💡 Awarding The Best New Stuff of 2023

On Sunday we held the annual Jasies awards, to crown the best new stuff of the year for accounting firms.

Honorable Mentions:

• Spark - An AI chat tool by Rightworks that’s a spin on ChatGPT specifically for accounting firms

• QuickBooks Ledger - A low-cost version of QBO to get your once-a-year cleanup clients onto a cloud ledger for the first time

• Elgato Prompter - A simple, easy to use teleprompter to make your videos a little less bad

• Google Bard Fact Checking - An update to Google’s chat assistant that fact checks its own statements with a secondary search to confirm what it said is correct

• CPA.com Generative AI Toolkit - A free resource anyone can swipe, no email required, to help you get started with practical generative AI applications

• Kitchen Table Automations - Education resources to help you & your team leverage AI in your daily workflows

• Practice Management Roundup - Our report on the 14 cloud practice management tools your firm should be considering, compared across 200+ features

• AI Meeting Assistants - A must-have to capture transcripts of your online meetings, check out Fireflies, Fathom or MS Teams Premium

My Winners:

🥉 Digits AI Chat Assistant
At a time when technologists say user interfaces are going away, and we’ll soon simply chat with software, Digits was the first to ship a meaningful version of ledger chat. The jury’s still out on how chat will impact the ledger, but props to Digits for moving first, well before Intuit even announced their Intuit Assist chat assistant.

🥈 Karbon AI
An entire suite of useful AI-driven upgrades, the release of Karbon AI this year set the bar for how practice management systems should be implementing AI. While there’s more room to continue developing in this direction, key features like generative email replies have pushed the category forward.

🥇 RightTool
What if an actual accountant redesigned the QBO UI to make you more productive? That’s the idea behind RightTool, a free chrome extension developed by Hector Garcia. More than any other tool this year, I’m hearing from folks they could never imagine having to go back to vanilla QBO.

🤔 What Would You do?

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📅 This Week

• Lovely seeing some of you at the New Money Summit in Orlando this week!

• My favorite AI music generation app is now built into MS Copilot - It’s what I used for the tax deadline song, among others

• Using AI to communicate with dead people

• If you struggle to come up with client-facing content ideas, start building a database of their problems

• OpenAI released a guide to writing better prompts, calling out 6 strategies that will improve the quality of model responses

• This co builds custom AI models for attorneys and just raised $80M

• I shared my personal ugly sweater collection

  

• Somebody launched the first AI news station

• An interesting new Ted talk on AI’s capacity to drive exponential economic growth

• The best outline I’ve seen of what transpired during the OpenAI CEO shuffle

😍From The Community

My private peer networking community Realize for firm leaders, now capped at 500 members.

• 01/05 🏫 Hall Pass - Live Coaching with Brandon Hall

• 01/16 💘 Swiping Right - Building a Firm Profile with Kellie Parks

• 01/16 🧠 AMA with Ben Coons - Offshoring for CAS & Bookkeeping with Jason Staats

• 01/25 🌴 Take A Step Back with Geraldine Carter

• 01/29 🕸️ Into The Chadiverse with Chad Davis

▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▯▯▯▯▯▯ 379/500 members