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Majority of CAS practices support 3+ general ledgers; KPMG may have turned a blind eye to deforestation; Intuit to replace QuickBooks Desktop POS with Shopify; Startup accelerators from Intuit and AICPA
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- (00:00) - Catching Up On AccounTech News
- (00:47) - Introduction and why we are doing this extra episode
- (01:42) - Voice authentication in the banking industry
- (04:45) - ESG update from David
- (14:02) - Deloitte's Australia becomes a victim of fraud
- (16:45) - Armanino crypto team has now started a new firm
- (17:49) - CAAS by the numbers
- (28:07) - Why switching from QuickBooks to Xero or vice versa is so difficult
- (32:05) - Accounting conferences entry fees excludes average CPA from going
- (39:32) - Listener mail on pricing
- (45:52) - QuickBooks POS system is partnering with Shopify
- (49:43) - AICPA and CPA.com new startup accelerator cohort
- (53:23) - Intuit cohort of startups
- (55:55) - Revolut struggles
- (01:02:23) - How to contact Blake or David
Show Notes
Revolut auditor concerned over £477m in late accounts
Intuit Announces 2023 Cohort of Toronto Startup Accelerator Program
The Dishonest Accounting of Net-Zero Emissions
AICPA and CPA.com Announce 2023 Startup Accelerator Cohort
Say Goodbye to QuickBooks Desktop Point-of-Sale
AICPA & CIMA Sponsor Inaugural 'IFRS Sustainability Symposium'
Professional accountants fall out of favour on ESG assurance
ESG Reporting Now Common at Large Companies, But Report ...
https://www.cpapracticeadvisor.com/2023/02/28/esg-reporting-now-common-at-large-companies-but/77221/
Voice Cloning: A Blessing or a Curse for the Voice Banking Industry?
Revolut User Base Grows Alongside Auditor Warnings
https://www.pymnts.com/news/digital-banking/2023/revolut-user-base-grows-alongside-auditor-warnings/
How auditing giant KPMG became a global sustainability leader while serving companies accused of forest destruction - ICIJ
AICPA and CPA.com announce new startup accelerator cohort for 2023 | Accounting Today
https://www.accountingtoday.com/news/aicpa-and-cima-announce-new-startup-accelerator-cohort-for-2023
Xero Announces New Chief Product Officer - CPA Practice Advisor
IRS Processing Returns as Fast as It Gets Them - CPA Trendlines
Tweet from Ryan Elblein re: cost of ENGAGE
[CAP] Accounting / Finance as a percentage of Revenue
CAS by the numbers | Accounting Today
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The Accounting Podcast (formerly the Cloud Accounting Podcast) is the world's #1 accounting, bookkeeping, and tax podcast! Join us weekly for a roundup of accounting news, analysis, and interviews. Plus, earn free NASBA-approved CPE credits for listening with the Earmark app. Learn more at https://earmarkcpe.com.
Attention: This is a machine-generated transcript. As such, there may be spelling, grammar, and accuracy errors throughout. Thank you for your understanding!
Blake Oliver: [00:00:04] I just can't believe that so many firms still bill in arrears for taxes. You're doing all this work throughout the whole year to get a tax return out the door and you don't charge for it until after it's been filed. You're basically giving a loan to your client. Of all the costs that you've accumulated to do that return and it just seems kind of nuts. I mean, you could totally transform a practice without doing anything else just by changing how it bills, just by changing it to a subscription Billing.
David Leary: [00:00:33] Coming to you weekly from the OnPay Recording studio, this is the Cloud Accounting Podcast.
Blake Oliver: [00:00:42] Hello and welcome to another episode of The Cloud Accounting Podcast. I'm Blake Oliver.
David Leary: [00:00:47] And I'm David Leary.
Blake Oliver: [00:00:48] And we had such a great interview on Friday with Dr. Josh McGowan from Troy University that we didn't get to any of the news that's been piling up. And so, David, you suggested that we should just do an extra episode this week, clear out our our piles of stories, and I think it's a great idea. So here we are on Monday. We are.
David Leary: [00:01:09] And I promise everybody right now, I'm telling you, I have, I don't know, 25 stories in here, and not one of them is about one 50 hour rule like it's all that's been cleared out. Oh, you.
Blake Oliver: [00:01:17] Promised, David. Okay, good.
David Leary: [00:01:19] There's nothing in here.
Blake Oliver: [00:01:20] So. Yeah, I'll let you start then. David, since this was your idea. What are we talking about?
David Leary: [00:01:26] So the banking industry over the last decade or so, because they're trying to be better customer service, but you can do a lot of stuff. You just call and it recognizes your voice. And so you could say your name, say your password transfer money, right? Those types of activities all through your voice. And that was great until this year, now that people can voice, clone and recreate things. And so you're starting to see people hack in to bank accounts by sampling. And it's not even where. Blake, you have to get a full recording of you now like it used to be, where you'd have to like train the thing. But now somebody could just find a recording of you anywhere. Like, Oh, you did a 25 second video. Nothing about your bank right on Facebook. And they just take your voice from there and they can recreate it and log into your bank account. So it's something that we need to probably start watching as this change through the next year, year and a half here.
Blake Oliver: [00:02:19] Or you have a podcast and somebody just samples your voice from 320 episodes of your podcast. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Voice authentication. I mean, that's, that's crazy because the last few years I was hearing from cyber security experts that the way that you need to defeat these email compromise scams is to have a process where you always do voice authentication, voice confirmation, and now that doesn't work anymore. So I feel like the fraudsters are always one step ahead of us.
David Leary: [00:02:50] And I've been thinking about that as when I saw this article because I've tried. I've been saying to accountants like, Hey, anytime anybody asks you to change routing numbers, you know, ach bank numbers, you have to verify it in two places. Like have them give you a phone call and an email or now I'm thinking maybe that's not going to work either. You almost have to have like a private yes, leave me a voicemail or call me. But you also need to use our private Slack channel or our private. You know, it could be licio or whatever, like a private channel for the message to where you're getting it twice because just telling them to call you doesn't work. Or you have to have a live zoom call where you physically see them until that gets cloned as well. But.
Blake Oliver: [00:03:29] Well, what do I have this week? I've got a story about the IRS. It's tax season, so we might as well talk about it. And it's good news. According to CPA Trendlines, the IRS is processing returns as fast as it gets them. They are at an incredible current rate of 99.8%. So as of February 18th, they had received close to 36 million returns and they had processed 33, 34 million of them. So that is a big improvement from last year. So they still haven't quite dug through the entire backlog, but at least it's not adding to the backlog at this point. That's my takeaway from this story.
David Leary: [00:04:12] Well, I mean, that's good, right? Because they're they're they're on top of things. And in theory, if they stay if they stay at this pace at the end of tax season, they won't be behind and they'll be able to really start working on the backlog more. That's right. I don't see if that's a I think this is all good. Do you want to talk a little bit about ESG stuff?
Blake Oliver: [00:04:32] Yeah, sure. Why not?
David Leary: [00:04:33] I mean, favorite soapbox.
Blake Oliver: [00:04:34] I'm not a big fan of ESG. I think any of the listeners of this podcast will know. My biggest problem with it is that I don't understand how you can combine environmental, social and governance into a single score. It's like comparing apples, oranges and pineapples or it doesn't make sense to me. And that's why you have companies like Tesla getting ranked below companies like ExxonMobil, because Tesla has terrible governance, even though it's this amazing electric car company. So what's the news about? What's the news about?
David Leary: [00:05:07] I think I have like five articles and they all kind of start stacking up. So it's kind of one in here first for you. So the AICPA and Oxford are teaming up on a sustainability program together. And essentially this is a certificate. So it's going to be a part of their executive management program program in sustainability for accounting and finance professionals. And it's going to be online classes that are for mid to senior level career roles like CFOs, CEOs and board members. And if you take the program, you get to get a certificate jointly signed by Oxford and the AICPA and CMA, then this is what the certificate is, right? It will provide candidates with expertise in how sustainability issues affect the organization's ability to create long term value and the implications for decision making and resource allocation. Participants will also have the opportunity to understand how to apply their business skills to ESG issues and have a positive impact on organizations business model. It feels very non-accounting for the AICPA to be involved. And just my my short $0.02 on that.
Blake Oliver: [00:06:10] Is real big on ESG.
David Leary: [00:06:11] Oh, they're going very, very, very big. So they had they also give you this article here. Okay. They actually had a symposium on ESG and they were the top level sponsor for this. It's an IFRS sustainability symposium. And they were the I put the link in on if you want to switch or not.
Blake Oliver: [00:06:31] I'm trying to load it up, but intuitive accountant.com doesn't want to load for me. Oh let's see. Block Yeah well it's a spinning, spinning.
David Leary: [00:06:39] Okay. It could just be the streaming issue. But essentially they were the AICPA and Sigma were the platinum number one sponsor of this event. Barry Millican is the CEO of AICPA, and he goes on to say, Sustainability continues to be a strategic key area for the organization and global accountancy profession as a whole. The development of globally accepted comprehensive and robust sustainability disclosure standards will support the transition to a more responsible business practices, enhance the reliability of ESG related disclosures and place long term value creation at the heart of corporate activities and reporting. So again, like you said, like the.
Blake Oliver: [00:07:16] Other, it could be a big moneymaker, right, for the big firms is now you've got additional mandated disclosures, more paperwork, more financial reporting, more footnotes in the financial statements. It's all going to generate money for the big firms. Is this actually going to improve information for investors, though, is the question. And I haven't really seen like we have not seen evidence that ESG in its current form actually helps anyone. Yeah.
David Leary: [00:07:45] And there was another article in CPA Practice Advisor that talks about ESG reporting. It's common at large companies, but there's been a study 86% of the companies use multiple standards and frameworks.
Blake Oliver: [00:07:59] Right? So if you yeah, you have to have a single standard for reporting this stuff. Otherwise you can't compare companies. And and so far there's not really like as far as I know, not really a good standard.
David Leary: [00:08:12] So I'm going somewhere with this, right? So if you go to the next article. So this is an article titled The Dishonest Accounting about or the dishonest accounting of net zero emissions. And this article really is specifically about the greenwashing and the of carbon credits and the evolution of these words and what it means. But essentially it gives a really good example of ExxonMobil. And there's three scopes. So ExxonMobil can come out and say, we're going to be green, we're going to be net zero. But they define that there's three scopes of the way this is defined, right? So scope one is actually the physical facility. So you have your refinery, right? They have 21 refineries that produces pollution or emissions. Scope two is actually to run your refinery. You probably have to burn some fuel or get electricity to run your refinery. Right? So that's scope two. Scope three is basically when you drive your gas powered car. Blake Yeah, right. Yeah. They don't count scope three. So. So, right. They just, they don't, they don't even reference it. They don't even claim to get to that for net zero. Right.
Blake Oliver: [00:09:17] So this is how ExxonMobil can have a higher score than Tesla because.
David Leary: [00:09:21] And Chevron.
Blake Oliver: [00:09:22] Yeah, they do because they only they only count their direct emissions right now. So the solution then is to require them to report these scope three emissions, which is all of the upstream and downstream emissions that are part of their product that are a result of fossil fuels.
David Leary: [00:09:41] That and that's makes it really hard to count all this.
Blake Oliver: [00:09:43] Right. Well, imagine if in in financial reporting you didn't have to just report on your own numbers, but you had to report on all of your distributors numbers. Right. And all of your customers numbers. I don't I don't know how accountants are going to actually be able to do this. Like to get accurate information just seems completely impossible. And so they're going to. End up using estimates, and we all know that estimates can just be manipulated. Is this actually going to make the world a greener place? No, like these businesses are just going to keep doing what they're doing. And like you said, they're going to make themselves look good on paper, but like what's really happening in the world? I don't know. I'm not convinced at all.
David Leary: [00:10:22] And I'm not convinced in this theory that, you know, hey, if we get the, you know, the firms involved, like that's going to help with that. But I just pasted another link in here, this last one that's kind of tied to all of this. So this is a long form article. Very long article. This is from the International Consortium. I would say this again, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. It's ICIJ, huge long article. And the article is titled and Blake has It Up right Now How Auditing giant KPMG Became a Global Sustainability Leader while Serving companies Accused of Forced deconstruction.
Blake Oliver: [00:10:59] Ooh.
David Leary: [00:11:00] And it's it's a very, very long article, but the long story short is they were issuing reports downplaying basically involved with the logging industry in Canada. Right. And they basically this company is a $6 billion in annual revenue. So they're big, huge companies and essentially not.
Blake Oliver: [00:11:20] Kpmg, their client.
David Leary: [00:11:22] This is the client. This is the client, right. So this investigation had a collaboration of 39 media partners. And when it crossed borders. Right. And what they found is year after year, KPMG signed assurance reports, quote unquote, for the project and described as minor non-compliances in instances of logging and protected areas, destruction of wildlife habitat and degrading water quality. And later on it goes on to talk about the not only is it KPMG for these clients, it's also palm oil companies, illegal deforestation and logging in Indonesia, New Guinea, Malaysia, Cambodia. So it's not just Canada, right, that this is happening at and they just keep signing off on these reviews. The last little piece in here that was interesting. Yeah. And this has gone on for a very, very long time. So early on, first, just environmentalists cared about this illegal logging that was going on in Canada. Then the consumers eventually wanted to do it. But the the logging industry is so powerful that they they basically worked with KPMG to create a study that talked about how much these regulations would increase the cost. And then when it was all said and done to come up with these new standards, somehow KPMG got on the board to write these new standards. So this notion that, oh, as accounting firms get involved in this ESG and environmental protection stuff, it's going to make it better. There's there's a history of 20 years of it proving not true. Right. If you really if you go into this article and read the whole thing.
Blake Oliver: [00:12:55] I don't know what to say about that, David. No, other than that, it's not a good doesn't surprise me.
David Leary: [00:12:59] It's not a good look, right, for for KPMG.
Blake Oliver: [00:13:02] No. Well, and that's the thing is, is I mean McKinsey I think is the one that gets periodically raked over the coals in the press for, you know, basically assisting these companies that are doing terrible things globally and helping them do that. And, you know, the Big Four are also part of that with their consulting teams as well. They're just they'll work for anyone, you know, if you if you got money to pay them, they'll figure out how to how to make the horrible things you're doing often you know seem not so bad. Right. That's their job.
David Leary: [00:13:34] And sometimes they're just in there temporarily, right? Yeah. We're we're going to help you solve this problem. You. You paid us to solve. Yeah. No, long term, like we're solving for your problem right now, today with no long term point of view.
Blake Oliver: [00:13:45] Yeah, well, hey, since we're speaking about the Big Four, I thought this was a interesting story. You know, Big Four accountants are pretty smart, and the leaders of the Big four are pretty smart, but sometimes they make bad decisions. And Deloitte's CEO in Australia was recently the victim of a fraudster, or I guess the alleged victim of a fraudster, although he's acknowledged that it happened. So I don't think it's alleged anymore. Basically what happened is that Adam PwC or PwC, CEO of Deloitte in Australia, admitted he invested in a scheme run by former partner Amber Jit Endow. Who is now under investigation, but said he did so in a personal capacity and never authorized the use of his name to promote the scheme.
David Leary: [00:14:32] So it's not a random criminal. It was a former partner, Right.
Blake Oliver: [00:14:35] A former Deloitte partner, Yes. In an email sent to Deloitte Partners on Thursday afternoon, Mr. PwC said he took full accountability for my personal investment decisions and the outcomes associated with these decisions. He also wrote that he had never encouraged anyone else to be a part of this investment. The stunning admission comes after reports that Mr. Endow, a former senior Deloitte partner who worked at the firm for more than 13 years, had allegedly stopped communicating with at least some investors around December, causing them to worry that they will be unable to recover their money. So yeah, anybody can be a victim of fraud.
David Leary: [00:15:09] So he's saying he put money into this and was a victim of it, but he went out of his way to say, I did not encourage anybody else to put their money in this.
Blake Oliver: [00:15:18] Right. Right. But his name was being used apparently by this former partner to get more investors.
David Leary: [00:15:22] Oh, got it. Got it. He was he was exploiting the fact that he put some money in. Okay. So this is We'll see.
Blake Oliver: [00:15:28] So this company, you know, it's classic fraud kind of situation. They were offering high returns for money that would be issued to purchase bonds relating to ongoing infrastructure spending by the Indian government. And get this, they were promising a promising 39% interest over six months.
David Leary: [00:15:46] Right. That's better than Bitcoin.
Blake Oliver: [00:15:49] I mean, it's it's insane, right? Oh, and it also there was an investment document that the Australian Financial Review saw that said that there was, quote, the investment represents a zero risk profile. So 39% interest, zero risk profile. I mean, you know, it doesn't matter who the person is. If you see that, you don't trust it. Right.
David Leary: [00:16:11] Anything above 8%, I guess I don't trust at this point.
Blake Oliver: [00:16:15] If it's too good to be true, it is, right? Yeah, completely.
David Leary: [00:16:20] What's next? It's not Big Four, but Big Ten. Okay, so I don't even know if we mentioned it when we were doing the interview or not, but did you see that the Armenelos bitcoin team or crypto team has left Armanino and started a whole new firm?
Blake Oliver: [00:16:36] Yeah, because armanino shut that down right after. Yeah, after everything went south. So.
David Leary: [00:16:41] So it's actually called the network firm.com and it's a brand new accounting firm basically really focusing on digital assets.
Blake Oliver: [00:16:50] So these are the guys that are going to be doing those attestation reports that provide no actual assurance. But then, you know, the crypto companies use them to say that, oh, we've got the assets to back up our depositors, but without without any liabilities being audited.
David Leary: [00:17:05] Now, what's interesting is they say that this firm was founded earlier this year. It's based in Miami. But how it feels pretty finished. I don't know if that makes any sense. Like, was this something that was like a back door they were planning the whole time? You know, like, hey, just in case this doesn't go well, we can still try to grab some of this money from from these crypto companies. But this way we can we can separate armanino from the risk, right?
Blake Oliver: [00:17:32] Yeah, I don't know. Here's a report, Survey report by Accounting Today cast by the numbers. And there are some good charts in here that we could take a look at. So Accounting Today does an annual report on CAS client Accounting Services, the fancy name for what is essentially bookkeeping and accounting on an outsourced basis by public accounting firms. Or it could be non accounting firms, could just be consulting firms, but they focus on on the accounting firms. And there's always great data in here around the growth of CAS, double digit growth. So the median growth rate for top performing CAS practices is 16% projected growth rate annually of 15%, which is really, really strong and has been going on for years and years now. Right. Which is why Cas, a few years ago surpassed 10% of all revenues in firms and is now, you know, probably way above that. How do CAS practices describe themselves? Only 43% of CAS practices actually use the term client accounting services, which goes to this problem with the whole branding of CAS and the meaning of it. Like when I talk about it, I always have to define it because it's not a common definition, right? Fewer than half of firms are actually using the term, 17% are using another name with outsourced in it. So they're calling it outsourced something or other. Yeah, 16% are using another name with advisory in it. So they're calling it advisory something. Now 13% define CAS as client advisory services instead of client accounting services. 7% use the term CAS. So they're mixing them, the double A's, the double A's, and then 7% use another name with CFO in it. That's how they with.
David Leary: [00:19:25] The double A's is that for accounting advisory services? Client accounting Advisory Services? Is that the double A Accounting.
Blake Oliver: [00:19:32] Accounting and Advisory services? Okay. So I think that so when you are branding your practice and you're doing. Cast or whatever we call it. Just know you have flexibility because there is no agreed upon definition of what that means. But if you're going to choose something, you might as well choose client accounting services, because that's the least confusing thing.
David Leary: [00:19:59] Well, really try to figure out what to name it like that feels very inside. But name it what the consumers are calling it. Your customers are calling it. Right. And they're probably more than likely is, will you do my QuickBooks? Right? Will you do my accounting? Right? They're going to use the word accounting. Right? Or they mean bookkeeping, but try to figure out what they're calling it and don't call it something else right now.
Blake Oliver: [00:20:22] How much money are practices making from CAS? Last year, the top performers earned just over $2 Billion in net client fees for CAS services. Now that's double all respondents who earned on average $1 million. So the top performers are making twice as much money in terms of net client fees. They are also making almost twice as much in median net client fees per professional. The top performers earned 231,000 per professional. All respondents. It's 121,000.
David Leary: [00:21:01] So do you think the discrepancy here, Blake, is people that. Their firm only does casts are these 2 million and the ones that are maximizing the money per employee? Or is it just firms that do lots of stuff happen to have a really great cast division? What's your gut instinct on this?
Blake Oliver: [00:21:18] I don't know. I mean, it could be pricing, it could be efficiency, it could be offshoring. It's probably a combination of all those things. I'm going to guess that if you're just doing casts on an hourly basis, you're probably in that lower revenue per employee number. Because if you think about it, the traditional firm structure is like a third, a third, a third. So you aim to, you know, your employees get a third of the revenue, you allocate a third of the revenue to your employees, a third goes to like overhead, and then a third goes to profit. In an ideal world. And so that that lower revenue per professional would kind of fit with that, right? If you're paying your employees like 40 to 50 K to do cast work and then or maybe more, the profit margin might be a lot lower in those firms. It's hard to say, but if you don't price hourly and you price fixed fees based on the value you're delivering, then you can earn $231,000 per professional because it's not linked to the amount of hours that they can bill in the day. Yeah.
David Leary: [00:22:17] We've also talked about like it maybe is okay to take make less on your cast practice and use that as a way to have a super efficient tax practice on the on the back side. So I think the context of that number I think is a little hard to see.
Blake Oliver: [00:22:29] Now, where do the clients come from? The top lead sources for top performing cast practices, 79% are getting their clients from existing tax clients. And this is why if you're a really good cast practice, if that's what you lead with, you can acquire tax practices and you can sell client accounting services to those tax clients that never got them before. And that's a really good strategy for growth, is acquire these traditional tax practices, take the clients who need casts, roll them into your practice. You could do the tax two and then you get rid of the ones who only want tax returns.
David Leary: [00:23:10] Because basically firms are out there just pumping out business returns and they've never paused once and said to the client, Why don't we just, instead of being this big mess at the end here, why don't we just handle your bookkeeping for you all year and their return will be faster? Yeah.
Blake Oliver: [00:23:22] Now, interestingly, 60% are getting clients from external referrals. I don't know if this is 60% or if this is like the top source. I think this might be the top source. It's not clear from the chart. But so so the next most popular source of clients is external referrals, then converting traditional bookkeeping, accounting clients, then existing non tax clients. And the last one is the website. Only 24% get they're only 24% have their website as their top lead source. So that's not.
David Leary: [00:23:56] Good.
Blake Oliver: [00:23:57] Well, I mean, it just shows you like this. This makes sense, right? This is not surprising to me because most, most traditional accounting firms get their clients from, you know, cross-selling within the firm if they're big enough or referrals. Yeah, right. It's only the really, you know, start up style firms that are doing really good marketing, really good content that are getting the most of their clients from their website. What are the most common offerings for all respondents to 1099 Financial Statement Prep CFO Slash Controller Advisory Services Accounts Payable Sales Tax Returns consulting, which includes financial planning, slash modeling, and then forecasting slash budgeting. Those are all over 80%. 98% of top performers offer tax services in combination with CAS. Let's talk about CAS staff allocation across service lines. The top performers, 57% of them have staff that are dedicated to CAS only, whereas with all respondents, it's 41%. So. If you want to have a top performing cast practice, you should be dedicating staff to just that. Which makes sense, right? If they're treated.
David Leary: [00:25:11] As a true business unit.
Blake Oliver: [00:25:12] Exactly.
David Leary: [00:25:13] Have a team. Yeah.
Blake Oliver: [00:25:14] Yeah. And the the the not the top performers are more likely to have those cast staff support other services. Much more likely. Number of general ledger programs used. I should have had you guessed this one, David, but it's already on the screen. The plurality of firms use two general ledger programs. That's 36%. Only 21% use one, and the rest all use three or more. So I guess if you add those numbers together, what, 21% plus 36%, you're at 57%. Right. So that means that, you know. 43% are using three or more general ledger programs in their practice. I wonder how the.
David Leary: [00:25:58] How people think about QuickBooks. Do they count QuickBooks desktop? Quickbooks Online is too, right? This feels like the right distribution to me because I do think once you get past 2 or 3, you really can't scale this in your firm, right? It's a little difficult to have multiple goals.
Blake Oliver: [00:26:14] Oh yeah. Well, the training becomes really difficult, right? And the process, automation and all that. You want to avoid it, if at all possible. But it's interesting because we just did that webinar with The Grove where we had Hector Garcia and Amanda Aguillard on talking about Xero versus QuickBooks. Yeah, And the the whole debate was really around which one do you choose? But it turns out that only 1 in 5 firms is doing one GL The rest all have two or more. So it might be maybe for a follow up to that, we should do a webinar on, you know, why should you just choose one or should you?
David Leary: [00:26:51] I lean toward because I've talked to enough like bookkeepers now where like there's a more maturity, more mature view. Like it doesn't have to be so black and white because it's a lot of work to move somebody off of QuickBooks to zero or off of zero to QuickBooks or off of Zoho Books onto QuickBooks, when in the end, if they're using apps and all these add ons, you're kind of getting to the same spot. But at the same time, I think the other piece of this is market size. And I think Hector talked about this a lot with QuickBooks. Like I forgot there was AA0 firm I met maybe eight years ago and they were strong zero only. And I think they were for law firms. And they finally, maybe about three years ago, started taking on QuickBooks clients instead of telling QuickBooks people no or migrating them. And they and within a year and a half, their QuickBooks business was bigger than all their Xero clients because they stopped saying no. And so yeah, the not supporting two is really you're just you're just telling customers you don't want their business. Ultimately I think it's a good idea.
Blake Oliver: [00:27:51] Christopher has joined us in the live stream. Thanks for hopping on, Christopher. We didn't schedule this. We just went live and we've got a few folks listening in. Christopher says Add bookkeeping to your tax clients. Now you're charging for CAS and such an easier sell. I agree. Roll the tax in. You actually can offer the tax included in the CAS. That's how I would do it is sell the client accounting services. We're going to be your outsourced accounting department and as long as you are a client of our team, we will do your tax return for free.
David Leary: [00:28:26] So lead with that. That makes sense. Yeah. For free. Free taxes.
Blake Oliver: [00:28:29] Right. And and it's really hard to get a traditional firm to buy into that when you've always sold the tax return. And the tax return has always been way more expensive than the bookkeeping work. We're flipping the script here, right? But the clients actually see having the access to the accounting and the tax team as more valuable than the tax return itself. So you're selling the value of having this team. And the beauty of it too, is that when you're not selling the tax return, if the client leaves, you aren't responsible for any work on the taxes after they leave. So you may you just.
David Leary: [00:29:04] Close that one month you're on and see.
Blake Oliver: [00:29:07] You later. It's like if you leave in March and your tax return hasn't been filed yet, we're not filing in April. Right. Or if you leave in, you know, we've extended you and you leave in July. We're not filing that return like we're no longer responsible. We're only responsible for the returns that are filed while you're a client. And that creates stickiness. Right. And it's a lot harder for somebody to go out there and replace their bookkeeper and their tax advisor at the same time. This is what I'm seeing The the leading firms do is fix monthly fee, throw in the tax work. But you have to change how you look at your firm. If you if you view them in silos, you can't do it right. So you've got to view it holistically.
David Leary: [00:29:49] We've talked about that, about the way Apple came in and he got rid of all these dividers between the business units and just worried about the one Apple dollar figure.
Blake Oliver: [00:29:57] Exactly. Steve Jobs did not view the App Store as a separate line of business. They view it as part of the whole iPhone business, which is true. Right. You can't have the app store without the iPhone. So why would you look at it separately? Trying to measure in terms of profit. Old.
David Leary: [00:30:15] Old cost accounting.
Blake Oliver: [00:30:16] Yeah. Allocating costs to all these different departments. Giant waste of time, at least in his view. Hey, I wanted to share a tweet from a listener. Ryan L. Cpe said, Hey, Cloud Accounting Podcast. I just started listening to this week's episode and IMO one reason you don't see more young CPAs at conferences is cost. I'm a new solo firm owner and would love to go to engage, but I can't justify the five K all in cost. And we've talked about this before, right? The cost of some of these conferences is really high. Like the the Engage conference, digital conference. It excludes a lot of the younger professionals and and the staff, too, Right? Only the firm owners can afford to go. I wish they would figure out how to bring the cost down.
David Leary: [00:31:05] They're doing some some virtual type stuff. But I mean, I get it. Like by the time you get your hotel and your food and your airfare, it does get expensive. But the ticket, just the ticket to go is still pretty pricey For this.
Blake Oliver: [00:31:17] Just to get into the conference is very pricey. I mean, we're talking over $1,000 a ticket, maybe more. Maybe it could be thousands. Right. And so compare that, though, to like QuickBooks Connect or to Xerocon, where the ticket might be $100 or 300. $600. Yeah. Yeah. So if we want to get there's got to be a way to do this, right? Like bring the cost down If you are if you fit certain criteria, charge less. They should charge more. If you're a big firm, you can afford it. You pay more. If you're a small.
David Leary: [00:31:49] Firm, you subsidize. It's like first class, right? Yeah. They're subsidizing the seats for the rest of the plane because this goes back to what I think you nailed on like Sage. Right. And they're their accountants program. It's super expensive. You can't get in. But over here, they're talking about inclusion and diversity with their other hand. I guarantee you Engage is going to have 30 sessions on diversity and inclusion. That's going to be dropped all the time, probably in keynotes. In the meantime, there's a lot of people outside looking in and to like actually make it inclusive by figuring out how to do it for a lower price point.
Blake Oliver: [00:32:25] We also got an email from D Hall about accounting and finance as a percentage of revenue, this idea of which we've talked about on recent episodes, this idea of pricing your services as a percentage of revenue, or it could be percentage of expenses of your client. And I always use this method as a gut check. I didn't actually price this way when I had my firm, but I would use my complicated pricing matrix and then in the end I would see, All right, what is this as a percentage of their revenue or expenses, whichever is greater? And I would try to get it to come out to between 1 and 2%. That was like the right number for the mix of services that I was offering. And so D Hall wrote us an email and he said, Here's a link to this CFO article called The Cost to perform the finance function Metric of the Month. And so if we go here and look at this chart, we see that the total cost to perform the finance function as a percentage of revenue ranges from 0.1. 6% at the high end and 0.56% at the low end. So between half a percent and 1.6% is is the range of that's the total cost of the finance function in-house at a company, according to CFO. Com's survey. So if you think about this, if you're providing outsourced accounting services, you are taking on the role of that finance function in at your firm, right? You're doing that for them so they don't have to hire people. So you should be charging at least this much, right? If you're charging less.
David Leary: [00:34:08] We talked about this before. How much is it going to cost them to do it themselves, whatever it might be? We priced our own services. We've provided. And, you know, it could cost somebody 50 grand a year to do this in-house to do bookkeeping.
Blake Oliver: [00:34:20] So so if you're charging less than 0.5, 6%, you're basically giving away too much, right? I would say that we should be on the top end, right. 2% if you're especially if you're replacing the finance function for a company like you're doing like CFO advisory services, you probably should be at 2% or more and then I would say up to 5%, because that's what business managers charge for celebrities and athletes is the standard amount is about 5%. And I know that from my personal experience working in LA, where business management is this whole big thing, there's entire firms that just do business management and they take 5% of revenue. So that would be the high end and then the low end, right? Maybe a percent. It could be in that range.
David Leary: [00:35:08] So should apps like Carbon. And I'm thinking like go proposal and practice ignition or ignition? Should apps like that just in the same way? When I go to a coffee place square and all these point of sales have these tip buttons that are all like way inflated like now the tip buttons start at 22%, right? And they have a little like should, should it be where these these apps themselves just have the base. The base already starts at 1.6% of revenue like they just the apps themselves kind of make it the default standard of 1.6. It's really hard to not do 1.6.
Blake Oliver: [00:35:42] Well, it'd be really neat if you could connect your clients file into these systems that are generating proposals, and then it would give you all the metrics that you need to generate a quote. Like, there's no.
David Leary: [00:35:53] Reason technically they can't do it.
Blake Oliver: [00:35:55] How many transactions do they have in the bank account? How many bank accounts, how many bills, how many employees in the payroll system, how much revenue, how much expenses, how many accounts in the chart of accounts, All this stuff that we use to design proposals to try to figure out what's the scope of this? If they pull it in, then we could generate proposals very quickly that would really help.
David Leary: [00:36:15] And technically there's no reason, no app, an app can't do that. I mean, QuickBooks Online already does it. When you connect your client, they give you those numbers. And I've seen other apps give you those numbers, but not the pricing apps and proposal apps.
Blake Oliver: [00:36:28] So it's a good idea. So back to our listener email. Yeah, Dial said. For me, bookkeeping only usually starts with 1.2% based on the level of services, accounting, slash CFO and industry, it could go up to 3%, not including payroll slash hr, slash purchasing, slash pricing. So his range is 1.2 to 3%. The overall goal is to discuss the plan with the client, how to reduce the accounting slash finance burden and ratio as a percentage of revenue Some clients take on high risk contracts, have complex tax slash nexus issues or have a greater burden for accounting due to audit or compliance. There may also be additional costs due to scaling up or new technology integration or like almost every new client, have a lot of cleanup work to do. Having the client aware of their burden, of their choices is always best and allows for easier discussions on pricing while creating a boundary for the level of services we are providing. The scope cannot be unlimited. The IRS has also stated that all businesses must establish a level of risk and reward having unlimited scope of work that some accounting firms do would break this test, especially as the IRS begins cracking down on solo practitioners, slash contractors versus employees for startups, or rapidly growing organizations that do not have historical revenue. An annual budget can be created based on the goals of the company or projected to break even plus margin.
David Leary: [00:37:49] I think that's imagine going back to tying this back to the other thing about offering tax for free, right? If you maybe you're charging $2,000 for a tax return, but if you can move them from 2% to 3% on their cash services, like the monthly bookkeeping services, that might be an extra two grand a month for your firm. Right. So you just. Hey, we'll toss in your if you if you buy this level package right at 3%, we'll throw in your personal tax return for free. And but you're basically getting that revenue every single month for not that much more work.
Blake Oliver: [00:38:22] I just can't believe that so many firms still bill in arrears for taxes. You're doing all this work throughout the whole year to get a tax return out the door and you don't charge for it until after it's been filed. You're basically giving a loan to your client of all the costs that you've accumulated to do that return. And it just seems kind of nuts. I mean, you could totally transform a practice without doing anything else just by changing how it bills, just by changing it to a subscription. Billing, You tell me.
David Leary: [00:38:51] Was like somebody like the big darling. I don't even know what firm it was. And essentially that was 99% of the success. Just by doing that one change and forgot you were you were telling me about.
Blake Oliver: [00:39:01] Oh, that was Jody Grunden. Yeah. Who just sold his practice. I think, bundles and bundles of money. Yeah. I mean, he talks about how they did two things. Mainly they added CFO services to their mix and they did subscription billing on a weekly basis for all of their CFO advisory clients. And they only do CFO work. Like if you don't hire them to be your CFO, they won't work with you. So you can't just buy tax, you can't just by bookkeeping. At least that's my understanding of it. I could be wrong on that, but that's what it sounded like. And then, yeah, you basically throw in everything into one bill, but the siloed practice doesn't work that way. You have to combine all this. And so like the traditional practice management software, they don't even let you do something like that because everyone's tracking their hours and all the hours have to get allocated to, you know, a return or to a bookkeeping engagement. You know, I suppose you could you could work it by just creating one engagement that includes everything and everyone just bills time to that. But at that point, you might as well just say like, well, who cares anymore about the time.
David Leary: [00:40:10] Right? Stop tracking. Just work on the returns and stop tracking. Yeah, yeah. You want to do app news? You have other any other non app stuff.
Blake Oliver: [00:40:18] Yeah. No, let's get, let's get more into apps.
David Leary: [00:40:24] I just put a link in. I think this was kind of big news. You tweeted about it. I think I saw that Intuit is saying goodbye to QuickBooks Desktop. Point of Sale.
Blake Oliver: [00:40:33] Yes, that's huge. They're sunsetting it and it's not that long from now. It's like this year in October. Very quick. Yeah. And well, I'm waiting for the article to load on intuitive accountant.com. I don't know what's up with their website but it is like taking forever to load. But the thing that really struck me as problematic for people who use QuickBooks point of Sale desktop and we should just say QuickBooks point of sale because there is no cloud version is that they're sunsetting all the connected services too. So it basically makes the point of sale unusable. Without the connected services for a lot of businesses, right? Like if you can't charge credit cards, if you can't update inventory, you have.
David Leary: [00:41:14] A gift card. Service.
Blake Oliver: [00:41:16] Yeah, like it. Basically it's done. And so what are all these businesses going to do? They're using QuickBooks Point of Sale. They have to switch. So David, does Intuit have a solution for those people?
David Leary: [00:41:30] I mean, so the way I read this article is they're announcing that they're going to offer an alternative point of sale from Shopify.
Blake Oliver: [00:41:38] So they partnered with Shopify, partner.
David Leary: [00:41:40] With Shopify, and they have an early release of this integration with QuickBooks Desktop. I don't know, I see this. And here, here, here. Here's my take on this. At a high level, you know, Intuit kills your point of sale to get in bed with Shopify and Shopify is like, Hell yeah. All right. This is great. Because of that, we're not going to release the general ledger, which I've been saying Shopify is going to build the general ledger, right? And then at the same time, this also kind of, you know, square or block. Now it forces them to figure like the the cards on them now because either I still believe Shopify or Block or Square was going to launch a general ledger. Right? And so now I could see this like scratch your back stuff. Who knows? Like we don't know the real conversations that went down, but it's mighty convenient, right, that Shopify now gets to be the point of sale for QuickBooks Desktop.
Blake Oliver: [00:42:39] So. So here's the services that are turning off the connected ones. Quickbooks Point of sale payments, the credit card service, mobile sync store exchange, e-commerce integration with web agility support plans, including live support and the vendor lookup service all gone. So we've already heard chatter in the communities that we're in, at least I have, of, you know, accountants who have clients on point of sale now looking for help, getting them off of it and getting them onto something else. So if you want to get a lot of business really fast and you've got capacity in your firm, I would say spin up a service and a web page on your site all about helping businesses switch from QuickBooks desktop point of Sale to Shopify and offer it to other firms that don't have capacity to do it. Great consulting opportunity. Jump on this.
David Leary: [00:43:32] I wish Intuit released some numbers because I have not seen a QuickBooks desktop point of sale in the wild in years. And this could just be like the rip the band aid off because it's just like a slow death that's been happening for a very long time. The one thing I don't like about this is Intuit already have tried to do this before, so they partnered with Revel. Revel is a big restaurant point of sale. A lot of you probably seen it when they they were one of the first ones where the waiter or waitress could come up and charge your credit card at the table. They take your order on the little tablet hanging off their their hip pouch there. And they were going to take that rebranded as QuickBooks point of sale for online, basically. And they wound up killing the whole agreement after two years because A it was good for restaurants but not good for products. So they kind of that caused a bunch of problems. And then B, I don't think Revel ever treated Intuit customers, accountants, the developers in the same way Intuit treated them. So it was always like a cultural issue going on. So there is some risk of this like, like is it doesn't sound like it's going to be white labeled, but it's always where is the grass? Greener, Maybe not. You know, we'll see where this goes. I mean, really, though, if you have to get rid of your desktop point of sale, it's wide open now, right? You're going to look at everybody. This could actually indirectly drive people to square.
Blake Oliver: [00:44:55] It could, yeah. I mean, and Square we know is building their own general ledger. We we heard that from a listener and who has access to that information And so that's that's very I'm very excited for that. I wonder when that's going to happen. That's going to give QuickBooks a run for its money. And zero. The AICPA and Paycom announced their new startup accelerator cohort for 2023. Let's see who is in the cohort we've got for impact data. This is the first ever knowledge as a service business guidance system that equips CPA firms to be the strategic partner of their business clients need. It's a client advisory platform built around analytics and cloud technology and includes industry best practices, proactive alerts and benchmarking across clients. There's also audit sites. This is a platform that reduces manual work for auditors, due diligence and private equity providers by automating financial transaction verification. The solution automates the audit testing process and generates gas compliant work papers. There's also cinder. Cinder is a sponsor of the podcast sponsor. They are a business intelligence platform for CFOs and accounting professionals that automates repetitive tasks around Multi-source e-commerce data and translates it into insights for business. So basically, take your e-commerce data and get it into your general ledger in a in a way that isn't a giant mess, right? David Yep. There's also tax plan IQ. This is a solution that automates various aspects of a tax planning engagement from selling the plan to implementing tasks throughout the year.
Blake Oliver: [00:46:33] And they also provide educational resources, videos, checklists, templates of 100 tax strategies. And the last one is verify IQ. It's a Vancouver based company that offers solutions to augment workflow and customer relationship management systems to make bookkeeping more efficient, including a practice management solution that automates quality control reviews and a tool that enables sales teams to scope a potential clients books. Okay, so this is what I couldn't remember when we were just talking about tools that pull in client data or prospect data so that you can scope and engagement verify. Iq does this so you connect the tool to QuickBooks. I don't know if they do Xero, you connect it to the GL and then they pull in all that information so you can scope the books, see what's wrong, see what you have to fix. And then also they do quality control, helps you do quality control on the clients you are managing. So are the accounts reconciled? Right? Like you don't have to go into each file to do that. And I know that Acuity is using this tool now to do quality control. They actually give it to the bookkeepers, and the bookkeepers can use the tool to make sure that they did everything. It's like a double check.
David Leary: [00:47:44] Yeah. There's one of the very first apps that were launched on QuickBooks Online. First did the App Store was a bad name. It was called Audit My Books, but it kind of did this. But the name wasn't good, right? Because nobody wants to get a product that says audit My books verifies a much better name. So the I think the instinct is there's a product here. And so we'll be interested to see where it goes. But I like the idea, like you said, tying it back to your quoting and your pricing.
Blake Oliver: [00:48:09] So those are all the new that's the latest cohort of the AICPA and CPA com accelerator. What do they get for being in that? They get a $25,000 grant, but the real value is they get a booth space at the AICPA Engage conference in Las Vegas. And I believe some of the other conferences that AICPA puts on, like digital CPA, they can get into that. So if you're a software company and you want to get in front of the attendees at Engage. We're at Digital CPE or anything else the AICPA puts on. That's why you apply to this program is because they have a booth for cpa.com and you can come to that booth.
David Leary: [00:48:50] So congratulations to all those apps.
Blake Oliver: [00:48:52] Yeah congratulations. Well done into.
David Leary: [00:48:54] It. Just put the LinkedIn. Intuit also announced a cohort of startups. So Intuit announced that they have a cohort of Toronto startups and a startup accelerator program. Now, what's interesting about this is because they're playing this up as part, you know, Intuit, we've talked about this before, their prosperity zones, right? And, you know, and they're trying to and I think like ones in like West Virginia and ones in Michigan, I was shocked that they kind of roll Toronto into that because I feel like Toronto historically, like a lot of the biggest apps in the cloud accounting space come out of Toronto. Toronto is pretty prosperous. This is being rolled in there, but they have a couple apps and we'll just kind of go through them quickly. So they have something called Carbon Hound, which is simplifies your carbon management by consolidating your measurement and reduction and offset and marketing services in one place for your carbon, Right. They have something net now which is interesting. It's a buy now, pay later, check out platform for B2B transactions focusing on the construction industry. So which makes a lot of sense because a lot of times if you're doing your job, being paid by your client, progress billing, how can you pay for all your materials right until you get that next payment? So buy now, pay Later is very interesting for that. They have a real estate platform called Equity Homes, which basically helps people do like rent to own programs, and they have Spruce, which is an AI loan origination decisioning software that can collect, analyze, underwrite and monitor small business data. That one I probably is the one. And two, it's probably betting on the most. What's it called? Intuit? Obviously, they want to give small business loans. What's that one called? Did have Spruce. Spruce USB.
Blake Oliver: [00:50:36] So what did they get for being part of this?
David Leary: [00:50:38] Yeah. What do they get? Good question.
Blake Oliver: [00:50:41] It's an equity free program in which selected startups benefit from mentorship on product and business innovation toward advancing financial prosperity for consumers, small businesses and the self-employed. So I guess it's like.
David Leary: [00:50:56] Yeah, Intuit will mentor them. They'll use Intuit Design, thinking, design for delight, pursue others business of mentorship.
Blake Oliver: [00:51:03] That's what it is. So. So they're not they're not making investments. They're basically giving them access to Intuit experts to help them raise money, raise money to help them design their product.
David Leary: [00:51:18] I just thought it was interesting they both busily announced that the same day. Now, this was part of Intuit Canada, though it wasn't just Intuit overall. So Revolut, Neobank, Revolut. We've talked about plenty of times in the past, but don't know if you've been monitoring them lately. They have been having a hard time getting out their 2021 Now this is from the UK, so they say accounts, but I would say like year end financials for 2021 and BDO has raised concerns about the completion or completeness of 477 million pounds of revenues in the long delayed 2021 accounts. They were unable to verify the 400 and 477 million pounds of revenue and set the company's IT systems meant that there was a risk and that the bulk of IT revenues were material misstated, materially misstated. So the.
Blake Oliver: [00:52:07] Bulk the bulk of the.
David Leary: [00:52:08] Revenue of its revenues. Yes.
Blake Oliver: [00:52:10] Wow.
David Leary: [00:52:12] And apparently they were struggling. The reason there was such a delay on these is the audit team were unable to get a complete picture of some of the companies revenues and they had to revert to verifying cash balance, cash balances and cash and clients accounts as a result. So not just like how much cash do you have? They had to go to each client's individual ledgers to figure out how much cash was there.
Blake Oliver: [00:52:33] I mean, that's really scary. Like this is a bank, right? I mean, they're a neobank, but they're just.
David Leary: [00:52:37] Trying to be a bank.
Blake Oliver: [00:52:38] Yeah, they're trying to be a bank. And. And you're saying that BDO Reuters is saying that BDO was not able to independently verify three quarters of the 636 million pounds of revenue.
David Leary: [00:52:53] And they've been pushing them. That's for 2020.
Blake Oliver: [00:52:56] That's for 2021. Yes.
David Leary: [00:52:58] Wow. And they found in 2020 and they were pushing them then that there was an unacceptably high risk of material misstatement. And then the Revolut's chief CFO was quoted that at the very bottom. Oh, go ahead.
Blake Oliver: [00:53:15] Well, I was just wondering, like, how is it possible that BDO in their annual report, could say that the financial statements gave a, quote, true and fair view of the state of the group, unquote, although it warned that some information may be, quote, materially misstated unquote like. But if they can't independently verify three quarters of the 765 million USD of revenue, like how can they say that it's fair and true and fair? I just I it's crazy to me. Sorry, Go ahead, David. Oh, no. My mind my mind is exploding out of my head right now.
David Leary: [00:53:48] And the quote from the CFO is like, ah, they've remediated it and quote unquote, I think we're basically they're.
Blake Oliver: [00:53:56] It doesn't give me a lot of confidence.
David Leary: [00:53:58] I think we're basically they're basically the CFO, the CFO. I think we're basically there. We're close enough. I don't I was just shocked that there's not a stronger statement from the CFO of like everything has been resolved numbers. There won't be a delay. You know, I think we're basically there.
Blake Oliver: [00:54:13] And to give some perspective, Revolute was valued at around $33 billion in its last funding round in 2021.
David Leary: [00:54:20] Making them one of the huge tech uber unicorns, Right? They're one of the top 3 or 4, you know.
Blake Oliver: [00:54:25] Britain's most valuable startup at the time. It's raised so far, $1.7 billion. Of course, SoftBank is in there. Softbank seems to be invested in all of these companies that have major problems, don't they?
David Leary: [00:54:40] Well, it's this growth at all costs, right? And when you have crazy fast growth, you lose control and you have good systems in place and maybe the game is grow correctly and grow at all costs.
Blake Oliver: [00:54:54] Wow, That is nuts. Well, I've got one more story before we wrap things up, David, because we're about out of time. Xero has announced a new same story. Okay. Xero has announced a new chief product officer. So this is replacing was it Anna Curzon? Anna Curzon was the chief product officer who was taking a sabbatical as a result of personal and family health reasons. So this is very sudden. It wasn't planned. And they have brought on Diya Jolly as their new chief product officer. Effective April 10th, 2023, Jolly comes to Xero from Okta, where she was Chief Product Officer responsible for leading product innovation for both its workforce and customer identity business. And then prior to that, Jolly was the VP of product Management at Google, where she was focused on driving adoption for some of the company's leading products, including Google, Home Nest, YouTube monetization and Gmail monetization. She has an MBA from Harvard Business School and. The Bachelor of Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Economics from the University of Michigan.
David Leary: [00:56:01] The two monetization ones scare me a little bit because those models are basically watch what you're doing and sell you stuff, right? Like look at the zero data and sell you stuff. When I see those two sentences, that's what I see and that's kind of it'll be interesting to see where that step is. And then Zero also had a second announcement. I don't know if you if you saw that there's a new note from Zero's new CEO. So this is Sundar Singh Cassidy. So she wrote a new note and just gives a little bit about her background, which is great. She was the daughter of two small business owners, and they've owned multiple small business owner businesses as she was growing up. And she talks about how she used to handwrite entries into her father's ledger. Right. And now she's working for this cloud company. Right. And how far that's come. Now, she also is from Google as well. So there could be a these things come and go or come and go, ebb and flow like this where I've seen this at Intuit where they they're hiring a bunch of people from GE then then it was the Microsoft kick a lot of ex-microsoft people. Right. And so these companies so right now maybe the the kick at zero is hired the the Google people and we'll see where these things but hopefully you know as long as the core of a company stays, it doesn't matter these other cultures you bring in. Yeah, but it's temporary.
Blake Oliver: [00:57:16] I mean the core of zero is definitely not that, right. The people who created zero did not come from Google or Microsoft, and now they're bringing those people in. And that could really change things potentially. And, you know, maybe they'll follow the Intuit strategy, which has always been to create all of these cross-sell opportunities to your customers. I mean, that's how Intuit's average revenue per customer gets into the hundreds of dollars per month, because not only do you buy QuickBooks, but you buy the payroll, you buy the merchant processing, you buy the all the other stuff they offer, the MailChimp, whatever it is, Right?
David Leary: [00:57:52] Not the point of sale, though.
Blake Oliver: [00:57:53] Not the point of sale anymore. No. They gave up on that. Yeah. Well, David, it's been a pleasure digging into the news with you on this episode. If our listeners want to follow you online, where should they go?
David Leary: [00:58:04] I'm just @DavidLeary on all the socials, and if you send me a message on LinkedIn, please say you're not a bot because it is like an all time highs again.
Blake Oliver: [00:58:11] Yeah, I am at Blake t Oliver. You can email us cloudaccountingpodcast.com at earmarked com. Let us know what you think. You can send us a voicemail record a voice memo with your phone. Send it in. We'll listen to it. You can send us a Zoom video too, something like that. We'll put you on our YouTube channel. Oh, and speaking of do follow our YouTube channel, we are Cloud accounting podcast on YouTube. You can see what we look like. You can figure out which one of us is, which one of us. And you can if you subscribe, you can jump onto our live streams and chat with us and we love doing that. It's a lot of fun. Makes these recording sessions a whole lot more exciting. And don't forget, you can earn free CPE for listening to these episodes. Download the Earmark CPE app on Google or Android. Get your free CPE for listening to podcasts. David, great to see you here. I'll see you again on Mostly.
David Leary: [00:59:08] It's like we did a 2.5 hour episode. I know these both together from Friday, but they're going to be good. Everybody like should be very happy with these two episodes and we'll do a normal episode on Friday. Yeah. Oh, do we have a special. We have a guest on the Friday one.
Blake Oliver: [00:59:21] Yeah. Yeah. So follow us on YouTube and you can join the live stream of our recording session with Paul Barnhurst, who is the host of the FPA Today podcast and is known as the FPA Guy. He is the all things. He has all things FPA. So join us then and learn what financial planning and analysis is and how accountants can do better forward looking financials.
David Leary: [00:59:49] And any progress from AICPA representatives or Nasba representatives reaching out to you for contact?
Blake Oliver: [00:59:55] Yes, we are in touch with Nasba and it's looking like we're going to get an interview with Ken Bishop, the I think he's the chair of I don't know if he's the president or the chair of Nasba, but he's he's the head honcho over at Nasba. Hey, we're getting somewhere, so I'm really excited to talk to him. We'll get that set up and that'll be coming out as a portion of a cloud accounting podcast episode or perhaps a bonus episode.
David Leary: [01:00:20] All right. Make sure you hit that subscribe button. Kids, Hit.
Blake Oliver: [01:00:23] Hit, subscribe. Yeah, we got to remember to do this. David, If we're going to be YouTubers, we got to remind people constantly to hit subscribe.
David Leary: [01:00:29] That is it. Smash, smash that subscribe.
Blake Oliver: [01:00:31] Button like and subscribe. All right, I'll see you later, David. Bye bye.