Five Ways to Leverage ChatGPT – Lesson 4
Providing advisory services can be a key opportunity to add revenue to your bottom line. As accountants and tax professionals, we often are in a unique position to provide our clients with much needed insights into their business financials.
But doing so can be time consuming and time constraints can prevent us from cashing in on a high value-added revenue stream.
Advisory services in one way that we can leverage AI and ChatGPT to assist us. Tools like ChatGPT and others powered by AI are a great resource to quickly analyze data and provide insights without hours of manual analysis.
Uploading a client’s profit and loss to ChatGPT for example (I recommend removing company names and only uploading numbers for analysis), allows you to then ask analysis questions such as “What is this client’s EBITA?” or “What is the projected net income at the end of the year?”
ChatGPT also can return KPI metrics such as gross profit percentage and then can tell you what the average gross profit percentage is for your client’s industry.
When prompted, ChatGPT was also able to answer the question. “If this client wants to increase sales by 5% over the next 12 months, what does their monthly sales goal need to be?” and the tool will provide a detailed breakdown of the calculations used to compute the answer.
ChatGPT also can tell you what the key performance metrics should be by industry and then help you calculate them on each client’s financial statements.
The tool is hesitant to give exact responses to tax questions, often citing back to the need to address specific tax laws to answer these questions. But it does provide the ability to quickly calculate and manipulate projections.
For example, if you are halfway through the year but the client traditionally sees a 10% increase in Q3 due to their seasonal business, you can ask ChatGPT to incorporate that expected uptick and still provide projected net income for the end of the year. This supports an advisor’s ability to calculate projected tax liabilities more quickly for a client.
The possibilities of this tool are endless when it comes to analysis. It also can help to quickly build model and forecast tables that can be used as templates for workpapers. The efficiencies that can be garnered in only minutes of working with the tool can help us to provide more in-depth analysis to our advisory clients in a way that does not eat into our already compressed schedules.
If you have yet to input data into ChatGPT to test out analysis questions, start by uploading the numbers from a profit and loss or balance sheet and begin with basic prompts like “what is the debt-to-income ratio” or “what is the projected net income if this profit and loss only represents seven months of the fiscal year.” From there you have an opportunity to get more creative in your prompts.
ChatGPT also saves the chats you create and allows you to rename them to label them. This allows you to easily label “ABC Company” Q1 KPI Analysis and refer to it should you need to. You can also “share” a chat with team members which can make it quick and easy to demonstrate to other members of your staff what kinds of prompts you may be looking for or even use a set of prompts as a template for future analysis with different clients.
You can find our other ChatGPT lessons below:
Christine Gervais
Christine Gervais is a licensed CPA, using her skills to help businesses grow and achieve their fullest potential. Christine has a Master’s degree in accounting from Southern New Hampshire University in addition to holding her CPA license for over a decade. Notably, Christine is a nationally recognized speaker providing education to other CPAs on how to best serve clients as well as instruction on a wide variety of topics for business owners on how to maximize success. Christine prides herself on the value she can bring to clients with her extensive tax knowledge and providing strategic, forward-thinking financial strategies to help clients grow. When not behind her desk, you can find Christine spending quality time with her daughter and stepson or tending to the family’s excessively loved farm animals.