What's Next For Accounting? - Issue #83

Author

Jason Staats
May 18, 2023

💡ChatGPT Plugins & Browsing

Everyone on ChatGPT Plus gets access to 70+ Plugins and the Browsing model this week. To enable them, go to Settings>Beta features.

Plugins

These let you work with your other apps from ChatGPT. For example, create an invoice in QuickBooks from ChatGPT, or summarize the emails you got over the weekend in ChatGPT. When you start a new ChatGPT conversation, you can enable any number of plugins. Its still VERY early days for plugins, and many of them are broken. A few notable plugins available now:

  • AskYourPDF - Chuck big files into it, then summarize/chat/query the doc

  • Wolfram - Do complex math stuff in ChatGPT

  • Polygon - Fetch current or historical market data - ie here’s a list of securities, give me a table of ticker symbols, share price at 12/31, etc

  • Zapier - this is the most interesting plugin at the moment, since it could theoretically be used to connect with thousands of other apps

The Zapier implementation seems smart. Here’s the process to pull customer and vendor info from my QBO final into ChatGPT. Any number of actions can be built out in your Zapier plugin, and it’ll only reference those actions when you do so in a conversation.

It’s amazing in theory. In practice, right now for me it’s super busted. I’m having trouble getting anything to work reliably, but will share more once they’ve sorted out the issues.

Browsing

The idea behind the “Browsing” model is it will fetch recent web results, theoretically bridging its knowledge gap of everything outside its September 2021 training window. A few best-practices I’ve learned from initial testing:

  • Only give it one job at a time - if I feed it a list, it tries to search for each item in the list and eventually gives up

  • Tell it where to search - for example if you’re looking into a tax matter, say only pull info from the IRS, the Oregon Department of Revenue, etc

  • The more abstract your request, the more it’ll struggle. So get very specific about the one thing you want, and where it ought to be pulled from

Having good luck with Plugins or Browsing? I’d love to hear about it!

💎This Week's Sponsor

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📅 This Week

  • I made an advanced ChatGPT guide for accountants - here’s the beginner and intermediate versions

  • OpenAI just announced ChatGPT for iOS including voice inputs 🎉🎉

  • AI thinkpeople descended on capital hill to talk AI regulation - here’s a 30 minute superedit, it’s a good discussion of what AI reg should look like

  • Brad Nelson shared a swipeable MS Power Automate bot that’ll extend tax returns in Drake

  • Today I shared some thoughts on how to improve your website

  • Zapier tables is now in open beta, and it’s pretty cool. Better granular access control than Airtable, and you can trigger Zaps from the table itself

  • And if you’ve ever struggled to build your own Zaps, they just launched a tool to describe the Zap you want, and it’ll generate a starting point (see the end of this article)

  • Ashley the CPA launched a 30 day course to help accountants get comfortable with AI - 5 minute daily activities - upskill yourself + your team

  • Apple is building voice cloning directly into iOS

  • We’re running job placement ads on my daily pod now - shoot me a message for more info if you have a job to promote, because imagine hiring the sort of nerd that listens to my pod 🤓🙄

  • Parthean is a GPT personal finance assistant - it’s a good window into what tax & accounting assistants will look like, many of which will have regular ole accounting firms behind them

  • Sticky raises a $2M seed - create NFC “stickies” for physical spaces

  • A notion template for managing your business - there’s an opportunity here to build a Notion template for DIY finance, to attract early-stage folks in your niche who could develop into clients down the road

  • After the recent article about ChatGPT bombing the CPA exam, I ran my own test that yielded very different results

😍From The Community

My community Realize is a private space for people to swap ideas & collaborate. At $180/mo it’s also the way I finance everything else I do, pay a full-time creative director, and a part-time developer in an effort to make the accounting industry a slightly better place 💗 The community is currently about 300 members strong.