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الثلاثاء, 29 مارس 2022 08:02

كيفية تكبير جزء من شريحة أثناء العرض التقديمي

هل رغبت في أن تتمكن من التكبير وعرض شيء ما على شريحتك بمزيد من التفصيل؟ إذا كنت مشتركًا في Microsoft 365 تستخدم إصدار Windows من PowerPoint، فلديك هذه الميزة!

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المحتوى بالإنجليزية June 8, 2021
Use the Camera tool in Excel to create dynamic screenshots
February 9, 2021
Various ways to display formulas in Excel
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How many times during a PowerPoint presentation have you wished that you could zoom in and show something on your slide in more detail? If you are a Microsoft 365 subscriber using the Windows version of PowerPoint, you have that feature!

If you are presenting with just one screen, here are the steps to magnifying part of the slide on the screen:

1. In the lower right corner of your PowerPoint slide, click Slide Show view to start your presentation.

slide-show-view

2. When you are ready to zoom in on a slide, click on the magnifying glass icon in the lower left corner of the presenter view.

zoom-view

A lighter rectangle will appear on the slide. Point your mouse to the area of the slide you want to magnify and click. That part of the screen will be enlarged. You can toggle the magnifier on and off by clicking on the magnifying glass icon. You can also press the Esc key to exit from the magnified view.

Here is a quick video showing another way to access the feature if you are presenting using two screens.

Being able to zoom in on detail on slides is useful, especially when you have calculations that you want to emphasize. Give it a try — it is a handy trick to know.

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الأربعاء, 21 سبتمبر 2022 13:07

نصائح واتجاهات التوظيف لعام 2021

من التوسع المفاجئ في العمل عن بُعد إلى طلبات خدمة العملاء الجديدة، كان لوباء COVID-19 آثار كبيرة على كيفية قيام شركات المحاسبة بأعمالها

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المحتوى بالإنجليزية The Future of Finance: Hiring Tips And Trends For 2021
From the sudden expansion in remote working to new client service requests, the COVID-19 pandemic has had significant effects on how CPA firms do business. And while many disruptions might be behind us, the aftershocks will rumble on for some time.

Paul McDonald

Pandemic-driven changes creating benefits

As leaders scrambled to put new processes in place to navigate the effects of COVID-19 on the business, they have made progress in a number of areas. In a survey of senior managers:

41% say leadership communication is better now than it was pre-pandemic
37% think collaboration has improved
31% feel like there’s been substantial innovation over the past few months
Perhaps the most positive development is the way some companies have reimagined the hiring process. Of companies asked about their hiring methods in the age of social distancing:

57% are conducting interviews and onboarding remotely
40% have shortened the end-to-end hiring process
38% have advertised fully remote positions
These changes can help you act quickly and decisively when you’ve identified the right candidate for a position. And the prevalence of remote working means you can look further afield for skilled staff, giving your company access to a deeper pool of talent.

Accounting staff are in demand

One aspect hasn’t changed: It’s still a competitive hiring market for financial talent. You’ll have to fight hard for the best performers because many companies are ramping up recruitment. For example:

● Public accountants are a lifeline for small and midsize businesses right now. They’re helping clients navigate unpredictable cashflows, as well as shifting compliance requirements.

● Corporate accountants are tasked with finding new efficiencies that will keep businesses viable during financial turbulence.

● Government accounting departments have been forced to scale up quickly to address a raft of unprecedented financial aid packages.

● Financial services institutions are helping clients secure credit and reorganize liabilities during tough times.

● Healthcare companies need staff to deal with billing, reconciliations and new payment processes.

Retention still a concern

Skilled professionals are making career moves, even during a pandemic, and retention remains paramount. Unemployment is higher, but not that high for those with specialized skill sets, so in-demand accountants could be tempted to join another company. For businesses with currently lean staff levels, even the loss of a single skilled professional could be a serious blow.

In a separate Robert Half survey highlighted in the 2021 Salary Guide, more than eight in 10 managers said they are worried about losing valued employees. Here are their primary concerns:

· 55% are worried about losing staff over morale-related issues

· 50% have employees who are facing burnout from heavy workloads

· 37% imposed salary cuts with no prospect of raises in the immediate future

Salaries remain stable

Median salaries are fairly stable across the board, though (as ever) the best candidates in the hottest sectors will be looking to negotiate a bump in pay. Use the Robert Half salary calculator to ensure you’re paying at least market value for your region.

Remote work is the new normal

The pandemic sparked a mass exodus from corporate to home offices. This was jarring for many workers, but research in the guide suggests that few employees are in a hurry to get back to company HQ. Almost three in four workers say they want to keep working from home after the pandemic.

When hiring, you’ll need to balance the desire of highly skilled candidates to work from home with the needs of the organization. Fortunately, you’ll be in a much better position to make these calls than you were in late March, since your firm should now have more data and anecdotal evidence to draw on regarding the productivity and morale of remote workers across your teams.

Tech skills are essential …

If you’re looking to add to your remote teams, new recruits should be tech savvy and capable of learning new systems with little or no in-person training. They need to be able to work with cloud-based systems, understand IT security protocols and be comfortable using digital communication tools. Home-based workers also need to have the basic IT skills to solve common computer and networking issues, as they won’t have hands-on support from a helpdesk technician.

However, while it’s easy to be dazzled by the new and exciting world of remote working, keep in mind that collaborative platforms like Slack and Microsoft Teams are much easier to master than specialized accounting software. Microsoft Excel, QuickBooks (for smaller businesses), enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and similar applications remain the gold standards, and you should assess candidates’ resumes accordingly.

… but so are soft skills

When is an Excel wizard with a fully equipped home office wrong for your organization? Perhaps when their track record or interview performance suggest that they struggle to collaborate with colleagues, or that they find it difficult to adapt to changing goals and circumstances. In these challenging times, soft skills such as critical thinking, resilience and flexibility can be every bit as important as technical expertise.

The need for these attributes is not driven just by the pandemic. As new technology such as AI becomes an integral part of finance jobs, you’ll place a greater emphasis on the kind of human values that can’t be replaced by an algorithm.

Flexible staffing is the future
Flexible staffing — an adjustable mix of full-time and interim professionals — is a strategy many companies have long been using to temporarily access specialized expertise and scale their teams as needed without overburdening full-time staff. It is tailor made for the current situation. Asked why they worked with interim professionals, more than a third of senior managers said it was to remain agile during the economic turmoil.

Predicting the future has never been harder. But if 2020 has taught us anything, it’s that uncertain times reward companies that are nimble and innovative.

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الأحد, 07 فبراير 2021 12:49

هل بيانات شركتك آمنة؟

يبدو أنه لا يمر يوم دون أنباء عن اختراق الشبكات والبيانات

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المحتوى بالإنجليزية Is your firm's data safe?
By Ted Needleman
January 29, 2021, 9:00 a.m. EST
11 Min Read
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It seems like not a day goes by without news of networks being breached and data hacked. One of the most recent, the SolarWinds hack, led to breaches within multiple areas of our government, while individual ransomware attacks on vital parts of our economy, including entire towns and hospitals, are being reported more and more frequently.

Given the chaos that the COVID-19 pandemic has caused through 2020, and with no quick resolution in sight, the last thing you need is for your practice to be hacked or held for ransom. But the plain truth of the matter is that the need to work remotely, fueled by the coronavirus, has made your practice and your clients more vulnerable than they were in the past.

“The rash of lucrative ransomware attacks over the past year pointed to organized hacker groups specifically targeting medical, legal and accounting businesses where they could not only invoke the ransom but also steal a treasure trove of client/business information,” said Roman Kepczyk, director of firm technology strategy at Right Networks. “This allowed the hackers to threaten to release confidential client information or intellectual property if the ransom was not paid. In addition to using the personally identifiable information to fraudulently file tax returns and instigate identity theft, in some instances the hackers contacted clients of the firms for further extortion, threatening to release confidential, compromising or embarrassing information.”

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Obviously, protecting your systems and data from outside intrusion is important. But even more important is protecting your clients’ systems and data. And the fact that many of us are working from home, and will likely continue to do so, at least part-time, for the foreseeable future, only increases the risk of exposure.

The steps you can take range from very basic to ultra-sophisticated. Your first lines of defense are great backup procedures and using a good anti-malware application. But these are just the beginning. You need to take active measures to protect your systems, whether they are in your physical office, or your office on the kitchen table.

It takes two

Two of the most common and easiest security measures to implement are two-factor authentication and encryption. While two-factor authentication can be a bit annoying, having to enter both a password and a verification code sent to an email account or messaged to a mobile account significantly reduces the chances of a breach if someone is able to get hold of your password.

Stronger passwords with greater security are also a must. Too many are still using weak passwords such as the names of their spouses, children or dogs, or even “Password123.” Many remote applications are now insisting on stronger passwords containing upper- and lower-case letters, numbers and special symbols. But keeping track of these, especially when they are different for every application, is a major concern for many users. If this is the case with your practice, there are several ways you can use difficult-to-guess passwords and still not have to write them down to remember what they are for each application.

The most common of these is to use a password manager that tracks your passwords and inserts the proper difficult-to-remember password into the appropriate application. Popular password managers include 1Password and LastPass, but there are plenty of similar applications for PCs, Macs, smartphones and tablets.

Another alternative is to use a hardware authentication key that plugs into a USB-A oe USB-C port or provides NFC (near field connectivity — the technology used in tap-and-pay credit cards and some phones) to work with mobile devices that incorporate this feature. One popular key is offered by Yubico, though they are far from the only vendor.

“The YubiKey provides users with a hardware-backed strong multifactor authentication solution that has a proven track record for protecting accounts,” Chad Thunberg, chief information security officer at Yubico, told us. “Not every service provider or application — including some of the popular accounting software suites — have yet adopted the FIDO [Fast IDentity Online] authentication standards that we use for the YubiKey. However, many of these applications support using a single sign-on [SSO] identity provider that does support the use of YubiKeys. To get started, users can enroll their YubiKey with their favorite identity provider (e.g., Google, Apple or Microsoft) and then use that identity provider to log onto their accounting software. I took a brief look at some of the popular offerings, and FreshBooks, QuickBooks Online and Sage Accounting all support SSO.”

Encryption is yet another option that you should be aware of. Richard Kanadjian, encrypted USB business manager at Kingston Technology, pointed out that, “Encryption basically means that if you encrypt the data on that USB drive and you lose it, the probability that somebody can actually retrieve that data is actually infinitesimal. It’s actually almost zero. And the reason is we have password controls. For example, you have a password or a pin for your USB drive and our encrypted drive will only let you enter the password 10 times. So, if you enter it more times and if somebody’s guessing, the drive will literally wipe its contents and erase the data. You will actually not have any data to be exposed to a breach.”

Keeping the data for your applications on an encrypted drive is a usable approach, but keep in mind that the data on an encrypted drive should be backed up to a secure location, be it the cloud or a second encrypted drive, just in case the encrypted drive containing important data is lost or stolen.

You should also be very aware of where you are using your laptop. Too many people go down to the local coffee shop or library, where the internet is freely available, and don’t take reasonable precautions against infections and intrusions. Infecting the routers at these locations with malware is becoming very common, and the compromised internet at these locations can infect hundreds or even thousands of the systems being used there, as well as any networks that the infected systems are then attached to.

“One of the biggest concerns that we are seeing is so many employees were forced to work from home and all of a sudden they’re sitting on networks that are outside of the control of corporate IT,” Stephen Lawton, special projects editorial director at SC Media, pointed out. “If you let the employee simply use their home systems and their home networks without any IP control, quite frankly what you’re going to get is BYOD — not ‘Bring your own device,’ but ‘Bring your own disaster.’ The lack of security controls on most home networks is really quite astounding. Many people have never updated the firmware and their routers. They’ve never put any kind of security controls or software on their systems. If you’re going to have your workers working from home, the practice really needs to invest in laptops specifically for that purpose, that have security controls built into them. At the minimum you need some enterprise-class antivirus, anti-malware anti-ransomware software. You should also have the systems going over a virtual private network back to a home base. VPNs are certainly not foolproof, but they’re better than not having anything at all, or just going through the employee’s personal network.”

© Pedro Nunes/pn_photo - stock.adobe.com
Your face and your printer

Biometrics as a password substitute are also becoming increasingly common. No, you don’t have to have a retina scanner mounted on your PC or laptop, though it would hardly be surprising to see something along those lines using the almost-ubiquitous webcam in the near future. But while retinal scanners have been around for years, along with the handprint readers often seen in movies, they are pretty much relegated to very high security installations with equally high security budgets and resources.

But real, usable, biometric roadblocks to unauthorized network and device penetration have been available for years. Fingerprint readers, especially in laptops, are common these days. And both the iOS and Windows operating systems have facial recognition capabilities that can not only serve as an alternative to system passwords, but in many cases can also be used as passwords to sensitive applications such as bank and credit card accounts.

This is a handy inroad to your sensitive systems and applications, but is somewhat blunted by the fact that most of the facial recognition capabilities at the entry level, such as those included in the operating system, require that the entire face be visible to provide authentication. Wearing a mask, a necessity out in public or in your office these days, often defeats this handy sign-in method.

One area of vulnerability that’s been getting more attention recently are devices connected to the Internet of Things — components, such as printers and multifunction printers, that are connected to your network and also have their own pathways into the internet. Most of us are familiar with threats such as phishing and embedded malware, but there is another route into your network that you may have not considered.

“A lot of times the network perimeter has, in the past, been used as a way to secure devices.” Shivaun Albright, chief technologist of print security at HP, pointed out. “And in this day and age, with email, phishing attacks, clicking on something, any type of email or link, you cannot guarantee that your interior perimeter network is secured. You just can’t. And one of the things that we’ve seen, in fact last year, was an article from Microsoft in August of 2019. They had highlighted that they had caught Russian state hackers using IoT’s breached networks. And, by the way, they found that devices that had been hacked were Voice over IP phones and office printers.”

Clients are targets, too

There’s obviously a lot more to look at security-wise than what is covered here. And, as with many aspects of technology, IT security is a moving target — what’s true and secure today might be vulnerable tomorrow. Developing the expertise and knowledge to deal with the new threats that emerge every day is not only an ongoing process, but one that can be difficult to maintain and expand, which is yet another good reason to examine the practices and protocols in place in your practice and at your clients’.

Protecting your and your clients’ data is not only a fiduciary responsibility, it’s also good business practice. “Firms that have been breached will not only have to deal with a damaged reputation, but can expect to see client churn and having to deal with ongoing litigation from clients that were impacted,” warned Kepczyk.

It takes time and money to build expertise in this area. And even after an extensive immersion in security, it’s likely that you still might not have the experience to know just how to determine where your practice’s vulnerabilities are and how to address them when you do discover them.

One approach suggested by Randy Johnston, executive vice president of K2 Enterprises, that is especially applicable if you outsource some or all of your IT support, is to “choose reputable IT providers that understand and implement best practices for security to help your internal IT staff. While security risks morph over time, the provider must actively respond to new threats and continuously adjust their security protocols and technical setup to protect your firm.”

And Kepczyk added, “Employee training is critical, particularly in regards to phishing threats, which account for the entry of the vast majority of breaches, so we suggest you outsource that to third parties such as KnowBe4, PhishMe, Wombat Security, etc., that will do phishing testing and employee training.”

If you’re thinking of expanding your practice into this growing area of concern, or just want to better educate yourself, Jim Bourke, a partner and managing director of advisory services at Top 100 Firm WithumSmith+Brown, has a few suggestions on getting started. To start, “I would highly recommend getting your hands on the AICPA cybersecurity risk management reporting framework.”

Bourke added, “I would discuss the AICPA’s ‘SOC for Cybersecurity’ engagement with your clients. At Withum, we are all over that space. As CPAs, only we can issue a ‘SOC for Cybersecurity’ report! There is huge demand for this type of deliverable today. The AICPA has classes and workshops in this space, allowing any CPA to gain the knowledge and expertise that they need to perform these services.”

But whether or not you decide to add security consulting to your practice or partner with a company that has expertise and reputation in that area, keep in mind that the very last thing you want to tell a client is that you had a data breach, were hacked, or that your system is locked due to ransomware. A good backup strategy is a necessary first step, but where you go from there is going to determine just how secure your ongoing livelihood is going to be. And while there is no such thing as perfect security, you need to be aware of where you are vulnerable, and take steps to strengthen those areas of your procedures and practices.

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الأربعاء, 20 يناير 2021 13:03

فتح الصندوق الأسود للذكاء الاصطناعي

وصف في السبعينيات من القرن الماضي أستاذ الروبوتات في طوكيو ماساهيرو موري، كيف تبدو الآلات أكثر شبهاً بالإنسان

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المحتوى بالإنجليزية AI, applied: Opening the black box
By Ranica Arrowsmith

There’s a phrase for the uneasiness many of us feel when confronted with humanlike machines — the Uncanny Valley. Coined in the 1970s by Tokyo robotics professor Masahiro Mori, the phrase describes how as machines appear more humanlike, they become more appealing to humans — but only up to a point. After that, as they appear more humanlike but not quite, they inspire revulsion in the observer.

In the accounting profession, there is a similar uneasiness when dealing with the idea of AI, though it has nothing to with how the software looks. The technology has the potential for high-level automation of processes, ultimately saving a lot of time for the accountant, but with its ability to perform tasks that are traditionally the purview of human beings, does this mean a diminished role for the accountant, or even the loss of jobs?

The good news is, the experts don’t think so.

Justin Adams, whose company Anduin has just launched an AI-enabled accounts receivable platform, insists there is an “art” to billing that must remain in the AR process for it to be meaningful and profitable — the deep knowledge of a client over time, for example, can affect a billing relationship. And Samantha Bowling of Garbelman Winslow CPAs isn’t interested in simply speeding up the audit with AI — she wants to provide an audit of such high quality that it’s unquestionable. These types of service goals can only be achieved by marrying AI with the human professional, with all the professional’s experience, skepticism and emotional intelligence.

Artificial intelligence can have an air of mystery about it, to say nothing of a hint of the unnatural, with something we value as inherently human — intelligence — being created and inserted into something inanimate — a machine.

It makes sense that we feel this way. The programming precursor to what we today call artificial intelligence was neural networks, code that was inspired by and modeled on actual human neural networks in the brain. Today, artificially intelligent programs have the ability to observe patterns and use those to “learn” behaviors and responses, making the technology smarter and more usable over time.

It’s worth bearing in mind the various ways in which AI is already here, working in the background of the accounting and enterprise platforms you know well, automating processes and making software more efficient. All the user sees are the benefits. But the market is now seeing true AI platforms that apply machine learning to entire processes end to end, such as AR/AP. And the common theme among all use cases for such AI-rich platforms is time — the time it takes to adopt the software and to validate it, to train it enough for a firm to realize its benefits. The machine has to learn. This takes an investment both of money and patience, but for the willing, it’s worth it.

Today, artificial intelligence is transforming processes across the accounting profession, for those are ready to invest in and adopt it. It’s not just being practically applied in audit, where AI is being used for data analysis and anomaly detection — we will look at examples of AI transforming AR/AP, as well as explore the implications of AI in sales tax automation.

Accounts: Receivable

Despite … everything about this year, venture capital funding continued on an upward trend in 2020, with the third fiscal quarter bringing in the second highest amount of VC funding per quarter on record. Artificial intelligence is high on the list of hot tech, which makes it no surprise that Anduin was able to obtain seed funding and launch its first AI-powered product suite all during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Anduin co-founders Justin Adams and Pat Morrell have built an AI-driven accounts receivable platform, Intelligence-Based Billing, for accounting firms. The platform launched in December, so it remains to be seen how successful adoption will be, but the pair of entrepreneurs have succeeded before in the AI space. Prior to founding Anduin, Adams and Morrell started, grew and sold a company that made an AI-driven product for the health care space, all within two years. That whirlwind experience propelled them into their current venture, and their success made them attractive prospects for investors.

“We had zero health care background when we started Digitize.AI,” Morrell said. “But we went to CFOs of health care companies and asked them where their biggest pain point was. When they said ‘prior authorizations,’ I had to look it up on Wikipedia — but I knew that a manual process is a manual process, and can be automated.”

Adams and Morrell weren’t quite as clueless entering the accounting space. Adams had spent years working at Big Four firm PwC, first in a consultative capacity and then internally managing technology projects. When they asked accountants what they would change if they could wave a magic wand, accounts receivable was a common answer. The process, managed manually, is scattered and unwieldy, and even streamlined client portals don’t optimize the process for each individual client and their payment habits.

There’s an art to billing, Adams said, and the platform tries to preserve that for the accountant. “Think of it from a client’s perspective,” he said. “There’s tons of friction. It can be confusing. You could have received a service three months earlier, and when you get the invoice, you’re trying to remember what you’re paying for again.”

Intelligence-Based Billing is made up of four modules (which can be bought separately), handling invoicing, collection, payments and internal analytics. The platform automates the invoicing process so bills are sent in a timely manner, but it also learns a client’s payment habits over time. How many emails or messages does it take before an invoice is opened and viewed? How many contacts does it take before a client pays the bill? Each client is different, and therein lies the art. If a client typically pays an invoice after two emails and a phone call, Intelligence-Based Billing will “remember” that over time, optimizing the process for each firm-client relationship.

More “art” that the AI tries to replicate: The analytics feature can be used in part to automate, so to speak, that gut feeling accountants also have to pay attention to when it comes to value-based billing. For instance, Morrell pointed out, a firm may have worked a certain number of hours on a project, but with their sense of the market over the years, they know that a client might expect a certain discount. Each client perceives different aspects of a service as more valuable, and also might need different billing structures to remain a client in the long term. Intelligence-Based Billing pulls and analyzes data from across firm systems to inform this type of decision-making.

“The fundamental pain is the anxiety that firms are leaving money on the table; and that firms don’t have real visibility into their cash flows,” Morrell said. “On the partner level, it’s all about liberating them to focus on complex, creative, value-generating service delivery.”

Intelligence-Based Billing is new on the market, and is signing up “trailblazer firms” now as its first customers. Time will tell how successful it will be, but no matter what, Anduin is part of a small group of innovators bringing fully formed, AI-enabled automation to firms of all sizes, for everyday firm functions, and will help set the stage for what’s to come.

Accounts: Payable

Youngseung Kuk manages business outsourcing services for Top 100 Firm Armanino in Boise, Idaho. This year, Kuk spearheaded the implementation of Vic.ai, a platform that automates the accounts payable process using AI. Using AI to tackle AP for clients was “low-hanging fruit,” Kuk said, as all companies, no matter what type, have bills to pay.

Armanino uses Bill.com firmwide for all AP, so the firm worked with Vic.ai to integrate the software to make the end-to-end AP process more streamlined.

Kuk and his team are validating Vic.ai as they use it, adding clients slowly, one at a time, to make sure they give the program enough time to learn its clients and become highly efficient at its predictions. This is a key part of understanding AI — it takes time.

Software that runs on AI doesn’t operate like the software we’ve become accustomed to. It doesn’t perform an exact set of functions as programmed, and only as programmed. Artificial intelligence learns as it goes, which means that by the end of a certain period of time, the software will operate very differently for each client, each firm, each project.

Kuk estimates it will take Vic.ai three years to predict client behavior and needs at a close-to-perfect rate. The wait is worth it for the sheer amount of time it can give back to an accountant once the AP process for a client is basically fully automated.

Armanino has one client, a law firm, that has highly repetitive bills that don’t have too many complicated dimensions (i.e., company name, address, and so on, are usually in the same spot on the invoices). Within a few months of use, Vic.ai can now predict any given AP workflow for that client with about 80 percent accuracy. If this is true for this client, Kuk said, that’s enough to know it’s possible for the others. Currently, Armanino has 46 clients on Vic.ai, and plans to keep validating the software so it can add more in time.

“The time spent validating is worth it, because by the end, as a firm, we’re going to be so much more scalable,” Kuk said. “Once you free up some capacity, even just from an AP standpoint we can do a number of different things for our clients that add more value, like confirming all vendors have W-9s, for example, or reaching out to vendors proactively if they haven’t accepted an ACH payment. These are just some basic examples, but I think we’re at the tip of the iceberg and nowhere near the full potential of AI.”

“Two years ago, we made an investment in artificial intelligence in a big way. It became part of firmwide strategy,” explained Tom Mescall, partner-in-charge of consulting at the firm. “Most CEOs, CFOs and business operators know the headline of AI, but they don’t know how to apply it in a business setting. We’ve done a lot of work around demystifying AI and bringing real-world examples to light for clients.”

A relevant audit

Firms have been using AI products for anomaly detection and analytics in audit for a few years now. Companies like MindBridge AI came on the scene and started to show the profession the real-world implications of being able to read every piece of data in minutes, as opposed to just sampling data. Samantha Bowling, a partner at Garbelman Winslow CPAs, saw the opportunity in MindBridge AI three years ago, and brought the technology to her firm.

In 2017, while Bowling served on the Governing Council for the American Institute of CPAs, she listened to president and CEO Barry Melancon describe how Big Four firm KPMG was investing millions of dollars into AI-driven audit technology.

“He was talking about how they were going to take over the world,” Bowling recalled. “As a small-firm audit partner, I was concerned, because if the big firms are doing something, sometimes it doesn’t become available to us for a while, or ever. I was actually concerned about eventually having to find a new revenue source.”

She called her existing audit software provider and asked explicitly if they had plans to embed AI into their platform. They didn’t. So Bowling did some online research and found MindBridge AI.

Bowling says that Garbelman Winslow is still in the adoption phase of MindBridge. As is true with the other technologies featured here, there is no substitute for time to allow an artificial intelligence platform to live up to its true potential. She started by engaging MindBridge for just one audit, and then grew usage from there. It helped when MindBridge integrated with QuickBooks, which made data transfers easier.

The biggest benefit of applying artificial intelligence to audit, for Bowling, is the risk analysis.

“Now that there is a direct link between QuickBooks Online and MindBridge, it automatically connects and does the risk analysis,” Bowling said. “I used to think MindBridge was an audit stamping tool that looked at transactions and identified anomalies, directing our attention and telling us where to look. But I realized it’s actually a great risk assessment tool in the very beginning of an audit.”

Bowling explained that while audits are based in risk assessment, a lot of the time, auditors have no idea where the risk is. “We only have our professional skepticism — there’s no one to tell us the risk is in revenue or payroll,” she said. “Now we have something that tells us where it is at the outset. Audit assertions are built into it.”

But there is friction in adoption. Not every client is easy to work with in MindBridge. There is still a lot of manual work to be done to transfer data that is not in the cloud, for instance, to MindBridge AI’s platform.

“Everyone just wants it to be an easy thing — to upload the general ledger and get going — but I think they’d be remiss not to do this with at least one client, or start with their cloud-based clients first before going to challenging clients,” Bowling said. “People are looking for faster, better ways, but I went into this not to do a faster audit but a relevant audit.”

Bowling received CPA.com’s Innovative Practitioner Award in 2018 for her work bringing AI to Garbelman Winslow CPAs. She won in part for the fact that it is small business and nonprofit clients to which she is bringing AI-enabled services, which also has the side benefit of Bowling being able to pass the cost of using MindBridge to her clients by folding it into the billing package. Nonprofit clients don’t mind paying top dollar for service that guarantees an accurate risk assessment.

“Nonprofit clients don’t care about us passing the fee onto them to minimize risk as much as we do, because nonprofit board members are just worried about someone doing something wrong with the money and it being in the newspaper,” Bowling said. “So they’re happy to have a very good audit done, and pay for it.”

Every transaction in the world

When thinking about the application for artificial intelligence in tax, often we think about tax preparation, since there is a lot of room to automate it. In fact, Samantha Bowling said that if she could apply AI to any other service area at her firm, it would be tax: “The current process, with a mix of paper documents and e-returns, is asinine,” she said. “I can’t wait till the whole process is 100 percent automated.”

AI-related innovation in tax prep is moving slowly, although the Internal Revenue Service has started to use the technology in different capacities to detect tax evasion and other types of noncompliance. But of course, there are other areas of tax that are ripe for disruption with AI, and sales tax automation is one.

One of the companies working in this area, Avalara, has made investments in AI in recent years, one of which was acquiring Indix in 2019. Indix was based on an idea that founder Sanjay Parthasarathy had for creating a comprehensive index of retail product information online using artificial intelligence to aggregate the data. (The aggregator was built in layers, with a Google web crawler grabbing information from all over the internet, and then various smart algorithms working together to curate and organize that data.)

Brands and retailers could buy access to this database of information on mostly retail, but also some business-to-business, products, to enrich their catalogs, benchmark against competitors, and so on. Basically, Indix was built as a neutral aggregator of e-commerce inventory.

And now, Avalara owns that AI-built index of more than 4 billion products. This means that Avalara can fold categorization data for much of the world’s online inventory of products in with its tax content database, which includes international product codes and classifications; taxability rules; exemption conditions; tax holidays; jurisdictions; boundaries; tax rates; thresholds and registration, compliance, and return preparation and filing requirements.

If this list sounds daunting, that’s kind of the point: Avalara’s mission is to “to be a part of every transaction in the world.” Without AI enabling at least some of this technology, this would be an impossible goal.

“When you buy a tax compliance product or suite, you want to be able to start using it tomorrow,” said Parthasarathy, who now serves as chief product officer for Avalara. “However, you know that before you can use an automated system, you have to make sure the tax nexus is right, the catalog is mapped to the tax code, a set of things that take time and research. If you want to start selling internationally, and you therefore need to start using harmonized tax codes — if it’s going to take nine months to do it, that’s lost value. We can get you going right away.”

Before Parthasarathy founded Indix, he spent almost two decades at Microsoft. He ended his career there in 2009 as corporate vice president of the Startup Business Accelerator program, a program he created; and he was director of Bill Gates’ 1997 trip to India, which led to a significant investment in that country by the software giant.

When talking about historical AI, Parthasarathy will sometimes use the term neural networks, which are indeed the statistical model programs ancestor to what we call AI today. His knowledge of AI is deep and historical, from having spent so many years helping build one of the most innovative companies in recent history. From his vantage point, he sees both the immense possibilities of AI, as well as the risks.

“There are risks in tax — compliance has potential penalties if done incorrectly,” he commented. “You’re doing it on behalf of somebody, so you want to make sure it is accurate and appropriate. You probably want actual people to keep an eye on it, rather than let AI run everything, even if one day it can. There is an ethical risk — when you have all this data, what is the responsibility of the government and companies to treat it as private data?”