will as well, but she might have how many people can use the paid version? How many seats? I'm not aware there's a limit on it. I don't think.

Naila says thank you for the answer earlier. Hi there Nat.

My good friend Teresa, she's late. I'm sure you'll catch up on the session.

So here's an interesting one from my friend Sue. I'm a bookkeeper. Is there a danger that I will use income because my clients could lose income? It's losing come because my clients could use ChatGPT to do some of the work that I normally charge for. I think that's a great question and I will give my thoughts on that. But also I don't want to steal all the thunder because I know that Emily will have some thoughts on that question as well. I think I'm pretty sure she will.

Zoe. Hi there, Zoe. Good to see you. I always love how ChatGPT talks to you. Like really helpful system. This is great, Mark. Thank you for the feedback.

I know Theresa's been. I know Theresa's been using it quite a lot. She's a very smart bookkeeper. So that's interesting, that comment.

Mel, good to see you. Hi Mark and team, great to see you all. Probably a dumb question, but how do you sign up for ChatGPT? Do you Google it to find this? Thanks, Emily. I'll get you to answer that one as well because I know you'll remember it better than me.

Okay. Craig's here. Very impressive. Thought you had typed it yourself. No, I would have done it a bit different, Craig, but I hope that at least helped you, got you in the right direction.

David says could it write chapters for an ebook? What are your thoughts? Absolutely it can. You could get to write your entire ebook. That would be the wrong approach, but we are about to launch early next week. An ebook will tell you about it on how to use ChatGPT and it's almost done. And so David, because you're in the value betting academy, will give you some more insights about how you can write an ebook with ChatGPT.

And he goes on to say.

I.

Want to say, why can't I pull it up?

My button's not working. Anyway, David says, could it write chapters for any book or is it more for a Q and a response? What do you thought again, I'll probably pull in. Emily. Emily.

Do you want to do any closing thoughts or do you want to move to questions? Entirely up to you. You've probably got loads of things to talk about.

You want me to answer some of those questions that you've just gone through?

Yeah, please feel free to. Yes.

Okay.

Which was the first one from Sue? From Sue. I'm a bookkeeper. Is there a danger that I will lose income because my clients can could use ChatGPT to do some of the work that I normally charge for. So one of the kind of, I guess for this industry good things is that it's actually really bad at maths. It's not very good at doing number based things. So when it comes to doing financial reports, whatever it is, if you were thinking, oh, I'M going to input all of these numbers into here and it's going to do it for me. It's not really going to do. May come a point in the future where it's going to get better at doing those sorts of things, but currently, as it stands, it's really not good at maths, so you're safe for now. But what it will mean is probably a change in doing some of the things that, you know, bookkeeping has been. For a long time, technology has been creeping up and taking over of doing certain things and it's making a move towards other services that you can't be replaced for. So doing business advisory and those kind of things is where you'll need to take your business in order to kind of stay ahead of that. But there will always be a place for human intervention. Even if an AI is doing it, it's going to take a while for you to, for it to get to a point where you're so confident that you can just click a button and do it at the minute, you're going to need to go over and check all of those numbers and make sure all that's working. So. But it will probably mean a move towards other services to stay ahead.

Thanks, Emily. And I'll give my thoughts on that. But first though, if you've had something, if you got something out of this that's been valuable, please hit that like button or whichever platform you're in, please do that just so I know if you're finding it valuable. My thoughts on generally, there has been a lot of talk about jobs disappearing. Bookkeepers, accountants are quite high up on the list. I think a few years ago people were dismissing it. I think that AI is going at an increasingly rapid pace. Nobody can predict the future. But I do think a lot of the routine work that bookkeepers do, tax preparers, it will disappear. It will disappear at some point because it's getting smart at an increasing rate. And so one of the things that from listing some of the experts is a lot of jobs will be replaced. But it's not going to be AI that replaces you, it's going to be how your competitors use it. And so essentially what you need to do is make sure you're ahead of the curve, use AI as a tool.

And also it means that you want to figure out you've got to add more value to your clients. It's been taught out for years that you need to add more value. Whether it's business advisory, tax advisory, you want to add more value. And that's I think becoming increasingly important because we will find downward pressure on price and perhaps even some of the routine work even disappearing completely. Emily, I know we're almost out of time, but there were probably a few more things that you want to cover off. Here's another question we want to look at.

Yeah, just some of the quick questions Mel asked. You know, how do I get set up? And just a little bit further in the chat, Sarah has put a link. So it's chat.OpenAI.com you can go there and just register for an account. And it's as simple as that. You register for account, you can start chatting to it and there's the option to upgrade as well if you wanted to. And then the question from David, can it write the ebook? I. I used it to help me write the ebook. We just. I've just finished writing an ebook for ChatGPT for accountants and bookkeepers, which we're gonna hopefully launch earlier next week. But I used it more as kind of a. To break the writer's block. So I would write something, I'd think, oh, how can I write this next bit? And I'd go to it and it give me a couple of ideas and then I would take that and I'd put it in there and it may give me one or two useful sentences, but I would largely write it myself. But that's because I'm a copywriter and I'm a perfectionist and I prefer to do it that way. But it will definitely, you know, the more, the more detailed your prompt is, the better the output it's going to give you. So it can definitely help you with doing things like that for sure.

Yeah, absolutely. And, and we're, we're in the process of creating a lot more training on Chat GPT. So if so, David, I know you're in the academy and we have launched a brand new academy called the Profitable Growth Academy where we are starting to put detailed training videos on how you can do things using Chat GPT. So if you want more detailed insights, you might want to check that out. So, Sarah, can I just perhaps one more time put in the link to both the Facebook group on our new Facebook group and also the proper Growth Academy for people who want to check that out as well. It doesn't say on the page about ChatGPT training videos because they're brand new. We're just starting to release those right now. I think we're out of time by one minute.

And I think we probably covered most of the questions. So firstly, Emily, thank you so much for sharing your insights. Shame that Google messed up with screen sharing. We will be doing Emily and I will be doing another session on what do we say? Emily May the second I think we said yeah, was it yeah, May 2nd. And Sarah doesn't know that so we agreed earlier. Sarah may the second. So lock down your calendar same time and we'll be sharing some of the latest news, things that have changed. We'll be sharing more use cases how you can actually use it. Hopefully it's Emily's screen share will work. And if there's anything you want us to cover next time around, ask in the Facebook group. Just say please talk about such and such next time around and we'll do that for you. So just give us feedback. Okay. We're going to play with some music as we normally do. Gives me chance to just read the final comments. If you enjoyed it, hit that thumbs up button and we will see you on May 2nd. You'll see us earlier if you're at the academy. Okay, thanks Emily. Bye for now.

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