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Transcript (Note: There may be typos due to automated transcription errors.)

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  00:00

Randy, welcome to the accounting Technology Lab sponsored by CPA practice advisor. With your hosts, Randy Johnston and Brian Tankersley,

Randy Johnston  00:11

welcome today’s accounting Technology Lab. I’m Randy Johnston with my co host, Bryan Tankersley, we’d like to speak to you about time credit today now, the time credit was one of the selectees for this year’s AICPA, cpa.com accelerator program. Now, in other podcasts, we’ve talked to you a fair bit about these other providers. And time credit was started by Ananya, Sanya and Kevin shebang. Sorry about the name pronunciations friends, but these two really had a dog on good idea because they were really trying to use AI to work on accounting memos. So Brian, I know that from your perspective, you often introduce yourself as recovering auditor. So for our auditing friends on the call, talk to me a little bit about accounting memos.

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  01:09

So what this will do is it will write technical accounting memos, and so it’ll go through and describe how they comply and what their accounting policies are related to. You know, what the accounting policies are, and what the related, what the, what the, I guess, the pertinent ASC sections are, and and so forth. And so it will. It will actually go in. And again, we’ll, we’ll help you do this. So, so what this does is it runs on dedicated servers, and it will automatically redact information in there if you have things that need to be redacted. The model. It has models where it will ingest your leases and contracts and other items, and then it will, it will go through then and write the memos for you in a couple of minutes. And so it will, again, it will, it will go through and basically handle all of that well.

Randy Johnston  02:05

So, Brian, you know, one of the claims from the the vendor is that it can save up to 90% of the time of, you know, processing credit memos, and realistically, a lot of the AI tools that are out there are trying to accomplish that goal, and we are watching for this leverage. Now, we’ve talked about this in other technology labs with you, where AI acceleration is reducing the amount of time required to do a lot of tasks. But in the past week or so, someone said so clearly, and it was like, Yeah, you’re right. We understand why the productivity gains are 2530 and 40% but do you live 100% of your time in let’s say Excel to take advantage of copilot 365 see the difference here? I believe, is that these general products, copilot, 365, chatgpt, Gemini, Claude, three and on and on and on. These general products can help us with general productivity in accounting, but we believe you’re going to find specific products to do specific tasks related to accounting, and I think time credit is one good example of that. So you are correct, Brian, they keep their own private area so the client data is protected, which, of course, is critical in our line of thinking. And then from there, you know, process through fairly quickly, so I’m sorry to have interrupted your explanation. But basically what happens then is you can upload documents for processing, I believe,

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  03:47

yeah, and so it will, it will again, go through and look at the look at the various things. It’s actually been trained with the accounting standards codification, and so it actually has that as an input into it, you can again upload the relevant contracts into it. So you just take the contracts and you drop again, Excel doc or CSV into it. It doesn’t look like it does PDF. So hopefully that’s an addition that they add in the future. And then you basically just end up waiting a couple of minutes, it will ingest and digest the information, and then it will go through and and then write the memo for you. And so that’s how it that’s how it basically works. Yeah.

Randy Johnston  04:31

So you know, knowing that that’s the case, it is rare. On the accounting lab that we talked to you about a product that is still in beta and testing, this one is and you know, as a self funded startup, these the founders were accountants who were dealing with his problem in the firms that they were working for, and they were trying to figure out how to streamline audit contract testing. And you know, the mundane pieces of automating footnote disclosures was another one that was really a painful thing for them as they were trying to solve the problem. So in effect, they created this GPT for accountants in this very specific area. So we believe that many products will come to market that have the AI built into them, like we have seen with checkpoint edge and the CO Council, which we covered in a separate lab, or like we saw in Walters, Kluwer, cch, answer, connect, and we can go on and on. In fact, Brian, I think there’s maybe a few other products that might be like this class. What might you mention on those? Yeah,

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  05:52

there. There actually are the the American Institute of CPAs actually went through, and they have a startup accelerator that they do. And they actually, we’ve actually covered most of these products, the time credits, the last one that’s in here, but aider, these are, these are products that include AI features. And so to get into their accelerator this year, you had to have AI. So they include, so they in the accelerator this year is aider black or time credit Laurel, diligence supervisor and materia and again, we’ve covered all seven of those in our in our time together. There are also other tools out there that are doing similar features. One of them is blue jay, that’s designed for for tax lawyers and CPAs that will again go through and give you, give you tax question answers,

Randy Johnston  06:44

yeah, so that is blue j with just the capital letter J. And as I’ve done consulting this year in firms, blue J has come up frequently because the need in both tax and audit to precisely automate the work is great, and we understand the continued pressure of lack of people resources. But that’s not the only tax assistant out there, besides Blue Jay Brian. I think you’ve got another one up your sleeve.

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  07:16

Yeah, there’s tax GPT as well. That that, again, is a is another product out here. They’ve actually got a little video on their site that you can watch, but it’s designed to do research and to write tax documents, and again, to respond to things like client emails and CP 2000 notices and again, other things like that. They also have another one that does some work, does some AI ingestion and summarization, is going to be mango doc. And we’ll probably cover it. We’ll probably cover these three. We haven’t talked about Blue Jay text, GPT and mango doc, probably in future, future

Randy Johnston  07:58

episodes, yeah. But, you know, getting back into time credit, you know, the the whole idea of their approach is to try to accelerate your processing on credit memos very specialized in this case, but we thought it was a pretty good example of a specific solution in a specific area, and you can hear, I’ve asked Brian to identify a few more as we’re going along. So you know Brian, where they basically have their claims of streamlined audit contract testing and automated footnote disclosures and advisory county advisory. Are there any other observations that you’d like to make for our listeners today?

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  08:45

You know, I think this is, I think, you know, we’ve talked a lot about AI and how it’s going to get used in accounting. And I think that, you know, these products that AICPA has picked are good ones, the ones that once we added on here chat, GPT and blue jay are others, and mango Doc is another one. But what I want you to generally see is that AI is coming. You have to be very careful with the privacy and the regulatory compliance. We’re actually going to have a separate session on regulatory compliance, and we’re going to even talk about privacy policies in a future in a future episode. But what I want you to just generally see here is that, you know, we’ve heard that folks were using AI to do lease disclosures and lease summarization and things like that. You know, people have been doing that for at least 10 years that I know of, and and so this is really bringing some of that, some of that capability, to smaller where, you know, again, we were, do? We had big firms that were doing that kind of stuff, and people in industry were, were doing that kind of summarization. This is really making it where any firm that’s willing to subscribe can can have those cape, those same capabilities that the big firms have had for quite a while.

Randy Johnston  09:58

Yes. So I guess one other call out then that I’ll make for our this podcast and future ones, we try to identify products that are interesting, most of the ones we’re quite familiar with because of their use in firms where we’ve consulted. But you know, there are innovative products that are hitting the market, left and right, and we know, as the year unfolds, some of the top award programs. For example, the CPA practice advisor publication just announced their selection of top products as well. And what we will continue to do is pick products that we know are innovative that may help your practice along the way. Many of them will have AI in them. And the thinking we’d like for you to begin working on is what parts of my practice could use. Acceleration is the tool that I’m using. Ai enabled. Am I taking advantage of that AI piece, and if not, should I consider switching to a more powerful, new generation tool that has the AI embedded to give us more leverage. So it seems like kind of a roundabout way of thinking about this, but we also know that the AICPA, cpa.com accelerator program applications are opening shortly, and there’ll be another new round of products as they go into their I believe it’s eight round of accelerator programs in this coming year. So the good news is that Brian and I will get a chance to look at many of those products while they’re being evaluated this year’s cohort of seven products that were selected were chosen out of more than 80 products that applied, that had AI in them related to accounting. Pretty stunning numbers. But we would encourage you, if you have this type of need to look at time credit or some of the other products that we’ve named today, and we appreciate you listening in we’ll talk to you again very soon.

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  12:09 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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