In this episode of the Accounting Technology Lab, Randy Johnston and Brian Tankersley, CPA, explore how generative AI is actively reshaping accounting practices—not as a future concept, but as a present-day operational tool. They break down where AI is already embedded in workflows, from document processing and OCR to client communication, research, and advisory services. The discussion emphasizes that AI adoption is no longer optional for firms seeking efficiency and competitiveness.
The Accounting Tech Lab is an ongoing series that explores the intersection of public accounting and technology.
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Transcript
(Note: There may be typos due to automated transcription errors.)
SPEAKERS
Randy Johnston, Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 00:00
Ryan, welcome to the accounting Technology Lab sponsored by CPA practice advisor, with your hosts, Randy Johnston and Brian Tankersley, hi everybody. It’s Brian, working hard at the lab today, but I thought I would let you know that do have a quick announcement? We have a giveaway. We’re going to be giving away one Rico, scan, snap IX, 2500 receipt edition. We’re going to draw. We’re going to make the drawing right after April 30. No purchase required. Suggested Retail value, $599 this is a one has one touch simplicity, and our friends at Rico graciously provided it to us with automatic invoice OCR, detachable receipt guide for small and curl documents and lightning fast, 45 page a minute, duplex scanning. It transforms paperwork into clean, searchable digital data in seconds. If you want to register, it’s CPA te.ch/scan snap. The rules are at CPA te.ch/rules and the privacy policy is at CPA, te.ch, forward, slash, scanner, dash, privacy. And for those of you attending the video, attending the video version of this, I’ve actually put on the screen now a QR code that you can capture and use to register for the for the again, for the scanner. Giveaway again. We’re giving one away. We’re going to give it away again right after April 30 and again, you must, you must be an accounting professional when all the rules again are at CPA te CH, CPA te.ch/rules so anyway, with that, thanks for joining us, and here we are back in the lab.
Randy Johnston 01:41
Welcome to the accounting Technology Lab. I’m with my co host, Brian Tankersley, and I’m Randy Johnston. Wanting to talk to you today about generative AI in your practice now, generative AI has had a lot of traffic over the last three and a half years, or something like that. And what we wanted to do was just discuss where AI is appearing and how it’s appearing, and how you might make decisions going forward for your use of AI. And you’re going to discover in our discussion with you today that we think there’s multiple ways that you can consider this and not everything. Is a large language model. In other words, it’s not all open AI chat, GPT or Claude or copilot or Gemini or whatever you think is the greatest thing since sliced bread. So Brian, how would you like to proceed with our listeners today?
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 02:37
Well, I think, I think it’s important to understand here that that this is going to be an evolution that everybody’s going to go through and how they work with things, just like when you think about how we went from paper Working Papers, where we had the reinforcers around the two hole punch, things at the top and all of that, you know, it’s, you know, we used to compete. We used to try to figure out what the best pencil was and what the best eraser was. Now I don’t know how. I don’t know that I have any mechanical pencils left in my in my desk anymore, so it’s, it’s really a different tool set, but it took quite a bit of evolution to go through there. So you know the thing here is that there are things that AI can do for you today. And we encourage you to try to check those things out. You know, drafting emails, summarizing, summarizing large documents where you can go back and have human in the loop to check them. You can go through and and again, use it for optical character recognition. You can, you know, in particular, in marketing, in areas where you know, you can use generative systems to clean up the writing and things you know you and I’ve used Grammarly for years now. You can also use some of these tools with bank feeds and update information, although we got to be very careful with privacy here. Okay, so, so we don’t, we need to. We need to, again, be very careful there, and we but we have, we have these bots in here that again we set up and again this, we look at Claude co work and the forthcoming, the forthcoming co pilot bots, as well as open claw and and these tools can actually take actions inside of things. I was actually looking at an extension for open claw yesterday that would actually go in and do do maintenance on Unix systems, like installing updates and things like that. So I found it, you know, it’s very interesting, some of the things that can be automated now that that we again, haven’t had now
Randy Johnston 04:43
before you, before you leave that thought behind, I was actually reflecting on self maintenance in Star Trek or Star Wars, and realistically, agents are probably one of the key things that you’ll have to watch for. We began talking to you over a year. Ago about how agents could be used. You’re going to find the agents you see this year more sophisticated than the agents of the past. So all this maintenance and updates again, we’ve got to watch what we allow the agents to do. Because they’re they are capable of doing real transactions like transferring
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 05:19
money, yeah. So, so they can create real damage, if we you know with this, but there are certain things that you can have them. You can have them, do you can have them go through and summarize your inbound emails in the morning, like I do with Claude every every morning, at eight o’clock, it goes in and summarizes the inbound emails that have come and the ones I haven’t responded to from yesterday, and and those things to try to help me manage this. We also, though we’re seeing a revolution in tax research, whether it’s co counsel, or whether it’s blue jay or whether it’s, you know, the Walters, Clewer tools we’ve got, we’ve got a wide range of tools in here that are that are taking new approaches with this, you know, research, where we used to have to have a senior tax manager would take, you know, or, or again, a technical tax tax director. We would have those people doing heavy duty research, and then they would go in and and, you know, if you wanted to get an answer to a question, it would take, you know, half a day and cost you a couple $1,000 at standard rates. Now, now, when we’re looking at this, we can go in and have the AI do the first cut at it, and then we can have those people look at it and see if that makes sense to them. And then they can check the things that don’t seem right and make sure that there are, there are big holes in this.
Randy Johnston 06:38
So one of the tricks when you’re doing that is to actually cite original resources, and you can ask for that, but we’ve noticed, particularly as I just watched, the evolution in Thomson Reuters checkpoint edge co counsel to their latest release of CO counsel tax, how much more sophistication is in that platform. 18 months later, it’s it’s a stunning amount of progress, but to me still going back to original IRS sightings, original regulation sightings and so forth. That helps minimize some of the hallucination. But this human in the loop check is still in my mind, mandatory. I don’t think any of these tools are good enough today. You can turn them loose. Now, the vendors are trying to tell me they are. I’m just not quite that comfortable yet.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 07:31
Yeah, the vendors don’t have to pay the malpractice premiums after you make a mistake. So there’s that. Okay, so the next one is going to be, we’re going to talk a little bit about audits. And you know the audit there are a lot of audit tools out there that will, again, like data Snipper and teammate, document managing that will match things up, or tools that will scan the whole ledger, like mine bridge, or you have data binding tools like salonis that you can use against against the enterprise processes, the automation that people have set up. You can again, you can get, you can get robotic process automation as well, as well as AI to do this, to do the data entry again, you can do, you can also do real time insights. You know, you look at what’s happened with ACL, and ACL is has repurposed itself from an audit tool to now a GRC tool, where it’s doing continuous monitoring so that you can catch things as they’re happening, before they turn into something that that’s to the point where it causes you to have a qualified opinion, or to have, again, to have findings, audit findings, you can catch them before they’ve they’ve grown to that level of magnitude. We can also use, we can also use, use things to do, to send better client notes. So again, the you can take tax law and use tools like ready to advise, to to make things for a non expert. You can have AI, write financial analysis and again, explain things in human terms. You know, one of the one of the most dangerous things about client accounting services is our clients may not understand their financial statements, and so we really have to teach them in here. You know, co pilot, one of
Randy Johnston 09:17
the comments I’ll make here, which you can hear in a separate accounting technology lab from the accelerator is there are new generation products like ping assistant that not only do transcription and take notes, but also provide insights. And you know, one of the most common questions that I’ve answered in the last 90 120 days is talk to me about the security of the AI transcription tools. What can we use? And of course, Brian and I both use transcription tools. This podcast, for example, has been processed by otter for some time. We recognize that it doesn’t always get all the words right, but it’s sure be. It’s trying to sit down and transcribe it like you you did in the old days, but tools like ping assistant really do provide better client notes, much faster, in a much superior way.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 10:14
Yeah, yeah. So, you know, there are a lot of things here, but again, the these, you still have to put the human in the loop, because I find that, you know, as good as otter is, you know, when we put this thing out, it will get things wrong, and I will correct some of them, and some of them I will just let sail through knowing that it’s machine transcription, but it’s, it is, it does. It takes something that would take, easily, take an hour per episode to create a transcript off of this, and it does it pretty much instantly in the background while I’m doing other things. You also do want to take the busy work out of your out of your practice, so this auto nag thing that we talk about, you know, tools like trust and KVA can handle this document chasing for you. You know, lisio does that most of the tools will do, will do the follow up in here. You can also have agents to file your selected engagement letters as they come in. And we’re seeing more and more products come out with tools that will automatically file those things. You know, we have dashboard statuses to show you what’s happening, so you can see what’s on fire in here. And And again, there’s a when a client uploads something, you can have it notify you immediately and set off some triggers.
Randy Johnston 11:30
And Brian, we’re lucky enough earlier this week to have a in depth discussion about how things are classified and filed and what makes sense and what doesn’t make sense. And you know, what we’re trying, trying to do with vendors who are creating these products is to give them enough insights that they can understand what you need do your work in a practical way, day after day. And I think the early versions of these will be good, but the later versions will be even better. But I don’t think it’s worth waiting for the later versions based on the productivity that you can gain right now. So we’re going to go through a pretty radical transition in my mind, on both document management and workflow, and realistically, this taking the busy work out of the practice is such a big advance, agreed.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 12:26
We also do want to keep our data safe, though. So we do want to keep our PII away from the public chat bots. Again, the enterprise plans typically will, will exclude the again, the AI data getting trained in here. The other thing to remember here, by the way, is that is, again, with the legal profession, the courts have said that the data that you put into these large language models publicly is now discoverable. And so there’s a whole new compliance challenge here. And so the question is, do you want to, you know, do you want to put these things on proprietary models, or proprietary instances of models, like those you can do in in Azure. You know, again, the the thing about this is that is that it is important that you understand the risks and the regulatory risks, and that you that, again, you don’t make catastrophic mistakes that cause things to be discoverable, either in litigation support or in, God forbid, in litigation against you.
Randy Johnston 13:25
Yeah. So one of my learnings in the past few weeks, but I kind of knew this. I just want to call it out for you. Trying to keep the data safe from the AI engines is one of the advantages of Microsoft’s co pilot. It does take some setup, and there’s some tagging, and there’s misunderstanding between advanced levels of Microsoft, 365, like e5 being required for purview and the tagging versus Business Premium, sophisticated enough to really handle most firms needs further the tagging efforts are labor intensive today and very error prone. So one firm that I had the privilege of talking to in the past week or so said, Look, we went to all this effort to tag everything, and when we turned it on for tax season, nobody could get any work done, and so we had to turn it all back off. So I want you to understand that there are vendors who will try to come to you to talk about AI strategies and data safety, and they talk a good game, but could put you at risk on the other side of productivity when they’re trying to get safety. You know, we’ve had that discussion in pre prior podcast with you. There’s always a compromise between ease of use and security and generally when it’s. Easy to use, it’s not very secure. And if you make it too darn hard to use, it’s secure. But nobody can get anything done.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 15:08
But we also do need to, you know, you’ve said for 15 or 20 years now that if you have an accountant keying in data, you have a broken process and and I think you know, this is one of the areas that that we’ve got to really hammer on now, because a lot of you are still keying in data. So you know, again, this, again, you can let makers hub, AI or Dex or others get the information. In there are general ledger platforms like like digits that have that will actually ingest invoices, extract all the information. If you haven’t seen the payables infrastructure in digits, then the bill pay in there. It’s actually very, very elegant the way it’s been done, you know. Again, letting the you know, again, focusing on the errors that the system flags and letting the you know. Again, the things were far enough into this journey with OCR and data entry that that we can almost start to let some of the systems run on on near autopilot, where the system is checking itself. But again, you can do this on bills and and again you can try this and see how it works. You know many of you already do hands off processing on bills with your with your light bill or your water bill, where you just set it up to automatically draft your account every month, as opposed to going in and having to transmit the money to them in here.
Randy Johnston 16:30
Yeah. So on this point, though, most of you are aware now that unfortunately, bot keeper did fail, and that was really sad in my mind. But I believe that there is a piece of learning from Enrico Palmero, you know, again, I like Enrico well, but he said, Look, our product was working. We put a lot of money to make it into the product to make it work, but we started having a lot of merger acquisitions, and when people started to consolidate, the number of licenses and subscriptions that we had dropped precipitously. And one of the things I asked you to begin considering as far back as 2019 was to control your SaaS subscriptions. And so you’ll continue to hear about saspocalypse, and I’m not sure that bot keeper didn’t really fall prey to merger acquisition and this constriction of SAS licensing. But was it working? Yes, and were they able to make it work? Well, yes, and when I look at other vendors, like makers hub.ai, their product is working beautifully. So the question will become, how much automation can you throw at this and how much of your regular labor can you take out of your transaction processing, in tax and in audit and in client accounting services Brian has laid out so far.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 18:06
Now we also do need to think about this. You know, we we just had, we just had one of the big four actually asked for a reduction in fees because of the automation that was being deployed by their external auditor. So, so we do need to think about value pricing in here. You know, ed class and Ron Baker had been beating the drum against against the billable hour for 20 or 30 years that I know of. And and as we, as we think about this now, switching to flat fees is, is again a way to keep things, keep things steady. As you, as you implement more and more technology, you also want to sell your expertise, not your calendar, and again, reward your team for getting things right, as opposed to just hours. There are things other than ours that are important, that that need to again, need to be rewarded. And, you know, again, when we’re looking at AI and these, these technological changes, people are going to make mistakes, okay? And we have to make sure that we don’t crush people that make mistakes if they’re if they’re doing them in good faith and their thought process is correct. You know, we still want to do an after action analysis to see what we got right and what we didn’t. But again, if you, if you come down too hard on people that make those mistakes,
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 19:37
again, to you want to talk, have your AI talk like a tax partner the industry context is going to come first. So again, you want to make sure you’ve got the right wording in here. You also want to set length limits so that things get boiled down to a certain number of things don’t take the first draft. You know, again, I’ve used multiple engines to clean up analyzes and things in here. You. Again, if I if I don’t like, if I get two or three things I don’t like out of one engine, I quite often will switch. You also can upload to PDFs or other things to keep things factual. So I will tell you that I often upload upload documents for context, like when I’m coming up with names for courses, I’ll quite often upload an outline for the course and then let it come up with with something. But after it’s analyzed, the text or Word document that has the things we’re going to talk about and and it generally does a better job as a result. So again, that’s that’s one way to put in here. You do want to have that human in the loop. The tax code is your source of truth, so you want to, you want to, you want to verify every site in here. You can use, you know, again. You can use tools like, like count, co counsel, tax and answer, connect again. You can use them to double check claims that you have other places. But you do need a human being to look over things first and again, there are places where things make mistakes. You know, I was, like I mentioned in a previous podcast. One of the things that that I was actually working on yesterday was I was setting up an instance of a libre chat, which is an open source tool that you can use to work with multiple large language models. And it kind of gives you an infrastructure where you can, you only have to key the data in once, and you can send it to multiple models and try it out different places and do more sophisticated things. So I was actually working on this, and I asked a simple question, what were the what were the final placements in the DC, in the drum corps International Finals of valley fever for all seven years of its existence, from 1979 to 1986 Okay, so there. And so I asked that notice, there’s eight years in there, but they didn’t feel the core in 1985 and so there were seven years that they existed. Well, it every single engine made up things in there. Nobody got me the right answer. The best answer I got was, I can’t figure this out, and you’re going to have to look up, here’s some sources where you might go to find this, because I can’t do this. But it’s, it’s, it’s important here, because that’s a very arcane piece of knowledge that I had about, about some of that information. And I think it’s, again, I think it’s important for you, for everybody, to understand that this, you know, this, this thing that we’re doing here, it will make especially if you’re dealing with art, with the less information there is on it, the more likely it’s going to blow it and blow it big time. Three different things made up facts in front of me, and I was looking at it, going, Wow, that that’s hallucination in action.
Randy Johnston 22:49
Well, Brian, this is too much information for our listeners, but I just can’t resist today, because we had the good fortune of attending grandson’s birthday this week. And I’m going to be specific, which maybe is also something I shouldn’t do, but 10th birthday this week, and I pulled him aside and said, you know, 10th birthday is a big deal. You know, obviously Artemis launched on your 10th birthday. You’ll remember that forever. But I said, I personally remember my 10th birthday because I got to go to the National Guard Armory and learn to twirl a rifle with the sky riders drum corps. So that’s what I was doing on my 10th birthday. And he kind of looked at me and said, What’s twirling a rifle? But for some of our listeners that have seen these performance groups twirling batons and rifles and so forth. I actually got to learn to do that on my 10th birthday. So how many people, though, would know sky riders and they are performing this summer here in my hometown?
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 23:54
Well? And those rifles are dangerous. I mean, if you hit yourself in the head, you can, really, you can go to the hospital. It’s, it’s it’s pretty
Randy Johnston 24:01
serious stuff. It explains a lot, doesn’t it? Yeah, well,
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 24:04
I say, you know, I played drums so, you know, I, I hit my head different ways. But anyway, cool. So again, you want to, you also want to keep your firm running smoothly. So you can use AI to kind of monitor things. In here, you can check bi or pro staff to catch those log log jams. Or, you know, again, we can, we can look at, you know, there’s, there’s all manner of tools. You can look at historical data. Again, is your crystal ball, you know, you can look at the AI scheduling. You know, there’s the good scheduling tools that are out there, like Empire suite and and others that are that are in the that are in the space, many of them use linear programming and other approaches. So AI is helpful. But you know, again, you look at the tax scheduling, for example, that that that you have in some of these engines, and, and again, AI can help, but it may. Not be a replacement. It’s also important here to look at, look at crunch times, and see who’s struggling, and see those tsunamis that people are about to experience, that that nobody else knows about. So you can, you can, you know again, avert the, avert the disaster that’s coming.
Randy Johnston 25:16
And we’re looking for AI to assist with these things. But there is some tone of knowledge that the scheduling products still struggle with. And I think it might be, you know, there’s too many variables for them to process through AI. They’re getting better. Not saying they aren’t, but you know, again, you think about what you know and what you do when you’re scheduling tax or audit teams,
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 25:46
you know, Randy, I think, I think, you know, this really brings us to, you know, we’ve got some additional things we could talk about, but I think this kind of brings us to a, again, to kind of a wrap up on this episode. So again, the to get the tools in your daily workflow, it’s like exercise. You have to make yourself do it, and you will not like it at the beginning. Like exercise, okay, but you have to fit it in. Let copilot draft your emails. Let quick run QuickBooks. Ai sorting on a few clients. You know, try a client or two on digits or will it, or will it, or some of the other, some of the other AI based engines, ask your tech savvy staff for honest feedback before you buy licenses. So try it out with some people. See what happens. Are your clients going to like this or not? I don’t know. You know, if you have, you’re doing litigation support, they may not like the AI use of AI, or if they’re in a particularly litigious industry, like handgun manufacturing or something this. This may not be a place where, where it fits again, check in every few months, see what’s going on and again, if tools not saving time, stop using it similarly. Talk to other people in the industry and and see where you can make progress. You know what kind of approaches they’re using, they’re making things, and with that, Randy, I’ll turn it back over you to bring us home. Well, you know,
Randy Johnston 27:07
this is pretty straightforward, because you know your comment is, you know, don’t just stand there, go do something. And of course, Brian and I are both running ergonomic devices that monitor us, called deep care, and my deep care ergonomic device is saying it’s time to stand up. So in any case, we’ll talk about deep care in another episode, but we wanted to give you an overview of what we believe is the state of AI adoption. But we have more to come in future accounting Technology Labs, we’ll talk to you again real soon. Good day.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 27:46
Thank you for sharing your time with us. We’ll be back next Saturday with a new episode of the technology lab from CPA practice advisor. Have a great week.
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