The Accounting Podcast | An AI-Powered Firm of One, KPMG Shuts Down Fed Audits

Thanks for listening and the great reviews! We appreciate you! Follow and tweet @BlakeTOliver and @DavidLeary. Find us on Facebook and Instagram. If you like what you hear, please do us a favor and write a review on Apple Podcasts or Podchaser. Call us and leave a voicemail; maybe we'll play it on the show. DIAL (202) 695-1040.

Sponsorships

Are you interested in sponsoring The Accounting Podcast? For details, read the prospectus.

Need Accounting Conference Info?

Check out our new website - accountingconferences.com

Limited edition shirts, stickers, and other necessities

TeePublic Store: http://cloudacctpod.link/merch

Subscribe

Apple Podcasts: http://cloudacctpod.link/ApplePodcasts
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheAccountingPodcast
Spotify: http://cloudacctpod.link/Spotify
Podchaser: http://cloudacctpod.link/podchaser
Stitcher: http://cloudacctpod.link/Stitcher
Overcast: http://cloudacctpod.link/Overcast

Classifieds
REFRAME 2026 - http://accountingpodcast.promo/reframe2026
Flowglad - https://cal.com/team/flowglad/flowglad

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? Let the listeners of The Accounting Podcast know by running a classified ad. Go here to create your classified ad: https://cloudacctpod.link/RunClassifiedAd

Transcripts

The full transcript for this episode is available by clicking on the Transcript tab at the top of this page

Creators and Guests

Host

Blake Oliver

Founder and CEO of Earmark CPE

Host

David Leary

President and Founder, Sombrero Apps Company

What is The Accounting Podcast?

The Accounting Podcast (formerly the Cloud Accounting Podcast) is the world's #1 accounting, bookkeeping, and tax podcast! Join us weekly for a roundup of accounting news, analysis, and interviews. Plus, earn free NASBA-approved CPE credits for listening with the Earmark app. Learn more at https://earmarkcpe.com.

Attention: This is a machine-generated transcript. As such, there may be spelling, grammar, and accuracy errors throughout. Thank you for your understanding!

David Leary: [00:00:04] If people just use AI to avoid using an accountant, you're going to have clients you never even know you could have had because they're just bypassing you entirely. You're not part of the conversation. Coming to you weekly from the OnPay Recording Studio.

Blake Oliver: [00:00:20] Hey everyone, and welcome back to another episode of the Accounting Podcast, your weekly roundup of news in the profession. I'm Blake Oliver.

David Leary: [00:00:27] And I'm David Leary.

Blake Oliver: [00:00:29] David, we've got two top stories this week. First, accounting today is out with their 2026 Best Firms for technology. And one firm in particular caught my attention. And that's because it's a firm of one one guy using AI to do all the prep. He just reviews. And he spends 70% of his budget on technology. We'll talk about that. And KPMG is shutting down their federal audit practice after the Department of War canned them. But first, David, let's thank our sponsors.

David Leary: [00:01:04] Our sponsors this week. We have on pay. We have our cost seg, fishbowl and CNR consulting Group. So two new sponsors this week.

Blake Oliver: [00:01:13] Let's thank on pay our lead sponsor. Are you tired of payroll headaches getting in the way of the client experience? You want to deliver manual workflows, creating bottlenecks, compliance, nightmares, and endless support calls that go nowhere. There's a better way for your team and your clients on pay is the payroll partner that accountants and bookkeepers actually love. Why? Because it's easy to use, packed with value, and backed by support that actually supports you. Their team gets rave reviews for being fast, expert, and actually reachable when you need them on pay handles the heavy lifting. You get a dedicated onboarding coordinator who sets up worker profiles and transfers all the year to date data from previous providers. And that's all at no extra cost. They have a seamless QuickBooks and Xero integration that eliminates manual journal entries, and I can testify to how well it works. With zero, it's flawless. They also support any type of business. You serve farms, restaurants, nonprofits, you name it on pay can handle unique requirements without adding any complexity, and on pay keeps pricing simple to everything your clients expect, from multi-state filing to off cycle pay runs. It's included. There are no hidden fees and no surprises. To book a demo, head over to The Accounting Podcast dot com slash pay. The Accounting Podcast dot io forward slash OPAY. And now, David, let's talk about that firm of one Accounting Today did their annual Best Firms for technology list, and on this list is a firm from Richmond, Virginia, called the millennial CPA one office, zero employees, one partner and a budget for tech of 70%, Which is, uh, really high. That's a lot. 70% of your budget is technology. I mean, it makes sense. You don't have an office or you work at home, right?

David Leary: [00:03:05] You don't have you don't have a staff, no employees.

Blake Oliver: [00:03:07] Why not spend it on technology? And what kind of technology? Artificial intelligence, of course. I'll just read this profile. Artificial intelligence allows firms to do more with less, but the millennial CPA takes it to a whole new level. It's a sole proprietorship. One man, Sam Leon, runs it all. And AI has been key. The millennial CPA is a tax firm first and foremost, and AI does most of the work while he, the human, does the review to make sure the model got it right. While this is a relatively new kind of tax workflow, he believes it will become more common as time goes on. I see AI as coming together to be a total tax preparer, and whoever signs the returns is the reviewer, he said, adding that it can even create its own workpapers once the human feeds it. Structured inputs. It has been especially helpful with tax return review by including redacted tax information and asking for year over year comparisons. Leon said work that takes a human hours can be completed in a few minutes. Additionally, creating detailed tax workpapers from QuickBooks exported financial statements in a highly interactive Excel export, which would have taken a human 3 to 5 hours, takes AI five minutes. Of course, Leon always has the final say, and everything the AI produces is reviewed by him. The bot is better thought of as a junior preparer, he suggested, while he would be more like the senior team member. As for now, this is how he expects things to remain. Essentially, the strategy is I won't hire until I hit a wall with my AI preparers and AI workflow managers and what they do for me, he said.

David Leary: [00:04:39] So does it go any detail? So obviously the work, the actual doing the return, reviewing a return, signing off on a return, he's using bots and AI agents to do that work. That's very clear in this article, but there's a lot more to running a firm than just that. Like, how is he interacting with customers? How is he getting document retrieval? How is he getting people to pay and invoice them? Is that all agents as well? Does it does it talk about that in this firm?

Blake Oliver: [00:05:02] That was the entire profile. So you really want to.

David Leary: [00:05:04] Have to get this on the show. You got to invite him on.

Blake Oliver: [00:05:06] I want to have him on the show. I mean, I think this is all totally doable right now. Like I'm using cloud Cowork every day. You could do all the tax return prep with that tool, drop all the client docs into a folder, or just point cloud cowork at the folder in your file storage, and it will organize all the source documents, rename them, put them into folders. It can then create the like a document with all of the key information, like a spreadsheet, right? With all the information you need to put into the boxes, into the tax return software, you could use it like he said, to take QuickBooks financial statements and then do the trial balance mapping that you have to do in order to get the financials into the right mapping to put into the tax software.

David Leary: [00:05:56] Which which I think I've seen half a dozen apps that have popped up over the last eight years that are trying to solve that use case. And I don't even know if they ever finished and got to market or what. Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:06:07] Something else you could do with it right now is point that cloud project at the client folder and give it the prior year return and ask it to figure out what's missing. What did the client not provide? Did they provide the correct year, the correct document? Is it legible? All that kind of admin work. I mean, you could create the client, uh, list of documents you need from the prior year return. Also, just put that, you know, get that return in there. Um, I mean, so many possibilities. It's hard to do at scale in a firm because right now, Cowork is a tool that everybody configures individually. For the most part, you can share skills among users in your organization, but to actually like do it at scale is hard. But to do it as an individual is totally possible. And so I expect we'll see more of these firms of one, and you'll be able to scale up and make a lot of money, because you don't have to hire employees. I mean, that's your biggest cost in a firm and be really profitable. Tait, in the live stream, asks how much revenue does he make? We do not know. I want to find out from Sam. Let's see if we can get him on the show. And Tait also asks, is he a software engineer? We also don't know that, but I don't think you need to be one in order to use these tools. Cowork is pretty simple, relatively speaking. I mean, you don't you don't need to know any code to use it. You just need to know how to prompt AI. And it's getting easier as the models get better and better and better.

David Leary: [00:07:34] Take your existing skill set and let you exponentially increase it. And I had an article from. It's been sitting in my stack for a couple of weeks ago, but the concept of a minimum viable sized company. And it really is. It talks about what this person's doing, right? You can have these teeny teams build a company and you can have growth because the old model, if you wanted to grow your company, what did everybody do? You go raise money and hire a bunch of people and that's how you grow your company. You just get lots of humans to build your company bigger and you don't need that anymore. So the future, the winners are going to be like you just described, small, highly efficient teams with a strong strategic clarity. Not large orgs, right. It's going to be small individuals using AI to level up to 20 X their productivity.

Blake Oliver: [00:08:21] Hk geek in the live stream on YouTube says between anchor and double, you can automate so much of the communication proposals and accounts receivable for your firm. I agree, and by the way, you can now connect double to klod via the double m CP server. And I've done this. And you can use Klod to help you with your month end checklist, your closed checklist and double it can go in and pull it and then help you work through the reconciliations. And it's not perfect. It's a little clunky still, but I've even got it opening up a tab in Chrome in zero and doing the reconciliations. So if I dump the bank statements into a folder project folder, it can go pull all the beginning and ending balances and see all the transactions and import them as a a bank feed via CSV import into zero if it needs to, and then run the reconciliation report and check everything off and look for errors and troubleshoot if there's a reconciliation discrepancy like that is powerful. Now it's slow because clicking around in a web interface is something that's very slow and uses a ton of tokens, but I think it's just going to get better and better.

Blake Oliver: [00:09:33] And when zero has their MCP server with clod like they've promised, then it will be able to work directly, not through a web browser, and that will be really powerful, assuming that zero makes all the functionality available through the MCP server, which is one of the issues we're seeing right now. And I've got a related story about that, which is that Intuit has released their apps into cloud. They've released their cloud connector. We talked about this in a previous episode. They announced it. Now they've done it. You can now connect clod to QuickBooks, TurboTax, MailChimp, and Credit Karma. Now I'm most interested in QuickBooks, and so I decided to give it a try. Just before we recorded this episode. This morning, I went into a Co-work and I checked out the connectors and I connected both QuickBooks and I saw that zero is available. So I went and connected that to. I didn't know that they actually created it yet. And I asked Claude, what can you do? What can you actually do in QuickBooks right now? And it's pretty limited so far. You can do the following. You can pull your PNL from QuickBooks. You can generate.

David Leary: [00:10:56] Save me from doing two clicks inside QuickBooks. Okay. All right. Continue.

Blake Oliver: [00:11:01] You can generate a cashflow report from your QuickBooks data. You can get your company info and profile and then update it like your industry code, which it asks me to do because we were missing one, apparently in our earmarked media QuickBooks file. You can also do benchmarking. You can benchmark your financials against the industry that you're in. I guess that's why it wanted me to do that and see AI code. You can get industry recommendations based on your data, and then the only thing you can do right now with transaction level information is import transactions into QuickBooks, like the way you would with a CSV. You can.

David Leary: [00:11:37] So I could see this being really helpful for write up work. Yes, you have a lot of you want to do some ketchup or write up work. This could be very helpful for that. But I think on the day to day workflows, like once it's in QuickBooks, like I see all these examples all the time, like give me a list of my customers. I'm like, that's two clicks in QuickBooks. Like, like I'm going to type a sentence and I click two things.

Blake Oliver: [00:11:56] Like nobody's going to ask that question, but those are the, you're going to have a specific need.

David Leary: [00:12:01] I know they always give those examples. Um, I don't know if you saw Kanopy just launched their new Co-work. So Kanopy has a Co-work chat agent or whatever they built in, and they have sample prompts. And the sample prompts are things like list. All my clients find clients with overdue engagements. I'm assuming the button on the left that says clients. If I click that, I would just see this in a view already, like why do I need a chat interface to do these things that are just in the app?

Blake Oliver: [00:12:27] Well, I think that that Kanopy co-work feature is actually more powerful than you think because the prompt examples are not great, but what you can do with it is interesting. I want to go back to that.

David Leary: [00:12:37] Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:12:38] Or I want to go to that. But first I want to go back to this QuickBooks thing. So I tried it. I actually tried chatting with Claude and saying, create a transaction. And you could do this not just with one, but bulk. So like theoretically you could take a bank statement, drop it into Claude, say, extract all the transactions for this bank statement, attempt to do the categorization as best you can and import them into QuickBooks. That seems like something you could do, but you can't pull any transaction data. And that's what I really would want, is the ability to say, give me my PNL and then ask questions about it. And basically with Claude, drill down into the transaction detail. But you can't because the connector can't pull the transactions. It also can't create anything other than bank transactions or like, what do they call them, just expense transactions in QuickBooks. Okay. And so, but what you can do is do that, you know, create a transaction. So I did that. I chatted with it and I said, uh, you know, I want to create a transaction. And then it asks me for the information that it needed, which is like the amount, the description, that sort of thing.

David Leary: [00:13:51] So you mean like the fields you have to fill in on a screen? You basically you're typing the same. You might as well just be filling in a form. You're basically.

Blake Oliver: [00:13:59] Well, no, I'm saying if you could do this in bulk, right?

David Leary: [00:14:02] That's a thing. And working 24 hours a day. Yes. It's like.

Blake Oliver: [00:14:06] Right. And you know, once you connect it to other things, you could have it like go into a folder of documents and then create the transactions from the documents if you needed to.

David Leary: [00:14:15] That's where this gets interesting because you can have other things all connected to cloud. Cloud becomes like your, your central gear that's spinning data out to these other spots like QuickBooks or Xero, etc.. That's where this gets interesting.

Blake Oliver: [00:14:27] Now here's where I hit a snag. It it didn't ask me for a specific chart of account like expense account. So it just tried to it just assigned one. Now I assume if I gave it a better description it would have used, you know, it should try to use. I would assume it would use the the best fit expense account. It also didn't ask me what bank account I wanted this put in. So it just put it into like our petty cash account. But it did do it.

David Leary: [00:14:53] Hey, that's exactly what Expensify has been doing for a decade. I can't get it to go to our bank account, so I have to edit the transactions every time it syncs to that account. So it's no worse than the current integrations that are out there on the market.

Blake Oliver: [00:15:06] So anyway, like you said, David, for write up work, I think this could be powerful for QuickBooks, although I think there's an argument to be made that for like write up work, you don't even need QuickBooks anymore because you could just write, pull in all the bank statements and have it do an Excel workbook for like a cash basis, PNL and balance sheet. That would be interesting to try. We should, I should try that for like a month of our data and see if it can, It can do that. Like give me a trial balance essentially from just bank statements, but I don't see why it couldn't. Um, what can you do in zero because zero has their MCP connector now apparently. Um not much really. You can also pull P and L get your balance sheet. Check your cash position. View contacts and receivables, see your top customers by revenue and then get your financial year settings for your organization. I mean, it can't like actually do any like working with transactions or pulling transactions data either, but I assume that these connectors are going to get more robust. If they don't, they're kind of useless.

David Leary: [00:16:08] But I have a prediction why they're not going to pull the transactions anytime soon.

Blake Oliver: [00:16:12] Why not?

David Leary: [00:16:13] Sage just acquired.

Blake Oliver: [00:16:14] Actually, wait. Hold on. We're going to go to our next sponsor message and then cliffhanger will cliffhanger about that. Our next sponsor is new, so pay attention here if you haven't heard this one yet. It's our cost seg. If you have real estate clients you already know cost segregation can save them serious money. But actually delivering studies in-house is a headache you don't need. And sending clients to an outside firm means losing control of the relationship. That's where Cost seg comes in. They're the partner CPAs trust to deliver engineer backed cost segregation. Studies start to finish. You keep the client relationship. They bring the engineers and the deliverables. Your client saves 6 to 7 figures. You're the hero. They've completed over 15,000 studies, and the pricing is actually reasonable. We're talking $1,000 for rapid reports and 3000 for fully engineered studies. That's way below the typical five K minimums you'll see elsewhere. And they never compete with your firm with the one big beautiful bill act reinstating permanent 100% bonus depreciation cost. Seg studies are more valuable than they've ever been. To schedule a strategy call with the cost SEG team and get a special bonus perk by mentioning the accounting podcast, head over to The Accounting Podcast dot com slash cost seg. That's accounting podcast dot promo forward slash RECOSTSG. And don't forget to mention the accounting podcast for a bonus perk. All right, David, tell me about this Sage acquisition.

David Leary: [00:17:47] Yeah, so Sage acquired an AI company called Doyon DOYEN ai. And what's interesting about this is all this AI company did was specialize in lack of a better term, ERP migrations. So you're on GL X and we're going to get you to GL y. So this is a direct attack or defense mechanism by Sage against QuickBooks enterprise. Because one of the QuickBooks Enterprise's big selling points was when you're ready to take that next level ERP level, you outgrow QuickBooks. You can migrate to QuickBooks enterprise fairly simply. But now there's no excuse. If you can take a week long, two weeks, three weeks, month long ERP migration and now do it in a couple of days using this AI automation, that's the way you want to do it. So Sage purchased this company. What's interesting about it is the company itself, it's not created by a bunch of ERP implementation specialists. It's all PhDs from Caltech, Berkeley, MIT, Cornell that all in two years basically started a company with expertise in migration from ERP systems. And my guess is they built the whole company with AI. It's probably another minimum viable sized company. There's like ten employees or something. And to do that in two years and then sell it out, it's a win for them. But this is really interesting for Sage because now if Sage can convince people, hey, it's going to take you days to move from QuickBooks or zero to Sage Intacct, that's a huge win for Sage.

Blake Oliver: [00:19:26] We got a comment here from male 22 on YouTube. What happens to 60% to 70% of the population who does not become self-employed and run a small startup? Since most companies do not need to hire any longer. Great question, and I've got a story that relates to exactly that.

David Leary: [00:19:43] You become an influencer.

Blake Oliver: [00:19:46] Become a podcaster, podcaster. Accounting Today published an opinion piece by Christine Kuglin and Bright Equity arguing that while AI can significantly improve productivity, businesses and the accounting profession should be more concerned about a broader economic risk. If companies use AI mainly to eliminate human roles, that could weaken the consumer base that drives demand. We have a consumer driven economy. Our economy is mostly driven by vast majority of. It is driven by consumer spending. So if people lose their jobs and they're not spending. That could put us into a negative growth kind of cycle where consumers are spending less because they don't have jobs. Businesses make less income. They hire fewer people. They use more AI. So we're getting more productive, right? But there's not money pumping through the economy anymore. And the authors call that an AI efficiency paradox. Businesses become more efficient, but it undermines the incomes and purchasing power of the people who ultimately buy products and services. And the authors argue that accountants should also make a mindset shift because of this AI efficiency paradox. Instead of thinking about how much labor can we remove, we should be thinking about how can we increase our value? How can we do more? How can we make more with our existing clients or with new clients? Take on more work without adding more hours? And maybe we can even do that while we cut hours? Is the idea. So a lot of companies are doing this not just in accounting. They're thinking about AI as like saving hours. But really, I would think about it in terms of how do we add more value. And the growth opportunity in accounting is advisory type services. And AI paired with like expert humans is just so incredibly powerful for doing that kind of stuff, like fractional CFO work, M&A advisory, uh, cost segregation studies, all of these things that take a lot of time because they take a lot of work to put together these reports and do this analysis so much faster with AI. So that's my take.

David Leary: [00:22:06] So there's an opportunity with AI for firms to possibly change their cash servicing offerings from the typical cash services to five coding. Uh, this is a blog post I saw on SaaS. I know we talked about SaaS in the past, but I'll read a quote. And the reason this caught my eye. Somewhere out there, two vendors just lost approximately $20,000 a year in IRR. Maybe more. We just don't know exactly who. And the genesis of this is. Saas was using lots of AI. They're building their own tools, their vibe, coding things, and they built two internal tools. And because of that, now, they didn't go buy two SaaS apps, right? And it's probably 20 grand each for each one of these apps, 20 grand a year. And the vendor who never spoke to them has no idea they just lost the sale because they never even engaged in a sale process. And because AI is basically letting people build versus buy at super accelerated rates right now. And in one way, it's bad for accounting firms, right? I've been thinking about this. If people just use AI to avoid using an accountant, you're going to have clients you never even know you could have had because they're just bypassing you entirely. You're not part of the conversation, But the good way. If you think about cloud accounting and cloud accounting services, what have you done the last 8 to 10 years? You've app stacked right? You've basically stacked apps on top of a GL and created a Voltron kind of ERP system, right?

Blake Oliver: [00:23:34] A tech stack.

David Leary: [00:23:36] A tech stack. You've been building app stacks and tech stacks and you've been a pipe connector. But I think the next opportunity is to help clients vibe code the apps exactly what they need and replace the app stack that you just implemented for the last 7 to 10 years. So you basically help them build the one app they need and that maybe has to talk to a cloud or cloud, sorry, cloud connector to get back to the to QuickBooks. The skills to do this is probably not what it was, what you needed ten years ago to do this. I am confident that accountants could vibe code. I'm super confident in this and build apps and help their clients build custom apps that that's the opportunity. Like this old stack of app stacking is going to go away. You're just going to help your client build the app they need. That ties to the geo vertical.

Blake Oliver: [00:24:23] Golf on YouTube says a Voltron stack smiley face. I'm going to use that in the stand up on Monday. You've just coined a term, David. It's going to be like Doug Slater's. Uh, what do you call it? Plumbing. Digital plumbing.

David Leary: [00:24:37] Digital plumbing was.

Blake Oliver: [00:24:38] When he used to call it that. All right, let's talk about KPMG's audit. Shut down. They shut down their federal audit practice. But first, let's thank our next sponsor. And that is fishbowl. Are your clients still trying to manage inventory and production in spreadsheets alongside QuickBooks as they grow? Those manual processes become a nightmare, leading to inventory errors, production delays, and missed opportunities. That's where fishbowl comes in. Fishbowl is the AI powered inventory and manufacturing solution designed specifically for growing product based businesses. It integrates with QuickBooks so you can keep your trusted accounting system while adding powerful operational capabilities. Manage inventory bill of materials and manufacturing workflows all in one centralized system. What makes fishbowl stand out is its AI assistant, Juno. Juno is built right into your workflows, helping you spot trends, improve forecasting, and make smarter decisions with your data. Plus, fishbowl connects with tools like Avalara for automated sales tax. Fishbowl creates a complete operational stack without the complexity and cost of traditional ERPs. Companies using fishbowl report incredible results like an 18% reduction in inventory costs, 50% less scheduling time and 99% on time delivery rates. To see why growing businesses are making the switch to fishbowl, head over to The Accounting Podcast dot com slash fishbowl. That's The Accounting Podcast dot pro forward slash. Fishbowl KPMG just shut down its entire US federal government audit practice. That's after they lost a $60 million per year Pentagon contract. Kpmg had been auditing the US Army for over a decade. And now 450 employees are being reassigned to other parts of the business. On top of that, KPMG is cutting 4% of its US advisory staff. That's about 400 people, mostly in regulatory risk and financial services consulting. This is all part of a longer streak of cuts since 2023. Kpmg has laid off hundreds of audit and advisory staff across the US and the UK. Where are they doubling down? Ai Cyber Forensic Services managed services. Their old work is shrinking, but their new work is growing fast.

David Leary: [00:27:02] And so specifically this. They had the contract for the audit of the US Army. Yes. And the US Army has not passed an audit. And how many years was this?

Blake Oliver: [00:27:13] I don't think they ever have.

David Leary: [00:27:14] Never have. They never have passed an audit. And there's pressure for them to have a clean audit opinion by 2028. And the way the Pentagon's going to try and do this, the Department of War, right, is they want to consolidate and restructure the audit. So instead of auditing all the separate divisions, they want to reduce the number of audits by about two thirds and just audit it one level higher. But isn't that just going to make the entire Department of Defense fail the audit now instead? So the Army won't fail the audit? The entire Department of Defense now will fail the audit, right? Yeah. The logic behind this doesn't make sense.

Blake Oliver: [00:27:48] Maybe if you go higher level, it changes the materiality and then they could pass. I don't know.

David Leary: [00:27:53] Because the okay, the budgets, the $840 billion size of the budget of Department of Defense, a couple hundred million for the Army being off is not material. I could see that.

Blake Oliver: [00:28:03] Like like a billion is not material.

David Leary: [00:28:05] Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:28:05] For not that big. So that's just wild rounding error. Um let's talk about tariffs now.

David Leary: [00:28:15] One more comment on that story.

Blake Oliver: [00:28:16] Okay.

David Leary: [00:28:17] Like this is how they're going to pass is the threat of losing the contract. So the next auditor is gonna want to keep the contract and they're going to pass. In fact, you and I should spin up our own submit an RFP for like $20 million. We'll do the audit and you'll pass.

Blake Oliver: [00:28:31] Well, it's going to be one of the other big three, because nobody else is big enough to do an audit of the Department of War. Because like you said, it's what, like almost a trillion in spending every year.

David Leary: [00:28:43] Almost a trillion spending, and it's a $60 million contract. So if you're going to get that $60 million a year contract, you don't want to lose it. You're going to help, not help, but you're going to be less prone to stopping that the audit opinion from coming back as a fail.

Blake Oliver: [00:29:02] Remember tariffs there's still a thing Nintendo of America has been slapped with a lawsuit over tariff refunds. I had to pay attention to this one. As the father of an 11 year old with a new Nintendo Switch two. Yeah, they're facing a proposed class action over tariff refunds. This was filed in federal court in Washington, and the plaintiffs allege that Nintendo of America raised prices on consoles and games during the Trump era tariffs, and has not outlined a plan to reimburse customers now that those tariffs have been ruled illegal. There are millions of Nintendo customers who bought products during the tariff period, which was in most of 2025 and continued through February 2026. And the suit argues that Nintendo could receive a double recovery. First, they pass the tariff customers onto. They pass the tariff costs onto consumers through higher prices, and later they collected the tariff refunds from the federal government.

David Leary: [00:30:04] Now, Ikea is also being sued in a class action over this same, very same story. Basically.

Blake Oliver: [00:30:11] We'll see what happens. Um.

David Leary: [00:30:14] So lawyers are going to win. All these class action lawyers are going to win. But like even the Ikea store, I saw people there being charged an extra 2 to $7 per item like, like nobody's going to, you're going to get that class action check for $0.38 at the end. But the lawyers are going to make money. But I was thinking about who and there's a number in this article that was shocking. Walmart might be getting a refund of $10.2 billion. You know who.

Blake Oliver: [00:30:39] Surprised.

David Leary: [00:30:40] Me? You know who's going to come out as the winner of this whole thing, or at least claim he's the winner is Trump. He's throwing up all these companies who already in a previous quarter reported crappy panels and crappy earnings because they had this huge tariff expense. Right now they have this tariff refund or stimulus in a way they got. So now Walmart's next quarter report, they're going to have $10.2 billion of extra income on the earnings statement. Right. So Trump's going to go look at all these companies with their record earnings. And he's going to win. He's going to win even though he's the one who caused the whole mess to begin with.

Blake Oliver: [00:31:15] Well you know who's losing. It's the actual workers. An op ed in the Tax Foundation by Alex Durant claims that Trump era tariffs are not strengthening the US economy. In fact, they're hurting it. He looked into the data and it's hard to argue. Manufacturing employment is down 88,000 jobs year over year. Weren't these tariffs supposed to bring back manufacturing jobs to the US? We lost 88,000 of them. Productivity and manufacturing collapsed in the fourth quarter of last year. So the tariffs increase prices for consumers. They haven't brought back jobs to the US. And it's hard to see how they will because the only way they would is if they basically shut down foreign trade and we had to bring the jobs back. Well.

David Leary: [00:32:11] It hasn't US manufacturer unless your entire supply chain of every single piece of everything you have in your factory is us sourced. All of your costs have increased from the tariffs to. So what are you going to do? You're going to cut labor. You're going to cut workers in your factory because you're there. You go cost to produce.

Blake Oliver: [00:32:29] And you're going to use automation. You're going to feel like this is just accelerating all that development of robotics. And I see these videos on like Instagram all the time. I don't know if you get those, David, if you're a TikToker or you use IG, but I don't know. It's hard to tell because like so much of this stuff's AI generated now, but like, if any of it's real, it's scary how like nimble these robots are getting. And it's just a matter of time until they're working in the factories. I got another Trump story. This is about that IRS lawsuit for $10 billion. It hit a snag. Judge Kathleen Williams, who has the suit in her court, has ordered the Justice Department to explain by May 20th how the court can exercise jurisdiction when the Constitution requires a genuine dispute between opposing parties. Yeah, because the administration is.

David Leary: [00:33:26] Running sides of the lawsuit.

Blake Oliver: [00:33:28] Yeah, right. So there's a May 27th hearing to address that issue. Um, yeah, there's like that's the issue. Like, is there a true adversarial conflict because Trump is suing agencies that are subject to his control as the president. So that might just end it all. All right. I got another IRS story while we're on that. And this is going to hurt those nonprofits or they're not going to be happy about it. You know, the administration has been going after non-profits and, um, you know, claiming that there's a lot of fraud and waste and abuse and surely there is, but there's a lot of non-profits that are not wasting money. They're getting caught up in this and this is going to increase their compliance costs. It's also going to be a big opportunity for anyone who does taxes for non-profits. Here's what's happening. The Treasury Department is working with the IRS to revise form 990. That's the annual information return filed by tax exempt organizations to require more detailed reporting from 501 C3 nonprofits. The Treasury says the changes are intended to improve visibility into government grants, government contracts and fiscal sponsorship arrangements so that regulators and the public can better track how funds are sourced, controlled and spent. I'm not sure exactly what they're going to change, but it sounds like there's going to be a lot more disclosure required.

David Leary: [00:34:56] So yeah, because they want to see like where the money came from, who controls it, how is it being used? It's it's to fight fraud and money laundering type stuff. But they just you're right. It's not really clear what the requirements will be. It just says more disclosure, more burdens, more compliance.

Blake Oliver: [00:35:13] I think we can assume that the tax work for nonprofits, 990 work is going to be more. And therefore, hey, that's good, that's good. If you do taxes for nonprofits or you, you know, do consulting because they're going to have to rework their charts of accounts, they're going to have to rework their financial reporting in order to comply. All right. Let's thank our next sponsor. And that is CNR consulting Group. This is another new one, right? David.

David Leary: [00:35:41] Yes. New.

Blake Oliver: [00:35:43] Okay. Let's learn all about him. Cnr consulting Group. If you're running a mid market accounting firm, you know the struggle, a shrinking talent pool, rising labor costs and your best people buried in routine work instead of high margin advisory services. It's a production bottleneck that's costing you growth. That's where CNR consulting Group comes in. For over 15 years, CNR has been the go to outsourcing partner for accounting firms across the US, Canada and the UK. Long before offshoring became a buzzword. Founded and managed by professional accountants with four decades of domain expertise. C and R isn't a generic outsourcing shop. They customize an engagement model for your firm, whether that's tax prep, bookkeeping, CAS or CFO services, so you get a plug and play extension of your team. Not a one size fits all headache. Their client list includes top ten CPA firms and boutique practices alike, and every engagement is backed by the same enterprise level infrastructure the biggest firms use in their captive offices. To see why mid-market accounting firms choose C and R consulting Group as their outsourcing partner, head over to The Accounting Podcast dot com. That's Accounting Today dot io forward slash c. Letter N. Letter R. So that's letter C. Letter n. Letter R. But the name of it is C and R or C. Ampersand R consulting. So I guess we can't put the ampersand in a URL. So we had to do C.

David Leary: [00:37:11] Exactly. Even their domain doesn't use the ampersand obviously. Oh that's funny. In the letter N. Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:37:17] Hk geek says the 990 updates are just so crazy. They want more disclosure. And at least in the articles I read, reference wanting to offer more transparency. These are the tax forms that are already public. I got more tax news. Representative Bill foster in the House introduced an act that would let you download a tax return that's already filled out for you. It's called the Autofill Act, and it would create a free IRS website where taxpayers at any income level can access a pre-filled return using data the IRS already has from your employer, Social security, and your bank. It would work as a replacement for direct file. That's the free filing program the Trump administration shut down last November. So you could get it as a printable document, a computer readable file that works with existing tax prep software, and. Sounds like a good idea.

David Leary: [00:38:13] Is this why not being proposed?

Blake Oliver: [00:38:15] It's it's a bill that has been introduced into the House.

David Leary: [00:38:18] Who introduced this.

Blake Oliver: [00:38:19] Representative Bill Foster of Illinois. So, I mean, it seems like a good idea, right? The IRS already has this info. Like why not let them. Why not let taxpayers get it?

David Leary: [00:38:33] Is he Republican or Democrat?

Blake Oliver: [00:38:35] We take a guess. I'm he's a Democrat.

David Leary: [00:38:39] A Democrat. Okay. So see, the Democrats are smart now because now Intuit's going to one day want this killed. And then the Democrats are going to get $1 million donation from Intuit to get this killed like the Democrats, are finally being smart and playing to win.

Blake Oliver: [00:38:54] The House passed a bill to strengthen IRS whistleblower programs. Well, there's just one program, the IRS whistleblower program, by a landslide. They pass this 346 to 10. What does it do? It's supposed to make the whistleblower system more effective and more attractive to insiders who report tax cheating. Here's how it updates the program. Whistleblowers appealing IRS decisions would get a more favorable standard of review in court. In tax court, and courts could consider new evidence. Whistleblowers can be anonymous. They can pursue tax court appeals without being publicly identified. That's a big deal. The IRS would have to pay out faster, or it would have to pay interest, so it would owe interest if it fails to issue a preliminary award recommendation within 12 months and attorney fees would be treated differently. The bill would align the tax treatment of whistleblower legal fees with rules used in other federal whistleblower programs, and it would also strengthen oversight and reporting to Congress. So it passed the House. Now it's going to go to the Senate. A little background on this program. The IRS whistleblower program has helped recover more than 7.37 billion in unpaid taxes since 2007. So that's that's a good chunk of change, although it dwarfs in comparison to the tax gap, which is many, many, many, many, many billions. But hey, it's something.

David Leary: [00:40:38] Do you want to stick with the federal government?

Blake Oliver: [00:40:40] Why not?

David Leary: [00:40:41] Why not. So we're only one more month left at the end of May. It's the end of the Treasury Secretary or Federal Reserve Secretary Jerome Powell. Right. He's going to end his run at the fed at the end of May. And the new nominee, Kevin Warsh, and this nominee nation. I've had this story since January in my list of stories. But he was blocked because of the investigation over the the building of the new Fed Reserve building. And so the senators are blocking the nomination anyways. So now the nomination is probably going through. But but back when he nominated him, I kind of researched him a little bit. So Trump definitely wants a yes man. Right. And Kevin Warsh agrees with Trump that the rates are too high. But he historically is kind of disciplined and has a lot of restraint and credibility to where he probably won't cut rates as fast as Trump wants them to. Right. And to some extent, I was thinking about it like every so often, Trump does nominate possibly the right person and not the influencer. Right? Or God forbid, a podcaster to some position. Right. Um, so this is it's interesting because he's gonna, he's going to get what he wants in office who maybe has the same views of rates as he does, but it's not going to be a yes person. I think this guy's a little bit more reserved scientific about it. Mathematical. He's not going to emotionally just do whatever Trump pumps him up to do. Um, which probably means he'll get fired for not changing the rates soon enough.

Blake Oliver: [00:42:12] Well, let's hope he doesn't, because raising rates doesn't make sense at this point, at least to me.

David Leary: [00:42:18] Well, you want to lower rates. Lower rates, lower rates.

Blake Oliver: [00:42:21] Yeah. Lowering rates doesn't make sense because you want to lower rates when jobless claims are going up, when the economy is slowing down. Right. Because then that pumps more money into the economy. Businesses invest, they hire more. But jobless claims for weekly jobless claims fell to 189,000, which is the lowest in more than five decades. So this is so interesting. We have all this fear and uncertainty about AI, and we're seeing layoffs, big layoffs, jobs. Yeah. But yet at the same time, we haven't seen a significant increase in unemployment benefits claims. So what is going on? Is this just lagging? Are we going to see them go up or are these workers just finding jobs in other parts of the economy or maybe working for themselves? It's hard to say, but it doesn't seem like the economy needs a stimulus in the form of lower interest rates at the moment, because what would that do? Well, if unemployment is low, when you do that, it just increases inflation. Inflation is not what we need.

David Leary: [00:43:37] So this is the jobs report. Remember what was it six months ago? There was a jobs report. Trump didn't like it. And the person that made the jobs report either got fired.

Blake Oliver: [00:43:47] Yeah, it was like at the BLS or something. Yeah. Head of the BLS. So. Well.

David Leary: [00:43:52] So this jobs number.

Blake Oliver: [00:43:53] Are you getting your Tin Tin foil hat out, David? Because one of our viewers is to Scott says the math's not mathing. I smell fraud. I mean, oh, man, if we can't trust the numbers anymore, what do we do? I agree, the math doesn't math. It doesn't make sense, right? All this AI productivity business is not hiring, not laying off workers. And yet somehow the unemployment claims are low. Hmm. I guess we'll find out in the elections, right? That's when we find out how people really feel about the economy.

David Leary: [00:44:28] But there is there is demand for accounting jobs, though. I saw this massive blog post from Intuit. A 19 minute read is massive, massive blog post and they use LinkedIn analytics data to, um, it's called LinkedIn talent insights data. So they use this data to talk about the 2026 accounting job market. And it's a couple of takeaways in this, um, both tax and accounting roles. Both workforces are classified currently as very hard to hire nationally. It's very hard to hire tax people and accountants. Um, tax opportunities are most intense in midsize metros such as Buffalo, Niagara, Richmond, Virginia, Hartford, New York. Um bookkeeping and accounting rules have the greatest competition in larger metros. So if you're a larger metro trying to get a bookkeeping job, there's just more competition. So we have Atlanta, Georgia, Dallas, Texas, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. And then, um, the tightest markets for hiring is going to be Atlanta, Hartford, Nashville. Now with this said, this whole post is really probably playing an SEO game. So if people are like, can I get a job in accounting? They'll, they'll come up here because it's really pushing people to Intuit's careers.

David Leary: [00:45:41] Like Intuit's the one trying to hire tax professionals and bookkeepers. And eventually if you click the link, you get to the page and I can actually bring this page up. I'm going to put the link in here to the chat, and then you can open it up here. If I can paste the careers page. If you bring that up, Blake and share the screen, I'll let you do it. It calls out the benefits you get of taking one of these jobs at Intuit, either a tax expert or a bookkeeper. And I'm looking at the benefits. And then the verbiage in this page is about having flexible remote work first opportunities, right? And then think about what have we just see the last two weeks, Deloitte cutting all the benefits, right? I forgot what the other big four firm was that got rid of remote work. Intuit is basically targeting the opposite of what the big four is doing into its hiring and offering. The benefits the Big Four is taking away from their staff.

Blake Oliver: [00:46:37] Yeah, but not the money.

David Leary: [00:46:38] That's it right there. That chart.

Blake Oliver: [00:46:39] Not the money. We know that, right? What? What do you get paid the money?

David Leary: [00:46:42] Yes. That's true.

Blake Oliver: [00:46:43] Yeah. You get flexibility, right? But as far as I know, unless it's changed, the pay is pretty low.

David Leary: [00:46:50] The pay is probably low. But I tell you what the benefits package you get from into it, nobody touches. It's like the gold standard.

Blake Oliver: [00:46:56] It's like when I that's like when I worked at Starbucks years and years ago, like 20 years ago, there were, there were like so many people working there just for the benefits. Like I just got to get my 30 hours so my family can get health care. I was the unemployed musician. Well, I was employed, I was making healthcare, but I didn't, I didn't need the health care as much. But it was like, you know, mom's doing 30 hours so that their family could get health insurance. Sure. Um, I got another story here that we need to get to. Oh, yeah. We talked about canopy, the practice management system and their coworker feature that they have just announced. And you were kind of making fun of it.

David Leary: [00:47:42] I actually wasn't good at bringing it to the show because I clicked through, I looked at the, I saw the screenshot and I was like, oh gosh, it's another chat bot doing silly things that are just in the AI.

Blake Oliver: [00:47:51] Well, I watched the video and there are some interesting examples, right? Because they say they've basically built in like an AI agent feature into the whole practice management suite, which is really powerful because the problem with practice management software is that firms implement it and then they don't use it because everybody gets busy. And just like a sales CRM, nobody updates it.

David Leary: [00:48:17] You know, clicking it's too much clicking.

Blake Oliver: [00:48:18] Yeah. You got a lot of data entry to do. You got to record all the conversations you had. You got to like, remember to put stuff in and people just don't like it's, it's hard enough to fill out your timesheet to actually keep all that stuff up to date is really difficult, but that's where the AI agents could do a lot of the work. So here's some examples of how coworker could automate work across an accounting firm from canopy.

David Leary: [00:48:41] Yeah, sell me on this because based on the sample prompts, I'm like, here we go again. It's just like dumb sample prompts. Okay, sell me on. Why would you use this in my firm?

Blake Oliver: [00:48:49] So you can create like saved prompts and use them across your firm, like for when different things happen. So for example, you're onboarding a new client. You can have the coworker automatically create folders, send questionnaires, and start welcome email sequences when a new client is created. You can store.

David Leary: [00:49:09] Isn't that just a function of canopy already before AI? That's what I don't understand.

Blake Oliver: [00:49:13] I don't know.

David Leary: [00:49:14] I think it is.

Blake Oliver: [00:49:15] I mean, I'm not sure. Um, scope creep detection. This is a big one. So it can look at your billing and communications. So your emails are in canopy, right. And it can identify engagements where effective hourly rates are slipping. So look at all the emails going back and forth with the client. Look at the agreement. It's all in there. And figure out if we're doing too much. And we need to like increase.

David Leary: [00:49:41] That's actually a really good use case.

Blake Oliver: [00:49:43] I think that's an amazing use case.

David Leary: [00:49:44] That's really smart.

Blake Oliver: [00:49:45] Actually. You could also, by the way, do that now with like cloud Co-work connect it to your email across your organization and then like ask it client by client to, you know, give it all your agreements and then try to figure out if there's like scope creep that needs to happen or price increases. Um, there was an interesting example in the video of like updating workflows and subtasks when a disaster declaration happens. So you know how every time there's a disaster, the IRS will say, oh, you have an extra X days to.

David Leary: [00:50:16] File.

Blake Oliver: [00:50:17] Your taxes. Yeah, you could have it. The worker can go, the coworker can then find all the engagements in that area affected by it and then update everything.

David Leary: [00:50:28] Change all the due dates.

Blake Oliver: [00:50:29] Change all the due dates, missing document audit flag, missing client documents, draft follow up messages and alert staff when items are received. So monitoring that intake folder. And when the documents come in, updating what needs to still be gathered and checking to make sure it's the right document. This is all stuff we've speculated about that you could do with AI agents. Totally doable there. They're building it and then capacity planning. So looking at tasks and staff skill levels to show workloads and suggest reassignments. So obviously it all depends on how well executed this is. But in general my take on this is these AI agents in practice management are going to be hugely important. They're going to make practice management ten times more valuable. And so firms that don't have it are going to start finally using it. And firms that are using it are going to see big benefits. So like I see this being a big deal for carbon and canopy and, and all those other practice management apps out there.

David Leary: [00:51:41] Now, is there any article you've seen? Are they going to charge extra for this? Are you paying per use or is this built into the. Oh I see okay. Actually I'm looking at their pricing page. So they have their normal their plans. Right. Yeah. And then they have additional product adds on add ons. So if you want to use smart intake, which is their AI powered intake forms $11 per client. Um, if you want to have pull down transcripts, so they're charging based on the service you need per client type of a thing to add on. So it looks like this is probably going to be an add on. It's not really clear though that you. Yeah, this is just built in. Or if you have to pay extra for this because their pricing is a little confusing.

Blake Oliver: [00:52:23] Canopy's pricing has always been confusing like that. It's all modular.

David Leary: [00:52:26] Oh my God, this page is gigantic. Why do they have such a horrible page? This is crazy. You need AI to analyze it. This page is huge.

Blake Oliver: [00:52:34] So canopy also announced another feature I might as well highlight here. And this is a pretty cool one. Also they now have an AI meeting note taker built in to their practice management software. So it will automatically create meeting transcripts and AI generated summaries and put them into the client record inside canopy. And to me, that's like going to be a killer feature. Everything's practice management.

David Leary: [00:53:01] Yeah, my my calendar task app now will attend meetings for me if I want. But, but then it's like, you almost think it should be the other direction where you want a high level service, attending the meeting that can talk to all the other things, right? Like having how many, how many invites are you going to invite to your meeting that are bots for different purposes.

Blake Oliver: [00:53:19] You can just use? I mean, the idea is with your clients, you would just use this one, and it records the meeting and puts all the notes and summaries into the client file.

David Leary: [00:53:31] But then if you have a different meeting at your firm without a client, now you're using a different note taker.

Blake Oliver: [00:53:36] Oh, I don't know. I mean, maybe you could use this without that, but the key is you can turn action items into workflow tasks with assignees and due dates. So you can just talk about what needs to happen. And then you don't have to go create all the tasks. And that is a killer thing. I've been playing around with this, with, um, with Gemini, you know, the Google Meet note taker and Claude. So I've got a skill that I built where I can, I can tell it to go find the transcript of my latest meeting, pull out all the detail, and then update a notion project page with all the information, latest information about that project that I'm working on. And then I've got a task tracker, like a tasks database in notion, and it will go and create related tasks and update those too. So I know this is all possible because I'm doing it in my own home brewed system and it's really good. I mean, I did have it create a few phantom tasks like or like it. It created some tasks that shouldn't have existed, but it was my fault for not reviewing it. But like, I would never have created all those tasks before, right? I mean, or I would have, but it would have taken just as long after the meeting as the meeting took.

David Leary: [00:54:48] Yeah. Because even if you just had a regular note taker, then you have to go back to the notes. What? Which ones are my tasks? Pull those out, put them in whatever tracking system you're putting in. So that does make a lot of sense. And it's kind of like I had a bell go off like a week ago and I have it written down here. Ai procrastinators might get rewarded. And this is an example of this. Like you could have home built something like this. To do this, take a note to over here, connect it in, put it the notes over here. You get a home built something. But if you procrastinated now, you could just get it for free out of the box. And the best example of this? This was during the March Madness basketball tournament. One of the first things I tried to do with AI was and if you have kids, anybody who has kids have done this. You get. They don't send calendar appointments, right? They just send like a yellow piece of paper with a bunch of dates on it, important dates for the school year, right? And then you, you have to manually type that stuff in to your calendar because you got to get in your calendar if you have kids. Right. And the commercial from Google now, and I tried build that and I was building it and horsing around with it, and I kind of got it to work enough. But now the commercial on television is that use case.

Blake Oliver: [00:55:57] Yeah. And it works. I've done that.

David Leary: [00:55:59] It's built right in with Gemini.

Blake Oliver: [00:56:01] I can just like take a picture of something and say, add this to my calendar, or I can like be in gmail and I can just open up Gemini in the sidebar and say, add this to my calendar. Now, it doesn't always.

David Leary: [00:56:11] Work to make it happen a year and a half ago. That's what I mean. So like procrastination in the AI era, it might be a good thing because the problems will be solved for you.

Blake Oliver: [00:56:20] So on a similar note, Tate says, Blake, you have notion, Gemini, Claude Cowork and a lot of experience with software. You are not normal. Not everyone can do what you do. I agree. Like I mess around with this stuff and honestly, it's it works, but not all the time. And yeah, I agree that the early, early cutting edge people are not like necessarily going to save a ton of time. I mean, although I am like the productivity boost I'm getting from AI is just like insane. But I know that's because I'm really spending a lot of time with it. If you don't have a lot of time, it's not worth your time at this point. But we're getting almost there. Where once you have these AI's built into like the software you're using, which is starting to happen, practice management, the gles, the closed software, right? Like then it makes sense to invest in learning it. So I still think it's worth playing around with it because now if you use like a general purpose tool like cloud Cowork, you understand how these agents function as a principal and they're all going to work in a similar way because there is a best practice for this. And so if you can figure that out with like just something, just anything, then you'll have an advantage in figuring out like what is the best to use going forward. So I don't know, I would say like, if you haven't done it yet, get cloud Cowork, buy a pro plan 20 bucks a month and create a project for something. And what's the best thing to do right now? I would do, I would do proposals with it.

Blake Oliver: [00:58:05] Take the transcript of your meetings with a prospect and give it examples of prior engagement letters like give it a, give it a bunch of good ones and then ask it to help you build well, ask it to help you figure out the pricing and build the proposal using your template. If you got one. And it's just takes what took hours now takes minutes. And that's a great example, right? Like little things like that. And you'll learn what works, right? You'll learn, you know, when to let it go and when to give it more information first, that sort of thing. So all right, that's all the time we have for this week. David. Listeners, you made it to the end of this episode. If there's any of you left, you should be earning free CPE for having sat through this. Go to the earmark app@earmark.app in your web browser, or get the free app from the App Store. Create your free account. Find this podcast on their search for The Accounting Podcast. Register for the course. Take a quick five question quiz and get your free CPE certificate. You can get one free per week, or you can sign up with us for the low price of $170 per year, and that's going to go up soon. We're going to do a summer price increase. David and I haven't even talked about it, but we do it every year. So lock in that price for this year and support the work that we do.

David Leary: [00:59:38] And you have a team, email us at sales@earmark.me and we can. Your team discount start at five seats, 20% off and just get better the more seats you need.

Blake Oliver: [00:59:48] Unlimited CPE for your whole team, and we can take your internal trainings and turn those into self-study CPE courses on the earmark app. So if you're doing lunch and learns for your team, if you're teaching them, they should earn CPE for that. But you don't want to deal with all that compliance, creating those courses, getting a sponsorship when nasba, you can just have us do it. Just send us your recordings and we'll load them in their private to your team. Amazing benefit. You can now have self-study. They don't have to join live if you do live. Cpe no extra effort on your part.

David Leary: [01:00:23] And so, Blake, next week I'm going to be at, uh, Grocon, uh, up in Salt Lake City. So that's a conference for kind of smaller solo firm owners, operators. I'm going to that conference and then so we'll have to record on Friday when I get back. And then we have another conference after that, I think. But then before we know it, engage is here. So what other conferences, where are you going to be? Where can people see us? I guess face to face.

Blake Oliver: [01:00:47] I will be sharing that information momentarily. But first I want to answer a question here in the audience, which is when will this episode be available for testing that quiz? Uh, it's isn't it usually next week? David. Like, yeah, so long does it take.

David Leary: [01:01:01] The podcast episode and it comes out actually as the actual Trulia podcast episode. It's usually about 24 hours later the course is available.

Blake Oliver: [01:01:08] Okay. So that's so if you've been joining us for the live streams, it feels like it takes a long time because first we have to make the podcast episode, and then we have to make the CPE course. And there's a delay between both because there's humans still involved in the process, because we have to make sure that there's quality. So we have a human CPE reviewer for every single course, and that's why it takes a day or two after it releases on the podcast feed. That's why it's like a week when you listen to it on YouTube. Um, where am I going to be? I got a lot of travel coming up next week on May 5th, Tuesday, May 5th. I'm going to be in Pennsylvania for the Pennsylvania Institute of CPAs Annual Meeting. I think this is their 129th Annual meeting. They are one of the oldest, if not the oldest CPA societies in the country. And I'm doing the keynote there on AI. So that's going to be really great. Thank you to Jenn Crider and her team for inviting me to do that. I think this might actually be my first CPA society speaking engagement. It's always been, um, conferences like not, not annual meetings of CPA societies. So that's going to be fun. And then after that, on May 15th, I'll be at the Wave conference in Seattle. So let me know if you'll be there. And then, um, I'm headed to New York for Black OR's AI summit.

Blake Oliver: [01:02:32] I think that's the official title of it. Um, they are an AI stealth startup where they were in stealth. They just came out. They're doing tax automation. I can't wait to be there. I believe that Kelly Phillips Erb is going to be the host of that entire event. Lots of other like really influential people I'm excited to meet. I'll be doing a panel hosting a panel there and then what's next? Aicpa engage in June, earmark is going to be exhibiting there, and we are going to have a cabana On Tuesday of AICPA engage will be hosting a cabana out by the pool. So be on the lookout for a registration page for that. Uh, we will share that here on the podcast and you can come join us and have some, uh, free drinks and food and hang out with me and the earmark team and all our friends on Tuesday. And then the following week, another event scaling new heights. I will be there. I will be at the relay booth signing copies of my book on Tuesday, June 16th. So lots of travel. Looking forward to that. If you're going to be at any of those events, let me know. Shoot us an email at The Accounting Podcast at earmark.me. That's The Accounting Podcast at earmark.me. And I look forward to seeing everyone. And David, I will see you around here next week.

David Leary: [01:03:57] Perfect.

Blake Oliver: [01:03:58] Bye.