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Welcome to Financially Fluent with Ray Godleski from Southeast Wealth Partners, LLC. Whether you're already retired or planning for the future, navigating financial advice can be overwhelming. This podcast cuts through the noise, bringing real insights from experts who specialize in every aspect of a successful financial plan—including how to adapt when things don’t go as expected. Join us as Ray Godleski answers audience questions and shares actionable strategies—not just empty clichés.
Speaker 1 (00:02.606)
eventually.
Financially Fluent with Ray Godleski of Southeast Wealth Partners. Our goal is to equip you with the knowledge and tools necessary to navigate your financial journey with greater ease and efficiency. Hey, good morning everybody. And welcome to the next episode of Financially Fluent, where we help you make sense of your money, both personally and professionally. My guest today is Matt Tate with the CEO of Decimal. His team helps business owners streamline accounting, payroll, and bill pay so they can focus on what matters most.
which is running and growing their business. So if you've ever felt bogged down by the numbers, this episode will help you get your time back in peace of mind. Welcome to the show, Matt. How are you doing today?
I am doing good, thanks for having me, I really appreciate it.
Yeah. Well, thank you for being here. Tell me a little bit about your background and why you got into what you're doing.
Speaker 1 (00:52.206)
Well, so I now run one of the fastest growing kind of bookkeeping and accounting companies in the country and one of the first AI enabled franchise for bookkeeping and accounting. not only do we have we grown our own but we're now in the business of helping other people start really good bookkeeping and accounting firms. And that's weird because I started my career out. I am a recovering attorney.
practiced for almost five years and after that just swung the pendulum all the way got into the kind of tech tech startup world ran a couple of companies decimal is my fourth business and And it's by far and away the biggest to date but it has really grown out of a problem that I had in my past businesses and I come from a family of entrepreneurs and what I saw it there is which was it's really tough to find good
kind of bookkeeping and counting and tax help. And yet it's something you have to do. Also as a business owner, you might sort of hate doing it, not want to think about it. And so we started a business to try to do that the best way we could. And I think it's been a good journey so far.
That's great. So, mean, how do you kind of do that for these business owners? mean, part of the issue I've seen is that garbage in, garbage out. how do you kind of keep them on track to make sure they're letting you know what's going on in the business with expenses and things like that?
I think a lot of that starts with just really working with your clients to help them understand the importance of doing it and then making sure it takes as little time as possible. Because the more I always joke that like the three worst things about running a business are HR, IT and accounting. And we do the accounting and it just feels like if any of those things pop up, you're just kind of angry. You feel like you're wasting time, but you got to do them. And we make sure that our clients just understand the importance, but then also
Speaker 1 (02:52.12)
that our job is to make it as little of a part of their day as possible. And part of that is saying like, we're the experts. If you want this to take as little time as possible, here are the tools you need to use. Here's the software you need to use for these features and functions. And here's why. And it's one of those things when we started this business, it's becoming less prevalent today, but we'd still run into companies that were writing checks. And hey, a bill came in.
You'd get a stack of bills on your desk. You'd go through them. You'd write a check. Well, nowadays you should never do that. Period. I don't have a business checkbook. I haven't since we started. You should be paying all of those through a bill pay software like ramp or a bill.com. And doing that saves you, I think it's 12 X the time to write a check versus pay it via a bill pay platform. And if you've got hundreds of checks, that's a lot of time. Yeah. And that's a lot of wasted time.
So for us, it's really working with them to use the right tools and put the right processes in place and then do as much as we can for them so they don't have to.
It's funny you're saying that because I still get annoyed in this industry that I'm in. Sometimes, not everybody, but some institutions require a voided check. it's terrible. Yeah. I don't know. Does your software have like a kind of like an e-voided check or something like that they could use?
No, in that case, do have to have a checkbook around for those. And a lot of times you'll run into vendors. If we have clients that are working with multi-billion dollar businesses, sometimes those businesses say, hey, it's cute. You think you can pay your bills your own way, but you're actually going to log into this portal and you're going to do it this exact way. And you know what? It's Target. So you're going to say, And those are some of the anomalies that we run into with some of these bigger companies.
Speaker 1 (04:45.922)
Banks have a tendency to still deal with and want to deal with a lot of paper, but where possible, trying to eliminate that paper, manual data entry, those are the things that I think we can really take away. And those are the things that are a waste of time. And also it's what annoys the heck out of us business owners.
So, I mean, what are some of those mistakes that you see, the blind spots, these small business owners that they're doing with their, know, just in the checks, but what else are you seeing?
There are a lot. the one of the first ones I see a lot of really successful business owners make a mistake in is, hey, I don't I can't do the bookkeeping myself, but I'm going to pay my wife's cousin's mom and that's going to work. Or I'm going to pay this, you know, I brought in an executive assistant. She's amazing at what she does or he's amazing at what he does. And guess what? He can also do the books because we just need somebody to do that.
And we see that more and more often and it is always a terrible decision. And to be fair, it actually will cost you more money down the road. So it may save you from paying somebody like a decimal or an accounting firm to do the work today. But when you end up having to file your taxes or file amendments to your taxes or pay some bills that didn't get paid or any number of things that happen.
you end up having to unwind that. It's unfair to ask those people to do it. It's also just a bad business decision to ask people that have no expertise and try to trust them to do things that really do need an expert.
Speaker 2 (06:24.43)
You know, work with different business owners, some are solopreneurs, some might have two people, five people, 10 people. How do you, what are you seeing, who's gravitating towards you? So is it a particular revenue, is it a particular amount of employees, complexity? What are you finding for certain industries who is kind of gravitating towards decimal?
You know, the decimal clients are typically those that have business needs beyond just bookkeeping. Like a solopreneur, you can find a good software that ties into what you do and it tracks your books and you can pay your taxes. That's really all you need. When you start to get bill pay complexity and payroll, just all of those operational things that surround accounting, that's when we typically find a...
Those are our ideal clients. They've usually got at least a million dollars or more in revenue. Most of our clients even have above five. They're kind of the five to 75 million in revenue as a traditional decimal client. Because we use a lot of that expertise. We are advisors. And when you're a solopreneur, you really are doing it to pay your taxes. Because what you are at that point is a bank account business. You're managing your business and understanding your success based on what's in your bank account today.
You know it's coming in, you know it's going out, you've got a good sense of what's happening. When that complexity starts to increase, that's typically a good decimal client. And that's also where you start to see the cracks. You know, one of the biggest cracks you asked about problems earlier that I see that I think is interesting to me, but we see it all the time, is how many businesses have a significant amount of outstanding AR where they just haven't collected money from their clients or customers.
And that's fascinating because I don't know about you, but in my four businesses, one of the first things I set up was, I'm going to make sure I know how to make money and it's going to go well. And so that's fundamentally not a problem I've dealt with. But it's what we deal with with a lot of businesses is, hey, how do you put in, it's not just systems and technology, but it's also the right habits to say, if you take an hour a week and you make it your collections hour, that
Speaker 1 (08:33.261)
$1 million in outstanding AR can dip to $100K and that's $900,000 that's in your pocket.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I've even seen the companies out there that will, uh, that's kind of their specialty. They, they say, Hey, we'll pay you for your AR. Right. Oh yeah. But for a fee, of course, it's not, they ain't doing it for free. So, um, okay. So yeah, so that's good. That's helpful. That kind of gives us an idea, you know, when someone might need to look at bringing that on, you know, you mentioned something else too, which makes me think of reporting.
but with the family members or the relative or whoever, the friend of a friend that's in the business. I'm always surprised when I, usually you see it, it's nobody I've known yet, but there's articles on people are taking money out of the business and are not supposed to. So what kind of reports should people be doing to make sure that that's not happening?
You know, really that gets to trust is one of the most important parts about managing money the way that you do, the way that we do. Touching money in general, I think, involves so much trust. What's really important isn't necessarily thinking, how do I prevent them from stealing from me? Because realistically, the right person, if they're smart enough, they're going to figure it out. But it's making sure that if and when they do, you have the right audit trail to know exactly what they took so you can get it back.
And that's what the right systems and software have is they know that X, Y, and Z person when they logged into your ledger, they did these number of things and that proved that they were hiding X, they were hiding that. And we've seen it every once in a while. What we see more often than not is just putting in the right controls and understanding what you as a business owner should control.
Speaker 1 (10:20.43)
So one of the other mistakes that we see frequently, which is also a little crazy to me, we run into quite a few business owners that just don't have access to their own bank accounts. They've just trusted somebody else to help them set it up. And it's this first bookkeeper or first controller or somebody they call a CFO. Yeah, that person's got all my bank account information and I don't know any of it. And also really bad idea. And you need to always make sure as a business owner that you have
Because that also gives you the ability to really look at it. When you get to understanding money, really looking at your financial reports and understanding what they are is really important. Like what is truly successful for your business and looking at it on a frequent basis. We did a test, it probably three years ago, we had about 500 clients and we ran a test on open rates. We'd send our month-end reports to clients, P &L, balance sheet, etc.
We just wanted to see how many opened it, let alone how many actually looked at it. Under 30 % of our clients even opened those emails. And that was just crazy to us. that I think is a big part of being a successful business owner is taking the time to understand your financials because you need to know if your business is being successful, are there anomalies? Have a budget, track budget to actual. And that can tell you like, man, I'm missing 20 grand. Like where did that 20 grand go? it?
caught in an AR? Do we not collect something? Is it billing was too high or did it just disappear? And I need to look into that. Having a good understanding of that and putting your thumb on the business, I think is also very, very important. It can also tell you what parts of your business are successful. I can't tell you how many businesses we run into that have a lot of revenue in a business line, but not a lot of profit. And that's another problem we see frequently.
I know, here we're process driven based upon what the profile is of the new client. So in your company, different widget, right? What's kind of that process, right? What's the process of them saying, yeah, I do have an issue and how do they get started and what does that look like from an onboarding experience, from a maintenance?
Speaker 2 (12:42.07)
standpoint, that kind of thing.
You know, what's interesting for companies like ours is we are we're not the type of company that's going to convince somebody who's happy to change. Nobody changes their accounting if they're okay with what's going on. So people always when they call us and are willing to talk, they have a problem. And it could be that I just don't understand my financials, my business, or I ran into things and they were inaccurate, or it's just taking me too long to pay my bills, or it can be any number of things, but they're calling us because they have a problem. That's a
initial starting point. for us, we start consulting on sales. Our sales team does an amazing job and they are very good at consulting and they just talk to a business. These aren't accounting problems. They're business problems that have an accounting nature. And we just talk to them. We understand their business. We start understanding where they are today and what a happy state would be. Like what would make you happy? If X, Y, and Z were true, would you be in a better spot or what gets you there? And then we
use the experience that we have to advise them on, hey, here's where you are today. Here's what we need to do to get you there. And here's the plan. And that's what sales does because then when you start onboarding somebody, it's just, hey, you already have the plan in place. Let's dive in, make sure we don't need to tweak it. And then let's just start operating. And we really start too with, look, your business in order for you to survive and succeed, you've got to pay your bills, get paid in track at all. So from day one at Decimal,
We start the bookkeeping, we start processing their bills and we get in there. And then we start improving things after we've already just kept the business moving. You can't, too many businesses and too many service providers say like, hey, let's stop everything and implement. Business still needs to pay their bills, get paid in track at all. So we make sure that things are continually moving and we just run dual parallel processes.
Speaker 2 (14:34.35)
So are you guys doing payroll?
We do help companies with their payroll. We will usually put them on gusto and sometimes rippling. And we will use that to help them with their payroll.
they have a payroll already and they don't feel like changing that, y'all just kind of integrate with that.
If they have a payroll that they're happy with and they don't want to change, then we can do the accounting around payroll, but we won't process the payroll.
And are you guys, are you kind of getting pulled in for reports for their CPA for text?
Speaker 1 (15:06.238)
Yeah, we also have an amazing tax team. Our business, we acquired a company from KPMG about two years ago, two and a half years ago, and it came with a really great tax team. And so these guys have like 30 years of KPMG tax experience. So we also will end up doing taxes for a significant portion of our clients. For those that we don't do their taxes, then yeah, towards the end of the year, it's our job to make sure that a business book
are closed and that we're getting everything that the CPA needs and that they are hopefully getting charged an appropriate amount. What I see a lot of times with businesses with all the mistakes that you and I just talked about is they end up having to overpay in taxes because that CPA has to come in and clean everything up so they can file accurate taxes. When they work with decimal that cleanup doesn't exist so the fees should be lower. And now a quick message from today's sponsor.
This episode is brought to you by Southeast Wealth Partners. If you've been listening to Financially Fluent, you know we're all about making smart money moves, whether it's planning for retirement, protecting your family, or building long-term wealth. But everyone's situation is different, and that's where the team at Southeast Wealth Partners comes in. They take the time to understand your goals, your challenges, and your values. To learn more and connect with their team, visit southeastwealthpartners.com. Southeast Wealth Partners, your next step toward being financially fluent.
Well,
Speaker 2 (16:29.07)
Okay. Well, know, the big buzzword these days is AI and automation and just wondering, you know, what do you guys do with that? And what do you just see happening, you know, out there when comes to that?
So right now I do think in a lot of ways AI is a buzzword and not exactly being utilized. But I do think it will very quickly, we exist in an industry where it should have a massive impact very quickly. And we're already doing stuff with AI and we will continue to. But what we stand on as the foundation of what we do is both our own firm and then as we're starting new firms is what people do really, really well and AI can't take is trust.
and the integrity of working with a trusted partner. And that's something that we have and that we will continue to build upon. But the reality is if we can figure out easier, better, and cheaper ways to do the work, whether that's through a globalized workforce, with us we have a large team in the Philippines, or it's with having more automated and AI doing more work, that's a good thing for everybody. So it's our job to continue to find better and better ways for the work to be accomplished.
And then when appropriate, picking tools like a ramp, for instance, as a software product to recommend for our clients and say, Hey, you should use ramp. And one of the reasons is their costs are lower because they use a lot of AI that's really being successful. And so it's cheaper than some of your other product choices that are out there. Yeah.
We just had a couple of weeks ago, we did a kind of a client dinner, more of a PSA honestly about cybersecurity. Yeah. I think it's such a big deal with AI. We heard this story, it actually happened in Europe where this employee was listening or had a zoom call with the CEO and CFO and then telling him what to do as far as spending some money.
Speaker 2 (18:32.974)
out of the account, thankfully that employee thought at the end of the call, let me just double check on something, called up the CFO and said, just making sure, you sure we want to do that amount? And the CFO said, look, I don't know what you're talking about. That wasn't me. So AI literally had looked like them, talked like them, and they had that happen. It's kind of wild that that's the world we live in. So I'm wondering, know, where...
What are you guys seeing from a cyber security standpoint? How are we making sure things are, you know, just going the way they're supposed to and nobody gets kind of, screwed out of some money.
You know, it's kind of like I'm a big sports fan and it's like performance enhancing drugs and sports. You have this constant battle between like they figured out a better way to do steroids or human growth hormone and then you figure out how to regulate it. Then somebody gets above it and you're going to always have that stair step when it comes to new technologies. It happened with the internet, it happened with the cloud and it's going to continue to happen with AI. The key is picking the right technology partners that take
security very, very seriously and then doing it yourselves. So company like ours, we're SOC 2 certified and continuing to build upon that is really, really important. But a lot of it also is training people. When you look at identity theft, when you look at some of the phishing that happens, what they are actually doing more than anything else is getting people to do things that they shouldn't do. And it's somebody that opens up that door.
And so to me, it's also training people to make good decisions so that they know when to not click the link or open that fake attachment or respond to an email that if you click on it is not at Google pay.com, but is actually at XYZ period YZ. And you really need to just it's training people as much as anything else. The other thing when it comes to AI, there's a good side and a bad side.
Speaker 1 (20:33.922)
The bad side is, you're right, there are a lot of crazy ways that people can figure out how to do things that steal and take money. Good thing is, there's also AI that can send that out, track it out, stop it. And so you can put AI on both sides of the ledger and both sides of the security wall, some that help and some that hurt. And so it's really figuring out the right balance there.
I think it's just going to be a constant thing we got to be aware of. think developing a safe word is not a bad idea, maybe more on the personal side than the business side. let's kind transition back to financial mistakes that you see entrepreneurs making. I what would be maybe the main one you're seeing them make and how to avoid it?
You know, I kind of hit on this earlier. One of the biggest mistakes I see people make is confusing revenue with profit. You know, ultimately when you run a business, you need to figure out how to profit, how to make money, how to take home money. And in order to do that, you do need revenue, but you need to figure out how to do it in a smart way. And that's one of the two biggest mistakes I see people make is they focus too much on what the top line is and not the bottom line. And number two that I see is
You should always build your business as if you're going to sell it tomorrow. And if you set up your business as if you're going to sell it tomorrow, number one, you're going to make more money along the way. Number two, when you do decide that you want to do something along an exit line or sell it, you'll be prepared and you'll get more money off that sale. We see too many businesses get approached and say like, yeah, I just got this great deal. They're ready to buy. Like they offered X, Y, and Z. And it's like, great, let's look at your books. And it's like,
They offered you X, Y, and Z, but guess what? When they get in and do diligence, you're going to get a third or half of that. And here's why. And most people don't understand it. They emotionally know the value of their business or think they do, but there's a difference between the emotional feeling of value and the rational spreadsheet actual value.
Speaker 2 (22:40.91)
Oh yeah. I couldn't agree more. You know, that's the struggle, right? For an entrepreneur is you're working in the business and you're always busy and it's like, no, you really got to carve out, even if it's a, well, there's an hour a day, hour a week, whatever you can carve out working on the business and team it up with folks, whether it's technology related or whatever it is, could even be a fractional blah, blah, blah, right? CFO, sales, just to get that.
business really kind of humming and be able to make it more sellable. So, you know, we have a quite a few folks around here that, you know, work on the selling of business, but you're right. You can't just, whether it's your accounting or other types of operations and sales related matters, you really gotta, you can't do it last minute. You gotta get ahead of it. And if you're ahead of it by three years, you're really doing well. But even a year is lot better than like, I got somebody right now wanting to buy.
Right. So I can appreciate that. Yeah, for sure. okay. So, yeah, just kind of curious about this too. So it sounds like there's quite a bit of stuff you're doing in-house there. What are you finding, where people you're working with folks on the accounting in, but they probably need someone on the, on the outside, whether it's, attorneys and it may not look.
For you guys for the referral, I'm not saying that, but I'm just kind of curious, what do you see is kind of a common thing or two that's not under your umbrella, but they really need it? Whether that's, like I say, attorney help, fractional help, sales help, are you finding any, you know, a couple of operational things that you see that people need from a business owner to kind of get it to the next level?
Yeah, like there's one thing that we don't do at Decimal. So we do the tax, we do the bookkeeping and kind of the control of ship work. We are not fractional CFOs. So we don't really truly help these businesses look forward and make those strategic decisions. And what we end up partnering with and where we end up referring out a ton is that fractional CFO business has decided they want to exit. How do you prepare for it? Or they decide they want to go buy something.
Speaker 1 (24:56.622)
How do you prepare for it? Or they decide they want to grow and hire and all that stuff. That's where a true like financial like CFO really comes into place, which is helping them look forward. That's one area I see. The other area is particularly as businesses start to become successful, you end up with people generating some personal wealth without the expertise to know what to do with it and how to hire and how to find the right advisor to help them.
make sure that when they want to sell or they want to retire that they're able to do that capably. And we end up also having the opportunity. We get asked about everything. mean, we get asked about divorce lawyers. We get asked about realtors. We work nationally. Our entire team is remote. Our entire client base is remote. What I do find is that business owners feel very isolated. And so they don't always feel like they know the right advisors that they should have for every area of their business.
And so when they do find somebody like Decimal, they trust, they have a tendency to ask us for things that we have no idea on. I cannot tell you a good divorce attorney in Los Angeles. And those are, or a realtor in Omaha. Those are things that are just outside of our lane, but we will do some research. We'll see if we can help when it comes to being in our lane and helping with like truly complicated tax, which we don't do or.
CFO advising or wealth management. Those are all things we do get asked about where we try to help people and say, Hey, here's here's somebody you should talk to or at least learn from. And, and that's what we see quite a bit.
big fan of collaboration because too many times decisions are made in a vacuum and then the CPA is finding out late or the wealth advisors finding out late. aren't in concert and yeah, it's really important to collaborate no doubt. Let's kind of, we're going to get to a trivia question here in a minute, but before we do that, and then I'll wrap it up after that, but kind of just if you want, fill in any gaps you think that are really important.
Speaker 2 (27:03.522)
that people need to know about that maybe we haven't covered so far.
No, I think we've really hit it all. mean, for us, we really focus on trying to help businesses run better so that business owners can focus on what's more important. And you said it earlier, like having the right foundation, setting up a business to run itself well, taking a little bit of time to do the hard, boring things can really pay massive dividends into the future.
Yeah, I definitely agree. Let's, uh, yeah, I think, do you live in Indiana? I'm trying to remember. Yeah, yeah, that's what I thought. Okay. So, uh, we picked out a trivia question. We like to end or bring those up at each show. And so we got it kind of catered towards Indiana. Don't worry if you miss it. Half people get questions right, half don't.
I'm in Indianapolis.
Speaker 2 (27:50.838)
Let's go ahead and get this one going. So which US president was born in Indiana, served as a vice president under Grover Cleveland and became the only person from the state to hold both offices.
Benjamin Harrison
They teach all that in eighth grade.
we don't have many. mean, technically Lincoln also from Indiana. Benjamin Harrison, I don't think he was president for very long. But yeah, we we don't have many, but we'll take him. We have quite a few vice presidents, but the only president Benjamin Harrison.
Yeah
Speaker 2 (28:24.162)
When we looked that up, I guess he was born in Ohio. Does that sound right? But raised in Indiana. That's right. And the grandson of William Henry Harrison, he was a president. So anyways, I guess the Hoosiers are doing good in football. Is that a team you're root for or more of a Purdue guy or who's your team?
So I'm, my in-laws and wife's family, huge IU people. My father-in-law played football at IU. So we're certainly rooting on the Hoosiers. I went to Duke, so I'm an ACC and Duke guy. Uh-oh. But we're getting closer to basketball season, so I'll take it.
Big game at Duke this weekend though, think Tech is an underdog even though they're undefeated.
Well, you know, we paid a lot for a quarterback. We've got a halfway decent. When I was at Duke, my freshman year, first game we won and it was, it snapped the longest losing streak of major conference D1 football history. And the next game we started the third longest. So the fact that we even win a couple of football games a year is, pretty crazy, but I'm actually going to head down for a football game and a basketball game here at mid November to hang out with some friends of mine. But yeah, I'm a, I'm a Duke guy and an ACC fan all the way.
That's great. That's great. We covered a lot of grounds today, how to simplify your back office. Technology is something to utilize. Systems are important. For listeners that out there, you know, if they wanted to kind of connect with you or they wanted to learn a little bit more, do you have any kind of website or profiles you'd like to mention on the show before we close out?
Speaker 1 (30:04.568)
Yeah, I mean, if you're interested or need some help, just go to decimal.com. It's real easy to find. For me, it's go to LinkedIn. Follow me on LinkedIn, Matt Tate. Would love to help if you want to message me. We also have podcast after the first million. We talk a lot about what it's like to scale a business past that million and how hard and crazy and fun it can be.
Awesome. Well, thanks for being here. Remember being financially fluent isn't just about investing. It's about creating clarity and control in your business and finances too. All right. Have a good one. Thank you for listening to the Financially Fluent Podcast. Click the subscribe button below to be notified when new episodes become available.
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Speaker 2 (31:17.334)
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