May 1, 2023 • 19 mins
There’s a lot of buzz around generative A.I. and the impacts it’ll have on workplaces. There are lots of arguments for and against for using it – where does your accounting practice sit? This episode we explore the current state of play through the lens of one small accounting practice. How is it being used, what are the benefits, what are the risks and what’s next. How can members help members come on this tech journey. Meryl Johnson CA, Bean Ninjas Founder joins Public Affairs Manager Gillian Bowen to explain.
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Episode Transcript
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Gillian Bowen, Host (00:08):
Hello, I'm Gillian Bowen, Public Affairs Manager at Chartered Accountants ANZ,
or CA ANZ. This is Small Firm, Big Impact.
Meryl Johnston, CA (00:22):
There's super powerful tools available, so I want my team
to embrace that. We can use that to not only
improve our productivity, but but we can use that to
improve the relationships we have with clients. If we can
write better emails that are explained, we were explaining accounting
terms in a more simple way. I think it can
create a great client experience too. So there's that component.
(00:43):
But then I'm worried about the confidentiality, about uploading things
or my team uploading things that they shouldn't to tools
like Chat GPT. So for me it's balancing that. How do
we set the guardrails?
Gillian Bowen, Host (01:01):
It's the podcast giving you and your clients the up
to date information you need to do your jobs. Each
fortnight I share resources, tools and expert advice provided by
CA ANZ and a range of people across our profession. So
make sure you're following the pod in your favourite pod
app and if you've got an idea for the show
email podcast@charteredaccountantsanz.com Today my guest is Meryl Johnston, CA. The
(01:34):
topic accounting and AI. But through the lens of practice
owner to practice owner, member to member. What's going on
out there right now and how are members using artificial
intelligence or dealing with it. Meryl Johnston welcome to Small Firm,
Big Impact.
Meryl Johnston, CA (01:50):
Hey, it's great to be here.
Gillian Bowen, Host (01:51):
Now I do like to get my guests to do
their own bios. It saves me from getting something wrong.
What's your expertise?
Meryl Johnston, CA (02:00):
I'm a chartered accountant. Started my career at BDO in audit,
had a little bit of time in commerce. And then
about eight years ago, I started my own firm Bean Ninjas.
And we do, we specialise in the e-commerce vertical, so
we do bookkeeping and accounting for e-commerce brands. I'm also
part of Chartered Accountants ANZ Council in Queensland and I've
(02:26):
try to be active within the accounting community.
Gillian Bowen, Host (02:29):
Okay, great. All right, this is good. So we're going
to be able to pick your brain effectively I think.
So what does tech in an accounting practice look like
right now?
Meryl Johnston, CA (02:40):
If I look at my own practice, I think there's
the tech stack that you need to run your practice. Bean Ninjas
started as a remote firm, 100% remote eight years ago.
And so we needed to have a cloud based tech
stack where we could communicate with the team, have access
to files, communicate with clients all remotely. And that was
built off the back of Xero. We now also support QuickBooks.
(03:03):
So there's the practice management tech stack, and then there's
the tech stack to support clients, as I mentioned, where we
work with clients in the ecommerce space. So we have
a very specific tech stack around using Xero or QuickBooks
A to X to bring in data, decks to capture information from bills,
gusto for payroll in the US. So there's the client
(03:27):
specific tech stack as well.
Gillian Bowen, Host (03:29):
It feels like the tech is getting smarter and smarter
by the minute, by the day, by the month. Look
with that in mind, then, let's talk about some of
the tools you use and why.
Meryl Johnston, CA (03:41):
Okay. Well, I'll do a little bit of rapid fire
just to list out a few tools that I use.
Gillian Bowen, Host (03:46):
We've got a time limit. So you're right. That's a
good call. Yep, yep. Love it.
Meryl Johnston, CA (03:49):
We can dive in and explore any that you'd like
to use for meeting minutes. I use a tool called
Fireflies.AI and that records a transcript. But what I find
more useful is it creates a summary and then also
pulls out action items. So that's I like that for myself.
But also if I want to share the meeting with
the team. Another tool is called DESCRIPT. We use that
(04:13):
for the podcast and you can edit within the software,
just - it's text based. So you can just delete the text
that you want to remove. But the bit that I
like is that if I mess up a sentence, I
could ... AI will replace my voice with a couple of
words so I wouldn't use it to record an entire
podcast episode. But it does save me having to go
back and rerecord a sentence. So.
Gillian Bowen, Host (04:35):
So it can it it regenerates your voice.
Meryl Johnston, CA (04:39):
Correct. Wow.
Gillian Bowen, Host (04:41):
Continue.
Meryl Johnston, CA (04:44):
A tool that, a lot of accountants might be familiar
familiar with is Expert. So that that all has a it's
got a huge huge range of use cases. One that
I like with my audit background is trying to prevent
fraud and it can flag if there's been a change
of bank account details, for example, with an employee or
(05:05):
a vendor. And that is typically a common way that
someone would try and perpetrate fraud. So it can give
you an alert to quickly capture that. It might also
bring up an alert if you're having a transaction that
doesn't have a receipt attached, that that's that that's over
the threshold.
Gillian Bowen, Host (05:23):
Where do you think AI could be more helpful in
the accounting space?
Meryl Johnston, CA (05:29):
Well, if I look at the use cases at the moment,
I've given the one accounting example, but most of my
use cases are related to marketing. I'm using. I didn't
mention Chat GPT. That's probably a big one that that a
lot of accountants have probably played around with a little bit.
To me, most of those use cases are marketing related
to help me write an outline for an article. Would
(05:52):
you recommend a headline. Improve what I've written. Help me
write an email to a client about a fee increase.
So a lot of that is to do with either
marketing or communication. But where I see what I'd like
to see is having this embedded into the tools that
we're using. So we use Help Scout to email our clients,
(06:14):
instead of having to open up Chat GPT to say, Hey,
could you please write an email? I still use manners
when I'm writing to the AI. Me too. Please can you
do this?
Gillian Bowen, Host (06:24):
To do that, I think maybe to be kinder to
if I'm kind. Love it. Yes. Yes. Continue.
Meryl Johnston, CA (06:31):
So if I have to open up a separate program
and then give the AI prompt and then copy it back,
what I would prefer would be to open up Help
Scout and have that embedded within the tool. And I
think that is starting to happen. I watched a video
this morning from Canopy, which is an accounting practice management
tool and they actually have Chat GPT built into their emailing
(06:52):
program so you can give some prompts and within the
practice management software, you can write or draft that email
and then change the tone to make it more friendly
or more formal. But to me that's one of the
biggest improvements would be to have it embedded within the
tools we're using rather than have to log into Fireflies
for the meeting minutes or open up Chat GPT to solve this,
(07:15):
solve a particular problem.
Gillian Bowen, Host (07:17):
And look, let's get into practice management in a tick.
I just thought it's worth explaining what chatgpt is just
in case people haven't heard of it, which I'm sure
they have, but just in case they haven't or perhaps
they haven't used it. So it is an online tool.
It's currently free. It's powered by AI Tech. That's essentially
a chat bot. So human like conversation responses, which explains
(07:40):
why Meryl and I are saying that we feel that
we need to be kind to it. So you can
type in a question like say you would on Google,
but it answers you like you're having a conversation rather
than just presenting you with a list of website links.
And you could also ask it to help you write
an email as Merly suggested, or code or a speech
shopping lists. It'll debate big ideas with you, and it
(08:02):
uses information from the internet, websites, books, news and more
to generate its answers. But the information that's been loaded
in there, there is room for error because it only
has information in it that's up to the year 2021.
But beyond questions, you can also put in your own
information and then ask it to analyze what you've pasted in.
(08:25):
So I'm thinking if you've pasted in confidential company information
and and then asked it for a summary, it will
summarize it. And I mean, I've, I have to admit
I did get a bit of help from ZDNET.com and
a wonderful article that they've written up on Chat GPT to
help me explain that in a way that will help
our brains come along for the ride. And I'll put
(08:45):
a link to that in the show notes. And it's
also worth keeping in mind that the program and ones
similar to it, are constantly evolving. So thinking about then
if you had, I guess the best way to describe
it would be an in-house ChatGPT function. How would that
work when it comes to practice management beyond just generating
(09:08):
an email? Meryl.
Meryl Johnston, CA (09:10):
Yeah, that's a great, great question and might just expand
on a couple of use cases with Chat GPT as well.
Before answering that broader question, I think you've given some
great examples of how it can communicate backwards and forwards
with you. It's like chatting to a human. I think
it's better than Google for searching for something because Google
you search and it comes up with a lot of
(09:32):
biased posts that have been ranked. Someone's been trying to
rank them for SEO purposes so that it feels like
there's less bias in the answers that are coming through.
And you could you could use it for things like
looking at a list of unreconciled transactions. As accountants, we
often are dealing with that. What what's this purchase? What's that?
(09:52):
You've got the merchant name, but not much else. You
could put that into Chat GPT and it can give examples
of what that could look like. So it's very powerful.
But when we think about practice management, I think back to,
to what I mentioned earlier about having it embedded within
the tool. And so there's different elements of practice management.
(10:14):
There's the billing side, there's the conversations that you're having
with clients is all of the file storage. And at
the moment, tools like Chat GPT, you can't actually post or
ask them, ask it to read a PDF or ask
it to read a word document. You have to copy
and paste that information in. But I imagine in the
(10:34):
future that all of that information that's captured within your
practice management, the files, the documents would, would be able
to be read and then you could ask questions. So
instead of having to ask a client and ask multiple
requests of the same thing, you could quickly ask, have
we requested these lease document from the client and it
(10:54):
could reply back to you? Yes, Jason asked this on
this date and it's stored here so that you don't
have to ask that client again or this piece of
work is out of scope. Has the client paid for it?
And you could probably ask the AI could get back
to you to say, yes, we've received payment. It's fine
to go ahead and start work. And all of that
(11:15):
would be within the practice management system rather than these
disparate systems. I should add a disclaimer, I'm no AI expert.
I've been playing around with it myself, so I'm describing
what I would like, not not necessarily with the technical expertise,
expertise to know when that might be possible or if.
Gillian Bowen, Host (11:32):
If it's and that's the point of having this conversation,
because I'm sure there's lots of members listening along who
are having these conversations already. And that's why I thought, well,
it's actually worth speaking to someone who's in a practice
and going, Well, how are you dealing with dealing with
this at the moment as it's evolving? How are people
within the practice saying, Hey, have you heard about this?
Have you seen this? We should get this? What are
(11:55):
the next steps here?
Meryl Johnston, CA (11:56):
Well, I can share the next steps that I'm thinking
about with my practice. So on the one hand, I
want my team..it's super power, there's super powerful tools available,
so I want my team to embrace that. We can
use that to not only improve our productivity, but but
we can use that to improve the relationships we have
with clients. If we can write better emails that are explaining,
(12:18):
we were explaining accounting terms in a more simple way,
we're using the make this user more friendly tone so
that we're always communicating in a nice manner. I think
it can create a great client experience too. So there's
that component. But then I'm worried about the confidentiality about
uploading things or my team uploading things that they shouldn't
(12:38):
to tools like Chat GPT. So for me, it's balancing that
how do we set the guardrails so that we're learning
and experimenting without doing anything that puts client confidentiality or
our firm's IP at risk. And so something that I'm
I'm actually running a training session with my team this
week around productivity. And part of that will be around
(13:01):
AI and some examples, but also training around well, what
not to do. So with the example I gave before
of explain helping Chat GPT, helping to describe what a merchant
transaction is, don't put the client name, don't put the
date of the transaction. Just give the minimal information required
to answer the question.
Gillian Bowen, Host (13:22):
And it sounds like then that there's room or the
need then for practices such as yours to be writing
a policy on how you do and do not engage
with generative AI.
Meryl Johnston, CA (13:35):
Absolutely.
And I'm not there yet. So we don't have a
policy yet. But the first place I went was to
an accounting Facebook group to to start chatting with other
accountants about how are you solving this problem? Do you
have a policy, actually I back up? The first thing I
did was put that into Chat GPT and asked, What did
(13:57):
it say? What should I? Well, I actually found it
quite generic in terms of things like not inputting confidential information.
It was not very practical in that case. So I'm
hope, hoping that I can get some advice from other accountants, which
is a bit more practical and specific about what you
can and can't put in. I know CA ANZ has a
(14:19):
guide that they've written that it has some useful things.
I think it's probably more directed at big firms, big,
the big four, mid-tier and also big business. But there's
it was still interesting reading, reading that report as well.
Gillian Bowen, Host (14:33):
Well, and what I'll do is I'll whack that in
the show notes and that's the whole point as well
as this of this conversation is literally just to have
a chat about what it is that's going on out
there right now. What are people experiencing? What have they
learnt so far? Let's all start a conversation so that
we can talk about it together and come along for
the journey because it's always, ever evolving. And with that
(14:54):
in mind, I did want to give an update because
there's obviously members listening along who'd be wondering about the
impacts on education in particular when it comes to the CA Program,
which chartered Accountants Australia and New Zealand runs, of course.
And we've actually communicated with candidates about where they can
and can't use Chat GPT. We've told them that after some
testing of the capability of Chat GPT on existing program assessments,
(15:19):
we're confident that the authentic and applied nature of our
assessments will ensure that A.I. alone will not produce a
pass grade. And further to this, the use of AI
in completing an assessment must be appropriately referenced, and failure
to reference will give rise to a plagiarism case against
the candidate of academic misconduct and for assessment in the
(15:41):
form of invigilated online exams, AI applications will not be accessible
or permissible during the exam and as an organisation, CA ANZ
has been looking at the productivity benefits but also the
risks of using generative AI and whether its use is
in line with IT Policies which were updating to reflect
(16:01):
the governance controls around the permitted use of generative AI,
such as prohibiting the uploading of confidential and sensitive information
into AI programs such as Chat GPT. So it's an evolving
situation for everybody, not just accountants. And Meryl, we've talked
a little bit about this already, but are there any
(16:21):
other sort of alarm bells that we haven't mentioned that
you think would be going off for accountants using tools
such as these?
Meryl Johnston, CA (16:31):
I think it's mainly around the confidentiality side of things.
So being careful about what you upload, knowing that that
might be used to train the model and you could
be giving away your IP. So I think that's the
main concern. I mean, probably the other if you're an
accountant speaking specifically to accountants is just making sure that
(16:53):
you stay on top of technology changes. This is a
huge change. It's powerful and invest the time to play
around with it. It doesn't have to be a lot.
It could just be an hour here, an hour there.
But make sure you invest the time to learn a
little bit because it could really help with your own
personal productivity and that of your firm.
Gillian Bowen, Host (17:10):
Yes, the productivity aspect of it and helping increase what
it is that you can achieve in a day. And
that then makes me think about that idea of there
has been a lot of chatter on LinkedIn about AI
replacing accountants. What's your reaction to that?
Meryl Johnston, CA (17:25):
No, I think it's a nice tool that we can leverage,
but I don't see it replacing us. I mean, some
of the AI experts may may say to me, well, I'm
not obviously understanding the power, but to me it feels like, yes,
it can help us. It's a tool we can use,
but it's not going to replace us.
Gillian Bowen, Host (17:44):
I don't think so either. Well, and that's what you'd
hope I would say. All right. So we've got this
a few. There's a few action points really from here,
isn't there? It's to familiarize yourself with the conversation. Check
out some stuff that we've got on the website and
from your perspective Meryl, what else do you think is
is kind of the next step from here?
Meryl Johnston, CA (18:05):
Yeah. Think it's educate yourself. Make sure that you've got
a policy or some guardrails. If you're giving your team
access to AI and then learn, learn, learn and explore. Um,
related to that, in preparation for this podcast, I did
a whole bunch of research and have been playing around
with different tools and I've written up some of my
notes and they'll be available over at the Lifestyle Accountant show.
(18:29):
So feel free to, to read that, but also feel
free to reach out to me. I'm really interested in
this space and having conversations with other accountants about AI.
Gillian Bowen, Host (18:39):
Great. I'll put a link to that in the show
notes because it's a conversation we're all having right now.
Tech It's incredible to think how things have changed in
what really feels like a few short decades. That is
all we have time for. Give the podcast a follow
in your favorite pod app. Engage with us on LinkedIn.
Feel free to get in touch if you have a
topic you want covered. The podcast has an email podcast@charteredaccountantsanz.com
(19:03):
Let's start a conversation we definitely started one ourselves. Thank you
Meryl Johnston for being my guest on Small Firm, Big Impact.
Meryl Johnston, CA (19:12):
Thanks for having me.
Gillian Bowen, Host (19:12):
Bye bye.
Hello, I'm Gillian Bowen, Public Affairs Manager at Chartered Accountants ANZ,
or CA ANZ. This is Small Firm, Big Impact.
Meryl Johnston, CA (00:22):
There's super powerful tools available, so I want my team
to embrace that. We can use that to not only
improve our productivity, but but we can use that to
improve the relationships we have with clients. If we can
write better emails that are explained, we were explaining accounting
terms in a more simple way. I think it can
create a great client experience too. So there's that component.
(00:43):
But then I'm worried about the confidentiality, about uploading things
or my team uploading things that they shouldn't to tools
like Chat GPT. So for me it's balancing that. How do
we set the guardrails?
Gillian Bowen, Host (01:01):
It's the podcast giving you and your clients the up
to date information you need to do your jobs. Each
fortnight I share resources, tools and expert advice provided by
CA ANZ and a range of people across our profession. So
make sure you're following the pod in your favourite pod
app and if you've got an idea for the show
email podcast@charteredaccountantsanz.com Today my guest is Meryl Johnston, CA. The
(01:34):
topic accounting and AI. But through the lens of practice
owner to practice owner, member to member. What's going on
out there right now and how are members using artificial
intelligence or dealing with it. Meryl Johnston welcome to Small Firm,
Big Impact.
Meryl Johnston, CA (01:50):
Hey, it's great to be here.
Gillian Bowen, Host (01:51):
Now I do like to get my guests to do
their own bios. It saves me from getting something wrong.
What's your expertise?
Meryl Johnston, CA (02:00):
I'm a chartered accountant. Started my career at BDO in audit,
had a little bit of time in commerce. And then
about eight years ago, I started my own firm Bean Ninjas.
And we do, we specialise in the e-commerce vertical, so
we do bookkeeping and accounting for e-commerce brands. I'm also
part of Chartered Accountants ANZ Council in Queensland and I've
(02:26):
try to be active within the accounting community.
Gillian Bowen, Host (02:29):
Okay, great. All right, this is good. So we're going
to be able to pick your brain effectively I think.
So what does tech in an accounting practice look like
right now?
Meryl Johnston, CA (02:40):
If I look at my own practice, I think there's
the tech stack that you need to run your practice. Bean Ninjas
started as a remote firm, 100% remote eight years ago.
And so we needed to have a cloud based tech
stack where we could communicate with the team, have access
to files, communicate with clients all remotely. And that was
built off the back of Xero. We now also support QuickBooks.
(03:03):
So there's the practice management tech stack, and then there's
the tech stack to support clients, as I mentioned, where we
work with clients in the ecommerce space. So we have
a very specific tech stack around using Xero or QuickBooks
A to X to bring in data, decks to capture information from bills,
gusto for payroll in the US. So there's the client
(03:27):
specific tech stack as well.
Gillian Bowen, Host (03:29):
It feels like the tech is getting smarter and smarter
by the minute, by the day, by the month. Look
with that in mind, then, let's talk about some of
the tools you use and why.
Meryl Johnston, CA (03:41):
Okay. Well, I'll do a little bit of rapid fire
just to list out a few tools that I use.
Gillian Bowen, Host (03:46):
We've got a time limit. So you're right. That's a
good call. Yep, yep. Love it.
Meryl Johnston, CA (03:49):
We can dive in and explore any that you'd like
to use for meeting minutes. I use a tool called
Fireflies.AI and that records a transcript. But what I find
more useful is it creates a summary and then also
pulls out action items. So that's I like that for myself.
But also if I want to share the meeting with
the team. Another tool is called DESCRIPT. We use that
(04:13):
for the podcast and you can edit within the software,
just - it's text based. So you can just delete the text
that you want to remove. But the bit that I
like is that if I mess up a sentence, I
could ... AI will replace my voice with a couple of
words so I wouldn't use it to record an entire
podcast episode. But it does save me having to go
back and rerecord a sentence. So.
Gillian Bowen, Host (04:35):
So it can it it regenerates your voice.
Meryl Johnston, CA (04:39):
Correct. Wow.
Gillian Bowen, Host (04:41):
Continue.
Meryl Johnston, CA (04:44):
A tool that, a lot of accountants might be familiar
familiar with is Expert. So that that all has a it's
got a huge huge range of use cases. One that
I like with my audit background is trying to prevent
fraud and it can flag if there's been a change
of bank account details, for example, with an employee or
(05:05):
a vendor. And that is typically a common way that
someone would try and perpetrate fraud. So it can give
you an alert to quickly capture that. It might also
bring up an alert if you're having a transaction that
doesn't have a receipt attached, that that's that that's over
the threshold.
Gillian Bowen, Host (05:23):
Where do you think AI could be more helpful in
the accounting space?
Meryl Johnston, CA (05:29):
Well, if I look at the use cases at the moment,
I've given the one accounting example, but most of my
use cases are related to marketing. I'm using. I didn't
mention Chat GPT. That's probably a big one that that a
lot of accountants have probably played around with a little bit.
To me, most of those use cases are marketing related
to help me write an outline for an article. Would
(05:52):
you recommend a headline. Improve what I've written. Help me
write an email to a client about a fee increase.
So a lot of that is to do with either
marketing or communication. But where I see what I'd like
to see is having this embedded into the tools that
we're using. So we use Help Scout to email our clients,
(06:14):
instead of having to open up Chat GPT to say, Hey,
could you please write an email? I still use manners
when I'm writing to the AI. Me too. Please can you
do this?
Gillian Bowen, Host (06:24):
To do that, I think maybe to be kinder to
if I'm kind. Love it. Yes. Yes. Continue.
Meryl Johnston, CA (06:31):
So if I have to open up a separate program
and then give the AI prompt and then copy it back,
what I would prefer would be to open up Help
Scout and have that embedded within the tool. And I
think that is starting to happen. I watched a video
this morning from Canopy, which is an accounting practice management
tool and they actually have Chat GPT built into their emailing
(06:52):
program so you can give some prompts and within the
practice management software, you can write or draft that email
and then change the tone to make it more friendly
or more formal. But to me that's one of the
biggest improvements would be to have it embedded within the
tools we're using rather than have to log into Fireflies
for the meeting minutes or open up Chat GPT to solve this,
(07:15):
solve a particular problem.
Gillian Bowen, Host (07:17):
And look, let's get into practice management in a tick.
I just thought it's worth explaining what chatgpt is just
in case people haven't heard of it, which I'm sure
they have, but just in case they haven't or perhaps
they haven't used it. So it is an online tool.
It's currently free. It's powered by AI Tech. That's essentially
a chat bot. So human like conversation responses, which explains
(07:40):
why Meryl and I are saying that we feel that
we need to be kind to it. So you can
type in a question like say you would on Google,
but it answers you like you're having a conversation rather
than just presenting you with a list of website links.
And you could also ask it to help you write
an email as Merly suggested, or code or a speech
shopping lists. It'll debate big ideas with you, and it
(08:02):
uses information from the internet, websites, books, news and more
to generate its answers. But the information that's been loaded
in there, there is room for error because it only
has information in it that's up to the year 2021.
But beyond questions, you can also put in your own
information and then ask it to analyze what you've pasted in.
(08:25):
So I'm thinking if you've pasted in confidential company information
and and then asked it for a summary, it will
summarize it. And I mean, I've, I have to admit
I did get a bit of help from ZDNET.com and
a wonderful article that they've written up on Chat GPT to
help me explain that in a way that will help
our brains come along for the ride. And I'll put
(08:45):
a link to that in the show notes. And it's
also worth keeping in mind that the program and ones
similar to it, are constantly evolving. So thinking about then
if you had, I guess the best way to describe
it would be an in-house ChatGPT function. How would that
work when it comes to practice management beyond just generating
(09:08):
an email? Meryl.
Meryl Johnston, CA (09:10):
Yeah, that's a great, great question and might just expand
on a couple of use cases with Chat GPT as well.
Before answering that broader question, I think you've given some
great examples of how it can communicate backwards and forwards
with you. It's like chatting to a human. I think
it's better than Google for searching for something because Google
you search and it comes up with a lot of
(09:32):
biased posts that have been ranked. Someone's been trying to
rank them for SEO purposes so that it feels like
there's less bias in the answers that are coming through.
And you could you could use it for things like
looking at a list of unreconciled transactions. As accountants, we
often are dealing with that. What what's this purchase? What's that?
(09:52):
You've got the merchant name, but not much else. You
could put that into Chat GPT and it can give examples
of what that could look like. So it's very powerful.
But when we think about practice management, I think back to,
to what I mentioned earlier about having it embedded within
the tool. And so there's different elements of practice management.
(10:14):
There's the billing side, there's the conversations that you're having
with clients is all of the file storage. And at
the moment, tools like Chat GPT, you can't actually post or
ask them, ask it to read a PDF or ask
it to read a word document. You have to copy
and paste that information in. But I imagine in the
(10:34):
future that all of that information that's captured within your
practice management, the files, the documents would, would be able
to be read and then you could ask questions. So
instead of having to ask a client and ask multiple
requests of the same thing, you could quickly ask, have
we requested these lease document from the client and it
(10:54):
could reply back to you? Yes, Jason asked this on
this date and it's stored here so that you don't
have to ask that client again or this piece of
work is out of scope. Has the client paid for it?
And you could probably ask the AI could get back
to you to say, yes, we've received payment. It's fine
to go ahead and start work. And all of that
(11:15):
would be within the practice management system rather than these
disparate systems. I should add a disclaimer, I'm no AI expert.
I've been playing around with it myself, so I'm describing
what I would like, not not necessarily with the technical expertise,
expertise to know when that might be possible or if.
Gillian Bowen, Host (11:32):
If it's and that's the point of having this conversation,
because I'm sure there's lots of members listening along who
are having these conversations already. And that's why I thought, well,
it's actually worth speaking to someone who's in a practice
and going, Well, how are you dealing with dealing with
this at the moment as it's evolving? How are people
within the practice saying, Hey, have you heard about this?
Have you seen this? We should get this? What are
(11:55):
the next steps here?
Meryl Johnston, CA (11:56):
Well, I can share the next steps that I'm thinking
about with my practice. So on the one hand, I
want my team..it's super power, there's super powerful tools available,
so I want my team to embrace that. We can
use that to not only improve our productivity, but but
we can use that to improve the relationships we have
with clients. If we can write better emails that are explaining,
(12:18):
we were explaining accounting terms in a more simple way,
we're using the make this user more friendly tone so
that we're always communicating in a nice manner. I think
it can create a great client experience too. So there's
that component. But then I'm worried about the confidentiality about
uploading things or my team uploading things that they shouldn't
(12:38):
to tools like Chat GPT. So for me, it's balancing that
how do we set the guardrails so that we're learning
and experimenting without doing anything that puts client confidentiality or
our firm's IP at risk. And so something that I'm
I'm actually running a training session with my team this
week around productivity. And part of that will be around
(13:01):
AI and some examples, but also training around well, what
not to do. So with the example I gave before
of explain helping Chat GPT, helping to describe what a merchant
transaction is, don't put the client name, don't put the
date of the transaction. Just give the minimal information required
to answer the question.
Gillian Bowen, Host (13:22):
And it sounds like then that there's room or the
need then for practices such as yours to be writing
a policy on how you do and do not engage
with generative AI.
Meryl Johnston, CA (13:35):
Absolutely.
And I'm not there yet. So we don't have a
policy yet. But the first place I went was to
an accounting Facebook group to to start chatting with other
accountants about how are you solving this problem? Do you
have a policy, actually I back up? The first thing I
did was put that into Chat GPT and asked, What did
(13:57):
it say? What should I? Well, I actually found it
quite generic in terms of things like not inputting confidential information.
It was not very practical in that case. So I'm
hope, hoping that I can get some advice from other accountants, which
is a bit more practical and specific about what you
can and can't put in. I know CA ANZ has a
(14:19):
guide that they've written that it has some useful things.
I think it's probably more directed at big firms, big,
the big four, mid-tier and also big business. But there's
it was still interesting reading, reading that report as well.
Gillian Bowen, Host (14:33):
Well, and what I'll do is I'll whack that in
the show notes and that's the whole point as well
as this of this conversation is literally just to have
a chat about what it is that's going on out
there right now. What are people experiencing? What have they
learnt so far? Let's all start a conversation so that
we can talk about it together and come along for
the journey because it's always, ever evolving. And with that
(14:54):
in mind, I did want to give an update because
there's obviously members listening along who'd be wondering about the
impacts on education in particular when it comes to the CA Program,
which chartered Accountants Australia and New Zealand runs, of course.
And we've actually communicated with candidates about where they can
and can't use Chat GPT. We've told them that after some
testing of the capability of Chat GPT on existing program assessments,
(15:19):
we're confident that the authentic and applied nature of our
assessments will ensure that A.I. alone will not produce a
pass grade. And further to this, the use of AI
in completing an assessment must be appropriately referenced, and failure
to reference will give rise to a plagiarism case against
the candidate of academic misconduct and for assessment in the
(15:41):
form of invigilated online exams, AI applications will not be accessible
or permissible during the exam and as an organisation, CA ANZ
has been looking at the productivity benefits but also the
risks of using generative AI and whether its use is
in line with IT Policies which were updating to reflect
(16:01):
the governance controls around the permitted use of generative AI,
such as prohibiting the uploading of confidential and sensitive information
into AI programs such as Chat GPT. So it's an evolving
situation for everybody, not just accountants. And Meryl, we've talked
a little bit about this already, but are there any
(16:21):
other sort of alarm bells that we haven't mentioned that
you think would be going off for accountants using tools
such as these?
Meryl Johnston, CA (16:31):
I think it's mainly around the confidentiality side of things.
So being careful about what you upload, knowing that that
might be used to train the model and you could
be giving away your IP. So I think that's the
main concern. I mean, probably the other if you're an
accountant speaking specifically to accountants is just making sure that
(16:53):
you stay on top of technology changes. This is a
huge change. It's powerful and invest the time to play
around with it. It doesn't have to be a lot.
It could just be an hour here, an hour there.
But make sure you invest the time to learn a
little bit because it could really help with your own
personal productivity and that of your firm.
Gillian Bowen, Host (17:10):
Yes, the productivity aspect of it and helping increase what
it is that you can achieve in a day. And
that then makes me think about that idea of there
has been a lot of chatter on LinkedIn about AI
replacing accountants. What's your reaction to that?
Meryl Johnston, CA (17:25):
No, I think it's a nice tool that we can leverage,
but I don't see it replacing us. I mean, some
of the AI experts may may say to me, well, I'm
not obviously understanding the power, but to me it feels like, yes,
it can help us. It's a tool we can use,
but it's not going to replace us.
Gillian Bowen, Host (17:44):
I don't think so either. Well, and that's what you'd
hope I would say. All right. So we've got this
a few. There's a few action points really from here,
isn't there? It's to familiarize yourself with the conversation. Check
out some stuff that we've got on the website and
from your perspective Meryl, what else do you think is
is kind of the next step from here?
Meryl Johnston, CA (18:05):
Yeah. Think it's educate yourself. Make sure that you've got
a policy or some guardrails. If you're giving your team
access to AI and then learn, learn, learn and explore. Um,
related to that, in preparation for this podcast, I did
a whole bunch of research and have been playing around
with different tools and I've written up some of my
notes and they'll be available over at the Lifestyle Accountant show.
(18:29):
So feel free to, to read that, but also feel
free to reach out to me. I'm really interested in
this space and having conversations with other accountants about AI.
Gillian Bowen, Host (18:39):
Great. I'll put a link to that in the show
notes because it's a conversation we're all having right now.
Tech It's incredible to think how things have changed in
what really feels like a few short decades. That is
all we have time for. Give the podcast a follow
in your favorite pod app. Engage with us on LinkedIn.
Feel free to get in touch if you have a
topic you want covered. The podcast has an email podcast@charteredaccountantsanz.com
(19:03):
Let's start a conversation we definitely started one ourselves. Thank you
Meryl Johnston for being my guest on Small Firm, Big Impact.
Meryl Johnston, CA (19:12):
Thanks for having me.
Gillian Bowen, Host (19:12):
Bye bye.
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