ChatGPT and AI for Accountants

---

ChatGPT and AI for Accountants

• 03 August 2023
• Mark Wickersham

Introduction

ChatGPT is the latest buzzword, and for good reason. This powerful new tool has the potential to streamline your workflow, increase productivity, and set you miles ahead of the competition.

The accounting industry is constantly evolving, and it’s essential to embrace new technologies and stay ahead of the curve.

Understandably, you may be a little wary of AI. It has sparked a lot of concern about job security, leaving many accountants and bookkeepers wondering if they are going to be replaced by machines... That will only be true for those who do not change and adapt.

AI offers a huge opportunity for accountants and bookkeepers. ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer) is an artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI and launched on November 30, 2022.

ChatGPT will enhance your role, enabling you to focus more on value-added services to become truly indispensable to your clients.

We will focus on the strengths and limitations of ChatGPT, explain the importance of crafting the best prompts, and share ideas on how ChatGPT can help grow your accounting firm right now.

History of ChatGPT

ChatGPT is a large language model developed by OpenAI – an artificial intelligence research organisation founded in December 2015.

GPT-3 was released in June 2020, and it quickly gained attention for its impressive capabilities.

ChatGPT was released for public use in November 2022. By December 2022 it had amassed over 100 million users, making it the world’s fastest-growing platform, beating the previous champion, TikTok, by a landslide. The new and improved model, GPT-4, was launched in March 2023.

It is designed to understand and generate human-like text, making it useful for a wide range of applications. It has been trained on a vast dataset containing diverse text sources such as websites, books, and articles up until September 2021. Any information made available after September 2021 is not known by ChatGPT as it is not connected to the internet.

In January 2022, Microsoft invested a whopping $10 billion into OpenAI and has since incorporated the ChatGPT tech into their search engine Bing – making it a huge competitor for Google.

Big benefits

Think of ChatGPT as your personal assistant, but one with almost all the knowledge of the internet, who can complete tasks for you in seconds, and who’s available around the clock.

Its most significant benefits is the ability to save you huge amounts of time. It can complete tasks much faster than a person, thereby increasing your workflow, your productivity levels and your ability to focus on the important tasks. By automating time-consuming activities, you can dedicate more time to client relationships and strategic decision-making.

Another advantage of ChatGPT is its excellent writing ability. Accountants and bookkeepers are numbers experts, but when it comes to writing, some of us aren’t as confident.

The power of AI and ChatGPT for accountants will be covered in a webinar where we will explore the big benefits of ChatGPT.  We will share three critical uses of ChatGPT to save precious hours each week.

Major limitations

There are five major limitations of ChatGPT and it’s crucial that you’re aware of them.

ChatGPT’s current knowledge cut-off date is September 2021, and as a result, its understanding of the world and the information it can provide is only as current as the data it was last trained on. That means if you try to ask it about the weather last week, it’s not going to be able to give you an accurate answer.

ChatGPT is also developing rapidly and keeping track of the changes to its capabilities can be tricky. It is continuously learning and evolving. New features are added continuously, and it can be overwhelming to decipher which features are going to help you, and how to get the most out of them.

During the upcoming webinar we will examine the five major limitations in detail to understand ChatGPT’s weaknesses. You will hear the embarrassing case of a professional service firm that may get sued for negligence from an over-reliance on ChatGPT.

Prompt engineering

When it comes to ChatGPT, the quality of the answer you receive relies on the quality of the prompt you feed it. “Put garbage in, and you’ll get garbage out”, the saying goes.   

If your prompts are weak, the responses will be vague and not very useful. The more specific your prompts are,  the better your responses will be. Engineering a great prompt is a skill that you need to master in order to get the full benefits from ChatGPT.

When you teach ChatGPT all about your personal brand and writing style it will imitate your style when creating content for you. Without proper guidance on your brand, audience, or style, the content ChatGPT generates is going to be bland and nondescript.

In the upcoming webinar you will learn how to craft prompts to get started, as well as some high-level tips.

Growing your firm

ChatGPT can be overwhelming if you do not know where to begin or what it can do.  

If you want to grow your firm ChatGPT can help you to brainstorm ideas and can give you inspiration and a fresh perspective. You can use it for targeted research. You can find answers much faster than typing your questions into a search engine and scrolling through pages of unrelated articles until you can patch together what you need to know.  

ChatGPT can quickly create content marketing material that will speak to your ideal client.

The webinar will demystify this new tool and help you create valuable prompts to use immediately that will help you grow your accounting firm.  

Closing Thoughts

ChatGPT is a very new tool, and as powerful as it is, we know it has its bugs and limitations.

Be cautious when using it, and always review the content it produces before using it in any way to make sure you have the correct information and that everything reads well and is in the right tone for your business.

You can consider ChatGPT to be a virtual assistant or employee – you still have to speak to it, work with it, and train it to get the most out of it, but it’s going to take a lot of work off your plate and help increase productivity in the long run.

This tool is a total game-changer for accountants and bookkeepers, and it’s going to make such an impact on your business.

Next Steps

If you want to learn more about how accountants can harness the power of AI and ChatGPT in their firms, check out my FREE eBook: ChatGPT for Accountants and Bookkeepers.

I also highly recommend you join our Facebook community, AI and ChatGPT for Accountants and Bookkeepers to stay up to date on the latest AI and ChatGPT news and updates as it affects the accounting industry.

About Mark Wickersham

Mark Wickersham – Chartered Accountant, public speaker, and #1 bestselling author – is known as the most sought-after profit improvement expert in the accounting community. He is famous for helping accounting firms double their profits in less than 18 months without having to work harder or do any uncomfortable marketing.

Mark is also a widely published author on practice issues. In May 2011 his first book, “Effective Pricing for Accountants”, was a number 1 Amazon bestseller. His other books include, “A Practical Approach to Value Pricing”, “How to Build a Successful Bookkeeping Business”, “Price: The fastest way to change profits”, and his most recent work, “Value Pricing for Accounting Professionals”. He has also co-authored “Your Blueprint for a Better Tax Practice” and “Your Blueprint for a Better Accountancy Practice”, both of which have been widely acclaimed. 

0 COMMENTS

LEAVE A COMMENT