Along This Trail
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250 Years of America Through the Lens of the Accounting Profession💙🤍❤️
Every profession has its own history, but few mirror the development of a nation as closely as accounting. The July issue of the Journal of Accountancy features a special commemorative section celebrating the 250th anniversary of the United States by tracing the evolution of the accounting profession alongside the nation’s history. Rather than presenting accounting…
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Will AI Really Take Everyone’s Job? Lessons from The Prediction Machine
A few days ago, YouTube recommended a book-review video by a Chinese content creator discussing The Prediction Machine (published in Chinese as AI Minimalist Economics), a book originally written in English by three economists from the University of Toronto. The video offered one of the clearest economic explanations of AI that I have encountered, particularly…
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Internal Controls Over Generative AI: Moving Beyond the Framework
Generative AI is rapidly finding its way into accounting, auditing, finance, compliance, and operational processes. As organizations begin integrating these tools into day-to-day activities, a familiar question emerges: How do we maintain effective internal controls when the system generating information can produce different answers to the same question? While reading the June 2026 issue of…
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Power Query Fundamentals for Accountants, Auditors, and Analysts
Many accounting, auditing, and reporting tasks begin with a familiar challenge: data arrives in different formats, from different sources, and rarely in a form that is immediately ready for analysis. Whether the information comes from an ERP system, a CSV export, a spreadsheet received by email, or a database report, significant time is often spent…
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Useful Macro and VBA Resources
What is Macro and VBA? Macros and VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) are closely related tools used to automate tasks in Microsoft Excel. A macro is a recorded sequence of actions that Excel can replay automatically, while VBA is the programming language behind those automations. Together, they allow users to eliminate repetitive work, improve consistency,…
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Is AI Really Taking Away People’s Jobs?
Every industrial revolution brings a period of social and economic transformation. Some professions gradually fade, while new ones emerge in their place. During the Industrial Revolution, many forms of manual labor were transformed by machinery. In the automotive and electronic age, occupations related to horse transportation — such as carriage drivers and stable workers —…