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Quiet Quitters make up half the U.S. workforce; remote workers waste more than an hour a day on "productivity theater"; Patagonia founder escapes hundreds of millions in estate taxes by donating his company to a political non-profit; Expensify rolls out free payroll; credit card companies to start categorizing gun shop sales
Show Notes
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Show Notes
3:14 – The billionaire founder of Patagonia gave up the company to protect the planet. He may have skirted a $700 million tax bill in the process https://t.co/tUfG40ubQq— Bloomberg (@business) September 15, 2022
3:28 – Patagonia Founder Avoids $700 Million Tax Hit By Donating Company
DealBook: Taxagonia
17:59 – Quiet Quitters Make Up Half the U.S. Workforce, Gallup Says – WSJ
22:30 – Remote Workers Are Wasting More Than an Hour a Day on Productivity Theater, New Report Finds | Inc.com
26:51 – Tips for managing remote workers - Journal of Accountancy
29:27 – The AICPA Has Written a Strongly-Worded Letter to the Treasury Department on Remote Work
31:39 – Email from Ray – Thank you!
33:51 – Employers can track electronically much of what their workers do. But should they?
36:08 – Why Rural Americans Keep Waiting for Fast Internet, Despite Billions Spent – WSJ
36:55 – Hybrid Work Meetings Are Hell. Tech Is Trying to Fix Them.
39:44 – Roofr Raises $12M to Advance SaaS Platform for Roofers
41:25 – Email from David Barrett – [Expensify] Automated payroll, taxes, and filings built into your subscription - blake@earmarkcpe.com - Earmark Mail
48:13 – Summit Hosting Acquires Tech Commandos
49:40 – That agent who sounds like they’re from Paris, Texas? Try Paris, France | TechCrunch
51:06 – Adyen to Become First FinTech Platform to Add Block’s Cash App
52:38 – Visa, Mastercard, AmEx to start categorizing gun shop sales | AP News
59:43 – Drunk Ethics – Greg Kyte – on Apple Podcasts
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David Leary: [00:00:00] Want to learn what sets LiveFlow apart from thousands of other QuickBooks Online apps. Do you want to learn how LiveFlow saves time for hundreds of accountants and bookkeepers? Want to learn how LiveFlow helps accountants and bookkeepers to use LiveFlow successfully in their firm. Stay tuned to hear more from our sponsor Live Flow later in the episode.
Blake Oliver: [00:00:22] So we've seen this actually with like the big firms, they are generally not requiring people to go back to the office like U.S. is not requiring it. I don't think any of them are really going to do it because it just makes so much sense. And when you have a lot of the work being done from client spaces anyway, not really necessary.
David Leary: [00:00:41] So coming to you weekly from the OnPay Recording studio, this is the Cloud Accounting Podcast.
Blake Oliver: [00:00:54] Welcome to the Cloud Accounting Podcast. I'm Blake Oliver.
David Leary: [00:00:58] I'm David Leary.
Blake Oliver: [00:01:00] And we are coming to you live from the unpaid recording studio via LinkedIn Live. Via Riverside. It's our second live stream.
David Leary: [00:01:09] I think it went okay last week, but I think now we're being really aggressive. Like, let's add these chats in this chat and like, you know, throws your game off a little bit. But, but if I improve my game though, like now that we're putting this live, I have to take showers before we go. I have to shave like I have to prepare a little bit differently than it's just audio a little bit.
Blake Oliver: [00:01:27] See, I didn't do any of that. I, I exercise. I have not showered, I have not shaved. And this is the beauty of remote work. And I've got stories about remote work in this episode, so I think it's appropriate. I love just being able to come to my job, which is crazy enough, being a podcaster to sit in my office, which is a second bedroom and yeah, do this. Thanks to you, to everybody who has joined us for our live stream, please let us know your thoughts about anything that we are discussing. We have invited one of our listeners to join us live on the show. We will try that. It might work. It might not. So, Tyler, if you are there, feel free to call in on Riverside at any point or chat with us to let us know. And we'll get you on the show because we want to get your feedback. All right, David, what's top of mind for you this week?
David Leary: [00:02:20] I'll start out with did you see the Patagonia? The founder is giving away the company. So this is like the the backpack company, right in boots, those kind of. Oh, yeah, I'm thinking Land's End the Boots. Patagonia.
Blake Oliver: [00:02:32] Yeah. Well, I mean, but also like the venture capitalist starter kit company, right? Everybody wears those Patagonia vest and.
David Leary: [00:02:41] Yes, the vest as well. Yes. Yeah, that's.
Blake Oliver: [00:02:43] Right. Yeah, yeah. I've never owned a Patagonia vest. I can proudly say that.
David Leary: [00:02:49] Well, if you're in Northern California, so that's the problem. It's you know, if that's where a lot of the startups are at Bay Area, it's a little chillier, you know, average, you know, your 60 degree days, you kind of need that vest. But yes, but I would you know, people send those vest me in Arizona and I'm like, I can't wear this ever.
Blake Oliver: [00:03:06] Well, you can wear it for like one month, right? In February. In December. January, yeah.
David Leary: [00:03:12] Well, but anyway.
Blake Oliver: [00:03:14] Yeah. So I saw that story too. Yeah. So $3 Billion Company, Patagonia, great company, great products. And the the founder is giving the company away for charity. Well, and political purposes actually, we should say.
David Leary: [00:03:28] Yeah. And so it's funny because if people only see the headlines of this go by on Twitter, it's like, oh, he's giving away the company to charity. But it's really he's helping his family save hundreds of millions of dollars. His his heirs are are avoiding estate and gift tax, which is like 40%. Right. So some of it's that Ray Madoff, he's a professor at Boston College Law School. He kind of brought up two points of view on this. And one is like this is we're letting kind of rich people get out of their job, which is supporting the government to run. Right. Like we're letting them not pay money to the government. Well, by doing this and.
Blake Oliver: [00:04:05] And that's what got my attention about this whole thing, is that by doing this, by donating the entire company to this, what is it called? It's a 501 c.
David Leary: [00:04:17] It's called hold fest.
Blake Oliver: [00:04:19] Okay. It's called that's the name of it. So it's a5001c for organization, which can make political donations, unlimited political donations. And if you transfer your assets to these organizations, you can't take a deduction from your income tax, but you can avoid estate and gift taxes. And in the case of billionaires, that 40, that's 40%. So this is the same strategy that was used by a Republican. A Republican billionaire bear side donated a $1.6 billion company to a conservative political action group. So this raises some interesting questions about like, do we really want this as a matter of policy that the way that you can escape estate taxes as a billionaire is to give your company to a political action committee. So we've got on one side, we've got a Republican $1.6 billion donation on this side. We've got Patagonia going for, you know, obviously, I think, the liberal environmentalist side of things. And that's a lot of money. A lot of money going to be entering politics.
David Leary: [00:05:25] So there's an amazing quote, though, that this professor said, which I thought was kind of interesting if you start thinking about it this way. So this is, again, that Ray Madoff professor at Boston College Law School. I'm just going to read the actual quote if someone wanted to leave their votes behind after they die. We do not let people do that. But through these organizations, they're doing something similar and that their money is much more powerful than a single vote.
Blake Oliver: [00:05:52] Hey. So Tyler is here. He is in Riverside right now and he is dialing in. We're going to take our first ever call in to the show after. What is this episode? This is episode 290.
David Leary: [00:06:06] 97.
Blake Oliver: [00:06:07] Yeah, we're taking our first call in. We're turning into a real, real radio show, a real live stream show. All right, Tyler, I'm going to press this green checkmark. Let's see what happens.
Tyler: [00:06:16] Hey, guys, you hear me?
Blake Oliver: [00:06:17] Hey, Tyler. Welcome. Welcome to the Cloud Accounting Podcast. How are you doing today?
Tyler: [00:06:23] Hey, I'm good. How are you guys?
Blake Oliver: [00:06:25] We're doing great. Great to have you here. So to what do we owe the pleasure of your company today, Tyler?
Tyler: [00:06:35] I think likewise to be the first person to ever call. Hopefully it goes well. Don't upset and set a good standard here.
David Leary: [00:06:44] Well, Tyler, I'm sure you email right in response to the whole culture that's happening at big firms.
Blake Oliver: [00:06:51] So you sent an email to us after episode 294. It was in response to this this concept of offshoring and whether that is hurting or. Well, in the case of the letter writer, it was hurting the learning experience of associates at big firms. And you had a different perspective. Tell us a little bit about your background, what kind of work you're doing, whatever you want to share in that regard. And then I'd love to hear your opinion on on this on this topic.
Tyler: [00:07:21] Yeah, for sure. So first off, I am a little over a year into my first year with the Big Four. I am not a regular core audit. I'm an IT auditor. So there's probably a little bit of differences. But with my experience, you know, right after a year or so into this, a lot of what I do in my day to day now is go to the client and I get, you know, the evidence that we need, what we're looking for, make sure it is what we need, which a lot of times it's not. So that's where a lot of the work is done. And that from there, in terms of filling out like our testing tables within our work papers and all of that, we actually shipped that off to one of our offshore teams in India. Oh, I know this at the firm I'm at. This has been a push for a couple of years now. But I think now I don't know if it's shortages of new associates or what, but there's definitely a huge push not to just push the work off to these offshore teams, but to try to treat them as team members themselves. So not as like a separate entity, but kind of move together as one throughout the audit. So I know with that some people might think, well, you know, you learned by filling out the testing tables and doing the evidence and all that. But with my experience, you know, a lot of the testing tables and all that is our spent formatting and plugging and chugging attributes and numbers. So for me personally, I'm still learning a lot by getting the evidence that we need and making sure it's what we need versus spinning hours of in Excel templates just formatting and filling in attributes such as like who approved this user new access and stuff like that. So that's been my experience.
Blake Oliver: [00:09:20] Awesome. So overall then positive, you like not having to do all that manual work yourself?
Tyler: [00:09:26] Yeah, I do. And I think, you know, it frees up time for me to actually like ask questions and really think about are the clients doing this? Is there a better way to do this as well? I mean, can you have that time, that extra time to voice that to managers and above? Whereas I could see, you know, the typical workload of just filling out all these work papers redundant, just work that she shall really wake up and get excited about. I definitely prefer this this method.
Blake Oliver: [00:10:00] Well, that's great. So if I heard correctly, you're in your first year as an IT auditor and now it sounds like you're enjoying this. Is this something that you plan to continue in or are you looking to get a different experience next year? Like, where are you headed with your career?
Tyler: [00:10:17] So right now, I think the nature of auditing, it's probably long term, not for me. I would prefer to help the client versus tell them or try to find things they're doing wrong. So in terms of long term, I would definitely see myself, you know, being more consulting or advisory. But for right now, what it's worth, I'm learning a ton. They're giving me a ton of resources, you know, the CPA exam and all that. So right now and going into it, it is kind of just a career booster launchpad mindset.
Blake Oliver: [00:10:54] And are you remote? Are you in the office? Are you hybrid? What's the situation?
Tyler: [00:10:59] So I am remote. I am based in Nashville, but my client is in Charlotte. And so a lot of the people I work with are in Charlotte. And so we have an office here in Nashville, but I've only been in twice and one of them was for a promotion day, which was basically, you know, a day we just went into the office and selling celebrated properties. But I have been here since August of 2021 and I've gone to Charlotte twice. So all in all, I've had three working days involved. Wow.
Blake Oliver: [00:11:36] Do you miss? Well, you can't really miss the office because your whole career has been remote. Do you do you want to go into an office or do you like the situation you have now? Like, what's your ideal situation?
Tyler: [00:11:49] So there's definitely pros and cons, I think, you know, like flexibility of working from home and being able to walk down when I have stuff to do and I can just lock in and get it done. That aspect of it is very nice in terms of learning. It is, I think, easier going into the office. Like when I go to Charlotte I can turn to somebody sitting next to me, be like, Hey, have you seen this before? How does this work? Versus having to set up a video call or chat through ping and painting messages back and forth. But all in all, I think I'm at a I'm going to Charlotte now probably like once a month. I think that's a good, healthy balance of where I'm at right now because I was a huge fan of traveling all over and being gone all the time. So.
Blake Oliver: [00:12:37] Yeah, I think I agree. I'm curious, David. I'm curious to know how you feel about this. I worked remotely for a company in San Francisco from Phenix in LA, and I would go once a month and I felt like if I really scheduled out my time with people, I could get a lot of value out of that one day, you know, especially the after hours stuff, right? Going out, having some drinks, talking to people, get to know them better.
Tyler: [00:13:02] Absolutely. Yeah.
David Leary: [00:13:04] Yeah. I think for me, I mean, I was doing remote work. For the last 12 to 15 years, probably always remote, but yeah, then you get it ebbs and flows, right? You'll get into a cadence where, hey, I'm headed up there every three weeks and you have you're there for 48 hours, you're knocking out meetings, you have a dinner, you have drinks by home. But it's it also you fall out of that cadence and just haven't made it there in six months because for whatever reason, right, especially when you have more client facing stuff, you might be fine to the client, which is like, well, why go the home office? Right? It's a little tricky. It's tricky to balance. But I think when you get into a cadence and a rhythm, it's great. It's really great.
Blake Oliver: [00:13:41] Well, Tyler, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for calling in. Thanks for listening.
David Leary: [00:13:45] It worked. Didn't crash.
Tyler: [00:13:46] Yet. Yeah, I'm glad. First time that's wow. I'm actually honored. That's awesome. I appreciate you guys having me on.
Blake Oliver: [00:13:54] And David Oh, Tyler, do you have a cloudaccountingpodcast.com t shirt?
Tyler: [00:13:59] I do not. I would love one this.
Blake Oliver: [00:14:01] Can we make that happen, David?
David Leary: [00:14:02] Yeah, we can make that happen. Send me on LinkedIn, Samir. Address, and we'll make this happen. Okay.
Blake Oliver: [00:14:07] All right. Thanks, Tyler.
David Leary: [00:14:08] Awesome.
Tyler: [00:14:08] Yeah. Appreciate you.
David Leary: [00:14:09] Guys. Thank you.
Tyler: [00:14:10] Good.
Blake Oliver: [00:14:12] That was awesome. So great. I love hearing from our listeners, especially people who are actually out in the field doing the work, not just us. David Rambling on who you know, we.
David Leary: [00:14:24] Do read.
Blake Oliver: [00:14:24] About this. We don't do any we don't do any, any work. Well, you know, this is it's hard for me to feel like this is work because I enjoy it so much.
David Leary: [00:14:37] This episode of The Cloud Accounting Podcast is sponsored by LifeLock. Have you ever exported a QuickBooks Online report to a Google sheet, spent time customizing the sheet, invited others to collaborate, then discovered the QuickBooks data has changed, forced you to restart the entire process over again. An app is solve this problem. Live flow by flow connects QuickBooks Online directly to Google Sheets in Excel, allowing you to have spreadsheets that automatically update with the most recent QuickBooks data. Thousands of accounts of bookkeepers and finance teams are using live flow today to create automatically updating budget versus actuals dashboards and consolidated reports. Yes, consolidated reports. You can connect one spreadsheet to multiple QuickBooks Online companies to see the numbers updated in real time. So more about using live flow and how you can save 20% off your first three months. Head over to Cloudaccountingpodcast.com promo slash live flow that is cloudaccountingpodcast.com promo forward slash l. Ibm Flow W. You said you had other remote work stories, though, this week.
Blake Oliver: [00:15:39] Yeah, and I think this would be a perfect transition to that. So I wanted to talk about this last week. We didn't get to it. I want to talk about remote work and this trend. Called Quiet quitting. Have you heard? Quiet. Quitting, David. It's been like a trending topic in the news.
David Leary: [00:16:00] Yeah, it's gotten a little mainstream, but. But we were talking referencing this loosely a year ago, talking about how like this concept of you remember how those people had two jobs. They're like, Yeah, I'll just get two remote jobs. And the other job doesn't know I'm doing this work that's kind of quietly quitting, right? Like you're kind of not really working very hard. So it's just it has a term now, right?
Blake Oliver: [00:16:20] Right. Yeah, I guess. I suppose that was like sort of the. But but you're not really quiet quitting if you're doing two jobs at once for two different companies because you're actually working really hard trying.
David Leary: [00:16:31] One of those is like, you didn't work hard. You're like doing just just enough to fly under the radar at this company so you can moonlight at another company and a third company. But a lot of it is that concept of if you've never actually been in the office, like do you actually really work there? And at the same vein, the other side, the employer is like, it's easier to fire you, get rid of you, but I'll let you continue with your story here.
Blake Oliver: [00:16:53] Well, you know, so, so quiet. Quitting the definition of quiet quitting is and I have one here. It's on Wikipedia now, by the way. It has its own Wikipedia entry. So we know it's a thing. Seth says, quiet quitting equals the old slowdown. And to me, without further information, that means you do your job, but you don't go above and beyond. You just do it at the minimum pace. You're doing the minimum job that you need to do. And on Wikipedia, the definition is quiet. Quitting is an application of work to rule in which employees work within defined work hours and engage solely in activities within those hours. The philosophy of quiet quitting despite the name, is not necessarily connected to quitting a job outright, but rather doing exactly what the job requires and nothing more. I added the end, nothing more part.
David Leary: [00:17:42] This would mean that takes you take slack and email off your phone. So yeah, you're not working on a weekend, you're not responding to an email outside of hours and.
Blake Oliver: [00:17:51] Yeah, exactly. And, you know, there's there's been a bunch of quiet quitting stories in the news. Gallup did a poll and this was reported in The Wall Street Journal. The headline is Quiet Quitters Make Up Half the US Workforce, the number of workers who say they are actively disengaged.
David Leary: [00:18:10] Repeat this.
Blake Oliver: [00:18:12] Quiet quitters make up half the US workforce. Now, is that a shock to you, David?
David Leary: [00:18:19] I mean, it's a shocking headline to frame it that way. But I feel like if I go back and look at my working career, then that arguably, yeah, that makes sense because a lot of people just they put a C level effort in and you get a paycheck, you put in your 40 and don't go above and beyond. And there's a lot of employees that have been like that forever.
Blake Oliver: [00:18:38] So yeah.
David Leary: [00:18:40] It just has this fancy new new term now. But I think it's just called being an average employee.
Blake Oliver: [00:18:45] It's not. It's nothing new. And in the past, we've just called this engagement or disengagement. And really for a long time, a significant percentage of the workforce has been actively disengaged or passively disengaged. Very few workers, less than half of workers are ever, you know, actively engaged, like they're really go getters. And I think, you know, this, right, if you own an accounting firm, for instance, you have maybe a few of those go getters who are like, yes, give me everything I want to be partner someday. I'm, you know, I'm that kind of person. And then you have the people who are just there, you know, doing the job, doing the minimum. Right. It's hard to motivate them. Right? This is nothing new. They've always existed, but the number has sort of increased. And I think that's the takeaway from these polls. Nearly one third of workers describe themselves as engaged or enthused about work. So a third, while just under 20%, describe themselves as actively disengaged. This is from a June survey of 15,000 US workers by Gallup. The rest. So the other 50% or so are not engaged. Those are the people who do the minimum required and are psychologically detached from their jobs. So that's kind of crazy. I think only about 20% are actively disengaged, but then like a huge chunk, like almost half are just sort of like passive, like.
David Leary: [00:20:03] Not I mean, I believe that. What's the 8020 rule? Right? I believe 20% of the employees do all the work for the whole company, like in general, most companies. I totally believe that. But what's interesting, I think with remote work and maybe there's an increase in this, if you think about like all stars, if all stars were working in a company, it was all in person. When that all stars kind of burned out or done with it, they just kind of they have to leave because nobody's just going to let them walk around doing nothing but remote work. Now there's this opportunity to be like, All right, I'll just kind of disengage. I'll take a paycheck, but I can be disengaged and I can spin up something else until that that has legs. And I think that's a lot harder to do. Pre technology of remote working I think remote working. Yeah, that's true. Enabled enabled the all stars to pull the same move. Yeah.
Blake Oliver: [00:20:48] Now here what's here's what's interesting about this survey so back in 2020, in the summer of 2020, the engagement levels for this same survey, they hit their highest level level ever at 40%. So we had really strong engagement in 2020, summer 2020, and now it's dropped a lot. And so one of the questions is, is the reason it's gone from 40% down back to like a third and we've lost like a 10% of those people who they went from being engaged to, not, you know, to now being passive or actively disengaged. Like, why did that happen? And so one of the theories is that a lot of companies are calling people back to work. So it's actually the like one theory is it's the opposite of what you said, David. It's that people became more engaged when they went remote because now they're not in my theory is they're not dealing with all the BS of the office and they get to just do their job. You know.
David Leary: [00:21:46] I think maybe. But also that was like when remote working was kind of brand new. People are just starting it and it kind of can suck after a while, after. That's when people were just starting to take Zoom calls. Then after 24 months of Zoom calls, 8 hours a day, your attitudes kind of change a little bit. And plus, I think that was the beginning. Like the pandemic was just kind of becoming a machine to some extent. The stimulus money was getting out there and companies were just trying. People were just thankful of that jobs for a little while and it needed a distraction. Right. I don't necessarily think remotely asking them to come back to the office is making them disengaged. I don't know. I we'll find out. Listeners can let me know on Twitter if they think that's true. If you work for a.
Blake Oliver: [00:22:25] We'll see.
David Leary: [00:22:26] The firms making you go back to the office if that's making you want to work less hard.
Blake Oliver: [00:22:30] Now here's another story about remote work that caught my attention. This was in incom remote. Workers are wasting more than an hour a day on productivity theater. A new report finds that's another new term of productivity.
David Leary: [00:22:44] That love it.
Blake Oliver: [00:22:47] So, David, it sounds like you're familiar with product. Theater. How would you describe it?
David Leary: [00:22:52] Well, that's these, you know. Oh, write me up a weekly summary of everything you did for the week. Or like a lot of times, daily stand ups or meetings about what we're going to have a meeting about in the. What are the what are the metrics we're going to build this project on? And there's slide decks and slide decks. I mean, like big companies are very good at this.
Blake Oliver: [00:23:13] Like, yeah, it's so, so, so this is from a survey of 2000 knowledge workers in the US and the UK. So it's finding that here's an example productivity theater, remote workers joining Zoom meetings know they will be worthless, responding to emails at strategically selected hours or other forms of being ostentatiously online to convince colleagues that they're working long and hard enough. This kind of digital presenteeism eats up a full 67 minutes of the average Remote Workers Day, the researcher found that is a lot of time wasted on productivity theater. So yeah, it's like looking. Looking busy was something that we did in the office. We'd just walk around, look like you're going places fast, right? Like whenever the partner comes out of their office, like, look, like you're free furiously typing that it it hasn't gone away in the remote work environment. It still exists. It's just different now. It's, you know, buying that program that moves your mouse cursor so that you look like you're active until 11 p.m. at night. On Microsoft teams.
David Leary: [00:24:14] Sketching your emails to go out.
Blake Oliver: [00:24:16] Scheduling your emails.
David Leary: [00:24:16] 6 a.m. Monday morning. So it looks like, well, you got a brilliant meantime you're really just sleeping.
Blake Oliver: [00:24:22] So, you know, it really is one of those stories where it's, you know, there's nothing new. It's just the same thing, people pretending to be busy. But I want to talk about why are they pretending to be busy? And I think it's because we still, even in a remote work environment, don't have good ways of measuring people's productivity other than inputs. And this is especially true in accounting. We love to measure people's time sheets, their time they are putting into their work, but we really struggle to measure their outputs and what they're doing. So people, because of that will do this productivity theater well where they will pretend to be busy and I myself was guilty of it. Here's an example of how I used to do this when I worked at the large firm. I had a client that was in downtown LA. I lived in Encino, which was between 30 minutes and an hour and a half away, depending on the traffic and this client really enjoyed when I came into the office. And so if I needed time on my timesheet, I would say, you know what, this week I'm going to go into the office and all that travel time to get there and the parking and all that stuff I got to put on my timesheet. So literally, even if I had no reason to be there to pad my hours, right? Yeah, I would go. And now it served a purpose. It wasn't really padding hours because it actually made the client happier. Right. But it wasn't productive. It wasn't productive. It didn't make anything really that much better. Like marginal. Marginal improvement. Right. I could have spent that time doing other stuff, but the way I was tracked was with inputs, right? So that's what I would do. And that to me is a type of productivity theater traveling around to look busy or going to a lot of meetings.
David Leary: [00:26:01] Yeah, I think I saw this my career with quality assurance where people you'd have a and this is when there was a lot of automated testing you're running lots of tests manually. All the tests would just be an Excel spreadsheet and you just be hammering out test, right? And there always be people on the team that like they get their tests done first they're done. They ran the most test and they find no bugs. And managers were convinced as well that that feature must be really solid. Like you're finding bugs and it's like it's the opposite, right? It gives this illusion of quality because they got. But the really the reality is, is the person that's done first is probably has the most bugs. They just didn't see them. They just went too fast. And that's that theater of like gave it gave management the numbers they wanted. And I think that's what ultimately probably drives this theater. Right, is you have managers that value the wrong things. Exactly.
Blake Oliver: [00:26:51] And unfortunately, there was an article in the Journal of Accountancy called Tips for Managing Remote Workers. And I got to call out one of these tips, which is sort of at the end of the article. So right at the end of it, it says Jessica Robinson, CPA Director, a senior tax at TMJ, PSP, LLC. Wow, that's a lot of letters. She suggested having employees keep records of their time on their own to ensure they stay on task when working remotely. And that doesn't do it right. That's not what we're talking about. And one of our listeners in the chat said, I can see Productivity and my Keeper app and the work is done. The employees can go on with their day away from the computer. And that's what these modern practice management solutions like keeper and Jetpack and Client Hub and Carbon are doing is they're actually giving you a way to measure the deliverable to the client and the completion of that deliverable, not just timesheets. That doesn't matter. The client doesn't care about timesheets. They care about the work getting done. And when it gets done and if it's done on time. Right. And that's what should that's what we should be measuring. So.
David Leary: [00:28:03] This episode of The Cloud Accounting Podcast is sponsored by Live Flow. Think about this if you have approximately 60 clients and create five reports a month for each of them, that's over 3500 reports a year. And let's say you're really fast and only take you one minute per report. That's almost 2.5 days a year you spend creating reports. Here are a few of the ways LiveFlow saves time for so many accounts and bookkeepers. Once you create the perfect suite of reports for a client, you can just copy the Google sheet. Use live flow to connect it to a different client's QuickBooks Online company. And you're all done. The new reports will pull in the data for the second client automatically. You can easily drill down on the details of each number on a live flow report, including drilling down to the transaction level to navigate directly to the transaction inside of QuickBooks Online. No more opening QuickBooks Online to search for specific transactions. By phone, Google sheets are in the cloud, so you don't have to waste time emailing files between your team and your clients. And you can give your clients access to a suite of reports that they can access any time eliminating one off requests for you and your staff. It's more about using live flow and how you can save 20% off your first three months here. The Cloud Accounting Podcast Promo slash live flow that is cloudaccountingpodcast.com promo for live e flow w stop manually updating your spreadsheets with live flow.
Blake Oliver: [00:29:24] You got any remote work stories that you've followed recently?
David Leary: [00:29:27] I mean, I saw I could I didn't I didn't really read this, but I saw the and it's an ongoing concern. So people could try to find it. But it says the title of the article is The AICPA has written a strongly worded letter to the Treasury Department on remote work. Oh, wow. It's that typical. Hey, we're going to write a letter. And so basically it's they wanted the requesting to some extent updated guidance on. Employees in remote work situations on non travel expenses that you might incur. So I didn't really read the article, but it exists and that's the closest I had to a remote worker article this week. I couldn't. I couldn't get into it to bring it to the show. It's just it's there on the cutting room floor.
Blake Oliver: [00:30:06] So that's all right. I didn't read that one either, because, again, a lot of these suggestions don't have specific measurements associated with them. So like, what's the point if you're just telling.
David Leary: [00:30:16] Me to focus on these areas? But right.
Blake Oliver: [00:30:18] Actually, but not like it should actually be making a recommendation. It's like pointless. Here's one from listener Ray. He sent me this article from the Census Bureau. There is data now on the number of people working remotely or working primarily from home. Get this the number of people working primarily from home tripled between 2019 and 2021. It tripled. So it went from 5.7%, very small numbers, 5.7% of people working primarily at home up to and that was 9 million people, up to almost 18%, 27.6 million people. So let's round those numbers right from 6% to 18%. Huge change. And I don't know if that's going to like. Go back down all that much in some states like Washington, Maryland. In Colorado and Massachusetts, it's 24%. Of workers and now working primarily from home, and that's across every job. So there's a lot of jobs that can't be done at all from home. Right. And so that means that of the jobs that can be done from home, even more are being done from home. And Ray had an interesting insight in his email to me. He said, You know, we have to also consider in terms of benefits of working from home, the benefit of reduced commuting times for those who still have to go to the office, because the average one way travel time to work has dropped from 2021. It used to be rounding up 28 minutes and now it's down to like 26 minutes.
David Leary: [00:31:59] So less cars on the road, less people.
Blake Oliver: [00:32:00] Yeah. Now, now, now that's over the whole country, right? But you can imagine in a metro, that would be an even more dramatic change because metro areas are more likely to have workers coming from home.
David Leary: [00:32:12] Or even if it distributes maybe that longer time frame. So instead of really trying to get the office at the same time at 9 a.m., you feel like, hey, I'm going to work from home in the morning, I'll go in the afternoon. It's really just changing the distribution of when people are on the roads.
Blake Oliver: [00:32:28] And that has environmental benefits, right? Huge change with people not driving to work like it's really good for our cities, for our air quality. It reduces our usage of fuel, which lowers cost for everybody else. Like there's also almost.
David Leary: [00:32:41] The worst driving because you're barely driving. You're sitting in traffic, right?
Blake Oliver: [00:32:44] Yeah, that's the worst. Right. So, you know, so we've seen this actually with like the big firms, they are generally not requiring people to go back to the back to the office like U.S. is not requiring it. I don't I don't think any of them are really going to do it because it just makes so much sense. And when you have a lot of the work being done from client spaces anyway. Right. Not really necessary. So I guess the only other story I have to get off my plate here is this one sort of the the big brother side, the dark side of remote work, which is tracking employees. So using electronic monitoring technology. David, have you ever been tracked electronically like on your computer?
David Leary: [00:33:29] Know the software? I only use my PC and I do not accept a company PC when they give you one. When you hired at a company I never.
Blake Oliver: [00:33:35] Take and you were able to you were able to avoid that into it.
David Leary: [00:33:39] I would just format the Intuit machine in my own image.
Blake Oliver: [00:33:42] Oh, and you were able to get around all that stuff. All right.
David Leary: [00:33:45] You just. Well, just don't get a virus. No crash to the network and nobody knows. Simple.
Blake Oliver: [00:33:51] Well, so here's some information on the prevalence of electronic monitoring technology. And by that I'm talking about a whole range of things, all the way from measuring whether or not you are present at your computer, like whether or not you're moving your mouse to taking screenshots or even pictures of you with the camera on the computer. This is all possible with technology, and I know a firm owner who uses this kind of tech. I know that there are some who do. There are many who don't. To me, I find it kind of creepy. Roughly 30% of large employers use some form of employee monitoring. And now that was before the pandemic, 30% before the pandemic. We're using it now. It's up to 60% of large employers are using at least one form of employee monitoring.
David Leary: [00:34:33] Which is kind of weird. It's like, would you let your employees of your company come into your bedroom? Probably not. But you bring your computer in there and they are like, it's it's a little. Yeah. And this is this like if people maybe understood really what working from home means or working remotely, maybe their attitudes would change a little bit knowing this is going on. It's interesting. I saw some timesheet apps that do this. It's like a timesheet app. So then, you know, maybe we have remote workers in the Philippines, I don't know, doing something. The timesheet app, they have to clock in and out on the timesheet so we can watch what they're doing and. We can actually drill down like, oh, they said they were doing this for an hour. We could drill down. It has a screen recording what they did for that hour. And if they weren't doing what they said they were doing, I could see that. And it's it's crazy. But it's a timesheet out and populates right up to QuickBooks and Xero and the whole thing.
Blake Oliver: [00:35:22] Right now I don't like that. Like I find that would be creepy. And although there's like it's tempting to me as an employer to want to do that, like I, I also feel like it, it's tracking the wrong thing. Like, why do I care about like, unless this is for a security reason, right? Why do I care to watch how my employee is getting the work done? If they're getting the work done right, it would be like standing at their desk and looking over their shoulder while they work. I feel like that would have a negative impact as well on their work.
David Leary: [00:35:54] Yeah. So they said something.
Blake Oliver: [00:35:55] Marissa.
David Leary: [00:35:56] Marissa stillwell.
Blake Oliver: [00:35:57] Yeah, go ahead.
David Leary: [00:35:57] Why hire someone if you don't trust them? That's a really good point.
Blake Oliver: [00:36:01] It is a really good question.
David Leary: [00:36:02] How do you how do you know if you trust them or not until you watch them for three months through there?
Blake Oliver: [00:36:08] It makes people feel not trusted. That's right. And so instead, you measure their outputs, measure what they're doing instead of what what they are clicking on on their screen. I've got some other stories about remote work, like how rural Americans aren't getting their high speed Internet, like there's huge problems with the way that program has been rolled out, unfortunately, with the federal incentives. And so, like, that's a big problem, right? We've got a whole group of Americans who can't do remote work because they don't have high speed Internet. And it's just an unfortunate situation. And I think the last thing I want to talk about is hybrid meetings. So the hell of hybrid meetings, you you've participated in some of these, right, Dave? That's where people.
David Leary: [00:36:50] Are in the conference room. It dials into the Zoom meeting and then you're on. Yes. Yeah. The worst.
Blake Oliver: [00:36:55] Right. Because you feel like you're a second class citizen. If you're not in the room, you feel like or you can't hear people if the tech is bad, right? If there's one microphone at the front of the room, you can't hear people in the back lawn.
David Leary: [00:37:07] It's always like one room is worse than other rooms, right? You can be on 20 Zoom calls in a day and it's fine. And every call then the one meeting, that one room, it's just the worst or you're only your audio cuts out and then you look like the crazy one, right? Like it's on your end.
Blake Oliver: [00:37:23] Yeah. So, I mean, this is part of the challenge with getting people to come back to the office is if not everybody's in the office, then you have this hybrid situation and then your meetings have to be on Zoom anyway. And then it feels extra pointless to drive into the office just to sit on a bunch of Zoom meetings.
David Leary: [00:37:36] So and that happens at these bigger, you know, even like in the Intuit campus, these are big campuses spreads, ten, 15 buildings, you know, and it's a good ten minute walk from a meeting to meeting across the campus. And so then and that's what I would get into it from traveling. You're talking taking this back to traveling to the on site, right? Yeah. And you travel there and you go to a meeting and three people that are literally in the same campus aren't. They're doing they're taking it from their desk and doing a zoom call in. It's like I came all the way here to do a zoom call with somebody. I could have stayed in Tucson. Right? It's yeah, that's. Yeah, that's because it's really enabled people to kind of be lazy in a weird kind of way, right? Just and be overly busy. Right. Because you just schedule the zoom call and zoom call a zoom call, zoom call, zoom call. And there's one minute between each call. This episode of The Cloud Accounting Podcast is sponsored by Life Low. One thing we haven't talked about yet is how live flow helps accountants and bookkeepers to use live flow successfully in their firms.
David Leary: [00:38:36] For starters, LiveFlow has amazing customer support. They offer instant help 24/7 from real humans via chat. Or, if you prefer, you can schedule a zoom meeting, choose to call them, or even email the founders directly. Reflow has a library of plug and play templates such as Consolidated Pal and Flash reports to enable them scale across your clients in a snap. You also have dozens of blog posts from other LiveFlow users where they share their best practices and even share their Google sheets. You can just copy them and start using their best practices in your firm instantly. In my opinion, this is what really sets life apart from thousands of other QuickBooks Online apps. This ability to build, share and scale on each other's work. Learn more about using live flow and how you can save 20% off your first three months. Head over to Cloudaccountingpodcast.com promo slash live flow. That is cloudaccountingpodcast.com promo for ugly b. E. Flow w.
Blake Oliver: [00:39:31] David, I think it's time for us to get to app news. All right, David, I monopolized the beginning of the show, so I'm going to let you start app news.
David Leary: [00:39:44] The first one is about a niche app I saw. It's called Roofer Like Roof. And then the letter R, you know, because you can't afford to buy the domain with all the letters. So it's roofer like with an R, right? Our offer, they raised $12 million to advance their SAS platform for roofers. Essentially what it does, it lets you take a photo of the roof and then you can do your estimates right on the device, your phone, get a quote, give it the customer. And but the reason this money, because they want to add features like payment capabilities, lead or acquisition, etc.. The funny thing about this was somebody at one of the very first QuickBooks Connect hackathon. So we're going back to late 2014 where he actually built this and he was on his own. He was just using he was an independent little developer and he used the Google Maps. And he built this app. And literally this app was built a decade ago. But sometimes timing is everything, right? That the technology just probably wasn't good enough just yet to do anything like this. But it was. So I caught my eye and I was like, Oh, that reminds me of this developer that we used to have, which is great. So far, they've already measured 1.5 million roofs.
Blake Oliver: [00:40:54] Wow. It's amazing how niche everything's getting now in terms of business management software. Like literally every single profession or job is going to have its own solution and then.
David Leary: [00:41:07] And then a few. So it's niche, right? But then they're starting to add like, oh, payment capabilities. Now you don't need to get square, right? You've got a payment app built in the thing, Oh, you don't need a CRM because it does lead acquisition. And then it's like, Oh, what's next to add payroll? What's next out of jail? Like, it's an interesting march we're on with these niche apps.
Blake Oliver: [00:41:25] Speaking of. Apps deciding to get into more than what they originally did. Let's talk about Expensify getting into payroll. Got an email from David Barrett all about, well, I'll just read the headline Automated Payroll Taxes and Filings Built into Your Subscription. At long last, I am extremely happy to announce EXPENSIFY now offers complete payroll services built directly into your existing Expensify subscription and managed entirely via concierge at no additional cost. So here's what it includes according to the email local, state and federal tax counts withholding and filing W-2 generation for employees, taxable and nontaxable benefit tracking stock earnings processing through Expensify ESOS Nso's use PTO and vacation tracking recurring and off cycle Paychex Direct Deposit, Bidirectional GL Synchronization, comprehensive bank feed, reconciliation, yada yada. That's the last bullet point, and it sounds like it's not quite clear from the email, but it sounds like Expensify is using their own payroll that they've built. So they think it will work for us.
David Leary: [00:42:33] Well, it's interesting. Did they build it from scratch or are they using a service like check or. I think Payroll City. Well, Gusto bought that company right out of Payroll City.
Blake Oliver: [00:42:41] Yeah.
David Leary: [00:42:42] Are they using a service like that? And they built on top of APIs. Now, when they say it's all available via concierge, so concierge is kind of the their chat bot or whatever that's inside.
Blake Oliver: [00:42:52] Chat bot slash support chat. Yeah.
David Leary: [00:42:55] So are they is that how you run payroll like pay Blake for 45 hours and go to check in the way say remember ADP, add that product, they launched that like chat based payroll product, that super simple payroll product. Is it kind of that's the march they're on or because I don't see any UI or thing. Yeah.
Blake Oliver: [00:43:12] Well, so that's what it sounds like. So I replied and I said, sign me up. And I still haven't heard back. So you know, I'll let you know what is included and how it works. I'm really curious to try it. It's kind of crazy that I don't remember when they announced that they were going to work on this. Maybe it was like a year ago.
David Leary: [00:43:31] Their first earnings announcement when they had an earnings call with investors. Yeah.
Blake Oliver: [00:43:36] Well, how long ago was that?
David Leary: [00:43:37] Well, they went public years.
Blake Oliver: [00:43:38] Two years? Yeah. Okay. So like that, they've built this in a year. That's really fast. I mean, gusto on pay, all these newer payroll companies rippling. They've been working on this for years now and Expensify is claiming to have done it that quickly. I'm not saying they couldn't.
David Leary: [00:43:52] Well, that's where if you build on another platform, right, you build on top of somebody else's platform and you're just building your UI on top of it. Yeah.
Blake Oliver: [00:44:00] But he said they were going to build it themselves so.
David Leary: [00:44:03] Well I mean we'll have these apps are built on Plaid and Visa, MasterCard, APIs like, like they've all built it themselves, right? I mean, the vast majority of apps are built out that way. So my thought on this, though, it kind of makes a lot of sense, right, because. Expensify is really already in the employee's pockets. They go after employees, they get the app and employees pockets. It's kind of a natural place. Well, I'll just open up expensify. If I'm already opening up Expensify to see if a reimbursement got deposited in my bank account. I can just open up expensify to see if my paycheck's there. It kind of makes sense from a strategy perspective, but you and I both know payroll. It's very hard to execute massively like this.
Blake Oliver: [00:44:47] So here's what I think the biggest risk is. The biggest risk is the customer support. Because that's where payroll companies lose customers is when something goes wrong. And you as a business owner, as an accountant, have to fix it. If you can't get the support you need to fix it, it becomes a disaster that snowballs because now you're not paying your payroll taxes. Now there's fees, the fines, penalties. Straightening that out can be a huge mess. And I, I wonder how Expensify is going to deal with the support that comes along with payroll when, you know, on LinkedIn they have less than 200 employees and they've always been very proud of the fact that they've got to the IPO with only, I think it was 140 employees at the time. Incredibly valuable company, you know, per per head. You can do that with expense reports because expense reports aren't the most critical thing, like if somebody doesn't get their reimbursement for their expense report. You know, you can do that next week and it's fine. But with payroll, if you don't get payroll on time, if there's a glitch with that, it's a disaster. And, you know, you look at Gusto, right? Gusto has close to 2500 employees on LinkedIn. So I just wonder, like, is Expensify going to ramp up, hire support to deal with all this stuff or because if they don't, I don't know how I don't know how you do it.
David Leary: [00:46:11] Is there a website yet for this? Like other than the email? Is there pricing? Is there anything like that?
Blake Oliver: [00:46:18] So this is this is the the big part of the story. It's it's included. It's free. With your Expensify account. And that also raises some questions in my head. Like, I mean, I think that's great. That's awesome. Sign me up. But also how how can you then hire the support? How can you support it?
David Leary: [00:46:36] Whereas the business model here is interesting. Yeah.
Blake Oliver: [00:46:39] I mean if it's completely self service, but I mean, I feel like the only way you could do this and make it included is if it's completely self service and you don't have support. But that means that you've got to set it up so that I, as the accountant, can go and fix everything, like handle everything inside the app. But they're saying it's all done via concierge. If it's all done via concierge, that means there's going to be people doing this.
David Leary: [00:47:00] So, so, so I mean, maybe the target market isn't accountant's bookkeepers and maybe it's just a small business owner that has two or three employees. They need Expensify to get reimbursed. And there's cutting these checks. I don't know.
Blake Oliver: [00:47:11] Actually, it also there's like there's big companies using Expensify now, like huge enterprise using Expensify. So like, are they going to be able to run? Like, who's it for? Yeah, that's a good question, David. Anyway, I want to go ask you know, we'll ask our contacts at Expensify. I would love to talk to somebody about how they built this and what the plans are for the future.
David Leary: [00:47:33] And then that's the next step. Because now that you've done payroll is and you already have bill pay, you have accounts payable stuff, are you going to do track your track time tracking so that way you can invoice and then it's a digital. Like, what's the march? Like Are you trying to build on everything? Stack We could talk about let's see.
Blake Oliver: [00:47:52] Before you go on to that, I want to say Marissa in the chat said, for example, square payroll. Last I checked, you have to contact support to fix payroll issues versus fixing it yourself. As the bookkeeper, it is very frustrating waiting on customer support when a client slash pay wants their pay. Yeah, because you're the one taking the heat for it, right? Yeah, go ahead.
David Leary: [00:48:13] David. Summit hosting. So summit hosting is like one of the largest providers of, you know, QuickBooks and hosting companies. They just purchased another hosting company called Tech Command Outsourced. It hasn't happened a while, but for a while it was very hot and hot and heavy where there's a lot of this merging of these hosting companies, tech commandos has really big in the. Have you ever heard of act you might be too young act act so act used to be like kind of a personal CRM and it was big on the desktop days big. And then Norton bought it like it's been it's been owned by different people over the years act. And they, there's people that are on it and they're just on it forever. They never move to a cloud based CRM or anything like that. They're still using this. And so there's a whole group of people that are just stuck on that old desktop product, haven't moved their data. And so now summit hosting, this is an opportunity for them to add that to their stack. So they do hosting for SAP, QuickBooks Sage, and now they're going to be act hosting as well, which should be interesting because like does it mean they're going to try to sell act to like QuickBooks users and like, I don't know, like, like. To grow, like get people to buy other desktop stuff and I don't know it's but we're going to see more of these hosting companies merge. That's the only way to grow, right? You're not going to get new customers. You're going to have to find just old ones and buy them. And they did not disclose the. The amount of the deal.
Blake Oliver: [00:49:40] Here's something that could change customer support. I was talking a lot about that in my last story. There's now a software called Sonos S.A. that has built voice as a software that can change accents in real time. And they just raised $32 million. From who did they raise the money from? Google Ventures and others. That's serious money, right? Here's the. Website for those of us who are on the live stream. Quite a crazy kind of like website here. The future. Sounds like you. So what is this software being used for? It's being used in call centers. So if you've got a call center in India or in the Philippines, you can implement this and you're. Non-native English speakers can have an accent where they sound like they're from Plano, Texas. Or actually the headline is the best that says the agent who sounds like they're from Paris, Texas, try Paris, France. Yeah. So this is like one of those amazing applications of artificial intelligence that will allow, you know, global barriers to be broken.
David Leary: [00:50:57] We'll see.
Blake Oliver: [00:51:02] We'll see what you sound like. Not quite so confident of this.
David Leary: [00:51:06] Should I read the text I tried to send you while I was driving yesterday? Actually, I don't think it completely went through, but it was just the first three words don't make any sense. Right. So we'll see on that. We'll see that. We'll see the app. Aiden So I don't know if you've you probably never heard of Aiden, but you may have possibly seen Aiden. So a lot of retail locations, if you still love them. All right. And you go and do a gap or an athletic athlete or places like that, they kind of a lot of the salespeople now have these little micro point of sales in their hands that there's no there's no actual cashiers anymore. Right. And they just handle your point of sale payment in their hand and some sort of mobile device and it prints out the receipt, etc.. So that company is in that space and they're kind of in the merchant payment space and they're fairly big. They they just their point of sales moved €49 billion last year. And they're they overall last year they did €349 across all their stacked or technology stack. But they are now the first company outside of BLOCK. So BLOCK Square that's going to allow cash app transactions. So right now I can only use my cash app at square merchant terminals. Now I can use it all these other merchants. It's funny because it didn't. I think it was higher market a little bit and they call them brands and like that's that's what you call retailers. Now brands like these brands use us and that's it's kind of interesting that a competing payments platform who obviously has their own piece of the action from payment processing is now letting square kind of come in to that space.
Blake Oliver: [00:52:38] So that is interesting. Well, hey, speaking of payments, I got to get to one of my top stories that I've saved for the very end, which is that Visa, MasterCard and American Express are going to start categorizing gun shop sales. This is payments, this is cloud accounting. This is, you know, fintech coming into the political realm of gun rights. They have been under pressure. The three major credit card payment networks have been under pressure from pension funds in blue states that hold large and have large holdings of these companies to start categorizing gun sales differently than have been in the past.
David Leary: [00:53:19] In the past, the past has just been general merchandise. It just is fallen.
Blake Oliver: [00:53:22] General merchandise is. Yeah. So so there's this concept of these merchant codes that are used by different types of stores to categorize transactions on these payment networks. So, you know, gosh, I don't have the list of them in front of me, but there's all sorts of different kinds. Right. And this is the way that the payment networks send information on sales to your bank, to your credit card issuer, to payment processors, to the whole financial industry of payments, uses this universal system of codes. And so they've created one now specifically for gun sales. And like this was a big political thing to do because the question is what is going to happen now that banks and credit card issuers and payment processors have this information? Are gun stores going to be banned by certain payment processors who don't want to be associated? Are our banks and credit card issuers going to start denying transactions that are coded this way.
David Leary: [00:54:25] Or put transactions on hold? Right. Is this a backdoor to get a 90 day holding time on automatic weapon? I don't know. Right? Yeah. Is it. Yeah. The so with this article though I don't think it's too far fetched because they're already doing this for the online porn industry. Like ultimately there's a podcast that I can share it out. It's called Hot Money. But the, the Chinese are trying to figure out like who runs the porn industry. And it really gets all the last three episodes really get into it's Visa and MasterCard. Visa and MasterCard determine what can be done online, what can't be done online, what's acceptable, what's not acceptable. And they've created a whole set of intermediary intermediaries to collect money and then not violate, because basically if you collect money, you have to make sure Visa and MasterCard's brand is not hurt. So indirectly they're basically controlling. Decency laws, if not laws. Right. Decency standards. And you're right, this is kind of the exact same thing. But for weapons or guns.
Blake Oliver: [00:55:28] Yeah. So the.
David Leary: [00:55:29] Question.
Blake Oliver: [00:55:29] I don't do I mean, if you are a big proponent of the Second Amendment, then, you know, like imagine if imagine if a Visa, MasterCard and American Express. Created a code. And these are called these merchant codes. These are defined by the International Organization for Standardization. Right. What if they created a code for abortion providers? I don't know if they have one now, do they? Like and what if they started collecting information on that? How would people feel about that? Is there a right to privacy when it comes to certain things like this in the financial system? And how do you decide what information is flagged and how and. I'm not sure what the answer is, but what I do know is that this is an accounting issue. It's a chart of accounts issue. The chart of accounts matters in in the world. Right. It's actually one of the most important things when you're setting up an accounting system is defining the chart of accounts properly, because if you don't get the information into the accounting system, categorize in the right way, you can't really do anything with it. And so this is the same thing. But in a global political sense, we're deciding on a chart of accounts, but the people don't get to decide that it's, you know, American Express, Visa and MasterCard get to decide that. And like, is that okay? Is that right? I don't know.
David Leary: [00:56:57] I'm surprised they haven't done it or hasn't been already because they have all the rules. Right. And then, you know, the band list of what kind of businesses you can't use with QuickBooks Merchant Services or Amelio had all these online payment services have these rules they have to abide by from Visa and MasterCard. So I'm surprised. But see, they put that that onus on the payment provider. It's QuickBooks job to make sure certain industries don't use the Visa. Mastercard rails. Right. So they put that on the providers. But I'm actually surprised they haven't been tracking this already. It's kind of strange.
Blake Oliver: [00:57:30] Yeah, well, I think because like, if you are in favor of this amendment, you don't want this being tracked because what is the information going to be used for? Gun rights opponents or gun control advocates, I should say, have been very upfront about they want to use this information to flag suspicious purchases to try and prevent mass shootings. So that's what's going to happen with this data, is it's going to be collected. And if you make a bunch of big purchases at a gun store, you might get investigated.
David Leary: [00:58:01] Or they'll it's for marketing data and they'll sell it. That's the other reason why that you collect it is to marketing and to sell to other people, right? Yeah.
Blake Oliver: [00:58:10] So then there's also the question is, will this give Second Life to crypto? Will this maybe be a way for crypto to like get into actual transactions, which, you know, like you've said, David, you know, you're one of the only people who actually uses crypto to pay for things.
David Leary: [00:58:24] Maybe micropayments. Micropayments, micropayments. Yeah.
Blake Oliver: [00:58:27] Yeah. I mean, maybe the crypto will be a way to get around this stuff, right? But it's definitely going to if you have clients that are, you know, gun stores, I'm sure there are, you know, firms out there that serve these businesses or there should be anyway. It's a good niche, right? You're going to be dealing with the same issues that cannabis companies have in terms of accepting payments. And so, you know, that's that's something to watch out for.
David Leary: [00:58:49] I mean, I think they already have to deal with that. I think QuickBooks Merchant Service or QuickBooks Payments does not allow gun shops.
Blake Oliver: [00:58:55] Oh, but how would they know without the.
David Leary: [00:58:57] So the merchant, it's always been pushed on the merchant to know your customer. So there's, there's already know your customer laws that exist. And so that's what's interesting that they want to get it to the transaction level, right, because now they know what you bought. But I'm assuming Plaid can already do this because they have databases of who the stores are. They knew. I mean, again, unless it was like a Dick's Sporting Goods, right. Because that's where this is going to matter, right? A Dick's Sporting Goods. You might have went and bought a football, Blake. You might have bought a gun because it's not called Guns and Ammo USA or something like that. Right? So that's maybe where they're getting it to the transaction level at merchants that sell lots of different goods.
Blake Oliver: [00:59:34] I don't know. Well, David, you got anything else?
David Leary: [00:59:37] Because we are going to be off the hour. I think this tracking of this is going to bubble up a lot. I think we're not at the end of it.
Blake Oliver: [00:59:43] It could be. I want to let our listeners know about a new CPE offering from earmark CPE friend of the show, comedian CPA Greg Kite, has released his miniseries Drunk Ethics. It's a four hour CPE behavioral ethics course available on earmark CPE all about ethics. It is hilarious if you've seen the show Drunk History, you probably have an idea of what this show is. They don't get drunk before they start, but Greg and his co host Adam take a shot every 7 minutes as they deliver an hour of high quality ethics CPE. And it's great.
David Leary: [01:00:30] It's really perfect one for this weekend past post the 915 deadline right this might be the just the show you need this evening relaxing pardon yourself a drink as you listen to drunk ethics.
Blake Oliver: [01:00:42] This is a premium course on the earmark app. So it's an additional fee because Greg put a lot of, you know, sweat and effort and whatever you do when you make a podcast into making this show, I was proud to be. He had to buy booze. Right. It's really great. I want to play a little clip for everybody so you can get an idea of how funny it is, but also how educational it is. To me, it kind of reminds me of, you know, driver's ed. The comedy driver's ed, which I actually always learned something in comedy driver's ed, where I never learned.
David Leary: [01:01:16] A great thing, taught those classes before. For some reason, I feel like that was a conversation once.
Blake Oliver: [01:01:21] And Liz in the chat says, Thank you, Greg, Blake and David. This is the year I needed my ethics CPE. Here's a preview.
Clip from Drunk Ethics: [01:01:28] Our whole problem as accountants is to go, okay, we're like, we feel like I'm just a band right now. Like, yeah, get em either. What? So. So I'll ask. So our fundamental problem and we don't even admit it as accountants, our fundamental problem is we're absolutely not independent because our money, our paycheck comes from the person that they're saying, hey, they're like going, hey, here's a bunch of money now. Oh, good. I was about to take my shot. Anyways, this is.
Blake Oliver: [01:02:03] So that's a little preview. That's toward the very end of the episode. I assure you that the first 40 minutes are highly educational in order to meet our requirement.
David Leary: [01:02:16] Yeah, it's locked in and then it hits them at minute.
Blake Oliver: [01:02:18] 40 and I. And I interviewed Greg about this on a live stream. You can go find that on our LinkedIn page. And, you know, I asked him, is it ethical to create a show where you drink while you teach ethics? And he said, yes, it is, because we are still meeting our requirement. We are teaching you all the material and it's even better. It's actually more ethical because you're learning more because it's funny and comedy makes you remember stuff. Whereas if you just took this check the box ethics course where you don't learn anything and you're just going through it, you really don't think about it, and then you're not being ethical. So I like that argument.
David Leary: [01:02:56] Yeah, I've been kind of thinking about CPE in general a lot lately, and I've actually started to think that podcast CPE or earmark CPE is on demand. Cpe is probably the most valuable to the person learning in a way, or that, you know, they've learned. Because if you think about it, if you go to a conference, they just scan your badge and you can just fall asleep in the chair and you get CP credit. And then if you do a webinar or online type of a CPE, you don't have to have to know any proof of any knowledge. You just have to hit. I'm here. I'm here. I'm here three times and you get CP credit like you don't actually have to learn anything. But with earmark, you have to take a quiz and you have to pass it, right? It's four or five questions you have to pass, which means you have to listen. So and to some extent, when people are walking their dog, they're doing their laundry. They're they're not they don't have five browser tabs up. They're not checking their email, they're listening to content and actually paying attention to the content. And so it's kind of a weird like it's not even a dilemma, but it's a weird paradigm that you would think the on demand content would be the. Least useful of all the content. I'm starting to feel like it's the most useful because you actually have to listen to it, learn it, and prove that you learned it. Of all the ways to get CPE like this is the. I'm starting to feel like this is the most proof of knowledge of CP. Maybe that's the way to say the word.
Blake Oliver: [01:04:20] Yeah. Yeah. It's not just showing up. It's not just inputs of time. It's actually outputs. You have to answer some questions. You have to prove your knowledge.
David Leary: [01:04:28] Yeah.
Blake Oliver: [01:04:29] So here's to making CPE better. Here's to drunk ethics. Here is to earmark CPE. If you haven't downloaded the app, go download earmark CPE on the Apple App Store or the Android store. You can earn free CPE credit for listening to the Cloud Accounting podcast every week for this.
David Leary: [01:04:49] Right? Here are a couple of days. You just take the quiz. Yeah. Okay.
Blake Oliver: [01:04:52] Yeah. So if you watch the live stream or if you're listening to the podcast episode, download the app, and then the course usually comes out a week after the episode because we got to go do the work to write the questions and put it all together. And then you've already listened, right? So you can just go mark your completion and take the quiz and get your CPP certificate. So we do one of these every week. You could earn 50 to CPE credits per year just for listening to our show hit your whole requirement. Although some states have limited the amount of CPE you can earn from.
David Leary: [01:05:25] Non The Cloud Accounting Podcast specifically they're passing legislation.
Blake Oliver: [01:05:31] That that is a life goal.
David Leary: [01:05:33] When that happens, we've made it when Visa and MasterCard want to track the spending on Cloudaccountingpodcast.com courses, you know. Yeah, that's the way it.
Blake Oliver: [01:05:42] And David, you posted something about our listenership that was really exciting this week. What happened?
David Leary: [01:05:48] Yeah. So we are now arguing. I'm going to put the flag in the ground. We are officially the number one accounting, bookkeeping and tax podcast in the world. We are ahead of what do you call it, Bloomberg Tax and the.
Blake Oliver: [01:06:02] Big Talking.
David Leary: [01:06:03] Tax, Talking Taxes podcast and the Apple Podcast ratings. Globally, we're not even sure. They don't even show up on some of the global charts on some of the regions like we're officially we're number 19. They're number 20 right now. And it's like we've been right neck and neck. We'll see what happens next week, week after. But we're right there for Business News podcast. Thank you all the listeners. This is an amazing place, actually. Thank you. We move. Okay, now we're 21. They're 22. So, yes.
Blake Oliver: [01:06:31] Hey, we.
David Leary: [01:06:31] Did actually we're still actually officially the number one accounting, bookkeeping and tack. So I'm going to be updating our websites and all our other stuff. We change our our description a little bit.
Blake Oliver: [01:06:41] So that's amazing. Of course, there's a crypto podcast ahead of us that Bloomberg does as well. But, you know, we're.
David Leary: [01:06:48] In it's all the big boys. It's all the big money up there. If you look at who's above us.
Blake Oliver: [01:06:52] Yahoo! Finance, we're right behind Yahoo! Finance Daily Bloomberg Crypto ESG Insider. That's funny. Above the law, thinking like a lawyer or Bloomberg Law. Then there's then you get up to like Wall Street.
David Leary: [01:07:05] Wall Street Journal. Yeah, it's it's the big money, guys. But hey, for any podcast, we're doing pretty good.
Blake Oliver: [01:07:11] Thank you to our listeners. Thank you to everyone on the livestream. Thank you to everyone has made this happen to make my dream come true so that I get to be a podcaster and talk about accounting. It's so much fun.
David Leary: [01:07:25] There's a long way to go by because I remember we started this, I said, I'm in it to win it. And like we're only like 19. We got 19 spots to keep going up. We'll be bigger than the Wall Street Daily Podcast, wherever that thing is called, The Daily Brief.
Blake Oliver: [01:07:38] We'll be back next week and streaming again. David, I think we should keep doing this. It's a lot of fun having you on the chat.
David Leary: [01:07:45] Yes, the week after that. Maybe not, because I think we're at a conference. We're going to go into sweet world. Sweet world. And then I think we're going to transform and then you're going to conference next week. These are busy.
Blake Oliver: [01:07:57] So next week, you know, next week or the same week this episode drops, I will be at the National Association of State Board of Accountancy Summit in Nashville, learning all about what's happening with CPE. So I'll, I'll be reporting from there. If anything interesting happens, look for me to live stream. David, I'll send you some memos from. From Nashville.
David Leary: [01:08:22] I'm excited to hear. All right. I'm ready to give everyone hot sweat box of a studio at half.
Blake Oliver: [01:08:27] So see you next week.
David Leary: [01:08:30] All right. Time for the classifieds.
Blake Oliver: [01:08:35] Hey, podcast listeners, it's Blake, and I wanted to let you know about a new show I'm working on with CPA slash comedian Greg Kite and blogger slash former CPA Caleb Norquist. It's called Oh My Fraud. And it's a podcast all about financial crimes. That's right. A true crime podcast for accountants by accountants. Caleb and Greg are going to come together every couple of weeks to unpack their favorite frauds and explore the circumstances, psychology and interpersonal dynamics involved. They also fully indulge in victim blaming the defrauded widows, orphans, infirm and feeble minded. Because who can resist if you fancy yourself a trusted advisor or prefer your true crime with spreadsheets instead of corpses? Listen to this show to learn what to watch out for and to keep your clients, your firm, and even yourself safe. To subscribe, go to Oh my fraud or search. Oh my fraud. On Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
David Leary: [01:09:33] Want to get the word out about your newsletter. Webinar party. Facebook Group. Podcast. E-book. Job posting or that fancy Excel macro you just created? Why not let the listeners The Cloud Accounting Podcast know by running a classified ad with the show notes for the link to get more info?