What's Next For Accounting? - Issue #61

Twitter shut down Revue! So this newsletter will look a little different going forward

• I built another app for turning smartphone pics of documents into tidy PDFs - let me know if it's something you'd be interested in. Complete with finger cropping technology.

• Been is a tax residency tracker for your phone

• Paralegal AI is a GPT-3 driven legal research tool - looking forward to someone building this for tax research

• Lorilyn Wilson launched a content creation company for accountants

• Windows 11 finally gets a built-in screen recorder that isn't the game bar

• MS is building Teams into Outlook and everyone's like oh good

• Google launches no-code machine learning for Sheets

• Ocho raises $2.5M for solo 401(k)s

• Vic.ai raises $51M to automate accounting but I can't tell what's actually happening here

• Google built ChatGPT for robots - you tell them to do a thing, and they do it

• With the recent announcement that a bunch of idle Twitter handles will be released into the wild, here's an app to monitor that handle you've always wanted

• GPTKey is an iOS keyboard that'll let you use GPT-3 anywhere you type on your phone

• Hints is another integrate-anything-with-anything-else app, but specifically to let you use SMS/WhatsApp/whatever else to update all your other apps

🤖 Automate My Thing

Generating Content Ideas

It's hard to trust AI to complete tasks right now, but it's fantastic for ideation. I paid Jasper a pile of money to help me with this, but find myself using ChatGPT (free) for this now.

So let's use Brogan McGraf's recent blog posts to generate similar blog ideas, then write a few in his own voice. The steps:

1. Feed ChatGPT a list of the titles of past blog post

2. Ask it to generate 10 new blog post ideas, building on previous posts

3. Feed it the full text of his past blog posts, and using the suggestions in #2, ask it to write a blog post in the voice of the posts I previously gave it

OpenAI acknowledges that one of the current issues with GPT-3.5 is that it's too verbose, so I had to give it a word limit. I used Midjourney to generate a cover image, and the result isn't bad:

• It rails on the difference between a tax preparer and a tax advisor, which Logan did in this previous blog post

• It asks itself a bunch of questions, which Logan does in his writing as well

• It includes this hot take: "it's a good idea to avoid tax preparers who charge very low fees, as this may be a sign that they are not very experienced or qualified"

It's worth noting, this kind of sucks. Nobody wants the web (even more than it is now) to become a sea of machine-generated nonsense, So the best way to think about this for now is as a writing assistant. Make it human, inject your voice & experience into it.

💎This Week's Sponsor

Put your client reporting on autopilot with LiveFlow

👷‍♀️ This Week I Made

Answering Your Questions About Running An Accounting Firm

😍From The Community

• 12/15 🟤 Roundtable - Big Tax with Brandon Hall

• 12/19 🤝 Meetup - Canopy

• 12/19 🤝 Meetup - TaxDome

• 12/20 🟤 Roundtable - Solo Tax with Nayo Carter-Gray

• 01/05💻 Demo Day - GoProposal

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 250 members strong.