ChatGPT

for Accountants
and Bookkeepers

THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO

ENHANCING YOUR
PRACTICE WITH THE POWER
OF AI
Written by
Mark Wickersham, Emily Cross & Gabrielle Wickersham
INTRODUCTION

ChatGPT – it’s the latest buzzword, and for good reason.

This powerful new tool has the potential to streamline your workflow,
increase productivity, and set you miles ahead of the competition.

The accounting industry is constantly evolving, and it’s essential to embrace

new technologies and stay ahead of the curve.

Now, understandably, you may be a little wary of AI. It has sparked a lot of
concern about job security, leaving many accountants and bookkeepers
wondering if they are going to be replaced by machines…

That will only be true for those who do not change and adapt.

AI offers a huge opportunity for accountants and bookkeepers. When you

start to use ChatGPT in your practice, you will be able to enhance your role,
focus more on the services that are much more valuable, and become truly
indispensable to your clients.

In this guide, we will be exploring the limitations and strengths of

ChatGPT, as well as 6 practical ways you can use it within your accounting
or bookkeeping firm right now.

Important Note

This guide was updated in September 2023. ChatGPT, and other AI tools,
are advancing at an incredibly rapid rate, so we recommend you join our
community: AI and ChatGPT for Accountants and Bookkeepers to get the
latest news and updates as it affects the accounting industry.

© Mark Wickersham, 2023 wickersham.co.uk 01

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Mark Wickersham FCA

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

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

© Mark Wickersham, 2023 wickersham.co.uk 02

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Emily Cross

Graduate of Manchester Metropolitan University in 2018 with a 1st class BA

Honorary degree in English.

Emily is a proficient copywriter, a great

researcher, and very tech-savvy. She
has been using these skills not only to
create content for Mark Wickersham but
also for members of our High Achievers
program. Emily is one of our Academy
trainers and teaches marketing and
online communication skills to our
members to help them grow their
businesses.

Gabrielle Wickersham

Graduate of The University of York in

2021 with a 1st class BA in English
Literature and Philosophy.

Gabrielle has a talent for writing and

design, which she incorporates into her
work for Mark Wickersham. She
regularly creates resources for Academy
members, produces marketing content,
and manages social media performance.

© Mark Wickersham, 2023 wickersham.co.uk 03

BRIEF HISTORY OF CHATGPT

ChatGPT is a large language model developed by OpenAI – an artificial

intelligence research organisation founded in December 2015 by a group of
top tech leaders including Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and Ilya
Sutskever.

The 'GPT' stands for ‘Generative Pre-trained Transformer’.

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

ChatGPT was then released for public use in November 2022. By December
2022 it had amassed over 100 million users, making it the world’s fastest-
growing platform, beating the previous champion, TikTok, by a landslide.

The new and improved model, GPT-4, was recently launched in March 2023.

It is designed to understand and generate human-like text, making it useful

for a wide range of applications. It has been trained on a vast dataset
containing diverse text sources such as websites, books and articles up until
September 2021. Any information made available must be accessed using
an internet extension.

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

ChatGPT is very new and is still learning and growing, but we are incredibly
excited to see what happens next!

© Mark Wickersham, 2023 wickersham.co.uk 04

THE STRENGTHS OF CHATGPT

Time Saver

One of ChatGPT’s most significant benefits is the

ability to save you huge amounts of time.

It can complete tasks such as writing emails or

creating content much faster than a person, meaning
your workflow will be quicker, your productivity levels
will be increased, and you can focus on more
important tasks.

By automating time-consuming activities, you can

dedicate more time to client relationships and
strategic decision-making.

Quality of Writing

We all know that accountants and bookkeepers

are the numbers experts – but when it comes to
writing, some of us aren’t as confident.

Another advantage of ChatGPT is its excellent

writing ability.

It can produce clear, professional text which can

help you to communicate better with your clients,
rank higher on search engines, and improve your
overall brand and reputation.

© Mark Wickersham, 2023 wickersham.co.uk 05

UNDERSTANDING THE LIMITATIONS

It’s still learning…

ChatGPT is a developing AI that is continuously learning and evolving. Its

knowledge cut-off date is September 2021, and as a result, its understanding
of the world and the information it can provide is only as current as the data
it was last trained on.

For example, if you wanted to check up on the latest developments in the

accounting industry, or changes to tax legislation that happened after
September 2021, ChatGPT may not have the right information for you.

It’s important to be aware of this when using ChatGPT for research.

It’s also had a few hiccups when it comes to security, so avoid inputting any
personal data during these early days.

© Mark Wickersham, 2023 wickersham.co.uk 06

UNDERSTANDING THE LIMITATIONS

Human Bias

Whilst ChatGPT is artificial intelligence, there are still some very human
biases involved.

First of all, the AI needs to understand human input. So, when you give it a
command or ask it a question, it needs to understand what you are asking
and what information you are after, then locate the appropriate information
from its vast data banks.

It then needs to output that information. It’s dealing with huge amounts of
information, so it needs to know how to paraphrase, simplify, and answer in
the way you need it to so that you can get the answer you require.

The way ChatGPT was trained to do this was through human input,
interaction, and feedback.

The human team would ask it a question or give it a command, then tell it
whether the response was right or wrong, appropriate, or not helpful. Those
human trainers may not have been perfect and might have different opinions
or consider something right when it is actually wrong and vice versa.

ChatGPT is only as good as it has been trained to be, and it is still

continuously learning from its 100 million users.

© Mark Wickersham, 2023 wickersham.co.uk 07

UNDERSTANDING THE LIMITATIONS

Fact-Checking

Whilst its capabilities are impressive, it’s important to remember that

ChatGPT is not perfect and sometimes gets stuff wrong.

To generate a response to your command or question, it will scour its banks

of text that has been taken from the internet (before September 2021).

That’s a lot of human-generated content that is subject to bias and is

potentially inaccurate or false. Essentially, it is regurgitating the content it
has read, so if it has read something false it will simply repeat this back to
you.

It has also been reported that on occasion it will hallucinate or ‘make up’ an
answer when it does not know how to respond. These answers can seem
convincing, so be sure you are thorough in your checks and use your own
expertise and judgement to verify the answers provided.

© Mark Wickersham, 2023 wickersham.co.uk 08

UNDERSTANDING THE LIMITATIONS

Math

There is no need to worry about AI taking over the world of finance just yet.

As a language model, it has not been designed to deal with complex

mathematical operations, however with some of the later improvements and
features such as ‘Advanced Data Analysis’ it is definitely improving.

We would recommend you continue to use your preferred accounting tools

and softwares for now when it comes to complex financial data.

This means you can use ChatGPT to help with communications, but you will
still be irreplaceable for the complex calculations and accounting work.

Capacity

It’s also worth mentioning that because of the global popularity of this new
tool, you may sometimes find that it is not available for use, or that it runs
incredibly slow.

You might find it useful to upgrade to ChatGPT Plus to be sure you can
always access it when you need it and make use of the various models
(which all vary in efficiency and speed) and latest features.

© Mark Wickersham, 2023 wickersham.co.uk 09

PRACTICAL USES

Where do I start?

ChatGPT is such a vast tool with so many potential uses, it can

be overwhelming to know where to begin and what to use it for.

But once you know a few standard practices, I guarantee you

will be using it every single day in your business (and your
personal life).

© Mark Wickersham, 2023 wickersham.co.uk 10

CREATING INTERNAL SYSTEMS
AND DOCUMENTS

Knowing the limitations of ChatGPT, one of the best ways to use the tool is
to create templates or starting points for you to take away, improve, and
adjust to meet your own requirements.

It can help you create templates for some common documents you might
need to use in your business. For example:

Engagement Letter or Service Budget Template

Agreement Client Reminder Templates
Invoice Template Year-End Financial Review
Monthly Financial Report Payroll Template

These documents will be the basic template, generally with a fill-in-the-blank

style layout. You will then need to input the specific data for each client.

You can also ask it to help you create checklists or systems for certain
standard practices and processes within your business, for example:

Sales Meeting Agenda Monthly Reconciliation Checklist

New Client Onboarding Checklist Payroll Processing Checklist
Tax Preparation Checklist Internal Controls Checklist
Year-End Closing Checklist Document Management System

Again, be aware that this will give you a starting point for your systems, but
you may want to add actions that are specific to your business or remove
elements that are not relevant.

© Mark Wickersham, 2023 wickersham.co.uk 11

Here are some examples of the prompts you might use:

“Create an invoice template for a monthly bookkeeping client”

© Mark Wickersham, 2023 wickersham.co.uk 12

“Create a post-sale onboarding system for a new client in an accounting
firm”

© Mark Wickersham, 2023 wickersham.co.uk 13

CLIENT COMMUNICATION

Improve communication with your clients by getting ChatGPT to review and

critique your responses and suggest improvements.

If you receive an email enquiry from a prospective client, you can copy and
paste the email into ChatGPT (redact any sensitive information) and ask it to
write an appropriate response.

Alternatively, you could draft a response yourself, then input that into
ChatGPT and ask for it to give you some feedback. You might ask it to
rewrite your response in a more professional tone, or perhaps a more
apologetic tone if the email is about a complaint or concern.

This is not limited to emails.

If you have a standard script that you follow when you call clients or
prospects, or perhaps a meeting script, you can input this into ChatGPT and
ask it to review this and suggest improvements as well.

© Mark Wickersham, 2023 wickersham.co.uk 14

Here are some examples of the prompts you might use:

“Write an email to a prospective accounting client who has reached out to

enquire generally about services available”

© Mark Wickersham, 2023 wickersham.co.uk 15

“Rephrase this email with a more friendly light-hearted tone”

© Mark Wickersham, 2023 wickersham.co.uk 16

CONTENT MARKETING

Content marketing is an incredibly effective form of marketing.

It involves creating valuable content that solves a big problem for your ideal
client and distributing it to attract and engage your target audience by
demonstrating your expertise and authority on the subject matter.

The content can come in many forms including:

Blogs Workbooks / Guides
Social Media Spreadsheets
Books / eBooks Podcasts *
Emails YouTube videos *
Checklists Livestreams and webinars *

ChatGPT can be a valuable tool in assisting with creating these forms of

content.

You can ask it to write you a blog post from scratch or give it an outline. Tell
it who your ideal client is, what your call to action needs to be, and a rough
word count, and it will create a blog post for you in mere seconds.

* Note: ChatGPT can’t generate a podcast or video for you, but it can help
you to create a script for that content. You can then either deliver the content
yourself or use other AI tools to create a voice to read out the content.

© Mark Wickersham, 2023 wickersham.co.uk 17

Here are some examples of the prompts you might use:

“Write a 300 approx. word blog on the top 5 tax saving strategies for
restaurants in a friendly conversational tone, incl­ude a call to action to book
an appointment with us”

Remember: You need to fact check and use your professional judgement
over the accuracy of the response.

© Mark Wickersham, 2023 wickersham.co.uk 18

“Now give me 5 tweets to promote this blog to the restaurant industry with
appropriate hashtags and emojis”

© Mark Wickersham, 2023 wickersham.co.uk 19

CONTENT MARKETING

You may have some concerns...

Plagiarism

Now, you may be thinking, if AI is creating this content for you, who owns the
rights to that material? Is it considered plagiarism to use ChatGPT’s blog and
frame it as your own?

AI-generated content is not plagiarism as it is created based on the prompts

you provide and not copied from existing sources. However, you might like to
use a plagiarism detection tool to ensure that the content created is not too
similar to other material.

It is possible that laws and regulations regarding AI and intellectual property

may evolve in the future, but as of now, AI systems do not own IP rights, and
therefore any content produced is considered the property of the user.

© Mark Wickersham, 2023 wickersham.co.uk 20

CONTENT MARKETING

Differentiation

“Won’t everyone have the exact same content though?”

Another concern is that your content could be exactly the same as someone
else who is using ChatGPT, so it’s important to use certain techniques to
help differentiate yourself…

Have a niche and ideal client, and include these in your content to make
you stand out from other accountants and bookkeepers
Engineer your prompts to include more detail and nuance
Ask ChatGPT to use a certain writing style or tone (i.e write in the style
of Mark Wickersham, with a friendly conversational tone)
Ask ChatGPT to regenerate the answer or rewrite certain sections

Ultimately, the best way to avoid both of these concerns is to use ChatGPT
only as a starting point.

You can take what it creates for you and edit it yourself to add your own style
and give it a more human touch.

© Mark Wickersham, 2023 wickersham.co.uk 21

BRAINSTORMING IDEAS AND LISTS

Now you know that you can get ChatGPT to generate many different types
of content for you, but how do you know what content to tell it to write?

Well, it can help you with that too!

ChatGPT can help you to brainstorm ideas, and give you inspiration and a
fresh perspective.

Simply provide a topic and ask ChatGPT to generate a list of potential ideas.

For example, you might ask it to give you a list of potential services you can
offer as part of your bookkeeping package. Or you might ask for 10
commonly asked questions in your client niche, giving you 10 blog post
ideas.

The ideas it gives you may not always be exactly what you are looking for,
but it’s a great way to springboard your own thinking and get you started
again when you get writer's block.

Not only does this save you so much time, but it may also help you to think
outside the box and uncover new angles you might not have considered
otherwise.

© Mark Wickersham, 2023 wickersham.co.uk 22

Here are some examples of the prompts you might use:

“Give me a list of 10 essential tax-saving strategies for business owners in

the dental industry”

Note: If the knowledge you are asking for is country-specific (like tax), you
will want to be specific in your prompt and include your preferred country for
the answer.

© Mark Wickersham, 2023 wickersham.co.uk 23

“Give me ideas for content for a book I’m writing about bookkeeping in the
plumbing profession”­

BONUS: Once you have this list or idea of an outline, you can feed it back
into ChatGPT one by one to help flesh out each element, create blogs for
each point, or create a script for a webinar where you teach each point.

© Mark Wickersham, 2023 wickersham.co.uk 24

TARGETED RESEARCH

Normally, when you are doing research, you might head to your favourite
search engine and type in a few keywords like ‘new tax legislation uk’.

Then you have to scroll through blog after blog to find something that
actually answers your question, or you have to patch together bits of
information to get a reasonable understanding.

With ChatGPT you can give much more nuanced search criteria and get a
rapid answer back that is thorough, short and digestible, and specific to your
exact needs.

Remember, ChatGPT does have some limitations in that the facts are not
always accurate (but you run that risk doing a Google search anyway), and it
only has knowledge up until September 2021. Bear this in mind when using
it for research.

A great way to use it is to help you paraphrase large chunks of text that
would take you too long to scan through to find what you are looking for.

For example, if you wanted to understand some new tax legislation, you can
copy and paste the legal text or article and ask ChatGPT to summarise the
key points and tell you what actions you need to take.

BONUS: If you are struggling to understand a complex subject, you could

ask ChatGPT to explain it to you like you are a 10-year-old, or like you are a
complete beginner in the subject.

© Mark Wickersham, 2023 wickersham.co.uk 25

Here are some examples of the prompts you might use:

“How to find bookkeeping clients in my local area”­

© Mark Wickersham, 2023 wickersham.co.uk 26

"What are the key financial ratios that I should monitor for my client’s
industry (restaurants)”

© Mark Wickersham, 2023 wickersham.co.uk 27

BOOK REVIEWS AND SUMMARIES

The best business owners are constantly learning, and reading business
books is a great way to do that.

But running your own accounting or bookkeeping firm can be a lot of work -
sometimes it’s hard to find the time to sit down and read through all those
books you’ve been meaning to get around to.

With ChatGPT, you can save yourself huge amounts of time by asking it to
give you a book review, summarise the key points of the business book and
give you actionable takeaways that you can read within a few minutes.

It’s a great way to condense those books and give you a chance to learn
something from them without having to try and find huge amounts of time to
read them all.

© Mark Wickersham, 2023 wickersham.co.uk 28

Here is an example prompt you might use:

“Give me a summary with actionable takeaways from the book Effective

Pricing for Accountants by Mark Wickersham”

Of course, you will get much more value from reading my books in their
😂
entirety!

© Mark Wickersham, 2023 wickersham.co.uk 29

TOP TIPS

You now have 6 great ways to use ChatGPT within your accounting or
bookkeeping firm to save yourself huge amounts of time and effort when it
comes to written tasks and research.

Here are just a couple of top tips to remember when using the AI tool to
make sure you are getting the most out of it:

We have this saying, ‘Put garbage in, and you’ll get garbage out’. If
you are giving weak prompts, the answers are going to be vague and not
very useful. The more specific you can get with your prompts, the better
the response you will get.

You don’t have to go with the first answer. If you don’t like the answer
ChatGPT has given, or the way a blog or social post is written for
example, you can ask it to have another go and regenerate its answer.
Or you could follow up on your prompt with more details and corrections
to help it get to a point where it is producing the content you need.

Feed it material from your business so that it learns to speak with your
brand, tone and style.

Include your Ideal Client in all prompts where applicable so that it is

always tailoring the writing to attract the right sorts of people to your
business.

© Mark Wickersham, 2023 wickersham.co.uk 30

CONCLUSION

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

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

You can consider ChatGPT to be a virtual assistant or employee – you still

have to speak to it, work with it, and train it to get the most out of it, but it’s
going to take a lot of work off your plate and help increase productivity in the
long run.

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

© Mark Wickersham, 2023 wickersham.co.uk 31

IMPORTANT NOTE

This guide was written in April 2023 and updated in September 2023.
ChatGPT, and other AI tools, are advancing at an incredibly rapid rate, so
we highly recommend you join our community AI and ChatGPT for
Accountants and Bookkeepers to get the latest news and updates as it
affects the accounting industry.

And if you want to know more about how to value price your accounting
services, and join a community of over 9000 accounting professionals
learning to price more confidently and efficiently, you can join our
Facebook group here.

Oh, and in case you were wondering - and we’re sure you were - ChatGPT
😉
did help us to create this eBook for you!

© Mark Wickersham, 2023 wickersham.co.uk 32