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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: 00:00:06.236 [music] Hi, I'm Stuart McLeod, 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 Jennie Moore, partnerships manager at Ignition and founder of Moore Details. Jennie is an experienced bookkeeper, savvy business owner, and a passionate cloud technology advocate. She's helped thousands of accountants improve their practice by sharing her expertise in strategy, process development, technology implementation, and client services. It's my pleasure to welcome to the Accounting Leaders Podcast, Jennie Moore. When do you think we first met in person? I'm guessing at Zero Con, but that's just me.
Jennie: 00:00:53.663 No, because I was green before blue. I think it was San Jose.
Stuart: 00:00:59.792 A QuickBooks Connect.
Jennie: 00:01:01.704 Maybe 2016 because I think that was the year I got that princess award for being-- it was at the San Jose event. You guys had a rooftop dinner or something. [Lachlan?] was there. Ian was there. I think that's got to be it.
Stuart: 00:01:15.851 Those dinners became a bit famous over the years--
Jennie: 00:01:19.103 They did. Yeah.
Stuart: 00:01:21.632 --as the hot ticket in town for accountants in San Jose. [laughter]
Jennie: 00:01:26.893 I know.
Stuart: 00:01:27.543 There was one year, it got a little bit off the rails, as accountants do, especially that first night. The first night is the one to watch out for because, typically-- God, love you all, but you don't tend to get out a lot.
Jennie: 00:01:40.398 I know, right? Last Zero Con, Ignition, we hosted one in New Orleans. I'm now 44 and my ears just do not do loud spaces anymore. So I'm like, "I will stand outside and greet everybody." [There just?] had to be 300 people going through this thing. I was just outside happy as a clam. I'm like, "Hello." [laughter] I was like--
Stuart: 00:02:02.409 The professional party greeter.
Jennie: 00:02:03.579 Yeah. I'm like, "I'm not going in there. I'm staying out here." [laughter] It's all good.
Stuart: 00:02:12.867 And how long have you been working with Guy and the team at Ignition?
Jennie: 00:02:16.844 I guess we're coming up on three years now. It started as a head of accounting role, which is an educational role. Actually, it was before COVID. It wasn't a reaction, "There's COVID. We got to do this." It was more of a educational role, which was super awesome, and hit many passion points. And then what I started to see was, "Okay. There needs to be a little bit more in-depth to product, a little bit more in-depth to how we work with other organizations. What better to have an accounting professional do that?" So now I'm in partnerships. So in the last, I guess it would be about, seven months, we've been learning lots, winning, failing, all that good stuff that comes with a new role that you're kind of pioneering and creating. So Ryan [Ambry?] and myself, we've been taking the lead here in the Americas. Yeah. So today, partnerships manager is what the label is, and it's fun, still get to do the chats.
Stuart: 00:03:11.296 Yep. You sort of still keep your hand in all your own business and-- so you're busy. Yeah.
Jennie: 00:03:16.421 Oh, yeah. I still got that practice, 17 years. It's fun though. But it's the right type of busy though. Not to sound narcissistic, but being a high performer, I can't just do one thing. But what's really neat about keeping the practice is it also keeps me relevant. So if that's a little bit of ego, it is, but it helps, right? Like when you're talking to accounting professionals, what better to say, "Yeah. I was just using that app, and this is how you work around it, or--" So it's kind of fun. I'm glad I have a team that handles it because I don't like reconciling anymore. [laughter]
Stuart: 00:03:50.687 Do people still do that? [laughter] Wow.
Jennie: 00:03:53.897 That's what the team does, and it's all about data management now. That's really what it is. It's data management. So it's kind of fun.
Stuart: 00:04:00.565 The rigor of the data, right? The reliability of it. That's what I--
Jennie: 00:04:04.584 Yeah, exactly.
Stuart: 00:04:05.809 That's relevant outside, very relevant to accounting and in accounting. But we find that as a SaaS business, just being able to rely on the structures and the formats and the volume of data.
Jennie: 00:04:17.682 And making sure you have good processes. We just had a meeting this morning and it was all about that, was like, "Processes, processes." Standardization to a bit, but-- and it's just a constant learning. You just can't get comfortable with what you think is perfection because it's completely unobtainable, yeah, completely. Yeah. 2016, I think, is when we first met, probably became a Karbon user that year. I'm not sure.
Stuart: 00:04:41.785 Would have been a little bit--
Jennie: 00:04:42.949 A moment later, now that I think about it.
Stuart: 00:04:44.882 Little bit [raw?] back then. [laughter]
Jennie: 00:04:47.729 Well, all product was. Let's face it. Every SaaS product was an ugly baby. [laughter]
Stuart: 00:04:53.985 Yeah. Or just a small baby, right? Hopefully, we were never ugly, but we might have been small.
Jennie: 00:05:00.596 As a Canadian, I'm going to apologize for saying ugly to you.
Stuart: 00:05:03.487 That's all right. It's just takes a long time to build enough software for, particularly, service-based businesses that just have a lot of moving parts.
Jennie: 00:05:13.727 Well, isn't that the case, especially when you come to integrate with other platforms? You're constantly learning the needs of your customers, right? But you would never think of on your product road map, like it's just, "Oh. Yeah."
Stuart: 00:05:25.109 What the fuck are you doing that for? [laughter]
Jennie: 00:05:28.582 Don't do that. Do that. [laughter]
Stuart: 00:05:30.478 Yeah. Sometimes it is dumb, but other times you're like, "Oh, fuck. Okay. All right, that's a good idea. Hadn't thought of that."
Jennie: 00:05:38.280 Yeah, exactly. So it's kind of neat messaging. That's always a big one to get through, it's messaging. How are you going to explain it? Because just calling it something and putting a label on it-- like a new feature and you can call it pixie dust. I don't care what you call it, but you need to be able to explain what is pixie dust and to who, then you create your marketing relatability to that. So that's always an ever-changing process.
Stuart: 00:06:00.747 I wonder which side of the fence you sit on. What we found with accountants, in particular, is there's two types of you. First, there's the obvious one, which is half of you, which is, "Just give me the fucking numbers and shut up and get out of my way. And I'll make it work."
Jennie: 00:06:17.351 No. You must be mistaken. [laughter] No. But it's true.
Stuart: 00:06:22.766 That's the obvious one, right? Accountant's supposedly good with numbers, etc., etc. And that's the one that we, still to this day, lean on predominantly. But I'm, genuinely, of the belief that there is exactly half of you that are the other way, which is you respond more to the journey and the purpose that you extract or enjoy from your client base, and seeing them be successful is the most important thing. It's not the numbers that is most important. So all is right. It's just the order and the priority by which we try and message. And I would love to see us push more towards the feeling and the belief that you get, the purpose that you deal in what you do and-- anyway, what do you think of that?
Jennie: 00:07:09.512 Yeah. No, it's [inaudible]-- even from a product standpoint, but also from our product user standpoint, getting that connectivity in the human touch is really important, right? Yes, there's always the numbers, just the facts, ma'am, just the basic compliance, right? And that's okay. You can't build a relationship with someone cold like that, right? Whatever the case is. Even last night, I'm mentoring for free. We're exchanging. She's great on social media. I'm helping her with her bookkeeping, and we meet over a glass of wine and-- it's that connection and giving them the confidence to be able to get ahold of the control of their business and know what they're doing because they're just like, "Money's coming in, money's going out." And just being able to create a connection and a human element to it. And I think that that's where our industry is moving towards is, now we're not so much in a cubicle, nose down with a pocket protector, and a 10-key there keeping us company. We're now out there on the battlefield with our customers, helping them survive and helping them know what's going on. And in order to do that, we need to be lean, mean, really focused on who our clients are because you can't give that kind of relationship to everyone. And then that also goes from a product standpoint as well is, how do we foster creating those types of relationships for our customers? And then educating. In the Americas, at least I feel-- us as accounting professionals still feel we're very much obligated where our customers are our boss. And then we end up with several bosses because we have several customers. And then you wonder, "Why the heck did I ever start this practice?" We need to get back to why we're doing it and then who we're doing it for and what are we going to offer. Some of my clients will call it Jennie time, and some of them will call it financial therapy. They don't really call it bookkeeping and accounting anymore. They're like, "I just need to feel better." [laughter] I don't know if that makes sense or not, but you're almost selling a feeling. I know it sounds really weird to say it, but you're selling confidence. You're selling security. You're selling trust.
Stuart: 00:09:04.850 Belief.
Jennie: 00:09:05.798 Yeah, exactly. As opposed to a tax return or a profit and loss statement.
Stuart: 00:09:10.823 That's what happened during COVID, right, accountants-- and there's a couple of things. I was speaking to, coincidentally, the head of Moore Global for a podcast that I assume will come out just before this one. And in the UK and Europe, in particular, the profession, I think, was revered more than America's. I mean, it has been revered here a little bit, but then Enron and Madoff fucking killed that. And then combine that with what happened during COVID, where accountants became therapists, psychologists, financial lenders of first and last resort, yeah. [laughter]
Jennie: 00:09:47.541 Financial front liners is what we called them. Don't get me wrong. I understand the medical front liners. 100% bow my head to those individuals. For the accounting professional, we were the financial ones, and we took a storm. [laughter]
Stuart: 00:10:03.636 Distributor of global stimulus funds and the job just got five times bigger. And the other thing that's happening, which is unfortunate, and it's a complex issue, is essentially the industry is shrinking in terms of its availability of talent because, more or less, one goes to the golf course and one finishes college, or university, depending on which part of the world you're in.
Jennie: 00:10:27.808 Yeah. There is a talent shortage. Let's face it. Let's call it out.
Stuart: 00:10:32.748 And the career has changed dramatically, right, no longer-- well and truly gone are the days where you sort of join your dad's practice and you wait 30 years until he fucking drops off and you take over as partner, right?
Jennie: 00:10:45.451 And then you can change the logo and everything else, right? No. I hear it. It's, all joking aside, completely understanding. I think what I see being the challenges of attracting talent to our industry-- and that's one thing I'm passionate about is, pardon of my language, how do we make accounting sexy, right, that we get-- I have three strong, independent women as daughters. How do I encourage them to know that in order for them to succeed in any business or anything, this is what they need to know and they need to work with an accounting professional? How do we attract more individuals to our industry and-- you know what? We're groovy right now, right? We're groovy, we're into apps, right? We are groovy. But I look at my teens and all the apps and stuff they're using, it's like we're speaking the language but we're just not translating the knowledge well. I think that's what's causing this friction point where we're seeing this void of new talent coming in, which is thus all of us trying to get good talent. But the more that we mentor our youth and try and promote the advancement of our industry and post-secondary education, that's one. Or being a one-to-one mentor to a group of students. Whatever the case may be, that's how we're going to be able to transfer our knowledge. And that's our staff. What's happening now is us as accounting professional-- we have so many of them. You're doing it right now, Stuart. We're advocating for that knowledge through social learning, right? Whether it be a podcast, whether it be a YouTube video, whether it be a tweet, whether it be something on Instagram, or-- I have no idea. By doing this, we're starting to educate our youth on how to be attracted to our industry. I think it's fun. I love this industry because I know I'm always right when you reconcile. Maybe it's more my type A personality. It makes me feel good.
Stuart: 00:12:29.868 Well, there's a lot of people like that. I mean, if you've ever done on any [inaudible], accountants do tend to be twos, which is sort of that partnership, relationship, bridge-building characteristics. And you mentioned the medical profession before, they just love to help. And they're just people that perhaps wouldn't make great firefighters.
Jennie: 00:12:49.149 Well, that's it, right? Because we're just going to run right into the frigging fire, but-- no. It's the truth. I have not met an accounting professional that doesn't care. I would challenge anybody to show me one, and I bet you I could find some caring in there. [laughter]
Stuart: 00:13:01.858 We might disagree on the journey, occasionally. Everybody's different. Yeah, it's a very difficult problem to solve globally, the decline in talent. But somehow the industry sort of got to create a better narrative or a different narrative for today's generations. And at the end of the day, finance and accounting, even though it might be what your mom said was a safe backup plan, it is the fundamentals of economies.
Jennie: 00:13:29.924 Of anything you do. Yeah. If I have a child that wants to become an electrician, she is still going to need to know basic business skills, right? We need to be bringing this forward. Financial literacy is really what it is.
Stuart: 00:13:45.594 Yes. And even if you don't end up an accountant, it's okay. We'd prefer you do, but it's okay. You've got those skills for wherever you go and wherever they'll take you.
Jennie: 00:13:55.809 Yeah. I mean, one way I've been able to solve it with more details is-- it's hard. We're preaching to the choir here. Finding an awesome bookkeeper that is cloud minded, using all the apps, is problem-solving, we're in demand, right? It is what it is. And how I've been able to solve it is looking at individuals for curiosity and willingness to learn. Not so much the literacy background, but teaching them the literacy background, right? I have work-from-home moms that have maybe two kids, right? And they only want to work maybe three hours a day, but they're looking for something-- and they're really good. Maybe they're really good at processing receipts through a receipt capture app. I can give them the guidelines. And I'm teaching them the literacy in little bite-sized pieces. Or they're really good with helping with collections for a customer, or-- whatever the case may be. And then my higher educated employees that are familiar with financial literacy are doing the things like the compliance side. They're doing the bookkeeping, right? And we're working together. There isn't a hierarchy, but that's one way that I've been able to look at solving this problem is-- having somebody sit in a bricks-and-mortar office where I can just watch them, which is weird by the way, those days are gone. We have to be a little bit more open to the virtual way that individuals want to work. I've done several webinars lately on virtual teams, and the question is, "How do you know that they're actually working and not vacuuming their floors?" And I'm like, "Well, you know what? Before I got on this webinar, I actually vacuumed my floors. Go tell Guy at Ignition. I vacuumed my floors before I went on this webinar." But you know what? I'm producing results.
Stuart: 00:15:33.885 I know Guy's seminar and I know he wasn't vacuuming his floors before the webinar. I can guarantee you that. [laughter]
Jennie: 00:15:39.349 Whatever it is, right? Maybe it's putting your kids on the bus or maybe it's - I don't know - taking the dog for a walk. We just have to be more open to not controlling people, but controlling the results. When we're more open to that, that's when we can start looking at little pockets of where we can find talent. Work-from-home moms is just a passion I have because these are individuals that have made a commitment to want to stay home. And having raised my own three kids from home while running a business for the last 17 years--
Stuart: 00:16:10.339 16 years, 354 days. [laughter]
Jennie: 00:16:12.664 Oh, yeah, 16. That's right. 17 tomorrow. Yeah. Right. Exactly. You're right. Okay. Never argue with Stuart. I'll give you that. That's my Canadian side coming [out?]. But yeah, just look for the pockets and look for-- like for me, it's always been, "Who's curious? Who's willing to learn?" Not, "Who's got a degree in accounting?" That's what helps. And then it's all about you. You're the mentor because, frankly, they're not going to go to a post-secondary education and know about QuickBooks Online and Zero. They're probably going to learn about some desktop product that's easy to learn because it doesn't change. That's just being very frank, in my opinion.
Stuart: 00:16:45.658 And at the end of the day, I mean, education is really teaching you how to learn, not the topics listed, right? So you're right. If you can find inquisitive people-- the issue that the industry is facing, that we've done a fair bit of research, is we invest tens of millions of dollars every year on accountants. The issue is the revenue of the industry is predicted to double next 10 years. So just in America, it's about 500 billion of accounting revenue every year, and that's tipped to go to a trillion in 10 years. But when you overlay the number of people coming into the industry--
Jennie: 00:17:20.431 There's a big gap.
Stuart: 00:17:21.927 --there's a massive gap, isn't there? And it's like, "What's going to fill it?" Either Enron? [laughter] Right? Things are going to fall through the cracks, but obviously, technology plays a massive part.
Jennie: 00:17:33.849 Exactly. And that's always been my advocate. Like when I was speaking yesterday at one event, I was like, "My model and my opinion only is leverage technology before humans. Now, I'm not saying replacing humans. That's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is replacing technology for humans doing redundant tasks that don't add value to the customer relationship, then bring in the humans that provide that relationship where we talked about the trust, the connectivity, the financial therapy, and all that warm, gushy stuff that clients are actually willing to pay for."
Stuart: 00:18:03.190 Oh, I agree. But also, I think there's another benefit here for the great accountants, like yourself, is that you're going to get to sort of pick and choose your clients a bit more too, because the availability of clients versus-- or the supply-demand equation tilts in the accountant's favor. You can only do so much in a service industry, right? It's not as though if you wanted tomorrow to take on 500 more customers, that's just fucking not possible, right? So the ones that you do choose to work with are the ones that you choose to work with.
Jennie: 00:18:35.397 Exactly. Yeah. I think there's going to be quite a bit of a demand. And I think we all struggle-- I know I do constantly on my value and who my ideal client is, right? And it's just always something we're always going to do. Does it make my ego feel good that in my industry I'm going to be more prized? It does. It also sort of saddens me that when I look at some startups that are not going to maybe get the support they need. And then that's where I can see-- because these are startups that could become the next $3 million client of mine. How do we cater to both, right? How do we make sure that we have sustainable clients that we want? But how do we nurture-- kind of similar to, how do we nurture the next employees? How do we nurture the next entrepreneurs that are also equally coming out of school? And I think technology is going to have a big play there as well where it's going to be more group minded, more collaborative, as opposed to one on one, right? Because I know some startups right now, there's no way that they can ever afford my prices. And I feel, as a human, awful about that but if I'm able to point them in the right direction, give them some apps, give them some DIY advice, have them pay maybe an optimizer session for me or one of my team members just to go, "Whoop, that's an iceberg. Come right on back. Go this way." [laughter] It's hard. Maybe we're there for them. They got 10 employees now, maybe. Maybe even they have their first. I don't know. But there's a concern there. I think for us as accounting professionals, it's handling that balance. How do we nurture? But also, how do we protect our businesses as well because we don't want that 500 clients that don't give a dang about what our value is. Chances are we want to help. We identified that. Chances are we want to help. How do you help 500 clients, unless you have a really strong team? And that's another question.
Stuart: 00:20:28.130 Yeah. Well, I mean, in theory, any business should be able to be what it chooses to be. But I think in the accounting industry in particular, you're going to get to choose more specifically who you want to be and who you want to service and the staff and stakeholders that you want to accommodate.
Jennie: 00:20:47.309 For me, we don't take on lawyers and restaurants. I have a personality conflict, apparently, with both of them. [laughter] I don't know. We don't do that, right? We have to get really granular. If you're Canadian, it's your niche. It could be niche, whatever you say in the rest of the world.
Stuart: 00:21:02.517 Here, it's your niche. Aussie is niche. Yeah.
Jennie: 00:21:04.943 Is that niche? There we are. Okay. Must be a Commonwealth thing. Anyhoo, but you know what I mean? Right? Just who? Who, what, where, when, and why? I always go back to those, like who-- who am I going to work with? And that's my business model because then you can replicate that. If you try and be everything to everybody, then-- I love that. I love building audacious systems. It made my ego soar. It just felt so good to solve these big, huge problems for clients that had these audacious needs, until I looked at my employees and how effing frustrating it was for them because they're not me. They don't share that passion. And it wasn't standardized, and it was all over the map and missing deliverables and-- you know what? I can satisfy my own ego by helping other things and doing things in a different manner, but when it comes to my team and my business, I need to standardize and keep to a certain client profile because, otherwise, I'm losing my number one asset, and this asset can depreciate really quickly. It can quit, [an?] employee.
Stuart: 00:22:05.745 Yeah. Especially when small, everybody counts, right? How many in your group?
Jennie: 00:22:09.592 Yeah. We have five. Yeah. We're lean and mean. We have five. We're a small, boutique practice.
Stuart: 00:22:14.726 But one person wants to do something else, that's 20%, right? If my numbers are right. [laughter]
Jennie: 00:22:20.795 Yeah. Lean and mean, boutique, high-value clients, not a lot of them. That's the way we approach it. Could we do it differently? Absolutely. It's just, that's not how I'm going to run my practice. So there's no right or wrong. It's just, do you have the processes and model setup?
Stuart: 00:22:36.616 No, no. There is no right or wrong. It's more right for you or not. What's in store this year for you, Jennie?
Jennie: 00:22:43.688 Oh, goodness. I think it's just really getting down to-- in the business, in more details, it's about getting more of the data integrity nailed down. To us, that's really important. We've seen it here in the Americas and especially here in Canada. We don't have open banking. Don't worry, I'm not going to get on my [on?] my soapbox about open banking, okay? That's a whole nother four hours of Stuart's time. [laughter]
Stuart: 00:23:10.408 You're better off using that time with the government or somebody. [laughter]
Jennie: 00:23:14.929 Which probably won't be able to-- anyhoo, we have a-- [laughter] But anyhoo, because of that, we're having issues with connectivity, with our apps. It's not the app's fault. It's the governing infrastructure that we have. So now we've gone from cloud technology emerging into the Americas. It's been really great with bank feeds and fetching, and now banking systems have kind of caught on to cloud technology and started to roll back the access, right? Roll back for-- I can see good intention purposes, but for us, it's caused quite a bit of influx of workflow, right? How are we going to use even more technology now to do OCR technology, to read a bank statement and auto dump it into a file like Zero or QuickBooks Online? How are we going to get these statements because our clients don't have time to go to their bank and download it? So getting access cards. And then there's the data integrity from it because some of our clients are e-commerce clients. So data's flying in there. We're breaking apps with some of the data flow that we had. So we had to chalk it out, right? How do we do holistic numbers instead of transactional numbers? For us, it's about getting the compliance data. So those would be bank statements, in my opinion, right, credit card statements, bank statements. Don't get me started on checks. That's five hours of talking. The other thing is the data integrity because all this disruption, which is good disruption, what it's done for at least our firm, and I'm sure other firms as well, is it's created more work for our client demanding it in less time. They want to know how their finances are doing the week after the month ends. Two weeks, I'm starting to see passive aggressiveness, right? But we're constrained by some of these issues. So for the business, it's about getting down to really hard processes on how do we get the data and how do we verify that the data is correct because there's so much of it going in. And I think you and I both know, it's very easy to duplicate, triplicate data with importing features. It's scary.
Stuart: 00:25:12.626 It sounds like sort of Canada's a bit behind then in terms of just that sort of source data.
Jennie: 00:25:18.836 Yeah. It is. When it comes to open banking, I think that's our biggest problem. I'd say throughout the Americas, including the US. [inaudible] thinking in the US how there's several smaller banks, right, that operate--
Stuart: 00:25:29.349 Several like 4,000.
Jennie: 00:25:31.440 No, like legit. At least in Canada, we have our major banks and-- yeah, we understand that Bank A is just super annoying, but Bank B kind of works with us.
Stuart: 00:25:41.298 Slightly less annoying. Yeah. Same as in Aussie from-- unless something dramatic has changed over the last 10 years. [laughter]
Jennie: 00:25:48.283 As soon as that's nailed, that's going to open up so much more for us as accounting professionals. Like SaaS products, we're all Ignition included, right? We're all limited by the banking infrastructure currently in the Americas. How do we move against something like that? So I think once we have a little bit more of that, we'll see almost like the second phase of cloud accounting coming through because then it's like, that's the-- who has the ownership of the data? Is it the bank or is it the client?
Stuart: 00:26:13.207 The reliability improves here?
Jennie: 00:26:14.758 Yeah. And that's when we can get really sexy on how we really push forward. And maybe that's also a part of the resistance of talent coming, too, because it's awkward. It's just like, "Ew. I have to go to a portal and manually download a bank statement to verify it?" It's not attractive.
Stuart: 00:26:32.833 No, not one bit. Hopefully, we can help you on that journey, of course. Any great travel plans or international journeys this year?
Jennie: 00:26:41.977 Nothing international yet. We have a beach retreat coming up with an association. So on the Ignition side, we got New Jersey. We'll be there. A couple of events. It would be kind of neat. Did a lot of travel last year in the US, so looking forward to seeing a lot of my friends again. And personally, I took the kids-- we hid in Florida for two weeks. We did the typical, Disneyland, Universal. Mama's still scared of those rides. The teacup ride and the Dumbo ride at Disney World are my thrill factor, okay? That's it.
Stuart: 00:27:15.936 Yeah. Right. There you go. That's up there. [laughter] Well, they could be scary. All that were invented on [acid?], right? So I think you got to be careful of fucking Snow White and-- [laughter]
Jennie: 00:27:26.977 It actually explains a little bit, but we did this one, visual-- what do you call that? Reality kind of-- I don't know. My kids have this device, Oculus. They have an Oculus, right? It drives me nuts. I can't do it. And we're in this one ride in Universal Studio, and I literally turned to my husband and said, "I'm going to puke." There's too much visualization, so--
Stuart: 00:27:48.501 Yeah. That's not good, puking over the kids before lunch. [laughter]
Jennie: 00:27:52.324 No. I'm used to blurring financial statements. I'm not used to graphics and stuff charging at me. I want to see the numbers from far away. That's how I want to chart my journey. Not those illusions.
Stuart: 00:28:04.898 Well, Jennie, you and I can happily look at the numbers far away. That would give me great pleasure. [laughter]
Jennie: 00:28:10.671 Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. So yeah, for travel-wise, we'll be doing the circuit as normal, so it will be nice and-- it's just nice to communicate with our accounting peers. There's nothing like the-- the virtual events, they're great. Anything that's webinar is great, but I do love going to the events because there's something about that relationship, that human element. Maybe it's part about reading body language, I don't know, and picking up vibes and all that good stuff. But I think we're less guarded when we meet in person, and we're more vulnerable, and we have more meaningful conversations. And I mean, I remember we were at a couple events, and I had a bunch of paper everywhere, and we're sitting down with a firm-- not even selling them on Ignition, just mapping out workflows. In fact, Karbon was one of the ones. I'm like, "This is what you need to do. And this is how you do it." [laughter] Right? Just sharing ideas and-- it's almost like grandmas exchanging secret recipes.
Stuart: 00:29:03.498 Yeah. Or knitting patterns or something. [laughter]
Jennie: 00:29:05.553 Yeah. Our patterns and recipes are now tech stacks. It's like, "This is my tech stack. This is so cool. What's your tech stack? Oh, how do you do this?" Yeah, that's what I like about it.
Stuart: 00:29:16.471 Wonderful. Well, Jennie, it's been an absolute pleasure as always, and I look forward to seeing you in person at some events this year.
Jennie: 00:29:24.811 Oh. Well, thank you. As always, it's great talking to you and your audience as well. And looking forward to 2023.
Stuart: 00:29:32.468 Congratulations on all your success so far, and thank you for being wonderful supporters of Karbon, and I'm sure that the partnership between Ignition and Karbon continues to grow for the benefit of all those that use it.
Jennie: 00:29:43.610 Yes, including myself. So awesome.
Stuart: 00:29:46.402 Thank you, Jennie.
Jennie: 00:29:47.476 Yes. You take care, Stuart, now.
Stuart: 00:29:55.468 [music] 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 a thousand 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 listen to this podcast. Let us know you like 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 on the next episode of the Accounting Leaders Podcast.