Episode Transcript

Please note this transcript was generated by AI and contains errors including missing and misspelled words.

Meryl: Welcome to the lifestyle accountant show. I'm Meryl Johnston, your host. And this podcast exists to help today's accounting firm owners build successful firms while also living a healthy, happy life without sacrificing sleep your weekend or time with loved ones.

On today's episode, I'll be talking about ChatGPT and AI in accounting. This is a little different from the theme that we've had around remote work in season one. But AI is such a hot topic right now. I've spent a lot of time learning about it and playing around with the different tools and having conversations with other accountants.

And so I wanted to do a bonus episode away from our core theme of remote work and have a chat about where things around with AI and accounting right now, knowing that this will change pretty quickly over time. So in today's episode, we'll talk a little bit about what AI and ChatGPT what, what are they? And how do you use them?

We'll look at some practical examples of using these tools in your accounting firm. Talk about some of the opportunities but also the risks and what are some of the guardrails you can put in place if you're trying to encourage your team to get more productive by using these tools. And I'll also share some stories from outside of the industry with some lessons that we might be able to apply. Like many of you who are listening, I've been trying to get my head around AI and tools like ChatGPT over the last few months, I want to make sure that I learn these tools to make the most of them. But I also want to make sure that I don't get burnt and don't do anything silly or share any confidential information. I've got three, three different topics that we'll be covering today.

The first is or is about what does aI mean for the future of work and specifically for accountants doesn't mean that as we automate more of our roles that we can move away from timesheets to compensation for team members based on outcomes. The second theme is looking at how can we choose how can we use chat GB team to build client relationships? There's a whole lot of different use cases, from Excel formulas using using it to help with coding. But something I'm specifically interested in and I think other accounting firm owners will be interested in is how can we leverage the tool to build stronger relationships with our clients. And then the last topic for today is about managing the risks of your team using chat GBT. And going through some examples of where things have gone wrong for some other people and other industries.

Okay, let's jump into the first topic. What does aI mean for the future of work for accountants?

 And more specifically, will AI enable us to move away from timesheets and to compensation based on output?

So I'm going to share two different perspectives here that these were based on Article One article and one comment on LinkedIn. And then I'm also going to share my own opinion. So there was a news article that with the title, CEO is so worried about remote workers using AI and doing multiple jobs. He's threatening to increase coders by 30 to 50 times on normal production time. And maybe this is a valid concern. I've heard of this before with remote workers. And in the case I heard it was specifically developers who would who would apply for multiple roles that apply for a full time role at one business, it would be remote, they would be pretty quick at their job. And then sometimes they'd be able to take two or three more full time roles on and there were some Twitter threads about people sharing how they were doing this and how much money they were doing and how long it would take until they get fired.

Now this is this CEO is worried about slightly different, something slightly different. He's worried about the workers leveraging AI to help them do their jobs faster, and then having multiple jobs.

So this is a reply. was actually an article by Chase Warrington from Doist sharing his comments about about the article starts by saying

I'm confused. Let's say I hired Bob and Sarah to cut down trees at a quarter of one tree per day. On Monday, Bob brings a hacksaw and cuts down one tree in eight hours. Sara brings a chainsaw and cuts down 10 trees that morning.

Then goes to cut down 10 More trees in the afternoon for another client clearly Bob is the is the better employee, right? He worked harder, and more importantly, he's loyal to me. Meanwhile, sneaky Sarah, as she's come to be known around the office just saw her quota go to 20 trees for no extra pay.

Notice the word threatens in the headline, CEO threatens to increase quotas by 30 to 50 times. Makes perfect sense.

This is the rat race we've buried ourselves in. Since the Industrial Revolution, every extra bit of productivity squeezed out of employees moves the bar that much higher, more efficiency is just rewarded with more work.

 accountants, anyone familiar with that, that your best staff are sometimes just allocated more work, because they're good at what they do.

So back to Chase,

it's Thomas. And these type of leaders equate butts in seats with real work. They value inputs, not output and allegiance to the company, which is only demonstrated by a sweat equity.

I'm seeing some similarities here with accounting firm owners who want to have their team members in the office butts in seats, compared to having the team work remotely.

Back to Chase’s article. So they want a bunch of bumps. Personally, I'll take the innovators who work smarter and live a more fulfilling life outside the office, give me an entire team of Sarah's.

So my initial thought was, yeah, that's right Chase, I want to innovate as to I want a team of series. Of course, that makes sense. I want to take the series because they have a higher output, Bob was taking a whole day to cut down one tree, and Sarah could get 10 done, even if it only took her morning.

So then I thought about well, what does that mean? If I put that in the context of my accounting firm, at bandages, we try and give our team as much flexibility over their workday as possible.

So once someone's trapped past that trial period with us, then there's no set work hours as long as their deliverables are met.

But we do still keep timesheets, and that is partly to keep an eye on job profitability for different clients. But we still do also pay team members based on their work hours. So if someone is doing three days a week, then their pay reflects that compared to someone doing five days a week.

So then I was trying to turn this into a little thought experiment. Well, what would it look like for accountants to be paid on output and not ours? So we'll How could you do it, maybe you have a senior staff member, senior team member, and they're paid on a percentage of client revenue for the job. So say it's $10,000, a month for bookkeeping, some financial controller work and some CFO stuff for a particular client. And you say to this senior team member, if you can do this end to end, and you don't need any team members, then you can have 50% of the revenue, so $5,000 a month, or you can also have to pay other team members, if you want to kind of say like, oh, maybe incentives aligned, they would their incentives are aligned with mine as the accounting firm owner, they would only want to take on profitable jobs, that they push back harder if I gave them a dud client or if the scope wasn't right, and we weren't charging enough. If they did have team members that have an incentive to manage their team members appropriately and make sure that their team members were incentivized to work hard. And were also appropriately compensated.

But what would be the impact on the team culture, it wouldn't really be the benefits team culture anymore, it would be the team culture of those managers, that kind of almost running their own little businesses. And so I was trying to think about the practicalities of it. Well, I like that idea in theory of paying for outcomes instead of hours.

But it seems very hard to break away from that. And if you do that, are you actually just creating other little businesses? And could you lose the team culture?

So if we go back to chases example, where he's talking about, he would prefer to have lots of sneaky errors, who are more efficient, even if they have higher output, even if they, even if it takes them less time to get the work done. And they also have other clients. So then this was an interesting reply from a guy called Bill CO, who's the founder and CEO of Athena. And he says, I get a trace. Bill here, I follow your stuff. And I agree with most of it, we are a fully async global team with 91% engagement stores scores, so 100% on the same team. However, I think the point you are making is getting ahead of things, things that things being the reality that we still sit in today. I don't think humans are productivity machines. But we still work under for the most part, the idea of the 40 Hour Workweek, right? If tools enable people to work faster, that doesn't mean that the agreement people came in, under again, in most cases full time work suddenly becomes null and void. What about the colleagues in different areas who haven't been super powered by off the shelf technology, they won't feel great about their colleagues being paid the same, but all of a sudden working half the time. I think in principle, your premise sounds nice, but dive deeper. And I would see this falling apart quickly and destroying culture at an organisation. In my opinion, the four-day workweek is the future and will take off, which would be incredible. But the idea that we are no longer at all tethered to the idea of time, doesn't make sense to me, keen to hear your thoughts. Sincerely, Team remote culture guy. So I think Bill's comments make sense to particularly around that disparity between roles that do have the ability to leverage AI, and those that don't. And he's trying to think about some examples of this and how that might play out. So if you were in a role like sales, which could require a lot of phone calls, and in person meetings, it's probably harder to have aI automate your role. You can't really send along the robot will be hard to get, send them along in your place to attend in person meetings. And they probably can't speak on your behalf yet on something like a zoom call. So you might be able to leverage it for drafting emails, recording, meeting minutes doing follow ups, by email, but not a lot of the voice and in person things. But if you compare that with something else, like a writer, or even a finance person, there's a lot of things we can automate with AI. If the salesperson and the finance person were paid the same, but it only took two days a week to complete the work of that the finance person's role and five, to complete the role of the sales, then I think there'd be some, some disgruntled employees in the sales team. But over time, I think we would see, if we think about supply and demand, we'd probably see more people move into that finance role. And they might also be willing to take a low salary, maybe they'd be okay, being paid for three days a week if it only actually takes them two days of work. And so eventually, I wonder if things would even out with more people moving into those roles. And, because of the supply of extra workers, maybe we would see the salaries, there would be pressure, downward pressure on salaries. Who knows? That could be a very overly simplistic view from my economics 101 day set up. But there was something interesting to think about. And related to, to this concept of AI and the future of work. It's also interesting to think about, what roles will this change? And will it remove roles. And I'm not immediately worried about our role as accountants, but I do think AI has massive power, and it's going to significantly change how we work. I've got a friend who owns a marketing agency. And I know that he's recently laid off some writers, but he's kept on his editors. And that's because chat TBT can do so much of the work that the writers were doing. It can't do it to 100%, which is why he's kept the editors and I imagine that writing the prompts as well. But that's, that is an example of the impact on the workforce right now. Not in a few years time. So I think as accountants, what's important is that we embrace the technology and we learn it and stay ahead of it to help us do our jobs faster and better. And maybe down the track, some areas of accounting will change and those roles won't be needed. But if we've adapted, then I'm sure there's going to be new roles as well. So let's move into section two of the podcast. And here I wanted to talk about how to use ChatGPT to build better client relationships. There. There's lots of use cases for ChatGPT, I think marketing and communications, some of the early examples, but there's a bunch of other examples from having it right Excel formulas, helping to categorise uncoded transactions if you're doing bookkeeping, and examples from a range of other industries. But I think as accountants and accounting firm owners, building better relationships with clients is something that is very valuable, and it's worth investing in. So I'm going to dive into some examples.

I'm going to split this into describing a problem, and then explaining how you could use chat GPT to solve that. So the first problem is that many of us have offshore team members, and they're not bad at writing. But sometimes, or often, English isn't their first language. And if they draft an email, it needs a fair bit of rework before it can be sent to a client. The solution would be what a solution would be to train your team members on how to prompt ChatGPT to draft emails to clients. And it potentially will still need a review from from a manager or someone from whose English or whether English is their first language before it goes out to a client. But I could see that really helping build the team's confidence in writing emails, and having them involved in creating and drafting a lot of those initial first drafts. Problem too, is that some accountants are great at the numbers not so good at writing in an engaging way, and potentially come across as too, too formal. I remember that I had that problem. When I started to write blog posts. When starting out with bandages, I had all of the writing style that I had learned when I was at video and to whom it may concern and regarding this, and it took me a bit of time to change my writing style to make it more engaging and to tell more stories. Something that you can do with ChatGPT is to copy and paste an email, of course, removing any confidential data from that piece and interactivity and then ask it to change the tone for you. And there's, when writing prompts, I normally start by writing the prompt and kind of setting the tone who is ChatGPT. They say Are they a writer and giving it a little bit of context. And then after that, then putting in the email, some of the accounting project management tools, like canopy, carbon, and I believe Pixi. All building, building in this email drafting tool within their practice management systems, which is great, you don't actually need to leave and go across to ChatGPT to use those and to draft emails to client. Okay, Problem three. So this is, this is a problem I've been into is that we have templated monthly emails to chase up outstanding information to clients. We've got templated emails for things like sending reports. And we use these same templated emails each month. It's lacking a bit of personality and probably doesn't the it's not in line with our brand, which is which is about having some fun and some personality. Something we haven't done yet, but is on the to do list is to use ChatGPT to write fun variations of these emails to keep them interesting and engaging. So the clients actually enjoy receiving them. And I'm thinking that we will do at least 12 variations of this. So a different one each month, maybe we need to do 24 So that they don't get the same email every January. But that's something that is on our to do list. Problem number four. This is something that I've heard advisors who do a lot of strategic meetings or CFO work, complain about. So I've heard many a time I'm in meetings all day with clients. And after all that talking, and so many meetings, it's really hard to remember what the action items were from each conversation. That if you're in this might be a little bit harder if you're in person, but if you're in zoom, or what the equivalent then team is something like that you could record the meeting and then feed the transcript into chat govt and then ask it to pull out the action items. And then instead of having to take detailed notes during the meeting, or handwriting them and then never getting those handwritten notes back online, you could spend spend 15 minutes at the end of the day, getting this into a task management system or just sending them across to the to the relevant people to action. I've also been using fireflies.ai. And that so instead of having to download a transcript, so with ChatGPT, you can't just upload the audio file, you need to turn it into a transcript, and then copy and paste it in. That's a bit of a pain. So actually use a different tool called fireflies.ai. Until you invite Fred from fireflies into the Zoom meeting. And then you don't have to do the download upload thing. And he'll just give you a summary. Problem five is kind of similar. In that, though the solution is similar, it's different, a different problem. To again, with clients, a lot of it is about relationship building, and remembering different things about your clients that helps to build that personal relationship. But I've definitely spoken to some accountants before who say I find it really easy to remember numbers and facts. But for some reason, I cannot remember the client's kids names, what sports teams they follow, or where their holiday house is. And so similar solution, if you feed the meeting transcript into chat GPT, then you could ask her to summarise that key information. And one way to do that, if you think of a personal CRM, well, some of you make keep this information in your if you're really organised in your in your accounting firm CRM, where you don't do that, again, it is better, you'd have imagined you'd have different columns, like kids names, birthdays, sports teams, spouses name, and then you could have chat GPT, summarise it in that information into their different into those different columns, and then get that across to your CRM. Side note, I'm interested in what the audience of this and the listeners of this podcast are doing for a personal CRM solution. I hear so much about the value of personal network. And for me, it's more about investing in relationships and trying to deepen relationships that I already have. And I do this on an ad hoc basis of getting back in touch with people. But I know of others that are using notion or spreadsheets to manage a personal CRM. And I think there's some some tools out there as well that are built specifically for this. So I'm interested to hear how you manage your personal network and proactively stay in touch with people over time. Okay, problem six, is that sometimes will delay writing hot emails, and I think there's various hot emails that we need to write as accountants. One of them is letting clients know about a fee increase. I think that's often because we're worried that the client is going to get upset. Again, you could use ChatGPT to draft an email like that and help you communicate in a way that's empathetic and also have it communicate your value to the client. So they are six different examples of how you could use ChatGPT to build better relationships with your clients.