What's Next For Accounting? - Issue #74

Author

Jason Staats
March 16, 2023

🤖 AI Stuff 🤖

On Tuesday OpenAI announced GPT-4 by using it to prepare a tax return. I shared why it's the most significant development for the profession in decades. I also shared a benchmarking framework to better assess the tax capabilities of different AI models, and incentivize existing & special purpose models to develop for this use-case.

To put GPT-4 through its paces, in the coming days I'll be running back several popular tests I put GPT-3.5 through: ⬜ Using ChatGPT as an intern - the Steve test ⬜ Training it to function as an accounting system ⬜ Converting data into different formats ⬜ Training it on an IRS publication to solve technical problems

  • I shared a bit about what building your own personal AI will look like

  • Google rolled out their own LLM API - some features are currently being rolled out to Google Workspace for "trusted testers"

  • If you're a windows user, you probably have a new Bing search panel at the bottom of your screen. This is a GPT-4-enabled search experience that's probably the best marriage of web search + GPT available today

  • Intercom rolled out their GPT-4 support bot that uses your Intercom help docs to support customers - whether you realize it or not you'll be interacting with this bot a ton

  • "One-Stop Shop for AI Assisted Tax Help"

🥔Non-AI Stuff🥔

💎This Week's Sponsor

🤖 Automate My Thing

Using GPT-4 On Ambiguous Bank Transactions

On 1/1 I shared my AI predictions for the profession, and one of them was taking a big step closer to fully-automated bookkeeping, courtesy of the additional context AI can provide around bank transactions.

It looks like GPT-4 is pretty good at this, making sense of an unclear bank transaction, so I designed a prompt you can use to drop a list of uncategorized transactions in, to save you some Googling:

Just copy paste this prompt into ChatGPT (for best results, use GPT-4). Since ChatGPT loses the initial context the further into a conversation you get, I recommend starting with a new conversation each time.

Security notes: remember ChatGPT no longer trains the model on the prompts you give it. So there is no risk of someone else querying the model and this information being presented. Also it should go without saying, but don't share the client name or any other sensitive info! Just paste in the bank lines, you don't even need dates or amounts.

Ways to improve on this:

  • Feed it the actual chart of accounts of the company

  • Have it output everything above a confidence level of X to a file type that can be imported into the accounting system to create those transactions

  • Set this up in an API, so you can trigger the workflow from your team chat app or somewhere else, to handle the full cycle automatically

😍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 280 members strong.