What's Next For Accounting? - Issue #66

🗓️ This Week

• A reminder next Wednesday I'll be on a panel talking 2023 predictions with David Leary, Dawn Brolin, Nicole Butler-Davis and Andrew Wall - Register here

• Brogan McGrafman released his annual video showing how much money his accounting firm made

• A heads-up I'll be speaking at AICPA Engage in June and would love to see you there

• GrowthLab offers automation-as-a-service to accounting firms

• I rounded up my favorite accounting memes of the year so far

• Missive email rolls out built-in GPT support - Whether you're a user or not, I recommend watching the video to get a taste of the user experience generative text will enable in all email clients

• A bunch of accounting folk shared how they deliver financials & tax returns here

• In my pod this week I shared my thoughts on the current state of AI

• CashWarden is an accounting firm built around Telegram

• The world-class Zapier blog with 6 tips to write better GPT prompts

• Also how to build your own Slack bot

• A good discussion around how to 2x the number of people in the (US) tax profession

• Previously branded as Portal, CoPilot is an all-in-one customer portal platform with a whole pile of integrations

• Automation app Bardeen launches Automations for Automations - an interesting look at what automations-done-for-you will look like

• Internal app builder Retool now supports mobile app-building - this is my go-to internal tool builder

• Tactiq takes meeting transcriptions, summarizes them and extracts to-do's using GPT - a productized version of the automation I shared last month in the newsletter

• 'The Zapier of Communication' - A messaging platform that supports 50+ channels

💎This Week's Sponsor

Spend intelligence for accounts payable

🤖 Automate My Thing

Auto-Generate Slides for Tax & Financial Delivery

Let's generate a few fancy looking slides to include with delivery of tax returns or financial statements. This is especially handy when delivering over video:

I shared the full build guide in this thread. In short:

1. Create a slide deck - Google Sheets or PowerPoint, the process is the same for both - design a couple slides and use double curly brackets for any variables, like client names or amounts

2. Create a form - members of your team can complete the form, and these details are then inserted into the slide deck. I used Airtable since it's free and super easy. Here's an affiliate link if you're trying it out for the first time

3. Create the automation - Create a new zap that (1) triggers when someone completes the airtable form, (2) creates a slide deck from a template, plugging the values from the form into the curly bracket variables, and (3) emails a link to the slide deck to whoever completed the form

That's it! If you end us taking this for a spin, I'd love to see your slides. A few resources:

• Check out UI8 for cool slide templates

• Here's a link to rip off my Airtable base

• And a link to rip off the Zapier automation

😍From The Community

• 01/24 🐠 EOS-Ish with Rachel Fisch - Getting Started

• 01/25 📗 Book Club - S04E01

• 01/30 🕸️ Into The Chadiverse with Chad Davis

• 02/01 📗 Book Club - S04E02

• 02/08 🚜 The Content Farm - Idea Harvesting with Jason Staats

• 02/09 📗 Book Club - S04E03

• 02/24 💘 Swiping Right with Kellie Parks

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 270 members strong.