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Martin Chee is the CFO and Co-Founder at Amaka, an accounting integrations system that allows firms to automate their data entry processes. In this episode, Martin and Stuart dive into the story of Amaka, how it delivers value to clients, and the challenges and complexities that Martin faces in this niche. They also discuss Martin’s professional journey, how to work with clients efficiently, and the impact the pandemic had on his business.
Join Stuart McLeod as he interviews the world's top accounting leaders to understand their story, how they operate, their goals, mission, and top advice to help you run your accounting firm.
Stuart McLeod 00:00:05.809 [music] Hi, I'm Stuart McLeod, CEO and co-founder of Karbon. Welcome to the Accounting Leaders Podcast, the show where I go behind the scenes with the world's top accounting leaders. Today I'm joined by Martin Chee, who's the CFO and co-founder at Amaka, an accounting integration system that allows firms to automate their data entry processes. Martin actually started his career in a boutique accounting firm where he is now a partner, while also helping run Amaka. He focuses on a range of areas such as businesses and startup advisory, management accounting, systems implementation. It's my pleasure to welcome to the Accounting Leaders Podcast, Martin Chee. Were you born and raised in Sydney? How did that all come about?
Martin Chee 00:00:56.486 Born and raised in Sydney. My dad migrated over here from China when he was about six years old, I think. Yeah, so I was born and raised here. My mum, she was born here, but both of her parents were Lithuanian migrants. So, yeah, interesting match. I don't know how that sort of came about, but anyway. So I got three other siblings. Mum was a full-time housewife, doing a good job raising us. And dad was pretty much in the restaurant business most of his life. His family was in the restaurant business and then he ended up there himself with a Chinese restaurant in, I don't know if you know, the suburb of Ashfield for a number of years. And then that was very successful, and then had an opportunity to open or move the restaurant to Hunters Hill, and then had that for a number of years as well. So he was in the industry for about 30 years running his own Chinese restaurant, and very much a family-run operation, which is a good source of cheap labor. He tend not to have so many trust issues with family. We'd like to say he was fortunate in that because he's had four kids that he could tap into across--
Stuart McLeod 00:02:12.293 A couple of front of house, a couple of back of house, a couple of chefs.
Martin Chee 00:02:16.143 Definitely. From my perspective, and I know from my older siblings as well, there's a little bit of resentment getting roped into the family business, but it's one of those things where you dislike it or you don't really rate the experience going through it, and then you reflect on it and there are some meaningful and useful things that you kind of learn along the way. And I think in that regard, it was an interesting start into employment generally, for me. It was kind of like you just get thrown into the deep end and you got to figure things out for yourself. And I think one of the great things working in hospitality-- and I'm a big advocate for everyone, I think, should do a stint in hospitality just to sort of be on the other side of the fence and understand what goes on behind the scenes and the pressure that you're subjected to and the kitchen is subjected to. And I think that experience in that service setting, it really puts you in a good stead regardless of what kind of professional environment you're in after that because it really teaches you to, one, get on with things. During a service, there's a whole host of things that can go wrong. And I remember one of the first shifts that I had, I ended up dropping a tray of drinks onto a poor lady's lap and that was the very first customer of the shift at 5:30. You just kind of want to put your head in the sand and not speak to anyone and hide, but you got 5 hours of service ahead of you. So you kind of just have to wash it off and get on with the job. So I think that's something that's really valuable that I took from it. And also being in service, it doesn't matter if you're having a bad day or a good day or an average day.
Martin Chee 00:04:09.358 You got to put on the smile and the veneer for the customer and make sure they're having a really good experience and having a good time because they're coming out to relax and enjoy themselves and destress. So that's a really important thing as well that I took from my time working in the biz.
Stuart McLeod 00:04:30.791 What was your dad's opinion of COVID and the restaurant industry, etc., in Australia?
Martin Chee 00:04:36.564 He's up there in age now. So I think most people sort of in their early 70s, late 70s, they're kind of just get on with things and quite compliant with everything, I would say, generally. So it's just yeah, they were kind of lucky, my mum and my dad, because they enjoy getting onto the golf course for a hit and they could still do that. And then in terms of the restaurant side of things, they both enjoy cooking a lot at home. So it was just a different kind of existence and lifestyle for the two years that things were kind of in a bit of a state of flux. But yes, it's funny eating out at restaurants with my dad because it's like going to watch a movie with a film critic or something. [crosstalk]. You get the commentary as you go along, "This was frozen. You should have picked that one up or--"
Stuart McLeod 00:05:32.936 How to ruin every meal that you're ever going to eat out at.
Martin Chee 00:05:35.940 Pretty much. So yeah, like I said, I think that's probably representative of the experience of most people in that sort of age demo. They're relatively fit and active, too. So fortunately, it didn't impact them too much. But yeah, it's like COVID obviously-- not to get into it too much, but yeah, it's definitely within the space that I'm in, not just on the accounting front, but the software side of things, yeah, it's been really crazy times. I mean, on the software front, we've been so fortunate that everything was already kind of in the cloud and you're kind of making stuff out of thin air. So we actually had our best-- when it comes to the Amaka side of things, we had our best two years in terms of the traction that we got. And then on the accounting side of things, again, a number of years ago, we put quite a lot of effort into making everything cloud. We switched a lot of clients across to zero, and this was sort of something that we started doing five or six years ago. And everything is just so much more interconnected now. So there's not a lot of-- or even back then, there really wasn't much on-prem stuff in terms of us having a physical server in the office. The bulk of our ops were already in the cloud. And then I'd also started to dabble in offshoring five or six years ago as well. So it kind of forced you to be that way, too. And it's been interesting managing that transition with clients. Not all clients really interact or care too much about how you do the job. It's much more outcome driven. So they don't really care or appreciate the processes behind the scenes.
Martin Chee 00:07:27.508 But definitely, I think and particularly when it comes to, let's say, bookkeeping clients, where it's quite a heavy engagement in terms of how frequently you might deal with the client or how often you might talk to them or how often you might share information with them, that's been quite transformative for us in terms of we like to be incredibly transparent with the way that we do things when it comes to processes for a client's business. So what I mean by that is that, let's say if you have an engagement and it's for bookkeeping, and that might include managing an account's email on behalf of the client, managing their AP, their AR, doing the data entry and filing. We like to make that really transparent so that effectively clients got a process manual. And even if it's not us that's doing it, even if it's something that they might assume over time or assume pieces of overtime and put that as an internal part of the business, we like to just have that there as a reference for everyone. And it just sets the expectations correctly so people know when something is done, who the person is that's doing it, what the process is that they go through, how long should it take, which people are involved in the process. And it's just being able to tap into different software to be able to present that information in a nice, simple, visual way, that's been really powerful for us. And it also helps to convey the value proposition as well, because a lot of people just they're busy running their businesses. A lot of this stuff is very reactive, and we try to inject a bit of that structure and planning into the process. And also to one, make processes as scalable as we can, but also two, we want to reduce any singular human dependencies that might exist in the process.
Martin Chee 00:09:26.889 And I think the most challenging thing with anything to do with accounting is this idea of how do you scale trust. And when it comes to most accounting relationships and engagements, it's all built upon the trust factor. You're making a pitch to the client, you're saying, "Yes, I can do this, and I can provide you with advice on that." And it's not easy once you've built trust with the client, to then just offload that to someone else.
Stuart McLeod 00:10:01.214 How did you manage that process? It sounds like something you've been pretty experienced in now.
Martin Chee 00:10:06.494 As like a vision and a bit of a philosophical approach to the way that we work. We've got a team in the Philippines across all the businesses that I'm involved in. And when I was starting that team very early on, the pitch to the staff that were working with me and had first started working with me was that there's really no limit on your capabilities and the level of responsibility that you can assume within whatever the business is. So it was something that I really emphasized early on, that the sky is the limit. We don't separate or view whether you're working in the Philippines or in Sydney or Melbourne or Poland or Indonesia, wherever you might be working. We just don't view it differently. The extent to which you can progress within an organization and the extent to which you can assume more and more responsibility over time and develop professionally and elevate your status, it's just dependent on the person's appetite and aptitude. And having that kind of approach, it was kind of very anti the way things were done. If I rewind five or six years ago, when we were first doing work in the Philippines and I'd engaged a BPO at the time because I had no idea the process or the way it would work or the quality of the talent that was there, and it was very structured. It definitely wasn't the cultural norm to deal with staff in that transparent a way. It was a bit confronting for them initially. It's almost like you can say to someone, "If you have any issues, raise them with me. If you have any concerns, whatever it might be, please approach me." All of these things.
Martin Chee 00:12:00.940 And even though you might say that and repeat that every week, there's still this apprehension culturally, and also not just culturally in terms of the general personality traits that they might have, but in terms of the corporate culture and the professional culture over there, that was just not-- just kind of didn't really work that way where you were having these kind of really frank and open discussions with your boss or your manager. And you also had this quite high level of control around the way that you might structure and do your work. That's something that we try to convey across all the businesses. Whenever we're hiring people, we want people to be self-reliant and responsible and can largely work autonomously. And there's obviously a support network there, but we want people to be able to exercise their discretion, and it's just something that you got to-- we had to consistently work at it because even though you might have a conversation with someone and you think they're being candid with you, you oftentimes find out later that it's like, "Oh, that was kind of 50% of the true picture of the situation." Yeah.
Stuart McLeod 00:13:13.306 So stepping back a bit, so you've got Amaka, which is about the software for integrating client applications for predominantly small businesses, I guess. We'll come to that. So tell me about the accounting practice, though, and draw it back to your life in your dad's restaurant and seeing the work ethic that he had. I've got no doubt that that's had a big impact on you and the way that you approach your career. But given that you've got three jobs at least, what got you into accounting? And tell me a bit about the story.
Martin Chee 00:13:49.664 So I actually got roped into accounting through one of our customers at the restaurant. It was a regular that came in once a week. And when you work in hospitality so long and you have all these regulars, you remember everyone's order. You remember all the prices of all the dishes. You basically just sit down and you're like, "Here's your order. We don't have to even talk about what you want to eat tonight." But anyway, there's this lovely elderly guy that had a small practice just around the corner in Drummoyne, and basically started doing part-time work while I was studying. I was studying at Macquarie University doing a Bachelor of Business Administration and majoring in accounting and HR, and doing as little time on the campus as possible because I was at the restaurant at that time. So we were open Tuesday to Sunday, and I was working basically Tuesday to Saturday. Yeah. So it was a full schedule trying to do a full-time uni and then do that. And then this opportunity came up to do a bit of part-time work at an accounting practice down the road, and I kind of grabbed that because it was, obviously, relevant to what I was studying. And yeah, just started-- it's funny reflecting on what the experience and what the profession looked like 15, 16 years ago, just a monumental change. But yeah, so I just started doing general bookkeeping stuff and month end and general journal adjustments and all that kind of thing. And it was a really great experience in that it wasn't like, let's say, an internship that you might get at a big corporate where you're probably doing quite a narrow set of things. It's very much like whatever you want to attempt or whatever we think you can handle, we'll just dump on your desk and give it a crack.
Martin Chee 00:15:47.728 And that was really great for me because I got a really diverse experience doing a range of things, whether it was preparing monthly accounts, whether it was dealing with insurance renewals, whether it was preparing tax returns for individuals, partnerships, trusts, companies, self-managed superannuation funds. And then on top of that, it was also the ability to contribute to that business in terms of having a look at the way things were run and why perhaps things were done in a particular way. And I really got a good insight into the way the business was run. And so that put me in good stead for a lot of the startup stuff that I eventually got into. But going back to the early days in the accounting practice, back then, drafting a tax return literally involved pencil and paper. We had printouts of all the different types of returns for the year. You basically pencil everything in that you're taking from the software. And so when you're doing a complicated trust tax return, and then something changed, you used to tear your hair out because you got to follow it all through. It was really relevant for where I ended up, because I got to see the evolution of technology coming into accounting practices. And the accounting industry obviously, has been massively disrupted. Probably one of the industries that has been most disrupted, I would argue, just in terms of the way that technology has sort of invaded so many different aspects of running an accounting practice, but also the way that your clients might otherwise manage the accounting and finance functions of their businesses.
Stuart McLeod 00:17:38.500 It's evolved. It's not like Blockbuster, which was disrupted by Netflix. Accountants have, well, most of them, hopefully, have gone from paper tax returns like you talked about to managing really personal relationships. I guess the disruption is being able to interact with your client in real time. It's no longer USB disks and CDs chased down the street with an MYOB file on it. But accountants are still there. The volume of graduates hasn't dramatically changed. Not like if you're a Blockbuster franchisee, which should be a bit shitty about, right?
Martin Chee 00:18:29.364 A little bit, yeah. It's just so many different things. I mean, one of the big things which really opens things up, once the bandwidth in the Internet opened up, there was a whole host of things which then became possible. And it's crazy now to reflect on. If you're talking about 15 years ago, if you were trying to send, let's say, a large MYOB file over the net, it was just like-- it probably wasn't possible until the likes of a Dropbox or someone came along, and then you could kind of share a folder and get out of that way. But then you had the issue of you want to work on the file, and then the client wants to work on the file. So you got to kind of organize.
Stuart McLeod 00:19:13.921 Never in the same version. That was illegal to work at the same version of it. Remember the days we had 75 different versions of MYOB on it?
Martin Chee 00:19:23.472 Yeah. I just remember, on every single desktop that we had in the office, it was every single version of QuickBooks, and it was starting at 7.4 all the way to 2012, 2013. And then it was all the same for MYOB as well.
Stuart McLeod 00:19:43.110 There's two things that were happening at the same time, because there was firstly, just the throughput increased because the software got better. It happened to be in a browser, but you were more connected and all that kind of stuff. So you had this scalability availability. I don't mean to end everything in ITY, but you were able to process more clients. You're able to get through work easier and faster, but also you're also able to start educating your customer base and having better relationships with them by essentially real time, which led to being able to not only produce financials that were a little bit less than one year late up to trying to help with looking forward. That was the big critical difference in the relationship. You were able to actually assist, not just tell your client that they owed the ATO, 75 grand. And depending on what year it was, you could probably wait a couple of years before you lodge your tax return so you could keep that money for a bit. So I think you can never do that here in the States. They'd fucking come around and chop your knees off. But the ATO it's still a great lender. But I don't know what it's like in the UK, but I think they're getting a bit more hard line. They need the money because Boris spends it on parties and--
Martin Chee 00:21:18.250 I mean, it's just incredibly-- the ATO, you would have to say, if you're doing a comparison of different tax authorities around the world, they would rank as one of the best at collecting tax revenue. And the system that they have in place now, the portal linking it to MyGov and everything else, they know so much about you before you've even told them anything.
Stuart McLeod 00:21:47.291 Yeah, they've done a lot of work the last couple of years. I think HMRC have done a pretty good job as well. I think we still get typed letters from the IRS. I assume that they're pretty manual in there. So I mean, they've had a huge amount of difficulty during COVID, but--
Martin Chee 00:22:06.649 Well, I dealt with one the other day, actually, because we've got a company in the US and we needed to get some registration numbers and, yeah, it was a phone call and then the lady faxed me.
Stuart McLeod 00:22:19.560 Yeah. That's why we love the IRS. That's keeping those e-fax services in business, I tell you.
Martin Chee 00:22:26.762 Yeah, yeah. We adopted one of those pretty quickly in the accounting firm, I can tell you, got sick of dealing with papers coming out of the fax machine and flopping onto the floor.
Stuart McLeod 00:22:37.990 So how big is the accounting firm? How involved in that are you still, and is that a fun thing to do for you?
Martin Chee 00:22:45.369 Look, I find elements of it enjoyable. I've been in public practice for over 15 years now. So I'm at a stage now where a lot of the aspects of it, I'm kind of been there and done that, and it's not necessarily-- particularly when it comes to, let's say, the tax advice piece and, let's say, interfacing with a lot of the software to do a lot of the tasks, I don't have that level of interest in it anymore. I much prefer dealing with the team and optimizing the processes and dealing with, let's say, more creative client issues that they might have. So I'm still involved, I would say, relatively heavily, but more in sort of like a managerial role. And the reason being that the startup side of things for me is just ramped up incredibly considerably. Yeah. So it's just time has shifted from one to the other. So in the accounting firm, I think there's around 20, 26, 27 in there. We've got a good team in the Philippines of about 10 or 11 now, and then the rest of the guys are sort of based here. We've got two other really great staff, one in Singapore, one in Jakarta. So we're trying to-- we're kind of quite global in that sense. But there's always a strong disincentive to scale the team locally here, you just start getting into that payroll tax threshold. And in the Philippines, I can tell you, the quality of the candidates that are coming out of university now, it's just really impressive. And these are kids that are incredibly talented. They go on and then they get their CPA and they do their time academically, and just incredibly smart, enthusiastic, talented kids.
Martin Chee 00:24:41.919 And it's hard to avoid that reality where there's such a strong disparity in the wages. And clients expectations in terms of pricing and value, that's always working against whatever business you're in, I feel like. People are wanting more value for money and more--
Stuart McLeod 00:25:00.672 The restaurant business, for instance.
Martin Chee 00:25:02.783 Yeah. And this is against a backdrop where not a lot of small to medium businesses are doing particularly well as well. So people have already got a bit of a cost sensitive mindset. But when I reflect on the growth of the team, we haven't really tried to look at the business from the perspective of trying to scale it as rapidly as possible. It's just we knew we had quite a bit of work internally to get sorted. There's a rebrand that will happen there at some stage in the next month or two. And that was the kind of stuff that, again, as I said, it's a bit more interesting to me rather than trying to solve someone's tax issues these days. And it's one of those things where, particularly from a taxation perspective, you can't really get away with being a generalist in that field. You really need to have a dedication to that craft and you need to be constantly reading every week and--
Stuart McLeod 00:26:02.992 Yeah. You need to be built a certain way to love that stuff.
Martin Chee 00:26:08.540 Yeah. One of the partners, she did a Masters of Tax at University of Sydney, and she loves that stuff. Whereas, I'm the complete opposite. I'd much rather engineer a new process for a client's business and see how that kind of all functions and helps them to sort of improve things in their day to day. And that's, as you touched on before, there's that evolution that sort of happened across accounting firms where you just historically were kind of viewed as a glorified debt collector for the ATO and the conversations that you were having with clients, which is quite shallow and one dimensional. And you'd have some clients where you'd be more involved in their businesses and more involved in interesting things that they might be doing, whether it's selling a business or acquiring a business or restructuring or doing some internal initiative. But you've got a lot of other clients who you call up or they'll call you once a year and say, "Hey, it's tax time. Let's get it lodged."
Stuart McLeod 00:27:15.294 And you sort of alluded to, but what was the Genesis of the commencement of Amaka? And tell me about that story.
Martin Chee 00:27:24.315 We started in the integration space. So one of the very first integrations that we did was with a US point of sale provider, and they were quite cutting edge in terms of they were the first point of sale provider that basically was able to be used on an iPad rather than you've got this big--
Stuart McLeod 00:27:44.018 Right. Okay. Was that Lightspeed, was it?
Martin Chee 00:27:45.887 It was Revel. Revel point of sale. Yeah. It was like a start up company based in San Fran. They were doing really cool stuff, and that was really groundbreaking in terms of you could have an iPad and you can have any app on it to run your business because you got great Internet and you can hook it up to your payment terminal. They had an appetite for building an integration between their system and zero. And even back then, zero was quite early on in terms of companies really integrating with zero and that sort of landscape starting to evolve a bit more in terms of other app providers, whether it was inventory management or CRM system or whatever it might be. That was really the early phases of people thinking about what was possible in terms of hooking things into an accounting package. We started on that journey and we sort of figured out what the integration needed to be and how it was going to work. And back then, the company was essentially myself and a CEO, and we just recruited a bunch of student developers effectively, and we were both at that stage juggling full-time jobs while we were doing this stuff on the side as well. He was in commercial banking, and I was working in the practice. Neither of us had kids back then. So it was just our wives getting angry with us rather than neglecting kids. So that was incredibly bootstrapped. We found some university students who were working on weekends and all that kind of jazz, and we were kind of figuring out our way through the product and yeah, managed to be very successful.
Martin Chee 00:29:45.748 Within a short space of time, we sort of had a couple of hundred customers using that integration. And then it was kind of like a theme that always existed within the business. And at the same time, we were getting opportunities to do other projects for Revel customers, whether it was packaging up point of sale information and sending it off to a server for someone else to consume, or whether it was looking at hooking it up to an online ordering system, or whether it was consuming information and pushing it into a template for a finance function to consume. And so we were doing these kind of side projects at the same time, and it was incredibly difficult to manage all of these kind of one-off projects, just in terms of the level of complexity, in terms of the level of uncertainty around the performance of the product. So when I reflect on that time, APIs with a lot of the vendors that we're working with were quite, let's say, not super mature, and they just were subject to change at the drop of a hat and were evolving quite rapidly. And there was just a really high amount of complexity in that whole process and it was just very difficult to scale that side of the business. And it made sense for us to focus more on products which just serviced a much broader segment of the market. So we knew whether it's Revel or whether it's another point of sale company or whether it's an ecommerce company, we know broadly what we might expect in terms of the intersection of that customer base, in terms of their demands for having that data, let's say, integrated into an accounting package.
Martin Chee 00:31:36.452 So it made more sense for us if we wanted to scale this business really rapidly, to go down that path where we were building these connectors or these automations between systems. And there's still a great deal of complexity in that side of the business and that process. You've still got the challenge of evolving APIs, and the developers at times are pulling their hair out when things chop and change, and sometimes things change and you don't get informed. Sometimes things do change and you don't get sufficient notice before you can sort of make those accommodations on your side. And not only that, the products themselves that you're working with are also evolving. So we work with Square, and they've got where their products started to where it is now. I mean, it's such an incredibly deep product. They're managing scheduling and rostering now, which they didn't do initially, and debit cards linked to accounts and all so of this stuff, which has made their product a much more comprehensive for businesses to use. But the challenge is you've got to keep pace with the way and the speed at which they're adding features, because then when customers are using those features, that can break the integration if you haven't considered it or accommodated the way that that information is going to influence the data that you're already dealing with or change the data that you're already dealing with. And I like to say that the architecture that we have, it's like a Rosetta stone of sorts, because you're trying to translate what different APIs and endpoints of different vendors mean in terms of in a way that's globally understandable.
Martin Chee 00:33:35.712 So you can have-- there are hundreds of point of sale providers in the world, but the terminology they use in all of their API documentation, I can tell you, is vastly different. Not only is the terminology vastly different, but the values that are attributed to those APIs can be different in and of themselves as well. So the way that they're calculated when they appear, like what's the conditional logic behind when a value might be populated within a particular endpoint. And so that complexity has been incredibly challenging to accommodate within the architecture. And the development team has done a really amazing job with that process, and it's this constant, iterative improvement that's happening there. So we try to, as best we can, conceive of things in an identical and consistent fashion, bring it in so that we understand what we're working with. And then when it comes to, if we're pushing that into an accounting package, there's this really heavy effort in the standardization process that's occurring so that if you're consuming information from a Revel point of sale or from a Square point of sale system, even though they can be vastly different, you're structuring that data in a way that's consistent so that you can gain the same insights out of them. And there's a lot of effort that goes into that.
Stuart McLeod 00:35:02.702 That's the benefit for the small business. So what's next for that business? Are you looking to grow that out and internationalize further?
Martin Chee 00:35:13.521 Yeah. So we've got quite a large global footprint. Now, our CEO, he's moved over to Atlanta with his family. So they're growing up the US team there at the moment and just expanding the resources generally. The list of products that we've got in the pipeline is infinitely long. It's been interesting in terms of just seeing that kind of market evolve as well. There was already an appetite for information to be transferred across systems. I think that problem still got a long way to being solved, and this kind of comes up in a lot of discussions that I have with our CEO. The vision is like, "You have data, and the data is really perfectly mobile across every platform. So it doesn't matter what point of sale system it is. It doesn't matter what accounting package is it. It doesn't matter what CRM or inventory management system it might be. You want that to be transferable and translatable across every system." And it's just very difficult to achieve that. And that's part of the fun of the challenge, it's like trying to crack the code, so to speak. And a lot of this is born out of if you're just looking at an accounting package and looking at apps that deal strictly with consuming information out of an accounting package. So you have a lot of forecasting apps that have emerged over the past six, seven years. And the way that they present that information to the user and the way the user can use that information, it's so incredibly powerful.
Martin Chee 00:37:13.883 We really want to tap into being able to consume information out of every system. And we call it liberating it for the customer, because you know that there are incredibly valuable insights in the data that you're collecting. And a lot of times, the customer doesn't really know or understand how valuable and useful that information is. And I like to use the forecasting apps as an example, because in your day to day, that accounting file is just being maintained. You might not know how it's being maintained, but you probably didn't realize that you could forecast your cash flow 12 months down the track based on the data that you'd put into it over the past 2 years. That's something that's really attractive for us and definitely a core part of our value proposition, where we want all of this amazing data that people are generating, whether it's from the point of sale system or an ecommerce system or even a scheduling system, give that to the user, and not just give that to the user, but also give them all of the insights and the value that they can take out of it as well in a very easy to digest way. Because I think the challenging thing now is that there's a bit of an app overload. You've got to learn the learning curve attached to, let's say, like a forecasting app or a cash flow management app. It's steep. A guy that's running a cafe or another small business operation, you don't have the time to dedicate 10 hours into learning just how to use the app and get the most out of it. And also, these things are expensive, too. Not every app is super cheap to run. And before you know it, you've got an app that's managing your payroll. You got an app that's managing your forecasting.
Martin Chee 00:39:07.780 You've got a pause system that's helping you process payments, that's linked to a payment provider that's taking a clip of the ticket, and you add it all up and you're like, "Wow, I didn't realize I'm spending a grand just on software each month before I even do anything."
Stuart McLeod 00:39:25.467 The money that you used to spend on the server every year, certainly, I don't think it's declined. It's probably increased to some degree. It's just whether you can pass on those costs as much. Maybe you can pass them on a bit more, but you're still going to feel them.
Martin Chee 00:39:38.663 We just want to eliminate the learning curve attached to accessing and understanding this information. And like a lot of the stuff that whenever we're developing products, we're always thinking about it from a layperson user's perspective. If you look at particularly when it comes to integrations, you look at the way or the typical user journey, it's complex. They got to authenticate the product. They got to make sure they're doing all of the mappings correctly. What happens when you screw up a mapping and then you subsequently need to fix it, and all this wrong data has gone into your system? It's a painful exercise, and I think that's one of the biggest things that we really emphasize and put a lot of effort into. And it's a really key point of differentiation for us in the Amaka business, is the support team. Even though we've got these at the heart of these really amazing products that save time for everyone involved, we always had a really strong emphasis that there is a service attached to that product, and it's a need borne out of the complexity of the product and the problems that we're solving. And we don't want the users to feel like they're just-- you're giving them a widget and they don't really understand how to use it. So we really wanted to make sure that although there's the product there, in tandem with that, there's a really strong service that's offered as well. And that's really reflected in the reviews that we get across all the marketplaces. Our support team, again, they just do such an amazing job. And I should point out as well that when we were recruiting personnel for our support team in the early days, we were always recruiting accountants. So we were like a lot of these--
Stuart McLeod 00:41:27.201 They understand it the best, right?
Martin Chee 00:41:30.041 Yeah, that was the thing. It's like you can't have a support person providing support if they don't understand accounting, they don't understand the reconciliation process. And that might vary, depending on the way that a bookkeeper or an accountant or the business owner might have already decided that they want to do things. So we try to be sensitive to that.
Stuart McLeod 00:41:52.437 How many staff in that business now?
Martin Chee 00:41:55.330 Over 30 now. I think we might have just touched 30. So yeah, and that's sort of growing every other day of the week. It's a challenging environment to scale a technology team rapidly these days. It's just a crazy amount of competition in the market, and it's not a fair-playing field if you're dealing with the likes of Atlassian or Google, all these guys. Yeah, so the team, we're scaling as quickly as we can, and we like to add quality, not quantity.
Stuart McLeod 00:42:27.612 Yeah. I look forward to working further with you, Martin. And I know we're doing an integration shortly, and hopefully there's plenty of there to work with together, and I'm sure I can see and we share quite a few of the same customers. So if there's anything that we can ever do to help, then please don't hesitate to reach out. But we come up to the hour, which is just flown by. So I really appreciate your time today.
Martin Chee 00:42:54.436 Yeah, no, anytime, anytime. Really lovely chatting to you.
Stuart McLeod 00:43:03.795 [music] Thanks for listening to this episode. If you found this discussion interesting, fun, you'll find lots more to help you run a successful accounting firm at karbon Magazine. There are more than 1,000 free resources there including guides, articles, templates, webinars and more. Just head to karbonhq.com/resources. I'd also love it if you could leave us a five star review wherever you listen to this podcast. Let us know you liked this session and we'll be able to keep bringing you more guests for you to learn from and get inspired by. Thanks for joining and see you on the next episode of the Accounting Leaders Podcast. [music]