6 Ways Email is Secretly Destroying Your Accounting Firm
Email: The word itself sounds innocent, doesn’t it? Kind of like “snail mail,” but faster, sleeker, and without the slimy trail. But don’t be fooled—email is secretly a sinister beast, hiding in the shadows as it plots to destroy businesses—including your accounting firm. If your accounting firm still relies heavily on email for client communication […]
Research: The Talent Shortage is Starting to Take Its Pound of Flesh From Corporate Tax Departments
This morning, Thomson Reuters released new research that reveals both corporate tax and global trade departments state they are under-resourced for technology and talent. This, naturally, is increasing risk in the form of penalties and audits. The latest research piggybacks a bit on what was revealed in their Future of Professions report released last month. […]
Don’t Grow Your Accounting Firm Out of Business! Break Up With These Unscalable Practices Now
Business growth is always a high priority for accounting firms, especially small-to-midsize practices. Take care, though, because growth can be a double-edged sword. If your firm expands too quickly or without the right strategy, it can ramp up costs faster than you can handle, lower the quality of your services—and put so much stress on […]
KPMG Canada Research: 60 Percent of Students Think AI Is Cheating, 52 Percent Use It For Schoolwork Anyway
KPMG Canada has surveyed a bunch of Canadian students over the age of 18 about generative AI and found that while many of them are using AI to help with schoolwork, still more think that’s cheating. Unsurprisingly, educators don’t seem to be using AI in the classroom to the extent their students are for their […]
SEC Nabs Its First NFT Case, Commissioner Peirce Won’t Be Throwing a Party
Yesterday the SEC announced charges against Impact Theory, LLC, a media and entertainment company headquartered in Los Angeles, for conducting an unregistered offering of crypto asset securities in the form of purported non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Impact Theory raised approximately $30 million from hundreds of morons investors, including colossal idiots investors across the United States, through […]
IBM Study: AI Won’t Replace People, People Who Use AI Will Replace People Who Don’t
I was going to say can we please get some better AI stock photos that aren’t totally corny but this one has a guy with a hilarious job-stopping tattoo so it’s not all bad. So IBM put two different studies together — one with 3,000 global C-suite leaders across 28 countries, another with 21,000 workers […]
We’re Told the Switch to Workday Isn’t Going So Great at RSM
According to a tip we received yesterday from a very frustrated auditor at RSM, the firm’s recent switch to Workday isn’t working. The tip: Effective 8/1/23, RSM’s scheduling, time management, billing and CRM system all merged to one system called Workday. Before the implementation all those modules were handled by a different software. We were […]
PwC Audit Client Gets Added to the List of Companies That Have to Send Out Letters to Customers About a Data Breach
Puerto Rico’s largest bank filed a data breach notification with the Maine Attorney General on August 14 related to the MOVEit ransomware attack that has so far snagged Deloitte, EY, and PwC. For once KPMG is thrilled to be excluded from the Big 4. EY client Bank of America sent a similar notice to its […]
EY Regrets Any Inconvenience Cybercriminals Having Your Credit Card Number May Cause You
“Hacker” stock photos are the worst. Is he hacking from the back room of a vape shop? We saw this story on Cybernews, shout-out to them for staying on top of the MOVEit data breach. TL;DR: File transfer program MOVEit was compromised earlier this year by the Cl0p ransomware group, Cl0p threatened to release the […]
AI Is Moving So Fast PwC Couldn’t Even Commit to a Year-Long Training Program
This stock photo might belong on r/itsaunixsystem but we’re quickly running out of AI stock photos so just deal. Saw something interesting in Fortune yesterday and thought it worth sharing as it gives us a look at PwC’s AI upskilling plans and demonstrates how difficult it is to train your people on a technology moving faster […]
Senators Get Angry at ‘Incompetent Tax Prep Firms’ for Sharing Sensitive Taxpayer Data With Facebook
A 54-page report by Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Ron Wyden (D-OR), Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Tammy Duckworth (D-IL), Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) snaps at online tax prep companies H&R Block, TaxAct, and Tax Slayer for sharing sensitive taxpayer data with Meta (Facebook) and Google for purposes of algorithm-based advertising. Attacks on Tax Privacy: […]
EY and PwC Among the Many Entities Caught Up in the MOVEit Cybersecurity Breach Ransom
On the 15th, CNN broke the story of a “global cyberattack by Russian cybercriminals” (guys, we only need one “cyber” here) that exploited a vulnerability in file transfer software MOVEit. The breach affected numerous federal agencies as well as “several hundred” companies, per a senior CISA official. According to Tech Crunch, a dozen or so […]
Accounting Firms Scramble to Push Out AI Acceptable Use Policies
Ever since ChatGPT exploded onto the scene late last year people of all stripes have been using, discussing, exploiting, and fearing it. Which category you fit in depends on your age, profession, familiarity with technology, knowledge of decades-old conspiracies about robots taking over the world, and most importantly your willingness to embrace the new and […]
EY’s New Payroll Chatbot Just Has to Be Slightly Less Sucky Than HR to Be a Success
No doubt proud of its partnership with a massive professional services organization that is mostly prestigious unless some scandal or embarrassing internal falling out is afoot, Microsoft has written a long and complementary blog post about EY’s new toy the ‘EY Intelligent Payroll Chatbot‘. Speaking of EY and payroll, the great “just kidding!” payroll snafu […]
People Who Have No Problem Ghosting You For No Reason Suddenly Butthurt About AI-Assisted Cover Letters
Google Discover recently threw a Mashable article at me about using ChatGPT to help write cover letters and how HR professionals are apparently displeased by this so I figured let’s talk about it since some of you might be looking for a job in the coming months. The figures come from a report by tech-forward […]
PwC Chair Basically Threatens AI Will Replace You If You Don’t Come Into the Office
For two years now, PwC UK chairman Kevin Ellis has been trying to get people back into the office. In 2021, he said he wanted to “create a buzz around returning to the office,” luring his people back with the promise of human contact we were all starved for in 2020. Launched a year after […]
PwC Chief Products & Technology Officer Says Not to Worry, They Don’t Want to Replace You With AI
A couple days ago, NYT published a piece asking an important question: Who will protect the workers losing their jobs to AI? The article references a May 16 senate subcommittee hearing chaired by Senator Richard Blumenthal at which OpenAI’s Sam Altman is told Mr. Blumenthal’s greatest nightmare is AI causing massive job loss. “There will […]
ChatGPT Can Pass the CPA Exam But Here’s What It Can’t Do (Yet)
If the headlines are to be believed, humanity is mere months away from being enslaved by artificial intelligence or, at the very least, being permanently unemployed (cue sounds of the Going Concern audience celebrating here). You may have seen clickbait articles about entire marketing departments being turfed in favor of ChatGPT (we never liked the […]
AI Poised to Put Fake IRS Agents Out of a Job
Of all the occupations most at risk of being replaced by synths AI in the near future — bookkeepers, programmers, and washed-up accounting blog writers, to name a few — no one really talks about how ChatGPT, Bard, and Microsoft’s Bing AI (if you’re counting that one) will impact scammers. You know, those people who […]
Microsoft Crunches Some Data to Find Out Teams is the Biggest Productivity Killer at Work
Have you ever been totally in the zone, grinding away at work oblivious to the world around you when you’re rudely interrupted by a *DING* that snaps you right out of your trance and back to the tedium of a seemingly infinite inbox? Or maybe you were cruising along on some project you’d been putting […]
Intuit is Using Fear and Uncertainty to Snatch Up Talent
620 tech companies have laid off 184,616 employees so far in 2023 per Layoffs.fyi, up from 164,511 employees in 2022 and we’re not even halfway through the year. The good news is tech layoffs are trending down for now after a peak in January, hopefully we don’t repeat last year’s pattern. It goes without saying […]
PwC Has Set Aside $1,000,000,000 for AI
We’ve used that PwC Chad image way too many times recently so have this AI-generated fantasy forest instead. It wasn’t that long ago that Big 4 accounting firms were cagey about staff playing around with ChatGPT on company equipment, consumed by the fear of sensitive client information being fed into the AI black hole. But […]
Academics Pitted Human Accounting Students Against GPT-3, Students Won
As aspiring lawyers everywhere learned with horror that GPT-4 is capable of passing the bar exam (in the 90th percentile of test-takers, no less) a whole bunch of academics were not-so-quietly putting GPT-3 to the test on accounting. Literally. Published in Issues in Accounting Education, a total of 328 authors from 186 different institutions in […]
GPT-4 Answers Tax Questions, Gets Them Mostly Right
These days there is a lot of yapping about what AI can and can’t do; it CAN answer bar exam questions so well it’s nearly in the 90th percentile of test-takers, it CAN’T search in real time to find up-to-date answers beyond what it’s been trained on so it won’t be getting stuck in a […]
Seniors and Up Are Hard to Find Because Associate Grunt Work Has Been Automated?
Yet another article about the accountant shortage has been published and we’ll spare you the bit about mass boomer retirements, declining accounting enrollments, and scary AICPA figures because it gets repeated in every single one of these articles. So why mention it at all? Because at the very bottom they get the expert opinion of […]
Just Be Glad You Didn’t Have FTX As a Client
Not long after the November collapse of crypto exchange FTX one of the first questions asked was, naturally, “where were the auditors?” (Francine McKenna answers that question here on CoinDesk) In the weeks that followed the FTX implosion, firms that once bragged about their crypto practices quietly shuttered them and walked away and the once […]
ChatGPT Talks About AI Taking Accountants’ Jobs From the Perspective of an Accountant Losing Their Job to AI
Ed. note: I asked ChatGPT to write about automation in accounting from the perspective of an accountant losing his or her job to AI. Here’s what it said. Note: Going Concern does not publish AI-generated content unless it’s clearly labeled as in this case. Believe it or not, humans write most of this crap. As […]
KPMG Is Putting ChatGPT to Work, It Probably Won’t Be Stealing Your Job For Now
KPMG Australia has joined PwC in deploying AI to get some work done, finally giving us the “robots taking your job” scenario we’ve been eager for since at least 2010. It’s here! Funny enough, KPMG blocked staff from using ChatGPT a little less than two months ago, though it did allow certain IT professionals to […]
TIL EY Has Commoditized Space
Is there any limit to the robust and ever-growing suite of services offered by professional services firms? Apparently not. As we’ll learn in a sec, not even the sky is the limit. It was less than a year ago that EY put $3 million Aussie bucks into a space business in partnership with Swinburne University […]
ChatGPT Isn’t Terminator for Accountants…Yet
Ed. note: the following is a guest post by Jack Castonguay, PhD, CPA, who has not yet been replaced by ChatGPT as far as we know. Or has he? Was ChatGPT sent to us from the future to rescue the industry from the pipeline crisis by filling open accounting jobs with cyborgs and sentient machines? […]
PwC Has a Fancy New AI Tool to Law Around With
Today is the day that PwC ushered in a new era for professional services: a global partnership with AI startup Harvey, offering PwC’s legal professionals “exclusive access” (that is, they are the only Big 4 firm who has it) to the platform. It’s a shame we had to scroll all the way to the bottom […]
The Accountant Shortage Has Finally Been Figured Out. You’re Not Underpaid, You’re Bored!
Ed. note: if you’re visiting from r/accounting, thanks for actually reading the article. Love ya. Another day, another article purporting to offer the solution to the precipitous drop in accounting talent over the past several years that doesn’t involve paying people more. “Young people” have been blamed for talent shortages long before an actual shortage […]
Armanino’s Former Crypto Team Has Left and Formed Their Own Shop, Allegedly
Having happily offered services to crypto clients since 2014, Armanino very nearly marked ten years in the crypto space until the catastrophic collapse of crypto exchange FTX in November 2022 forced them to part ways with crypto clients seeking assurance, FTX being one of them. As a reminder, here’s what happened in December: Armanino is […]
Fans of Punit Renjen Will Be Happy to Hear the Former Deloitte Global CEO Has Landed a Sweet Board Chairman Gig
This morning, SAP announced that it has picked former King of Deloitte Punit Renjen as designated supervisory board chairman. You’ll remember he was liberated from Deloitte last fall after many years and many billions of dollars together with the firm. Deloitte US CEO Joe Ucuzoglu succeeded Renjen as Deloitte Global CEO at that time and […]
4 Ways PBC Management Makes Busy Season Less Sucky
For CPAs, accountants, and auditors, busy season sucks. The stress can take a serious toll on your personal life, your relationships, and even your health. That’s because it’s hard to find time for things like diet, exercise, and those pesky “other people in your life” when you’re busy reconciling the list of outstanding client requests […]
Unable to Bill For It (Yet), PwC Australia Tells Staff They Can’t Use ChatGPT For Client Work
Hate to be the burster of bubbles for anyone out there excited to unload your work on ChatGPT but PwC Australia has told its people that for now, playing around with AI should happen strictly off the clock. Australian Financial Review reports that in this morning’s internal newsletter, PwCers were told not to feed client […]
Overcoming the Five Stages of Lease Accounting Grief
When Thomson Reuters reported late last year that the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) had proposed an eighth round of changes to lease accounting rules1, accounting and finance execs around the country channeled their inner Charlie Browns with a collective, “Good grief!” The grief is understandable, although we’re not sure how “good” it is. The […]
Local Accounting Firm Baffled That Desperate Laid Off People Don’t Want to Work There
When big layoffs began in tech last year, accountants everywhere justifiably celebrated for having chosen a career that may not be the most prestigious (or exciting or lucrative…) but will always be in demand. While their employees were quietly boasting about not losing their jobs, it seems EY leadership was waiting in the wings hoping […]
PSA: Change Your AICPA Password NOW (UPDATE)
Who penetrates networks in the dark with a hood over their head? Silly. h/t @cbriancpa for tweeting this story out Hackers are claiming they gained access to a database with more than 140,000 emails and passwords from the AICPA according to Cybernews, the only outlet reporting on this as yet. We have reached out to […]
House Republicans Go After IRS Agent Funding But Leave Technology Funds Alone Because Even the GOP Agrees IRS Call Wait Times Suck
This lady is going to be on hold for a long time, her phone isn’t even plugged in to the wall. The GOP-led House voted 221-210 on Monday to eliminate almost 90 percent of $80 billion in new IRS funding under the Inflation Reduction Act, much of which is supposed to be used to fund […]
No One Cares But Here Are PwC’s 2023 Metaverse Predictions Anyway
What’s next for the metaverse and what — if anything — should you do about it? PwC has answered the question no one is really asking in its 2023 metaverse predictions. These predictions are, as you’d expect, dumb made assuming that businesses and consumers alike will begin using the metaverse in earnest rather than making […]
Here’s What Happens When You Hire AI to Do Accounting
For a good decade we’ve heard about the robots that are going to render accountants obsolete, now we finally get a peek at the glorious technology that will transform the industry as we know it. You should prepare yourself, this advanced technology will have you on the University of Phoenix website ASAP to get a […]
Deloitte and PwC Top This Indeed List of Companies Hiring Tech Workers
The tech sector continues to lay off talent in droves (don’t worry, it doesn’t affect you) and Indeed has helpfully put together a list of companies looking for tech talent to assist the newly laid off in finding a new gig. At the top of this list with the most jobs? Deloitte and PwC. Interestingly, […]
Five Ways to Incorporate Profitability Into Your Practice
It’s official, we have reached the exciting future 1950s sci-fi magazines promised us. We have all the world’s knowledge in a tiny device that fits in our pockets, can get just about anything delivered in two hours or less, and nowadays you don’t even need your hand to open a glove box anymore, just your […]
Good News! You Don’t Have to Go to Work Tomorrow (In 20 Years)
You’ve probably seen this making the rounds on Reddit, Twitter, and whichever other dark corner of the internet you hang out in to commiserate with your fellow capital markets servants. It’s from FinanceBuzz’s 13 Jobs That Will Be Gone Within 20 Years: Like most article that claim accountants will be replaced by machines in 5-25 […]
KPMG Australia Recruits From High Schools to Meet Demand For Talent
KPMG Australia was in the news the other day for a new recruiting program involving high school grads (who were clearly rounded up from the burnout section behind the building joke) and it’s an interesting idea: on-the-job training in lieu of university. You’ll note these are technology recruits, we’re not desperate enough for accountants yet […]
Hear Me Out, Accounting Firms Should Add PvP and Achievements to the Metaverse
It’s 2022 and accounting firms are proudly buying up “real estate” in the metaverse, putting out self-congratulatory press releases about it like it’s supposed to make us think they’re ahead of the curve on technology. Really my first thought has always been “didn’t the Maryland Association of CPAs do this 14 years ago?” (They did) […]
This EY Split Thing is Going to Be Responsible For a Lot of Dinners and Golfing in the Year Ahead
The EY split is yet to be official — that should come late next year after a vote in a few months — but technology consultants that would have to go up against “the competitive edge” of a liberated EY consulting house for clients should get to work now if they want to stand out […]
Here’s Your Sign From the Universe to Find a Better Opportunity
From the moment you choose accounting as your major, the one thing you consistently hear from peers and professors is “go into public accounting when you graduate.” Many professors, being Big 4 alum themselves, urge you to take a traditional path: internship, graduate, full-time role, CPA exam, and then put in your mandatory two years […]
ICYMI: There Was an Excel All-Star Battle on ESPN
3 Excel tasks, 1 winner. All-star Excel esports battle! Excel esports on ESPN show world the pain of format errors [Ars Technica]
Let’s Take a Quick Tour of EY’s Metaverse Space (It Doesn’t Suck)
When the first glimpses of KPMG’s metaverse space appeared earlier this summer, my first thought was how much it looked like first-person shooters I played 20 years ago. I was also struck with a sense of deja vu, it looked oddly similar to the Maryland Association of CPAs’ CPA Island in Second Life which existed […]
Network Security Experts Found a Way Into Moss Adams’ Cloud Network
We’ve learned this week that benevolent hackers found a vulnerability over at Moss Adams a few months ago and detailed their findings in a blog post on Tuesday. Via VPNOverview: VPNOverview’s security team in April discovered an improperly stored virtual machine (VM) image that belongs to Moss Adams, one of the largest public accounting firms […]
EY Puts Its Money Where Its Mouth Is on Audit Quality With a Technology Investment
EY announced today it is making a $1 billion investment in audit technology just weeks after WSJ reported that the firm is in the process of splitting its audit and consulting arms. $13.6 billion of EY’s $40 billion global revenue last year came from audit. From EY: EY today announces an investment of more than […]
Are You Future-Ready? Learn How to Get There at This PICPA Event
For the generations that have provided free technical support to grandparents everywhere since the ’80s and ’90s, it can be difficult to admit that the rapid pace of technological innovation is intimidating at times. There’s no denying things are changing fast. While business writers push endless streams of science fiction about robots taking jobs, technology […]
Shape Up With This Five-Step Plan For Finance Department Fitness
Feeling a bit pudgy these days? You’re not alone. In one recent survey by WebMD, 54% of respondents reported having gained weight due to coronavirus lockdowns. It makes sense: people were not going to the gym, many were subsisting on takeout (OK, basically all of us), and we weren’t getting in the daily steps one […]
Automation Will Replace Accountants Who Don’t Even Want Their Jobs, Says Guy
Although the show ended seven years ago (yeesh, where has the time gone?), I regularly find myself binge-watching Mad Men, sometimes for nostalgia, sometimes for soothing background noise, sometimes least of all in hopes I’ll catch some small detail missed in my previous 20 rewatches left there like a pretty striped Easter egg rotting behind […]
Andrew Ngai Is Better At Excel Than You
Andrew Ngai, a director at the consulting firm Taylor Fry in Australia, is the Lord of Excel—a title all of you plebs hope to one day achieve. Ngai showed off his Excel wizardry during the Financial Modeling World Cup, an esport competition in which participants were asked to create Microsoft Excel spreadsheets to solve complex […]
Get Your Precious ZZZZs and Let An Automated A/P Solution Handle Supplier Tax Compliance
Believe it or not, risks associated with tax and tax compliance still keep CEOs in the US and around the world up at night, even in these COVID times when supply chain issues, the Great Resignation, and cybersecurity incidents grab all the headlines. According to the KPMG 2021 CEO Outlook Pulse Survey, 14% of the […]
4 Ways to Automate Your Day and Free Up Precious Time
It’s hard to remember that dark time in the not-so-distant past when we had to do things like print out directions instead of trusting our phones to lead the way. Alexa hasn’t even been around for a decade, and yet here we are today, with smart home setups that open up the house for us, […]
Exposure Drafts: Artificial Intelligence Will Destroy the Accounting Profession
Exposure Drafts holiday cards are now available for purchase through Rubook Creative.
Advance Your Accounting Career with Intuit’s AI-driven, Intuitive Technology Platform
In previous posts, we’ve talked about how Intuit can help you thrive in the remote work era and shape your accounting career your way. By empowering you with an AI-driven, intuitive platform, Intuit can also help you be more productive and provide a higher level of service to customers as you advance your career. Intuit […]
Shape Your Accounting Career Your Way with the Intuit Expert Network
Looking to grow your professional experience, engaging with new clients in new situations? Ready for the next challenge as your accounting career revs up or winds down, or seeking a full-time job as a bookkeeping professional? The Intuit Expert Network offers the perfect opportunity to shape your career—transforming your journey to fit your wants, goals, […]
How Intuit Can Help Your Career Thrive In the Remote Work Era
With the widespread adoption of remote and hybrid work structures and an increased reliance on technology, the past year has seen big changes to the accounting and finance professions. As many accountants and finance professionals face the reality that they won’t be returning to the office any time soon (if at all), it’s clear that […]
The Road to Work/Life Nirvana (Hint, Don’t Take the Technology Exit)
“Hahaha … Dad, you were working all the time … we never saw you. Why would I want to do that?” It’s a sad day when buzzing in with “What is a CPA?” will win you $400 based on my daughter’s comment. Worse, her remarks aren’t grounded in laziness. She’s graduating college this spring with […]
Believe It or Not, There Are Advantages to Getting CPE In a Virtual Setting
If there’s one main thing pandemic living has taught us it’s how to pivot. For many of us, we’ve had to figure out how to do our jobs at home (oftentimes while simultaneously wearing our parent hat). Our kids have had to adjust to learning in virtual classrooms. The past year has forced some people […]
This Is Not a Drill: The Robots Are Coming For Your Job (Probably)
For years now, we here at Going Concern — much like most of the accounting profession at large — have been engaged in dramatic hand-wringing over the possibility of robots edging accountants out of their jobs. And — again, much like the greater profession — we have mostly come to the conclusion that even when […]
TIL There’s a ‘Hall of Tortured Souls’ Easter Egg In Excel and That Couldn’t Be More Appropriate For Accountants’ Favorite Tool
Endlessly scrolling my YouTube recommendations the other night in a desperate attempt to scrape up the tiniest shred of dopamine, I came across the video I’m about to share with you all. It’s about the “Hall of Tortured Souls,” an easter egg buried in Microsoft Office 1995. This website has been around for 12 years, […]
3 Ways Accountants Can Get Awesome Results In the Value Pricing Era
The move toward value pricing marks the dawning of a new era for accountants and accounting firms, where financial and professional advancement opportunities abound. No longer constrained by the billable hour, earning potential for accountants is limited only by their own efficiency. And that’s awesome—for those who can find ways to make every minute of […]
Weekend Read: Is Your ‘Bedtime Procrastination’ Ruining What Little Free Time You Have?
We’ve all been there: you know you have to be up early for work however that doesn’t stop you from binging half a dozen episodes of your favorite new show or playing way too much Overwatch with the scrubs you call your gaming buddies well into the night. Next thing you know, you’re setting an […]
Need to Take a Dump But Stuck In a Zoom Call? There’s An App For That
One consequence of work from home is that all of us now know way too much about how our colleagues live, from filthy “offices” to screaming kids and rowdy dogs. And because some managers are terrible at their jobs and think camera on = working, there are those among us who can’t even get five […]
If Your Password Is ‘123456,’ You Are Dumb and Lazy
From ZDNet: After analyzing 275,699,516 passwords leaked during 2020 data breaches, NordPass and partners found that the most common passwords are incredibly easy to guess — and it could take less than a second or two for attackers to break into accounts using these credentials. Only 44% of those recorded were considered “unique.” The password manager solutions […]
Happy Birthday, Microsoft Excel!
Thirty-five years ago this week, Microsoft Excel was born. Which means if you were born prior to 1985 you lived in a world without Excel. Unless you were born much earlier than 1985 chances are you didn’t even notice. 35 years ? pic.twitter.com/YFXTJZ4npl — Microsoft Excel (@msexcel) September 30, 2020 Of the great inventions of […]
This ‘Almost-Rockstar’-Developed 10-key Is the Best Thing to Happen to Accounting Since Microsoft Excel
“Necessity is the mother of invention.” Although the internet has no doubt attributed that quote to everyone from Abraham Lincoln to Marilyn Monroe over the years, it was actually Greek philosopher Plato who spat out the phrase we still use today. What it means in simple terms is that human beings are amazingly adept at […]
Miserable and Burned Out? It Might Be the Zoom Meetings
In the early days of the Rona pandemic just as most of you were starting to adjust to that work-from-home life (much to the chagrin of some of your employers that feel it’s not really working if you’re not chained to a desk where they can observe you), I shared a pic of my own […]
Get Your Mind Out of the Data with Modern Analytics (So Your Accounting or Finance Career Can Take Off)
It’s hard to make your accounting or finance career dreams come true when you spend half your day gathering, blending, interpreting, and learning to understand your data. And that’s especially true when your data exists in many formats—from spreadsheets to databases to emails. (By “dreams,” we’re speaking figuratively—we’re not talking about your recurring nightmare where […]
What Data and Analytics Skills Do You Need to Advance Your Accounting or Finance Career?
As we mentioned in our last article, data and analytics skills are becoming increasingly more crucial for accounting and finance professionals. These skills are in high demand across the industry—and by becoming data-fluent now, you can open up bigger career opportunities for yourself and perform your current job more effectively. But it’s not like you […]
Here’s Where We’re at With That Whole ‘Robots Taking Over Your Job’ Thing
For pretty much the entire lifetime of this website — which, by the way, is 11 years come July 20 — the specter of robots automating our core audience out of a job has been a persistent topic. Not as persistent as, say, perverts with CPA at the end of their names or dick-measuring contests […]
How COVID-19 Warped Us Five Years Into the Future—And What That Means for Your Accounting or Finance Career
Tom Brady was a Patriot. The only “Tiger King” was Tony, and he was grrrrrr-eat! And hand sanitizer was just worth its weight in, well, hand sanitizer. All of these things were true at the end of 2019, and that was less than half a year ago. So why does it feel like another lifetime? […]
CPA Canada Is Like Your Grandma Who Sincerely Believes Nigerian Royalty Wants to Give Her Money
You know, I’m kinda starting to feel bad. We rarely write about CPA Canada and when we do, it’s because of some epic technological snafu that has disrupted their exam process or, as is the case with the news I’m sharing with you today, otherwise adversely impacted its member base. I don’t think there’s ever […]
Exclusive Interview: Spreadsheets Reveal Why They’re Terrible at Tax, Audit, Finance, and Accounting Analytics
We’ve been trying to track down Spreadsheets for a long time. We scoured the Negative Zone with the Richards/Storm family. We looked behind the expired potato salad in the office fridge. We even sent Geraldo to check Al Capone’s vault again (and, yep, it’s still pretty much empty.) We were hoping to ask Spreadsheets what […]
Keeping Cash Flowing In Turbulent Times
“Cash flow is top-of-mind for most clients,” reads an April 3, 2020 article in the Journal of Accountancy about how CPAs are supporting business owners through the COVID-19 crisis. Cash flow has always been an issue for business owners, and CPAs are always their trusted advisors, but if the coronavirus pandemic has taught us anything […]
Deloitte Is Giving Unemployed Gig Workers In Some States Something Extra to Worry About
Imagine being an out-of-work independent contractor living in Ohio during this pandemic, anxious and unsure of when you’re actually going to get some financial assistance from the state because Ohio’s unemployment systems are being blown up with regular unemployment claims. Finally you get word that you can now file for unemployment benefits through the new […]
Cybersecurity Experts PwC Get One of Their Subdomains Hijacked By Porn Spam
It feels like it’s been months since I’ve been able to write about something that has nothing to do with coronavirus. Kind of a nice feeling, actually, I’ve forgotten what that’s like. Anyhoo, when my esteemed colleague Bramwell spotted this story the other day, he made sure to send it my way because apparently it’s […]
Number of the Day: 124%
Because a good deal of you guys are now working from home, accountants contributed to VPN usage in the U.S. increasing 124% between March 9 and March 22, according to data from Atlas VPN. From March 16 to March 22, VPN usage increase 71%. During the last two weeks, VPN usage in the US increased […]
An Interview with an Accounting Firm Partner ‘Mire-d’ In Client Service and Musicals
Welcome back to another installment of … uh … we never did name this series, did we? My bad. Well whatever, welcome back to another installment of us interviewing folks around the accounting profession who have mastered the art of working smarter, not harder. This series is brought to you by our friends at Gusto; […]
How Self-Service Analytics Will Boost Your Accounting or Finance Career In 2020
In 2020, self-service analytics could be the superpowered accelerator your accounting or finance career needs to get to the next level. Ten years from now, if you were to look back at your career like it was a superhero movie (and you will, of course—our Disney overlords will require it), everything before self-service analytics will […]
Holiday Protip: Don’t Leave the Interns Unsupervised With Excel
Merry Christmas, everyone!
5 Times Modern Analytics Saved the Day In Accounting and Finance
Around the world and at businesses of every size, accounting and finance professionals are seizing the opportunity to make analytics their ultimate sidekick. Where there’s Batman, there’s a Batmobile—and for these folks, where there’s accounting and finance, there’s a custom-built, mega machine of a platform to assist in the day’s activities. Modern analytics is all […]
An Interview with a Paperless Practitioner Doing Things Her Way
Welcome back to the second in our series of interviews with Gusto partners who just so happen to be doing some pretty cool things out there in the exciting world of accounting. In case you missed the last one, we introduced you to Bruce Phillips of Aprio Cloud, all while extolling the virtues of payroll […]
Be Thankful For These Learning Resources This Thanksgiving
Hi there, you little turkeys. While you cower in the bathroom to avoid making eye contact with your creepy uncle Dan we’re here to give you some learning resources from our friends at Alteryx. Look, it beats trying to explain to your grandma for the 100th time why you became an accountant and not a […]
How Analytics and Chicken Sandwiches Can Put Time Back In Tax Professionals’ Days
The Chicken Sandwich War of 2019 was such an emotional firestorm, decorum prevents us from officially weighing in on the suddenly critical debate of which fast-food chain offers the best fried chicken sandwich (but seriously, it’s Chick-fil-A). We can, however, declare a winner in a different war, this time without the use of tongue-in-cheek parentheticals. […]
An Interview with an Accounting Firm Managing Partner Who Likes Sleep as Much as We Do
If you asked small business owners what it’s like to process payroll (or onboard employees, or set up insurance, or, well you get the hint), you would probably hear it described as “dull,” “time-consuming,” and “a big pain in the butt.” But what if payroll was actually “awesome,” “easy,” and “quick?” Shocking concept, we know. […]
Accounting in 2040: 4 Ways the Industry Will (Probably) Change in 20 Years
What will the accounting industry look like in 2040? Will Skynet launch a nuclear apocalypse, leaving robots to inherit Earth’s charred, radioactive remains, or will it just ruin the Terminator franchise with unnecessary and confusing reboots? Will accountants be plugged into a giant matrix, their bioelectricity used to power evil machine overlords, even though a […]
UPDATED: What In the Hell Is Happening to CCH?
Get excited, Tax Twitter, you’re about to get your moment in the sun. Granted it’s a moment of total panic, but still, a moment. So, if you haven’t heard, CCH has been borked since yesterday. When we say borked, we don’t mean “some users are having access problems,” rather the entire thing has been nuked […]
3 Ways Millennials Changed the Accounting Industry with Technology
In the age of Instagram influencers and workplace beer gardens, millennials often get an unfair rap for communicating and working differently than their older office peers. While they may have grown up texting in lieu of talking and “dancing” with headphones at silent discos, like it or not, millennials are now the largest and most […]
Here’s Another Boring, Totally Predictable Article About How Robots Are Coming For Your Job
As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster. Wait, no, wrong intro. Uh, as far back as I can remember, the Chicken Littles of accounting have been carrying on about the inevitability of robots taking jobs from honest, red-blooded professionals. You know, like they did at automobile assembly lines, […]
Big 4 Calling On All Blockchain Nerds to Come Nerd Out At Their Firms
From CoinDesk: “Big Four” professional consulting firms Deloitte, KPMG and EY are all in the top five when it comes to posting blockchain job ads, according to new data from Indeed.com. The employment site released its latest figures for job postings relating to blockchain, cryptocurrency and bitcoin in the U.S. on Thursday, with the data covering […]
Going Concern March Madness: Ultimate Tech Showdown
Once upon a time, our former dear leader Caleb — who is not exactly known as the pinnacle of red-blooded, sports-loving American male — got the bright idea to gift the accounting profession with its very own March Madness competition. Although it was wildly popular those first two years, it also ended in embarrassment for […]
4 Reasons the Accounting Firm Timesheet Must Evolve in 2019
It’s 4:45 on a Friday afternoon at Accounting Firm, USA. Fee earners are itching to start their weekends, but one final task remains. Before the happy hour beer taps can flow, before elated dogs (and disinterested cats) can greet their returning owners home, before the family can pile into the minivan and head out to […]
Thankfully, PwC’s Robot CODE-E Does Not Want to Destroy the Human Race
Everybody’s favorite technology-talkin’ PwC robot, CODE-E, made an appearance on the show “Windy City Live” in Chicago this morning and WHY DIDN’T I KNOW ABOUT THIS IN ADVANCE, PwC? I would have made the trek into the city to see CODE-E in the flesh … or steel … or aluminum or whatever it’s made out […]