Hear all about it: What’s in the December JofA

Jeff Drew, the JofA‘s editor-in-chief, is the guest on today’s episode, taking listeners through some of the articles in the December issue.

Drew, a former JofA senior editor and manager with the AICPA’s Private Companies Practice Section, has focused on content for the daily and monthly magazines for more than a decade. He is also the host of the Small Firm Philosophy podcast.

He previews coverage on the topics of:

• firm practice management;
• considerations for potential firm partners;
• the employee retention credit;
• Excel’s Automate feature; and
• Improving your work setup with a vertical mouse, mechanical keyboard, and more.

If you have article ideas or other magazine feedback, you can reach Drew at jeff.drew@aicpa-cima.com.

What you’ll learn from this episode:

• Where readers can find the latest monthly issue of the JofA.
• A summary of a small firm owner’s article about firm practice management.
• Considerations for CPAs on the path to partner.
• Drew’s explanation of the top item in the Tax Matters section.
• The advice that Kelly Williams, CPA, shares about Excel in Technology Q&A.
• Another Technology Q&A topic that reminds Drew of 1980s arcade games.

Play the episode below or read the edited transcript:

To comment on this episode or to suggest an idea for another episode, contact Neil Amato at Neil.Amato@aicpa-cima.com.

Transcript

Neil Amato: Welcome to the Journal of Accountancy podcast. This is your host, Neil Amato. The guest on this episode is someone who should be familiar to listeners to this show because he’s also a sometime host of the show. He’s the host of the Small Firm Philosophy podcast. He’s the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Accountancy. His name is Jeff Drew, a colleague of mine for more than a decade. He’s joining us to preview what readers can expect from the December issue of the JofA. That issue will be live on the web in flipbook and link form on Friday. Jeff, this is your first time, I believe, on the show as a guest. How does it feel to not be the one asking questions?

Jeff Drew: I don’t know. How do you think it would feel? I just wanted to respond with a question. No, it’s different.

Amato: It is different. I can’t even imagine being the one being asked the questions, but here we are. We’re going to talk about some of the highlights in the December issue, as I said. The first story I want to ask you about is one from a small firm owner with the headline, “Tips for building a firm to the right size for you.” Tell me something about that story, who wrote it, and what readers can expect from it.

Drew: Well, that article is by Keila Hill-Trawick. She is the founder and CEO of Little Fish Accounting. That’s a boutique firm in Washington, D.C. She serves small, single-owner businesses – well, the firm does, she doesn’t do it by herself. As you might guess from her firm’s name, she’s made a big commitment to “growing small,” as we put it on the cover. Her big idea is “growing small,” both in terms of the size of her firm and in the size of her clients.

Basically she wanted to create a firm where growth didn’t become the end-all, be-all. So people could maintain work-life balance – where she could go on family vacations, for example – where busy season wasn’t complete chaos, and where people could be in an environment where the culture was not just completely crazy.

Amato: I think this has been addressed actually by you on a previous podcast with some firm co-owners. One of the things you have to do to grow small is be able to say “no.” It seems like one of the most important things.

Drew: That’s something that’s becoming more and more common, really across the whole profession because of capacity issues. Firms are saying “no” and dropping clients more than ever before. In Little Fish’s case, Keila goes through the whole process from when she launched the firm in 2018. She goes through the lessons learned, what we refer to as the four keys to success that she learned along the way. She calls it “building intentionally,” trying to create the type of firm you want to work for, and work with the kind of clients that you want to work with. We hear a lot about that in terms of people going into niches and stuff so they can become experts in a certain area. Her approach is a little different, and she writes about it for us.

Amato: That’s great. Thank you. Another article, the headline, “Five steps for assessing whether to become a partner”: That seems like it should have obvious interest to a lot of our CPA listenership and readership. Tell me more about that on making that decision to go down the partner path or not.

Drew: Well, the way that article came about was I was with the firm practice management section – PCPS, Private Companies Practice Section – for 14 months before returning to the JofA. One of the projects I worked on during that time was an update of the emerging partners guide. We got half-a-dozen young CPAs who are right at that partnership decision, and six members of the PCPS executive committee to go through and do updates. We produced an updated version of the partner guide. With this article we went out – Sarah Ovaska was the writer for us – and she went out and she talked to three emerging partners – two of which recently made partner and one who is on the partner track – and talked to them about what their five nuggets of advice are to those who are considering becoming a partner.

Basically it can be summed up as, you need to understand what you’re getting into. There are a lot of things to keep in mind that you need to understand. In the article, it’s focused mostly on – and the practice guide – on equity partnerships. So you’re buying in and becoming an owner of the business. There are, of course, non-equity partnerships, but the focus on this is equity partnerships, so that brings in a whole other area. You need to understand it’s risk. You’re putting money in, your becoming a business owner. There’s just a ton of things to understand, and this article captures, on a microcosmic level, the experience of these three young partners and future partners. And it also shares some from the emerging partners guide on a five-step process for figuring out how to become a partner. There’s five nuggets of advice and five steps. It’s double five. Five squared.

Amato: Five squared. You could even say that. Maybe just 10, maybe just five times two. But either way, steps and nuggets. Look for that article. Speaking of the article and the issue overall, that will go live on Friday, Dec. 1, in the show notes for this episode, we’ll have the link to the issue, which you can also find at journalofaccountancy.com, going to the Magazine tab. Jeff, is there any other way that people can access that maybe that I haven’t mentioned?

Drew: They can also, if you go to the Journal of Accountancy homepage and you just scroll down a little bit below what newspapers would call the “fold,” you’ll see a link and an icon to go to the digital edition. That’s the actual flipbook. You can click on that, and that will take you to the flipbook which is housed on the AICPA & CIMA site. The flipbook is a different experience. It kind of looks like the magazine. You can go from page to page.

Amato: A simple scroll down on journalofaccountancy.com or going to the Magazine tab, not only gets you the December issue but also the issue library so you can look at past issues.

Tax Matters, that’s a regular column in the Journal of Accountancy. I think it’s pretty obvious what it’s about, but in this particular issue, what would you like to tell people about the Tax Matters column?

Drew: Well obviously, the employee retention credit has gotten tons of attention this year because of the aggressive ERC mills, or just these companies offering to do the ERC filings and taking very aggressive approaches that aren’t supported by the law. It’s gotten to the point – and this is mentioned in the Tax Matters article – that the IRS did issue a moratorium recently because they’re going to audit thousands of ERC claims and they said they’d bring criminal cases against hundreds of taxpayers. The article also walks through earlier IRS guidance that highlights the red flags for employers who have clamed or intend to claim the ERC.

It goes into great detail, so if you have any questions about that guidance, this gives you a perspective to go through and understand where the risks are. This can be something your clients run into. You may have told them not to listen to these people, and they may have listened and now you’re stuck having to tell them, “No, you can’t claim that.” Or you may have already been yelled at by your clients because you told them they couldn’t claim that but they really wanted to.

Amato: That’s a good summary. Obviously, there’s plenty of interest right now in the ERC, and we’re following the news but also giving advice at the same time. Tech Q&A, it’s long been a popular column in the JofA. This month’s Tech Q&A features items by both Kelly Williams and Wesley Hartman. What are they writing about for this month?

Jeff Drew: Well, Kelly Williams, who is our Excel expert and has been doing this for us for about three years now, she writes about the new automate tab that is now available in Microsoft 365, in the Mac version of that and the Excel for that, and also just for Excel on the web.

The Automate tab allows users to create Office scripts to automate tasks in Excel. You might say, “Well, that sounds a lot like a macro.” It is, but the Office scripts are more powerful than macros in that you can use JavaScript and also access the Internet. Which means you can do things like write a script that goes out and communicates with ChatGPT or the GPT engine, so you can pull in information or analysis that way. She walks through an example and shows how it works, which is what she does, on a monthly basis, shows you how to do something.

Then Wesley, for his, if you ever looked at your desk setup, which I’m doing right now, and wonder, “You know, there’s probably a better way I could set this up,” Wesley has some ideas for you. He has four tips to improve your work experience.

He covers monitor arms, a vertical mouse – well, actually two vertical mice – a mechanical keyboard, and an outlet tower. He describes how they work, what they do. He describes how weird it was at first to do a vertical mouse, which I can’t even imagine, but now he likes it a lot better. There’s photos from his setup at his office, so you can see two different vertical mice – they look like these really fancy joysticks for a game system – and his monitor arms. You can really control the height; they’re very flexible. The mechanical keyboard is interesting because you can set it basically to react and sound differently, almost like a typewriter if you’d like that. He just likes it. He likes the response, and it helps him with his work, and he’s at his computer all the time. Then the outlet tower is just a cool way to plug in all the stuff he has on his desk.

Amato: The vertical mouse – as an aficionado of the Atari and ColecoVision era of video games – the idea of having a joystick as a replacement for a mouse, just, I don’t know, it’s really intriguing.

Drew: Yeah, it’s almost more like, you remember when we were growing up and you go through the arcade like at the mall?

Amato: Yes, I do.

Drew: They had some of the games with the really big joysticks where you put your hand on it and it almost had grooves for your fingers? It’s almost like that, except it’s not attached to anything. They’re interesting to look at. It’s worth going in there just to see the picture. It’s something space-age.

Amato: Yeah. So that’s a wireless setup?

Drew: Yeah.

Amato: Oh wow. Yeah. That’ll be a fun read. Again, we’ll have links for the issue, for the individual articles, on journalofaccountancy.com, the magazine page, and you can also scroll down and read the latest issue as Jeff described. Jeff, anything else you’d like to add in closing? I really appreciate this rundown of the issue.

Drew: No, it’s nice to talk about the Journal of Accountancy flipbook on the Journal of Accountancy podcast.

Amato: There’s some branding.

Drew: Yeah. In case you’re wondering, you are listening to the Journal of Accountancy podcast, which is brought to you by the Journal of Accountancy, which is where Neil and I have worked for a decade.

Amato: Yeah. That’s good.

Drew: And yes, I am trying to make Neil laugh on his podcast. This is what happens when you bring on people who have worked together for 10 years and have known of each other for 30. I was at (North Carolina) State and he was at (North) Carolina at the same time, a long time ago and we were both in sports and we had heard of each other. We never really officially met until years later. Now we’re on a podcast talking about accounting with the Journal of Accountancy. On the Journal of Accountancy podcast.

Amato: Brought to you by the Journal of Accountancy.

Drew: Yep.

Amato: Jeff, thank you. This has been great. To the listeners, thank you for continuing to come back for another episode. We invite you to share, follow, write us a review, give us a rating. It’s been awhile since we’ve had a written review on Apple Podcasts. I believe it was about 13 months ago. We’d love to hear from you if you’ve got any questions. Leave it on your favorite platforms.

Drew: Any critiques of the guest.

Amato: Yeah, any critiques of the guest.

Drew: The quality of the jokes made by the editor-in-chief.

Amato: Yeah, jeff.drew@aicpa-cima.com.

Drew: You can send those directly to me, or you can send story ideas, any thoughts on the flipbook. In all seriousness, I do want to say thank you to all the listeners of this podcast. It is amazing that we’ve gone over one million downloads, which is a credit to the JofA brand, to the amazing job that you have done, Neil, and to a great listener base. Thank you so much to everyone.