AI's impact on billable hours and CPA career paths debated at podcast milestone

Attention: This is a machine-generated transcript. As such, there may be spelling, grammar, and accuracy errors throughout. Thank you for your understanding! Adam Zaki: [00:00:05] Would you trust a mechanic who's never worked on a car but could tell you everything about the engine? Like I wouldn't. David Leary: [00:00:11] Coming to you weekly from the OnPay Recording Studio. Blake Oliver: [00:00:21] Hello and welcome back to the Accounting Podcast, your weekly roundup of news in the profession. I'm Blake Oliver. David Leary: [00:00:28] And I'm David Leary Blake. We made it to episode 500, which is 500. Kind of amazing. Like we've never skipped. We've actually, I think we had one hiccup where we had to double record one week, but essentially 500 weeks in a row, we've released the show. I it's a, it's. Blake Oliver: [00:00:43] Hard, it's hard to believe. And, uh, we should tell the story of how this podcast started because it's a fun one. I get asked about it a lot, and I don't know if we've ever shared it on the show. David Leary: [00:00:55] So after we shared on the show. Yeah. Blake Oliver: [00:00:57] Yeah. After we thank our sponsors, we'll talk about that. I also want to thank our two special guest co-hosts for this episode. We've got Adam Zaki, reporter@cfo.com. Adam, welcome. Adam Zaki: [00:01:10] Thank you guys. I'm happy to be here. Congratulations. I'm a listener of not every not all 500 episodes, but I've been listening to you guys for a while. Thank you for putting your podcast together, I love it. Blake Oliver: [00:01:19] Thank you for all the great stories that you write. Like they, they inform our show. That's what we talk about on the, on the show. So it's great to have you here. We've also got Adrienne Gonzalez, managing editor of Going Concern. Adrienne, great to have you. I all right, let's thank our sponsors, David, who are our sponsors for this week, our sponsors. David Leary: [00:01:37] This week we have on Pay Canopy Thomson Reuters and Cloud Accountant Staffing. Are you tired of payroll headaches getting in the way of the client experience that 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 pays the payroll partner that accountants and bookkeepers actually love Y because it's easy to use, packed with value, and backed by support that actually supports you. Their teams get great reviews for being fast, expert, and actually reachable when you need them on pay handles all the heavy lifting. You get a dedicated on board onboarding coordinator who sets up worker profiles and transfers year to date data from previous providers, all at no extra cost. Their seamless QuickBooks and Xero integrations eliminate manual journal entries, and they support any type of businesses you serve farms, restaurants, nonprofits, you name it on on pay can handle the unique requirements without adding complexity. And on pay keeps pricing simple to everything your clients expect, from multi-state filing to off cycle pay runs is included. No hidden fees, no surprises. To book a demo. Head over to The Accounting Podcast dot com slash The Accounting Podcast dot promo forward slash ONPAY. Blake Oliver: [00:02:48] And thank you for. Thank you to Onp for being an incredible sponsor of this show, supporting the show over the years. We really appreciate you. Please do visit those links to let them know that's how you found us? All right, let's get into the origin story, David. David Leary: [00:03:01] Well, do you want to welcome our live studio audience that are starting to show up here? Blake Oliver: [00:03:05] Oh, yeah. That's right. Look at all the comments. Boring. Accountant as always, Arcola. We've got Oswego Sharks and Kobe and VMZ and James and Linda and Melanie and, uh, thank you for commenting. Let us know as you watch. What are the favorite stories that you've heard on the show? Favorite moments? Uh, anything you want us to discuss? We'd love to hear from our listeners. So David, do you remember how this all started? David Leary: [00:03:34] Yeah. So you were kind of you had your blog, the @BlakeTOliver blog, and then you, it evolved to where you had, it was called, you had a cloud accounting blog, right? Or cloud.com. You had that and you were, you basically were using the squarespace blog site to record a couple podcast interviews over Zoom or something you did about eight episodes and then in. Blake Oliver: [00:03:56] David, we have to go back even further. David Leary: [00:03:58] Oh, yeah. Before that. That's right. Blake Oliver: [00:03:59] This is where we met. David Leary: [00:04:00] Yes, yes, yes. That's right. Right. I forgot about that part of the story. Blake Oliver: [00:04:03] Yeah. I mean years. So we were at expensive con at in Maui at the Andaz resort. And I remember this is how I remember it. I think this is the first time I ever met you. Perhaps I'm lying on a lounge chair by the pool like. And I've got my one year old there. No, he's not even one yet. He's Thomas. He's he's not even walking. He's rolling around. Yeah. And I'm exhausted because we got we're traveling with a kid and at a conference and I'm like lying there and I've got my eyes closed and I'm getting like, my, my, you know, one minute of Zen, right? And all of a sudden I hear my name and I open my eyes and standing over me is David Leary. And I think within the first few minutes of talking to me and introducing yourself, you were like, we should have a podcast. David Leary: [00:04:53] Yeah, I did. Blake Oliver: [00:04:54] That's how I remember it anyway. David Leary: [00:04:55] Yeah, it was like over beers or drinks. And like two years later, we finally have a podcast. It was just like, yeah, it really, there's a big gap of no podcast, no actual planning. And then you were doing a podcast on your own. Intuit bought t shirts and you had me on because you wanted to talk about that story. And then as soon as we were done recording, I said, let's just do this every week. And I've never left. So I just crashed your podcast and I just never left it. Blake Oliver: [00:05:18] Well, you know, what you did is you planted the seed in my mind, and then it grew. And I totally forgot about it until you reminded me when you were a guest on the show and you were episode six or something. And it went so well that basically after that you were always on. We just that's how it happened. So thank you. And you know, I love that about us because I feel like it, it sort of is like how our working relationship works, right? Is you plant these ideas in my mind that then grow and then we work on them together eventually. Yeah. David Leary: [00:05:49] So the best story, I still think, and the reason we've been successful and hit 500 episodes is I'm a Gen Xer. Blake's a millennial. I don't know, maybe episode 14 or so. Blake was like, I want to skip this week. And I just told him, if you skip this week, we'll skip next week and this whole thing's dead. And I didn't let Blake skip. And because of that, that's why we hit 500 episodes. If we would have skipped this thing, would have died at episode 15. Blake Oliver: [00:06:13] That's true. That credit goes to you for that. And, uh, we're getting comments here in the chat. We'll check in on you later. Thank you all. Um, let's get to the news, shall we? Adrienne, I want to start with you. Um, going concern is probably the first accounting publication I ever started reading when I just entered accounting. And I feel like actually, it's it's really popular with a lot of young accountants because of the issues that you talk about the, the irreverent attitude, the, the, the, uh, brave, unvarnished coverage of the big four and all that. And so I wanted to ask you, like, you know what, what do you want to talk about today? What is top of mind for you? Uh, let's start, let's kick it off. And actually, it looks like we may have lost Adrienne. Oh, no. If you can hear us, Adrienne, go ahead and refresh your browser and come back and we'll get back to you. So over to Adam Zaki. Adam Zaki: [00:07:09] Adam, I got it. Blake Oliver: [00:07:10] Great to have you. What's top of mind for you? Adam Zaki: [00:07:12] Listen, I'm a kid in a candy store here. Adrienne's one of the best writers writing about accounting right now. And you two are the best. So I can't thank you enough for having me. But I got a lot to talk about. I want to, I guess we could open up with the future of the billable hour, because this is something that I just did a story on. I interviewed the co-CEOs of Cross Country Consulting, and they told me that the future of billable hour is waning. And CFOs would love to hear that, right? Because the idea of product based or outcome based pricing is huge for my audience. Right? Especially now, like we've seen it in your world where which one of the big four firms was asking for a reduced rate because their auditor used AI, I believe it was KPMG or PwC. I want to get that wrong, but one of them did do that. Right. And so if the if the firms themselves see that the value of things like auditing is going down because of AI and value, meaning the cost, I should say the cost, why can't we all get that cost benefit? That's what my audience is saying. And so I think that the move to outcome based pricing is totally legit in the consulting world. I don't know where it will come first. Right. Will it be consulting? Will it be in accounting? But it's coming. I just don't know when and where. Blake Oliver: [00:08:19] I'm I, I believe it. I mean, my own experience was in outsourced accounting. And once we got all these like cloud based accounting tools and we could automate a lot of repetitive right up work, like literally typing transactions into accounting systems are billable hours dropped by 80%, 90%. And we as a, as a team, as a department inside of a firm had no choice but to move to fixed fe