What's Next For Accounting? - Issue #70

Author

Jason Staats
February 16, 2023

🗓️ This Week

  • Over 100 lovely folks purchased the app I launched last week 🤩 a reminder early access ends on Saturday & the price doubles. If it's working for you, give a colleague the heads up before the price increases!

  • I published a video featuring a $2M firm with two full-time employees 🫠

  • Brandon Hall with a quick thread on how he does capacity planning - He also gave away his employee performance goal tracker in his newsletter this week - Brandon kicks off a 6 month series in my community today, "Hall Pass", on how to scale resilient firms

  • I've started doing a bit of longer-form writing on LinkedIn

  • Airtable's built-in automations now support looping groups of actions

  • You can copy-paste steps in Zapier now

  • ClientHub launches a free plan so stop using your stinky old spreadsheet

  • I recorded a pod about how to begin selling your automation expertise

  • Otter launches Otterbot (🥇), a meeting assistant that sends out a meeting summary with links to key moments to keep attendees & non-attendees in the loop

  • But even more interesting, Fireflies launches AskFred. Built on their AI meeting assistant tool, Fred: gives you a chat interface to ask questions specific about the meeting, will take notes for the meeting based on your instructions, score the meeting based on requirements for that type of meeting (sales meetings for example), generate blog posts based on the meeting content, and more

  • Another skinny-jeans-wearing spreadsheet startup raised some money

  • Not to be outdone new-age spreadsheet app Equals launched a cool new approach to dashboards

  • GPT has dominated headlines, but accessibility of vector search may go down as the most important development of the last 12 months. Digits put out a blog post on how they're using similarity-based machine learning on QB files, in what's an early front-runner for technical flex of the year

  • Inkle raises a $1.5M pre-seed - "A Chat-based accountant for US companies" - It's an accounting firm with a chat interface! 🏆

  • Then there's this abomination - "Chat with a CPA-trained chat bot for $6/mo" - credit to Jeremy

  • A custom chat bot you say? There's a growing set of tools to make it easy to build your own models. CustomGPT is one such example

  • Another is Kaila, and we're going to use this to train our own AI for free down in 🤖 Automate My Thing 👇

💎This Week's Sponsor

🤖 Automate My Thing

Train Your Own AI

Train it on any data set, It's free for now, and only requires copying & pasting in your training data.

A recurring test I've used is the business use of home publication, so that's my source material. You can try the bot here, I'm using Kaila.

The process is as simple as copying & pasting in your training data, taking care to prepare the data according to their recommendations.

What data sets could you pull in to make something useful here?

  • Video/meeting/podcast transcripts or summaries

  • Blog posts

  • Your help center

  • Your book

  • Technical guidance combined with your commentary

I'd love to hear what you build! And if you want to impress your friends + colleagues, share this newsletter along with a few ideas 👇

😍From The Community

This week leading thinkboi and LinkedIn enthusiast Brandon Hall kicks off his 6 month Hall Pass series:

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.