What's Next For Accounting? - Issue #61
Jason Staats
December 15, 2022
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:
Feed ChatGPT a list of the titles of past blog post
Ask it to generate 10 new blog post ideas, building on previous posts
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
👷♀️ This Week I Made
😍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
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.