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Digital transformation expert, self-declared geek and fellow podcast host, Ryan Pearcy, joins Stuart to share his accounting journey. Together, they discuss the joys of empowering clients with the right business insights, the impacts of technology in accounting over the last two decades, and why the four-day workweek is less likely to be adopted by accounting firms than other businesses.
Join Stuart McLeod as he interviews the world's top accounting leaders to understand their story, how they operate, their goals, mission, and top advice to help you run your accounting firm.
Stuart: 00:00:05.916 [music] Hi. I'm Stuart McLeod, CEO and Co-Founder of Karbon. Welcome to the Accounting Leaders Podcast, the show where I go behind the scenes with the world's top accounting leaders. [music] Today, I'm joined by Ryan Pearcy, a chartered accountant, head of SB Digital. That's Scrutton Bland. Ryan is a digital transformation expert and has helped many accounting firms move to the cloud. He's a self-declared geek and a tech enthusiast. He co-hosts the Digi-Tools In Accrual World podcast that brings app news, insights and a healthy dose of banter to the UK accounting industry. He's also a dedicated father to a two-year-old, a keen golfer, and a runner, and it's my pleasure to welcome to the Accounting Leaders Podcast, Ryan Pearcy. Well, firstly, Ryan, welcome to the Accounting Leaders Podcast. I was looking back at how long we'd sort of been connected, and I thought it was actually a little bit before 2018, but we saw you at Accountex in 2018. Do you remember? We probably didn't have much to offer back in those days apart from a banner and one person on the-- I don't know. It might have been a little bit more than that.
Ryan: 00:01:17.040 Do you know what? I would say I probably knew you guys before that. So that was probably more when it logged on the system, yeah, because 2018 feels a little late for my awareness of Karbon, so. But--
Stuart: 00:01:29.282 Good. Good. There you go. We'll have to get our records [laughter] [inaudible].
Ryan: 00:01:34.748 Well, it's definitely when you were bringing a lot more to the UK at that point.
Stuart: 00:01:39.382 Well, let's go back to the start, Ryan. How did accounting become part of your life?
Ryan: 00:01:43.380 Ah, well, that was a bit weird. So I did a degree in mathematical and theoretical physics, which is not your kind of entrance to accounting. But I'd gone through pretty much all of my education not having a clue what I wanted to do when I grew up and had to earn money and came out of that degree still not really having a clue but having now a pretty good degree. And there was a few areas that went into a carry-on kind of study and kind of pursue the world of physics. I could go into teaching or education, or I could go into finance. Finance seemed to be a big thing, so I delved into that, did some research on it, and found there was kind of two roles that I thought would be a good fit. I'd be an actuary or an accountant, and I felt the accountant would be more rewarding because you are giving back to people. And that's kind of how it started. I started at a small firm after taking probably a year off not doing much, and yeah, qualified, moved to a top 20 firm, and then moved to Scrutton Bland, which seems the right fit for me.
Stuart: 00:02:44.189 There you go. That's a very technical degree and something that requires a brain much smarter than mine. Was there an academic career or a physics career or a aeronautical career or something in there, or you just sort of had the affinity with numbers perhaps?
Ryan: 00:02:59.047 Yeah. I love what it was about, and I would never change it. I love learning about how the world works and how everything works, and the bit that I guess I always found funny is in my first job as an accountant when I couldn't get something because I struggled with accounting early on, my boss would always say, "It's not rocket science." And I was always, "So I can do rocket science." Rocket science, I've got.
Stuart: 00:03:19.223 Rocket science I've got under control.
Ryan: 00:03:20.090 Double entry. Double entry [crosstalk]. [laughter]
Stuart: 00:03:24.898 The [inaudible] brought you undone.
Ryan: 00:03:26.975 Yeah, exactly. To be honest, the mathematical part of accounting came easy to me possibly because of my degree, but the wordy part and the arguments and the justifications especially on the kind of audit side etc. is the bit that took a little bit longer.
Stuart: 00:03:41.747 And you joined a-- what was your first job like?
Ryan: 00:03:45.069 So it was a small firm. So there was a small office or a bigger firm, but the office generally kind of ran itself, two partners, and you kind of had to do everything. So I ended up getting a really broad experience in that, and I'd say it was challenging. There was reasons that I decided to leave, and those reasons kind of-- I was there nearly 10 years, and those reasons never changed, but I think that set the base experience for everything that I've kind of then built into.
Stuart: 00:04:16.922 You would've learned a lot having to cover all those bases then.
Ryan: 00:04:20.006 Yeah, definitely. And I've always been quite techie and nerdy, and ended up moving into kind of a systems role there as well, looking at the-- it was pretty early on in cloud accounting. QuickBooks online was quite prevalent and Xero was coming over to the UK market. And yeah, I was playing around with them, dabbling them. I even remember exploring Spotlight Reporting back then, so yeah. And that was good.
Stuart: 00:04:43.014 Good, good, good. Keeping the commonwealth companies in business.
Ryan: 00:04:47.834 Exactly, yeah. But no, it was a really good experience. It's not one I'd change.
Stuart: 00:04:52.299 And then, so from small firm to monolith would've been a cultural shift for you?
Ryan: 00:04:56.836 Yeah, it was odd. I moved into a role, and it was an audit and accounts role, and quite early on, I realised that the portfolio that I'd inherited was a bit small for me. So I was always fishing around for new work. And they had just started-- or just launched their own cloud accounting team, which I got involved in, and as I do, I kind of threw myself into it quite fully and ended up leading it basically in the top 20 firm. And although there was a partner there, she was more than happy for me to kind of take the lead, and she would oversee parts. And yeah, I pretty much ran a lot of the early strategy, developed a lot of skill set around that because I'd not got involved in strategy at all and did that for about three years before exploring new and different avenues and moving to Scrutton Bland at that time.
Stuart: 00:05:45.380 And when you started with Scrutton, what was the sort of dynamics of the firm, and what role did you take on?
Ryan: 00:05:52.781 So the firm was what I call mid-tier. So I'd gone from small. I'd gone to large. And then this was a mid-tier firm. So I was covering--
Stuart: 00:06:00.034 You faired [inaudible].
Ryan: 00:06:00.893 Yeah, I was covering all bases, basically. And their focus was owner-managed businesses, and that's what I realised when moving to a large firm. I realised actually what I loved was those people that ran their own business, interacting with them because I think I started [pigeonholed?] into a bigger corporate dynamic at the firm before which was MacIntyre Hudson, and I wasn't enjoying it. So I really liked the fact that I could actually talk to owners of the business, help them with their aspirations. So I moved across. It was a general portfolio early on, but with the kind of idea to develop their cloud accounting space. They had developed a solution called SB Live, which was about basically three solutions which was Xero, Dext, and Featurely at the time, but it kind of stalled a bit, and they wanted to grow it. So I'd already started to do digital transformation in my old firm. Wanted to bring that across, though. We're quite excited about the opportunities there. So I started exploring that. We had the advent of MTD for VAT at that point early on at Scrutton Bland, which was about four years ago. And so I ran that project, and then from that, we started advising clients on systems beyond the likes of Xero, QuickBook, Sage, and we developed a team and developed now what is a service line called SB Digital. So yeah, we created something which was for Scrutton Bland, at least completely new.
Stuart: 00:07:21.346 And what does a portfolio look like in SB Digital? Is it a vertical in terms of sort of what those clients do, or is it horizontal in terms of their business types, but the tech stack is sort of similar across all of those?
Ryan: 00:07:37.267 No, it is completely bespoke. So what we do is we--
Stuart: 00:07:41.491 Yeah, right. Okay.
Ryan: 00:07:42.022 Yeah. So we assess how that business operates. We map out their processes officially, so using a kind of data process tool, and then we will recommend systems that fit how they operate [inaudible] industry. So there'll be specific stuff, but there'll be then functional areas such as expense management or reporting. So literally everything that we end up recommending is a combination of different apps. Normally, [inaudible] centred around the Xero ecosystem, but that's generally because it's larger and has more opportunity there. But it could have QuickBooks online at the heart, or we've looked at the bigger systems such as AccountsIQ, Exact, etc. And on average at the moment, we identify about £1000 a month in time savings for those businesses that we do this work. So 12 grand a year that they can save in time.
Stuart: 00:08:24.399 Yeah, and I imagine if you're putting together this portfolio of vendors that [inaudible] the time savings, right. It's enabling them, the customer base, the client base to get more live data, be better managers, get better insight into their operations. Tell me some of these clients of yours that come to mind in terms of success stories where perhaps you've started with them, and they've grown, that you've put the tech stack in. They uncovered levers or metrics that they hadn't had before. You spoke before about giving back and being involved in these sort of owner-operated businesses, so there must be some great clients that you've worked with.
Ryan: 00:09:06.366 Yeah, definitely. I'll touch on the bit you said first, which is about what do we deliver more than just the efficiency gains. That's exactly right. We focus on three key areas, which is efficiency and automation, but it's flexibility. I mean cloud accounting enables so much flexibility in how you operate and especially for owner-managed businesses, that ability to be able to work from anywhere as they need to rather than having to go to an office, especially since the pandemic. But the third and most important one and the one I think segregates us from those IT professionals that are used to kind of doing digital transformation is the fact that as accountants, we understand businesses. We understand business owners and what they're trying to achieve, and to do that, they need access to insights. So everything that we design is about making sure that they're getting the right information at kind of the endpoint through either reporting tools or different tools that kind of bring that information to light. So we focus on what you want to get out the system, and then we kind of work backwards to what does that system need to look like and what's the structure of that to deliver. But a couple of examples that I guess that I quite like: so one was a not-for-profit. They knew they had to something. They were on an old system that was working on MS-DOS in one computer in one dusty room. Yeah, it was a really old system I've never heard of.
Stuart: 00:10:19.629 Not connected to the internet?
Ryan: 00:10:21.098 No, pretty much you couldn't. If you connected to the internet, the whole thing falls over. [laughter] [inaudible] system.
Stuart: 00:10:28.332 The modem out and dial-up.
Ryan: 00:10:29.619 Yeah. And so what we did is we did a review and recommended a system in, but we recommended the system about four months before COVID hit, and we implemented it the month before COVID hit.
Stuart: 00:10:41.841 Ah, very--
Ryan: 00:10:43.156 Timing was everything.
Stuart: 00:10:43.933 Fortune teller.
Ryan: 00:10:44.442 Yeah. Because if we hadn't done that, they wouldn't have been able to access their finances because how they operated, they weren't allowed on-site. None of the finance team were allowed on-site. The finance system was only on-site, so they couldn't access anything. Also, over that period, with a lot of what's going on with COVID, unfortunately, they had had some people from the finance team that couldn't come back to work, and it meant that they couldn't recruit with what everything that was going on. So they needed to find a different way of operating to keep the charity going. So they managed to outsource to us actually-- well, not to SB Digital, but another part of the firm just for three months, just whilst they recruited to be able to tick things along, and they wouldn't have been able to do that if we hadn't moved them into cloud accounting, which enabled that flexibility. So yeah, they were a massive advocate of ours, and it was a huge success story for them and for how we've helped, and yeah, we're really happy with that. But we've also done one where we did a huge bit of work for the hospitality business that was shut down over COVID. We've done things with retail businesses. We've done stuff with those in trade, so electricians, gas workers, etc. We're not sector specific. We pretty much cover any sector, so yeah, we've got lots of good stories, and I'd bore you with running through all of those for the next hour.
Stuart: 00:11:55.283 Ah, no. Let's do it. That's the bit that I love. I mean, [inaudible] talk to people like yourself Ryan. It is about the people that you work with, and the reason that you do what you do. Well, you tell me. The reason that a lot of the accountants that we have talked with over the years is going on that journey, is there a client that you've worked with for a long time that you've sort of seen growing from success to success, and you're proud of the way that they've conducted themselves and succeeded along the way?
Ryan: 00:12:27.336 Yeah, definitely. So less so if I kind of move slightly away from SB Digital because SB Digital is only three years old now, so it's harder to kind of track that longer-term success. But in my old firm, there was a client that literally I was there for it's creation. Two of them were running the business. I had to get some investment to do that, but they were starting out, gambling, not knowing if they'd make it a success or not. Loved working with them. When I moved from MacIntyre to Scrutton Bland, I was privileged enough that they wanted to come with me. [inaudible] once [all covents?], etc. passed, they reached out to come over, but they've--
Stuart: 00:13:05.271 You don't have to have a writer. [laughter] It's okay.
Ryan: 00:13:08.526 It's going out on the [laughter] [inaudible]. So they were adamant it would just be them two, that they didn't want to grow. And then they got to a point where they kind of maximised their time, and they're like, "Well, should we dabble a bit." And since that, they're now a team of 10, and they're approaching audit threshold, and yeah, they're constantly pushing. They've had a couple of difficult years in the past, but this year they're flying, and it's amazing to see what they've built up over the past, what, probably six, seven years.
Stuart: 00:13:41.583 Oh, yeah. Cool. What sort of industries are they in?
Ryan: 00:13:44.902 So they used to call themselves a Del Boy and Rodney style business. So they would buy goods from one area which is a huge manufacturer that's trying to offload goods, and then they'd sell them into supermarkets or big chains making not huge profits every time, but doing it in a high volume so that it makes a big difference. And they'd always be looking for deals. And so yeah, they always compared themselves to the Trotters Independent Traders, but they were a much more slick operation than they give themselves credit for at times.
Stuart: 00:14:16.732 Very cool. And let's talk a little bit about SB Digital because it sounds like you've been pretty instrumental in building that out. What does the team look like now, and what do the growth patterns look like as well?
Ryan: 00:14:28.523 Cool. So as of October 22, we're a team of four, and we started off. It was just basically part-time, myself and one other person. We were kind of dipping our toe in the water. We had an objective for, I think it was, nine months or about 30 odd thousand, which was some advisory fees, but mostly implementation of systems and training. That was kind of what we'd do. And then the next year was like, "Okay, let's aim for around 60 odd thousand," kind of look to kind of double where our objective was on the prior year, move a more into advisory, which is kind of selecting those systems, recommending them. And kind of expand on support as well. So we provide phone and email support for clients on various systems, and also on that, on the connections between them because if you look at cloud software, you can get support on the individual piece of the cloud software, but then as soon as you've got a connection between two, both vendors tend to go, "Well, that's not our problem. That's the other--"
Stuart: 00:15:25.038 [laughter] It's somebody else's problem.
Ryan: 00:15:25.544 Yeah and they just get moved between, so we take up that as part of our support. So we expanded into that. We beat our target in the second year, not by a huge amount, but that was when COVID had hit, and we expected to just fall off a cliff edge. It's advisory. It's not something that a business necessarily needs, but we were lucky enough to beat our target. And then the following year, we'd set ourself quite a lofty target heading towards more like 120, 130 thousand, and we did not achieve that. It was a tough year. It was that year when you're kind of coming through lockdown out the other side, but you're approaching a kind of second winter where you're thinking, "Oh, they're going to lockdown again," and every business just went, "Ah, we can't afford to put any investment." So we hit around the same as we did the prior year, but it wasn't the growth we wanted. But this year, we've hit a target of 150 for the year, and we think we're likely to hit that. Although we've got a team of four, we have a hybrid role because we want to make sure that we're still acting as accountants, but the following year-- basically every year after this, we're looking at a 30 to 40 percent growth rate. And we can't see a reason we wouldn't achieve that.
Stuart: 00:16:27.148 And I imagine that the services that you offer feed directly back into the rest of the firm once those clients are sort of well established. They've got their systems under control. The processes and procedures are in place. The tech stack is integrated nicely. Do you have some favourite vendors that you work with when you were going to clients?
Ryan: 00:16:45.861 Favourites probably not the right word only because we purposefully are agnostic, and there's a reason for this. I know that there are people in the space that advise, and they get a kickback from software vendors for implementing a lot. We purposefully do not accept that. We look to secure discounts for our clients, and we pass them on because we want to be completely independent. We take our pride in making sure that it's the right system we're recommending. But there are software or systems that constantly come up - Xero is one - and that's mostly because of how great its app store is and the connections and how robust the connections are to other systems. Dext and [inaudible] quite regularly come up from the expense management side, and not all the time, but they do regularly come up, [inaudible], especially in the space that we work in. But from, I guess, quite an advanced tool, one that we specialise in that is less prevalent in the UK is one called Scoro, S-C-O-R-O, which is a project management system. And it's probably one of the most advanced project management systems cloud [inaudible] in the UK that's still affordable for small or medium-sized businesses. So we are one of two referral partners in the UK, and we're looking to move into what's called a reseller model, which just means that we take on the implementations of the software because we've become-- not even for any choice of our own. There's been so many clients that we've either had directly from Scoro, because we can provide advice beyond just the system, or just clients that we picked up that actually Scoro's the right fit for that we've now got a specialist in this area.
Stuart: 00:18:18.633 And they would appreciate your expertise in the way that you work with their customers as well.
Ryan: 00:18:24.073 Yeah, definitely. They want a deeper relationship with us. They're already aware that from their implementation team, most of those are based in Scandinavia or the U.S. They want more of a UK team, and we're working with them to help support them in what's quite a lofty growth strategy from their side. But definitely, I could see them achieving it because their system does have-- or stand about-- or stand above in many areas in that project management space.
Stuart: 00:18:48.683 And they're big on the-- is that the one that's big on the four-day work week? Was that them?
Ryan: 00:18:52.788 That is indeed. Yes.
Stuart: 00:18:53.565 I read a bit.
Ryan: 00:18:54.188 You definitely picked that up. So I think they went live on that in 1st of July. They wanted to go live before that, but for certain reasons, it was not ethically the right time to do it. I think they launched it in July, and they do feedback on how well that works, and we're likely to have them again on the-- not again, sorry. We'd like to have them on the Digi-Tools In Accrual World at some point to discuss how effective that's been. Got to drop that in there.
Stuart: 00:19:20.729 We can do promos. That's no worries. So have you adopted the four-day work week at Scrutton Bland yet?
Ryan: 00:19:26.318 No. I've got to admit, the first accountancy firm that is bold enough to adopt the four-day work week I think is going to be quite a trendsetter. When you're a business that's so dependent on chargeable time from individuals, it's quite a hit to go to four days. So I think it's going to be a-- personally, I think it's going to be a while before accounting firms properly look to adopt that.
Stuart: 00:19:47.498 Well, the war for talent is well and truly waging. Perhaps that's the next frontier, right?
Ryan: 00:19:53.746 Yeah, no. I completely agree. I think the thing at the moment is that most accounting firms are understaffed because it's just so hard to attract. The pool of people seems to have shrunk since COVID. I don't know why. I don't know the reasons, but it seems to have shrunken. When everyone's overloaded because you've not been able to bring people in, the last thing you want to do is go, "We have to deliver the same amount of work, but now in four days rather than five." I think that would break-- I think that would break most teams at the moment. [laughter]
Stuart: 00:20:20.087 We need six, not four.
Ryan: 00:20:21.308 Yeah. [At work?], it feels very much like six at times I think, and it's how do we give more value back to those individuals that are investing that time to make sure that we can deliver the service that we're so keen to deliver as a firm.
Stuart: 00:20:33.361 And having built up the digital aspect of the firm, where do you see that going? Have you got a grand plan or you're on a steady growth path that everybody's comfortable with?
Ryan: 00:20:44.937 No. So we do have grand plans. So the whole kind of digital transformation space is still quite new if I look at or compare to most firms out there, and I still think we're quite a leader in the space. There's a lot of firms that are starting to talk about it, but realistically, it's not something they're delivering on scale. There are a few that do this really well, but there's not a lot that do this at scale. And what we are looking to do at SB Digital is support those firms that want to deliver a system or service like this, but don't have, I guess, the same level of resource that we're lucky to have at Scrutton Bland. Because to do this properly and do this, I guess, like I said earlier, which is independent - you're not just focusing on a small set of systems, and you're kind of shielding yourself from the rest - you do need a certain scale. So we want to try and support those firms that want to do it but can't do all of it. So they might be able to do a certain area, and they can do that really well, but they can't do everything else, and we can support them in those areas that they can't deliver in.
Stuart: 00:21:38.810 So you're going to sort of white label the digital transformation offering?
Ryan: 00:21:41.995 Yeah. Not only white label. We want to set a baseline for what the standard should be. So yeah, developer benchmark that this is how good-- we were focused for the last three years on really making sure we deliver a quality service. We want to make sure that that's what everyone can deliver instead of the whole thing of-- which I think it started out as when everyone was dabbling. It's like, "Oh, I've heard of this system. I recommend that system to a business." That just might not be relevant for them at all, and you really--
Stuart: 00:22:09.697 Yeah, yeah. It's just because they've used them before.
Ryan: 00:22:11.608 Exactly, and you really need to understand that business to know and the system to know if that's a good link or not. And we've been through the pain points where you don't recommend the right system, and it doesn't work for that business and the fallout from it. We've learned from that, and we want to make sure that we can educate everyone else that's going through this process of trying to bring in the service line and the pitfalls to avoid.
Stuart: 00:22:32.074 And having worked so closely with the likes of Xero and Dext over the years, what do you think is the most significant technology change since you've sort of been involved in this aspect of accounting and accountants?
Ryan: 00:22:47.008 Wow. It depends how far we go back. I mean--
Stuart: 00:22:48.971 As far as you like.
Ryan: 00:22:50.541 Well, the most significant impact and the one the really made Xero work was bank feeds, wasn't it? Bank feeds and the bank reconciliation. That was huge. But open banking now, let's say if we're looking at what's the significant thing right now, it's payments. Payments are booming. The amount of new business technology that are trying utilise and make payments as easy and as streamlined as possible for businesses, there's more bits of software in the space than [will last?]. They'll either [inaudible], or there'll be ones that fall by the wayside. There's a huge boom. But I wouldn't say there's been a-- I think since the bank feeds part, I don't think there's been anything significant. You've got certain areas that make a big impact: OCR technology, so the likes of Dext. And you can go into [inaudible] and beyond that, but the actual capture of data. And I think the next one will be the one that links systems together. So every time they make a sale, it goes into a system and then comes as a purchase into the other. And I know there are bits of technology out there at the moment that are already trying to solve this. Once they've done that, you don't need the likes of Dext anymore. You don't need to scan because it automatically comes straight into your finance system from another one.
Stuart: 00:23:54.716 So that's, I guess, the continuity of the supply chain, right? The records moving from one to the other to the other to the other. Oh well, let's just get two going first, but. There's the open banking initiative in the UK. Other governments have got invoicing initiatives. Is there similar in the UK?
Ryan: 00:24:14.989 Yeah. So obviously, I'd say Australia has probably one of the most well-known invoicing initiatives that I guess as the news has come out to the UK. I know there are some other countries especially down in South America that have mandated it for a while now. In the UK, invoicing is mandated for the NHS, so if you work with the NHS, you have to do invoicing, and it's used more sparingly by larger businesses. They connect systems in to be able to send it back and forth, and some businesses will mandate that you have to connect into their platform to work, which is basically similar invoicing. I think there's a different term they use, but it's pretty much the invoicing structure, but it's not hit the small business space, which is, I guess, where you get boom. But I would expect it to-- would I expect the UK to mandate it? I don't think they would at the moment. There's too much going on with making tax digital. I think it will probably start coming out through systems that are released that generate value and have invoicing as a part of them. I think that's what will happen first, and then it will become a mandated thing once the government catch up.
Stuart: 00:25:16.850 Yeah, well they've got vested interest, right, like GST in Australia, VAT in the UK. They love counting their money before it even arrives with the live payroll essentially into the government, right. So where a VAT or a GST or a sales tax here exists, there is a motivation for the government to know to remove cash economy and to be at the heart of, I guess, the transaction process. To give them a view on revenue is pretty critical.
Ryan: 00:25:47.708 Yeah. So, I mean, the whole point of making tax digital was to close that tax gap. Whether it's going to do that or not, I think the jury is still out. It's definitely [crosstalk]--
Stuart: 00:25:57.828 It'll come back in a few years.
Ryan: 00:25:59.376 Yeah. Well, it's definitely creating an admin burden for those businesses, but there's a massive benefit of doing it for businesses as well, and it's changing that mindset. The bit I think the government will look at is making tax digital is their aim to solve that. The invoicing would probably improve the quality of it and the reliability of it, but wouldn't give them necessarily the visibility they need to improve their systems, which I think it was only last month that they reported some sort of billion-pound investment into their IT systems, which they're contracting for. So they've decided, "We're not going to do this internally. We're going to basically get contracts in to replace some of our aging systems," and I think that's part of how they digitise the entire of the HMRC process.
Stuart: 00:26:47.801 Yes. Like anybody, they're struggling for talent. The governments are struggling for IT talent and trying to keep costs within reason as well. I know the IRS for instance just tried to hire 80,000 people or something, and it's a battle for governments across the world and accountants obviously, organisations. But how do you think-- [inaudible] keep this timeless, but you've had a change of government-- or a change of prime minister recently. Do you think that that has an impact on the making tax digital project and the timelines, which would affect you and your clients?
Ryan: 00:27:26.831 No. I mean, yeah, we've definitely had a change of leadership over in the UK, haven't we? It kind of all happened in a week. [laughter] What should we do, just rewrite the script of how the UK is going to be run? So yeah, it's a bit of turmoil, and the new prime minister has already said they're going to make some dramatic changes, but I don't think any of that will impact making tax digital in the timeline. Realistically, what will impact the timeline is the fact that HMRC systems are still struggling to catch up with the deadline that they've self-imposed. It may be in place, but as we've experienced many times, they've had to delay the release dates because the system is just not ready. We may see that for the likes of corporation tax because they've already put that back once or twice. I don't think they're going to push back making taxes [inaudible] for income tax, but what they may do is say that there's a smaller pool of businesses that firstly get brought on, and then they bring in the kind of more complex business on in later phases. But I don't think the prime minister will have any impact on that. I think every government-- and it was a conservative government that came up with this thing. Every government sees a benefit and would want this in place as soon as they could.
Stuart: 00:28:31.980 Yeah. Yeah, no, is it fair to say reputation for perhaps a bit [inaudible], so it's good that these initiatives are moving the economy forward and being progressive. I mean, at a macro level, I'm sure they've got other things to worry about at the moment.
Ryan: 00:28:54.068 Definitely. We're traditional. That's what we like to say. We're traditional.
Stuart: 00:28:56.667 Traditional. Yeah, that's a better word.
Ryan: 00:28:58.589 But if we compare the UK's tax department to the U.S.A tax department, I would say we are miles ahead at the moment.
Stuart: 00:29:09.146 You're 100 million years ahead at least. The still many, many, many parts of the IRS and parts of state tax agencies that the only way to communicate is via fax. That's the only way. So anything ahead of the 1980s is well and truly ahead of the U.S. Don't worry about that.
Ryan: 00:29:34.156 Definitely, yeah, although we love to moan about HMRC over in the UK.
Stuart: 00:29:39.198 Of course. Well, speaking of tradition, that is a tradition. [laughter]
Ryan: 00:29:44.076 It is. It is. Queueing and moaning about HMRC. I think that's what we have.
Stuart: 00:29:47.603 Queueing. Lines here, lines. They look at me blankly when I say queue, but yeah. Well, Ryan, it's been fascinating to catch up. Look, congratulations with all your success at Scrutton Bland. I know that you're at the forefront of digital transformation in the accounting industry, and for that, the industry at large is grateful, and I'm sure there's many, many happy customers that have experienced transformation, that has improved their lives, and made operating their businesses so much easier.
Ryan: 00:30:22.363 Yeah, I think so. I mean, we [inaudible] insignificant compared to the successes of Karbon, but we like to do our bit. [laughter]
Stuart: 00:30:32.330 Ryan Pearcy, thank you for joining the Accounting Leaders Podcast.
Ryan: 00:30:35.655 Thank you very much. [music]
Stuart: 00:30:42.476 Thanks for listening to this episode. If you found this discussion interesting, fun, you'll find lots more to help you run a successful accounting firm at Karbon magazine. There are more than 1,000 free resources there including guides, articles, templates, webinars, and more. Just head to karbonhq.com/resources. [music] I'd also love it if you could leave us a five star review wherever you listened to this podcast. Let us know you liked this session, we'll be able to keep bringing you more guests for you to learn from and get inspired by. Thanks for joining, and see you in the next episode of the Accounting Leaders Podcast.