The Future of Accounting Software and AI

Welcome to Accountants Law Pod, where accounting professionals and law firms converge, hosted by Linda Artesani, Sarah Prevost, and Steven Libhart.

Welcome back to the podcast, everyone, and I love the topic we're gonna do. I know we should— we're supposed to chit-chat about things, Steve. So we just got off the Law Lab and it was incredible because we went through a lot of ethical ethical conversations, which I think were very thought-provoking. And it's kind of funny that I, you know, when I put the whole thing together and Tierra helped me with the PowerPoint, it was just different scenarios that happen in real life for accounting professionals that work with attorneys and also with other clients. And I think that for us, it's interesting because where do we sit and whether we just sit back and not take an action, or do we step forward and take an action? And I think that's the part.

That was a really good Law Lab today. I think we had lots of interaction on it, and, and I really liked that you brought up all the scenarios because they were real-life scenarios. They really happened. And what would you do? And that was good feedback from everybody.

It was good because a lot of it was— what parts of it that I really liked was things like, what do you do when you get a client? And this has nothing to do with our topic today, but What do you do when you get a client and the client actually has a trust account that's messed up? You know the trust account is messed up beyond the scope of your work. What do you do? And I think that that is a conversation because they're out of compliance no matter what. And if their books go back to 2015, what do you do? So those are kind of the thought-provoking things we talked about in the Law Lab that I think why you want to join the Law Lab, because you get to talk about these with us and kind of reason them out. We had some great The conversations are amazing with the group, and I think that even if you don't really have answers for that, just listening to what people do, you learn, which makes it great.

Well, and I find I love watching the new people in the Law Lab and how they're just like sponges, you know, absorbing all this information. It's great. I love it.

And some people in our group don't have a lawyer client. They're just there because they want to get some lawyer clients, which I think is really awesome too. They're interested in this. in the niche. And, and I think that's awesome that they're there and they're learning. And before they dive in, that's better than diving in and then learning afterwards.

Well, you know, some of, some of that spills into what we're going to talk about today too, because, um, you know, when we bring up the subject of AI, people always say, oh my gosh, you know, I'm gonna lose my job. And, and we continually are reinforcing people in the legal industry that, you know, this is actually going to help complement the job that you do. If you treat it right.

And/or speed it up. So, so the future of accounting software and AI, and I think I love, I love this topic because to me, it's very, we have to pay attention to this. It's kind of one of those things that I have conversations with a dear friend of mine all the time about this because what's going to happen to our industry? I think it's actually going to affect the tax people before it affects us in a big way.

I agree.

Because a lot of that is just moving numbers out of the accounting software into the tax software. A lot of it's rigid to the point where it's this. If you have good— obviously, if you have good data from us, it's easy work, an easy lift to move it over. And I think that that is one of the areas you're going to see that happen more, where tax people need to up their game with advisory, because most of the times when they get the records from us, they don't really talk to the client. They just put their heads down, put the numbers in, hand the tax return over. Then they have the terrible job of saying, You owe the IRS X amount of dollars. And they have that awful job where they have to do that and then the person's mad at them. And, you know, that's something I think it's going to be. I mean, just look at what Intuit has done with TurboTax. I don't know if you watched the podcast with David Leary and Blake Oliver when they tested out the tax, doing a business tax return with TurboTax.

With Turbo? Oh, did they? Okay.

Really good, and maybe Tierra can find that. That was last year, but it was such a good one because they actually did it live and answered the questions and popped all the numbers in. And it, it was—I thought, oh, this is going to be a big failure—and actually it wasn't. And I was surprised at how well it handled it. And Blake is a tax person, so he knows what it's like to do the tax work, even though he's not practicing. I don't think he practices anymore, but it was very interesting, and they're friends of ours. So. I really enjoyed listening to that one because I was waiting for it to fail and it didn't fail. And I was kind of surprised. And I think if you are an accountant or a bookkeeper and you're just going to ignore it, which I've talked to a lot of people at the conferences that are like our age that are like, it won't affect me, I'm going to ignore it and ride the tide out. I don't know if we're all going to be able to ride that tide out.

I don't think we're going to be able to ride the tide out. And, you know, we're at the level that we're at with the numbers. for our clients. We're the nuts and bolts of their operation, and we have great opportunities to do the advisory services, to really ramp those up, really get involved in their businesses and create that value. I almost said value-added, but to create that value that's there that we haven't had to do before.

Right. I mean, you— back in the— back in our day when we used to start to do the work, we would get the papers, open the mail, have the paper on our desk, type everything in, all the reference numbers and everything in, print the check. The, the whole way we did work, which is in my book, actually, that little historical journey, which we forgot about, was very paper intensive, labor intensive.

Yeah.

And a lot of that stuff we don't do now. So in little small increments, we've ticked the, the needle forward. And I think ignoring AI is not a good thing to do no matter what age you are, even if you're in your 60s and you're still doing this work. I'd rather be that forward-thinking person that's looking forward to it than dreading it and saying, I'm gonna ride it out. Like some of the people that are sitting in desktop software going, ah, we'll just stay here. And they don't understand what they're missing. I think they don't realize what they're missing out on not being in the online space where they can automate so many pieces of the work that they cannot do in the desktop space. And just the fact that you don't have to log into a server and do all those things that you had to do when that's what we had to do a long time ago, and you forget about it because you're not doing it anymore. It's amazing when you start to go back and look at what we had to do and the computer wasn't on, say the power went out and the computer wasn't on so you couldn't work, and all the things that would happen in your day-to-day that we don't deal with at all anymore.

Because I like— I personally like the Google search. I like the— I love the AI that's popping up in there now, opposed to what we used to get.

And, you know, really, search is gonna be— I think somebody— I was listening to a podcast just recently on this exact topic. Well, it wasn't this topic, but it turned into part of it to talk about this, and it was the Maximum Lawyer podcast. If anybody's listening to us, you should certainly be listening to that one too, because it's one of my favorites. And they had an estate planning attorney on, and they talked to him about what was gonna happen in the future and what's happening with tech. And he said, I look at ChatGPT as a just really fast Google search. It just knows everything on Google, and it just kind of processes it really quickly and spits the data out. That's where it sits today. And then he talked about what's gonna happen with law firms and AI, which perked my ears up because I always try to equate it with our industry as well. And he talked about And then never consider this, and I thought this was genius the way he looked at it. Personal injury attorneys. So we have automatic auto, auto-driving vehicles. Go to San Francisco, you can hop in the back of a car that has nobody driving it, and it's going to take you all over the place wherever you want to go. Sarah got into one.

I can't get there with that yet.

Well, I'll tell you what, Steve, I've got the new Tesla, and my friend was visiting. We were in the parking lot after eating a nice dinner at the restaurant. And it's kind of funny. Tesla calls it the ASS, A-S-S, Auto Summon Something. So it's ASS feature. So I hit the button and told the car to— it finds me in the parking lot. And it was parked way over. We parked it way away.

So it came to you?

It came to me.

Oh my gosh.

It drove. It turned. The flashing lights turned on. It started up and it pulled out of the parking spot, came around the parking lot and came to where I was standing. And I got in the car.

Wow, I love it. So it's the Jetsons. We're there.

So what's really cool about it when you think about it, and this is what this attorney was saying, he said, so what's going to happen to personal injury attorneys? Because this— the data on auto driving, self-driving vehicles, is there's less car accidents. So less car accidents means less clients that are going to need Personal injury attorneys. There'll always be a need for them. But if your, your business is based on a lot of car accidents, and there's some out there that's all they do, that's their specialty, right? They sub-niche down. What happens to their business?

Yeah, you're right.

That's not that far away. I don't think.

I'm an Airstreamer, as you know. And have you seen that GMC commercial where the truck, the guy lets— he's gonna— he's towing his RV. Behind him, and he lets go of the steering wheel and he's just doing his thing with the radio and all that. And down the highway they're going, and I'm like, oh my gosh.

Okay, so that's the thing with the Tesla. Okay, so we tried it when we were going to— where were we going? Might have been when we were going to, uh, Reframe over in Fort Lauderdale. And I tried the self-driving, and it's so funny, right? Because it's a new car and it's— I haven't had this service turned on to play with it much, and Because I had him in the car. I'm like, well, let's try this because, you know, you're a nerd and a geek. And he's like, I'm just going to go to sleep while you're driving. Not driving, but driving, because normally he probably wouldn't do that if it was me driving. And we're sitting there and I was at a light and the lights in Florida last 5 minutes. They're really long. So I took my hands off the wheel and it went beep beep beep after like 3 minutes. I'd taken my hands off the wheel. Now we're stopped at a light. I'm like, oh, that's weird. I went a little further up the road to the next red light. Beep beep beep. And then it came on the screen that I had a demerit. You only get 5 demerits and they take away your ability to play around. And he's like, you already got a demerit on your car. Oh my gosh. You're supposed to have your hands on the wheel the whole time. So if you at least have to have one hand, even at a stop. And like I said, the red lights in Florida, it's really weird how long they are.

Does the car know when the light turns green?

Yeah.

Oh my goodness.

You're sitting at the light and you're like going for Facebook because they load very long and, and the light turns green, it goes ding if you don't move fast enough.

So let's, let's take this into the next step then. You've brought up some really cool examples. Now let's talk about an attorney filing, writing a brief for court. AI is going to be that intuitive eventually.

Yeah. So it can't be generative where it makes stuff up, but it's gonna be a system in place where it can do that work for you, which means now they're gonna be able to do other— so I look at it this way. Whatever AI does take over for us, it's gonna make us have the ability to have more time to do something else.

That's right.

So we're not gonna— although my daughter thinks, because she watched the whole thing on the robots, Elon Musk's robots, which freaks her out. I think they're super cool that everybody's gonna have a robot in their house. For us, that's great. We don't have to move into a nursing home. We can have a robot who we don't have to deal with anything. That's like having a dog. They'll love you forever, right? They don't talk back, and they don't snore, and they don't chew ice, and you're perfectly fine.

Yeah.

So, but so she thinks it's horrible. I think it's great.

Yeah.

We're moving towards— she— it freaks her out. But if that's what we're moving towards, what she says, what happens when the robots do everything and we just live off a stipend from the government? I go, well, that's a scenario But I don't think it'll be that because people want to do things.

Human beings have always found ways to make money when things change. I'm not worried about that at all. But the analogy, the comparison here now, you said you got a demerit for letting your hand off the wheel. Do you remember that story we had a few— oh, you got 2 of them. Do you remember that story we had a few months ago where we stumbled across that article where the attorney Used AI to file a brief, and he got— I think he got—

That is—

I think he got disbarred. So to your analogy of keeping your hands on the wheel, don't just rely right now especially that AI is the Bible, the verdict, whatever, and that it's the end-all be-all. You've got to look at what you just did in there and make sure that it's correct. As an example, I have— I had to write a difficult Email to a client yesterday.

Oh, you're so good at that. Isn't it great how—

I'm good at that, but I had to go through and, and massage it the way I like to talk.

Yeah. It's not plug and play for the most part.

Exactly.

You throw it, you write it yourself, throw it in and say, make this sound more professional. Make this sound— because sometimes I'll write something, it's not—

Give me another example. I don't like this one. And— Yeah.

You know, I'll say, this isn't very— can you make this have more clarity and be more professional? It's my favorite prompts when I use that. And it spits it out, and you still kind of have to tweak it a little bit, but it's way better. But the thing that I worry about with that is, like, I don't have to think now. The part of that means I don't have to think a lot. And how do you get— like, so we have lived our life where we've had to think. What happens to the people who, like, as this gets better, they're not having to do the things that we did? So, for example, reading a map. When we were kids, that's how you got around, right? You read a map. Right. You opened up this big map. Now nobody reads a map anymore. And I saw—

If you can find a map.

Right. I saw an article about map reading and how good it is for our brains because it makes us think. And I'm one of those people, I'm so directionally challenged that I would actually have to take the map and, oh, we're going this way. And I'd have to turn the paper to follow the map in my brain because I had trouble with that. So map skills, and they actually do this for Alzheimer's patients, that if people are starting to lose their memory, they actually do this where they take them on this retreat in California, I think, and they give them maps. And because it's using a part of the brain that we no longer use anymore, and it kind of lights up those areas of the brain. So I think when it comes to AI in accounting, some of the tasks that we do now, and one of the things when we were at Scaling New Heights last year, well, this year, 2024, but it was in summer, or maybe it was 2 years, it was 2 years ago. They got the guys from Digits got up And did a whole presentation and showed how they used chat and they showed how it couldn't add.

I remember that. Yeah. Yeah.

That's the answer we wanted to hear, but it didn't give us a mathematical— it was incorrect. And if you threw the balance sheet or whatever into it, it didn't analyze things right because it couldn't do the math piece. Now, from what I've heard, there's some new AI out there that can Because so there's a lot of different types of AI. There's AI that makes pictures. They've got AI that writes music now. So they've got some that are like an artist and can draw. And what do you do with that if it's created by that? And if they're taking something else and seeing something else and creating it, what about the original artist? Where does that land? Same thing with music. If it's got all the music in its head from everywhere, say it's got Spotify in its, in its database. And it's— you tell it to create music and it creates something. Who owns that something?

Exactly. And there's been a lot of news on that lately.

Right. So this new AI that I think I just heard about this week, um, on a podcast that I follow that's amazing, that's actually AI doing the podcast, which is really freaky. Um, they said that this new software, and I forgot the name of it, it wasn't Minstrel, it was something like that where it can see pictures It actually looked at a receipt from a restaurant. So the receipt came, you're eating dinner, and you could put it on there, and it read the receipt and calculated the tip by, like, looking at the picture of the receipt. So it didn't have any of the data points behind it. It just actually looked at the picture and figured it out. So it's got the ability, it's getting the ability to be able to do that. And there's so much that goes on with AI between the different types of AI, the different corporations that are behind the AI. But for the most part, with the accounting software, what we see is it does things. I don't see it in a lot of software. I see it in like Ignition has it, which is our contract writing software. And again, the best— that's probably one of the best use cases of it where it takes it. I can take what I want to sell a client and throw it in there and say, make this better. And it creates a much better presentation for a client. It rewords everything. In a contract way. And I don't know where it gets its data from, but it does a great job with that. But I've seen other places where AI has been added to software where it doesn't do a heck of a lot. It's like, let's get in, you know.

Let's look at this. This comes to mind with an attorney. LexisNexis and Thomson Reuters and those platforms, as they develop their AI more and more, attorneys are creative people in finding ways to handle disputes and resolutions and things like that. And I feel like as AI gets stronger and stronger, they're going to be given a lot more opportunities and a lot more examples of how to resolve things and make more comfortable decisions in their individual cases. I truly believe in that with AI. It's just not there yet.

Right.

But as long as you're double-checking everything with all the data that you're getting, you have this great opportunity to really shine as an attorney with AI in different platforms as you're doing research on a case.

The attorney that was on this show on Maximum Lawyer, he said people who have a job that their, their whole law firm attorney hat job is filling out paperwork, those are the jobs that are going to go first because You're putting numbers in, you knowing where to put data or names or whatever, that's gonna go. And he's talking, he's an estate planning attorney. So he was talking in respect to that. He said, but the part of our job, somebody comes in, they don't have an estate and who's gonna get Uncle Johnny's tractor and trying to figure out by talking to the people, is that something that the AI is gonna be able to do? Because that's the personal—

Oh yeah.

Part of the job. that probably is gonna always be handled by humans to be able to do that. Where if it's a job where they're doing a house sale, I could see some of that even with blockchain. So you could get some of that contract stuff in blockchain where it's set in stone, where you're just putting in— if it's just putting in the data, it's just like the tax returns, right? If it's just—

Right.

The numbers. And there's a way to connect that. I can see that. I still look at bank feeds even in our accounting software with QuickBooks and I go, wow, really? That's what you came up with? And then we have like RightTool, which is added on to QuickBooks for us. We pay for RightTool and RightTool has all these tools in it that can send it out and you can go search in just one click and it takes you out there. And there's so many buttons that tweak QuickBooks to make QuickBooks better and save us time and Features that it does, all these things that you can't do within the program of QuickBooks that they've figured out how to do outside the program that allows us to do things that we can shut off that, you know, that annoying box when you make a change and you do want to make it go through, but you have to click like 3 more times to make it go through because you have to approve a kind of a—

Right, right.

That off by using WriteTool. So those are things that I kind of liken that to some of that is, I mean, that's obviously programming, not AI, but the fact that they're on top of all that stuff. But the AI is baked in with ChatGPT, is baked in. I can take that on the financial statement, run it through and let it analyze the data. Now I have to use my brain because I've done this for a while and I wanna look and say, okay, so it looked at 2 years worth of numbers and processed the differences and it can just go in and look like, all right, your advertising was here last year. This seems high. And it just writes a thing about this seems high. We should investigate why. Very generic language that's in there. But it's something that I don't have to now do manually, right? Which helps save time. And that's the whole point of it, is saving a lot of time. And I just find it— I find it exciting. But then you really go deep into, like, when you go into the robots and the things that are going to happen with it, and then probably we're going to live and see it, Steve. We're going to see it too.

Oh, we're going to see it.

What do we— I mean, I'm watching that stupid rocket come down into the— I'm like, oh my God. Oh my God. So, well, that's—

Linda, you and I, 20 years ago, we were hopping in the car and going to clients' offices and doing work in their offices on QuickBooks Desktop. And in 20 years, look at how this has all moved to where, uh, 20 years ago we would have gone Zoom. What, what is that? I'm afraid of that. That's never going to work. And look at us now. You know, it's— we always find ways to work within these things and with them. And, um, AI is not going to go away.

You think about it, Steve, just the fact, like you just said, with Zoom, we wouldn't be able to do what we're doing here. Exactly. Without Zoom, I probably wouldn't even know you without Zoom because we lived in a little bubble of where we lived.

Yeah. Yeah.

Sarah and known Sarah and had a business with Sarah. How would I ever have a business with somebody in Oregon when I live in Florida?

Exactly.

And another, you know, all the way across the country. How do I have this, this relationships? And all of that's changed. Even dating's changed. When I look at my daughter at her age, I mean, she's— the windows open up with all the dating apps and software that meeting people that she never would have met because that exists.

You know, well, you can't, you can't find a mailbox anymore. You can't, you can't go to a bar and meet somebody anymore. You know, it's all changed.

No, because even if you do meet them, what's the first thing you're going to do? You're going to go on your phone and research them.

Right, right.

Everybody's sitting in the bar on their phone. So yeah, absolutely. It's— I, I love, I love where AI is going. And you know, you— I have you to thank because you're the one who kicked me into the AI arena. You're like, get in there. I don't know if you remember that or not. It was about a year ago, and I love it. Absolutely love it.

Well, you love digits, and that's one of the best use cases where they're really using AI in a way that I think is really fascinating. And I want to see where that goes.

I do too.

Building a GL and all of that. And every time I hear anybody, so many people want to build a GL, it's like, oh, it's such a big job. You can't— what everything QuickBooks has done is hard to do.

Right.

Short period of time. But yeah, it's, it's funny. But, you know, you never know. Maybe with AI they'll be able to do it.

Exactly. Exactly. I love it.

It's a really great topic. And I think, I think a lot of times we look at the software and we see what's happening. It's just an exciting time. And I, I wish I could think of some other great examples of where I've seen AI. I think I've seen it— well, Dext has some of it. So I've seen it there, which is a software that we use for accounting. I'm trying to think of where I've seen it. I know— oh, Duo in Clio is another good use case, which I think that's just really It's going to save a client time. I wish they'd bring the price down.

Wait a minute. What are we talking about here?

Clio Duo, which is the AI in Clio.

Okay.

So that's really exciting. And what we saw—

What is it doing? What is it?

It's actually retrieving documents faster. So you've got Clio, you've got all the documents for your clients are inside the program. And it does a lot more than that. But the little pieces that I've seen with it, we do have one client, I think, that has it. It's expensive to have because they make you add it to every user, even if the user really isn't going to have a need for it. I wish they'd fix that a little bit. And the price is expensive because it's new, but they're, they're really developing something I think that's going to be incredible because they've got the money. They're a big company and they are really invested in that because they know that's where their software needs to move towards. It's really cool what they're doing with it.

If you and I were 2 attorneys and we were using that within our law firm, And you came to me and you said, didn't you have a case that did XYZ? We could actually plug it in and it would go back and say, this is what was ruled. This is what— yeah, I like that a lot.

It's really amazing. And I wish it was included in their software for like $10 more a user license. It's expensive, but I understand that. I mean, it's expensive because the fact that it's new and they've had to probably devote a lot of money towards it. The person at Clio that's like the head of that whole thing, incredible lady who's really, I mean, I watched her presentation and I could see her excitement just talking to her about it, to see her excitement about what she's doing. And the same thing goes with what they're doing even at Intuit, same thing. They're very excited about it. And the fact that the people behind it that are working with it are excited, they want to see it land well. Obviously you have to make sure it works well on the product. I hopefully will see the price come down a little bit in Clio and then they will see it with more client files. It's hard to sell unless you can explain what it does and how it's going to save time. So if you have staff searching for things and you're paying them whatever, it might pay for itself. I think that's the kind of the way we have to tell people to get them to buy into it. And sometimes that's hard to do, but I think it's going to be a great value add to software if it's done well. And I think in the case of Clio Duo, it's done well, and I think it's going to be Amazing to see. Give it a few years, we're going to be like, how did we live without this thing? You know?

Well, a new attorney is always so scared if they're making the right decision, if they're getting the right research, those sort of things. And, you know, how good would it feel if I was one of those new attorneys just fresh out of school and I used AI and I did the research that I needed to do, and then I went into my mentor partner and said, okay, this case, it landed this way, this case went that way, this is what I've learned about. And they're going to go, where did you get all of that? How did you know? I didn't see you walk into the library and pull a book off the shelf, you know. So I, I, oh my gosh, I think the, you know, it's wide open what could happen here.

And if you get the right— there's so many different AI. There's Claude, Claude AI, there's ChatGPT, there's— what's Google's?

That's where I get lost, is all in all the various ones right now. It's like another one will hit me and I'll be like, oh, what does this one do? You know.

Yeah, Gemini. There's Gemini. So there's different named ones, and they all have their different things that they do. Some of them do things better than others, so you really want to research that. I know with the one that I use, which is you.com, that one is a whole bunch of them rolled in together, and it's $20 a month. It's not expensive, very affordable. What I use it for a lot of times is just like ideas of things or writing articles. I'll put it in, let me give me an idea for writing an article, and I'll have it kind of throw something out, then I'll put it in Google and kind of make it my own, and then put it back and say, you know, make this in the right order. Because sometimes I write— a lot of times I write on my phone as I'm walking. I'll write an article, and then I'll plunk it in and say, here, put this in a better order. And then it will do that, and then you still have to tweak it. But I think a lot of times with that, if I'm doing an article and I want research that I get the data points out, and I'm like, okay, I wanna show in this article, cite some areas where, like, I see that The billable hour is going away or something, and then it'll bring other articles in and give me little links. And that's what I like about it because then I can refer back in my articles to somebody else's article where they've done the research. And it's, it's, it's good. So I think that that's a great use case. So what we're using AI for now and what we'll be using for it in another year might be completely different, and we might have this topic.

If you come across one that will exercise for me and help me lose 30 pounds, I'm in.

You want the magic pill then, huh?

Magic pill AI. And somebody's going to invent it one of these days.

They will. They will. I watched something on TV the other day, and they had like an AI in the kitchen, and you just on your phone put the— your recipe, you picked your recipe, and it cooked it for you and spit it out. Here's your meal. And it had all of it. All of— all the ingredients were inside this thing.

I love it. So I love it. There's the Jetsons again.

Right. They were having their time in the '60s.

Yeah, exactly. Great conversation.

I love this.

For sure.

To support the Accountants Law Pod, don't forget to like, share, and leave a review. And if you haven't already, hit that subscribe button on YouTube or wherever you find your favorite podcasts. If you have questions or topic requests, shoot us an email at info@accountantslawpod.com or send us a message through our website, accountantslawpod.com. To join our weekly Accountants Law Lab mastermind sessions, head over to accountantslawlab.com to sign up. And if you need help modernizing your law firm, pick up Linda's books, which you can find linked in the show notes below.

Awesome. Well, great topic, Steve. I know we're doing this one again. Maybe we'll grab Sarah and do the next one.

Yeah, we got to get Sarah in on this one. I know she would totally feed off of this.

She'd have a whole other different— probably have way more details to bring into the conversation too. Yeah.

So Sarah, when you watch this, we're missing you.

Yes, we are. We are. But she's doing big things right now.

In fact, she's in my city today, so—

She is so close. Yeah, yeah.

Now, I didn't get to see her this time, so—

No. Next time she's going to be popping into Denver again for sure. She always does.

Yeah. Well, thank you, everybody. Have a great one.

Bye, everybody.