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Back from SuiteWorld, Blake and David discuss key takeaways from Oracle NetSuite's conference, including product updates and the event's growing scale. They also examine recent fundraising in the accounting-tech space, notably bookkeeping startup Finally's $200 million Series B round. Moving on, there's Big Four firm news, including PwC's layoffs and return-to-office policies, as well as a viral TikTok trend exploiting a Chase Bank ATM glitch.
Chapters
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Chapters
- (00:46) - Recap of Oracle SuiteWorld Conference
- (02:26) - NetSuite's Growth and Market Position
- (12:48) - Product Announcements and AI Integration
- (18:56) - Listener Questions and Career Advice
- (26:03) - Bookkeeping Startup Raises $200 Million
- (29:13) - Exploring All-in-One Bookkeeping Services
- (30:03) - The Future of Accounting Software Market
- (31:31) - Mercury Bank Acquires Teal
- (32:12) - Challenges in Automated Bookkeeping
- (35:39) - Consolidation in the Financial Services Industry
- (38:44) - Viral TikTok ATM Glitch Exploits
- (42:18) - PwC Layoffs and Office Policies
- (50:09) - Deloitte's Olympic Gold Medalist
- (54:58) - Career Advice for Tech and Accounting Professionals
Show Notes
Oracle NetSuite – SuiteWorld
Accounting Software Market Size With Growing Demand and Forecast to 2032
Mercury acquires Teal
Revolut Business Adds Bill Pay Feature
Paylocity Announces Definitive Agreement to Acquire Airbase Inc., a Leading Spend Management Software Solution Provider
The Chase ATM 'glitch' that went viral is likely check fraud, bank says
PwC Laying Off 1,800 Employees in First Formal Cuts Since 2009
PwC tells employees it will use location data to police 'back-to-office' rule
PwC Isn’t Used to Being Called Desperate But Here We Are
Deloitte rower earned gold at Paris Olympics
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Transcripts
The full transcript for this episode is available by clicking on the Transcript tab at the top of this page
Creators & Guests
What is The Accounting Podcast?
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] Some TikTokers figured out that if you write a check to yourself and you deposit it at a chase ATM, that you can immediately withdraw funds. And apparently the amounts were quite large. And Chase is saying this was a technical error. It allowed customers to withdraw all of the funds from a check before it had cleared.
David Leary: [00:00:28] Coming to you weekly from the OnPay Recording Studio.
Blake Oliver: [00:00:34] Hello and welcome back to another episode of The Accounting Podcast, the number one podcast for accountants in the world. I'm Blake Oliver and I'm David Leary.
David Leary: [00:00:42] I'm a little raspy though, Blake, a little raspy today.
Blake Oliver: [00:00:45] Well, you have Vegas throat. We were in Las Vegas for Oracle Sweet World, which was combined with Cloud World this year. And at some point during the conference, wildfire smoke rolled in along with a dust storm and made it completely unhealthy to be in Las Vegas. It was. It was worse outside than it was in the casinos. The air was better in the casinos. I woke up on Wednesday and I thought there was a fire in my room because it was so bad. These fires in Oregon and Utah feels like this is an every, every year occurrence now. Yeah. Um, but let's talk about the conference. David. What was your impressions of Netsuite's annual conference?
David Leary: [00:01:32] I mean, it was their biggest suite world ever, right? And they combined it with Cloud World, which is the Oracle Conference. So 7500 attendees at Suite World and Cloud World, I think had 18,000. So there's like 25,000 people at this conference.
Blake Oliver: [00:01:47] It was like a small city. Uh, every single person I saw at the Venetian and the Palazzo was wearing, uh, an oracle badge. Oracle badge? It was crazy.
David Leary: [00:01:57] And it's, I think my biggest impression is just comparing the two. I mean, our background is QuickBooks and Xero, like small businesses. And then and we've been to Sage Intacct, right. And they're bigger businesses there. And then you have these hyper fast growing startup funded businesses that are on NetSuite. Even the the fastest growing company in North America, I think is on NetSuite. And they were up on stage. But then I went to the Oracle keynote, right, with Larry Ellison. Yeah, I'm watching that. They're talking about rolling things out to countries. It's it's really hard to comprehend, like, oh yeah, we had to set up these like a server because some countries don't want their stuff on a shared server and a data center that any other data is connected to. But it's it's a whole different sense of scale.
Blake Oliver: [00:02:44] Yes, it is, it is. But even Sweet World just by itself felt a lot bigger this year. They had to put the keynote in a giant tent outside in order to fit everybody the 7500 people that paid something like $2,000 each to be there. And when we were walking in, it was like just a mass of people. I couldn't believe it. And it makes me think that, you know, NetSuite, after 20 something more than 20 years, has really reached this point where it is it's big, it is big. And so there's an opportunity in between QuickBooks and NetSuite for somebody to come in and build an ERP. The cost of NetSuite, just for example, I was uh, I was at one of the happy hours in the expo hall, met this guy who's implementing NetSuite. He owns a business. And he came to the conference to, you know, make sure he made the right decision. His entry level price is like $40,000 a year.
David Leary: [00:03:50] Yeah. And I kind of loosely did some math because they said they have 40,000 customers now on NetSuite and approximately Netsuite's portion of Oracle's revenues may be 3.84 billion. Somewhere in there. So it's about the average customer is about $75,000. That makes sense. But and we've even met a couple other people we talked to where people are just on one of the modules or two modules, and they have all these modules and a plan to get people on the other modules. And the one thing I always take away from this conference is people view those modules as a body. So when NetSuite creates some sort of function or feature in their product that automates things. Now I don't have to hire somebody. So sure, I'll spend 60 grand on a module and I'll spend another 50 grand on a module.
Blake Oliver: [00:04:36] Yeah, it's the pricing actually makes a lot of sense. If you think this is one person's salary or less than one person's salary in our organization, for this whole ERP system that automates the work of many headcount. So they're in a great spot. They're doing fantastic, but they're going to need to find another venue for this event.
David Leary: [00:04:57] Another city? Maybe.
Blake Oliver: [00:04:58] Well, because. Because when the smoke came in the tent outside, I assume the reason that they changed the the timing of one of the keynotes is because there was too much smoke outside. They couldn't, like, bring everybody out to that tent and have it be safe. And then it.
David Leary: [00:05:11] Got really windy that afternoon as well. So it was smoky. Then it became windy and dusty and yeah, to have it safer, they had get everybody in the keynote and uh, get out of the keynote. But the keynote they did the, the very first opening keynote, one of the customers and I think this is like perspective for us.
Blake Oliver: [00:05:27] This was the woman who runs that, uh, company in medical. Is that what you're talking about?
David Leary: [00:05:32] Yes, a medical company, right. They were the fastest growing fortune 5000 company or something like that, right? Yes. And she's the, uh, the accountant there. And you could hear the excitement in her voice because I'm there and we talked about this when we were there. It's hard for me to get excited about the things that Oracle is releasing a little bit, because we've had it for a decade. You know, they finally got bank feeds a few years ago. Right, bill. Pay bill. Scan. Right now they're adding some AI type stuff, and it's hard to get really excited about it. But you have to step back. And when she was on stage and you could hear it in her voice, she was in her smile. She was so excited talking about how she now uses bill scanning and she uses bill pay and she has this employee. They have 47 bank accounts, and his only job was basically to reconcile those bank accounts. And because of the AI improvements that are in NetSuite and, you know, bank feeds, the combination of the two, he basically got rid of his job.
Blake Oliver: [00:06:26] So she was excited about bank feeds and OCR bill scanning technology. Yes. Yeah.
David Leary: [00:06:34] But but then but but her perspective. Right. Like if you have 10,000, 10,000 bills a month. Right? Right. 47 bank accounts. This is humongous. That's a whole employee that doesn't have to do that. Work is versus in QuickBooks. It saves me 20 minutes if I don't have to type in bills every month. It's not much.
Blake Oliver: [00:06:53] So this is why we expect at Intuit Connect. I mean we know the angle is going to be mid market. Intuit connect is the new name for QuickBooks connect. And Intuit's going to going to go up market with a new product. And uh that's the rumor I hear. And go after these companies that are going on NetSuite. So will they come up with something that's more in like the $10,000 a year price range that could have kept somebody from migrating over and would provide a really significant revenue source and growth opportunity for Intuit, which also creates a huge opportunity for accountants who jump on to these partner programs early. You capture the leads, you become the expert. Most of the conference was not accountants. It was actually NetSuite experts, consultants in my in my experience of the conference just wandering around, I met a lot of NetSuite consultants.
David Leary: [00:07:50] And their engineers and coders and their. Yeah, their level. They pull the levers their IT guys. Right. It's a team usually that that comes in. And it's interesting because you think about at this level companies when they need to buy NetSuite don't need an outsourced CFO. So it's almost like if you have a client that goes on Shark Tank takes VC money, you're kind of going to lose them as a client because they're going to hire an internal CFO. Unless you're like that one time we met that, um, the Crumbl cookies CFO. Yes. Remember he he he was doing outsourced bookkeeping for them then when they but he left.
Blake Oliver: [00:08:26] His practice in order to go in-house. So in, in the sense they did lose their outsourced. Outsourced CFO. Yeah. Yeah. That it is very interesting. It's a totally different um, it's a different audience for this software. The CFO, the VP of finance, is buying it, and often the CEO is buying it because it's way bigger than accounting. Accounting and finance are just one piece of the ERP system. Boring. Accountant. Welcome to our number one fan. Boring accountant. In our live stream, boring says is NetSuite sold through accounting firms like Sage Intacct? Not so much anymore. A few years ago when we went to Sweet World, there were more accountants there, even some who we would see at a show like QuickBooks connect. I didn't see any of them at Sweet World this year, and I think that's because NetSuite very intelligently decided to go all in on direct, because why? Why give discounts to accounting firms when you can just sell the software directly to the end user? Right. And again, most outsourced accounting practices, the the folks who listen to this show, who do outsourced accounting work on QuickBooks or on Xero, once the company goes on NetSuite, you tend to become, uh, less necessary because they have an in-house CFO or a VP of finance. And so it's not really it doesn't, it doesn't it's not a good growth strategy for accounting firms because you obsolete yourself.
David Leary: [00:09:54] It's interesting. It's a little bit of a closed ecosystem in a way. Right. Where like, they want everything in the suite. You never leave the suite. Use the suite for everything. Keep adding tools to the suite because then your data is really seamlessly going across the suite. But it's the same relationship with accountants, right? It's not. It's not really outsourced. Even the vendors is a little funny because, like, there's no payroll companies at the conference, right? Because their own payroll.
Blake Oliver: [00:10:18] Net suite pushes its own payroll. Its own payroll. Yeah, but there were a ton of vendors in the expo hall. I mean, it must have been hundreds of booths.
David Leary: [00:10:27] 130 easily.
Blake Oliver: [00:10:29] Yes. Amazing. And then to contrast that with the Oracle Cloud World Expo hall, there were like not nearly as many, maybe a 10th. And they were all big consulting firms PwC, Deloitte, Accenture, all the consultants. And with of course Oracle. You don't you don't use add ons. It's all custom built for you in the software or you buy modules from Oracle.
David Leary: [00:10:52] I think one takeaway I got is I know in one hand, yes, it's always felt like Sweet World's March was kind of a closed system. But then Oracle in the keynote for Oracle they made this big announcement how they're working with Amazon. So if you think about the cloud providers right at that that level you got or infrastructure you have AWS, Google, Microsoft and Oracle. But then you have the apps, right that run on top of these types of things. So that run on top of databases. So like workday, ServiceNow, obviously NetSuite runs on top of that. Um, who knows what's under the covers for QuickBooks and Xero etc.. Right? If they're running Google databases or I'm sorry, Oracle databases, I don't know. But what they've done is now with Amazon. So it was kind of kludgy because everybody the original and uh, Larry Ellison talked about this originally with databases in the early days of all this. They want it in the cloud. They're like, we want data to be, like talking to each other and connected. And things slowly shifted to a bunch of siloed clouds. And now the pendulum is swinging back. Where now in Amazon. So if you are. Because if you're using Amazon because that's what's really good for running your app. Right. But it was kludgy to connect to your database. And now right inside of Amazon, if you sign up for if you're an Amazon AWS, you can spin up your Oracle database right from Amazon AWS and it and and there's technicalities I don't understand. But let's just say it's like faster pipes to access your data. That might be the way to say it. So it'll be interesting is are you going to see that that mindset swing on Sweet World as well? I'm sorry NetSuite right to be a little bit more open.
Blake Oliver: [00:12:24] So let's talk about the actual product announcements at the conference. And I'm just going to straight up say it didn't seem like there was that much this year. There were tons of announcements last year about AI. Netsuite is building AI into the suite, and this conference seems like a continuation of that. Nothing mind blowing in my opinion. One highlight is this feature called Ask Oracle. It's a natural language interface for user queries. So in other words, a search box at the top of every screen. And you can just type in English what you want. And I will help you get that report or find that screen or change that setting or the help file.
David Leary: [00:13:13] It's really for if I guess, and we don't understand this pain, but if I do have NetSuite rolled out and I hire an employee and they have to do some work in NetSuite, it's a lot of training you have to do to ramp them up. How to use NetSuite. And so this is going to help onboard faster because if I want to know, I don't have to learn where to go to click whatever levers to create a report of quarterly sales, I can just ask it and it's going to take me to that part in the UI with the graph created, which is pretty slick. And then you can save the results and re-access it later.
Blake Oliver: [00:13:44] Um, there's also now a prompt library where you can create your own custom prompts and save those so that other users in NetSuite can access those prompts and use them again, which I thought was very clever and responds to a real user problem, which I have where I have a giant Google doc filled with prompts. Uh, now I can build these custom themes and and cloud projects and share them with the team. But in NetSuite they have to do that themselves because they aren't using any of these outside providers. They have their own LLM. Anything else you saw that was interesting to you?
David Leary: [00:14:21] One thing I thought was kind of cool is they're also doing, um, they're doing something with Amazon business. Now this is on the NetSuite side. So you think about your admin needs to order some supplies at Amazon. Or they also partnered with staples as well. So they your your admin goes into the Amazon business account. So they're on Amazon. Everything looks tasty. It's Amazon. You know you add Xerox paper, you get a print cartridge, post-it notes all in the shopping cart. When you go to hit checkout, it automatically sends them back to NetSuite with a filled out purchase order of all the stuff in your Amazon shopping cart, and then it goes through the approval process. You approve the Po and eventually it triggers the payment. And then Amazon ships the goods, and then you can receive them back and forth. So that I thought was kind of slick. Now it's not available yet. And this is the big this is the big issue I think that Oracle does versus other places. Oracle likes to say what's coming in an upcoming release. Right. And then that's what all their press releases are. So nothing is like. And it's available now. It's just rolling out soon. Rolling out soon.
Blake Oliver: [00:15:24] No not just soon like in the next 12 months. 12 months when I see that at the end of a press release, like I say to myself, how can we even talk about this on the show? This is just your idea. You haven't built this yet, so I wish they wouldn't do that. And I'm not even clear on which of these features that we saw are real or imagined, right? Is is ask Oracle available in the product? I don't think so. They just demoed it. The prompt and.
David Leary: [00:15:51] The prompt library I think are that's available now. But that was stuff they told us about last year. The prompt write prompt admin or the prompt tool to create your own prompts.
Blake Oliver: [00:15:59] I think this is actually one of the problems I have with annual user conferences for software like this is there's so much pressure to deliver some new announcement every year. New product got to wow the investors and the users that even if there isn't one, they'll still announce something. And I just maybe just skip the conference that year or just don't make the conference focus on product stuff.
David Leary: [00:16:27] But I think in general, we're like nerds. We want to see all the new stuff. I think most people there are there for training.
Blake Oliver: [00:16:34] Oh yeah, definitely.
David Leary: [00:16:35] They have training sessions nonstop, and the people have to wait in a waitlist line to get in to some of these training sessions. And so I think like for them, and even if it was released today, if you're a big company, you're not going to use that feature today. Just planting the seed that one day I might use this AI feature that next week is rolling out to me one day. Mhm.
Blake Oliver: [00:16:57] Anything else that you saw that you want to call out before we move on?
David Leary: [00:17:03] I mean I think accountants can learn from their sweet success model. So they have this model where they'll analyze, let's say you're a brewery or a restaurant or an industry right. And they'll look at the modules you're using of NetSuite and then figure out like a plan for the next five years of these other modules, you want to get in what order to grow, right? Based on their other customers, it's like a playbook, kind of in a way. And I think that's something like accountants could like think about more with their clients. Like, how do you put your clients on a plan where you're not only adding apps, right, to help them improve their business, but really a plan to get them to buy your other services. Like maybe you don't have to sell a client on a full stack of services on day one, but have a plan of like, hey, I think in year two, you're probably going to be ready for this and year three of this and like really lay it out in that plan because I'm sure Netsuite's customers are big companies. They have staff, they have management, they have a board. You can't just impulsively do things. You're going to have to have a 3 to 5 year roadmap. But I think it's a really smart way for them to upsell all their other features. And it's I think it's a model that listeners can take away from their own firms. Like, how do you upsell your other features without upselling it? It's more of a roadmap, right? Like now you're going to get consulting services from us. Now we're going to do your taxes. Now we're going to roll up, I don't know, defined benefits plan. I don't know these other types of things you could do.
Blake Oliver: [00:18:31] So David, I think it's time for our first ad. Before we read that, I want to highlight a listener comment. This is from drew. Drew says, good afternoon dudes. I have an internship coming up in January at a smaller CPA firm. What should I do over these next four months to prepare and get an offer? Any good books I should read, or tips other than listening to this podcast?
David Leary: [00:18:54] Of course I'm going to go grab the book. Hold on.
Blake Oliver: [00:18:57] What's the book?
David Leary: [00:18:58] It's reachable. One second.
Blake Oliver: [00:19:00] Okay, David has left. I hope he comes back. He's getting a book. I. I haven't been good about reading books lately, drew. I'm going to be honest. Um, but I, I would advise you during your internship, do as much as you can to become.
David Leary: [00:19:22] I can't find the book.
Blake Oliver: [00:19:23] You can't. What is it? Now? You have to tell us.
David Leary: [00:19:27] It's a long title. It's basically how to be successful when you start your career at a CPA firm. Um, what is the. Who's the author? I'm getting it. One second.
Blake Oliver: [00:19:35] You know, you have this thing called Google. You could probably find it.
David Leary: [00:19:37] I'm doing it right now. Yeah.
Blake Oliver: [00:19:40] I would say, drew, the biggest challenge for small CPA firms when they hire new people right out of school is that they have to teach you so much. You are not a revenue generating individual at that firm, sometimes for years. So if you can get yourself there faster, you will be very valuable to the firm. And if you want to stay at that firm and become a partner at that firm, you will be ahead of everyone else. So during your internship, work really hard to figure out how to actually do the work. I guess it depends on your area that you're in. Are you in audit? Are you in tax? Are you in client accounting services? Um, if you were in client accounting services, I would tell you learn all the technology as quickly as you can and if necessary outside of work, get demo accounts or actually just get accountant partner accounts and start using it. Start practicing with it. Be able to navigate your way around. Go get QuickBooks certified. Go get Xero certified. Get certified in Gusto's. Uh, what is it people advisory do? Um, there's a variety of trainings that you can do. Go learn some FMA software. Even you could do.
David Leary: [00:20:59] Stuff on your mark. You could take.
Blake Oliver: [00:21:02] Yeah, take as many earmarked credits as you can. Yeah. And uh, in the chat says ask lots of questions, drew. Oh, yeah. Especially if you're remote. Uh, don't be afraid to ask stupid questions, because there's so much to know in accounting that nobody knows everything. And so if you if you if you ask questions, you will you will learn. A lot of people are afraid to ask questions. They think that if you're an accountant or a CPA, you have to know all the answers. And that's the opposite. You really just have to know how to ask good questions. And, uh, if you do ask questions, be sure to research the answer first. Don't ask a obvious question that you can get the answer to on Google. Better yet, get perplexity. I pay 20 bucks a month for a pro account and do your research there before you ask questions. I bet you if you use perplexity to get answers, um, you will blow the partners minds. And we have a story.
David Leary: [00:22:01] To do that because you're going to ruin our billable by hour. They don't want any of that hero stuff.
Blake Oliver: [00:22:07] Um, I did find the.
David Leary: [00:22:08] Book, though. I did find the book. So the book is, uh. It's from Jerry McGinnis. It's just it's a long title. I always forget the title of the book. The title of the book is advice for a Successful Career in the Accounting Profession. How to make your assets greatly exceed your liabilities. Yes, I put the link in the Amazon link is in the chat, so click on that. And that's a good way to go and.
Blake Oliver: [00:22:28] Listen to my interview with Jerry, uh, on the earmark podcast. And you can earn continuing professional education for it. It is episode 51. I'm putting the link here in the chat. Go to podcast Earmark Comm slash 51 and you can get a summary essentially of his top takeaways from the book. And then go buy the book to. Jerry was managing partner at KPMG Philadelphia. He oversaw hundreds of people at KPMG and led the audit practice there as well. I believe. All right, now it's time to thank our first sponsor, Live Life Flow.
David Leary: [00:23:11] So are you a QuickBooks fan or do you prefer Xero? Well, I've got some exciting news for you, Blake. Oh, boy. Flow now syncs Google Sheets and Excel to both QuickBooks and Xero, so you may have already known that. Wait wait wait.
Blake Oliver: [00:23:24] Isn't it the other way around? You sync QuickBooks and Xero to Google Sheets in Excel.
David Leary: [00:23:31] Yeah. So you can. Yes. So it's so it's Google Sheets Excel to both QuickBooks and Xero.
Blake Oliver: [00:23:37] But it's from not to. Right.
David Leary: [00:23:41] Oh yes. Okay. Yes. Sorry. Yeah. It's not bidirectional. It's not it's not a sync. Correct. Directionally that way. That's true. All right. Good correction on the grammar there. Good pickup. See that's what I get for using AI sometimes.
Blake Oliver: [00:23:52] That's why we're here. That's why we do this show together. You know, we're fact checking each other live.
David Leary: [00:23:56] And thousands of accountants have used live flow in the past. Right. To be in successfully syncing QuickBooks online to Google. So the proper way for you this time. But if you're an Excel user or if you're on Xero. Sorry you couldn't use Live Flow. Well, right. The great news. Now you can use Live Flow to connect Google Sheets to QuickBooks online. You can link Microsoft Excel to QuickBooks online, you can sync Google Sheets to zero and even connect Microsoft Excel to zero, right? And here's what will blow your mind, Blake. You can create consolidated reports for clients who are on one entity on QuickBooks online and one on Xero. Live flow can speak to both at the same time and just continuously, automatically update your reports and your custom dashboards.
Blake Oliver: [00:24:38] That's amazing.
David Leary: [00:24:39] So whether you're on Team Google Sheets, Team Excel, team QuickBooks or Team Xero or any combination of these, and you're ready to take your financial reporting to the next level and to get 25% off your first three months, head over to The Accounting Podcast Dot promo slash Live Flow. That is The Accounting Podcast dot promo forward slash l I v e f l o w.
Blake Oliver: [00:25:00] Thank you. Live flow. Definitely check that out. I just love the idea of having, like one link to a Google sheet to send to my client, and then that updates every month. No more PDFs, the reports and sending them over, they just get a live dashboard. Uh, Joseph says, thank you, gentlemen, for the advice to global slash drew. I'm trying to get with a firm Visor Tax while still in school. I'm definitely getting the recommended book. Awesome. So what else do we need to hit on this week? Oh, it's in the headline. It's in our title. Bookkeeping startup raises $200 million. This company is called finally. Like they finally got the money. Finally is a Miami based bookkeeping startup. And they have secured 200 million in series B funding, with 50 million from peak span capital and 150 million credit facility from Encina Capital Partners, bringing their total funding to $305 million. So, David, this harkens back to fundraising by I. Bookkeeping startups like pilot, which has raised a similar amount nearly 325 million and was valued at 1.25 billion in 2021 and notably got investment from Jeff Bezos's family office. So, Thoughts on this startup.
David Leary: [00:26:33] Is interesting because they are an accounting firm like they straight up legitly say we move you to QuickBooks or Xero. It's truly an accounting firm, but what they've done is they've used somebody's APIs right, to offer credit cards. So they control the bank feeds with credit cards. So they put you on a finally credit card. So that's where this credit financing comes in to help that grow even more. They have um they do everything Bill pay all these features they do for you. The only thing they can't do, from what I can tell, I don't know if you want to bring up their website or not, is I? They don't have a bank. They have everything, every other feature they offer. And you could get their merchant services separately. You could get their credit card separately, but they really try to roll it up to become a full blown, you know, I mean, to compare it to NetSuite, right? You get the whole suite from them, you get your software, you get all your merchant service, you get your credit cards, you don't need to do anything else. And that's what's surprising, that they don't offer a bank, right?
Blake Oliver: [00:27:32] So help me understand this. David finally is using QuickBooks. They're using Xero. They've got stripe, PayPal, Salesforce, Shopify, gusto and square on their website, on the home page as logos. What do they have that is proprietary? That is different than what any other bookkeeping company or accounting firm is doing. Why are they worth $200 million? Or why are they? I don't know what the valuation is. Do we, uh, their last deal amount was 200 million. I don't see a valuation. I mean, they really.
David Leary: [00:28:09] Only raised 50 because 150 150 is to help the financing parts, right?
Blake Oliver: [00:28:14] Is it credit.
David Leary: [00:28:15] Line? It's credit line. Yeah. If you go to their pricing page it's a little clearer to understand what they do.
Blake Oliver: [00:28:20] Okay.
David Leary: [00:28:21] So on the pricing page they have like these little arrows at the top. And if you go start with the right it has payment processing like you could just get only payment processing. It's the little black tab at the top.
Blake Oliver: [00:28:31] Black tab, uh, payment processing.
David Leary: [00:28:34] You could just get payment processing. Well, that's just.
Blake Oliver: [00:28:36] That's just stripe. This is this is just stripe 2.9% plus $0.30 per successful card charge. They're just white labeling stripe.
David Leary: [00:28:42] And then they have expense management. So they're obviously partnering with somebody to issue expense cards or corporate cards. So you can just get that service. You can just do invoicing through them through their mobile app. Or you could use them just for your bookkeeping, but they really want to put you on the all in one. If you keep moving to the left.
Blake Oliver: [00:28:59] All in one, uh, okay. All in one.
David Leary: [00:29:01] And that's where you get everything that they do.
Blake Oliver: [00:29:04] They don't have pricing. There's no pricing here on the website. It just says call for pricing.
David Leary: [00:29:10] The individually the sum of the services do, but not for the bookkeeping. Yeah okay.
Blake Oliver: [00:29:14] So they say automated bookkeeping. What does that mean. Are they using people to do this. Is this another bot keeper David I.
David Leary: [00:29:20] Don't know on that. I think when I looked at it before because they're controlling the corporate card. It's interesting. Right. Because now you're you're controlling the bank feeds directly in, in a way, not not directly, but you have a layer deeper than if you just connect it through Plaid through the accounting system. Right. It's right. And this is the same reason you're seeing other companies add accounting features, right? I think you're seeing it for for two reasons. One, I saw a story that oops, that the global accounting software market, Blake is going to double in the next ten years. It's going to go from about $14,000,000 billion a year to 30 billion. So it's going to be over $30 billion in in 2023. The largest market is North America, right. Um, interesting thing in this study that was from brainy insights on premise or on site is still 58% of the revenue, right? So then you wonder why all these startups are chasing, you know, Intuit's the Sage, the Oracle's into it. They're spending millions on conferences like Sweet World, and you're seeing millions of VC money flowing to companies like finally, right is and you're even seeing new GLS pop up. And it's just because there's so much money that's available in the next ten years that they're all going for.
David Leary: [00:30:38] And it explains why, I don't know if you. Do you remember we talked about teal before? Yeah. That's the former bench founders. They started this like accounting as a platform. So apps in theory, just like how apps can add Billpay to their app now or banking to their app. Well, they were going to offer kind of bookkeeping bookkeeping services to your app. So if I was, you know, some app, I could add bookkeeping and accounting services to my company or my app. Well, Mercury Bank just bought them. So Mercury bought teal. Um, teal just raised money a couple of months ago. $11 million. They didn't say how much they acquired them for, but essentially the one co-founder from bench, he's now going to head the accountants division at Mercury. And it kind of makes sense, right? Because if the it's very easy now for the accounting platforms, the natural place to pay the bills and the accounting system, the natural place to do a lot of stuff is in the accounting system. In theory, the natural place for banking might be in the accounting system eventually. So it makes sense that a bank, a small business bank, might want to try to add services for accounting, bookkeeping, bookkeeping, bookkeeping.
Blake Oliver: [00:31:48] But the way that they think about this bookkeeping is really just expense categorization. When you get down to it with most of these companies, they're just they're just categorizing your spend on your corporate card into the GL automatically. Who knows how accurate it is. And when it comes to actually doing real accrual accounting, they can't handle it. They can't do accruals and deferrals accurately. Nobody's figured out how to do that yet even with AI. So I feel like all of these massive fundraising announcements that we see, it's just betting on the founders to figure it out And like our live stream viewer, Madman Dan said, at that level of seed money, I'd argue they'll eventually develop their own back end versus using Xero or Qbo, which is always way harder than anyone imagines to build a GL. It's very, very difficult. There's so much complexity involved. And so the investors don't understand this and they they bet on it. But any of us who have worked in an accounting firm or done bookkeeping know that it's very, very difficult to standardize it all and to scale it. And that's why even though accounting firms are great businesses and can grow 20, 30, 40, 50% a year under ideal circumstances, it's really hard to get the 2 to 3 times growth that you need to be a software business valued at a valuation that justifies these massive investments. So they miss the people part. It's still a very people heavy business. Accountants, business owners want to talk to their accountant.
David Leary: [00:33:28] And think about how long it takes to build the GL. I mean, we were just at SeaWorld, 26 years old, and there's all kinds of stuff they haven't built yet in their GL. Yeah, yeah. And QuickBooks and Xero and intact. Intact is a solid mature 15.
Blake Oliver: [00:33:40] They're all 20 or 20 or more years old.
David Leary: [00:33:43] Yeah. And they're still there's so many features that have not been built yet. It's very hard to build a GL, I think.
Blake Oliver: [00:33:48] Although arguably with AI assisting in development of software, you could clone a GL a lot faster. So that's what I wonder about with NetSuite. They've gotten to this maturity level where all somebody has to do to get a giant piece of their revenue is to clone it and offer it at a much cheaper price, because it's very pricey compared to any other SaaS application out there. So could you program an AI agent to click around inside of NetSuite and learn the functionality. And then. Reverse engineer it.
David Leary: [00:34:29] Yeah. And then you got to somehow figure out. So let's say you build that GL, then you got to figure out how to sell it. Right. Like like you're selling into these massive established worlds where, you know, what was this thing. You're always safe if you buy IBM. Yeah, that's.
Blake Oliver: [00:34:43] How it is with NetSuite.
David Leary: [00:34:44] Now. Yeah.
Blake Oliver: [00:34:45] And you're not going to go wrong. Like, it's it's the it's the choice for startups. If you're a fast growing company you go on NetSuite. Nobody in the investor community is going to argue with you about that.
David Leary: [00:34:57] And nobody using it. We talked to the users. Nobody's like, oh, I never there's nobody there's no vibe of people looking for an off ramp either.
Blake Oliver: [00:35:05] No, they're.
David Leary: [00:35:06] Not, because they're like, I didn't have to hire an employee this year because of NetSuite. Exactly. That's the way they view it. It's saving them $500,000. So related to this crazy money. And I think when I think about Mercury acquiring this. It's because they have a lot of competition. These online business banks, so revolute, who they were based out of Europe, and they've come to the states, they've they're targeting businesses now. They're adding 20,000 small businesses a month now to revolute Bank. They just announced they've added bill pay. So they've added bill pay to their app. It syncs with QuickBooks and Xero and free agent. Um, you know, they can pay bills 150 different suppliers and destinations. So it's it's just this mismatch of everybody keep adding everybody's features because you have to to be competitive. Right. And then another example of this is uh paylocity. I don't know if you're familiar with that. They're kind of in the HR payroll space. They acquired Air Base who was in the expense management p-card space. And if you really look at that, that's essentially is a play versus rippling. Right. Because rippling, you get your air, you get your your spend management, your everybody's a lot of these reactions and these raises and the buying of companies is all because everybody's competitors are doing the same stuff and you can't be left behind. You can't have. Well, we don't offer those three features. So now you got to go buy companies or else you're not going to be able to compete. So we're we're going to see a lot happen this week with these acquisitions. We're going to see more and more and more of that as it continues down the path. Even like pace, Dan bought Team Pay, they got acquired last week or a couple of weeks ago. So you're seeing this consolidation happening really fast.
Blake Oliver: [00:36:41] Let's go ahead and read our second ad. I'll take this one okay. Thank you to the Small Business Research Institute for sponsoring our show. Are you ready to take your accounting career to the next level? Introducing the Certified Entrepreneurial Advisor program from the Small Business Research Institute. As accounting professionals, we're always looking for ways to better serve our clients and grow our practices. That's where the CEA comes in. This isn't just another certification. It's your ticket to becoming a true business advisor. Imagine having access to hundreds of MBA level courses, all designed specifically for accountants and CPAs like us. We're talking expert led training on everything from advanced financial strategies to the latest business trends. The best part? It's all available through one affordable membership and includes a 30 day free trial. And with their flexible, easy to follow tutorials, you can learn at your own pace, fitting it around your busy schedule by earning your CPA certification. You're not just adding letters after your name, you're opening doors to high paying clients and exciting new opportunities. If you're ready to transform your career, elevate your advisory services. Stay ahead of the curve and start your journey to becoming a Certified Entrepreneurial Advisor. Head over to The Accounting Podcast promo slash CEA. Now that is The Accounting Podcast promo forward slash c e a n o w.
David Leary: [00:38:05] And that's another place. This person that's about it was it was listener mail right that they were looking for other resources or what they should do. This would be a good way to get some extra education before you start that job at a firm.
Blake Oliver: [00:38:15] I agree. Uh, David. Changing gears. Yeah. Did you see the viral TikTok trend of Chase customers? Uh, exploiting a glitch at the ATM?
David Leary: [00:38:29] I've yet to actually see it. I've just heard about it on the news. They keep talking about it, and I'm thinking it's probably just like kiting. Right? Check kiting? Like your old school thing. But I was like, hopefully we don't get too busy and we can bring it to the show. So I'm glad you're bringing this to the show. I hope you have the original video.
Blake Oliver: [00:38:47] So there's all these terrible TikTok trends where like, people hurt themselves or die even, um, but we've now seen this come to accounting and to fraud. Uh, some TikTokers figured out that if you write a check to yourself and you deposit it at a chase ATM, that you can immediately withdraw funds. And apparently the amounts were quite large And Chase is saying this was a technical error. It allowed customers to withdraw all of the funds from a check before it had cleared. And I believe that normally it's only a small amount of the check. You are allowed to withdraw before it clears. So people were depositing checks for large sums, you know, $10,000 or more and then withdrawing the funds and throwing the money around in the air on TikTok. And of course, then people started doing this. They, they like, uh, like many people, they many people get their news from TikTok and learn about how to do things on TikTok. And so they started doing it. And Chase is now investigating thousands of incidents of possible check fraud committed as part of this TikTok craze, and plans to share the evidence it gathers with police departments around the country. This is reported in the Wall Street Journal. Um, yeah, thousands of people were involved in doing this. And of course, like you said, David, this is essentially check kiting. Uh, deposit the check. Withdraw the funds before the check clears. And it's a tale as old as time. This is one of the original bank frauds, check kiting.
David Leary: [00:40:23] And I'm sure the first video on TikTok of it was probably fake. It was probably. The person probably didn't even really do it. And then the copycats are the ones that are getting in trouble.
Blake Oliver: [00:40:34] Um, what's, uh, what's really sad about this for the people who did it is that it's a federal crime. This is a serious thing. And why did these influencers do this? Because they got millions of views. And the views are what get you money. On TikTok, one video was viewed over 100,000 times. It shows a young woman calling her mother and telling her she should get 40,000 to $50,000 out of her Chase account by cutting a check and taking advantage of the glitch. Another video, filmed by a young rapper to promote his song Chase. It showed him flashing $20 bills in front of a drive thru Chase Bank ATM. The rapper UTM later clarified he didn't condone fraud and was just trying to call attention to his song, which is about chasing dreams. Um.
David Leary: [00:41:19] I don't know what people are thinking. Like, it's it's theft. It's not a glitch. I don't know. Well, I know.
Blake Oliver: [00:41:25] Apparently people are eating dogs somewhere in Springfield, Illinois, and I learned that from social media as well.
David Leary: [00:41:32] It was. Well, it was immigrants.
Blake Oliver: [00:41:34] Immigrants? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So President Trump, you know, he gets his news from from social media. So I guess this is not this is not strange to us, right.
David Leary: [00:41:43] Do you have I think you had some stories on like Big Four people are like in the office laying people off. You have to work in the office.
Blake Oliver: [00:41:51] Pwc caught my attention because they are laying off 1800 employees in their first formal cuts since 2009. This was also reported in the Wall Street Journal. The layoffs are going to impact around 2.5% of PwC's US workforce, and crazily enough, it includes audit. They're laying off people in audit. And we were just last week talking about how there aren't enough freaking auditors in UI.
David Leary: [00:42:18] Let's UI let go of clients. They didn't lay people off, but no.
Blake Oliver: [00:42:22] Um, yeah. It's it's like but, you know, this doesn't surprise me because what do firms do when things slow down a little bit is they they just lay people off. Right. Preserves their revenue per employee. I don't understand why this is always big news. I think it's just because so many people at PwC must read the Wall Street Journal. So they cover all the big four layoffs because it gets clicks or something like that, but it's not anything new. I do want to call out Paul Griggs, PwC's US leader, for the memo that he wrote to employees. The quote, the quote could have used some some work from marketing or communications. He said there will be an element of resource action that will impact a relatively small proportion of our people, something that is never easy. What a resource. Action is what they call layoffs now. A resource action. It's it kind of reminds me of, like, what Putin calls the Ukraine war, right? It's not a war. It's a it's an action or something like that. Does he does the same thing? Yeah. And it will impact a relatively small proportion of our people. Yeah. That's that's great. Sucks for them still. Right. And something that's never easy. Never easy for who? For you to have to do it.
David Leary: [00:43:36] He obviously didn't listen to our episode about Intuit's mismanagement of their layoff messaging.
Blake Oliver: [00:43:42] Uh, he says ultimately, we are positioning our firm for the future, creating capacity to invest in anticipating and reacting to the market opportunities of today and tomorrow. Uh, half of the jobs are actually offshore. I'm just surprised that it says here in the article that it's going to include anywhere from anyone from associate to managing director, and will include business services, audit and tax. I mean, doesn't seem like the right time to lay off auditors if you want to maintain your audit quality. But then again, PwC and the rest of the big four are not. Audit firms, they are giant consulting firms that happen to do audits. So what are they clear?
David Leary: [00:44:22] There was I didn't meet any accountants in a cast practice from PwC at Suite World. But they had an army of consultants at at Oracle Cloud World.
Speaker3: [00:44:32] Yeah.
Blake Oliver: [00:44:33] Pwc was also in the news this week because they are going to start requiring their 26,000 UK employees to work at least three days a week in the office or at client sites. They're going to start monitoring employee work locations, sharing this data with employees in their career coaches to ensure fairness and consistency. So get ready to badge in and badge out PwC employees, because Big Brother is going to be monitoring you on a monthly basis to make sure that you are, in fact, in the office or at a client location. What a waste of resources to do this. And all the evidence shows that people who work remotely are more productive than those who were forced to work in the office. And the thing that I hate the most about this is you end up with the situation, the inevitable situation where you go to the office, you sit down at your desk, and then you spend the whole day on zoom calls with your team because they are in different offices and or.
David Leary: [00:45:35] It's the day they worked from home or whatever it might.
Blake Oliver: [00:45:37] Be. Right? And if one person on your team, even if your whole team is in the office, if like one person on your team is at home, then you have to go on zoom. So you're all sitting around this office on different computers. I feel like leadership in these big companies just doesn't understand this, that it's very unusual for a working group in a big corporation with tens of thousands of people to actually all be co-located in the same city anymore. It doesn't make sense. And so requiring people to come to the office, you know, to to increase spontaneous, you know, meetings of the mind is silly because the people you meet have nothing to do with what you do. They're in completely different departments or teams.
David Leary: [00:46:21] So so Ed Bailey is trying a different strategy but similar strategy okay. So Ed Bailey there in in Minnesota they're shutting down some of their smaller offices in the suburbs and requiring everybody to come to the downtown office. Oh no. And they say, well, I guess.
Blake Oliver: [00:46:36] You know, it's better if everybody's actually there in the office together. That's better than.
David Leary: [00:46:40] Okay. So so they they did not add square footage, but they renewed a lease and they're spending $5 million to renovate its space. The renovation will be complete in December. Would you like to hear about the upgrades, Blake?
Blake Oliver: [00:46:51] Tell me.
David Leary: [00:46:53] It's doubling the size of the break room, expanding its cafeteria, adding a game room, adding a bar with beverages on tap bar and a fireplace.
Blake Oliver: [00:47:04] Beverages I might be I might go in for that.
David Leary: [00:47:06] And a fireplace and new carpeting.
Blake Oliver: [00:47:08] A fireplace, I guess. And is it in Minnesota, you said?
David Leary: [00:47:12] Yeah. And they're hoping these new amenities and amenities will draw the employees back to the office more often.
Blake Oliver: [00:47:18] But we know forced tracking.
David Leary: [00:47:20] But at least they they want they're dying to get people back in the office.
Blake Oliver: [00:47:24] It won't work. It won't work. I'm sorry, guys, and I'll tell you why. I've been to some really, really nice offices in San Francisco of technology companies that are trying to do exactly the same thing. They have way more money. They are way cooler.
David Leary: [00:47:37] Than you, and they're paying their employees for X more, and they still don't come to work.
Blake Oliver: [00:47:40] And they can't get them to come to the office. I went to one company where they they have a full time, like barista at the office with all the gear to make you the best espresso drinks. Any time you want, you just walk up, order totally free. Nobody's in the office. They have free lunches. Nobody wants to come in. Why? Because two hours of my day is more valuable to me in San Francisco than anything you can offer me to come into the office. And oh, by the way, I know that as an individual contributor, I'm more productive at home as opposed to in this giant open air office where I'm constantly distracted. I don't understand why leaders cannot get cannot get this. You'd be better off spending your money on quarterly retreats for the entire company. If you want to get people together, having fun, coming up with ideas, and then let everybody go home for a few months and work on it. I got PwC also on my list for another story that I've been saving for a while. This is a oh PwC UK again. They were in the news back in June for conducting another round of voluntary separations, which are essentially unannounced layoffs, and they got a lot of crap because they instructed affected employees to avoid mentioning the forced nature of their departure and farewell emails. Employees were provided with a script by HR for their goodbye notes, which must not reference the severance offer or the circumstances of their departure, and must include positive remarks about their time at PwC. This was reported in Going Concern.
David Leary: [00:49:18] Pwc. They won't get their their severance.
Blake Oliver: [00:49:21] Pwc reserves the right to review and approve any farewell messages before they are sent out, assuring they align with the firm's guidelines and are not derogatory. And the Financial Times originally covered that story. You know, I mean.
David Leary: [00:49:33] This is a great way to get people never become accountants.
Blake Oliver: [00:49:39] Uh, since we're talking about the big four, we should mention a positive story. Um, a Deloitte rower got a gold medal at the Paris Olympics. Oliver Zeidler, a consultant at Deloitte Germany, won a gold medal in the men's single sculls rowing at the Paris Olympics, marking Germany's first gold in this event since 1992. Zeidler transitioned from competitive swimming to rowing. After missing the 2016 Olympics. Inspired by his family's legacy of Olympic success, including his grandfather and aunt, both of whom are medalists, and he received significant support from Deloitte, which allowed him to balance his athletic training with his professional responsibilities, including sponsorship for his education and flexibility for competitions. It took him three years to prepare. He executed a successful race plan and got an Olympic record in the semifinal before winning gold in the final. Congratulations to Oliver Zeidler and well done Deloitte for supporting an Olympic medalist.
David Leary: [00:50:39] My understanding, because I was researching this and trying to find an accounting Olympic story, I think Deloitte has 11 or 12 gold medals. Deloitte does not, not from one Olympics, but over time then they have they of any company. Deloitte has like the most gold medalists, the most Olympians ever. Like they, they they don't need to sponsor the Olympics. They just send their, their employees, I guess. But yeah. So or it works out. Well It could be high performance. Like there's there's a reason why they have these Olympians. They should go to work.
Blake Oliver: [00:51:06] They should totally promote this more. Right. Like, and I don't know if he was in audit or tax or anything like that. Probably in consulting, I'm guessing if he was given like all that time to, to pursue the Olympics. But they should definitely.
David Leary: [00:51:19] There's no auditors.
Blake Oliver: [00:51:21] No auditors in the Olympics.
David Leary: [00:51:22] None of them are CPAs. They just they're in the advisory side. I guess there's no CPAs in the island. No. That's funny.
Blake Oliver: [00:51:27] So follow up in the live stream. Uh, drew says thanks, guys. I appreciate the advice. And I'm going to buy that book for sure. I know they use QuickBooks, so I'll also look into getting certified. I appreciate the tips. Happy to help, drew. And if any of our listeners have, uh, insights for drew on how to prepare for his internship, uh, let us know in the chat. You can you can post on, um, on YouTube and everyone will see it there on YouTube. Hunter says if you have a big urbanized city, people would actually not mind coming into the office. People don't hate going into the office. They hate the commute. Look at NYC suburban loving higher ups. Can't understand. I agree with you completely. If we could all afford to live within, say, 30 minutes of the office, it wouldn't be so bad. When I lived in LA, I was a manager at a big accounting firm. The best I could do was an hour, hour and a half commute. And I lived in a nicer neighborhood, like an hour and an hour and a half or an or an hour and a half. It was like an hour in the morning to get there, and an hour and a half in the evening, and I lived like 12 miles from the office. I, you know, it was it was brutal.
Speaker3: [00:52:36] I'm going to.
David Leary: [00:52:37] Get our last ad in here so we don't miss that before we wrap up the show. We have a new sponsor, Blake. Safe send.
Blake Oliver: [00:52:43] Safe send. Thank you. Safe. Sen. Sen. Sen. Thank you. Safe. Send. Yes.
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Blake Oliver: [00:54:32] Thank you Steve and David and I actually have to go. We both have hard stops and we are rolling over into the top of the hour. So I just want to say thank you to Akintola for commenting in the live stream. Akintola says, I'm at a career crossroads. I've taken principles of accounting one and two and I'm working through the bookkeeper launch course. Oh. I'm sorry. I got to that's message number two. Let me start over. Hi, Blake and David, I'm a huge fan of your podcast and earmark. I've been listening while considering a switch to accounting finance. I've been in tech for ten years as a data analyst and solutions engineer. I'm at a career crossroads. I've taken principles of accounting one and two, and I'm working through the bookkeeper launch course. I'm also in the process of applying to the UNC Mac program as well. My question are there roles that combine tech and accounting slash finance? I'm looking to leverage my tech background as I make this transition. I'd really appreciate any insights you can offer. Thank you. What a perfect question because we just attended Sweet World and yes, there is a perfect job for you. Become a NetSuite expert and if you have the accounting and finance knowledge and you have the technology background, you could crush it. There are so many companies that need ERP experts that also understand accounting, because the biggest problem is that often these are not set up properly. To get the financial reports that you need, right. You want to be able you don't want to have to rework it all.
David Leary: [00:55:57] And if you have a little bit of a code background, I mean, a lot of there's a whole interface for you to code things with Sweet World and build custom stuff.
Blake Oliver: [00:56:05] They've got a whole scripting platform inside of NetSuite, and you can basically automate a ton of like accounting journal entries and all that stuff. So impossible to do if you don't know the accounting. Thank you everyone for joining us live today. Huge audience today. Uh, I guess Thursdays are a good day, Dave. I mean, we should consider that, uh, and if you are listening on the podcast feed and you want to join us live, subscribe to us on YouTube, The Accounting Podcast, uh, on YouTube and hit that notification button. You will get notified when we go live. And don't forget, you can earn free CPP for listening. Download the earmark app on Apple or Android, or just go to earmark app in your browser. Take a quick quiz and get your free CPE for listening today. We'll see you around next week.