What's Next For Accounting? - Issue #151

English Is The New Programming Language?

The past two weeks the internet has been aflurry with stories of non-programmers developing custom software with AI.

Dashboards, Chrome extensions, iPhone apps, video games. New courses to teach non-programmers how to create codeless software, even a new brand of internet thinkperson: The codeless software developer.

It’s the early stages of what Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang recently described as an era where everyone is a programmer.

So, what does that mean for accounting?

I’d argue accountants have an incredibly nuanced understanding of how data moves through an organization. This puts us in the driver seat to build helpful custom solutions.

After all, the closest person to the problem is the one best positioned to create the solution. I’ll show you how easy it is:

A basic example

Most of the excitement recently has come from the app Cursor, but an even easier way to get started is Claude Artifacts, which as of this week is now free for anyone to use.

I’ve got a hairy profit sharing spreadsheet. Profits are split differently at various cutoff thresholds, and we currently use an ugly spreadsheet to calculate it.

Here’s a video of me building it live in 10 minutes:

It actually took me less time to create this with AI than it did to get all the formulas right in a spreadsheet.

Wild, right? It’s hard to imagine where we’ll be 12 months from now 👀

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🗓️ This Week

My master guide to managing client logins 🫠 Video Audio

I made another accounting meme review

Remarkable launched the Paper Pro, their first color e-ink tablet

Click here and I’ll punch you in the grief bone 9 times

Karbon launched a Practice Marketplace and it may be the smartest thing I’ve seen this year. They aren’t even taking a cut as a broker

⚒️ App Of The Week

Not sponsored, just stuff I like that’s worth checking out.

What it is: An AI assistant that works with all the most popular models, and includes some accounting-specific tools.

Why I like it: You get access to both OpenAI and Claude’s models for $17 rather than $60 ($30 + $30). You miss some functionality specific to those apps, but if I’m putting my team on a single AI assistant app, it should probably be Spark.

🤓 AI Corner

The CEO of OpenAI Japan said in a presentation GPT-Next, to be released later this year, will be 100x as powerful as GPT-4

I used AI to create a Client Battler for you to simulate tricky client conversations. Great for training your team! I demo’d how it works in this pod Video Audio

The 1X NEO announcement made us want to go back to robot dogs

Alexa will soon use Claude 👏👏 good LLMs in home devices will be game-changing

A guy repeatedly spammed “hi” at every language model and some of them lost their sh*t

I’m using AI to MS Paint people’s avatars on social right now LinkedIn Twitter and you can too

🎨 Meme Of The Week

💼 Jason.Careers

🔥 8 accountants joined this week

I help forward-thinking accountants go to work for modern firms in my audience. All roles remote. Firms and applicants US-only for now. Currently placing over 100 applicants into over 100 firms. Learn more