PodsGPT.io - Podcasts Summaries and Transcriptions

Want to learn what sets a live flow apart from thousands of other QuickBooks online apps? Do you want to learn how live flow saves time for hundreds of accountants and bookkeepers? Want to learn how live flow helps accountants and bookkeepers to use live flows successfully in their firm? Stay tuned to hear more from our sponsor LiveFlow, later in the episode. So instead of people like burning out in two years and just leaving, now you're going to be burned out after two years, but then you have these golden handcuffs you can't leave because you've invested yet to cash out your vesting. It's just going to like, just shift when people burn out a little longer. People are going to hang around a little longer, but then if they're still burnt out, it's almost worse. It could turn out to be an unintended consequence. Right. It could turn out worse. Coming to you weekly from the OnPay Recording Studio. Hello and welcome to the show. I'm Blake Oliver, CPA, and I'm David Leary, not a CPA. But you know what, David, you do really good accounting. I just want to say I'm always impressed when I go into QuickBooks and I look at the work you've done. It's just behind. It's just behind. That's the problem. And actually, you know, actually, to be honest, you want, you know, how it gets behind is apps. Apps. Tell me more. Like, because you got to like, you connect an app and then you get, if you don't take the time to go configure and connect all the pipes of that app perfectly, so then you just kind of have stuff sitting in limbo. I know these are in the bank fee because I haven't configured that app to send the transactions over to the bank fee to match them. Like, I hear you. I hear you. You know, I deal with this with my, like, the gusto integration into zero. I've got to make sure that that journal entry sinks in as a bill properly. And sometimes it doesn't. I got to go in and, you know, get that to sink. I mean, that's that's the era we live in. But hey, it's better than making it manually, right? Yeah. I have not on pays great. Like, once you said it, it's just said it, forget it. So on pays never the issue. But when you try out new apps, which I'm always constantly doing, which is probably the worst, I don't know. I have mixed opinions on this. Some piece of me says, don't use anybody else's apps. Because and just or outsource are bookkeeping. But I feel like I have to use these different apps and do the bookkeeping. So you and I can see on the weeds. We have to understand how this stuff works. Yeah, we got to understand how frustrating it is or how it's constant pipe massaging. Yeah, we cannot outsource our own accounting and bookkeeping. Otherwise, we'll lose touch with the tools. And, you know, that's why I love running the payroll and reconciling the books. And last week, I went to a user conference for a payroll company. I went to gusto next, gusto's annual get together for accountants. But a hundred accounting partners came to gusto's headquarters in San Francisco. They have a beautiful office on, I believe it's pier 70 over near the port on the Embarcadero. And it's in an old submarine factory. So there's still cranes hanging from the ceiling that the submarines used to hang from. And they've built the office out inside of this old structure. And they built that, right? If I remember correctly, they just finished and just opened it like right and then COVID hit. Yes, you never got full attendance. And, you know, it was a great place to have their user conference because a lot of people are still working from home. And actually, one of the issues that I discussed with some of the gusto people there is this, they're doing a return to the office policy at gusto. They're going to start requiring employees to come in two days a week to that office. And they're getting a lot of resistance. And that is something that every business that's trying to do a return to office is seeing firms are seeing that a lot of people have moved away from the city, don't want to commute an hour or more to get there. It's not the easiest place to get to, right? You got to go across bridges, you got to take public transit. So it's a real challenge for them. And it'll be interesting to see what happens because, hey, they're an HRC business. But the thing I wanted to talk to you about, David, the most interesting thing that I saw at gusto next was a new feature that they have released. It is, get this, a spreadsheet view of your payroll. Yes, yes, yes. Yes, instead of going through running payroll like it's a type form or a wizard, you can actually switch views and you can see all the employees as rows. And you can see all their different hours and stuff as an interactive spreadsheet embedded in the application. And the accountants and attendants loved it. And it reminded me of you, David. It made me think of you because you have said to me, I don't know if you said it on the show. I told developers I've consulted with for years. When they're like, what about this for the accounting UI? The greatest accounting UI ever is Excel. Make it be like Excel. So they can hit the tab key, hit the entry key, type with their 10 key, and just burn through it. Yeah, so it's great to see gusto listening to their accounting partners and building that every app should have a spreadsheet view. You can have that simplified view for the non spreadsheet users. And you can have the spreadsheet view for the people who need to see all that data in one place. Spreadsheets are powerful. They're great. There's a reason that they are the killer app of computers and still are. So I've got to mention type form because I think that's the epitome of what accountants don't want. Here's one field and then you can give it to them like a tax form. Show an account in all the fields at once on one screen. They'll fill them in. It's their nature. They'll fill them in. But let them see the field that's coming up next. It's great to see it goes against all the sexy one screen, modern UIs, but it's super efficient when you can just tap and go to the next field. That's what we want. And you know what's going to end up making this all work is AI. I did a webinar on Tuesday where I interviewed Jason Stats all about AI and productivity for accountants. And he said something that stuck with me. I'm paraphrasing here, but it was something like we have reached peak UX, peak UI, peak user interface. There will never be more bells and whistles in a user interface than there is today. And that's because conversational AI chat bots are going to end up eliminating a lot of the user interface because we'll simply be able to tell the bot what we want it to do. And then it'll go and put all that into the database into that spreadsheet, that table view for us. So users who are not needing to access the spreadsheet type of view or the database directly will simply chat with a bot that will do it for them. And that's going to solve a lot of problems. I would list where I was lazy. We were at a conference and we got a list of names and email addresses, but our CRM needs first name and last name and separate fields. And I know there's a formula in Excel. We could have done to separate the first name and last name, but it was easier just to give it to chat GPT and say give it back. So when that actually is in Excel, you're right. It eliminates a bunch of UI. I just tell Excel, make this two columns, first name, last name. And we have a comment from a viewer on our YouTube live stream. Adam says, is there a reason why you guys simp for chat GPT so much? There it is. Yes, I'll tell you Adam. The reason I simp for chat GPT is that I believe it is a truly transformative technology. I have been following AI in this profession for 10 years or more. And it's been total bullshit up until now. Most of it has been utter marketing bullshit. And I can say that with authority as somebody who spent four years working in marketing for different software companies, it's total bullshit. Chat GPT, generative AI is the real deal. And I did another experiment this week to validate that. On Wednesday, I gave a presentation to the San Antonio chapter of the Institute of Management Accountants all about AI and accounting and how I believe AI will save accounting. And in preparation for that presentation, I thought, hmm, I wonder if anyone has tested chat GPT on the CMA exam, the Certified Management Accounting exam. I wanted to impress my IMA members who, if you're a certified management accountant, you've passed that exam. And so I found a bunch of sample questions and I put five of those sample questions. The first five I found on the IMA website into chat GPT is multiple choice. It got five out of five. Five out of five. And I'm running some more experiments with more questions. It's nailing them and not only is it getting the answer right, but it's providing a detailed explanation of how it got to the answer, along with calculations. It's incredible. So this technology is going to change our lives very rapidly. It's going to end up doing the job or performing certain functions that are currently being done by humans. And you're going to interact with a bot that will very much seem like an accounts payable specialist or a payroll specialist or any of these other kind of lower level jobs that require us to process data and manipulate data in systems. That is going to come within five to 10 years. It's going to completely change how we work. Our colleagues will be bots. Many of them. And we're not full blown sims for it. I am equally as frustrated with chat GPT as I am. And I think I'm more frustrated with it than I am happy with it because I see the potential and it just, it's just not, it's so close. It's so great there at the edge. And the red, do you own a 3D printer, Blake? So my son goes to a coding academy. And one of the rewards they can earn, they are in points for completing coding assignments. If you get a lot of points, you can do a 3D printer thing. And so they have 3D printers in the dojo. And you can, so I've seen them in action. Okay, so I have a 3D printer. You can use my kid want a 3D printer. You got a 3D printer. And of course, like most things, you can make with it. What do you do with the garage? And they're not using any more. But I installed air conditioning to my recordings studio. So as you can see, it's a nice 76 degrees in here. It's not sweating, David. Not sweating. So, but I had to connect basically two pieces of the fan to a vent through my wall. And I was trying to pair up with these different ways to do it. There was two different sizes. It's like, you know what, I bet you I could 3D print this. And yes, I did 3D printed after 300 messed up prints. Do you know what I'm saying? Like the potential is there. And it's like, this is so great. I was able to print it eventually by myself. But it took like 300 messed up prints. Like the temperature is too low. The string went off. You know, the filament got jammed in the thing. Like all, there's so many points of failure. And I think it's kind of that same thing. Like, it's right there. But at the same time, I'm like, this is too much work. This is so annoying. Because I actually have to print a second one now. And I haven't started it. Because I just know like how much of a nightmare it is. It's actually print. So, you know, these things take time. I mean, we got to remember chat GPT, generative AI. It's less than a year out in the world. And it can take years for... Look, I printed this. Our live stream viewers can see that David has printed some sort of funnel-looking thing that I guess that's an error. It could be. You'll put my whole arm through it. Yeah, I'm impressed. So it took you several tries to get that right. How much was the printer, by the way? I think you can get them on Amazon. It's just like chat GPT, 20 bucks a month. You can get a printer for like a hundred bucks, 112 bucks, $12, $12, $29. It's nothing. Amazing. Well, David, that's my story about being in San Francisco at Gastonex. Cool features. Oh, I should mention that I got an interview with Liz Wilkie, the chief economist at Gasto. And we talked all about rising interest rates. We talked about her new podcast, Gastonomics, which everyone should check out. I'm going to put that in the feed as a bonus episode. So do check that out and give it a listen when it's available. It's really good. Liz is brilliant. And Gasto has done some really cool stuff with their research. This episode of the counting podcast is sponsored by LiveFlow. If you're really a busy body, your title would read CPP, a certified public busy body. Your CFO, a controller, a CPA, and yet you've earned so much time on the busy work component reports, stuck in the land of CPB. Well, LiveFlow's mission is to get you out of there. It's the fastest way to connect your QuickBooks Online to Google Sheets. It's designed to eliminate your extra busy work by automating and scaling your client reporting with live hourly updates. Once you cross the border, some strange and wonderful things start to happen. You stop exporting reports from QBO, you no longer customize your sheets over and over again. Your central nervous system forgets what it feels like to deal with stale data and you enter a state of Nirvana. For your one-way ticket out of CPB land and 20% off your first three months, head over to accountingpodcast.promosflashliveflow. That is accountingpodcast.promo-forward-slash-L-I-V-E-F-L-O-W. Welcome back to CPA land. Well, my top story for this week is a study by the National Association of Tax Professionals, the N-A-T-P, that found that tax pros have hiked their fees by more than 20%. The 2023 fee study found that the average cost for a new client in 2023 was $218 versus $174 in 2001. An increase of just about 23% said Tom Osabin, Director of Tax Content and Government Relations at N-A-T-P. I'm glad you brought this because I think I saw this on Twitter, on tax Twitter, and then trying to get stuff into our workflow now with Twitter and their APIs is like so bad. So I never actually, I go in today, and my article for about this was in here, so I'm glad you brought this. But don't they break it down like each return per state if I'm actually charged? So I'm just looking at the summary of the study in accounting today. I have requested a media copy of the full study so that we can dig into this more next week. Okay, great. Yeah, but the thing that kind of shocked me when I read this is just how low that average fee seems to me. $218 for a tax return. Now I'm assuming this is an average of all tax returns, so there's a huge weight waiting towards individuals. And we know that individual returns are less than business returns. But like, even if this is just for individual returns, it's like not a lot of money. It costs, how much does it cost to file your taxes with TurboTax? Well, we paid $1500 bucks. Well, now seeing we could have got it done for maybe 600 Blake. I saw it on the Twitter, that's why I'm upset. Well, so actually it's funny. I just saw a coupon code come through from Intuit for that full service business thing we bought at full price. I think it was $500 off. They discount it. So I want everyone who heard that episode to know that 1500 is the list price Intuit has been discounting it to as much as 750 for a business return. But even then, right, this is way lower than that. And I know that there's a chronic problem in our profession of tax professionals undercharging for their work. And I'm just curious, like on the individual side, are we undercharging? I mean, it seems like it's very low. And we could be doing a lot better. So anyway, I want to dig into this. Right, obviously depends on where you are. What kind of clientele you serve? If you're in a small town and you're serving middle class, main street average Americans, you're not going to be able to charge a lot of money for returns. The people who are making, you know, under six figures, right, it's just not possible. And I would love to see a breakdown. So I've asked to see that report. There are some other insights from the overview that I wanted to share. Unbilling or never getting paid for your work. Six percent of work goes unbuild. So usually it's tax strategies and IRS slash state correspondents. It's work that tax pros do. And then they never bill for it. Those are the two top areas. Almost two thirds of practitioners gross revenue is earned during tax season with another 12% coming during the extended tax season. So during tax season, right, that time, two thirds of revenues earned during that time, that to me indicates that there's an opportunity to spread this out over the year. Put your clients on subscriptions, get them paying you every quarter, or at least twice a year, spread the income out. So you don't have this feast and famine type thing going on. And then here's a chart on the screen. And then spread the workout, right? Yeah, exactly. Hey, we just found an extension for everybody automatically and you just start pumping out the returns. Yeah. And then, now, I know clients push back on that. They want to get their return done. But I've also heard from tax pros who successfully have made this the default in their firm, you want to work with me? I'm going to extend everyone. And then we're going to get you done before the extended deadline. Here's a chart on the screen. The headline is before, during or after, when clients pay to have their taxes prepared. When do clients pay? In an ideal world, every client should pay before you follow the return. But that does not happen. Only 4% of clients paid beforehand or on retainer, just 4%. 59%, more than half, paid on completion, but before filing. Okay, that's second best, right? You finish the return. But before you file, that client has got to pay. And that's how TurboText does it. They will not file your return until you pay. And we got that message from our preparer, right? Now, 37% of clients are still paying after the filing is done. So that means the tax pro is filing the return and sending a bill to the client and hoping that they pay. That makes no sense to me from a business perspective. Why would anyone run a business that way? Do you as a tax pro do that with everything that you buy? If you place an order for furniture, you're at least putting down a substantial deposit before it gets delivered. You're not paying after they delivered. Anybody could still come and take the furniture or repo the car. But like, once the returns files, but you have no recourse over that other than not taking them as a client. Yeah. So I thought those were good insights. So basically... We're back to the coupon you got. So you said, into it, send a $500 coupon. Is that a coupon like, if we pay for next year, we get $500 off if we book now? Is that one of those type of coupons? It was a if we filed by the end of the month. So folks who are maybe waiting for that October deadline, it's incentivizing people to get the work in. Get it done now. Yeah, get it done now so that it's not all compressed for the TurboTax people in September and October. And firms could do the same thing. You could offer a discount to your clients who get you their documents sooner rather than later. So if you're really speedy, get me your documents in January, get me everything you need. You know, you get a significant discount. And I think discounts work really well as opposed to penalties. But I've seen both being used, incentivize people to save money. Otherwise, you know, what incentive do they have really to get the documents to you? And that's the problem that everyone complains about. My clients don't give me the documents in time. That's why I have this workload compression. I mean, there's things we could be doing to incentivize them. If you ask me. If you're going to solve that problem, get into the documents. It can go bug them for us, right? That's the dream. This episode of The Counting Podcast is sponsored by Arrow. 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Arrow has direct integrations with Office 365, QuickBooks Online, QuickBooks Time, and thousands of other apps via their Zapier integration. And if that isn't enough, you can even create your own integration using Arrow's Open API. Arrow also provides a free training and certification plan to you and your staff, including unlimited, free one-on-one support sessions. Arrow is currently offering all new accounts white glove onboarding that usually cost $2,000 for free. To take advantage of this offer before the end of 2023, hit over to accountingpodcast.promos-arrow. That is accountingpodcast.promos-a-e-r-o. What else you got, David? So, we just talked about taxes. Did you see the, uh, this is in Phoenix, the IRS agent who accidentally killed the other IRS agent at the gun range, the shooting range? I saw that this morning. I couldn't believe this when I saw it. It was here in Phoenix. Yep. It was during a routine interagency exercise at a federal prison's gun range. The agent was taken to a nearby medical center but did not survive. The name of the agent has not been released. And the circumstances surrounding the shooting are under investigation by the FBI's Phoenix Field Office. No other injuries were reported. And the, the, the, the bigger issue with this is that just the optics, right? Because then all, all the 87,000 memes about 87,000 IRS agents with guns come into your door and then this is the headline. Look, they really do have guns and they're shooting each other. They, they, it just, it's just not a good look for the IRS to have this unfortunate accident and unfortunate timing. Um, and I think the one website I saw there was a link to an officer down memorial page. There's only been like four or five debts ever in the history of the IRS agents. Oh, dude, like, like, dude, dude, this sort of thing. Three of them were car accidents, I think. Wow. Like an active duty. So this might be a terrible situation. Yeah, it's just not in the head. My, it just doesn't help the, you know, for all the people that are paranoid about the IRS having guns. This sure reinforces those arguments, unfortunately. It's just bad. That's, it's a shame. Well, speaking about optics, did you see that Sam Bankman-Freed has been sent to jail? Yeah, a judge revoked his bail. So he was under house arrest. This is the founder of FTX, who was put under house arrest, and is under criminal investigation, where he's been charged criminally for running a massive fraud on his, on his crypto currency exchange. And he was apparently trying to influence witnesses, including by giving documents to reporters. He gave documents to reporters that made his ex-girlfriend look bad. It was also an executive at FTX. And yeah, you do that. And the judge is not going to look kindly upon you and sent him to federal jail. It's good. Yeah. But at some level, like, he's just clueless. I don't know, I don't know how else to say it. And then what's amazing is like, how can somebody who operated the way he did just give people money like this? It's, it's, I guess like, Americans just get blinded by greed at the end of the day. And it's an opportunity to get rich and people just go for it. I saw another stat this week that stuck out to me. 60% of accountants rate their job fulfillment at sea or lower. This was discovered in a survey commission by flowcast, my former employer. The study revealed that many accountants lack fulfillment in their jobs and desire financial transformation in their organizations. It was conducted in partnership with the University of Georgia Consumer Analytics program and gathered insights from 284 accounting and finance professionals. Key findings include that 42% of accountants are not completely confident in their work. 60% rate their fulfillment in their job as a sea or lower. And they want to be more strategic partners and have a greater impact on their organizations. They want to have better technology. And the survey also highlighted the need for financial transformation in companies with 70% of accountants stating their company is in strong need of it. I think that headline though, so flip this around it. So that means 40% of accountants have satisfaction be or higher. Right. So, which I think, I don't know, I'm trying to think it like in a bell curve, like this feels like it's just an average survey. Like I don't know if it's, if it's really as bad as maybe the headline feels like it's bad. I mean, let me see this room for improvement. Yeah, I guess it's certainly bad. I don't know. I just feel like I would hope that most accountants would be happy in their jobs, right? We want that. Yes. This doesn't surprise me based on reading online forums, like Reddit, which, you know, the happy accountant is a rare accountant on Reddit. But I always thought that was an anomaly that it was just an unhappy people on these forums. But it seems like there's actually quite a few accountants who are, you know, not happy in their jobs. But, you know, maybe that's also just like a personality thing. Like, maybe a C isn't that bad. I don't know. We need to investigate it more. What else? Do you want to talk about the BDO stock purchase? Stocking options thing? Yeah, that was big news. So BDO, top 10 accounting for BDO is, they've borrowed $1.3 billion from Apollo Global Management. And they're going to use that money to create an employee stock ownership plan. So I guess it's for BDO US. Right. So it's about 10,000 participating employees. The parent of the US has about 11,000 employees. So somewhere, you know, somewhere in there. Now BDO overall has 111,000 employees. So this is just the US division of BDO. So they're using the money. And this follows BDO converting to a corporation. So like BDO is no longer a partnership. They are converting to a corporation. And they're using this money to buy out a good chunk of the partner equity. So partners are getting paid out now. And they're creating this employee stock option plan. And I believe employees will earn 10% of their salary each year in terms of stock options. So it wasn't clear to me if this is every employee or just some. I think that's why I went and looked up the number of employees is because when I said, only 10,000 participating, that doesn't make any sense. And then I went and looked. I was like, oh, there's about 11,000. So it sounds like maybe everybody knew us. That's yeah, which close. So this is really, this is really interesting. Think about that. Like you start work at BDO. And you are earning equity in the form of options that you can buy into every year. You don't have to wait to be a partner. You don't have to go to a tech company. And you've talked about this. Yeah. The partnership model is different. But actually was thinking about this a lot. I mean, you've worked for startups. I've worked for startups. Usually what goes along with these options? A cliff. Yes. And a lot of times, sometimes it's three years. Sometimes it's four years. You've got to work four years before you actually get these options. Or before you invest in these options. And I was kind of thinking about this. So what if these firms switch to this options model? They start giving people options. But you have a four-year cliff. You can't even earn them for three years or four years. So instead of people like burning out in two years and just leaving, now you're going to be burned out after two years. But then you have these golden handcuffs. You can't leave because you've invested yet to cash out your investing. It's just going to like, just shift when people burn out a little longer. Like people are going to hang around a little longer. But then if they're still burnt out, it's almost worse. It could turn out to be an unintended consequence. It could turn out worse. It could be abused. I think that's fair. I would hope that they wouldn't have a cliff that long. My cliff in the tech companies I worked for was a year. So I had to work for at least a year to get any. And then they've invested every month. A lot of people see each month. Over the course of four or five years that I was granted that block of stock options. Now, the problem in a lot of tech companies is that the employees don't exercise their options as they earn them. And so they end up after four or five years with a large amount of options that becomes kind of pricey to purchase, even at the reduced price that you were given. Accounts won't make this mistake. They understand tax law and this type of thing is correct. So that's what happened in my first job is I didn't exercise until I left. And then I had to put a lot of cash on the table to buy my options, to buy my stock. And in the next job I had, I exercised every month. When I got the notification that I invested, I would immediately go and exercise and pay the money. So I hope people do that. If they don't, then this is not going to help them. It's better. It's a step in the right direction. But I want to say, I care for about the options. This is what we've been talking about. This is great. If this works out and employees truly do get equity now and can earn it, like this will give BDO, I think, a big advantage over other firms that are saying, oh, yeah, you can make partner and then you get equity. But that's like 10, 15 years down the road, like BDO is saying, no, no, you can start earning equity right now. It's the way to go. You want to compete. So we'll see if other firms do this too. I mean, the partnership model could be on its way out below the big four. Yeah, there's a lot of people are going to have that C-suite style model, right? So I think it's my turn. What do I got? I got so much to talk about this week. Because last week, we talked with Jen Crider of the Pennsylvania Institute of CPAs. And we had a great time talking with her, but we didn't cover our regular news. Could we review for a second that that? Yeah, sure. One of the big things we talked about last week was the announcement from NASBIT and AICPA and their ELE program, the Experienced Learner, the partnership with Tulane, right? So you can work at a firm, take classes online at a reduced cost, like a hundred and fifth, well, I don't know if they have a price, but I think they're trying to keep it under $5,000. To get your fifth year. So I'm a little confused on this because make sure my interpretation of last three, four or five years is correct. They've continually hammered both NASBIT and AICPA that they have no data about the 150-hour rule being an issue. And I think they've already said, we survey students, it's not a barrier. Over and over again, that has been the message we've seen. Is this correct observation by me? Say that again. Over the last few years, the messaging we've gotten from NASBIT and AICPA is the 150-hour rule is not a barrier. And we have we talked to students. We have no survey data. It's not a barrier. Yeah, the students are not saying it's a barrier. Yes, they would tell us that. Right. They would tell us to public that. Right. So if that's true, why would they implement this program unless they have some data telling them it's something else now? Because I'm sure this didn't spin up in the last three weeks. But this probably took two years of planning to roll out. Yeah, well, we all know it's a barrier. The data is very clear that it's a barrier. Illinois did the study. There was another study that was done. Just ask people. Was the extra 30 hours a barrier to becoming a CPA? Yes. I think what the ASCPA is arguing is that, oh, they would do it anyway. Right. Like if you take away the extra 30, it's not going to change the pipeline. Is what they're saying. I, I think it would make a big difference. But you know, that's a hypothetical, right? Can't test that necessarily. All right. So so maybe they have it. Maybe they have the data. But to me, this is like a half measure. Right. We know that the 30 hours does not add value. We know it doesn't make better CPAs. All the evidence says this. All the studies say this. So why go halfway and create this like reduced cost, you know, learn while you earn program, which by the way is going to just make it harder to be a first year associate. Because now on top of working the hours, you got to work in your first year, you got to take classes. Like to me, this actually compounds the work life balance problem. It's going to make work life balance harder for these kids right out of school. It would be easier to go get the masters and then go work, right? From a work life balance perspective. And it looks like with them, work the seat and hall university and they're doing something similar. Yeah, with this now as well. So a lot of firms are trying, trying this out, this apprenticeship program. To me, we need massive change. We need, we need to make immediate significant changes now to create a pathway that doesn't require five years of education. If we aren't willing to do that, we're not going to make a dent in the problem. Because the problem is we're, we have a gap of tens of thousands of accounts every year. So we can solve some of that with AI, but we also need to solve it with bodies. And like this is just, you know, it's a half measure. Something I saw, just if we can pivot to tech news and AI, since we're AI simps. Something that I saw that I really liked in real life was, I was going through Amazon looking for something to buy. And at the top of the reviews section, there was a summary of the reviews saying like, in general, people agree, I was looking for a swim cap. I've gotten into swimming recently, you know, the heat, Arizona. Do I have to say more? And yeah, I want to go a little faster in the water, right? I'm starting to figure this thing out. So I'm looking for a swim cap, but I have a giant head, you know, like my, it's just, it's way too big. Like normal hats don't fit me. I have to buy a special hat. I could just really print you a swim cap. So, you know, I'm looking at the reviews and it said on this hat that I had ordered previously, I was looking to return it. It said actually that like people like the quality, they like the comfort, but not the size. Like there's, so that indicated to me, oh, if I'd seen this before, this brand new feature before, I would have realized that it was going to be too small. And so anyway, that's AI, AI in action is, Amazon is now looking through all the hundreds or thousands of reviews for a product and summarizing the feedback for you. So you don't have to go read all the reviews. That's a time saver. Because basically what I do, I click on the five stars and peek at those and I go down to the one stars and I peek at those. And then my brain, I'm probably summarizing, you know, coming through a conclusion. So yeah, this would be a time saver. This episode of 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 task 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. 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That is cloud accounting podcast.promos-word-slash-k-e-e-p-e-e-m-r. Now David, I think you had some news about the new CEO of PayPal. Yes, so yeah, change screens here a little bit. So yes, so the news is about that. The big headline and it was in my news feed, 300 times, 500 times, it just was in so many times. Essentially Alex Chris, who he has been 20-year veteran of into it, he essentially I want to say since 2017, he's been leading the Quickbrook side, the small business division, whatever year and a half they rename whatever that division is, but it's the non-turbo-tax side of the business. He drove the MailChimp acquisition, etc. He has now been announced he's going to be the new CEO of PayPal. And so when I saw that headline, I was like, wait a minute, this is history repeating itself. So yeah, I'm going to share something here. And I'm going to tie some stuff together with some people before I share the screen. So a couple of different people. So Bill Campbell was into its CEO from 1994 to 1998, right? He was one of the first CEOs. And then he returned to be a temp CEO in 1999, right before Steve Bennett came, who was there until 2007, then Brad Smith, that was the Brad Smith era, 2007 on. But in there, you had Bill Harris. So Bill Harris was the president of Chipsoft, right? 1999 to 1994. But then into it went public, merged them within to it, that's turbo-tax. So so he went through this merger. That he became the executive vice president and then eventually CEO between 93 and 99. And then he basically started the launch of Crickin.com and the move to online services and internet services. Right? He started that thing. Well, then the other player in this whole story is Elon Musk. You know, the guy just bought Twitter and changed the name to x.conf. Yeah, I think I've heard of him before. So look at this headline. x.com names former into it brass at CEO. So this headline literally is from 1999. CNS. So Elon Musk renamed Twitter to x, which is this old startup that he had. Is that what we're talking about? That's what we're talking about. So look, we've got to go. So I'm going to go act like 1999. I was like a lowly tech support employee. And I remember getting invited to one of those like CEO skip level lunches where you get to like eat lunch with the CEO. And I remember sitting distinctly, remember sitting in the room with Bill Harris. And he was talking about this x-pay thing. And that he was getting involved or in too. It was getting involved or something like that. Right? So so back to this article, essentially this article is naming Bill Harris as joining x.com as its CEO. He's going to replace Elon Musk who's the founder as a CEO. And then Elon Musk will stay on his chairman and oversee the product development. And so essentially Bill Harris was the founding CEO of x.com in 1999. So an intuitive executive was a CEO of x.com which became PayPal, which merged with PayPal because guess who I'd experience merging companies? Bill Harris, who did the merger of TurboTax and do into it. So x.com launched. This is crazy. December 7th of 1999 with him as a CEO. And within two months, x.com attracted 200,000 sign-ups. Wow. And so my brain, I've always had this tie, you know, to x.com do into it. So over here, you have x.com. And then you have this other company called Confinity, which had a product called PayPal, but let's you take Palm Pilots. Remember Palm Pilots? Yes. Okay. And you could send money through my dad had a Palm Pilot through the infrared port. That was PayPal. You could send money through the infrared port. Elon Musk figured out like sending money in emails the way to go, screw this infrared port stuff. So the crazy thing is both companies were in the same business. They're the same office building together. Both these companies. And it was .com 1.0 days. So both companies like, hey, Blake, I'll pay you $20 if you join my app. And then anybody of your friends that join, I'll pay you another $10. So both companies were just bleeding money. So then in March of 2020, so you're thinking December of 1999 to March of 2020, you're going four months later, these two companies merged together. And the new company is called x.com. And so Bill Harris did all the work to merge the two companies together. And then Musk, who hand picked Bill Harris to come to x.com, ousted him and takes over the CEO roll himself because he's now the biggest shareholder. Well, but then his is the great part. And typically Elon Musk's drama, right? And September 20th, September of 2000, Elon Musk goes to Australia for his honeymoon. The x.com board voted to change the CEO from Elon Musk to Peter Theo, which everybody knows who Peter Theo is, part of the very politically motivated these days. He's the co-founder of Confinity. So in June 2001, x.com was officially renamed to PayPal. And so deep relationships of these two companies, and I always thought some part of me thought into it could have gallbled up PayPal at one time. So Scott Cook, the founder of Intuit, was on the board of PayPal, eBay, eBay PayPal, from 1998 to 2015. And then when those two companies split. So when they split, so this goes back to Bill Campbell. Bill Campbell, who is the two-time CEO of Intuit, he mentored Steve Jobs. He mentored all the Google guys. He just was really involved in Silicon Valley. He was mentoring the former CEO of eBay, who named PayPal's current CEO. And so John Donahue, who was mentored by Bill Campbell, had a say in naming Shulman's replacement this week. So it's a full circle. This whole Intuit train from this headline leads us to Alex Chris being named the VP now. It's all connected. It's all taught. So that's all the history. Thank you for that history lesson, David. That was fantastic. So I don't know if people know about Alex Chris. So I think we talked about it before. He did all the quick business side of the business. It looks like they searched, they talked to 20 investors, searched for a bunch of different people, and he was the finalist from a pool of nine candidates. And that was that's it. And now, Maryana Tessel is going to take over the Small Business Self-Employed Group at Intuit. I think my only two cents on this is it makes you wonder what he's going to do there. And my gut is just like other companies that had Intuit executives go to them. EG Legal Zoom. What do they do? They rolled out accounting and bookkeeping services. Yeah, you think that's what PayPal might do? I don't know. Who? So I know PayPal is enormous, and they've got Venmo. But like, most of the last time you used PayPal, David. I use it anytime I'm on a site that I know I'm never going to do business with again. And it's not that they're sketchy, but like, I don't know. So if they have a PayPal button, I'll pay with PayPal to put that level of separation of my credit card and my identity. But that's usually when I use PayPal for situations like this. But mostly, it's Venmo these days. Yeah, I feel like that's the big area of growth for them. I mean, I never see anyone using PayPal dongles, you know, or PayPal. They've got like a PayPal point of sale. I've never seen that in the wild, ever. Yeah, that's what they're talking about. And it could be because like, I know Alex Chris, he, you know, he was very big on self-employed, maybe overly zealous about it possibly, add into it the QuickBooks self-employed. But in the last two years, you know, the QuickBooks group launched their own Venmo PayPal small-businessy thing, kind of in a way like Ranji of the New Expensify, this kind of super app chat send money type thing, right? I think it was, it might actually just be called QuickBooks Money. It might be, which is crazy because I think the bank counts called QuickBooks, I don't know, but it might be called QuickBooks Money. So I think, you know, he's been keen to this idea. Of payments in it, in a app or something. And what's also tells me, I always thought he'd be in line for CEO of Intuit, which tells me maybe investors in the board are super happy with Sassan, and Sassan must not have any future plans to go anywhere anytime soon. And Intuit, but it'll be a, it'll be a ride and it'll be interesting to see, you know, what, somebody with a QuickBooks small business background and a counting background does with PayPal. It could make PayPal better for all the accountants and bookkeepers and clients, right? But, well, David, thank you for that history lesson. I know, I know, I know, but it's good. It's good to know, like, it's dots, it's dots. I never, I never realized how connected these companies were. So I appreciate that. Thank you. I think that's a great place to leave it. I know you've got to go. It's Friday afternoon, as we record this. So let's go enjoy the weekend. It's cooled down a little bit here in Arizona. If our listeners want to get in touch with you, David, where can they do that? You can go to x.com and find me there now. I'm on all the socials just at Davidly. And I am at Blake Teoliver. You can email us. We are the accounting podcast at earmark.me. That's the accounting podcast at earmark.me. Thanks everyone who joined us today in our live stream. Follow us on YouTube. Subscribe on YouTube and you'll get notified when we go live. You can jump in. Yelena is tuning in from Croatia. Great to have you on the stream. Yelena, I wish I was in Croatia right now. That sounds amazing. Thanks, Giles and David and Adam for commenting. Appreciate having you on. Oh, Giles asked, how do those BDO employees cash out? And that's a good question because they may have BDO stock, but the question is, you know, how are they going to sell it? I mean, I know you can always sell your stock off of exchanges, right? Like I get it's really hard, but it's not easy. It's pretty hard and you think. Hopefully the firm will have a way to buy back stock from employees. They'd better create that or it's not really going to work. That's a really good point. Yelena, we will see you at QB Connect. Oh, that's awesome. Yeah, follow us online and let us know what you think. The accounting podcast at earmark.me. Send us your listener mail. Send us your voice mails. We love getting messages from our listeners and it's been a little while. So I want to make sure you know about that. And don't forget, you can earn free CPE for listening to this episode and almost every episode of the accounting podcast at this point. Just download the free earmark app on the app store or on the Google Play store. Sign up, find us in the channels page and take a quick quiz. It's five questions and you can get your CPE certificate. The CPE is NASBA approved. We are a NASBA sponsor of CPE at earmark and it works for CMAs. The tax content works for enrolled agents. You can even use this if you are in the UK as a chartered accountant. CAs and CPAs in Australia and New Zealand, I understand. And Canada can also use NASBA CPE to fulfill their license requirements. So don't miss out on that. I didn't know that earmark was international now. We are. We don't advertise it really. We should, but yeah, it works globally. The standards or the rules about continuing education are actually looser elsewhere in the world. So they accept all of our CPE because it's so rigorous. I don't know for sure. You got to check with your local licensing body if they accept NASBA CPE. Often they do because it is verifiable CPE, meaning that you had to take a quiz. You had to verify that you learned the material. And our quizzes are not the easiest. You really got to listen to our episodes to ask the questions. I can't do the ones for our own ethicists. Every time I demo your mark, I never get the quiz right. I don't think I've gotten a certificate successfully yet. Well, I've got to be certificate. Good thing I don't need them for my job, but I have not passed the quiz yet. But on that note, I'll try to do some in the car while I dry. Safe travels and we'll see you all here next week. Bye everybody. time for the class of fives. Your county clients don't want another shiny app they have to log into. They want to be met where they live in their email inbox. FinDaily does just that. FinDaily automates the communication of key financial data by sending it to your clients inbox. Daily try FinDaily out for free at findaily.io Sick of waiting for same day ACH transfers that stick to bank hours or paying high fees for credit cards. 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The Future of UX Is... Spreadsheets! & QuickBooks Leader Is New CEO of PayPal