What's Next For Accounting? - Issue #143

Author

Jason Staats
July 11, 2024

💻 A New Way to Build Your Own Software (with AI) in Minutes

The best AI language model today is Sonnet 1.5, from the team at Claude. But a recent update that’s better than all that? Artifacts.

Think of it like a mini computer inside your browser. Ask it to create a document, a website, an image, a flowchart, and it appears live next to your chat panel.

Continue to modify it by chatting with the assistant, share it publicly to non-Claude users, and let other users remix your Artifact.

And the unlock for accountants is it means you can build software to do custom jobs for you in minutes. Like this one:

Plug Buddy

Your client either didn’t post last year’s adjustments or broke something between now and then. I can’t be bothered to determine how or why it happened, so it’s plug time.

Here’s an app that took me 15 mins to make. It imports their TB + my TB, calcs the difference, and presents a journal entry to fix it.

Plug Buddy™

Wild! I may rebuild this one live and post to social, just to show how easy it is. My mind is frankly spinning at the possibilities.

And YOU can use this Artifact here, you don’t even have to be a Claude user. I’m using QBO excel trial balance exports that I saved to CSVs. Your mileage may vary with other formats.

Stuff you should know:

💎 This Week's Sponsor

Join our community of 450+ accounting professionals

📅 This Week

  • I created a guide for all the different ways you could put firm pricing on your website, and identified my 2 favorite approaches

  • I used complexity scores in my firm to break down the barrier between preparer and reviewer, making everyone in the firm a reviewer, and giving the team a linear path to more technical work. Here’s how I did it Video Audio

  • Big news! I’m on Facebook

  • Feeling overwhelmed? This is the mental exercise I use to get back to what’s most important 👇

  • This week saw the high profile launch of Runway - a finance platform that sits atop your accounting ledger to help normies understand what’s going on

  • This college-aged accounting student just took over their mom’s firm Video Audio

  • An exploration of the different ways you can charge for catchup work (accounting or tax), and a few traps to avoid Video Audio

  • Top AI research tool Perplexity launched Pro Search for advanced technical research. Initial testing: it’s mind blowingly good. Will break this down in next week’s newsletter

🔮 Q&A

AI’s capable of delivering finished work to clients - but should we let it? Link
Obviously the fact we can doesn’t mean we should. A good rule of thumb is to start and end projects with a human touch. Can we use AI to assist a human in the process of delivery? Absolutely. In this newsletter I shared how I used AI to script financial statement delivery videos. But take extra care when considering removing yourself from client touch points.

Can AI help me work out how to standardize my services? Link
Potentially for ideation, but this is a good example of where YOU making the rules will make AI more effective. Our goal should be to put AI on rails. There's doing something right, there's doing something wrong, then there's doing something the way that I expected you to do it. Design the system so it can operate within the system. Most of us haven't gone far enough yet to intentionally design the system.

Old-fashioned firm here. What are the first steps to transition to a more sustainable path and is it possible to get buy-in from legacy partners? Link
It all starts with exposing partners to new ideas and success stories from peers. Our conviction stems from what we've consumed and what we've seen in others. When we come to a partner with a bright new idea, we can't expect them to feel the same way having not consumed what you have. Consider how you could connect legacy partners with other firm runners to grant them new perspective. Patience is key. Conviction comes from repeated exposure to successful examples rather than from a single conversation.

Any tips for navigating succession in a family-owned accounting business? Link
Explicitly discuss how long the previous generation will remain involved and clarify decision-making authority. Recognize the existing team and client base may not align with the new vision, so be prepared to gradually bring in new staff and clients that fit the desired direction. The last thing you want to be thinking about when your parents are late in life is the business. Set boundaries up-front to ensure that isn't the case.

😍 From The Community

My private peer networking community Realize for firm leaders, and it’s now reached its cap of 500 members 🎉

▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮ 500/500 members