 Welcome to the nonprofit show. We are so glad you're here. But moreover, Julia Patrick and myself are elated to have with us today, Geraldine Dressler. Geraldine joins us from the team at YPTC, your part-time controller, where she serves as the Director of Strategic Partnerships. She's a phenomenal Director of Strategic Partnerships because she's the one who works with us each and every month on our partnership with the YPTC team, and never, ever, ever have you been in front of the camera with us. So thrilled to have you here joining us to talk to us about a topic that really needs, again, its own time. And so glad to have you bring this to us. As we talk about why, you might not find nonprofit accountants. So really kind of talking about where are the accountants, how do we get them. So again, really excited to have you with us, Geraldine, before we jump into conversation, want to remind all of our viewers and our listeners, whether this is your first time joining us, or you've been with us before. We want to say thank you to Julia Patrick for creating this wonderful platform. Julia Patrick is the CEO at the American Nonprofit Academy. I just get to play alongside Julia each and every day as a co-host, and I'm so glad to do that. I'm Jarrett Ransom, your non-profit nerd and CEO of the Raven Group. We would not be where we are today, coming up on nearly 900 episodes in just a matter of days if it weren't for our strategic partnerships with these amazing sponsors. So thank you. Thank you to all of our friends over at Bloomerang, American Nonprofit Academy, Fundraising Academy at National University. Also thank you to Nonprofit Thought Leader, your part-time controller, especially Geraldine today. Also thank you to Stapping Boutique, Nonprofit Nerd as well as Nonprofit Tech Talk. As I mentioned, these companies, most of them had truly been with us for this entire 900 plus episode journey. So thank you for all of your support, your investment, your unscripted trust in us. And so for those of you watching and listening, if you missed any of these previous episodes or you want to go back and find out where are the accountants? Where are they hiding? You can find all of our previous episodes including this one today on streaming broadcast podcast as well as you can download the app. So if you are watching, you can scan that QR code with your smartphone in just a matter of hours, you will get a notification that today's conversation with Ms. Geraldine Dressler is uploaded on that platform. So thank you for being so patient, Geraldine. And also thank you for saying yes, again, for those watching and listening today. We have turned the camera on Geraldine Dressler as she serves Director of Strategic Partnerships at YPTC. Good afternoon to you. Thanks, same to you. I'm so happy to be here on the other side of the camera. Are you really? Cause sometimes... Really, I love this topic and I love you guys. So this is great. You know, it's fun to have you with us because I get to work with you and hear your genius and Jared and even Kevin Pace, our executive producer, we know what you do and how you do it and how you work. And so it's really cool for us to be able to bring that full circle to our viewers and all the people that follow us throughout the world. And so we were talking in the green room so much to go over because this is a crisis that's kind of in the middle of our looming, however you want to explain it to us, which you will. But we've got to ask the question, where did all the accountants go? And first and foremost, help us understand the difference between an accountant and a CPA so we can really unravel this even further. Yeah, that's a great place to start because they are not necessarily one in the same. So the easiest way to think about it, especially for nonprofits, your CPA firm is the organization that comes once a year to do your audited financial statements, your 990 preparation, maybe your state charitable registration filing, that kind of thing, whereas your accountant is gonna be the person who's working with you throughout the year. So that might be your CFO, your controller, your finance manager, it could be an outsource function like us at YPTC. But accountants can be CPAs, but not all accountants are CPAs. So I just wanted to make that clear from the outset. And so I would imagine, because it is a professional designation, that the pool, as we look at who's leading our financial teams and the systems, when we start looking and then we go down to that CPA level, we're gonna have even fewer people. Is that inaccurate? Yeah, that's accurate. And I can give you some statistics that came out very recently, just to illustrate that. So the AICPA, which is the American Institute of CPAs, it's our professional organization, they did a study and they found that 75% of CPAs hit retirement age in 2020, which is bonkers number. That's a lot of CPAs. And yeah, yeah. And that's being compounded by the fact that there are fewer students going to college. There are fewer students majoring in accounting. And even those that major in accounting aren't necessarily going into careers with accounting firms. The beauty of an accounting degree is that you get this amazing skill that can be used in so many different industries like technology, data analytics, finance. So we're not only competing with other accounting firms, we're competing with other industries. So there are just fewer accountants to go around from that perspective. You know, Jeralyn, I cannot help but name drop Ellie Hume because we need more Ellie's, right? And she knew as a young child, she wanted to be an accountant. And I swore I was gonna write this children drill about her. And I think we still really need to do that because you speak of the lack of accountants, the lack of this professional track. We need more Ellie's. Yeah, we absolutely do. And there is a very big concerted effort led nationally by the AICPA, but also at the various state levels. Every state has their own CPA society also to really try to connect with even high school students to get them interested in careers in accounting. I personally think it's the best profession because you get to learn so much about the way businesses, nonprofits, really any organization works. I think we kind of suffer from some poor branding. It's not as sexy as technology or as finance. And so we have that compounded by the way that CPA firms generally are structured. So you come out of school and it's great because you get to use your accounting skills. Everything you learn in school you get to put to use pretty immediately. But a lot of CPA firms, most of them actually are their partnerships. So you work your way up to partner, but that takes time. So the payoff is longer. And then that's not as attractive to younger people today that are coming out of school, they may have school loans, they wanna hit the ground running and they want that higher starting salary. So there's some deep structural issues that have caused this shortage. And I did read a stat somewhere that for every two accounting positions that are open in this country right now, there's one accountant. So there's a severe shortage. Okay, so then drill down a little bit for us on that and address the issue of how nonprofit accounting services vary from for profit. And even if you can back up a little, are we teaching that in school? Are students understanding that there is a difference? Because Jared and I talk about this a lot. In our country, there are still less than really a dozen major universities that have nonprofit educational tracks that are substantial, right? So if that's the case, what does it look like for nonprofit accounting? Yeah, that's definitely true. I think that when I was in school, I may have had half a semester that dealt with nonprofit accounting. So it's definitely an issue from that perspective too. You know, as far as the needs of nonprofits, they don't necessarily need a CPA to work for them. You know, when I think about the needs of organizations that have CPAs in those controller or CFO roles, their large public companies or large private companies, you know, for nonprofits, they really, they need people who are really going to understand how the day-to-day accounting works and have that experience working with nonprofits. There's different accounting rules and guidance that has to be followed. So it's more that you want to have somebody with the correct expertise and the correct experience. It's great to have the CPA designation, but it's not crucial. Interesting. Well, and you can work with CPAs, right? So the CPA doesn't need to be on the payroll per se, point in case, YPTC, right? Like bringing, working with an expert in that manner. There seems to be so many factors truly that impact this, the shortage, if you will, but talk to us about the impact into the sector. How is this shortage of professional accountants truly impacting the sector? And what are you seeing by way of this? There's really two main ways that the sector is being impacted. The first one is actually not a new thing. Nonprofits have traditionally had a lot of trouble hiring for those accounting and finance roles, especially at the higher levels. That comes down to salaries and just what a public company can pay for the same expertise versus a nonprofit. But really where this is playing out for the nonprofit sector in particular is with their CPA firms, we at YPTC are seeing nonprofits getting dropped by their CPA firms, sometimes right before the audit is supposed to occur. And this has terrible implications for these nonprofits who desperately need to have these audits because they may have to send them to their banks to fulfill their debt covenants. They probably have to send them to foundations and other fundings to government agencies, to the IRS in order to keep their nonprofit status. Fun fact, if a nonprofit doesn't file its 990 for three years in a row, it will lose its nonprofit status. So there's wide ranging implications if nonprofit organizations cannot get their financial statements audited or their 990s filed. Gerilyn, I didn't know it was three years. My assumption was one year, right? Like if you don't dot your I and cross your T with it one year, sorry. So that seems quite lenient to me. It is, but it's crazy how it can catch up to some organizations, especially if there's been transitions at the leadership level. I know an organization here in Philly, they had a whole board changeover and they got a letter in the mail saying your nonprofit status, your 501c3 status has been revoked and had to hire an attorney to help with that. They had to pay penalties and fees and fines and you'd never want to get to that situation. So it's really important that you have those statements getting filed on an annual basis. You know, when we talked about this shortage and the impact on our sector, is this something that is going to get worse? Is it something that you're hearing about or talking about? I'm kind of wondering like how armed and how educated are we about this situation even going on? Yeah, so there's kind of two parts to your question, Julia, about how educated are we. So the first thing that comes to mind, I wrote this article recently this year for the National Council of Nonprofits just about this issue. And some of the feedback I heard, particularly from foundations, some of them felt validated that this was actually a systemic thing because they were thinking, oh, my grantees, they're slacking off. What's happening here? And then for others, it was really eye-opening. Like, okay, maybe we need to, we need to help our grantees deal with this. As far as is it gonna get any better? I mean, that's the crystal ball question right now that I don't think a lot of us have the answer to. I can tell you that there is a multi-prong approach that the AICPA and all of the state societies are embarking on to really try to increase the pipeline. We are also participating in that. We're trying to plant the seeds with college students. Come have a career in accounting and work with nonprofits. The only thing that I think that is going to help probably from a couple of perspectives is really the adoption of technology and AI in particular. And it's actually really amazing. Another stat that I read, I'm sorry I can't quote the source, but after technology firms, the accounting industry has been the fastest to adopt AI and technology because we know that so many of the tasks we have to do as accountants and helping our clients, they're routine or they're looking at lots and lots of data. So how can we use tech better to make our jobs more efficient? And that actually makes the profession more attractive to younger people who are really tech savvy and don't want to be doing busy work. They want to be able to use that higher level set of analytical thinking in the work that they do, which makes the job overall much more satisfying. Yeah, you know, that's a little surprising but not totally surprising. Because as we look at the technology advancements over the last four years and the conferences I've been to over the last couple of years, I am seeing such a push for technology specifically in our sector. And maybe it's been there, Geraldine. Like maybe it truly has been there and I've just had my blinders on, right? But really looking at this to, you know, for automation, integration, there's so many different ways, you know, to really, I don't know, use it as a catalyst. But I love what you're saying to really attract a younger demographic of, you know, professionals. What specifically, I'm putting you, I don't know, like in a corner now, but what specifically is YPTC doing strategically, right? To attract some of these younger professionals to say, hey, we see you, you know, you're in this program in your university, consider us. As I said to you, I've almost attended one of your meet and greets. Just because I simply love the team, but what are you doing by way of attraction? Yeah, so we've been really fortunate to have a founder and our CEO who's incredibly tech forward, you both know Eric, right? He has really been at the forefront of this effort for our firm. You know, we wanna make sure that we not only have the tools on our side to make sure that we're doing our work as effectively and as efficiently as possible because that results in a better product for our client, but we wanna make sure that our clients are informed too. And we do that by educating our staff. There's a lot of training that we do internally to make sure that our people are up on the latest tools and technologies and even just the way that systems talk to each other. We're actually building our own technology, our own bots that incorporate AI, so stay tuned. But the whole point of that is that we want to make the work experience the work that we do to help our nonprofit clients feel really good and feel like that we are using our skills to the utmost extent. We don't wanna have people be doing busy work. We don't wanna have them sifting through, you know, an Excel spreadsheet that has 1800 lines to try to synthesize the data. How can we use technology to make that work better? And then we can serve more clients. So it really is a win-win for everybody. It's such an interesting thing because it's, I can see the issue with you all as an organization trying to do what you need to do to build business. And at the same time, reach out to the nonprofit sector that has been woefully behind in the adoption of technology. You know, Jarrett and I, when we first started the nonprofit show, we literally had episodes on how to get people on to Zoom, right? I mean, didn't we, Jarrett? You know, and I mean, that's how behind our sector was. And so as we look at moving forward, there's got to be, I don't wanna say a reckoning, but maybe just more of a push to explain technology is really gonna help our sector move ahead and to your point, serve more than we ever thought we could. Part and parcel to that. I got to ask this question and that is, if we have folks that we like, if we have folks that we're, maybe we don't even like them, but we have them and we wanna keep them, what do we do? I mean, we talk a lot about how we keep programming staff and how we keep fundraising staff and development and C-suite, but we haven't really addressed the financial teams. And what would you advise us to do? So the way I kind of think about your accounting talent, I think of it both your internal talent and then also your external talent, right? Like we can't forget about the CPA firm element here because it's really crucial to the functioning of nonprofits. So internally, obviously as nonprofits, they're limited, there's only so much salary that they can pay. So they usually do a great job of trying to compensate that with other types of perks and benefits. But I think beyond that, especially knowing with the younger generations, how important work-life balances, generous PTO policies, even dealing with elder care issues and childcare issues or pet issues, having time off that people can take that doesn't have to be explained, that's a great way to kind of attract people and retain people. When we talked about it before technology, being a tech forward organization is going to attract talent because they're gonna know that they are going to, again use that higher order level of thinking to do their job and not have to do busy work or not having to spend time making one system, talk to the other, they should do that naturally. So those are just some tips on the internal side and then on the external side, you wanna be really attractive to your CPA firm so that they don't drop you. Part of the reason for that is they're having a hard time attracting a retaining talent. They're overwhelmed, they have more clients than they can handle. So they're following the path of least resistance and nonprofits tend to be messy and not ready for the audit and not pay as much as for-profit firms. So you want to be attractive, you wanna make sure that you have all of your documentation ready, upload it to the portal, you're ready by field work, you've got people on hand that are dedicated to answering their questions so there doesn't have any delay. But you wanna make sure that you have all your eyes dotted and tees crossed so that you remain a viable client for that CPA firm. Sterling, I have a curve ball question as you're sharing this with the advancements of technology and AI, all of us have heard, right? Like it's coming for our jobs, there's not gonna be jobs for us. Do you believe that the accounting sector will still grow at the same rate or the need I should say as it has or do you feel that within that crystal ball that you alluded to having or being so close to that the profession, we won't need quite as many accountants. And I know it's a total curve ball but I'm just curious because we hear about this in so many different positions, so many different roles. How is that impacting the amount of professionals we need to attract and retain in this very talented sector? Yeah, that's a good question. I think that's something a lot of folks are wondering. The way I like to think of it is that AI won't replace accountants but it will replace accountants who don't adopt AI. So it really, it's two pieces of the puzzle that have to work together. So yeah, I mean, it kinda makes sense though because I mentioned that two to one gap earlier. Hopefully technology and AI will help to shrink that gap by a little bit. You're never gonna replace a human when it comes to decision-making. There's only so much that AI or a bot can do to interpret data and then use that to make strategic decisions for the future. AI doesn't really have that crystal ball like humans do because we're synthesizing a whole lot of other qualitative aspects to the way that a nonprofit works to make decisions. So, I remember being, the summer I was going into college and I heard on the radio, an article that said that accountants are gonna get replaced because of technology. And that was a long time ago. So we'll be popping up but the answer kind of stays consistent. And that's probably why the accounting industry has been so quick to adopt technology because we do need it and it makes us better at what we do. You know, I think the accountants in the nonprofit sector you know, forever and a day, we're just kind of like, get me this report, stat, you know? And now it seems to me like the finance and accounting departments are really a lot more engaged. They're having to show up and work on the grant application. Not just servicing a grant, but before they're having to look at costs associated with, you know everything from HR and, you know, investments and things like that. It's not as simple as just balancing the checkbook. It just seems to me like they're much more enmeshed in the strategic operations of an organization if they're being used correctly. I mean, is that a fair assessment? Oh yeah, and finance and accounting touches every aspect of a nonprofit organization. And if it doesn't, if you're, you know an ups person or a program manager or something and you don't know people on your accounting team you should because they can help you and they are your friends and they can help you, you know everybody is beholden to budgets, you know wherever that source is coming from and you do need that help to interpret and to report and to make sure you're not double dipping most importantly. So I, you know, that's a big part of the work that we do is to try to bring down those silos that may exist in an organization and make sure that that communication is happening because finance accounting it's everywhere and you're, you have your head in your sand if you have your head in the sand, if you don't think so. Right. I agree. I think, you know, really pulling this person persons into the conversation into the, you know, strategic discussions. If you're not doing this I'm not quite sure you're doing it right. You know, I mean, it's just they are a critical role into the organization. So I so appreciate you bringing this to the topic. Love that this is one of your passion, you know areas of conversation and that we were able to benefit from having you with us today. Again, Geraldine Dressler has joined us director of strategic partnerships at YPTC or part-time controller. I'm gonna give a plug. I know this is not what you asked me to do but YPTC does offer these meet and greets. I happen to run across it on LinkedIn. And as I shared with Geraldine I was even tempted to RSVP and join it was online. And I just think it's a wonderful opportunity, you know and again plug for the younger professionals if this is of interest to you, you know certainly check them out. It's a phenomenal company and culture. And Geraldine, you really did shine bright today on this topic. Now I wanna go back and read these articles that you wrote and mentioned. So thank you for mentioning that. I'm gonna be on a goose hunt unless you're able to send that to me along with that, you know pumpkin bread recipes. I will, I will send you the article and it's a fun fact. I'm tweeting my own horn here but the council has told me that that article is the most read article this year even to this point. So it has been very eye-opening for people. It's been great. You know, Geraldine we have literally four minutes left and you are a young mother, a professional working woman. Give us the pitch of why we should be if we have children going into college or maybe we're a college student or maybe we're somebody looking at it at a shift in our career. Why this is a good career choice? What does it mean for you? For me, you know, I made that decision not like Ellie, not when I was in third grade. I was a sophomore in college, but I remember taking my first accounting class and it clicked and I really like numbers. I, you know, I'm not a wizard math. You don't have to be a wizard math to be an accountant but I like finding patterns and seeing how things fit. And one of my professors I think early on said accounting is a skill that you can use in any company in any industry really anywhere in the world. You understand how an organization works. You see how the sausage is made and that's a translatable skill that you can take with you anywhere. So even if you don't know what you're going to do in life or maybe you want to start your own business it's a really good idea to start with accounting because you're going to have that foundation that's going to bring you pretty far. Love it. Well, thank you. That is a fabulous way to wrap up this episode of the nonprofit show because again, we need all the great talent we can in our sector and especially when we're looking at our accounting and finance teams and leadership and thought leaders. Geraldine Dressler, Director of Strategic Partnerships for Your Part-Time Controller has been with us. Again, I'm Julia Patrick, CEO of the American Non-Pak Profit Academy. I've been with Jira Ransom, my profit nerd, the nonprofit nerd. She can be your nonprofit nerd, CEO of the Raven Group. Again, we have amazing partners and they include Bloomerang, American Non-Profit Academy, Your Part-Time Controller, Non-Profit Thought Leader, Fundraising Academy at National University, Staffing Boutique, Non-Profit Nerd and Non-Profit Tech Talk. These are the folks that join us day in and day out and every once in a while, I mention this, but they don't dictate our editorial direction. This is a really amazing thing to recognize is that in 900 episodes, we might have had a couple of sponsors that called me personally and said, Julia, I didn't like what you talked about today and that sometimes happens but we are never dictated to towards what we can speak about and who we can bring on and how we navigate these conversations which frankly is very magical. Don't you think, Jared? It is, we appreciate it much. Yeah, it's really amazing. Everybody, we sign off every day with this amazing mantra and every day I think I hear it differently and I think of it differently and it goes like this. Stay well so you can do well and become an accountant. How about that, Gerilyn? Love it.