The Most Powerful ChatGPT Use Case for Accountants: Strategic Planning & Growth

What are we going to talk about in this session? We're going to look at what I believe is the most powerful use case of ChatGPT, other large language models. I think it's really powerful for strategic planning. We can look upon this from two different perspectives. Firstly, if you're an accountant in practice doing advisory work, this is really powerful for adding value to clients for doing business advisory. I love it for business advisory. And also if you're a business owner, you, you should be doing this yourself. If you're the owner of an accounting firm, then you are your number one client and so you should be doing strategic planning in your own business. So everything that we're going to talk about you could think about with two different hats on. One as an advisor advising business owners and one as being a business owner yourself, wanting to build a more powerful strategy. So we're going to talk in this about a bit of an overview as to why is advisory a big opportunity, what does it really mean? And then we're going to dive into how we can use AI for advisory and we'll look at some practical prompts. We'll go into ChatGPT and I will try and do two or three, perhaps four different prompts examples as we run through this session. But let's start with just a quick definition of business advisory. To me, business advisory is all about how do we help business owners, clients build more successful businesses, how do we help them increase their profits, grow their business, increase cash flow, et cetera. And when I'm thinking about advisory and when I think about how I was doing it in my accounting firm many years ago, when I was a sole practitioner, when I did advisory work, I really think of it as being six core things that we could do as part of a well rounded advisory solution. So to me they would be goal setting because how can we help a client be more successful if we don't know what success means to that business? So if I was doing advisory work with a client, I would always start off with the first session being all about what are their goals, what are they trying to achieve? So that's goal setting. Strategy is simply all the possible things they could do to get from where they are today to where they want to be towards their goals. Advisory may also consist of an element of forecasting, looking into the future, looking at projections of profits, sales, cash flow, etc. Then there'll be an element of reporting, which is the comfort zone stuff. For most accounting firms it would be producing, for example, monthly management information, monthly profit, loss, account Monthly balance sheet and then talking about the trends of how the business is going. And then the ongoing advice is having a regular meeting. And this is the bit that is where the real value lies. It's in the relationship that you have as an advisor with your, with your client. It's giving the advice, it's having a monthly meeting to interpret the numbers in the report to see if they're on track to achieve their strategic plans. And then finally, there should be an element of accountability where you hold the client accountable to do the things that they have agreed they're going to do between the last session and the next session. So just like a coach helps people be accountable to do their homework, to do the things they need to do to get to their goals, we would do a similar thing. Now, that doesn't mean you have to do all those six with every single client. It all depends. And I talk a lot about pricing and having different packages. And it may be if you're creating, let's say, a bronze silver gold of different levels of advisory packages, that those bronze silver gold might have a different mix of these. It might be the entry level is simply a strategic planning day where you do some goal setting and some strategic planning. It may be that then the next level is the ongoing advice and the reporting and the accountability. And then for our premium clients, the larger clients, it may be we do more forecasting and what if analysis and budget setting and those sorts of activities. So that would be what I see as being the main elements of advisory. But, but what we're going to talk about is, well, how can we use large language models to help us with advisory and particularly, how do we use it to help with delivering the service, doing the strategic planning, giving the advice? I talk about large language models. I'm focusing today on ChatGPT as I normally do, simply because, firstly, Most people use ChatGPT and secondly, because in all the benchmarks it regularly comes out as number one. But if you're not a ChatGPT fan, if you prefer Claude or Gemini or something else, everything I'm going to show you today would apply just as well to any of the different large language models. So what are the sorts of things that we might do if we are doing advisory work with a client? What different activities could we do using a large language model? Well, firstly, we could use it for research. We could use it to research the client, we could research the industry so that we can speed up our homework process so that we have some preparation before we start that first initial session with the client, we want to make sure that we understand their business and understand their industry. And we could spend hours doing research, but with ChatGPT, we could cut that down into just a few minutes. And we'll look at a prompt for doing that. We could, of course, also use it as part of the numbers side of things. We could use it for financial analysis. And again, we'll look an example in a short while, we'll look at a prompt that you might want to use for the numbers side of advisory. We can also use it for creating strategy. And I think of this in a couple of levels. Firstly, when we think about strategic thinking, one of the things that we can use is business consulting models. So what do I mean by that? Well, when we're coming up with strategy and a definition I love is strategy is all the things you could possibly do to get from A to B, where B is where the client wants to get to. What are their goals, what do they want to achieve? What do they want to achieve? Next year they might want to, for example, double their revenue. Next year, they might want to increase their profits by half a million next year, what are their goals? And then we need to figure out where are they right now, what's their point A, and today, where they are right now is all the challenges they're facing, all the frustrations, the pain, the issues in their business, the issues coming their way because of changes in their industry, for example, and these are all the things that are bogging them down, getting in their way, that are stopping them from getting to their point B. So strategy is everything to get from A to B. So we need to make sure we understand, first of all, where do they want to get to? What is their point B, what are their goals? But we also want to understand where are they right now, what are the various issues right now, what are their strengths, what are the various products they have, what are the strategic marketing alliances, what are the opportunities in their business, and so on. Because that's the starting point, understanding that. And then that'll help us. That'll be, if you like, a springboard to come up with ideas or strategies to move them towards their goals. And so that's why we use business consulting models. We use those models to help us come up with a picture, if you like, of what the business currently looks at, like, and we'll, we'll look an example in a short while. And then once we've done that, once we've used a business consulting model to understand their business right now, we can then Work with the client to come up with strategies, to come up with a strategic plan or strategic action plan. And there are lots of great prompts that we could run to do exactly that. And then a specific type of strategy that certainly I would always work on when I was working with clients is then growth strategies. Because every business owner that I talk to wants to grow their business. They want to increase profits, increase sales, and one of the things we can do is help them to do exactly that. But Mark, I'm just an accountant. I'm just a bookkeeper. How do I do that? How do I help people grow? I'm not a marketer, I'm not a sales expert. It doesn't matter, because we now have the access to AI that will create the strategies for us and help you be seen as an expert in your business community. And then what we can do with AI is we can then take things to another level entirely, which I call implement. Normally, advisory or coaching consulting is largely about asking the right questions, being a facilitator and the client then coming up with a plan because you've opened up their mind through different questions and ideas, and they come up with a plan with your help as a facilitator. And that's really powerful. But we can take things to another level because we could, if we wanted to help the client to implement and implement is the highest level of value when we do it for them. And again, AI tools, large language models make this so much examples of things that we could do at that level. It could be that we help them to create a business plan. It could be that they want to grow their business and we come up with a growth action plan, but they don't know how to implement that. They don't know how to create. The social media plan, for example, you could do that for them. You could use some carefully crafted prompts and you could create social media campaigns for them, because AI makes it so much easier. But if you do implementation for a client, always remember that's the highest level of value. You should charge premium prices for doing that. If you are running their marketing system for them, then you should charge premium prices. And so I'm going to focus on some of those things in this session today. But also another thing that we want to do as well is if we are delivering advisory services to clients. So all these things so far you could do with your own business. And that's why I'd recommend you start all the things we'll talk about you should do yourself doing, come up with strategies strategic thinking and so on. But if you're going to offer this as a service to clients, then you're going to want to figure out, well, how are you going to package it up? Think of it as a bronze, silver, gold, offer three different choices. How might you package it? What would you do as part of advisory? How would you value, price that and communicate the value? How would you go out to the marketplace and promote that service as part of that, to build your positioning, your branding, you would perhaps want to do some content marketing and write, for example, blog posts, ebooks, perhaps do some webinars to position you as an expert in helping business owners and all of those things, packaging, pricing, marketing, content marketing, all of those things. Again, AI can really help. I'm not going to talk about that in today's session. We're going to focus on the delivery of IT first. But bear that in mind. So let me just quickly recap. We can use our large language models, our chatgpt to financial analysis, do business consulting models to identify where they are now, their challenges, their issues. We can then build strategies, building, we can come up with growth strategies, we can help with implementation and then we can also use it to build our own packages, our pricing and marketing of advisory work. And so we're going to go into. I'm going to show some prompts in a second. The reason I think this is such a huge opportunity for the accounting profession is a couple of reasons. Number one, AI is moving so fast that we are seeing already now that compliance work is being more and more automated. And so we need to figure out ways to create more value for clients more than ever before. We need to help our clients with their biggest problems. Advisor is one of the highest levels of value that we can create and we have to do that because we cannot keep relying on compliance work if AI is going to automate much of it. But also if we understand value pricing and know how to price based on value, then the other thing about advisory work is that it's high value. We can charge higher prices than compliance work. But also with the use of AI, as you will see, the time to deliver it is relatively low and so it can be a very profitable service. Whereas in comparison, the value of compliance work is less and the time taken to do compliance work is much higher. The margins are much, much smaller because it takes time to fill in tax returns. It takes time to do bookkeeping and cleanup work. These are time consuming processes and relatively low margins compared to, let's say tax planning or advisory, where we can make bigger differences to the lives of our clients, but do it in less time. So I believe that this is the way, this is where the profession should be focusing more and more. Right, so we're going to grab a few prompts, we're going to look at. Let's look at some research first. Let's imagine that you have just met a brand new client, you've just met a business owner and you've had some conversations with them. Perhaps you met them at a networking event and you've had a conversation. They've got some frustrations, their business is stagnating, it's not growing the way that they'd like it to grow and you've identified that you can help them. So I'm going to use a case study for this. It's a restaurant in the uk, it's a steak restaurant. In the evening they have steak on the stone, it's a cafe. By day they're called Kazmyc's. I think they're in Dunstable in the uk. So I'm going to use that as my case studies. Imagine this is a business that you are about to. You've just met and you've been talking about how you can help them get their business back on track, grow their business and so on. You've got a meeting with them, your first strategic planning session, let's say tomorrow, and you need to do some research, you need to understand this business better so we can do some research. So if I go across to here, this is a prompt library, by the way, and those of you that have been using my prompt library already, you may notice it looks a little bit different. That's because this is the new version coming out in just a couple a week or so. And so I'm just doing the final testing of it just to check it works. So let's look at research. And I'm going to go across to this. These are all the various prompts that owners of accounting firms would want to use to speed up their use of AI. And I'm going to look for my business strategy prompts and specifically I'm looking for business website context report. So I have a prompt here, here's the prompt. I'm going to copy that to the clipboard. I'm going to go across to ChatGPT and I just paste it in. Now I'm going to switch the model from GPT5 to the an older model to 4.0. The only reason for that, if you've used ChatGPT since August you'll know that GPT5 is better, but it can be slow sometimes if it does a lot of thinking. And because I'm doing a demonstration, I'm going to go back to the old GPT4O just because it will give me a quicker answer for the purpose of today. So I have my prompt here. I'm going to tell you a little bit about the prompt. Also when I create these prompts I always put variables in. So all of this prompt I could use for every single client, every business I want to, because it's got placeholders, but they're variables. So I only have to put in at the end of the prompt the variable. In this case, it's asking for the website. So let me just grab that website of Kasmix, paste that in. Here's the website, here's the prompt, and let me just move that out of the way. So what this is going to do, this first one is I've asked ChatGPT to act as a business analyst. And what I want to do is I want to analyze every publicly available page on the business website because I want a report that I can use as my preparation for my strategic planning meeting. And the report is going to give me the contextual foundation for things like business strategy, growth plans, financial advice, strategic recommendations. And then I've given it more specific instructions in the prompt. I want it to use the website at and this is the variable. So it knows from below it will go and pick up here. Website analysis is defined as the URL for the website. So everywhere that appears in this prompt it will just knows we're talking about Kasmics. So it's going to use that to complete the report. It's going to review every page and summarize what it finds. And it's going to also open up a canvas. So if you don't, don't know what that is. It's one of the tools inside ChatGPT. I love Canvas. It's. It's really powerful. And then what I've done is I've been in this prompt, I've been specific about what I want that structure of the report to be. This is where prompt templates are really powerful. Anything that you might do frequently creating a report, for example, we can then specify in the prompt the exact structure that we want. I want to have something about industry and market context, the business models and operations, how do they make money? For example, what are the products and services, what's their pricing model, what's their brand positioning and messaging, what's their marketing and lead generation. And even we could ask, what is the website user experience? I've got a few rules. And then we have the variable, which in this case is Kasmic. So let's just run that prompt to see what it does. I'm just going to close the sidebar. It's pausing for a bit because it's obviously going to read the website and I've asked it to read every single page of, of the website. So it's analyzing that, searching the web, as it says right now, searching for Kasmics. And now it's writing the report and it's doing it in a separate canvas. You know, it's a separate canvas because it will, which I hope it is. It might not be in this case. Sometimes it doesn't always follow the instructions. It's not. Anyway, here we go. So we have industry and market context. It's telling us a bit about the industry and the sector that Kasmix operates in. What are the typical customers they have? They have daytime customers for their breakfast and light lunches and cafes. And then in the evening it's diners looking for more special outings, steaks, cocktails and social dining experience. We've got some information about the market trends and analysis, some information about competition. We then got in section two, we have something about the business model and its operations. How does it make revenue, what's its delivery model, how does it deliver its services? Well, it's a physical location, it's a restaurant, in this case with eat in and takeaway. We've got who is dependencies, who its partners, like suppliers for steaks and so on. Then we've got section three, which is what they sell, what's the products, the services. We've got a cafe menu by daytime and so on. What's its usps, what's its pricing structure? We've got brand positioning and messaging and we also have some marketing. And then what's the website like? So that took seconds to do. And if you've got a prompt in your prompt Library, it takes 30 seconds to grab a prompt, put it in there, copy and paste the URL to the website, run that prompt within two minutes, you have a really powerful report, which is a complete summary of that business, which is going to give you huge amounts of information, ready for your first strategic planning session. Without tools like this, without those sorts of prompts, you could spend easily two or three hours doing research into a business, at least an hour. And we've cut that down to just a few minutes and the time it takes to read it. So let's move on to a different type of activity we might do. So we might do financial analysis. What might we do as part of financial analysis? Well, we could of course analyze its past financial statements and look for trends and so on. That's one thing we could do. We could also start to look at what might be the most useful ratios. And another one that you may want to do if you're working with another client is identify what are the key predictive indicators. The KPIs really important measures that a lot of small businesses don't measure. So you might want to have as part of your strategic planning session with the client a conversation about what are they measuring and what else could they possibly measure. And then what you might do as part of your advisory service going forward is you then might want to offer to help them create the measures, to even perhaps pull together measures every month and create a report, for example, showing the Trends in those KPIs. So let's do exactly that. I'm going to go back to my library of prompts and I'm going to look for one called KPI Creator. I can see it here and I'm just going to grab that to the clipboard. I'm going to go back to ChatGPT and paste that in here. So here is our KPI creator. Again, it's a long prompt and that's because as we know from prompt engineering using these models, the more specific your prompts are, the more specificity, the more clarity in your prompts, the better the outputs you'll get, the more predictable they'll get. So anything that you want to do frequently, like a particular report for a client, like the report just shown you, if you want to report on financial statements, if you anything you want to do frequently, then think of these as little mini systems that are going to save you huge amounts of time going forward. So this one creates KPIs and if I just scroll to the end, you'll see there's lots of variables here, placeholders, if you like that we could fill in the gaps here. But it's much better just to go straight to the end. It saves us time and it's asking for three variables. What is the client's name, what what's the website and what's the industry they are in? So I just need to answer those three and then I can run the prompt. So it's Kasmix restaurant and they're a UK restaurant and there's the website and I Always put variables in the prompts like that because it saves so much time. The reason I put these variables in is because it enables you to use each of these prompts standalone. I could start a brand new chat and run this prompt and that's why I'm putting these in. Hope that makes sense. Okay, let's actually, I'm going to run this one quickly and then while it's running, I'll just walk you through just a few of the things in this prompt. I'm changing the role in this case because one of the things we know from prompt engineering is that we get better results if we give ChatGPT a specific role to play. And so now I want it to play the role of a performance analyst. And what I want it to do is analyze the industry and identify the most appropriate KPIs. So more specifically, identify the key KPIs relevant to the business and then create a table. And I've been very specific with this example built into it because I want the table in a very specific format. Again, because when we specify this, for example, we can get a predictable outcome. We'll get exactly the table and the information that we need. So this example here is telling it exactly what we want it to look like. The example is quite long because I'm being very specific. And then we have our variables. So, interestingly, ChatGPT is still thinking about this one. Let me explain a couple of things here. So I've got action steps, and then, yes, so I want a table of my KPIs, and then I want to have a detailed description of each one. And then I've got some more broad instructions. So replace the variables in the curly brackets. This is Instructions. Now for ChatGPT, I wanted to fill out the KPI table and expand the detailed descriptions it's now producing for this restaurant. It's coming up with some possible KPIs that we could measure. And you can see it's a really, really good report. There's our table. Then we've got more detailed descriptions, which includes what it measures, why it's important, and some tips on how to measure it. So while it's doing that, let's go back here, let's pick a few. So it's a restaurant industry, so revenue per cover. Yep, that's a really good one. For restaurants, we could measure that. There's the calculation. That's what it measures. This is why it's important. And then we've got some tips on measurement in our table. We've got things like table turnover rate, probably the labor cost percentage will be a good one. Food cost percentage. These are all great KPIs for a restaurant business. So if you're having a conversation with business owners about what KPIs they should be measuring, this is really, really. This is a really powerful prompt with more details here of exactly how to measure them. So we could use it for financial analysis, we could use it for creating KPIs, for example. How else could we use it? Well, we could use it for strategic thinking. So one of the things we could do is we could run a SWOT analysis. Let me just show you that very quickly. And if I go back to here, I've got a prompt here for SWOT analysis, which I can copy to the clipboard. I can go. Once you've got your prompts all in a database or prompt library, it saves you so much time just grabbing them, copying and pasting. And in this case, I just have one variable I need to put in, which is the name of the business, which it already knows. I'll just put that in there. Oops. And so this one's just telling it to create a SWOT analysis. If you've never used SWOT before, it's really, really powerful. One of the things I always used to do with business owners is in this first strategic planning session is go through swot, which stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and Threats. And so what it's doing is based on everything it now knows about this business, it's coming up with what it thinks might be some possible strengths of kasmc. Five of them is coming up with five possible weaknesses. For example, a brand identity split because it's a steak restaurant by night, it's a cafe by day. So that's two different identities that causes a branding issue. From a marketing point of view, that could be a potential weakness. We've got opportunities in the industry or opportunities it could do. Like it could leverage its hot rock experience in its marketing. That's its stake on the stones. These are really powerful. And what I would do is I would do this as part of my homework. And then when I went to see KASMCs tomorrow, I would, as part of the strategic planning, I would then say, let's do a SWOT analysis. And I would go through these and say to the client, do you agree these sound like strengths? And if they agree, great. If they don't agree, cross them off the list. But then say to the client, so what else? There's five things that I think could be strengths. What do you think are your strengths? And we get the client to come up with the strengths, the weaknesses, the opportunities and the threats. What I used to find is if I just went to the client and said, what are your strengths? They would look at me blank. But if I went with a list, if I did some homework and came up and said, look, I've been thinking about your business and based on what I know about your business, I think these could be the things you're good at. It demonstrates that you understand the business, you care about them, you've done some homework, some preparation, and it also then starts to, it helps to. The conversation from that point onwards becomes much easier because the client's now got some examples. When you say, so what do you think are your strengths? This will then trigger them. But then the question is, so what do we do with SWOT analysis? And this is the same with any business consulting model. Whether it's swot, whether it's pests, whether it's pestle, whether it's the whatever, whichever one it is. These are just a starting point to identify where are they. Now what we then do in our advisory work is when we know where they are now we've got their goals, now we use that as a starting point to work with the client and brainstorm. Based on this SWOT analysis, what could we possibly do? What could be the strategies to get from here to there? And so the real power of this is when we then run a follow up prompt. So I just grab the cop that to clipboard, I go to ChatGPT, I paste that in. There's no variables for this one because I'm just following up on the SWOT analysis. I just copy and paste, send it. And what this one does is ChatGPT would now take each of those five strengths, five weaknesses, five opportunities, five threats, and for each of them come up with three possible ways to leverage the strength or the opportunity or to mitigate against the weakness or the threat. So if you do the math, that's going to give you 60 possible strategies, as you will see. So for the strengths, if we take its signature hot rock experience, it's giving us three possible strategies that we could use to build on that strength. If we take a weakness, if we look at the brand identity split weakness, it's giving us three possible strategies that we could do to mitigate that branding positioning, weakness. We could redesign the website homepage with two clear entry points, loads of great ideas in total. 60 ideas. You don't need 60 ideas. Your client's going to think you have spent hours doing research on this and it took you probably two or three minutes and you've got 60 ideas. Does that mean all the ideas have to be good ideas? No. The whole purpose of this is to start a conversation with a client to get their creative juices flowing. You probably won't even go through 60. You might take to the meeting what you think are five, ten great ideas and then say to the client, these are some ideas I've come up with. And do you like these ideas? What else do you think you could possibly do? What else could you possibly do to capitalize on your strengths? And the client will come up with the answer. Every business owner knows the answer to their problems. The trouble is every business owner is so stuck in the day to day business they don't take that step back. And that's the value of you as a business advisor, a business consultant. You get them to take some time out of their business to meet with you to look at the bigger picture. And what you also bring to the table is an outsider's perspective. And one of the things I've talking to accountants over the years, they often say I can't help my client in this industry or this industry. I don't understand engineering, I don't understand manufacturing, I've never run a restaurant before. That doesn't matter. That strength you bring is the outsider's perspective. You come at it from a different angle, you'll see things that they've never seen. It may, because you're a customer in the restaurant industry, you'll have seen things from a customer's perspective that they won't see because they're too much in the business. So what else can we do? What else could we do with these AI models? Well, another thing that we could do is, and I'm going to at this point run one that I did earlier, one of the things we could do is going back to the financial metrics, etc. So one of the things that we could do is if I switch across to here, we could create dashboards. With ChatGPT, we can create dashboards and we can do what if analysis. We can, we can look at what happens if their sales growth grows by 5%. We could look at what happens if they increase their margins by 1%. It'll re chunk all the numbers, give commentary and recommendations. So we can create dashboards very, very easily. And I'll be showing how to do that in the AI academy. What else can we do? I said that implementation is the highest form of Value so many things that we could do. For example, we could build a complete business plan. The problem with doing things like business plans with tools like ChatGPT is the limitation of the context window. If you ask it to create a business plan, it will be an okay business plan. But if you want a really powerful business plan, then you want to break it up your prompt into different sections. Let me explain what I mean. And this is the concept of what I call workflows. So far I've shown you prompts that are what's called one shot prompting. We give it a prompt and it gives us the answer that we want. But sometimes we need something that is more involved. Where if I just create business plan, sometimes we need a series of prompts that we run one after another. So if we're creating a business plan, for example, we can do that really, really quickly. But we'll want to make sure that that we do it one step at a time. So let me show you what I mean. Let's do this. This is part five. This is chapter five of a business plan I started earlier. I'm going to copy this to clipboard, go to ChatGPT and here's my Kasmc restaurant business plan that I'm building. And I'm now going to do the marketing section. So I just Ctrl v send paste and it's now going to create and write for me the marketing section of the business plan. This is now writing the marketing and sales strategy for Kasmix restaurants in a really good business plan. It's doing it in just seconds, as you can see. And if I just close that we can see that we can go to each section of the business plan that we can create one step at a time. These are all the chapters of the business plan. This is a, I think it's an eight step process, nine step process that you could just copy and paste each of these prompts. There's 10, one after the other. Within less than 10 minutes you have a full business plan that could take you several days to create. Anyway, that's it for me today. If you've enjoyed it, please give me a thumbs up and also let me know in the chat what is the best thing, the key insight you've learned today. I read every comment and hopefully I'll see you again on a live session. Bye for now.