CPA and co-host @AcctPod 🎧 a weekly news roundup for accountants. Founder @earmarkcpe — earn free CPE anytime, anywhere for listening to podcasts
Scottsdale, Arizona
Joined January 2013
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AI can now draft a set of financial statements. Someone still has to know whether they're right. 🧵
(Sponsored by @Wolters_Kluwer. Opinions mine.)
That moves the accountant's job from preparing to reviewing. Good trade. But most reviewers learned what wrong looks like by preparing first. If an agent does the first pass, where do new accountants get those reps?
Firms will have to teach review on purpose: new staff, the agent's draft and a senior person, on real client files. I'm taking that question to #CCHConnections in Orlando, Oct 25-28.
Register here: cchconnections.com/event/907…
4 small accounting firms. Real AI workflows:
One Stop CPA paired Blue J tax research with ChatGPT Enterprise to turn complex multi-state M&A questions into memos in 2 hours instead of days.
Agate CPA used Lovable and Claude to build custom website intake forms, boosting conversions by 25% for almost zero cost.
Public Trust CPA built a Power Automate + ChatGPT workflow to route vendor invoices straight into QuickBooks with signed docs attached.
High Rock Accounting built its own client satisfaction tracker in 5 hours using Claude Code, replacing a paid software tool entirely.
These firms picked one annoying, repetitive task and automated it: youtube.com/live/G2xfT5RT9i0…
The SEC’s proposal to end quarterly reporting got 225,000 public comments.
The PCAOB’s request for comment on how AI should be used in auditing got 33.
Barely enough people to fill a conference room weighed in on the standards that decide if we can trust AI-driven audits.
We covered the story on Ep 501 of The Accounting Podcast: youtube.com/live/G2xfT5RT9i0…
The hardest part of running my accounting firm wasn't the accounting. It was hiring. 🧵
(Sponsored by @Wolters_Kluwer. Opinions mine.)
ALT Blake at the Cloudsourced Accounting office, leaning back with his hands behind his head and his feet up on the desk, next to a laptop, a monitor and two coffee cups.
We ran on Xero and QuickBooks, not CCH. So I'm going to #CCHConnections in Orlando, Oct 25-28, to see whether what Wolters Kluwer is building works for a firm of 10, not just a firm of 200.
While I'm there, I'm recording a live episode of The Accounting Podcast on the CCH Axcess Theater stage. Monday, Oct 26 at 2:50 p.m. ET. Come say hi.
Register here: cchconnections.com/event/907…
An AI agent deleted an invoice and emailed a vendor to reschedule a delivery without telling anyone. Then it denied doing either.
On the blog, I shared several more stories like this, what these incidents have in common, and what the fix looks like: blakeoliver.com/blog/rogue-a…
Would you trust financial statements you knew were missing $347 billion of commitments?
That’s the situation at Meta. GAAP allows purchase commitments to stay off the balance sheet until delivery. Future leases stay off until they commence.
But when one of these commitments turns into a default, who gets the blame? The auditors.
We talked all about it on Ep 502 of The Accounting Podcast: youtube.com/live/fwIcTwYAMQ0…
$80 billion is currently sitting in Microsoft's accounts receivable. In fiscal year 2022, its AR balance was $44 billion.
What changed? AI.
OpenAI, a company Microsoft has invested billions into, owes at least $6 billion of that. OpenAI buys compute from Microsoft but doesn't pay cash for it, yet Microsoft still books the revenue.
We broke down these wild numbers on Ep 502 of The Accounting Podcast: youtube.com/live/fwIcTwYAMQ0…
Revenue and cash aren't the same thing.
Alphabet and Amazon reported negative free cash flow, meaning they spend more on capital investments (like AI data centers) than they generate from operations.
We dig into these cash flow red flags on Ep 502 of The Accounting Podcast: youtube.com/live/fwIcTwYAMQ0…
Intuit posted $21.4B in revenue, up 14%. Yet the stock dropped after management admitted price is now the #1 reason DIY tax clients leave TurboTax.
It costs roughly $0.25 in compute to process a basic return. When AI makes marginal cost visible, charging $100–$200 for standard filing gets hard to defend.
We covered the story (and what clients are still willing to pay for) in Episode 503 of The Accounting Podcast: youtube.com/live/lyP7zRpwyg0…
At age 20, Britton Ratcliffe became the youngest appointee to the New Mexico Public Accountancy Board.
As an accounting student, his primary interest is private equity.
When you remove partner equity from the long-term career track, what keeps young accountants in public accounting?
We interviewed Britton on Episode 503 of The Accounting Podcast: linkedin.com/company/theacco…
ChatGPT scored a 1 out of 13. Gemini scored a 0.
That was on a test of two AI-generated cost segregation studies against the IRS's actual guidelines.
Over six weeks, three prospective clients brought Heidi Henderson of Engineered Tax Services studies built entirely with ChatGPT and Gemini. They wanted her licensed engineering firm to sign off on them.
On Ep 504 of The Accounting Podcast, we talked about how clients are using these tools and expecting a rubber stamp from professionals: youtube.com/live/s2wn65xfdsE…
$8.5 billion. That's what liquidators are seeking from PwC over the collapsed Chinese property giant Evergrande.
PwC is using the same defense every global network relies on: the international entity was just a coordinating body, and liability stops at the local member firm.
But if a Hong Kong court decides the international entity is on the hook for roughly $5.3 billion, that's entirely different. That’s a lawsuit that could pierce the corporate structure every global network firm is built on.
We talk about it on Episode 504 of The Accounting Podcast: youtube.com/live/s2wn65xfdsE…
Overall accounting salaries are up, but median entry-level pay dropped from $75,000 to $73,000.
We've spent the last few years trying to fix the accounting pipeline by passing alternative CPA pathways, but if entry-level pay falls, that's a massive red flag.
We talk about it on Ep 504 of The Accounting Podcast: youtube.com/live/s2wn65xfdsE…
