🧑🚀 New Launch
I soft-launched a new app over the weekend, ScanStraight. It's steeply discounted for the next week while it's in early access, but essentially converts terrible smartphone document pics into tidied-up scans. Imo this ought to be in the toolbelt of every firm admin.
🗓️ This Week
- Here's a roundup of the coolest new stuff I personally picked up in 2022
- Super crispy monitor stands
- "The best desk in the world" because your standing desk isn't fancy enough
- A free Chrome extension to simplify your Twitter interface 💯
- TigerBeetle raises $6M as a scalable double-entry backend for your apps
- My pod this week ran through ChatGPT, offering background, dispelling myths + a trip to the hospital
- Herman Miller launched a wee portal table
- Keeper Xero support is now out of beta and anyone can use Keeper with Xero
- I was on the Karbon podcast
- A good discussion highlighting aspects of our profession that still can't be automated
- The four best chatbot builders according to Zapier - I ran through situations where chatbots are better than web forms in this podcast
- The comments on this video of a super-fast 10-keyer prove accountants had a hard time in high school
⚠️ AI Stuff Ahead ⚠️
- Big news this week was Google announced their ChatGPT rival, Bard. It's in private beta now, will be released 'soon', and will also somehow be incorporated into their search experience
- Not to be outdone, the next day Microsoft held a press conference announcing a new version of Bing (which is now live) that's like search had a baby with ChatGPT and it's every bit as confusing as that sounds
- Ghostwriter is a Microsoft Word add-in that gives you a ChatGPT-like writing assistant
- "The world's first AI assistant for lawyers"
- Google invests a whopping $300M in Anthropic, company of former OpenAI researchers with a ChatGPT-like model, Claude
💎This Week's Sponsor
🤖 Automate My Thing
Generate QBO Reports on an Automated Basis
QB's scheduled reports functionality lets you get your hands on PDF or Excel versions of reports without lifting a finger. It's available on any version of QBO and can run as frequently as daily.
Create a rule to route these emails to an automation app like Zapier or Make to level this up:
🟢 Beginner
- Log BS and P&Ls to your file system on a monthly basis (for the clients you don't do the accounting for)
- Each quarter pull the "Recent Transactions" report for your non-bookkeeping clients, to see if they're keeping current & ID those who need help
- Pull the 1099 transaction detail report each month to see if they need to send out W-9s lul ya right
⚫ Advanced
- Generate a daily unpaid bill list to incorporate into an automated cash reporting email
- Use a PDF extraction app like DocParser or Microsoft AI Builder to pull data from reports
- Use a data processing app like Parabola to pull structured data from the Excel report
😍From The Community
Month #2 of Swiping Right this week. This is a series that genuinely would had changed my life had I heard it early in my firm-running days. How to nail down your perfect client & manage those engagements successfully.
- 02/09 📗 Book Club - S04E03 with Kate Presto
- 02/14 💘 Swiping Right with Kellie Parks
- 02/15 📗 Book Club - S04E04 with Kate Presto
- 02/16 🏫 Hall Pass - Identifying a Niche with Brandon Hall
- 02/21 📗 Book Club - S04E05 with Kate Presto
- 02/22 🐠 EOS-Ish - The Model with Rachel Fisch
- 02/27 🕸️ Into The Chadiverse with Chad Davis
- 03/01 📗 Book Club - S04E06 with Kate Presto
- 03/01 🎤 Who Runs The World - “It’s me, Hi, I’m the problem it’s me” with Twyla Verhelst
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 280 members strong.