JofA highlights: Tackling accounting’s talent shortage, ChatGPT tips

Hosted by Neil Amato

September 19, 2024

Jeff Drew, the JofA’s editor-in-chief, is the guest on today’s episode, the 400th in the history of the JofA podcast. He’s recapping for listeners some of the top articles of the summer and looking ahead to content in future issues.

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 reviews or previews coverage on numerous topics, including the retirement of AICPA & CIMA CEO Barry Melancon, CPA, CGMA.

Resources

September JofA: HTML version | Flipbook

Articles (HTML links)

How academia is tackling the accounting talent shortage

Rewriting accounting’s employment narrative

Taxation of influencers: Gifts with strings attached?

Using ChatGPT-4o with Excel

Using ChatGPT to build a standard operating procedure

Summer feature articles

Technology Q&A

Professional Liability Spotlight

IRS funding and a potential rise in malpractice claims

Issue links:

August HTML | Flipbook

July HTML | Flipbook

June HTML | Flipbook

Podcast episodes:

Barry Melancon part 1

Barry Melancon part 2

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:

The “incredible range of backstories” in an article focusing on sole practitioners and sole proprietors.
The focus of several recent Technology Q&A articles.
Highlights of a summer Professional Liability Spotlight article.
The link between Barry Melancon and Muhammad Ali.
A preview of the October digital edition of the JofA.

— 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: Hey, me again. Neil Amato with the Journal of Accountancy. Welcome back to the JofA podcast. The purpose of this episode is reflection and also a focus on the future. Our guest is going to guide that look back and look ahead. That guest: one of two people in the history of the show to be a repeat guest and repeat host. Who is it? Find out after our sponsor message.

I said it earlier, one of two people in the history of the JofA podcast to be a repeat host and repeat guest is joining us. Who is it? It’s Jeff Drew, the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Accountancy.

For those who’ve listened closely over the years, you may know who the other repeat guest and repeat host is. It’s Tax Section colleague April Walker, who as host of the Tax Section Odyssey podcast, has been the person asking questions on JofA/Tax Section Odyssey collaboration episodes, but also has been the one answering them more than once.

Today is historic for one other reason; this is our 400th episode. We’d like to thank you, the listeners, for coming back week after week. Your interest in the show definitely keeps us going. Now without further ado, here’s Jeff Drew. Jeff, happy to have you back on the podcast. Thanks for being here.

Jeff Drew: It’s great to be back on the show with you, Neil.

Amato: Well, good. Summer officially ends Sept. 22. This episode is our official end-of-summer look back, but also our look ahead to fall. First, we’re going to hit on some highlights of summer coverage in the Journal of Accountancy, going to talk about some of the solid performers and also some other reflections. Jeff, first, do you want to highlight content of note from the monthly issues over the summer?

Drew: Sure. We’ll start with the most popular of our cover stories from the summer, which is from our August issue. It is on single-owner firms. Whether you call them sole proprietors or sole practitioners, they’re a huge part of the profession. We want to shine a spotlight on them. We did an article, our writers, Anita Dennis and Sarah Ovaska, talked with solos, as we call them, firm owners who — some are sole practitioners, so it’s just them in the firm or maybe one staff person. A few others are what we call sole proprietors, which means they may have another CPA on staff, but they are the sole owner.

The article really showcases the diversity and the incredible range of backstories and areas of focus that these firm owners have. For example, we have one solo who is focused on mental health practitioners, another who calls herself a plug-and-play auditor. There’s one sole practitioner who has built his business over 30 years on relationships he made as a child while playing Little League baseball with other American expats living in Mexico City.

Two of his best clients came from connections he made from that team. At least one was a teammate. We also have a young woman who’s had her firm for almost 10 years but is now in the process of getting her CPA. She’s in the middle of taking the exams, and she’s looking to add that so she can add some services to it.

We have another solo practitioner who specializes in being an expert witness. That’s what he does. The stories are really cool, and we got really good reaction and play in social media and stuff from that article.

Amato: I’ll interrupt you briefly to say we will include links in the show notes for all the articles mentioned in this episode. I guess you have some others, maybe on the Tech Q&A front and maybe some other fronts.

Drew: Right. Tech Q&A, which is something I’ve been involved with since I started at the AICPA in 2011, it’s been the most popular column in the Journal of Accountancy the entire time I’ve been here, and it was before that as well. A couple things about Tech Q&A. It’s so popular that we post the individual items on the website, the HTML version of the magazine, we post them separately.

If there’s two items in the September Tech Q&A, on the website, they will be posted separately. In the flipbook or digital edition, which is the one that looks like a magazine you can flip through there, it’s still one entry like Tech Q&A, like it used to be in the print.

Amato: Those articles are popular. They’re popular in CPA Letter. In fact, this morning’s CPA Letter, we had a September Tech Q&A item on, I guess, the latest version of ChatGPT. We’ll have more on that to discuss.

Drew: When we talk about the September issue, we’ll talk about that one a little more, but over the summer with Tech Q&A, the most popular article, and we track the traffic on everything like everybody else does, but the most popular article for each month actually was a Tech Q&A item. For example, in June, Kelly Williams, who is our Excel writer, wrote one on how to find errors in Excel formulas. That is the second most popular article overall since June 1 among our monthly articles, our flipbook articles. That one did really well.

She also had the most popular article in July, which was how to create a watermark in Excel, which is not as simple and straightforward as you might like it to be. The most popular article in August was from our other Tech Q&A writer, Wesley Hartman. He focuses on other Microsoft tools such as Teams. The article in August was getting more out of Teams with these five features. That was the most popular article. He also had one in July that was the fourth most popular article on four features for enhancing PDFs. Kelly had the fourth most popular article in August on how to identify and delete duplicates in Excel.

Then Wesley has also been doing articles with ChatGPT, doing walk-throughs on how to do certain things or put certain things together. For example, in June, he wrote one on how to build an HR guide with ChatGPT, which was something he thought would be useful from his time being the head of technology for a midsize firm in the Los Angeles area. He also has another one in the September issue where he talks about standard operating procedures using ChatGPT. That column has been really productive for us, and it does really well.

Another of our columns, Professional Liability Spotlight, produced a really popular article in August on how the increase in IRS funding is likely to lead to a rise in malpractice claims because, even though a lot of the money isn’t going directly to enforcement, it’s going to improving operations. Those improvements will make it more likely for the IRS to be able to find mistakes and errors and to send out more notices, and that could lead to people getting upset with their CPA firms and filing more malpractice claims.

Amato: Interesting tie-in there. Is there anything also, I guess, on the not-for-profit front?

Drew: Our July issue had a not-for-profit focus. There were articles on an overview of the landscape for not-for-profits right now. A lot of those are still recovering from the pandemic. There’s lot of post-pandemic challenges related to the fundraising and operations.

There’s also a more of a technical one on how to avoid deficient not-for-profit audits. The most popular of our not-for-profit stories in July was on how CPAs can benefit from joining a not-for-profit board and how to go about doing that. The most popular one this summer was actually from our August issue which was on the UBIT, applying the unrelated business income tax to not-for-profits, which can be really tricky. We have got a good article that goes through and explains different scenarios and situations.

Amato: One thing I wanted to ask you about, I guess it’s promoting this show on its own. But one of my highlights was the two-part interview that I got to do with Barry Melancon, the retiring CEO on the JofA podcast. You either sat in on some of those interviews or also heard them yourself. Anything, as Barry’s tenure as CEO winds down, that stood out to you that you’d like to go back to? And we’ll also link to those two episodes in the show notes.

Drew: Well, I would say that you and I have both spent a good amount of time with Barry on interviews since he announced his retirement. Really, I’ve learned all kinds of stuff from talking to him. And then we’re doing an article for the December issue that is a profile and farewell to Barry as he ends the longest tenure that anyone has ever had as the AICPA’s CEO. The article looks at how much the world has changed and the accounting profession has changed in the 29 years he’s been in office.

It also looks at just his unique career and how he always was very future-focused, always looked ahead, and always wanted to get to the future quickly. He skipped a grade in high school, he skipped a year in college. One of my favorite things from the podcasts — or maybe this was from the article you wrote when he retired, but either way — when he graduated from Nicholls State, he was inducted into the Hall of Fame at the same time — just blows my mind.

Amato: As a graduating senior.

Drew: As a graduating senior, yep. He’s always ahead of the game on stuff, and he was always very involved in leadership positions, even in school. He grew up in southern, rural Louisiana. He and his friends they might go camping and have to beat off snakes and alligators to get their campground OK. Then he’d go to school; he was at a new high school. He was part of the student government. They were going to have the first assembly for their school. At the time Muhammad Ali’s wife was from Barry’s hometown.

Barry and his colleagues in student government decided to try to invite Muhammad Ali, and sure enough he said yes, but then they had to convince the parish school board — and parishes down there are like counties in most states — that, because there were some parents who didn’t like Ali for various reasons. He didn’t want to serve in Vietnam, for example. But Barry worked out a compromise, basically said, “We should get him here.” Barry ended up being onstage while Muhammad Ali became the first speaker at this little high school in South Louisiana.

It just encapsulated to me the way he would find ways to get things done. He set a goal of being a CPA firm partner at age 25, and he did that. Then he became probably the youngest lead of the Louisiana society when he was 28, and then was 36 when he was hired as the AICPA CEO, and 37 when he officially started the job. The article will go into how he made a lot of big changes early, why he did that, and it gets into his legacy as well.

Amato: I think that’s a good look back and a good look ahead to specifically closer to the end of the year, the JofA coverage on Barry Melancon’s tenure and his impact. Let’s talk about the month we’re in right now, September. The September monthly issue is out. Some of the articles have been highlighted in our CPA Letter, but you have one we teased to and then some others maybe to bring up. What do you have?

Drew: We’ve got a couple of stories, including the most popular one of the summer and one of the two or three most popular ones of the year, based on the National Pipeline Advisory Group’s report on how to get more people coming into and staying in the accounting profession. There’s a couple of parts in the report that focused on the experience of accountants in the job, the employment experience, and then also the academic experience.

Our article on how academia is tackling the accounting talent shortage — that one has gotten picked up places and has been very popular, and we’ve gotten a lot of reaction to that. It looks at some of the programs that people have put in place at universities that are already showing results, like second-chance test-taking, expanded curricula, extra help for at-risk students, and more. The early results are encouraging.

Along the same lines, we look at the employment experience both at firms and in finance departments, and we look at changes that are being done to improve the employee experience and create more career accountants. We talked to several people. Andrew Kenney was our writer on these articles. We’re making progress — at least that’s what the early indications are, so hopefully that will continue.

Also in September we have a fun article which is on the taxation of influencers, who are the social media types who get products and sponsorship money for basically having a lot of followers and then guiding them or convincing them to try certain products like “drink this soda.”

I’m not exactly the core audience. I’m not an influencee, but I do know the influencers are a big deal, from my children. The taxation issues for influencers are actually kind of tricky. Our headline is “Taxation of Influencers: Gifts With Strings Attached?” It’s an interesting read, especially if you are in the tax side or you know anyone under the age of 40.

Then our Tech Q&A, which is a theme for this episode is Tech Q&A. We’ve got the two ChatGPT-related items. The one I mentioned earlier on using ChatGPT to build a standard operating procedure is Wesley Hartman’s contribution. The other one is Kelly Williams went and played with the relatively new, just a few months, ChatGPT-4o, the letter “o” for “omni.”

This one is a step forward for ChatGPT because you can actually get it to do things within applications such as Excel. In the article, Kelly does a lot of things within Excel and just asks basically ChatGPT to do it and to provide the coding or the instructions. It’s really very interesting, and she just keeps going step-by-step until the end is doing an entire tax analysis that she just kept going with it.

It’s interesting to see the potential of it. You have to be careful with ChatGPT. Obviously, you can’t just take anything that it puts out and just run with it. You have to check everything, you have to use your professional judgment, but it does do some cool stuff, and Kelly walks through those in the September Tech Q&A.

Amato: That’s great. We’ll have a link to that September page, again, with many other links to content we’ve mentioned. Jeff, looking ahead to the fall, there’s also obviously the successor to Barry Melancon, that news coming up. Is there anything else you’d like to add in closing to this end-of-summer episode?

Drew: The October issue lineup is set. That is on the page, so to speak. It’s our corporate finance focus issue and management accounting. Our lead article is on the skills that management accountants or CPAs in businesses and industry need to have and how to upskill or reskill.

It’s a very thorough look at all kinds of skills, from technical skills to technology skills to what we call human skills, which are emotional intelligence but also some of the soft, what have been traditionally called soft skills. That’s a good one.

We also have an article that takes up 22 pages because of all the screenshots. It’s a pretty amazing piece on how to use the AI in, this will be the Copilot in Power BI, Microsoft’s Power BI, to save hours upon hours in doing analyses by using the AI and some of the features within Copilot.

The walk-through in the article shows how to do a root-cause analysis to find the culprit for a big drop in revenue in a product line for a grip-making company for golf clubs and tennis rackets and stuff. But it shows how to do it. It shows a bunch of different things you can do within Copilot, within Power BI, and it gives step-by-step. I thought was really cool stuff. I would definitely encourage people to check that out.

And in Tech Q&A, Kelly Williams has got an article on how to do 10 different types of Excel charts. She walks through and shows 10 different types of charts and how to use them.

Amato: Wow, yeah, that’s a lot of stuff, a lot of education and coverage of trends for the members. Jeff, thanks. I don’t have anything else, but great to have you back on the show.

Drew: Thanks for having me. It’s always good to hear your voice, Neil.

Amato: Thank you.