How To Create Your Own AI Based Accounting System with ChatGPT

At the end of 2022 OpenAI released ChatGPT, the latest iteration of AI software and one that has now taken the internet by storm. Some are going as far as to say this (or something like it) will replace or become Google.

Check out my Guide To The Galaxy Podcast Episode:

Is ChatGPT the Beginning of the End?

Check out this article on the NYT, which puts this nicely in perspective.

“Hey, ChatGPT. I just spent $5,000 on computer equipment on Amazon and paid for it with my Capital One credit card on 12/20/2. Can you record that purchase and make sure it matches up with my bank feeds?”

It’s not QUITE there yet, but it’s very close, as you’ll see further down.

First, let’s look at who is behind OpenAI. 

From their website:

OpenAI LP is governed by the board of the OpenAI nonprofit, comprised of OpenAI LP employees Greg Brockman (Chairman & President), Ilya Sutskever (Chief Scientist), and Sam Altman (CEO), and non-employees Adam D’Angelo, Reid Hoffman, Will Hurd, Tasha McCauley, Helen Toner, and Shivon Zilis.

Our investors include Microsoft, Reid Hoffman’s charitable foundation, and Khosla Ventures.

You can google these people and learn who they are. This is not an off the beaten path group of people. They are experienced and they are serious.

When TikTok first emerged, I had mixed feelings. On one hand, I sort of knew it would be the next thing. On the other hand, I told myself, “I just can’t.” After years of getting random connection requests on obscure social networks that I had joined and forgotten about, I said something like, “not today satan!”

But ChatGPT I refuse to ignore. And I am getting more and more emails daily in my inbox from sites like Seeking Alpha, talking about how not to worry, that ChatGPT will not overtake Google. And somehow I find myself thinking, “that is exactly what can happen”. Once you play with it and start to see what it can do and how quickly it can do it, you will see why I am certain this technology cannot and should not be ignored. 

I even got an email from Grant Cardone about it this week! 

Now this is an interesting take…

"If AI can spit out blog posts, then yours have to be better. 

And if your business is in a crowded space, it has to be better.

Because even if AI isn’t coming for you…"

Your competition is.

My thought is that it will not replace the ability we all have to take what is in our hearts and pour it into what we create. AI will never have “heart.” 

But it can surely save some time! I asked it to write a blog post about remote bookkeeping work, QuickBooks Online, and Nerd Enterprises courses as a resource.

See for yourself what it came up with, almost as quickly as I could write out the query:

Think of this as a starting point for a blog post. 

Then you embellish and put your own heart and soul into it.

And this is just the beginning.

During the week I first heard about ChatGPT, I started seeing the buzz pick up right away. Then I noticed a thread on Twitter from Jason Staats. What he got it to do was brilliant, so I tried it, at first with no luck. So I asked him for help, which he gave, and then I was off and running.

You can see what he did here → So.. I trained ChatGPT to be an accounting system.

Once I got the hang of it, I got to work and I took a bunch of screenshots of my transcript and saved them in Notion:

Click 👉🏽 Nerd’s ChatGPT AI Accounting System.

As I was wrapping up my several hour session on ChatGPT, a fleeting thought popped into my head. So I asked it to create a meal plan for me based on the following specifications:

2,500 calories per day

Macros:

Carbs 40%

Fat 30%

Protein 30%

Here’s what it came up with in seconds:

Click for a larger image.

I implore you to start playing with this. Get used to it. Get comfortable with it. Learn how to interact with it. 

Get an account here:

https://beta.openai.com/overview

Then try ChatGPT here:

https://chat.openai.com/chat

Then get in touch with me and share screenshots of what you’ve come up with. You can join my Guide To The Galaxy community and there you’ll find a ChatGPT channel under “Apps”. This should be a collaborative learning experience where we can all share and learn from each other. 

Then, as this technology evolves, we will be ready to dive in and start using it to the fullest of its ability. I have no doubt that our friends here at Intuit are looking at this right now and thinking about how QuickBooks Online will evolve to include this kind of technology.

Imagine if your clients could log into a chat screen and write a narrative explaining the transaction, and the AI codes it?! This WILL happen. 

And before everybody panics and says that bookkeepers will be out of their jobs, that’s what everyone said with bank feeds and rules and the automation that came with that. But they were wrong. The role of the bookkeeper evolved. Opportunities emerged where you could get the work done more efficiently, allowing you to take on more work and make more money. 

A few years back there was an app called Chata.ai. It is still around, but it’s evolved into “bigger” data. They were onto something with Chata.ai. You could connect their app to QuickBooks Online and write natural language queries that would pull data from QBO and give you reports, charts, and nicely formatted data.

They were ahead of their time. 

Now, Genius Sheets is doing this. For the uninitiated, Genius Sheets can take real time data from QBO and drop it into Excel or Google Sheets with formulas, so that the data updates in real time. 

Now they are adding natural language queries with AI that interprets these queries (in beta) and produces the reports you need. I was able to run an A/R Aging report in a second, beautifully formatted in Google Sheets. 

Many technologies come and go, or they are overtaken by newer or better versions. Remember Vine? Periscope? These were some of the original short form video platforms. Then Snapchat came along, then Instagram added the short video form to compete with Snapchat, and then TikTok came along.

ChatGPT is exactly what the future is going to look like. Maybe it will actually be ChatGPT. Or maybe Google is already working on something like this as the next generation of Google Search. Or, just as the existing apps emerge and become mainstream, something else will come out that makes this tech even better, and everyone will jump on that bandwagon. 

I can tell you this. I would definitely use something like this over the current Google Search technology to get information. Right now, ChatGPT does not have access to the internet to search information. Imagine how much better it will get once it does!

If you want to be at the forefront of advisory services and command the kind of rates that one can command when they are the first to make use of new technology to help businesses run more effectively, more efficiently, and with greater accuracy? Jump on this bandwagon. 

I have not said this often. Maybe not ever. I didn’t say it about crypto. Still won’t touch that with a 10-foot pole! FTX anyone? 

I looked up the company to see who owned it, because if it was owned by a publicly traded company, I would have bought stock in it immediately. Turns out it’s privately funded, for now. 

I am excited to continue playing with this tool, and I am especially excited to see what others do with it. You can’t save your transcripts and for some reason, when I tried to print mine to a PDF, it would only print what was visible, and sometimes even that was not accurate. So I used Snagit to take my screenshots and preserve my transcripts that way. I hope you will try it and share with me.