What's Next For Accounting? - Issue #68

Author

Jason Staats
February 02, 2023

😍 A Big Announcement

I shared on Twitter this morning the last 3 months I've been working on a first-of-it's kind event for the accounting profession. I put together my dream speaker list, and worked with them to create a unique content series. Check out that Twitter thread for all the details, or my community landing page.

🗓️ This Week

⚠️ AI Stuff Ahead ⚠️

  • One report claims Microsoft will soon be updating Bing with GPT4

  • Microsoft launches a premium version of Teams that uses AI to summarize the transcripts and pull out to-do's. Sound familiar?

  • ChatGPT got an update that improves its math skills - I'll be re-running a past thread where I trained it to produce financial statements from journal entries (though it did it almost flawlessly last time)

  • What does a GPT-enabled spreadsheet look like? New-age spreadsheet app spreadsheet.com launched GPT formulas. It's a great point of reference for what we can expect to see from Excel

  • Water is ChatGPT that has access to your apps, and can trigger your automations

  • OpenAI did an about-face on $42 ChatGPT pro and yesterday launched $20 ChatGPT Plus

  • They also launched a tool for AI-generated text detection but with some very important caveats: "Our classifier correctly identifies 26% of AI-written text (true positives) as “likely AI-written,” while incorrectly labeling human-written text as AI-written 9% of the time (false positives)"

💎This Week's Sponsor

🤖 Automate My Thing

Get Notified When a Client Updates A Spreadsheet

We don't like to admit it, but there's a good amount of spreadsheet swapping that happens in the wild, for which there isn't a great alternative. Payroll hours, non-financial metrics, inventory balances etc.

And the best workflow i've found for this, is to stage those requests in Sheets or Excel online, and have Zapier notify me when the client makes modifications. It looks something like this:

Every other week we need payroll hours for a few employees. I've given them access to a spreadsheet to enter hours so no email-exchanging is required.

But I want to be notified as soon as the client enters the hours. Both Zapier and Make have triggers for Excel & Google Sheets, to trigger when a row is 'updated'.

This kicks off an automation to send the update anywhere you want. In my case let's notify the team in Slack, so they know to hop in, download the updated spreadsheet, and lock those hours.

If you're feeling especially frisky you can also set up a job to run on a recurring basis. Every month, every two weeks, etc, to add another column/row/place for the client to enter data. Then email them/send them an SMS/send them a Slack message with a link to the spreadsheet, reminding them to enter the info.

All without lifting a finger 😴

😍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 275 members strong.