What's Next For Accounting? - Issue #76
Jason Staats
March 30, 2023
I launched a daily show! A low-key, hang-while-you-work sort of show.
A space for accountants to come hang & share ideas. This was what I needed 5 years ago when my work felt soooo isolating. Doubly so now that many of us work remotely from home.
AI's Killer App Is About to Drop
Lost in the news cycle of how good GPT-4 is, was the fact it does unbelievably good image processing. It hasn't been released yet, the initial estimate was it was a couple weeks out, but it vastly outperforms any OCR model we've ever seen. What do you think that could do with a pile of documents + images?
But a life-changing application of this, is combining desktop bots with LLMs like GPT to use the apps on your desktop. Imagine prompting an assistant to do things on your computer for you. Training it to perform specific tasks on your computer, and it remembering. Adept AI was already doing this with previous GPT models.
💎This Week's Sponsor
📆 This Week
I'm currently losing to the Cloud Accounting Pod in the AccountingHigh bracket challenge. If I lose Blake & David's pod will go up against Blake & David's Earmark in the final four. This is truly the worst timeline. You can vote here and be entered to win a trip to Hawaii
I published the best video I've ever made about AI replacing accountants
ChatGPT plugins will connect to all the other apps you use
Of particular note is the Zapier plugin that's in early access, which would seemingly open ChatGPT up to all the apps you have connected to Zapier
And they casually added a "browsing" mode that'll fetch stuff from the internet, which will go a long ways toward bridging the issue of it only being trained on data through Sept 2021
I did a roundup of how all the major LLMs are faring on tax research
And Matt Metras ran some more tests on GPT-3.5 and 4 doing tax prep
Intuit expands its developer growth program and announces a 3-company cohort
Tailor Hartman shared his Zap to set up projects in Keeper on Ignition proposal acceptance
Microsoftie Ashley the CPA shared how to build out your own CRM
The internet browser taking the Mac world by storm, Arc, launches an iOS app
Retool launches "Database", an Airtable-like experience backed by a fully managed Postgres database
An app to generate blog posts and newsletters from your podcast, and an app to do the same from your videos
Use your actual videos to train an AI to generate AI videos of you
I talked with Bitwave’s CEO yesterday and came away with the impression that working with web3 businesses is still an interesting specialization for tech savvy folks to do high value work. Bitwave's got a certification track to take you from beginner to expert if you're getting started
😍From The Community
Amazing things community members showed off in this week's Into the Chadiverse session: (1) ChatGPT plugin early access (2) a month-end close QA scenario in Make (3) an automation to use Zapier, Active Campaign + Google My Biz for review requests + OpenAI to reply to reviews (4) using Microsoft AI builder to extract data from brokerage statements (5) pulling Xero data into Google Sheets with Make
03/30 📗 Book Club - S05E01 with Kate Presto
04/04 📗 Book Club - S05E02 with Kate Presto
04/05 🎤 Who Runs The World - “Say what you wanna say” with Twyla Verhelst
04/11 📗 Book Club - S05E03 with Kate Presto
04/19 📗 Book Club - S05E04 with Kate Presto
04/20 💘 Swiping Right - File Review with Kellie Parks
04/24 🕸️ Into The Chadiverse with Chad Davis
04/25 👉Show & Tell - Canopy with Jake Kessenich
04/26 🏫 Hall Pass - Designing Advisory Offerings with Brandon Hall
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.