Transforming Your Accounting Firm with ChatGPT: Boost Your Growth with these Practical Uses

Wow. Everybody is talking about ChatGPT right now and it's going to have a huge impact on the accounting profession. Whether you're an accountant or a bookkeeper, it's going to have a big impact. And so in this video we're going to be sharing ideas of how you can use it in your accounting firm. So let's go to that video now.

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Welcome. I'm Mark Wickersham, founder of the Value Pricing Academy. And in this video we're going to share with you some really powerful thoughts around ChatGPT, which has taken the world by storm at the time we're filming this in early 2023. Now before I bring in our in house expert on this, Emily Cross, who you've met probably from the previous videos, this is video seven in this six part video series, marketing 101 for accountants and bookkeepers. Let me just start off by saying, just in case you're not aware, what is all the fuss about? What on earth is chatgpt? Well, just a few facts about it. It was created by OpenAI, which was founded way back in 2015. It was founded by a number of people. The main people that you will have heard of is perhaps Sam Altman and Elon Musk. And collectively the founders invested a billion dollars in this business. And ChatGPT became publicly available in November 2022 and it's taken the world by storm. So for example, in January 2023 Microsoft invested, get this, $10 million in this platform because they saw the potential of it and they built it into Bing. Remember Bing? We used to think it was a dinosaur and now it's got Google panicking. So Google then launched Bard. And here's the other interesting thing is in just a few months ChatGPT got over 100 million users. Now that's extraordinary.

Nobody's ever achieved that before. In second place on the league table, well behind was how many users that TikTok acquired in just a few months. But ChatGPT has just gone crazy. Crazy. And so this is something that in our profession we have to be aware of. There's threats and there's opportunities. So let's bring in our head of marketing and expert on ChatGPT within the value Pricing Academy. We've got Emily here. Emily and the rest of our team have spent a lot of time going deep on this because it's going to have such a huge impact on the profession. And in this video we're going to go through some of the key things you want to be aware. We're going to share some user case studies, things that you can use it for. But also we've also done a live stream, we've done a full 60 minutes, so we recommend, and I'll tell you details at the end, but we're going to go into even more detail in a follow up live stream, so watch out for that. Emily, Emily, over to you. Let's talk about first of all very quickly.

What are the big benefits? Why do people, why do accountants and bookkeepers? Why should they be looking at ChatGPT? What are some of the big benefits to them?

Yeah, so it's a language model, so it's really good at basically anything writing based. So when it comes to content marketing, which is what we've been talking a lot about in this series, using something like ChatGPT is going to help save you so much time when it comes to writing because you can just tell it what you want it to write and it will churn out, you know, a thousand word blog within seconds. And that's something that might have taken you an hour to sit down and write. So it's going to save you so much time and at the same time it's going to make you blogs and whatever content, social media content that you ask it to make. It's going to be content that is optimized for search engines and stuff like that. So it's going to be really well worded and great content that's built for you essentially in seconds and you know, going on from that. You can tell it to write a blog and then ask it to write 10 social posts to go with that blog and then, and then 20 tweets and stuff. So you, you can just create three. So much content in such a short amount of time. And I think that it really is going to be the key benefit to, especially if something, if writing is not something that you're very confident in. You know, accountants and bookkeepers are good with numbers, but maybe writing is something that is a bit more of a struggle. So it's something you can pass to ChatGPT and it's going to do it for you quite a good quality as well. The main thing that I'm using it for, which I think is really, really beneficial, is brainstorming and researching. So you can ask it to help you build a list and you could do this in your personal and business as well. But for the business sense, you know, if you want to brainstorm a couple of content ideas for blogs that you're going to write, you can just ask it, you know, give me 10 blog ideas and then it'll make the blogs for you as well. So really, really useful. And I use it more so now than I do. If I go to Google to search for something, if I want to have a more nuanced and more specific search.

I can put in a lot more detail. And rather than, you know, if I Google something and then I come up with loads and loads of blog articles, I have to scan through a couple to try and find something that's kind of relevant to the answer I was looking for. I can use ChatGPT, put in the exact criteria I'm looking for, and it will find me the exact answer to that exact question. I'm not going to have to scour through lots of different pieces of content. So it saves you time again in research and brings you a much more specific answer to that. So those are just a couple of the benefits and a couple of the ways I'm using it as well right at the minute.

So, yeah, yeah, it's incredible what it can do.

As is this whole world of artificial intelligence, which, by the way, isn't brand new. Artificial intelligence has been around for 70 years now, but it's really gathering momentum now. And you may well have seen that people talking about research studies showing that various professions will disappear. Huge threats to bookkeepers, huge threats to accountants. But the reality is, yes, it will be a threat to those that don't react to the times. And at the same time, we see it as being a huge opportunity. But you need to be riding this wave. You need to be, you need to be ahead of the curve on this one. So it's got huge benefits.

But there are three things that you really need to know. There are three critical things when it comes to taking advantage of this. The opportunity that you can get from ChatGPT.

And as Emily says, lots of benefits there. We're using it all the time. Saving time is a huge one. But let's talk about really, what are the three things that you need to know, the three critical things. And the first one is you have to understand the limitations. There are limitations. At the time of doing this video, they just released ChatGPT 4.4.0. It's just come out. There are limitations, though, and so we'll share a couple of those. And so the first limitation is human bias. Human bias. And there are two aspects to this human bias.

When they were building the model, when OpenAI were building the model, there were really two sides to the software, two parts to the software that they had to deal With. And so the first part of it is it needs to have all this knowledge. Where did that come from? Well, it came from stuff that's out there. It scraped the Internet, it's pulled together all this information, all of this knowledge. And the problem with that, the limitation is that knowledge is subject to bias. We know that from if we do Google searches right now, not everything is factually correct. There's some things that are not right. And so Chat GPT has pulled together his knowledge from stuff that's got this human bias in it. And then the second aspect of it, when they were generating it, the software, they had to train it. They had to train it. So who was training it? Humans. And they trained it by putting in prompts, asking questions, and when the answers came out, they would essentially say whether the answer was correct or not.

And at first a lot of it wasn't correct. And over time the technology software learned from that. But again, it's subject to human bias because it may well be that it came up with the wrong answer and the human said, no, that's correct. And so it's being trained wrong. And so we must bear that in mind. And what that essentially means to you, what that means is that when something comes out of ChatGPT.

You must still use your professional judgment to not just take it as read, but to fact check it to make sure you're happy with the output. And that's really important. Emily, I know you've got one or two other limitations as well. There are many limitations, but that you need to be aware of. Let's pick two more. Emily.

Yeah, so two more. I mean, the first one I would say is the point that we've mentioned previously when we talked about website copy is this idea of differentiation is if Everybody is using ChatGPT, then how are you going to make your blog look different to somebody else's? So it's, it's, you know, the way I recommend using it is kind of using it as a base for your blog and then you go in with your, with your professional output and you, and you tweak it and you change it and it can help give you a good starting point, or it might give you a template, fill in the blank kind of things, and then you can go in and tweak it and add your own personal touch to it to kind of get around that. But differentiation is going to be a big thing to make sure that you're standing out. And then another point kind of similar to what you're saying is that it's going to build you. If you ask it to write a blog or something, you're going to want to then take some time, read over it, make sure it does read properly and make sure it does actually look accurate. Because yeah, you need to fact check it. But also does it read well from a human perspective? You know, has it churned out just a load of random words, or is it a human perspective? And also there are these kind of questions of is AI generated content going to rank on Google? At the minute, I believe it doesn't matter if it's AI generated and it will still rank quite high on Google. But eventually they are probably going to start changing that and making it more so that the human content. So if AI is detected in your content, it might not rank as well. So there are ways to get around that. But that's another thing to consider, especially when you're going in and differentiating it to make it more personal, to add your own touch and add your own tone to things as well. Because if you've got your own tone in your business and the way that you write, then it might kind of produce something that's not quite the right tone for you. So going in and changing it is going to be a part of the process as well.

Awesome. Great. But with all of these limitations, as long as you're aware of them, you have to be aware and some of these limitations, over time it'll just get better and better and better. There's already a huge improvement in version 4 over 3.5, and that will continue. So there's some of the limitations you need to be. The first thing you must be aware is be aware of them. So the second thing, the second challenge I think is because it's so new, it only was released to the public in November 2022, even though it was developed way back started developing back in 2015. It's only been recently available to the public at the time of doing this video. And where a lot of people are struggling with it is, yes, they can see this huge power of it. But what do you use it for? What are the use cases? How can we use it practically in real life? And that was certainly my issue when I first looked at it. And a lot of people use it for just silly things. It's a bit like when we first got Siri or Alexa. We'd test it with asking stupid things and then we start to figure out some practical uses that we could, we could use it for. So what we're going to do is in this, we're just going to share with you a handful of use cases, three or four things that you could do. We're going to focus in this video specifically on marketing things because this six part video series is about marketing. There are things beyond marketing and we will share some other thoughts on those in a longer and separate livestream that Emily and I are doing together. But let's just quickly give you a few ideas. We'll do a couple each. So the first one I know, actually Emily's already touched on it, but the first one is in content marketing, a key part that is blog posts. It is really, really powerful for saving you hours of time with blog posts. And so we're certainly using it for that. But you also have to be aware of some of the challenges. You have to be aware of the problems of things like how do you make it in your style so it sounds like you've written it? How do you avoid the AI detectors?

You can get your blog post scored against AI detectors and there are things that you can do to change it so that it passes the AI detectors. So as long as you're aware of those things, it's a great tool for creating blog posts really fast. Crazy fast actually. Emily, do you want to share another practical use case?

Yeah, another. Another great place to use it is social media content. So you can ask it to write. It might be Facebook posts, it might be LinkedIn posts and it will do things, you know, you can add it to, ask it to add emojis and things that are relevant. So rather than you scouring through and trying to find stuff, it'll do it for you and it's all going to be optimized content that's really, really useful. And then another one that I find particularly annoying is Twitter because the character limit is quite short. So you can just say make me a series of tweets. Here's a blog, write me 10 tweets and it will generate that for you. It can include the good hashtags.

And make sure that the content fits nicely into that character limit and uses up as much as the character limit. So that's another really use as well. So all various kind of forms of social media content.

Yeah. Awesome. Another one, a third idea for you is it's great for coming up with content ideas. So if you want to create, let's say a series of blog posts you want to write, you want to create blog posts for the next three months and you've got no idea what they will be about, then you can ask ask ChatGPT to come up with content ideas for blog posts based around your keywords. The key things you want to talk about, for example, managing cash flow, it can come up with ideas for you. Emily, do you want to share another one?

One that I've actually been using it a fair bit for is actually making systems. So when you're in business, if you can systemize a process, you know, here's how we deal with it. We do xyz.

It can help you kind of make a quick system for something. So if I'm using certain tools to, let's say edit the podcast that we do and I have a process of doing that and I use specific tools, I can go to it and say I'm using these tools and I need to edit the podcast and then upload it to this space. Can you make me a system for doing that? And it'll write you up a 10 step process of whatever you ask it to do. And you might need to go in and tweak it based on your personal systems, but that's really great because then you can put that in a file and if you hire new members of your team, you've got the systems there and that's all in place and that saves you a bunch of time as well. So that's a great way of using it.

Brilliant. Awesome. So there's three things you need to be aware of. Number one is the limitations. Number two, you need to have some use cases. How can you use it? Number three, the third one is something we're going to, we're going to talk much more about on a separate video. It's a live stream that Emily and I have done. And that's what's called prompt engineering is the common term that's, that's being coined at the moment. Essentially the idea is this, is that as you probably heard, the phrase garbage in equals garbage out. If you want to get better outputs, if you want to get better results from using ChatGPT, then it's all about better prompts. You have to ask it the right things. It's just the same as dealing with any.

Human, an employee. If you don't give very good instructions, you won't get the results that you want. And so we have to understand how do we create great prompts. It's a bit like learning a new language. There are things that we need to skills we need to learn to make sure we ask the right things. We're going to go talk about this much more on a separate livestream. But Emily, we'll just Let me just give one practical tip in the area of great prompts.

So being really specific, I mean, when we're talking about marketing, the very first thing we talked about was an ideal client profile. So if you're wanting it to write a blog or social media or something like that, telling it who you want it to target, you know, if you're writing something in there, say I want you to write this blog post and I want you to target accountants of bookkeeper. Make it specific for accountants or bookkeepers. Then it will, it will, you know, make sure that the wording speaks directly to that ideal client. So that's a great thing to always include in your prompts when you're asking it to write something.

Wow. Thank you so much, Emily. I want to wrap up with, I want to share with you what is the big content marketing problem? You see, we've talked a lot about content marketing this series and we've now talked about how we can use ChatGPT to save hours of time with creating content. But I believe there's a big problem that people aren't talking about yet. So I'm going to share that with you. But before I do that, just a few things to to wrap up with. And firstly, of course, if you've found this valuable, please click the thumbs up button. Please like it. Please feel free to share this video with your team. Subscribe. Hit the bell. If you've got any comments, put them in the comments below. If you've got any questions, put them there. I've also put in the description for you some links to some free stuff including. Including, as I've mentioned a few times, Emily and I have run a 60 minute livestream where we've gone to much more detail about how to create great prompts and practical use cases and so much more. We'll put the link to that live stream so you can watch that if you missed it live. And last, let me just share with you what I see as being the big content marketing problem. And that is.

At the moment there's a huge opportunity. We can use tools like ChatGPT. And there are other AI tools as well. It's not the only one. We can use them to save huge amounts of time with creating content and you should be taking advantage of this and using this tool. But what happens if all accounting firms, if all firms of accountants and bookkeepers have all got ebooks talking about they're the experts in helping people manage their cash flow and grow their business? What if we've got so much content out there Everybody's everybody, every accounting firm is now doing content marketing, then it's going to mean that if we're all doing the same thing, it's not as powerful. And I believe that as we see more and more content blog posts, for example, getting out there, there will be an increasing importance of, of a very specific type of content marketing, and that's video marketing. I believe video marketing is going to be more important than ever before because in our profession as accountants, we're in the relationship industry. Your clients are clients of you because of your personality. And you need to get your personality across. And videos and live streams and webinars are the best way to do that. And that's why after the pandemic back in 2020, we created something called the Online Live Academy. I'll put the link below what we do in the online Live academies. I teach you how to be more confident, how to be more professional in front of a webcam so you give a better impression when you're meeting people for the first time on for example, zoom calls. I teach you how to communicate more effectively. I teach you how to be more effective and confident with doing video and how you could then do webinars, live streams, how you might even build a business club. Many of my students, people like Jessica Fox, tell me now that video is one of the most powerful ways for her winning brand new clients. She has a waiting list of people wanting to work with us. So video is going to be the place this is going. You have to use video. Check out the link below for the Online Live Academy and click on that link and I'll see you on that live stream where we're going to chatgpt in in more detail. I hope you've enjoyed this six part series on marketing. 101 for accountants. Let me know if you've got any comments below. I would appreciate that. See you on a live session sometime. Bye for now.