I’ve also seen this called “The Whispering Earring”, and have seen it hosted here (this version slightly more readable)
1,326 karma · joined June 29, 2009
It's more the satisfaction of (a) doing a small nice thing for a stranger on the Internet while also (b) freeing up a little shelf space is also worth the ~$5 it would cost me to mail it to someone.
The short summary of it is: the sorcerer's apprentice (Mickey) uses magic to get a broom to fetch water for him, and then the situation gets out of control as the broom continues to get water, and he has no idea how to stop it.
(It's a cautionary tale about the danger of playing with forces you don't really understand/"be careful what you wish for".)
Here’s a detailed writeup I prepared a while back about exactly how to resolve this if you want to DIY it. (This is one of the very few filings I actually recommend you DIY.)
https://pilot.com/blog/how-to-file-your-delaware-franchise-t...
In 2024, your business has $1m in revenue and has $2m in expenses. 100% of these expenses are R&D salaries (engineers you hire.)
Your company loses $1m/year. (You brought in $1m and spent $2m.)
Under the old rules, you'd owe no tax because you were unprofitable.
After Sec 174, what the IRS now says is:
You had revenues of $1m. But you only had $400k in expenses (because you now have to spread that $2m in R&D expense over 5 years).
So actually you had a profit of $600k! And you owe tax on that $600k profit (~$120k)
So you now have an additional $120k tax expense, making your business even more cash-flow negative.
.
Amusingly, if you're pre-revenue, none of this matters (you have no income at all, so it doesn't matter what your expenses are.) You get hardest hit by this change when you have some revenue and when you do a fair bit of R&D.
(I am one of its founders, though that doesn’t make the above inaccurate.)
Email me? (Email in profile.)
(It's a nontrivial problem but there's at least a reasonable check—"Did the balance sheet, P&L, and cashflow statement generated by both systems match")
https://pilot.com/bench-qbo-migration
(Disclaimer is that I'm one of Pilot's founders.)
Here's my best articulation of specifically what makes it hard: https://waseem.substack.com/p/tech-enabled-services
And yes, we can do 2024 catch-up work.
(waseem@pilot.com if folks have any specific questions)
The Harris Victory Fund (the linked-to thing) is where I'm planning on making my contribution. (I'd do this as "up to $500k from each of me and my wife.")
But LLM context windows are now large enough that you can feed your entire balance sheet and P&L into the LLM and ask it to point out things that might be errors (or that could be optimized). With the right prompting, it produces results that are… surprisingly good.
So I hacked together a little tool around it, combining some LLM checks with some deterministic checks of a few things that are usually signs of a problem in QuickBooks. I’m pretty happy with it.
My main critique so far is that some of the LLM output feels a little bit like a horoscope: specific enough to feel tailored, but vague enough to be true for anyone. In my testing, it always seems to want you to be more profitable (which, in its defense, is probably a nearly-universally-true statement about businesses.)
On the backend it’s Python and Flask, and it uses a mix of Claude (Anthropic) and OpenAI for different parts of the prompt.
I’ve always been shocked at how manual the job of doing the books is, and I’m very bullish on stuff like this to both (a) improve quality, and (b) actually make the job more enjoyable.
I incidentally happen to be a founder of an accounting firm, but this was a nights-and-weekends hackathon-style project made by me and a person on our marketing team--don’t tell the engineers :)
Trying this out (perhaps obviously) requires a QuickBooks Online account. If you don’t have one, you can watch a short screen recording of it working here: https://youtu.be/Xvqnzr82XVc
Very interested in your feedback. I'll be checking this all day to answer any questions.
The idiomatic translation here would be "Bonjour, comment allez-vous?"
In addition to having deep integrations with these tools, we actually do have real partnerships with almost all of them.
"What's a real partnership?" is a great question, but I'd mostly think of it principally as "We know them, they know us, we have a red phone we can pick up to get things solved for each other" (which is good for the customer), and then also "And we occasionally do some comarketing together."
Not to shill my own stuff too much here, but I wrote a bit about this here: https://waseem.substack.com/p/will-your-startup-make-you-hap...
You're right that that is distinct from “hours worked”, and sure, maybe 35 is the magic number for someone.
0 hours is too few hours, and 70 is too many— so clearly there is a line there somewhere. I suspect that that line varies from person to person and even week to week, hence the point about “either be working or don’t be working”.
The process itself is slightly easier because I don't have to tediously type in wire instructions into my bank's website :)
The creator of the RUV can decide whether the company pays the fees or whether the investors pay the fees. The ones I've done so far have been "company pays the fee," in part I think to help avoid the perception that you're getting a worse deal via the RUV.