.

Or use the below podcast player to listen:

Transcript (Note: There may be typos due to automated transcription errors.)

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  00:00

Welcome to the accounting Technology Lab, sponsored by CPA practice advisor, with your hosts, Randy Johnston and Brian Tankersley.

Randy Johnston  00:10

welcome to the accounting Technology Lab. I’m Randy Johnston with co host Brian Tankersley, we have been on the road for you, and we want to talk about some of those events. And in this session, we’re going to cover the CCH user connection conference of 2024 now I’m fortunate enough I have attended every single cch user conference, and this year’s version, I think, was one of the better ones I’ve been to in a while. Not that any of the CCH user conferences are bad, per se, but it seems like every session I walked into, it’s like I’m learning something new. So that was a pretty good deal, as I saw it. Brian presented sessions and attended, and I did, too. And you know, in the big picture, it is such a pleasure to see so many cch users and talk to them about their experience on the platform now, Brian, I know you got to spend a little bit more time on the floor than I did, and there were some notable marketplace announcements that were done by cch. Can you talk to our listeners about those today? Yes.

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  01:15

So cch really has, has expanded their expanded their partnerships with other folks, and I think you’ll see this with with some of the other vendors as well when we get to their conferences in future episodes. But we noted that they picked up audit minor, Abdo compass, vinograph and ignition to again, that to have some integrations with have integrations with the with the access suite. And they also, they also included some service providers protection plus right works, Eric does data and rare karma also as part of this. So they, you know, they’re, I think everybody started to realize that the major innovation in in technology these days, you know, they’re, they’re, they’re evolutions taking place inside the big vendors, but, but the really outer space stuff is coming from, is the moonshot stuff is coming from the startups, okay? And so, you know, that’s why, for example, audit miners there. I mean, they’ve rethought the whole thing around, around how to do a 401, K audit, you know, how to do these limited scope DOL benefit plan audits and and people are really making that work for them. And so, you know, instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, they partnered with them. And I think audit minor actually has partners with, partnerships with both cch and Thompson, you know, and but, but again, I it was nice to see all those folks there, I think, you know, in addition to them, you know, there were some existing folks there. I believe, I believe, Empire suite, you know, WSG systems was there, the skit, the the scheduling and and time off tracking folks that that have such a great tool. And, you know, I actually talked to talk to bill for a while, the CEO of WSG, about their tax scheduling product in particular at there. And, you know, there’s just a lot of, there’s a lot of interesting stuff going on in the profession. I will say that that again. They cch had another, had another AI based base showcase that I spent quite a bit of time in. They actually had a preview where I was there, and then a few people from some other consultants were there. I think Sandra Wiley from Boomer, and some other folks over there. But I just generally we, we talked quite a bit about, you know, they talked to us quite a bit about what we were seeing, and what the impact of private equity was, and, and and other things like that. And it was quite interesting to see how APIs have become, have become to the fore here. So you know, for especially for our listeners that are bigger firms, the ability to do integrations with APIs is, is something that everybody is talking about a whole lot more, because it’s, it’s something that’s in there. So

Randy Johnston  04:13

you know on that, thank you for that, too. Sorry to interrupt you there, Brian, but I was thinking back on the partners. You know, I talked to Jeff kupiec, a pro staff as well. And you and I think each walk through all of those vendors. I also found another dashboard vendor, but you and I,

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  04:28

Jeff? Was it? Jeff was at Synergy, but he wasn’t at cch, was he? He was

Randy Johnston  04:32

and I did, yeah, exactly. I thought maybe you had, and that’s why I called him out. But also, there was a new dashboard vendor there that I had not met before. I mean, I knew the people, but I didn’t know the product. And so that will cover all of these things in separate episodes. And I wanted to mention that audit minor we have covered in a separate Technology Lab. Further, Brian got the executive briefing. That’s what he’s really referring to right now, I was speaking for a conference, so I. Couldn’t be at the executive brief, and I was sad about that. But the AI demonstrations this year were even better than the ones from last year. Of course, they do have aI released in some of the products with answer connect, as well as some of the new firm intelligence pieces that they’ve put in place. And they were demonstrating prototypes of audit AI and pieces as well. So I did go through also the entire AI demonstration, as you did, Brian. And frankly, the future’s brighter on these big boys, but to take the other big, big suppliers, but remember, we are asking you to think about your firm. Are you a one sweet shop where you work all with Wk cch, or Thompson Reuters, or are you a best of breed shop? And you are correct that a lot of the super innovation at the edge is coming with these, you know, one of a kind startups, just like we’ll talk in the Thompson Reuters synergy lab about the materia acquisition, and we’ve done a separate lab on materia. So I’m just watching all this maneuvering in the marketplace, but not only the startups, but also the private equity place that are taking place. And you know, this is a difficult time to navigate, and one of the things that I did with this year’s user conference was direct, one on one conversations at length with many of my clients. Those who are listening will know exactly who I’m talking about. But also with Wk employees like Brian diffen, who’s, you know, really long term relationship, but very, very has a lot of influence inside the the organization, but we want to make sure that you understand that I think we saw more innovation in Wk this year than I’ve seen in a while. That might have been pandemic delayed. It might have been, who knows, but the access tax session that I sent in with Frank was just stunningly well done.

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  06:59

Yeah, I agree, I agree. And I probably overstated the innovation for the evolution versus revolution there, because again, there are, there are a lot of things that they’re doing that are that are really big, but what they’re doing is they’re more completing the vision of the access suite. And you know, I like the stuff they’re doing with smaller firms, where they’re, they have the bundles for for access tax, for smaller firms, you know, they’re, they’re doing, you know, they’re, they’re, the things they’re doing are really finishing out things, as opposed to, you know, stuff that just comes out of left field, like the statement ingestion and the SAT the SOC two SOC two spreadsheets that that that audit miner has, and some of those things like that. So it’s, it’s been a it’s been pretty interesting,

Randy Johnston  07:52

yeah. And in fact, your your attitude around that, Brian, and again, we try to be very factual here in the lab with you. And, you know, try not to have a lot of hyperbole. There’s plenty of sales pitches that are over the top, but here’s a case where, you know, a lot of the things that we’ve seen the promise of are finally getting delivered. Yeah, and that’s really, you know, your completeness statement there is really kind of spot on, as I’d see it. Now, are we going to cover every little thing that we need in firms? No, but are a lot of things getting bleeding. I’ll just pick on the, you know, brilliant AI teams for Wk out of Europe that are really helping fill out these things, or the initial delivery of the access engagement. And, you know, I can just keep going, but, you know, I know the things that we saw in or you saw in the executive briefing, and we both saw in the AI briefings were really quite worth our time.

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  08:47

Yeah, so, so this is just kind of a diagram that presents the vision for, I guess, to integrate content and and the applications through the CCH access suite. And this is kind of their their true north slide to kind of describe the the different, the different things here. Notice that they are, they are not saying that cch access is the only piece of your suite of applications you’re going to be using. So notice they’re, they’re trying to be open with APIs and marketplace solutions. And I think that is a welcome change. Or, you know, access has always been open, but it, but the, it’s a this emphasizing of this is a welcome change in that we’ve got, you know, there’s just too many people doing too many different things in the accounting profession for one provider to solve every single thing the way everybody wants to do it. And so it’s a it’s good that they’ve got the APIs and everything in here. Now, when we let’s see here, let’s let me get to our next slide in here. One of the things they they talked about pretty extensively with cch access, firm intelligence, and this brings data in from all the other cch access. Applications. What’s different this year is that, again, remember, they’ve got, they’ve got these huge applications they have to write to. And so there’s the technical complexity of bringing some of this stuff to life. Is is much more than we’ve than we’re acknowledging here, because they’re, you know, they’re, they’re solving for battleships instead of, instead of, you know, tug instead of tugboats or something. But I will just say that most of the things that they talked about in this in this session, were were in active development, as opposed to last year. They were just kind of proofs of concept. They’re using large language models in Azure for some tasks. Okay, and so this means that the way they’re doing this is there’s no training with your data, and there’s no cross pollinating, okay, so they’re taking an approach similar to the one we talked about in previous labs, about about the Microsoft 365 co pilot, and kind of how it handles data, where it just has access to the things it has access to, for the queries for that individual. Again, they can only retrieve the things they can see through those access lists. So you can take those access control lists that you have and then go, then again, use those with this. It also uses some Azure pieces, again, similar to 365, like I said. And again, it ingests the data, scans, it extracts it, and they purge the model. So, so this is a place where we can use AI, in my opinion, from from what I understand here, it appears to be very safe and very protective of the confidentiality of the data. And that’s something that’s, you know, that’s met, that’s that has to be done with all of these things. And unfortunately, it doesn’t look like that’s something that’s being done everywhere. So, yeah,

Randy Johnston  11:41

you’re spot on on that. Brian, Spot spot on because being able to keep confidential, sorry, client data confidential, very got it out is critical, and we believe Wk is doing that. We believe Microsoft is doing that. So even though there’s other great, large language models out there, perplexity.ai, or Claude or chat, GPT, which now we’re only recommending the $30 team enterprise version instead of the $20 or free versions because of data protections. You know, those are still pretty much in play. But Wk team, they get it, and they are executing on it, which is what I like. So not only do they have leverage against copilot in their platforms, which they also said that by the end of 2025, that they would deliver a lot of the copilot integrations, which today, as of the day we’re recording this, they didn’t have those, but also within their own systems, the private AI models. Big deal here. Big, big deal.

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  12:46

Yeah, yeah. And, and, you know, get very impressed with that. I’m sure Brian diffin had some insights on that for you that you may or may not be able to share. I always love talking to him, because he’s, he’s always got the, you know, the satellite view of what’s going on. And then he’s, he’s like a spy satellite, you know, he can look at the whole thing from outer space, and then if you want to drill down into any individual thing, it’s amazing. The things that he can, he can explain to you at a technical level and make it make sense anyway, the so this is their vision for how generative AI is going to get applied. So there’s going to be a lot of general AI like chat GPT and Claude, you know. And I’ll tell you that I use, I’m starting to use now when I do writing, I’m starting to use chat GPT and as well as, as well as co pilot to do the first draft of most non technical memos, okay? Or most non technical documentation, okay? And so the idea here is to get a good start without having to expend a whole lot of effort. And so yeah, and

Randy Johnston  13:52

Brian, you’re right on that piece. And in fact, you know, I have told people for two years I don’t use Google or DuckDuckGo searches anymore, but I actually am starting my searches in most cases now with perplexity.ai but what I liked about cch is Walters, cluers approach on this is they called Chat, GPT Claude, and they probably would have called perplexity general AIS, whereas they said Microsoft copilot became a productivity AI, and that in their when they showed that model in their triangle, and then their applications for cch access for industry. Ai, so think about it, General. Ai, productivity. Ai, industry. AI, I think we’re going to write CPA materials in the coming year, using that as a pretty good structure, because we’ve been talking about models running on cloud and on desktop and laptops. That’s why we’ve been asking you to buy neural processing units and on smartphones which all have neural processing units. So you’ve had these different size models. And as you know. Ryan, because you you’ve seen me morph on this. We’ve gone from four language models that we’re talking about to five with the new one supporting robotics. And so, you know these the thinking here is evolving rapidly, and what I feel good about is that the WK team is being quite intelligent about how they’re choosing to use AI while protecting data. And

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  15:23

what I think is fascinating about how the industry is addressing this is, if you look at the industry, AI up here, they are intentionally setting it up to be smaller than than the general AI, the productivity. AI, because you have to be right, okay, and they have to be right. And so that’s part of why you haven’t seen the AI come out as fast out of these folks, because they’ve got to get their models tuned. You know, you can, you can accept that chat. GPT, you know, if you ask it to run a bio on me, it’ll tell you, in the past, it’s told me that I was adjuncts at four different universities that I never set foot in. Okay? That kind of hallucination is acceptable in something that you’re going to prove okay, but when you get into technical things, it has to be right the first time, and so this, and it also has to, has to keep the confidentiality of the data and the information you fed into it such that it has to learn it and then unlearn it every session so that it doesn’t, it doesn’t remember that confidential stuff and then potentially share it. So, so as we, as we think about this industry, AI, you know, I like the fact also that it is the peak of this, because it is the most important part of of what they’re doing, and it is the most important part to the profession, and it is the part that uniquely they only can do. You know, they see a role for copilot and Claude with general correspondence and summarization of meetings and things like that. But I like that they’ve got the industry AI up there to do those things that will maintain confidentiality and eliminate hallucination,

Randy Johnston  17:04

yeah, and so Brian to stay in along this point to a degree, the AI usage inside the Walters Kluwer platform is very focused and right, you know, I know You covered for me in Tennessee, you know, a month or so ago, but I was speaking in Tennessee this week, and we were talking about errors made on tax law when using these general AIS, and the attendees were talking about it, and I said, Well, look, I’ve actually with some intent, poisoned chat GPT by feeding it Tennessee law and then having it come back and incorrectly reporting things. And it was like, oh. And then I checked it a few weeks later and it was still wrong, because the data that I’d been had put in had been incorporated in the model. It’s like, wait a minute, these big boys shouldn’t allow this data poisoning to occur. So your point to being right, that is part of the deal here that you’re getting with the background content and answer connect, perhaps, or in the systems themselves.

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  18:17

And that’s why chat GPT is $30 a month and copilot is $30 a month, and the industry AI is more expensive because they have a narrower market to sell it to, and they still have to build their own model, and their own model has to both be right and incorporate fact specific data at a higher level. And so it’s, it’s, you know, nobody’s doing this for free. So it’s a it’s a challenge here now for the firm intelligence, the this is this, again, their vision here is that they’re going to have automation of insights, analytics and a conversational interface to do things. So it’s going to incorporate firm guidance, like the like the audit guidance, and, again, things related to the firm’s historical data, client relationship assistance, like composing emails and messages and other things like that, benchmarking guidance. Or you can compare, you can compare to things based on industry data, both the firm as well as clients, and then a schedule optimizer. Okay, and so these are the, these are the exercises that were part of this, of this, of this thing, you know, these to

Randy Johnston  19:27

your point, on those. Brian, last year, those were shown as prototypes. This year, they were shown as working and new ones. Oh, and they did, yeah, and I was, I played with the scheduler. Enough, I said, this actually has some purpose. Is it perfect yet? Sure, it’s not. But is it good? Yeah, and so they’ve got a nice arc of where they’re going. So some of the new things that they were adding this year was the AI mapping of accounts for audits, and being able to do a little bit more of the. AI disclosures on a on the generator

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  20:04

and and that, that AI mapping is something that has been part of the vision. So this is one of the things that has been part of the vision of the access suite that that has that has taken a while to get done, but they have got it done, and it looks pretty amazing.

Randy Johnston  20:21

Yeah, it does. And that auto tie on audit work is another thing that was pretty, pretty interesting. Again, that was in prototype this year, but I can, I can see where they’re going and and what I was told, and I think it is believable, is it took a while to get the foundation built, and now that the foundation is built, we’re able to build more rapidly and through the years. Our friend and associate CPA, out of Nashville, will Perry, has often talked about, you know, if you watch a building being built, you got all that groundwork and engineering, and you build the foundations, and you don’t see anything coming up out of the building for a while, and then all of a sudden, up come the girders, and in the building, I think here it is, and that’s exactly where I think we’re at. I think the building’s coming up out of the ground right now Well,

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  21:08

and I don’t know that they haven’t topped out at this point. I think they’ve topped out, and they’re starting to finish out some of the, many of the things, you know. So so that, that little Christmas tree they put up at the top, when they top out the steel on a building I think is definitely up there. And I think they’ve probably got a third of the floors done anyway. And there’s the top third boy, it’s top two thirds boy. That’s going to be interesting. Now, by

Randy Johnston  21:31

the way, I’ll just say this for us, Brian and I, are speculating. We have no inside baseball. We’ll never, you know, violate an NDA. We do know some things under NDA, but we’d never violate those. But we also have not been told this is where we’re at. This is how much percentage complete we have, and all that. So that is our speculation based on being long term Walters, Kluwer watchers and, you know, advice givers, if you will. And I think Brian is right on the way he said it just for the record, Brian, I think you’re right.

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  22:06

Cool. Well, you know, it’s, it’s, I I think, I think everybody, everybody at all the conferences, trying to leave everybody wanting more. And I think they do want more, and I think they’re working very hard to deliver that more. So it’s going to be, it’s going to be quite an interesting thing. But they had, you know, you see, you can see some of the things in here, you know, again, the composing, the composing things, you know, I’ve noticed that my young staff that I work with seem to be weaker at writing than at original writing than in the past. So it’s this AI generation of emails and documents and things like that’s pretty is pretty helpful. AI mapping of accounts like we talked about, you know, having, having, having tools that will incorporate both firm guidance as well as as well as the practice, the guidance that you have out of your out of your research, the schedule optimizer we talked about the AI disclosure generator. This auto tie to auto work is actually pretty cool. It’s called teammate, document Linker. I’m going to play about a minute of this in here, and I’m sure they’ll I’m sure cch won’t mind this. But this is a YouTube video that actually goes in and again in and talks about and actually displays how this works. Now, the their product manager has this, but the concept here is that you take individual documents, and you take, you take, again, the purchase orders, the the the, I guess, the receiving reports and the invoices, and then you go in and it will create the links and identify where all these things are. So it’s going to, it’s going to extract from, from the PDFs of the the individual PDFs of the documents. It’s going to extract the relevant information. It’s going to populate it into Excel. It’s going to match the things up and then present them to you, for you to look at. And so,

Randy Johnston  23:59

so for our listeners on Apple podcasts, where you’re only on the audio side. We’re going to warn you that some of the things we’re talking about today might have been easier to see on the video side, on YouTube or some of our other distribution pieces, but the teammate, document, linker, video is worth seeing even if you have to search it out. So Brian, I think you’re probably ready to run that guy. Okay,

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  24:23

I got to do one. I just realized I got to do one thing here, share sound and have to optimize for video. Okay, now there we go, and here we go.

24:39

Now I need to tie those transactions back to supporting evidence. In this case, I want to agree each sample back to invoices and purchase orders, and I have requested those from my client. This is where teammate, document linker, comes in to dramatically speed up this process. First, I add the documents into two groups, one for invoices, one. And one for purchase orders.

25:10

Teammate, documentlinky uses AI powered vision technology to quickly and accurately extract all of the text from these documents, even if they’re scans or photos. Now I can use auto link to match the sample in Excel with the supporting evidence and create dynamic links between them.

25:39

I can then use these links to review and verify the matches. So it’s embedding with any items that did not match. So it’s embedding those documents the way I can create links manually, either to pieces of text, or I can mark an area on the document as verified or a potential anomaly. Let’s say I wanted to verify whether the invoice included tax or had been approved with the signature. The verification and anomaly links make this easy to keep my audit evidence together with the sampling work paper, I can choose to embed the documents in the Excel file and then add them all together in my working paper. Management Solution, cch Pro System, FX, engagement, cch, access, engagement, teammate, am teammate plus, or any other tool that supports Excel files. This makes documenting the work performed and keeping a robust audit trail simple and makes reviewing a breeze. Okay, so that makes documenting,

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  26:36

that’s the thing, I guess I wanted to share with it. I you know the thing, the thing that I thought that was so amazing about this was that, again, it went through and extracted all that information from the two source documents, the POS and the invoices. It it gave you a tool set for embedding the dot the the image documents within the within the spreadsheet. Now your firm might or might not want to include those, but it gives you a way to, you know, you, you know, some firms like to include the documentation. Some firms don’t. And so it gives you a way to handle all of those pieces. And again, you can see that it didn’t fill out everything in there. And so there’s still some work for the staff person to do, and there’s still some things that need to be, need to be cleaned up. But it did a bang up job of of going through and identifying, you know, doing the low hanging fruit, and handling the easy ones from, you know, using AI, and then the ones that need a little more looking, you know, we want to make sure that they’re right. And so we, you know, so we may have to go in and fill in some of those, some of those dots in there. So

Randy Johnston  27:41

we this the document linker we have covered in another technology lab, but the video here, I thought, was a better demonstration of the current capabilities. And for those of you that might be using alternate what performance were like, truly on or some of those, this is really a pretty well thought out approach, and it’s been evolving now over 14 to 15 months. So again, a very nifty tool.

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  28:13

Yeah, I actually talked to, I think Stefan is the guy that’s the product manager that’s in charge of this. And you know, it’s, I will tell you, the first time I saw this product, it absolutely made my head explode. But this is what I hoped AI would do when I was a new person in the profession, doing, doing work on five, 714, column paper with, with the 10 key adding machine and a pen tail pencil and, and I just, I got to say that, you know, the the satisfaction that your new auditors are going to get out of the profession, I assure you, is a whole lot more than I got back in 1992 when I had the privilege of footing the general ledger of Knox County, Tennessee. So, you know, it’s, it’s exciting stuff here, folks,

Randy Johnston  28:55

well, and Brian, I hadn’t heard the word pin tell in forever, and I have a flock of those here. In any case, I hadn’t even considered that. Now I know friends, this is a long session. Stay with us, because there’s a few more things we’d like to make sure you know from W K’s user conference, and the next is about their digital tax flow. So

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  29:19

with their digital text load. The The idea here is that you’re going to have an integrated suite that’s going to collect the data, do the onboarding, ingest the data, prepare, review the return, deliver the return, E, file it, and then you’re going to have advisory as part of it. And so the advisory piece is one of the things that I think everybody is focusing on in the accounting profession as we try to develop new revenue streams. And so the eight, you know, the they so what they’ve done is they announced, I guess, in October, the access tax updates, which include the AI powered research integration with cch answer, connect the API capabilities for data import. Seamless data import. Can. One functionality 1042, electronic filing. They have a solution for access beneficial ownership information. Now, again, as we record this, there has been in the last 48 hours, an injunction from a court in Texas that that has suspended, that has enjoined the I guess, that enjoined the government from from enforcing the need to file the boi information this year. We’re recording this on December 6. You need to pay attention to the news. You know, I went ahead and filed, and I probably think you ought to, but, but I think you need to watch the courts if you’re not going to file, because the penalties are $500 a day. They also So

Randy Johnston  30:42

Brian, if I could step in exactly right, I was going to recommend that also it’s $10,000 plus $591 a day for not filing and this particular injunction. And we could have a whole boi discussion, which we have in a separate lab. But the bottom line was, I don’t think the law was really structured to capture the money laundering and fraud. And it turns out the injunction was or the lawsuit was brought by an arms dealer selling into Mexico. So when you realize that, you know, most of the Mexican drug lords are getting their weapons from the United States, I thought that was one of those interesting, okay, and I looked at the jurisdiction of favorable jurisdiction too, and

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  31:26

it’s a and it’s a district court, and not A, not A Court of Appeals or the Supreme Court, okay? So it’s a nationwide dis, nationwide injunction from a district court which, which is always kind of

Randy Johnston  31:39

dicey, always dicey. So our advice still is and file those bois, because the alternative, when it comes live, is scrambling at the end, and I’m betting the systems won’t hold up to the scramble. Yeah,

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  31:53

okay, so, so now the firm management updates. They’ve they’ve added some OCR in Pro System FX again, with auto flow. They have, they’ve migrated. They’ve got some migration tools for access workflow again, which is the former xcm product that does and some new scheduling APIs and analytics in here. They’ve also expanded the Expat Tax offerings, including some new boi outsourcing services. So some people have said, Hey, I’m nervous about doing boi, and my malpractice doesn’t cover it. You know, this gives you an option to to ship it, to ship some of it to somebody else. Now you maybe you need to, you know, you still need to look at your malpractice and make sure you’ve got coverage. But it gives you a again, it gives you a solution to get that problem solved if you don’t want to mess with it. So there are some access firm management updates where they they updated with some enhanced tools and access client collaboration, including some integrations with access document and invoicing, two way messaging. Now in the taxpayer mobile app, they also added next generation browser based reports manager in it to make things a little bit better. You know, the reporting has always been something that that firms had to do some individualization on in that product. They also improved some billing features within practice with project based building is expect, is anticipated. And they said by 2025 so I would assume that means, that means sometime in early 2025 at the latest. Now you can see that when we get to digital audit flow, they’ve, again, they’ve, they’ve put quite a few, quite a few things in here. But again, the idea is that you’re going on board clients, set up your binder, you’re going to ingest the data, assess risk and plan audits, execute and perform field work, and then get to financial statement review and sign off, and then have finalized and flow here. Now, as we look at this workflow, notice that their vision is that you’re going to upload the trial balance, you’re going to they’re going to use the AI mapping of accounts, which is working today. You’re going to do the client tailoring, then you’re going to have the AI disclosure generator, generate the disclosures for you. You can also auto tie to the audit work. You saw that with the beat, with the teammate document Linker. You can also do link deep editing. Then you have an AI based disclosure checklist. Okay, and again, can I just say that the half inch thick, legal size financial statement exposure checklist for public companies was the bane of my existence for the couple of years that I was a senior associate, and I just have to tell you that it’s it’s so cool to see it going AI so that you can just react to it, as opposed to having to having delivery, smoke it, and then you could, again, you can go through and submit them for review. Now in the access audit platform here, they’ve, again, they’ve, they’re set it up to do multi user it so it so we people can work at the same time from different locations. They have automated ratio analysis to. Get your planning analytics and other things in there, correct contextual guidance to bring up junior staff. Because, again, with remote workers, it’s it’s hard sometimes to to watch, you know, to be able to look over your shoulder and tell somebody struggling with something and have them reach out and get help with it. They’ve also expanded the CCH access validate product, to bring in bank statements for fully automated bank confirmation processes. And they’ve they’ve enhanced accuracy and risk reduction through the elimination of some of the manual, time consuming methods that it took to do things. They’ve created a more modern user interface and increased automation. They’ve got some better Trial Balance reports and some highly customizable templates and some micro learning tutorials. Okay, so they’ve gotten quite a bit done. Now, what we want to call out here, though, is that there are still, you know. So want to kind of let you know here, because the access engagement product has been a, you know, this has been one of the things that, you know, where, where we where they have, it’s, it’s taken a long time to get it to the right point, okay? And this is a, again, this is a fairly complex thing, but as we look at this, these are the things they released, okay? So I’ve got the features listed in November and May, and the things they released in August, and then the things they released in again, in November of 24 and so they’re making, they’re making great, great progress on here. I will say that, you know, again there, there’s still some things that that they need to get for some users, okay, so, like folks doing governmental, there’s still some things that that they’re going to that they may need. Now this is the the product manager actually presented this during a session on access engagement. The stuff on the left here is most of it is under active development. That is the the things that they’re that they’re planning on adding, and so, you know, fund trial balances, again, are coming in the first half of 2025 and so that’s why I said what I did about governmental because again, getting the, getting that, getting those things set up so that they’ll, they’ll handle all the trial balances, and everything is, is a problem right now. That’s, that’s, that’s a challenge. And

Randy Johnston  37:18

Brian just a social comment that most of the audit platforms from most the competitors. Governmental doesn’t arrive until 2025 on the new generation stuff. That’s kind of the status of that.

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  37:29

And let’s be honest, governmental is hard, okay? I mean, it’s hard because there’s, it’s, it’s not everybody, and it’s, there’s just so much weirdness in it with the different basis of accounting and and, you know, the account groups and that kind of stuff. And it’s just, it’s just oddball, okay, and so, but, but I’m mentioning that because governmental is one of the areas where, where, where auditors are still doing big business. And so we just have to kind of acknowledge that in here and governmental

Randy Johnston  37:59

has become far more profitable in the last two years from an audit perspective, which is also good. So one other thing I am just going to call out there is a migration planning tool from cch engagement to access engagement. We are broadly recommending you run that right now whether you’re going to migrate or not, because it will tell you what in your binders is compatible with the new generation platform and what is not. And just like when access was released, there was a migration planning tool that Brian and I helped design. This tool we’ve only done a little bit of review on, but it’s a bloody good tool, and I would recommend that you get that it runs locally on your desktop or in your servers, and it will tell you exactly what works and what doesn’t. And the presentation on the migration tool, I sat in with the guy who manages that as well, and Mustafa was really, gosh, it was a great presentation. Oh,

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  39:00

that guy’s that guy’s amazing. Yes, yeah. And so anyway, we’ve listed out some of the things here. So you may want to get into the YouTube video that that’ll be linked from the CPA practice advisor website. If you’re listening to this on audio, if you want to see what some of the things that are coming are and what’s kind of the timing is on some of those things so you can make a better decision. This, again, was part of that session that was at the conference. Okay. Anyway, now the the boi, when we get to the boi reporting, the application is available from cch. At this time, the speaker reported that some malpractice carriers are covering and some are not. They cited a on and Cameco, maybe not all products that they have covered boi but, but they at least have products available that include boi products. So you’re going to want to check everybody’s going to want to check their policies. Like Randy said, The deadlines are crazy. I mean, the deadlines are coming. Up short, coming up very soon, and the penalties are crazy. So you know you want, you’re going to want to get these taken care of. Also, Expat Tax will do the outsourced prep and filing. So, and I’ve got, I’ve got a link here this CPA tech is my URL shortener, CPA te.ch and so there is a they’ve actually listed some boi resources, and I’ve linked those at CPA, te.ch, forward slash, CC, H, boi two. And that’s a, again, that’s a URL shortener like Bitly that I maintain on my web server, just to handle those things. There was also a lot of discussion about, this is our last slide. This is a lot of discussion about answer connect and the generative AI features that they’re, again, that they’re that they’re working on within there, as well as they announced an advanced virtual agent that’s going to that’s going to help out with customer support and other things like this. So, you know, again, the general thing that I would just say is that cch is moving forward there. They’ve done some pretty amazing things. You know, I think that, in particular, that teammate, document, linker is is one of the coolest products I’ve seen in a long time. I know they’ve had it out there for a year, but it’s, you know, the people I’ve talked to that are using it, are pretty impressed with it, you know, I think they’re, they’re moving forward. And again, they’re, they they had APIs before everybody else had APIs. And their, you know, their access product stack all has APIs in it. And so it’s a, you know, it’s, I think it’s, I think they’re very well positioned to help professionals move forward in this strange new world we find ourselves in. Yeah.

Randy Johnston  41:49

So as you can hear, friends and listeners, Brian and I were pretty impressed with the four days of cch user conference, and we’ve summarized what would be 1000s of dollars of admissions and and presentations for you in this period. We know your time is valuable. We appreciate you listening in, and we’ll talk to you again soon in another technology lab. Good day.