Accounting Teacher Tells Students Accountants Hate Their Lives

As a small business owner, I've had my share of accounting, tax, bank feed, and app issues. Some could say I'm a mess, kind of like some of your clients, but as a reflect in the last three years of my business, the one app that I've had not any problems with is on pay. It's been said it and forget it payroll. Stay tuned to hear more from our sponsor on pay later in the episode. The root of the problem is that people aren't charging enough for the work they're doing, because if you charge enough for the work you're doing, the value you're creating, then the cost of the software ends up being very small compared to what you're charging for your services. I just think there's a lot of people out there that are still billing effectively $20 an hour, which is maybe what they got as an employee, but they're a freelancer now and they haven't figured out that you've got to multiply that by two and a half times and be billing at least 50 or more an hour. Coming to you weekly from the on pay recording studio. Hello and welcome to the show. I'm Blake Oliver and I'm David Leary. I love the title of this episode, David. It's the beginning of the pipeline, right? It's very applicable. Yeah, we got, we got some listener mail and I just got to kick off with this message that we got from Davos and Dave says, hey, Blake and David, I have to tell you about an experience my daughter had today on her first day of high school senior year. She's taking her first accounting class. I'm not going to read the rest of the message because we actually got on the phone with Dave's daughter who was taking her first accounting class and had a really unique experience. Well, hopefully it's unique and it's not, yeah, maybe it's experienced. Maybe that's the wrong word. It's not, it's not unique. Anyway, let's hear from Genika. Hi, Genika. Thanks for talking to me today. Hi, of course. I'm excited. So, I understand that you just started accounting. Yes, a couple days ago. Tell me about yourself. So my name is Genika and I'm a senior at, I'm in high school. I have been doing computer programming since seventh grade and that's something that I'm really interested in. So I want to go into information systems when I go to college and I understand that that includes accounting and that's just also something that's kind of interested me ever since my dad has kind of taught me a little bit about his accounting business. So that's kind of where I took the accounting class. So how did it go? You had your first day. Walk me through it. Yeah. So, you know, I'm just like, I got to my class and I was kind of excited to jump into it and obviously the first day is kind of going over rules and going over the course and what you're going to learn and what you're going to do. I was definitely excited to get into it because of everything I've heard about it and it's just always been something interesting to me. But my teacher started talking about accounting in a very negative way that was not as expecting and the first thing she kind of says is the fact that accounting is boring. I remember her saying like, who thinks accounting is boring? Who actually even wants to be here that kind of made me like giggle a little bit because my dad is an accountant and she said that we'll learn about why accountants hate their lives. I was like, okay, it was just like really weird as she's like talking about how terrible accounting is and how hard the semester is going to be and how much harder it is and all the lot of classes and that you're not going to want to go into accounting and we're going to try to make it fun even though it's not. She said that she wouldn't want to be an accountant and she doesn't like accounting, but she appreciates it and thinks that it is a good skill. But she was talked about how boring it was, how hard it was and she even made some jokes about people dropping the class and it kind of just like hit me because I was like really excited for the class and suddenly she's talking negatively about accounting and she kind of really upset me. I've been kind of looking forward to this class and again hearing about my dad and the things that he does all the time, I got excited because maybe this will be maybe one day I'll take over my dad's business and this will be the class that kind of leads me into that. So I think that this being my first accounting class, it just kind of really took me down because all of a sudden there's this negative energy in there. She's talking about how terrible it is and even on the second day, she still kind of went on about how hard accounting was and how boring it was and how accountants have boring personalities and I don't know, I just was very upsetting and like I don't know, I just definitely isn't getting me excited for the class anymore. We'll tell you what, let's set the record straight as the daughter of a firm owner as a future firm owner yourself. What would you tell somebody who's thinking about taking an accounting class or you know majoring it in college? I think that nothing should stop you if you're interested in it because obviously there are people out there who enjoy accounting and that's why they went into it. And I think that even though there is a negative stigma around, it doesn't mean that it is hard or it is boring. And obviously I do believe that accounting isn't for everyone. But I also wouldn't want there to be so many people kind of hating on it for no reason even though they've never tried it. I think that it's always worth the try, especially if it interests you and I think that you should never give up just because you think that it's going to be boring and that you're not going to like it. Even though that there is some hate on it in my class and there's kind of in the world that I shouldn't have to worry about that. And I should just kind of keep being excited about it because it interests me. So I guess just yeah, keep it going and keep working hard towards it because if it interests you, that's all that matters. What is your view of accounting as the daughter of an accountant? I think especially when I was younger, I didn't necessarily understand it. And even like growing up and like just hearing about accounting, I feel like there's a stigma around it that it's boring and not something fun to be into. But as I got older and I got thinking about my own career and as I'm like watching my dad with his business, it got me really interested. He's been teaching me a few things and it just gets me excited because I think accounting from what I've heard and learned about is a very useful skill, especially because I'm interested in starting my own business. And I think that learning accounting will either help me guide what I want to do in my business, but also just starting a business in general. I think it's very important to have that ability to know kind of how to do accounting. And it's just I don't know. It's been super cool for me to watch my dad with all of his skills and the things that he's learned throughout the years. And I don't have a very strong knowledge on accounting, which is why I'm taking a class. But I think just from like watching it just got me really interested in it and maybe even going into it when I'm older, there's kind of jokes around being an accountant or doing accounting that you may have like a boring personality or that the job itself is really boring. I love talking to my dad and he's outgulling and exciting, so I just think the fact that accountants are boring or that the job is boring just kind of like upsets me a bit that people think that another thing that my dad is telling me is that there's already kind of not enough people in the industry and that we could use so much more accountants and that it is a very useful job and a very useful skill. And I think that this being my first accounting class is already getting 20, 25 people not interested in it when there's a need for accountants. And I think that it's really important and he also told me that the first accounting class that you take will make a break like your interest for it and I think that if there are accounting teachers or you know teachers for any subject, I think that they should be getting students excited about it and ready for it because you know who knows who's interested in there and what it could lead to and what career it could lead to. I think that's great advice, Jenica, and I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to me and share your story. Yeah, of course. So there you have it. That was Jenica, senior in high school, just started her first accounting class in high school and unfortunately the teacher was not very, what's even the word was not promoting the accounting profession as a career was repeating a lot of those negative stereotypes. Stereotypes. Stereotypes. I would say stereotypes. Stereotypes. Yeah. Memes. Memes. So, you know, this goes to the whole pipeline problem we've been talking about. How do we get more students interested in accounting if this is what they're hearing from their teachers? And she recognized that. She's a high school senior, probably 17 years old and she recognized that hey, if that's the message you deliver to 25 people with their first experience of accounting, they're not going to go into accounting. Right. Right. So somebody, somebody needs to talk to that teacher. We've got to hope it's a unique experience. I hope other people that have our fortune to take an accounting class in high school are getting something you're excited about. Yeah. Well, luckily, Jenica knows an accountant. Her father is an accountant and so she knows that these stereotypes are not necessarily true, but not all those other kids do. That's the problem. We've got to do something about it. I don't know what the answer is, but maybe our listeners have some ideas. If you have ideas for how we can dispel the myths about accounting, how we can get rid of these negative stereotypes, counter them at least. I know that those listening to this show most likely are happy in their jobs. They like accounting, right? We enjoy being firm owners or working at modern firms and, you know, it's not the green eye shade and still say it anywhere. It's a accountant's accounting partners at firms sitting on like the coot of their poorest or their Lamborghini and Ferrari, that's the way to do it. And we just have a YouTube channel of those over and over again. Or, you know, showing the fact that you can go on vacation, that you don't have to work 60 to 70 hours a week all the time that you get time off and you get to go enjoy your life. I don't know. David, we're talking about pipeline. The news from South Carolina is also pipeline news this week. Let's talk about what's going on in South Carolina. I mean, another state, right, proposing legislation to change the definition or the lack of a bit of terms, the 150 hour rule. That's easy. We have to summarize it, but they want alternative pathways to get to become a CPA. To make it more streamlined, make it less costly, less burdensome, started with Minnesota. And we have seen now South Carolina proposed legislation. And that was the news this week. There's a press release on the SCACPA.org website. You can find the link to that in our show notes about the changes that they're proposing. And we spoke very recently, a couple days ago with David Noble, who is the chair of the South Carolina Association of CPAs. And he explained why they're doing what they're doing. So let's take a listen. Before you hit play on that plate. So I think that the summary of what this is is they feel that the 30 hours was intentionally not defined or black and white on purpose to give future flexibility to the profession. And based on that, he went through and reinterpreted the whole Uniform Accounting Act. And their conclusion is they had this freedom to let the 30 hours be defined of what it needs to be. It doesn't have to be on a transcript, right? Really good point, David. So South Carolina is taking a different approach than Minnesota. Minnesota is simply creating an alternative pathway that is 120 plus two years of experience. South Carolina is saying, we're still going to have 150, but we're going to reinterpret what the extra 30 hours means because based on their interpretation of the Uniform Accountancy Act and the way that it has been implemented in different states, it doesn't have to be hours on a transcript, which is really brilliant because if you keep 150, how can anyone argue against the change and South Carolina believes and David Noble believe that they therefore would keep their substantial equivalency and mobility would not be impacted? And then the other argument is that all the states already have all these oddball weird laws anyways. There's differences in education and differences in experience requirements already. So you can't you can't really argue logically that any change, like the change that they are making should take away their substantial equivalency. That's what they've proposed. I'm going to play a clip from our interview with David Noble. This is also available on the podcast feed as a bonus episode. So go back into the feed if you didn't see it and look for the bonus interview with David Noble for the full 45 minutes with him. This is just a little piece of that conversation. So here it is a clip of our interview with David Noble, chair of the SCACPA, talking about the changes they're going to make or that they are proposing to make in South Carolina. Understand that South Carolina is considering some changes to the Accountancy Act there. What are you working on? We started this process almost a year ago and sent a law, a proposed law out to NASBEN and the CPA to review and we got comments back from them. As we went through that process, we rethought what we were going to do and how we were going to do it. South Carolina is not being radical. We spent a lot of time researching it to make sure what we were doing was something that made sense and had been done in other places. We're not changing our initial licensure process at all. And so our substantial equivalency has to remain because we didn't change our process. We're making it clear that they can come up with different things to make equivalent. We're changing mobility consistent with other state laws so that we're protecting the public for folks that might come in that aren't substantial equivalent. We're getting folks into the profession that might not otherwise be here. If we do low cost certificate programs, we're getting folks into the profession that might not otherwise be here. We're not making it easier. We're making it less costly and we're actually improving the 30-hour education and taking away the concept of doing anything you want and instead guiding them to more business skills to make them a better well-rounded professional. So with this law that we have now proposed and we've sent it to NASBA again, we've sent it to the ACPA. We've actually just sent it the last day or two to our Board of Accountancy and we've asked to be on their agenda for an October meeting. We always talk with our board and get feedback from them. We've found over time that there are some folks in there that have practiced accounting much longer than we have and have good and insightful thoughts. There's a person in South Carolina that was very instrumental at NASBA as a chair during this process of becoming substantially equivalent. He's a good friend of mine and I always run things by him to get his perspective. He's got a perspective on both sides. He's been chair of our board, chair of the Board of Accountancy and chair of NASBA. So we solicit comments and we want to hear what people think. We just believe that this time we really hit it that it's not radical. And so this is the right thing to do for everybody including the nation. So there you have it, David Noble, chair of the South Carolina Association of CPAs. Talking about what they're doing to change and reduce the cost and complexity of licensing requirements and get more people into the CPA pipeline that otherwise wouldn't go. And they're also proposing extending the testing time. We did reach out to the ACPA and we did get a response. We appreciate that many organizations are trying to address our pipeline challenges. At the same time, we believe the best solution is one we can pursue together as a unified profession. That's why we've convened at the National Pipeline Advisory Group, a multi-stakeholder body charged with developing solutions to address talent issues within the profession. The advisory group is already hard at work with a draft strategy due at the ACPA Spring Council meeting this coming May. The advisory group will examine substantial equivalency, the three ease of education, examination and experience to better understand if there are additional pathways to licensure that also preserves CPA mobility. As we've consistently said, the ACPA views mobility as essential. The proposed South Carolina legislation is subject to an assessment by the National Association of State Boards of Accountancy, NASBA, and the state's own board of accountancy. We look forward to seeing the outcome of those reviews. That is a comment from the ACPA. NASBA, I do not have a comment from NASBA, and the main reason why I have anybody from NASBA is listening. NASBA, picture email. I cannot send you an email from earmarkcpe.com, earmark.me.com, davidlerie.com, or my Gmail account. They all get blocked. You cannot email NASBA. So they're on tight lock down there. It seems like I've had the same issue. I feel like it's an IT configuration issue. What's that way to my personal domain? I was like, this shouldn't be blocked either, so adjust. There's something else going on. But yes, NASBA, please let us through. Well, so did you say that the draft, they're going to have some sort of draft plan in May? The ACPA has something coming out in May. So this is the problem with the committee approach, is that they're not going to have anything until May. And what month is it? Oh, yes, that's a half a year, right? Right. So by the time anything, these committees just go so slow. And I think that's why the states are making their move. Because if one state can do it and not lose substantial equivalency, then it becomes a model for all the other states to follow. And then you don't have to wait for a national leadership. I think that's the struggle here, is that this is a problem that's happening right now, and we need solutions now, not in years from now. In the interviews, really good to us too. There's some mind-blowing stuff in there. I think the biggest mind-blowing thing, did you know in the state of New York, if you just have how many years experience? So, yeah. So New York, apparently, still has a statute, a law in the books that says that if you have 15 years of experience, you can sit for the CPA exam and become a CPA if you pass the exam without a college degree. There's no education requirement if you have 15 years of experience. And New York is still substantially equivalent. So you could, I mean, we don't know how many people have actually done this, but you could potentially be a CPA without a bachelor's degree in New York. And then go get licensed in another state through reciprocity. So this whole concept of mobility, David Noble in the interview said something like it's already broken because of these differences. So, go listen to the interview. Well, it's not so much it's broken, but the, because the argument is you're going to break it, but it's not, it's working just fine with the differences. Yeah, well, he's saying that, yeah, exactly. There's already these differences. So if we make a few more differences, what's it matter? That's kind of my take. He didn't say that. Yeah. This episode of the Cloud Accounting Podcast is sponsored by OnPay. OnPay is built for accountants. I'm a 30 plus years of payroll experience. They can be the payroll partner you can always rely on. They offer a dashboard to manage all your clients in one place. And when I say manage, I probably should say balance that fine line between control and delegation. OnPay lets you keep 100% control. You can delegate payroll to someone at your firm, or hand off payroll duties to your client. But no matter who runs payroll, OnPay always takes care of all tax payments and filings, even local filings. And with integrations with QuickBooks Online, Zero and QuickBooks Desktop, you can use OnPay across your entire client base regardless of the accounting GL they are using. OnPay's partner program offers free payroll for your firm, discounts or a rev share, and a dedicated support team of in-house payroll experts will do all the heavy lifting. From setting up your dashboard to adding your clients and their employees, they'll even enter any prior wages to make it easy to switch. If you're looking for a great product with great support to match, check out OnPay. For more about switching your clients to the award-winning OnPay payroll in HR, head over to cloudaccountingpodcast.promo-onPay. That is cloudaccountingpodcast.promo-forward-onPay. OnPay switched a better payroll. All right, where do we go from here, David? You want to talk more about pipeline issues? Do you want to talk about technology? I've got a story about air traffic controllers. I could, there's just another article in going concern, from Sharon Lassar, PhD CPA. She's currently the director of the School of Accountancy at the University of Denver, but she was previously the chair of the Colorado Society of CPAs, and she basically writes about how the 150 hours is actually a barrier, and she points out and criticizes an AICPA study where was done by the Illinois Society of CPAs. I think we've talked about this one on the show before, where they only talk to accounting students and accounting graduates. You brought this up in the interview with Noble. The study, so AICPA and NASBA have pointed to that study that Illinois did, saying that the 150 hours is not a barrier. And the author of this article, did you say Sharon? Sharon, yep, Lassar, Lassar. The article is called 150 hours is a barrier, really. And she's saying that the study in Illinois can't make that argument based on that, because it only surveyed people who are already bought in to the CPA pathway. So of course, for them, 150 is not going to be considered that much of a barrier, because they've already chosen to absorb that cost, right? Yeah, you need to survey the people who decided not to do it to find out. And then she quotes the Center for Audit Quality, which we covered a couple of weeks back, where it was called out the 150s issue, and then goes back to that. I think he's talked about this in the past, the Dr. John Barrios survey. That was the first study, a period of study, yeah. But it's really that when I get down to the bottom of it, it's her per-conclusion paragraph. And the reason I feel like this ties back in, because it goes back to the, you said, the states, the states are taking action, right? And she was a former chair, right? And she's probably still involved in influencing these people that are involved. So she said, based on the research, I suggest states reduce the barrier to becoming a CPA and recognize the value of graduate education by requiring two years of experience, for bachelor degree holders, and one year experience for graduate degree holders. And she says, notice I did not say 150 or 120 hours. The education requirement should be based on earning degree, not random hours. So this is not the CPA. This is regarding the EA, my next story. But I think it's relevant because we've seen these declines in the number of accounts across all of the professional licenses and certifications. I got an email from the Arizona State Society of Emerald Agents inviting me to a meeting, a town hall, at which a major change will be considered. They are considering, or it sounds like, that the National Association of Emerald Agents is encouraging the state associations to dissolve and become chapters of the national organization. And one of the reasons is that their membership has dropped 23% from 2018 to 2023. In February of 2018, there were about 10,000 regular members of the NAEA in May of 2023. So five years later, the number was 7,700. That's a drop of about 23%. Now, we don't know AICPA membership numbers or state society membership numbers. Those aren't often published, at least I'm not aware of them being published. But if it's similar, that means that we're talking drops of 20 to 30%, 20% or more. And that's a serious issue for these state societies. This is also why they are interested in getting more CPAs because a drop of your membership of 20% is also a drop of your membership dues of 20%. It starts to become a survival issue. And I wonder if, at the national level, they're not seeing that issue as much. And that's why it's not as much of a burning issue for them. I'm not sure. I'd be curious to know. I would love to know how it's trending at the national level. Well, there's just so many off-ramps. You have people burning out, the burnout people after two years in it, a big four firm bailout. You have an aging population that's retiring. There is some set of people that are just dying off. And so the percentages start to add up to where, yeah, you could have 10% year after year after year for three, four years in a row. And also, that's 20%. I've got a story here that is not accounting, but there's an accounting tie-in. It's in the New York Times and it's called airline close calls happen far more often than previously known. A Times investigation has revealed a concerning pattern of safety lapses and near misses in the skies and on runways in the US. There have been at least 46 close calls this year, close calls meaning that planes nearly collided. Actually, that was last month alone. There's hundreds happening every year. So example would be a plane is taking off on a runway and another plane starts to land too soon and they almost collide. And the pilot has to pull up or there's a plane with a nose sticking out on the runway and a plane landing almost collides into it sometimes within hundreds of feet anywhere from a few miles to hundreds of feet. So the cause of this rise in these close calls is attributed to shortage of air traffic controllers. And you know what made me think about this and drew me back to this for this show is we were just talking to Jerry McGinnis for a bonus interview that is going to come out soon. Jerry was the office managing partner of KPMG Philadelphia auditor for many, many years. And we were talking to him about audit quality issues. And he used the analogy of airlines and flight disasters that we don't often, we don't hear about the crashes that didn't happen. And then of course this article comes out. And I wonder if the same thing is happening in financial reporting and auditing where there's a lot of close calls that we aren't hearing about and that they may have risen. But because of the way that we measure audit quality and the it's it's if not visible to the public right a lot of we don't get to see the workpapers the PCOB keeps the company's anonymous like it's all very obscured similar to how the FAA has kept this under wraps for a while the risk could be increasing but we're not aware of it. So this is a problem across all professions air traffic control medical accounting we just don't have enough people and quality is going to become a real problem. You know how do we how do we yeah. And I mean it's is this the whole levers people are pulling to make the economy crash because that's going to make people have to go back to work. I think they're still that extra stimme money floating around out there right and well we got to get people to go to work. Well the problem with air traffic controllers is that it takes years to become one age out yeah a lot of them have aged out it takes a certain personality not everyone is cut out for this either you got to have a college degree to do it and so a lot of these towers are understaffed sometimes by like an incredible amount. There's some stats here in the story as of may only three of the 313 air traffic facilities nationwide had enough controllers to meet targets set by the FAA and the union representing controllers many controllers are required to work six day weeks in a schedule so fatiguing that multiple federal agencies have warned that it can impede controllers abilities to do their jobs properly. So I'm really sure I heard that you said only three of three percent three of three hundred thirteen so one percent so it's the same number as accounts remember the survey from accountants two three weeks ago the only one percent of firms saying they can hire enough people yeah it's the same statistic it's the same statistic so I guess you know the upside in a bigger level yeah this is scary because like I'm I'm flying a lot this year and one of these close calls was in Phoenix one of the the closest of calls was here in Phoenix where two planes almost collided yeah the rate of so-called runway incursions such as when planes get too close to one another airports was nearly 25% higher now the decade ago here's a quote from an air traffic controller who spoke to the times on condition of anonymity the staffing shortage is beyond unsustainable it is now moved into a phase of just plain dangerous controllers are making mistakes left and right fatigue is extreme the margin for safety has eroded tenfold morale is rock bottom I catch myself taking risks and shortcuts I normally would never take it's only a matter of time before something catastrophic happens it sounds very similar I mean I think when we the the Southwest Airlines problems and we were talking about it we were basically I we played that game where I read the sentences the paragraph and I swapped out pilots or flight attendants for accountants and it was the exact same problems in the industry yeah and it's yeah I don't know it kind of makes you scared about everything you use in your your life not just accountants of what that David I hope you have some positive news I guess the upside in accounting is it nobody generally nobody's lives are at stake in accounting this I think this is positive news so we've talked about how you know remember remember bitcoin and blockchain and you know crypto all that yeah I heard that crypto is poised for another rise and one of the big problems we saw over and over again was there'd be the astastation reports right yeah and then the fake audit would say like we were audited yeah and they were exploiting accounting firms well one of the industry blog sites or news sites called blockworks.com they published an article this week from EY's a global blockchain leader Paul Brody and the title of the article is stop calling them audits there's no magical guarantee that comes with the word audit let's start calling things what they really are and it's a beautiful article he actually it ties back to some bookie wrote but he he talks about when S the station report is what agreed upon procedures a UPs are what a sock systems and organized controls reports are what smart contract audits which he says unfortunately despite the name audit there's no audits and should not be treated as such proof for reserves also not an audit and then trust but verify he's like yeah you're supposed to be able to trust the math but because there's humans and people involved like you can't it's just it's led to nowhere this trust the math policy and so it's just really good to see a crypto magazine for lack of better words or blog site or crypto crypto press crypto media actually finally in car while yeah that like nobody's getting audited like there's no such thing stop stop using the word audit yeah yeah yeah that's got to happen we we got to put an end to that it's the whole access station report thing if that comes back man I'll be really disappointed it's not it doesn't provide assurance you know it's what are they what are they at testing too we we dug into it on previous episodes and we found that they're not attesting to really anything at all it doesn't if all you're doing is telling up assets and you don't check the liabilities it doesn't mean anything what matters is the net position of these crypto exchanges so yeah smoke and mirrors and did you see I just on a side note did you see the FTC bankruptcy apparently they're burning through fifty million dollars a month in legal fees oh boy what a sweet gig for the lawyers and I tried to check like there's no I can't find any firms that are involved in the bankruptcy stuff like like a firm an accounting firm should be taken a piece of that pie too it's just sitting there everybody's getting their hands in it that's crazy this episode of the cloud accounting podcast is sponsored by Walter's Clure this year Walter's Clure is proud to celebrate 10 years in the cloud with their cch access platform cch access is the tax in accounting industries most comprehensive cloud platform specifically designed to help you focus on the work that matters most to your clients and your bottom line with a proven cloud platform for tax audit and firm management cch access delivers seamless integration and efficient workflows that will transform the way you do business posted in the cloud cch access enables your team to be justice productive at home or on the road as they can be in the office with all your firms dated in a single secure platform your data becomes more usable providing valuable insights into your clients and your firms operations that less connected solutions just simply can offer additionally cch access offers a wide range of features and functionalities to help you manage your practice more efficiently from automated data gathering and processing to advance the analytics and reporting cch access empowers you to make the data driven decisions that drive growth and improve client satisfaction cch access is perfect for firms of all sizes scaling to meet your needs whether a small firm or a very large one in fact 94 of accounting today's top 100 firms trust cch access to power their firms if you want to elevate your practice with cch access and join the range of successful firms reaping rewards of this innovative cloud platform hit over to cloud accounting podcast.promo slash access that is cloud accounting podcast.promo forward slash a x c-e-s-s I got another email from a listener I'm a non-profit bookkeeper and I input everything into cubie and cubio manually I'm so slow but when I've tried to import or automate I make a mess and give up I think I need coaching I'm not great at just reading stuff and then implementing it I miss key things and I can't figure them out and I get frustrated can you recommend a course or even better a place to find a coach if I can get over this hump I can do my work in less time importing PayPal donations striped donations and payroll journal entries making the bank feed work with me instead of against me integrating dynamic excel budgets and cubio for example and finding a way to edit cloud-based pds so I can add notations without downloading editing and re-uploading to the cloud please share your recommendations so I posted that on linked in and asked everyone to put in their recommendations and notably missing was anyone recommending that this person go to college and study accounting to learn these things that's fine so we're the top ones so let's see I'm going to sort by most relevant David Fibig said Blake thanks for sharing this question I believe the situation is significantly more common than most of your followers slash listeners slash admirers slash contemporaries understand the need to automate processes services workflows etc is broadly understood by most professionals smart or engaged enough to follow you and listen to your valuable insights however when it comes to actually implementing all the recommendations ideas software and apps a small business owner or small accounting company simply doesn't understand the right path or true potential of your main point you're one of the vanguard to the online accounting industry because of your early adoption of cloud technology integration and so forth we are in a different realm now at least as far as my recent dedicated research tells me no code low code sass zero slash cubio app zappier bubble caspio build fire blah blah who knows and how many firms or businesses can dedicate their time to research your money to hire someone to guide their path what is the right step here or is this where the most innovative firms rise above to capture their well-deserved market share and the firm that was the genesis of this post loses their clients slowly so I guess basically his point is that it's just overwhelming and he agrees like there's there's not a lot of places to learn this stuff and when I started I had to learn it myself yeah there are coaches they can help there are coaches there's individuals out there who will coach you and help you find apps there's a lot of profit quick books groups on Facebook you can jump into there it's really getting into the community and believe it or not something like a conference like QuickBooks Connect could help you get around you can kind of gravitate to some of the nonprofit sessions and then from there you start meeting other people that are in the same boat and that a community is probably the best village right to help you learn this stuff it can be but the problem is that even in that community how many people have actually tried a particular workflow with a particular type of client there's often not a like anybody who has something that they're really happy with right they might have something that works but is that really the best way forward in the end you still end up experimenting a lot there's a lot of recommendations in LinkedIn for specific solutions but I don't have an answer I don't think there's one place where somebody can listen to this or configure this out Katie recommended Katie Peterson recommended Greg Bossen and QuickBooks made easy dot com he does a lot of nonprofit training yeah let's see if there's any else in here Megan Tarno or Charelle Martin was recommended by Megan Justice Megan Tarno's Facebook group for QBO for nonprofits is amazing is that the one you were thinking of David I think yeah that's I'm saying I'm in so many I don't know which ones but I know there's four or five nonprofit ones and jump into those Mahoney CPAs and advisor Christine Nelson recommended Mahoney CPAs and advisors and their QuickBooks Pro advisors so I think yeah the Facebook groups could be good YouTube honestly you can learn a lot from YouTube now people are putting up all sorts of content I mean like just Hector Garcia's QuickBooks channel hours and hours and hours of content I would I would search YouTube for this but like yeah there is no there aren't a lot of courses and that's because it changes so quickly as soon as somebody puts up a course then there's new apps new technology it changes so I think I don't know the best thing is actually just to set up a bunch of like demo accounts or test accounts and try different things and don't and don't test on your own books just like then you'll never get your taxes done because you're always having you have a mess all the time your own bookkeeping or have two sets of books right have your test test set of books the practice yeah so so this whole like multiple apps and in these types of things it complicates these in a firm right along with you know one of the solutions you've said is start paying people more right so prices are gonna you're your cost to provide the services are gonna go up but what's I've always also noticed the last three or four weeks you're starting to see apps start to raise prices across the board even myself and I have five or six apps I'm using that I've had to go in and change and relay I had to bump up the limit on the credit cards because the apps instead being $10 and about $12 or $40 or not $45 everything's kind of in step well I saw the last couple weeks Dex had a major pricing change right they at one time people bought like a lifetime unlimited subscription to Dex for as many clients as they wanted and they pulled that back now and so some people's prices for Dex that's going up a hundred percent they had a lifetime discount and they took it away I think they were they had some yeah if you bought in at a certain time in the past you know startups get crazy when they want to start money yeah see I never trust those lifetime discounts because they can there's always something in the fine print that lets them take it away from you so so that huge jump in price ramp who has one of the you know expense card type companies so ramp hat they're going to opt everybody into this new platform called ramp plus which apparently is the paid version of the platform you can opt out but they're going to migrate you there first then you can you have to back out so that's going to move some percentage of people on paid quick bricks desktop I think we listen to talked about that they've raised a bunch of prices but it goes back to this like a bigger article accounting web bro which is great which is like how do you the articles called the countenance face up to the cost of cloud app stacks and essentially what they're doing is there's five ways to handle this and I'd love to get your points of view but it gets kind of going through these because ultimately if you have 30 40 apps in your firm maybe each you know the client using 10 or 15 and of all those apps raised up in price now what right or now if you start paying your staff more wait hopefully wages are going up right so five here's five ways you can how you can pass this on to clients so one of our five ways you can pass fees on to clients yeah so one is you don't do it all you just absorb the price of the software as an operational cost of doing business right well that's not passing it on to clients not at all right it's not well hopefully you've priced it in a different way okay right right like you've you've priced it enough to where this is never an issue right right I think there's that factor the cost and the client pricing but don't pass price the price rises on right which is kind of like the same a little bit it's just you're you're kind of figuring it out when you give somebody a quote they can assume it's going to raise right kind of like that factor it into the client pricing and pass the price rises whenever the client's package is reviewed so so annually you're okay these things cost more now we're going to have to charge more for these factored instantly so you just already have in your contract as soon as it changes yeah you changed your pricing instantly and then the other one is just to to punt the whole thing and tell the client to go subscribe to all these apps on their own yeah just how they're possible off shit it's it's there's trade-offs I think my three favorite are one is simply absorb it which is what I did with most of the apps that we recommended for our clients like I didn't charge I didn't add a fee for zero or quickbooks but sometimes we did add a fee for high volume clients that paid a lot of bills when we had to pay a per bill price I mean that could really add up so I've done it both ways the problem with only doing it annually is that if the price increase happens eight months before the review you might absorb eight months of price increases it eats at your margin before you actually get around to it so I feel like it should either be an all or nothing sort of thing it's you either need to pass through all of these charges where you need to have the client pay for them all themselves where you need to just absorb it well yeah and I think the first step here is stop being surprised by this like we've been this has been a trend now for the last four or five years and then you could see it every time quick books raises at five dollars the bulletin boards go crazy right so like figure out how to fit this into your model more long term yeah right where hey we just automatically every year we just raise our prices 15 10 percent every year right we just do it yeah if you as a firm are always raising your prices and you're raising them at least as much as SaaS businesses do then you'll be okay and you can just roll it all in together and I think the big problem really the root of the problem is that people aren't charging enough for the work they're doing and if you charge enough for the work you're doing the value you're creating then the cost of the software ends up being you know very small compared to what you're charging for your services I just think there's a lot of people out there that are like still billing effectively $20 an hour which is maybe what they got as an employee but they're a freelancer now and they haven't figured out that you got to multiply that by like two and a half times and be billing at least 50 or more an hour right if that's what you're doing because there's all these costs you've got to cover all this overhead we need to do more education in the accounting profession about setting rates because people just aren't charging enough last episode we were talking about that NATP price survey which I still need to dig into and the average tax return is like $200 or something it's just so low this episode the cloud accounting podcast is sponsored by Keeper by combining client communications file review reporting and your task management Keeper has everything you need to run your bookkeeping or cast practice Keeper is an all-in-one app that allows you your team and your clients to easily collaborate to make your monthly clothes as efficient as possible starting with a beautiful custom branded client portal optimized for bookkeeping work your client can answer questions you have about uncategorized transactions allowing you to categorize and automatically post them to QuickBooks Online correctly all without ever leaving Keeper via the month-end file review feature to surface transactions that may not be posted correctly and by providing the perfect customized report that each client may need Keeper can highlight the value that your firm provides clients Keepers built-in task management ensures nothing falls to the cracks and 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invoices received payments link bank accounts automated income and expense categorization and month-to-month cash flow trends $10 a month Blake $10 a month they've launched this how long is that going to last David that's to get you in the door and then once they built up a user base they jack up the price but I think what it is this is a door to get people and to remember they launched their legal tax services so they have their own turbo tax live kind of live bookkeeping live tax service and I think this is a way to push people in there because one of the features they say is it's seamless integration easily share financial and transactional information with LZ tax and our tax experts like it's it's kind of a push that's even $10 it's like that's a it's crazy it's it's you guys want to make it free like why it's too much work to account for the $10 well you've taken us into techniques so I'm going to share this tweet from Jacob Schroeder on Twitter he said on an OS CPA town hall that's Ohio society on an OS CPA town hall and the poll responses and question around chat GPT and AI makes me realize how far behind the majority of the accounting industry is and how much of a bubble the tax Twitter community is so then he said in a follow-up tweet that the poll was about how many attendees have used chat GPT would you like to take a guess David how many Ohio state CPA society town hall attendees have actually used chat GPT at all and this is not on Twitter this is actually at the event yeah in person event right not Twitter people oh and he did not participate in the poll let's assume that it was a big enough group where it doesn't matter if he participated oh it's two people well I mean what percentage of the attendees oh 100 percent 0 percent oh this is under under one under one percent maybe maybe a half a percent oh so it's a little more than that 14 percent 14 percent of the attendees had tried it 86 percent of the attendees have not used chat GPT at all like not even gone to the website and just use the free one to see what it's about just to fit around that yeah no curiosity whatsoever that's the state of the accounting profession I mean how can you not be a little bit curious about this thing that has the potential to change everything especially the way I had a bunch of articles this week and I didn't bring any of them because I got mad and I just tweeted about instead but the amount of articles written about how AI is going to change accounting bookkeeping and tax that are written by AI as blog posts are just astronomical now and it's just it's all fluff it's just SEO blog post fluff and it's a shame how many but even what I'm saying with that's a whole they're being exposed to this so yeah you're right it's surprising they didn't go in just test it around and just play with it for once just see I want to do like a webinar where we just do like everybody together opens up chat GPT at the same time and we just play with it like okay we're all gonna try the same prompts and just like get I mean maybe maybe you really have to walk people through it right you can't just say go use chat GPT because people don't even know where to find it on Google maybe they don't know how to Google I mean we have to maybe we have to start from the basics it would have to be a big keynote so you're doing thousands of people at the same time so that really that's the only way to create great exposure experience I think the problem is that all these people read that accounting today article that said that chat GPT can't pass the CPA exam and they just assume that it's a toy you know thanks a lot accounting today yeah I saw that we talked about that we don't have to we don't have to rail on there for that anyway I saw it in one of these articles today too into it had their conference call they released their year end earnings and I'm assuming they crushed it again so so I'm sorry they crushed it again yeah not like Nvidia just Nvidia they had 100% year-over-year growth so this Nvidia has just they've been so lucky they had the crypto craze so all their chips are selling for crypto mining and then when that fell off AI picked up they can't lose yeah I really wish I bought Nvidia stock like 10 years ago jeez so into it they gave guidance for 2024 which is basically let's just say a 16 billion dollars now into it is a 16 billion dollar company wait is it and then 16 billion dollars of what revenue company revenue wow and there that's what they're projecting yes wow with the base base that's a growth of 11 to 12% and then you know the conference call goes on and this is not a good look for into it so we refer into it listening this is not a good look keep in mind you now have 16 billion dollars in revenue okay and you owe 700 million in taxes but because California was one of those relief states they're just making they they just noted like by the way we will be paying this you know and q1 a fiscal 24 but it's just not a good look right you don't have to pay 700 million dollars just pay it just go pay it up over there um a couple others interesting things so credit karma which is like the personal finance kind of credit reporting app there's just the number of people that they took from credit karma and turn them into turbo tax customers was up 5x this year wow so which is a pretty pretty much a move was a big reason that they bought credit karma was to make that happen so yeah to to move and move my guess yeah and then let's talk about they also there's a question about business business tax so like we did we use turbo tax business to do our taxes so here's this here's what was in the comments call we look we launched and learned to get the product market fit in business tax that is now going to be available both across our QuickBooks live platform and directly going to market with turbo tax and we have hundreds of thousands if not millions of people that come to turbo tax looking for business tax we've never had an offering so the the tam on this like they're just like we've had millions and millions of businesses coming to us looking for a product so now they're going to have an offering there right and then the other really cool thing that they had in their comments call is they're just talking about the turbo tax live in general and and probably and I bet you they're using QuickBooks providers in this as well but essentially they have tax experts and business experts now 10 miles from every single house in the United States so wherever you're at in the whole country somebody within 10 miles has some tax or QuickBooks experts use basically but you can't see them in person you have to see them in a little square on your screen so I think it's a fun data point but yeah and now they're not irrelevant I don't think there is anything as I scroll down a highway to everything yellow but there was not many other things coming out of there well I got some news from zero con Sydney since you mentioned into it it's only fair that we talk about their product wrap they announced some new stuff some new AI stuff of course you can't do a conference now without announcing either AI that you've built into your product or that you plan on building into it right it's the new blockchain short term cash flow in zero analytics plus now includes predictions for recurring invoice and bill payments giving small businesses a clearer picture of their potential future cash flow so this is the cash flow tool that is available inside a zero in the analytics tab actually forget exactly what it's called don't quote me on that but there anyway there is this cash flow tool so they're using AI to help improve that which I think is great because nobody in any of the small business jails has figured out how to do good cash flow forecasting like automated I mean even manually it's bad everyone's still using spreadsheets for that so I think that's really cool they're moving in that direction now here's what's coming they said that in coming months they're going to use AI in the bank reconciliation which is music to my ears it will populate new contacts that aren't already in your clients context list and that's one of the most time consuming things in zero that you have to do when you're coding is you have to create a contact because zero doesn't automatically create contacts and they're going to use AI to help do that which I think is is good I mean it depends on the implementation right if it's just creating a bunch of contacts and now you have duplicate contacts that would be very bad but if it's using AI to intelligently create contacts that you don't have yet that would be great yeah I don't need Starbucks 23 Starbucks 254 Starbucks just put them all as one Starbucks just yeah yeah exactly yeah every restaurant location is its own contact yeah you don't need that and they are also experimenting with AI in hubduck zero expenses zero go zero central is powered now by an AI tool that serves up relevant content to your search queries so when you're looking for help articles they are to use some AI they're going to start using a large language model to surface better answers from across all the content and zero central so that'll help you get to the answer that you need sooner and that's a great use case for generative AI LLM's is or just the caller or the the voicemail or the the email you got a wondering you know how to get help right you know if the apps and cells had better search it would be nice way to get help oh yeah well and so the problem of search right now is that you have to match the terms exactly or very closely to what's in the help article so if you're not using the same words you're not going to find it but LLM's let you use something approximate it understands the meaning of what you're trying to search for and finds you a similar meaning in those articles you don't have to use exact search terms so it improves the the power of search by many many times so that's a great example of it being used so kudos to zero on that those developments I can't wait to see the cash flow to I'm gonna I'm gonna really be playing with it because that's something I always wanted as a advisor that I could never really get the way I wanted it there's other breaking zero news so when you were you know pull all the dials to get the pod to get us recording this morning zero con announced there's zero announced that they are going to do zero con back in the eight states again in Nashville yes August 14 to 15 Nashville is one of my favorite food cities I'm so sorry oh yeah oh in music I mean it's the I mean yes this music yes yes I mean for me it's it's I love the food but don't like the reason I go to Nashville is for the music you cannot get better live music but I think it's an underrated food city maybe that's the way to think about it nobody puts it on their map of like food cities but I would say August 14th and 15th 2024 and they're they're 14 15 cellar for accountants that's gonna be like my birthday right around my birthday so I'll have to go perfect yeah now it's on and then I don't know do I have any more small app news relay now has two and a half million dollars in FDIC insurance up from the usual two hundred fifty thousand they've done this via thread bank where now if you have a balance over two hundred fifty thousand dollars in relay they will automatically sweep it into different deposit accounts and obscure all of that for you you don't have to worry about it at all and so that way you've got two point five million dollars in FDIC insurance so if we have a situation like SVB bank runs again you are protected up to that amount and you don't have to think about that they will that's the best part it's just and I believe it's just included now in all of the relay accounts like that you you this is now a feature which is very compelling because other banks charge a fee for this service or don't even offer it so really nifty um and this probably my last article I think for me this week um stripe unveiled a platform they call it tax for platforms the streamlined tax compliance for small business and it's a little confusing when you read it but I don't remember a few years back stripe bought tax jar I don't know if you remember that they were kind of a smaller pre-availer or competitor and they they y'all will them up and they've been offering sales tax calculations for stripe customers right but now with it don't they built it as a platform which really now they're really an avaler competitor competitor so then with other companies or other apps so for example mine body right which is like lots of offer gym views orange three uses etc mine body doesn't even have to use stripe for payments they but they don't who who knows how mine body's calculating sales tax right now but what they can do now is they could use stripes sales tax platform and they don't have to get avaleras so this is like direct real competition for somebody like avalera where if I'm building an app I would probably lease technology from avalera but now stripes getting into that game which this is an interesting run to watch I mean it's probably not going to affect accounts of bookkeepers as much directly but that's a pretty big movement in this space I think I think that's a wrap thanks everyone who joined us live today you can follow us on youtube subscribe to our channel get notified when we go live and you can chat with us everyone who's chatted really appreciate your joining show eeb hamza hk Edgar Natalie john Trevor Trevor Mitch really great having you on the chat with us and everyone watching live I am Blake T Oliver on the social media what about you David I'm David Larry everywhere and send us an email we are the accounting podcast at earmark.me let us know if you have a friend or relative who is taking accounting for the first time let us know what's going on with your firm if you've got news to share in accounting that we haven't covered we want to hear it we love hearing from our listeners and do us a favor and rate and review us on apple podcasts it really helps us getting more listeners our show numbers are up massively this year and it's because of you our listeners for putting in those reviews you've you've helped bring us to a whole new group of accountants and we really appreciate you so thanks a lot oh and hk says hey guys please schedule your live feeds again in youtube yes that is something we want to figure out how to do unfortunately we are not quite organized enough to start on time every single week but we're working on it we're going to get there someday all right David I'll see you here next week beautiful I'll see you Monday we're being Chicago oh yes you're Chicago bye everyone time for the class of fives your accounting clients don't want another shiny app they have to log into they want to be met where they live in their email inbox fin daily does just 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