The Accounting Podcast

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David Leary: [00:00:00] I recently saw a LinkedIn post that was a screenshot of somebody's folder of Microsoft Excel files for their 2023 budget, could you not? There are 15 versions of the 2023 budget Excel file, eight of which had final in the name, four had final final and three had final final dash updated When it's a screenshot like this. It really surfaces how insane it is. But what is more insane is that I suspect all teams doing any type of financial planning and analysis in Excel. They have folders of Excel files that look just like this. If this is true for you or your team, stay tuned to hear more from our sponsor Jirav later in the episode.

Blake Oliver: [00:00:40] So $10 Billion Business Tax Market. And what you just heard there is that TurboTax and TurboTax Live are getting into SE Corp and partnership filings. That's huge because until now, last time I checked, which was just earlier this year, there has not been a good DIY option for business tax returns. And so if you own an SE corp, if you have an LLC, you need to file a partnership return. You've pretty much had to go to a pro and now there's going to be a DIY option. And that I think could chip away at those returns that are being filed by pros. That could be a true competitive.

David Leary: [00:01:21] I might do my s corp with it, frankly. Coming to you weekly from the NPR recording studio. This is the Cloud Accounting Podcast.

Blake Oliver: [00:01:34] Welcome, everyone to a special episode of the Cloud Accounting Podcast. This is episode 300. Wow. I'm Blake Oliver.

David Leary: [00:01:44] And I'm David Leary.

Blake Oliver: [00:01:46] And our special celebrity guest for this 300th episode of the Cloud Accounting podcast is Hector Garcia. Hector, welcome to the show.

Hector Garcia: [00:01:54] Hi, everyone. Thank you for inviting me. This is really, really cool.

Blake Oliver: [00:01:57] And I'm sure that most of our live attendees know who Hector is because we are streaming to Hector's very popular YouTube channel, which has over 200,000 subscribers. That is quite a lot. And you are a QuickBooks expert. Hector, you have been a ProAdvisor for four. Is it decades now? Tell us a little.

Hector Garcia: [00:02:20] All right. Thank you.

Blake Oliver: [00:02:21] Yeah. Over a decade. So. And he's got a plaque.

David Leary: [00:02:23] He's got his million million YouTube views plaque there on the wall.

Blake Oliver: [00:02:27] That's amazing.

David Leary: [00:02:28] I'm going to make our own plaque. Blake, when we get a million downloads. The Cloud Accounting Podcast. Which where's earn plaque for each other?

Blake Oliver: [00:02:33] Hector So you've been doing YouTube, you've been doing QuickBooks training for a long time. You have your own practice serving small business owners, and now you are getting into app development yourself. Tell us about that.

Hector Garcia: [00:02:48] First of all, congratulations on your 300 show. That's quite an achievement. I know it's a labor of love. I have over a thousand videos in my YouTube channel, which means thousands and thousands of hours of editing because editing is the the not so fun part of this piece. The recording is the fun part. Editing not so much. So, you know, kudos to you guys because I know there's tons of work that goes behind having an end product that's high quality. And I think, David, I told you this 20, 30 episodes in, you guys have the best quality, best audio sounding podcast out there. And you told me how obsessed you guys were with the quality of audio because that's what gets people to listen to it while they're running or working or interacts because the better the quality, the easier it is to speed it up. And some people want to optimize, of course. So congrats on that. You guys have done a wonderful job between the three. My three favorite podcasts, The Soul of Enterprise and The Cloud Accounting Podcast. I listen to them religiously every week and it it gives me my weekly fix for inspiration on why I love this industry, technology and everything that we do. So kudos on that.

Hector Garcia: [00:04:01] So beat about me. I quit my regular banking job in 2008. Then I started a bookkeeping practice called Cubic Accounting, and I've been very, very true, very loyal to Intuit, only working with QuickBooks products. I tried Xero, I tried NetSuite, I tried Zoho, and they're all great. They all have their own thing. But I decided to marry the brand and the tool, and that has been for 15 plus years what we use for our practice. I'm a huge lover of QuickBooks desktop. I still am, always will be. I really don't want to live in a post QuickBooks desktop world, to be honest with you. But quick QBO is the future is the present is where everything is moving too. But I think that sometimes Intuit doesn't innovate fast enough. I want QuickBooks Online to do more and more and more and more. So we built a little app to make it do a little bit more. We can't compete with that suite yet, or we can't compete with QuickBooks Enterprise yet. But hopefully what we're trying to build with this app called Right Tool is increase, whether it's by nanoseconds or half a second increase effectiveness of the power users so they fall in love with the tool more and more.

David Leary: [00:05:16] So you're now building an app. So Blake Blake's built an app, you're building an app. We talked to lots of accountants all the time that are now building apps, but you're so, so this app is a standalone SaaS product. Is it for my phone? Like what would you where are you actually building?

Hector Garcia: [00:05:28] So the app is called right Tool is a toolbar on the right side of the screen. So what we've done is we added all the power tools per se. These are the power tools that we think accounting professionals, pro users experience. Users need to quickly access certain parts of QuickBooks, and it's all on the right side of the screen. So that's what we call it, right tool. And it's basically a bunch of shortcuts to quickly access different parts of QuickBooks Online. We added some keyboard shortcuts. So QuickBooks Online has about ten built in keyboard shortcuts. We added the rest of the keyboard, so every button on your keyboard can be a shortcut and get you somewhere in QuickBooks Online. We're very excited about that. Currently, it's a free tool. It's in public beta, and what's really cool, you guys are going to like this. It's not an API based tool, so we're not manipulating the data in any way. But the really cool thing about it not being an API based tool is that we don't need to have a per company connection, which means we will never have a per company fee. We're going to have a user fee at some point in the. Future when it goes goes off better. But it being a non API tool, it doesn't have any server load in our site. So that means all the sort of computing happens happens on the browser of the user. So to answer your question, it's actually a Chrome extension. It's a Google Chrome extension that loads up when QuickBooks Online loads up.

Blake Oliver: [00:06:54] And it just saves you seconds every time it saves you sitting around.

Hector Garcia: [00:06:58] Promise you, I promise you it will save you seconds.

Blake Oliver: [00:07:01] But thousands of.

David Leary: [00:07:02] Times.

Hector Garcia: [00:07:03] Exactly. Exactly. Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:07:04] That's awesome. Well, great, Hector. And send us the link to that. We'll include that in the show notes to this episode so anyone listening can go find it. And I'm also excited to have you on the show today, because last week David and I ran out of time talking about Sweet World and we didn't get to the big Intuit news into it had their 2022 Investor Day and David spent a bunch of time looking through the presentations and the deck for that. And there's some really interesting insights. So David, so we just jump straight ahead to app news and get into just into it.

David Leary: [00:07:37] Yeah, we can jump right in.

Blake Oliver: [00:07:44] Over to you, David. What's what's what's the big news?

David Leary: [00:07:46] To be honest, I don't know where to start. Right. It's 152 slides, but I think at a high level, like, I've not seen a deck like this put out by anybody before. Where? Pretty much. There's no secrets. Here's the market. Here's our space in the market. Here's what we're going to do to win. We could start out with some high level number stuff if you want. Yeah. So let's go. If you can follow along. You're in the deck right now.

Blake Oliver: [00:08:10] I am. And so our live stream viewers will be able to see what we're talking about.

David Leary: [00:08:15] If you go to Slide 13. So they basically are thinking about the total addressable market and they're viewing this whole entire thing is like a $312 billion global market.

Blake Oliver: [00:08:28] Wow, that's a lot of money.

David Leary: [00:08:29] So that's how they're viewing the world, right? But then if you go to Slide 14, they kind of break it down by each thing. Either it's payroll or QuickBooks Capital or banking, right. Or consumer personal finance or consumer banking or payments. And they break down all these different things, for example, marketing. So this be like the MailChimp that's a $28 Billion total addressable market. And to it it's just a teeny little sliver of dark blue on there.

Blake Oliver: [00:08:57] So yeah, so we've got these light blue lines which represent the total market for that segment. And then there's the Intuit current revenue, which is like almost nonexistent compared to what's possible.

David Leary: [00:09:08] Exactly. Like they have business tax that shows us a $10 Billion addressable market and there's not even a line for Intuit yet right on that. And so in the grand scheme of things, Intuit it definitely views themselves as we haven't won anything, but we've just started.

Blake Oliver: [00:09:24] Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like, even accounting, there's no lines to show exactly where they're at right now. It's very you have to sort of just eyeball it, but it kind of looks like they've got a few billion dollars of revenue in that area and they could go up to 27.

Hector Garcia: [00:09:38] I wanted to add that the reason why they see the market is so big, it's also because they shifted away from being just an accounting and tax software company to being a sort of small business operating system company. So they now view banking as part of the industries that have opened up. You know, what they've seen, what the total market is, and banking is lending products and payment products and actual banking products like deposit, having an actual virtual bank account, that's a thing like QuickBooks no longer sees that as a little opportunity. They see themselves foot in the door in the industry, and now they see the entire industry as something that they can potentially capture. Also, e commerce, again, QuickBooks and Intuit, we're not looking at e-commerce as an entire industry. They were looking at it as a sort of a type of customer, but now they're looking at all the potentialities of e-commerce together with marketing and email marketing with MailChimp. So now they look at, you know, the possibilities of providing marketing services or marketing solutions, ecommerce solutions and banking solutions. So those three things primarily has just opened up their point of view of how big the addressable market is.

David Leary: [00:11:03] This episode of The Cloud Accounting Podcast is sponsored by Kanopy. Did you know that Canopy has a partnership with the IRS? This means that you can now use Canopy to pull your client transcripts. The integration is approved by the IRS and can be configured to automatically pull transcripts. You can easily monitor if and when something changes. Now, here's the best part. Once you have your clients transcripts, you can use Canopy's notice feature to help you resolve your client's notices. Canopy has a library of 350 plus pre-built federal and state notice templates that provide an overview of the notice type, as well as walk you through the recommended steps to resolution and Canopy can even create an auto fill your IRS response letters. Canopy also integrates with QuickBooks Online zero FreshBooks Crm's form builder, spreadsheets, calendars, email and Zapier even have a mobile app centralized file management filled with PDFs, a client portal, task management, and the list goes on and on to get a demo of Canopy and to receive a $40 Amazon gift card. Head over to Cloudaccountingpodcast.com promo slash canopy That is Cloudaccountingpodcast.com Promo forward slash canopy. Why? Yeah. And if you scroll down to 20.

Blake Oliver: [00:12:13] Into its strategy, basically.

David Leary: [00:12:15] It's a picture of a globe and it has pretty much what you'd argue is the three major business units of Intuit and then all the interested parties. Maybe the better word is stakeholders. Small businesses are stakeholders, consumers are stakeholders, self employed are stakeholders, accountants, developers, financial institutions so that banks the mega platforms. This is your apple, your Google is these these companies that are way bigger than even intuit educational institutions. Right. And governments. What I found was interesting about this as far as like all the stakeholders, what used to be there in historically for Intuit, one of the stakeholders at the table, part of the strategy was always shareholders, right? And in the olden days of Intuit, it was basically employees, shareholders and customers. And then it's grown to like all these other interests. But it's interesting that shareholders isn't even on this part of the strategy, which to some extent, if they just do everything that they want to do and shareholders are going to benefit from this, they don't have to be a part of the decision making process and their strategy really shareholders will just get the benefits of the strategy. But that notice that that they weren't listed in the strategy anymore. Hmm. And then what else? Oh 26 and 28 have some interesting numbers. Let me jump into their.

Blake Oliver: [00:13:29] Intuit's platform that powers prosperity.

David Leary: [00:13:33] So this is kind of another slice of the similar data, but with more of the numbers. Uh huh. And they're viewing 10 million small businesses. And this is, I think, where they're at now.

Blake Oliver: [00:13:43] So 10 million small businesses, 93 million consumers.

David Leary: [00:13:48] They're doing $2 trillion in invoices. Mm hmm. Quickbooks basically per year in about 270 billion in payroll. So it's pretty impressive numbers. Yeah. On that front. And then Tate had some other interesting numbers on it as well. So 28. So when you've talked about earlier about that slide that like 312 billion was the total addressable market. The really thing about the core, so not not the ecosystem apps, right, but the core is about an $81 Billion market. So they're looking at QuickBooks Online. The subs are up 11%, the ecosystem is up 34%. I might advance, the subscriptions are up 40%. And this is what Hector was talking about, like bigger businesses, power users and that post desktop world can adopt, right. And use this. And the other one is TurboTax Live. 20% rise in customers, 1 billion in revenue, 3% revenue growth like they said we've talked about before on the show with $1 billion in revenue, TurboTax or Intuit is a top ten accounting firm.

Blake Oliver: [00:14:49] Right? Because TurboTax Live is that offering where you can sign up for TurboTax? You pay a little extra, actually quite a bit extra, and you then get access to a CPA or an enrolled agent inside a TurboTax who will help you complete your return. So it's this assisted experience. And at what point does that become an accounting firm? They may not call it one, but that's what it's becoming or it's it it's at least the online equivalent of an H&R BLOCK or, you know, one of those kind of retail tax prep shops.

David Leary: [00:15:25] And if you really want to get a feel of everything Intuit's doing to do to win, like the whole tire company, go to Slide 44. It's not going to come through in the video too well because it's you probably need like a super gigantic monitor.

Blake Oliver: [00:15:38] Oh, no.

David Leary: [00:15:39] Screen.

Blake Oliver: [00:15:40] This is like one of those slides that we used to see at conferences. I think Doug Slater used to put one of these up where it would be like every app in the QuickBooks Online ecosystem. And at first it was easy because it was a few dozen and then it became hundreds and hundreds, and then you couldn't read anything anymore because it was it.

David Leary: [00:15:57] Was meaningless what the slides doing right. Here's all the different end products, right? Is that dark green bar, right? This is your mail. Trump's your QuickBooks, the TurboTax is all the QuickBooks products. Credit Karma, Pro Tax Write the developer portals. That's kind of the front end facing applications. And then the next part is the capabilities that they enable, right? Tax filing, tax prep, small business bookkeeping, payroll, right is the work right. So it's work finance, marketing, commerce, money, enterprise expertise, right? And then it starts getting into that next layer of like customer growth, core capabilities, AI, infrastructure, data. So it's basically the stack is all moves all the way down to like the developer environment and enterprise systems. So this is essentially the architecture of Intuit.

Blake Oliver: [00:16:39] Yeah, I don't know, slides like this kind of just annoy me because it's like, Oh, we're so great, we're going to do everything. They're just trying to impress people with like.

David Leary: [00:16:47] I think too much words we're going to do. Like this is what they are today, which is kind of it just shows how big of a machine.

Blake Oliver: [00:16:54] Yes. So so in other words, Intuit does a lot of crap. Yeah. Is what they're saying. Yes to investors into it. We do a lot of stuff.

David Leary: [00:17:01] Yeah. A big, huge poop emoji. We do a lot of this. All right. 70 slide 70.

Hector Garcia: [00:17:05] Too much. Too much, in my opinion, sometimes. But yeah.

David Leary: [00:17:08] So I 72 is amazing because check.

Blake Oliver: [00:17:10] Okay, this is the.

David Leary: [00:17:11] One you speak to this because you sent us this slide. You had attended the the deck live I think, that day and you sent us a slide before they were even done.

Blake Oliver: [00:17:20] So So I'll describe this for our listeners. So what we're seeing here is a graph over time showing the breakdown of online QuickBooks Online customers and desktop customers. And it starts back in 2012 when it looks like desktop was twice as big as online, and then it proceeds through fiscal year 17, 2017, up to 2022. And the share of online paying customers just is on this exponential growth pattern, right? It's the line curving upward into the right. And the the blue shaded area represents all those customers and it just keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And meanwhile, desktop is slowly declining to the point where it's now it looks like it's as as small as online was back in 2012. And online is 7.1 million customers, while desktop is just 1 million customers.

David Leary: [00:18:15] So this is not just QBO either. This is like all their online products. I'll wrap it up together. Okay. Got it. Small business products, anyway, so milk's got it.

Blake Oliver: [00:18:24] Okay. That's why.

David Leary: [00:18:24] There's that. That big jump, the straight up and down line is because that's the MailChimp customers coming to that phone.

Blake Oliver: [00:18:30] I see. So that's all their online customers across all of their online products. So. So, Hector, you're a big proponent of desktop. As you said at the beginning of the show, you wish Intuit would invest more in their desktop products, but it seems clear as an Intuit investor from that perspective, you're like, you want the online to grow, you want into it to grow online. This, to me, doesn't look good for desktop.

Hector Garcia: [00:18:54] I think. Very true. Very true. So where we stand today, according to the graph, is we have 7 million customers paying some sort of web platform product. Right? So it could be QuickBooks Online payroll, QuickBooks Online and probably all the other options in the ecosystem. Mailchimp, right, Maybe QuickBooks Self-employed. And then the the 1 million represents just QuickBooks desktop because I'm not sure what other software could be counting if they're accounting, lesser tax desktop or something like that. But that's minuscule anyway. So very true. So I'm not a proponent of desktop. I just love when a tool helps me do my job efficiently. That's all it is. And QuickBooks Desktop has done that so well for so long that I have nothing but love for it. And QuickBooks Online has done a great job at expanding the potential things that a user can do attach to their online product with integrations and additional services. But it's not as powerful as a tool to do my job as QuickBooks Desktop, which is why people think that I'm a proponent of desktop. I'm not. I will prefer to have all my clients in a cloud based application. Our firm is 100% cloud. We have hybrid workers. I work from home doing COVID. We were more than ready, you know, to serve our clients. So I'm not in no way, shape or form. I want people to downgrade to be stuck in a desktop environment. I just love QuickBooks Desktop because it's a great tool. That's all it is.

Hector Garcia: [00:20:29] It's really that simple. But there's there's just not going to be a significant amount of innovation and investment coming into desktop into it's very clear saying we're going to continue to support it, quote, as long as our customers continue to pay for it. And one of the interesting things about this is this year they raised the price to $550 per year for QuickBooks Desktop Pro. To give you a general idea, back in 2012, at the beginning of this graph, QuickBooks Desktop Pro was a $200 product that it was a lifetime license. It was supported for three years. It was supported for three years. But you could do 90%, 95% of the stuff, pass those three years. So fast forward to a world where the value proposition in desktop is just not there anymore. I know a lot of people want to go to the cloud, but most people go to the cloud because of the promise of efficiency and working better, working faster and avoiding redundancy. And some of us are still struggling to completely see all the tools, all the value that desktop, but they're getting there. I've talked to enough people into it and, and product managers and and just folks that are building QBO and it's amazing the stuff that's coming down the pipe. So I'm very, very bullish on online and bullish on where online is going. I want to embrace cloud and online, but like I said before, I just wish the pace of innovation was a little faster.

David Leary: [00:22:02] Yeah. So this this chart talks about like so 16% of the year over year growth is just from customers migrating from desktop to QBO. So essentially in a decade, there's half as many cube desktop customers as there were a decade ago. Well.

Blake Oliver: [00:22:16] I'm not sure if that's right, David, because I saw that too, and I wanted to bring that up. So it says 16% year over year growth in customers migrating from QuickBooks Desktop to QBO. So is that saying that like the number of users that move every year from desktop to QBO has increased 16%? Is that what it's saying.

David Leary: [00:22:32] Or that's true or is it 16% of the growth is is.

Blake Oliver: [00:22:37] I, I think it means that that more desktop customers every year are switching from desktop to online.

David Leary: [00:22:43] So so so it's going even faster than it's accelerating 16% of the previous years in the previous year and the previous year is even more people switching over. So then if you look at this chart, is it five years, six years, like eventually it's going to be pretty close to 10,000. And now a year ago I mapped half down in Australia and he comes kind of a little bit more from the enterprise space in Australia and he works in that that that end of the market and he said there's old desktop enterprise companies that they barely exist anymore, but they just charge a lot, like it's almost like the peak oil, like nobody's ever going to pull out that last drip of oil out of the ground. Right? It's.

Blake Oliver: [00:23:19] The price will just.

David Leary: [00:23:20] Increase where people are just going to. They'll just keep raising the price. And these people that refuse to move will just pay the price. They might be paying $1,000 a month. Subscription fees for QuickBooks Desktop one day, who knows?

Blake Oliver: [00:23:30] So some more data points.

Hector Garcia: [00:23:32] Go ahead. Now, David, that happens now QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise Cloud ified, you know, on a on a host on a hosted is it's over $1,000 a month.

David Leary: [00:23:43] All right. Well, let me sense.

Hector Garcia: [00:23:45] Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Sure. Well, what I'm saying is there is a still a really interesting addressable lower echelon of the mid-market higher echelon of the small business paying for QuickBooks desktop enterprise on the cloud. And this graph that shows number of users, it's not showing revenue because QuickBooks Online advance is at $200 a month product, which is $2,400 per year. Math is right. Yes. And QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise 30 users, which is similar to what QuickBooks on advanced has with 25 users. It's 9000 per year. So even though the graph is and this is why I communicate to you guys, the graph is showing a growth in number of businesses moving to the cloud. It's not showing how much money QuickBooks is making with the enterprise product that people still choose, choose to renew every year because you have to renew every year. They choose to renew it. They choose that over going to QBO, they choose that over going to net suite. So there's a lot of satisfied QuickBooks Enterprise customers, which is the bulk of the customers I serve.

David Leary: [00:24:55] Yeah. And I imagine they'll keep they'll keep raising the prices right to where the revenue from QuickBooks desktop from a contribution margin to intuit it's going to stay the same, but the the number of users is going to keep going down. They're just going to keep raising the prices.

Blake Oliver: [00:25:09] Well, that's what Hector was just saying with pro, it's it's basically factoring in inflation more than double the cost it used to be ten years ago. They've doubled the price for this same product. Right. In in ten years and maybe.

Hector Garcia: [00:25:23] Plus annual subscription. So it's not just it's double entry point oh annual subscription.

Blake Oliver: [00:25:28] So that's like triple really if you upgrade to.

Hector Garcia: [00:25:30] Say every three years, Right.

Blake Oliver: [00:25:32] Yeah. So doubled and then tripled. Yeah. So, so some more data points from here on the slide. 80% of their total revenue now is subscription based. That's a humongous shift. More than 80% of new QuickBooks subscribers choose online over desktop. We mentioned the 16% year over year growth in customers migrating from desktop to QBO. Only 12% of customers remain on QuickBooks desktop versus 68% ten years ago. 100% of desktop sales are now a subscription. So even though they're still selling desktop software, it's all subscription based. So it's just it's really incredible. I wish they broke out the revenue numbers. They stopped doing that at a certain point. And it's just this is one of those things where I like I like to complain about accounting standards. Why don't we have an accounting standard that says you got to break out your revenue by online and or subscription and like this would be much more useful information than knowing customer numbers, right?

David Leary: [00:26:23] I think that's like, do I know we're in tech? I thought I thought they reported the revenue from QuickBooks Desktop versus Revenue group was in line. I think they.

Blake Oliver: [00:26:30] If you can find it, I would love to know what it is because that would answer this.

David Leary: [00:26:32] Question anymore of how many they added each quarter like they used to because okay, it's hard to if you're a few quarters where they had 300,000 coming on a quarter on QuickBooks Online. So then if you come out and say we only had 100,000, it's still an impressive number, but it's not as impressive. And I think they pulled back on some of those numbers. This absolute The Cloud Accounting Podcast is sponsored by Jirav. Are you still using Excel to create budgets, cash flow, forecast revenue models and hiring plans for your fast growing or mid to large sized clients? Jirav is an all in one financial planning and analysis solution that maximizes the collaborative value of forecasting, budgeting, reporting and analytics, giving you and your clients the confidence and speed needed to drive their business forward. The best part of Jirav is that it eliminates the constant rework that your team or clients must do every time data or variables change need to adjust projections based on hiring two more employees. Just connect your payroll app to Jirav and your numbers are updated. Need to account for marketing and spend changes the impact of new leads or upcoming deals. Just connect draft to your CRM. And of course, Jirav connects to all the cloud accounting systems you love, including QuickBooks Zero Net Sweet and Intact Draft knows that firms that offer advisory services that include budgeting, forecasting and PHP ANDA are 34% more profitable. That is why Draft has an accounting firm partner program that guides you step by step through the process of adding PHP to your firm. If you're ready to become an accounting firm, partner with Jirav, head over to Cloudaccountingpodcast.com promo slash Jirav That is Cloudaccountingpodcast.com promo for j i r a v Plan Smarter, Faster and together with Jirav, I'd say jump to slide 78 to talk about QuickBooks Live for a little bit.

Blake Oliver: [00:28:16] Yes. And then we I want to play that clip. So let me know when I should play that clip about TurboTax live. Well, we'll.

David Leary: [00:28:21] Go after this, because the last slide I have is slide 93, which is a bit more about TurboTax market share. And then we can perfect that. That makes sense. So QuickBooks Live essentially there viewing this is it's another $28 Billion bookkeeping category. They're basing it off of two major things. 40% of small business owners say the worst part of owning a business is the bookkeeping and taxes. And then they have another proof point, which is essentially 30%. 33% of accounting firms say growing their business is hard, right? Growing their own firm is hard. And so there's this scale thing. If if the demand's there and the accounting firms can't keep up. And so there's $28 billion just sitting there for the taking.

Blake Oliver: [00:29:01] Yeah. So that's that's a I've never heard this stat before. 40% of small and medium businesses say that bookkeeping and taxes are the worst part of owning a business. The worst part does that does that go does that say something about the does that say something about how we're serving them as accountants and bookkeepers like that they say it's the worst part about owning a business. Or is that just the nature of bookkeeping and tax and accounting? That's sort of a rhetorical question, but feel free to answer if you have an opinion.

Hector Garcia: [00:29:32] My opinion is it depends whether you ask one one that has an outsource accountant and one that doesn't. Because if I was a business owner and I didn't have the help and had to do it all myself, then of course I would think this is the worst. But if I had already mentalist myself that I will part away with 500 bucks a month or whatever to have this thing outsource to a professional, my feelings towards that would be a lot different, I think. And also to throw tax in there, it's a little bit unfair because bookkeeping and tax are two different things. Bookkeeping is organizing your books so you understand where your business is and tax. Is this Sure where I have to give my money to the government. So to to bundle up whether you love taxes as a business owner and bookkeeping and put it in the same stat, it's a little bit misleading in my opinion it is.

David Leary: [00:30:22] But for a small business owner, it's all the same. This is where we get as accountants and bookkeepers like, well, that's bookkeeping and that's tax for the small business owner. It's all the same. Like right, because it's all the same.

Blake Oliver: [00:30:32] Most small business owners only do bookkeeping to do their taxes. They would not do bookkeeping if they didn't have to do it to do their taxes. And I think that's the segment that Intuit is going to capture.

David Leary: [00:30:43] And to reinforce Tester's point, though, about the people that have maybe ProAdvisor are working with a professional, right? They're going to be the other 60%. But this goes to what Intuit said for a long time. 40% of the QuickBooks Online users aren't working with anybody. They're just out there by themselves. 38% of the exact number is so this makes sense, right? Like the people that have our listeners helping them run their business, they don't think that's the worst part of their business. But if you're doing it on your own, which those are the people not listening to this podcast, those small business owners like this is why you're struggling. They need to find a Hector, right? We should make sure to say that.

Blake Oliver: [00:31:19] Go find Hector with with QuickBooks Live into it plugs that gap. They're filling that enormous gap between people who need help and accountants who want to help them, but struggle to grow their own business and find those clients.

Hector Garcia: [00:31:36] And I do want to add something about QuickBooks Live, because I think it's important to keep in mind and this is all speculation, but it's one of those things that you don't know if it's true, but I know it's true. I don't think anyone has made any money from QuickBooks Live. Like if you actually were to do a pal and I know this is sacrilege, you know, from the stuff that Ron Baker teaches about about systems thinking and that sort of thing. But, you know, if you were to separate QuickBooks Live as his own bookkeeping business, there's no way that they're making a dime.

David Leary: [00:32:06] So I think it really is.

Blake Oliver: [00:32:08] But isn't it $1,000,000,000? Well, TurboTax Live is $1,000,000,000. Now, do we know what QuickBooks Live is in terms of revenue? Do they break that out? David?

David Leary: [00:32:16] I don't think I saw that broke out. But here's what I would agree with that is that this goes to what they announced in their earnings report and the conference call, how they kind of until they actually get good and innovate on the product, they can't really grow it and make it profitable. And they're still there in what, year three of QuickBooks Live. It's still young. It's going to be five, six years before it becomes a machine that's profitable. Right? So I agree with Hector on that thing. But I also think.

Hector Garcia: [00:32:41] And David, my conspiracy theory is that QuickBooks Live is not being built to try to build a huge accounting firm. Quickbooks Live is the platform that QuickBooks is building so they can learn what humans do and they can use machines to do that work. They're going to have to they're going to observe bookkeepers, internal and external, with metadata, specific data or whatever you want to call it. They observe how we how people behave and react with transactions, how they classify, how we classify. I think what Intuit is doing is they have a learning mechanism for the judgment pieces. The humans are doing, and eventually they're going to program that into the code to make their QuickBooks Online app more quote unquote automated. And this is not like an agreeable way to take over the industry. They're just trying to make the software better. And the way you make software better is to watch humans do it and and do the, you know, get frustrated with it and then annotate what's frustrating you. Can we automate this with an app? Can we automate this with a function? Can we automate this with a trigger? So what I think QuickBooks Live ultimately is it is the lab, you know, it's the Google X testing round for the AI of the future where QuickBooks Online is going to be a much, much more streamlined tool where the bookkeeper and the accountant is going to be doing a lot less of the minutia and much more of the judgment work. So that little by little, looking at what we do day to day bookkeepers and trying to figure out what are the little things that we can take away. And this has been happening with bank feeds, with automatic categorization, with bank rules. Bookkeepers are not noticing that this is happening because it's happening so slow, kind of like the frog, you know, with the boiling water, it's happening so slow where all these little tiny improvements are coming to QuickBooks Online. And because they're not sudden, they're not realizing how much better their lives are by using QuickBooks Online or whatever, you know, many cloud platforms as well.

Blake Oliver: [00:34:39] It's I agree with you, Hector. I agree with you, Hector, that that into it's going to learn a lot from QuickBooks Live and improve their product with it. But I really do believe that at $200 a month at volume, at scale, with the capacity that they can build by just having people on demand on their platform, they can make a lot of money, a lot. David did the math at one point on one of our shows, maybe it was episode 200 or something. It was a long time ago and we figured out that they could have just an incredible amount of revenue from the millions of small businesses that aren't being served by bookkeepers today and are doing it themselves but would happily pay $200 a month.

Hector Garcia: [00:35:18] And the QuickBooks Live bookkeepers are getting paid 35 bucks an hour plus benefits in some cases. And and just by doing simple math, I know that cost plus is another sacrilege to do here. But but by simple math, I don't think the average bookkeeper is spending less than 5 hours per account. So when you start doing the math on what it costs, not just to have the employees, just the infrastructure, the systems, the managers, the supervisors, quality control, customer service, it's very difficult to make any money with it. So I think that $200 might be a subsidized rate for the learning part. And if they do increase it to five, six, seven, eight, there's the profit.

David Leary: [00:35:57] Yeah, that's the whole ecosystem. That's the difference. This is the advantage that Intuit has versus you cannot do your own bookkeeping company for 2 hours a month. You can't intuit can because they can sell you MailChimp, they can sell you payroll, they can sell you all these other things that you can't sell them as an account or bookkeeper. And that's you're right, it's a little bit subsidized. But I do agree with Hector, like this is helping Intuit because they own a bookkeeping firm, they're learning bookkeeping problems and they're going to solve bookkeeping problems, which really benefits everybody. Eventually. We all get the benefits of that.

Blake Oliver: [00:36:27] Some data points from this slide that are important to point out. 55% subscriber growth sorry, an increase of 55% in subscriber subscriber growth as a result of improved service delivery that they are claiming. They also are saying that they had a 1.5 times increase in books done on time. So they are learning, they are learning how to do this. And you know, where I think they're going to find success is and I don't know I don't know exactly what their promises that they make to customers. I don't think that for $200 a month, though, you're getting like you're getting like a promise, like I'm going to reconcile all your accounts for you every month. What they're getting is I'm going to help you reconcile your accounts and I'm on demand. So if they do it as an on demand kind of subscription where you get help when you need it, then I think they can make a lot of money because it's just a matter of capacity. Like Hector, You love Ron Baker. I love Ron Baker. He's all about building capacity in accounting firms and selling capacity.

David Leary: [00:37:28] I wonder how many people don't even use it. It's like a gym membership, right? Like, right. It sounds exciting. Then you never hit the live button and talk to anybody. You're just going along. Yeah. So I don't think they're proactively reaching out to you, right?

Blake Oliver: [00:37:38] No. You have to reach out to them.

Hector Garcia: [00:37:41] Yeah, right. And. And the other thing that that makes me think of QuickBooks Live is the hardest thing about this business, about the accounting software business. And David, you probably know this firsthand is it's very difficult for the customer to know the difference between a glitch with the system and a glitch with their way. They're doing their accounting. Yes, right. Like like understanding the difference between software errors and user errors. It is such a blurred line. So when somebody calls QuickBooks for support, 99% of cases, there's a problem with the way they imported the data. There's not a problem with the actual system. Like most people, when I talk to people saying, Hey, I couldn't reconcile my account and QuickBooks was no help. Well, QuickBooks is not there to help you reconcile your account. They're here. They're there to make sure that their software has all the buttons working correctly. You need to know which button to press, in what circumstance. So that blurred line creates a lot of consternation between the software company and the user. And what QuickBooks Live really is, is the way to blur that line in disguise of service. So what they've done is they essentially increase the cost of the software in such a way that they can afford more people with field level experience to assist their customers. So QuickBooks life ultimately is a desired price anyone wants to charge for their software, but having the desired talent to support their customers to meet all the expectations. That's the really interesting part that like the vision of QuickBooks Live, assuming that that's part of it, but that's the way I like to see it, because if I were to sneak into it as my competitor, I'll make it very difficult for me to to be partners with them as an accountant myself.

Hector Garcia: [00:39:27] So I think I don't think QuickBooks Live long term, again, I'm not apologizing for them if they are, you know, five years from now, you could tell me I was wrong. I don't think that they're trying to build an accounting firm that trying to build a world class accounting software that has talented people on staff that can answer every question, whether it's a software glitch or a user glitch. And if they get to that level that all of a sudden the accounting software does become a little bit of the replacement of what the traditional bookkeeper was. And the traditional bookkeeper now has to figure out how to serve their customers in different, more creative ways and more valuable ways. Because trust me, no one hires a bookkeeper because they value how great they are at data entry, right? They hire the bookkeeper to take away the shore and hope that the bookkeepers point of view as a third party watching the whole thing brings into light important information that they need or or to support this gut feeling decisions that the small business owners use every day. So again, most people are not excited about hiring a data entry person. They want to hire someone that can provide insights and take away the minutia away from them.

David Leary: [00:40:38] This episode. The Cloud Accounting Podcast is sponsored by Zoho. I'm sure you've heard of Zoho before. We've probably even mentioned Zoho CRM or Zoho Books on this podcast in the past, but you really know about Zoho. Did you know that Zoho offers an entire suite of solutions to run your firm, including a CRM expense tracking bookkeeping, a full office suite, a support ticket system, and workflow automation? Did you know that Zoho offers a suite of solutions for your clients bookkeeping, including bookkeeping, inventory invoicing, subscription management, and a checkout app? Did you know that Zoho has an accountants program? Did you know that Zoho advisors get free access to eight Zoho applications and a dedicated account manager? If you want to learn more about becoming a Zoho advisor, head over to Cloudaccountingpodcast.com or promo slash Zoho. That is Cloudaccountingpodcast.com Promo for Access. Zoho. So I like how you talked about competing with an accounting firm. So Slide 93 really kind of shows, especially on the tax side. That Intuit is not taking away business from accounting firms on the tax side.

Blake Oliver: [00:41:46] Really? Okay.

David Leary: [00:41:47] So this is a ten year. A chart of how many tax returns are filed with the IRS and 2012 it was 146 million and now it's 163 million. And it breaks down how much, how many what percentage of those returns are done by a CPA or professional? How what are done by tax stores? How much is done by TurboTax, other DIY products, and then manual manual. Basically, it's gone from 8% of all these are manual paper returns down to.

Blake Oliver: [00:42:13] 1% filing pen and paper.

David Leary: [00:42:15] Yes, it's very, very bottom. But if you really look at this graph, CPAs and tax pros are actually that's grown over the last decade slightly. It's not growing. It's tax stores and manual. And that's where TurboTax growth is over this last decade, is they're taking market share away from the tax stores. They're not taking it away from true CPAs.

Blake Oliver: [00:42:35] H&r BLOCK, Liberty tax, those kind of places. They've lost 2%. The CPAs or professionals have grown 0.6%, and TurboTax has grown the most 4.3%. Actually, the other DIY is also 3.1%. That whole market, 7.4% DIY software has grown 7.4% in a decade. It's amazing.

David Leary: [00:42:58] Manual. The paper people dropped 18%, so they're taking it from the manual paper people and the tax stores.

Blake Oliver: [00:43:05] Well, so here's the thing, though, David. Once TurboTax has eaten all of the returns from those tax stores, where are they going to go next to grow?

David Leary: [00:43:14] Well, yeah. And that's and that that Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:43:18] And that brings us to. Can I play the clip now? Yeah.

David Leary: [00:43:21] Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:43:22] Okay. So this was a clip into it, did a bunch of videos as part of their Investor Day, not just a presentation. And thank you to Jason Staats for featuring this clip in his newsletter and Lorilyn Wilson for tweeting it out and that's how I saw it. So let's play the clip now.

Intuit Investor Day Clip: [00:43:42] Let's talk about how we're expanding the platform into new verticals. Soon, TurboTax will support business taxes for partnerships and SE Corp federal returns with both a do it with me and full service model solving a pain point for our small business customers and expanding our assisted tax TAM from $21 Billion to $31 Billion. Because we leverage capabilities across the Intuit platform from our professional tax business, QuickBooks Live expertise and our virtual expert platform. We were able to create a full service business tax solution in a matter of months rather than the years it took to launch our first live offering. Now, the experience for business tax is almost identical to what you just saw with TurboTax live full service. But let's take a look at the collaboration experience, this time from our experts perspective. Once an expert receives a new customer, they'll receive all the documents that the business provided. When reviewing the documents, the expert can see new building improvements were made which could result in a credit. The expert can easily send a message requesting any additional information. Once they get the information, they can confirm the customer qualifies for the credit and finish filing right within the virtual expert platform. These are just two examples of a series of live offerings that exist today. Revenue with TurboTax Live reached $1 billion in fiscal 2022, up 30% year over year. The opportunity ahead is large, with a $21 Billion assisted tax preparation market for individual returns and a $10 Billion business tax market. We're just getting started. Thank you.

Blake Oliver: [00:45:35] So $10 Billion business tax market. And what you just heard there is that TurboTax and TurboTax Live are getting into SE Corp and partnership filings. That's huge, because until now, last time I checked, which was just earlier this year, there has not been a good DIY option for business tax returns. And so if you own an SX corp, if you have an LLC, you need to file a partnership return. You've pretty much had to go to a pro and now there's going to be a DIY option. And that I think could chip away at those returns that are being filed by pros. That could be a true competitive.

David Leary: [00:46:16] I might do my corp with it, frankly. Yeah. To me, I view it as the same. I'm typing the same crap. I would have to type into TurboTax se Corp product that I type into some portal. It's the same stuff. So if I'm going to type all this in a portal, I must just type in interpret to actually be done.

Hector Garcia: [00:46:35] As a taxpayer, as a bona fide person that understands how to do business returns. I can tell you two things. One, I would say about half of my clients don't need me. They can go to TurboTax, they can go to DIY. They just they just afraid to screw it up. And this.

David Leary: [00:46:54] Whole.

Hector Garcia: [00:46:54] Afraid to screw it up concept is something that Intuit will capitalize on it, especially if they offer the return and a guaranteed audit guarantee or something like that. The minute a big company slaps that, hey, you know, if you get audited will represent your type of thing. That's going to really, really big time chip away from the accountants. But at the same time, at the same time, honestly, even though a lot of my revenue comes from these returns that I shouldn't be doing, and I'm basically stuck doing them because the customer doesn't want to lift a finger, that's that's time that I wish I was spending helping them do other things, like finding more clients or increasing their prices or improving the quality of the service offering or innovating their business model. There's so much, so much time we spend and depend on that revenue for our practices that we forget how great it would be. A world where accountants don't do taxes. What we're accountants don't do bookkeeping, where we're actually being paid for our knowledge, not for our finger or our our keystroke skills. So like David says, a lot of these things are basically just moving keystrokes that were already entered in QBO into the tax software. Yes, there's some important things like, you know, bases and, you know, especially depreciation. And are you are you paying the owner enough salary? I mean, there are things that accountants know tax law related that the business owner won't know. But the bulk of that work, it's minutia, it's data entry, it's moving numbers from one side to the other. And that needs to stop.

David Leary: [00:48:30] So so as a firm owner sector, do you see kind of a great so right now there's QuickBooks Live or TurboTax Live and I'm working with a professional that works for into it, but almost a version where it's like I get some help from my accountant. So instead of having pro series and all these other professional tools and all these tools you use as a professional accountant, I'm doing the majority of the data. Instead of using these portals, I'm doing a lot of work, the legwork for you, the minutia, the typing stuff in into a TurboTax level product. It's like TurboTax with my accountant. It's like a big heart, you know, or something like that. And then you come in and wrap up the return. Do you would you as a professional, is that something that interests you or is that like or am I just nuts?

Hector Garcia: [00:49:11] Yes, it interests me the way a micro robot doing surgery in a part of the body that a human being can't access interest. A neurosurgeon. The neurosurgeon looks at these surgical robots as a tool to cure the patient. They don't look at them as, Oh, that that machine is going to take my job. And I think the problem that we have as accountants, as a firm owners, is that we see all these great tools and enhancements that, yes, they're marketed as a service and they're marketed as a replacement to our services. True. And it is chipping away at our other revenue. True. That's all true. But we got to start seeing these things as tools to be able to help the patient at the end. So for Intuit to win or any software company to win with these tools, they have to have a cohesive partnership strategy where the tools are available to the customer. And they also have open windows for the consultant to collaborate. Because when you can do that, when you can enable if somehow TurboTax Live open opened it up for a CPA that's on the accountant on the accounting side, sorry, the customer side, the customers ally, right. They have log in and see what TurboTax live is doing and collaborate with TurboTax. Now, that doesn't happen now.

Blake Oliver: [00:50:31] Well, no, I mean, you if you want to if you want to collaborate with clients on TurboTax filings, you just sign up as a CPA or an E for TurboTax Live and you get paid by Intuit $35 an hour.

Hector Garcia: [00:50:43] I'm not talking about being subcontract. I'm not talking about being an Uber driver for Intuit.

Blake Oliver: [00:50:47] Well, that's what they want to build.

Hector Garcia: [00:50:49] Right? But they can build that all day long. But I can build relationships with customers in the ground that into it can. I can do it in social media, I can do it in YouTube. I can do it locally in a chamber of commerce. And what I want is for Intuit to aggressively market. I don't care the aggressively market at DIY service, but give me a gateway to collaborate with you so I can be on your side of this. The problem is that they're building this live products as a replacement of the accountant instead of as a as something that they can use in conjunction with the accountant. And this is the flaw that QuickBooks Live had when it was released is that it was released almost almost hidden from the accountant's view, you know, like accountants. I thought about this and they felt so heartbroken by this. Instead of Intuit saying, Hey, here's QuickBooks Live and here's a strategy, or how you can collaborate with us and QuickBooks via revenue sharing, via access to their tools, whatever it happens to be. So that's the problem that the software company that has been a partner for so long, they puts out these services which are great. I think they're awesome, great alternatives, great service and great sources of innovation for the company and the software, But they're never presented as something that can co-exist with the accountants. They say you can coexist because this customer will never talk to you, but that's not true. What's true is this customer, the live customers and the firm customers with virtually will eventually converge. And it's in that conversion that accountants and professionals want to feel that the software companies have their back and they need to open up these tools and mechanisms for us to work together.

David Leary: [00:52:31] And it's just some outside of Intuit data point on this because ultimately and we've talked about this before, this is Uber's problem and all these other companies problems, they can't just be an engineering company because there's people involved. It's a service company, it's a service offering. And for Intuit to do this, they can't engineer this. They have to have people involved and lots of accountants and bookkeepers either as employees and as partners. But there's a review on Glassdoor. Hopefully a lot of our listeners know what Glassdoor is. Glassdoor is like an anonymous write your employer site. So if Hector has maybe a bookkeeper that works for him and he or she's not happy, she could go out there and read a review about Hector as a manager or boss type of a thing.

Blake Oliver: [00:53:09] Or if she's loves working for.

David Leary: [00:53:11] Hector, she could do a five star review as.

Blake Oliver: [00:53:13] Well. Exactly.

David Leary: [00:53:14] Yeah. So this is a review That was somebody forwarded to me. It was from September 26. It is a software engineer at Pilot. So pilot is the QuickBooks Live style competitor Jeff Bezos invested in them, etc.. And mind you, this is a kind of a disgruntled possibly employee, right? He's recommending that you don't work there as an engineer, but there are a couple of nuggets that he he or she said in this this article here and some of the nuggets that were in here is very blatantly sentence. This is not an engineering led organization. It is a service oriented one. And then in another sentence, despite being a 400 plus company, engineering maybe accounts for about 30 of those employees. Right. So here's this this thing, right? Like, oh, we're going to we're going to automate bookkeeping, we're going to automate accounting. That's what everybody wants to do, right? And the reality is it's they have hundreds and hundreds of employees basically doing manual work for small business clients to some extent. And then the other end of their sentence is that this person says it's not clear to me if the founders actually want to be a tech company or an accounting firm. Right. It's starting to sound like it's really hard to do both. A little bit.

Hector Garcia: [00:54:24] David, you predicted this. I remember when the whole bookkeeper fiasco came out and you said more and more companies are going to say they're going to automate an AI, and it's just a bunch of people in the background trying to do it, you know, as fast as possible. Meanwhile, they breach up to the point where they get the actual tech that automates these things.

Blake Oliver: [00:54:43] Well, I think it's a lot easier for a software company like Intuit to add services because they can build rails around the services that are delivered through their software. And so really, people just become another app in your app stack and you are essentially programing them. And we see this with Amazon, Amazon workers and UPS workers are driven by apps and metrics and they are essentially programed these days. And that's what the QuickBooks Live offering is going to be. That's what TurboTax Live is. They make it so easy to to provide the service we know doing it ourselves quick, you know, providing bookkeeping services, providing tax services. It is really hard to stay on top of everything, to get everything you need to serve customers. There is so much going on, even with a simple engagement where it's something that somebody could do with TurboTax themselves, it's really hard. But a software company can get rid of most of that by creating defined systematic processes. So I think Intuit, because of that, is going to gobble up the low end of the market. If you are providing bookkeeping services for under $500 a month for a client, or if you are doing tax returns for, say, under $1,000 for a client, Intuit is going to be more competitive. They're going to be able to charge a lower price, provide a better service simply because they have the tech. Just like if you're a small store selling online, it's really hard to compete with Amazon. And you end up putting your stuff on Amazon because that's the easiest way to get it out and deliver that two day experience to your customers.

David Leary: [00:56:31] Speaking of having the tech, did you see that Kabbage filed for bankruptcy?

Blake Oliver: [00:56:36] Kabbage filed for.

David Leary: [00:56:36] Bankruptcy. Yeah. Really? It's there. They remember. American Express bought them, but didn't buy the PPP loan servicing part of the business. Mm hmm. Right. And we've talked about this before, that the amount of they processed almost the most of loans, like $7 billion worth, right? Yeah. As far as the tech companies go, but a huge higher percentage are fraudulent. Right. And so essentially, they it's falling apart. But there's a company that supposedly Blake had all the tech. They had all the tech. They had all the data.

Blake Oliver: [00:57:06] Right. So so this is amazing. This is like this is PPP fraud. I don't even know how to categorize this. So Kabbage made a ton of money. Facilitating fraudulent PPP loans. They then got an incredible valuation sold to American Express.

David Leary: [00:57:25] They did not buy the carved.

Blake Oliver: [00:57:26] Out carved out that liability into its own company. And so I'm sure all those Kabbage executives just escaped with all the money. And now, now, whoever is now that Kabbage entity that owns all those PPP loans that were fraudulent is just going to go under. It's kind of genius. I mean, in an evil way, right? Evil genius kind of way. That's amazing.

David Leary: [00:57:52] And then another committee that has a lot of technology is another app kind of related article that is in relation to all of this. Right? So QuickBooks Online has their self employed product. And in theory, that's for all the gig workers, the DoorDash is the Uber's, etc.. Uber just announced that they are launching here in the US market debit card checking account through. They're partnering with a company called Branch App dot com. And so now in the Uber app, your driver's app, right you're your full blown stack, you have your income being reported, you have your tips being tracked. Now you have expense side. What did I spend on gas, what I spent on insurance. All of these things go into your checking account and they have a cash flow and reports so. If you think about it, if you're an Uber driver, you're never going to use QuickBooks Online self-employed for somebody, look into it. What's the point? And so this is why Intuit has to go after this bigger market share, because people are going after Intuit at the same time, right? It's being cut at a different We talked about this last week. Two other companies outside of the space are offering bookkeeping services. Right. Intuit's going to compete because people are coming after into it. Maybe it's a way to think about that.

Blake Oliver: [00:59:00] So we only have a few minutes left. It's about time to wrap it up. Hector I want to talk about a new project that you and I are collaborating on with Ava. Lara, we are going to be doing, I think it's an eight part series called The Focused Firm, and it starts in two weeks. We're doing it. The first one is going to be October 21st. And did we pick a time? I can't remember if we picked a time yet. 12. It might be on right after The Cloud Accounting Podcast 1230.

Hector Garcia: [00:59:32] That was Pacific. 230 Eastern. Okay, 230 Eastern.

David Leary: [00:59:36] We'll overlap. This could be a mess.

Blake Oliver: [00:59:38] Well, no, we're going to have a hard stop with The Cloud Accounting Podcast because then I'm going to go over and get on with Hector and we're going to do this new series called Focus Firm, and it's going to be released as a podcast, as YouTube videos. We are going to allow people to join live and ask questions. Hector, tell us about what this series is going to be.

Hector Garcia: [01:00:00] Yeah so so I have a lot of reached out to us and said can we do something different? That's a sort of a service to the accounting professional community. Hector, can you come up with something interesting? And I've done this course called the Focused Practice Workshop, which is a private course. I do for like four or five people at a time. They pay thousands of dollars and we do the sort of life coaching for a couple of weeks. I kind of help them, you know, get to the next level, right? But we do it in a hands on one on one fashion. So I took a lot of the content from this and I'm rewriting it into a podcast and we're doing a mini series. So imagine you got eight little books, right, that tell you how Hector runs his firm or how Hector looks at accounting and how how I've seen what works and what doesn't work from my perspective. And also Blake is going to be able to chime in. So we're going to talk about pricing and employee retention. We're going to talk about branding. We're going to talk about tech stock. It's basically like MBAs in a box for accounting professionals, from my perspective, from my very skewed, weird world perspective.

David Leary: [01:01:08] But instead of an NBA, can I get credit for this?

Blake Oliver: [01:01:13] Yes, you can download the earmark CPE app on the Apple App Store or the Android Google Play Store. We're going to turn these live streams into CPE courses, free courses, so you'll be able to get accounting CPE and learn from Hector his his best practices for how to build a modern firm. So I'm really looking forward to doing this with you. Hector I think that's it. David Where can people find you online?

David Leary: [01:01:41] I'm on all the socials, just @DavidLeary.

Blake Oliver: [01:01:44] I am at Blake, T, Oliver and Hector. Where should people follow you?

Hector Garcia: [01:01:49] Hector Garcia, dot com.

Blake Oliver: [01:01:51] Thanks, everyone who joined today. Great to have you in the chat. Great to see you. And if you want to get notified of future The Cloud Accounting Podcast live streams, subscribe to our YouTube channel Search for The Cloud Accounting Podcast. Hit that subscribe button and then you'll get notified when we go live by everybody.

David Leary: [01:02:10] Time for the classifieds. Are you still paying 1% for A to receive money from your customers? If you collect, you can pay as little as $0.30 per transaction you collect as to async to both Xero and QuickBooks Online and gives you the features that the accounting systems lack, like installment plans, secure automatic payment, set up invitations, automatic receipts, and allows access to other credit card merchant providers beyond the ones that come with the accounting system, giving you more control over the service fees that you pay. For more information and a 30 day free trial, go to you collect biz a.s.a.p. That's you collect busy a.s.a.p.

Blake Oliver: [01:02:49] Hey, podcast listeners, it's blake. And i wanted to let you know about a new show I'm working on with cpa slash comedian greg kite and blogger slash former CPA Caleb Norquist. It's called Oh, My Fraud. And it's a podcast all about financial crimes. That's right. A true crime podcast for accountants by accountants. Caleb and Greg are going to come together every couple of weeks to unpack their favorite frauds and explore the circumstances, psychology and interpersonal dynamics involved. They also fully indulge in victim blaming the defrauded widows, orphans, infirm and feeble minded. Because who can resist? If you fancy yourself a trusted advisor or prefer your true crime with spreadsheets instead of corpses? Listen to this show to learn what to watch out for and to keep your clients, your firm, and even yourself safe. To subscribe, go to Oh My Fraud or Search. Oh My Fraud. On Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

David Leary: [01:03:47] Want to get the word out about your newsletter, webinar party, Facebook group, podcast, e-book, job posting, or that fancy Excel macro you just created. Why not let the listeners The Cloud Accounting Podcast know by reading a classified ad at the show notes for the link to get more info?