What is CPB?
A CPB is a Certified Professional Bookkeeper. Certified Professional Bookkeepers of Canada is the premier bookkeeping designation organization in Canada. CPB ensures that a designated CPB is a bookkeeping professional with sufficient knowledge to provide quality bookkeeping services to the public.
CPBs are required to undergo significant training and testing to gain the designation and are required to regularly get updated on new challenges, regulations, and technologies affecting the industry.
They are also required to adhere to a professional code of conduct and ethics, and regularly be educated on ethics in bookkeeping.
What is CPB Ignite?
CPB Ignite is the premier Canadian Bookkeeping Conference. It’s my top choice of conference in Canada. There is a wonderful community that is supportive and collaborative, and perhaps most importantly, the conference is software agnostic.
This means that you encounter individuals who work in various industries with various technologies. When these larger groups come together, it often results in ideas you wouldn’t be exposed to if you were only attending software-specific conferences.
My Key Takeaways
Learning is absolutely useless if you do nothing with it. In the hours and days following the conference, it’s important to zoom out and examine what you’ve learned. Then, one must prioritize the implementation of the learning.
One group of very smart bookkeepers had an Air BnB where they stayed, and the morning after, had a mastermind group to discuss and action what they felt were the most important takeaways.
Below I will list my top 3 takeaways from the conference and discuss them briefly. However, different attendees from different walks of life will have different opinions.
If you were at CPB Ignite, physically or virtually, and I missed something that you thought was a key takeaway, I’d love to hear your opinion!
Now, on to my thoughts…
Community and Collaboration
The CPB Community is very collaborative. Though many own their bookkeeping firms, they don’t view other attendees as competition, but rather, as coopetition.
CPB hosts a regular collaboration corner where members can attend and discuss the challenges they face, and get real answers. Sometimes, that could be a theoretical question, sometimes it’s a tool that will help them do their job better. Regardless, the key message is that you are not alone.
Beyond CPB, there are many collaborative groups out there on Facebook, LinkedIn and more. If you’re willing to look, you can find help. (A word of caution, make sure you share your jurisdiction and specifics about your problem, and take responses from the internet with a grain of salt – trust, but verify, as sometimes the response may be appropriate in their jurisdiction, but not in Canada).
AI, Integrity, and Communication
AI is here and it isn’t going anywhere. However, it has a lot of growing up to do. When using AI tools, it is vital to clearly understand their terms and conditions. Beware of providing confidential information to AI, as depending on how it learns, it may release that information to others. This would be a violation of privacy.
Another challenge with AI is that it can “hallucinate”. AI Hallucinations occur when the data it is founded upon is not clear or clean. This can result in the provision of false or biased information.
Therefore, unless you’re 100% certain of the data set being used by the AI, it is vital to trust but verify.
One of the most useful things AI can do at the moment is to help you communicate more effectively. Whether that’s taking notes on a Zoom meeting so you don’t have to, cleaning up an email that you’re sending to a client, or helping summarize your thoughts for a presentation or workflow, there are a multitude of applications that don’t risk false responses or divulging private client information.
Using AI to communicate better is something that we are implementing.
Every Bookkeeper Needs to Know a Bit of E-Commerce
One of the most powerful sessions for me was about e-commerce showing up in traditional business models. This was a very important session, so if it’s possible to watch the recording, I strongly recommend it.
Sherri-Lee Mathers of Balsam discussed how e-commerce is appearing in all kinds of places you wouldn’t have suspected it – especially in the post-pandemic era. As a bookkeeper who specializes in breweries, she has encountered everything from Uber and DoorDash, to PayPal, Square and Stripe Payments, to taking pick-up orders through a website.
Though most craft breweries brew beer, they also usually have a tap room where they must serve food. Some have developed extremely good kitchens to augment their businesses.
She also discussed mobile services and traditional “pick-up” services, such as dog grooming, flower shops, and bakeries, using e-commerce components in their scheduling, and taking deposits and payments.
My key takeaways from this session were to:
- Identify where e-commerce is coming into play in traditional businesses
- Create processes to help our clients successfully navigate e-commerce
- Adjust our pricing appropriately.
What’s Next?
For me, the next thing is to take what I’ve learned back to the team and discuss what we should implement, and move forward with implementation.
We’re going to examine the e-commerce components of our traditional businesses and learn more about them, create better processes, and help our clients better than we currently do.
Though we pride ourselves on communication, we aren’t always perfect in the execution of it. AI is going to help us get better, so we’re going to be working with it.
And, of course, we’ll be back collaborating with the community regularly! (I’m already excited for CPB Ignite 2025 in Calgary!)
What were your biggest takeaways? Let us know!