The Accounting Podcast

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David Leary: [00:00:00] Regardless of what we technically call it. I think most of us can agree that all signs are pointing to an economy that is getting tighter, which means your small business clients will need your assistance in evaluating the spending of every dollar. How would you like to be the hero to your clients? By helping them to get free payroll until January 31st, 2023. I repeat, free payroll until January 31st, 2023. Stay tuned to hear more from our sponsor OnPay later in the episode.

Blake Oliver: [00:00:31] The PhDs are who are screwing up accounting theory because they've never had any real world experience. And they they they create complexity that doesn't need to exist to justify their existence.

David Leary: [00:00:43] I ran into somebody at QuickBooks Connect. She teaches at her university or college. I don't know where she's teaching at. That's not the point. The point is the textbook that they have actually has some screenshots of QuickBooks in the text, the accounting textbook. But the faculty told her of the business department she's not allowed to teach QuickBooks to these accounting students. Coming to you weekly from the OnPay Recording Studio, this is the Cloud Accounting Podcast.

Blake Oliver: [00:01:15] Welcome to the Cloud Accounting podcast. I'm Blake Oliver.

David Leary: [00:01:17] And I'm David Leary.

Blake Oliver: [00:01:19] And we are back from QuickBooks Connect 2022. David, how are you feeling? Well.

David Leary: [00:01:25] Usually recording Fridays We hit record on Friday because we had a creators Meetup group that we did Friday morning at QuickBooks Connect, and then you and I were really aggressive. Let's just record an episode before we get on the airplane to leave QuickBooks Connect. So we didn't do that Friday, and then I think we just rested on Saturday. Then I texted you on Sunday to say, Hey, I got a cough and I pushed us out to an hour Monday morning, 9 a.m.. We're going to try and record. I got my cola here. I'll try to push through. See what.

Blake Oliver: [00:01:52] Happens. Good. Yeah. Thanks, David. I am. I consider myself very lucky. I feel fine, which is amazing. Normally I'm wrecked after days and days at conferences because you're on your feet for 12 hours, or at least the way you and I like to do it. We're on our feet for 12 hours or more every day, and it can be kind of exhausting, but it's so much fun. And I would highly, highly recommend to anyone listening who has never been to a QuickBooks Connect or a Xero can go to one of those or go to both, whichever your flavor, whichever your preference go to that. They are fantastic. And it was so great to see people who I've seen for ten years at these events and also new people. You know, I met Taylor, who's a CPA, who just started his own practice earlier this year and is doing great. And it's so exciting. Awesome.

David Leary: [00:02:43] Well, it's the event's so big and it feels so fast that you don't get to see everybody, you know, and you're at the airport. Then you run into somebody when you're leaving town. There's just too many people. You can't talk to everybody. Now, we did have a party which helped. Everybody came to us, which made things easier, and that was a huge success.

Blake Oliver: [00:03:00] And joy, that was that was a first for us. We had a party. And David, you deserve so much really all of the credit for putting that together along Chris.

David Leary: [00:03:10] Christie from our she does.

Blake Oliver: [00:03:12] All the amazing events coordinator Christie did it but David you know I mean you hired her so you take the credit and and we had like I don't know over a couple of hundred people in the Chandelier lounge at the Cosmopolitan. I felt like we have arrived.

David Leary: [00:03:29] We took a lot of photos. My jaw was hurting from smiling. We took we took.

Blake Oliver: [00:03:33] A lot of photos. If you want to see photos of the event, follow us on Instagram at Cloud Assist Pod or follow me. I'm at Blake T Oliver and you can see pictures of the event. It was a lot of fun.

David Leary: [00:03:47] If you're at the event, take your photo, upload it to social and Tag Cloud Accounting podcast and hashtag QBE Connect so we don't miss the other photos that were taken.

Blake Oliver: [00:03:55] One of the things that special for me about QuickBooks Connect in particular is the quality of the speakers. David QuickBooks always brings amazing speakers. Past speakers have included Oprah Winfrey, Shaquille O'Neal, Malcolm Gladwell Yeah, Martha Stewart. And this year they had three all star speakers Serena Williams, Simon Sinek and Malcolm Gladwell each for 30 minutes. And I wanted to talk a little bit about what they had to say because I really enjoyed their key points. And I have sort of three key takeaways from their sessions or their speaking that they did. How about you, David?

David Leary: [00:04:37] I don't have any special takeaways from what they were saying per se, but I think I'll cover the product side and the product announcement.

Blake Oliver: [00:04:44] Yes. Yeah. You you were very diligent and went around to the QuickBooks booth and looked at all the new product stuff, which was important because what was different about this event versus previous QuickBooks connects is that they didn't dwell on the product a lot in the keynote. And so that is how you are going to contribute back to our listeners is you did a tour of the booth with Ted Callahan. Yep. And summarized all the most important stuff to know because it really wasn't one big feature. It was a lot of small stuff, which I think is why they had they didn't give too much time to the product in the keynotes.

David Leary: [00:05:21] And I also feel like this because this, this Coopers Connect was just accountants and bookkeepers. It was not small businesses, so it allowed them to treat the audience differently. I feel like at previous QuickBooks Connect, some of the product features were very like pie in the sky. Like we get this chat thing that's going to drive your Tesla and you're going to chat and order your sugar before you're the baker that gets the office. Like it was that kind of remember that in this time it's like real features were rolled out real, real, real features. And the biggest thing that should be threatened by the features of the rolling out would be QuickBooks Desktop. They finally are rolling out features to finally put desktop to bed.

Blake Oliver: [00:05:59] Wow.

David Leary: [00:06:00] Stacked from multi. I don't want to go into it. Or do you want to talk about other stuff?

Blake Oliver: [00:06:06] Can I talk.

David Leary: [00:06:06] About the keynote keynote? And then.

Blake Oliver: [00:06:07] We'll talk about.

David Leary: [00:06:08] The product. Okay. That's the inspirational.

Blake Oliver: [00:06:11] Well, so I took notes. I was listening. I was paying a. Attention. And I have three key takeaways three things I learned at QuickBooks Connect. Serena Williams did a fireside chat. She said, I never regretted saying no. And that's the thing that stuck with me, because in the accounting profession, we really struggle to say no, especially when it comes to taking on clients. And so I thought, I hope everyone takes that away from the conference is. You are not going to regret saying no. We need to say no more. We have been trained in accounting to say yes to everything. To succeed as a staff accountant. As a staff auditor. You want to succeed. You say yes to all the partners, all the managers, all the directors. You're always a yes man and you just overwork yourself. But when you own a firm, when you go off on your own, when you're trying to build a modern practice, it's way more important to say no to. I would say a majority of the clients that are walking in the door, if not 80 or 90%, depending on how you've structured your whole marketing operation. And so I love that she said that. And you know what I loved about Serena, too, David, is how confident and calm and collected she was. She just seemed so at peace with where she is now. Did you get that feeling?

David Leary: [00:07:28] Did you ever watch her documentary? I think it was on HBO about two years ago.

Blake Oliver: [00:07:31] No, no, no.

David Leary: [00:07:33] She's so she's so down to earth and so vulnerable. Like, she might think about it like, you know, she's breastfeeding her kids and had no problem with cameras being in the same room. And, you know, I think she had a little like postpartum depression and she was upset, you know what I mean? Like, she just put it all out there and she was very vulnerable and that was just genuine. I think you don't get that fakeness from her when she's up there. Yeah. The one thing I thought.

Blake Oliver: [00:07:54] She got.

David Leary: [00:07:54] Good.

Blake Oliver: [00:07:55] I was going to say I got that feeling too. She talked a lot about her faith on stage and and had no issue doing that, and I thought that was refreshing.

David Leary: [00:08:04] And then I like how she keeps phrasing like she wants to be a, B, C, D, e, f, and a really good tennis player that won a bunch championships. Like, it's not like that's not her first. She does a lot of things and that's a piece of who she is.

Blake Oliver: [00:08:17] Well, we talk pretty frequently about diversity in the accounting profession, and Serena brought up the issue of diversity in cap tables, and that's one of the reasons why she is now pursuing a post athletic career as an investor, and especially in African startups. She believes that if you want to help Africa, you need to have diversity on these boards. But my number one take away from Serena is I have never regretted saying no, saying no. We need to say no more. Simon Sinek. Simon Sinek spoke and he always has a lot of insights. He's sort of just one of those people that comes out that's full of quotes. Fantastic author If you haven't seen his TEDx talk, go search for his TEDx talk on on. You know how to find your why. I forget the name of it exactly, but just search Simon Sinek and you'll go down a rabbit hole of YouTube videos. The thing that stuck with me that he said was he talked about his book, The Infinite versus the Finite Games or that concept. He wrote a book about this like finite versus infinite games. And the the main principle of that book is that businesses, people who play infinite games are the ones that win versus those who play finite games. And finite games are like like a sports game or like a tennis match is a finite game where there's two players, there's two teams, there's winners, there's losers. And unfortunately, a lot of people in business see business as a competition like that. We have to crush our competition, right? We have to win. And and Simon Sinek says, Actually, that's not true. Business is an infinite game. There are no winners and losers. We all can win.

David Leary: [00:10:02] Guidelines, but there really there's no there's no rules on creativity. You can do anything you want. Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:10:07] Yes. There's no one and unknown players. The rules can change and there's no winners or losers. And and so what what he said in that 30 minutes that stuck with me is he he said if you if you don't want to play a finite game I'm paraphrasing. If you don't want to play a finite game, ask yourself right. If growth is the goal in your business, what is the purpose of that growth? Growth without purpose is really a finite game and we're going from quarter to quarter trying to beat these results, trying to get these commissions. And I think any of us who have spent time in businesses know that the ones where everyone's just focused on a number. Let's take the Wells Fargo fake account scandal, for example. They were so focused on a number that it led to a really, really messed up culture in the company that ended up costing them billions of dollars.

David Leary: [00:10:59] And I mean, what happened with Intuit when they started going the way the way is squeezed, that diamond to get that last drip of blood out of it and it's kind of the same thing almost happened to Intuit in the past.

Blake Oliver: [00:11:09] Cost cutting over everything else. Right? That's that's a finite kind of game.

David Leary: [00:11:13] Next quarter's numbers. Next quarter's numbers, that's quarter's numbers. Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:11:17] Now, the thing that I wish that he had done that I also wish Malcolm had done was like, tie this more to accounting. Try like, actually, like make the leap and take your theory and apply it to what we're doing in QuickBooks. Right? A lot of accountants, what do we do? We produce financial reports, which are, you could say, a finite game. Scorekeeping quarterly reports, Annual financial report. It's right. That's a you could see that as a finite game. And if that's all that the business owners or the stakeholders are focused on, then ultimately that's not going to help you win as much as thinking bigger picture. And to me, what that means is thinking about how does your business impact? Everyone in the world. How does it make your customers lives better? How does it make your employees lives better? And if you do that, if you focus on that, right, if that's the the goal of your growth. To make everybody's lives better, to improve the lives of your employees and your customers, then you're going to have a much more successful company. And I think into it does that really, really well in their mission statement Powering Prosperity. I don't know if that's still what it is, but I think so.

Blake Oliver: [00:12:29] That's what it's been in past years. And I think that's really great, right? Like powering the prosperity of small business is a Simon Sinek style big picture goal that's more than just quarterly financial results. All right. Number three, last one, Malcolm Gladwell, he was the final keynote speaker. And and actually, I was I didn't know quite how to feel about what he said, David, because basically the the. The gist of his entire 30 minute monologue was good ideas take the longest time because they focus on the hardest problems. And he kept giving these examples of. Innovations that took decades and decades to actually succeed and to get through, like the one he started with was container shipping, container containerized shipping, which took 60 years before it actually took off. And it changed the world by driving down the cost to ship goods internationally to a fraction of what it used to be, right, by using containers instead of manually loading and unloading. And I kept thinking to myself, Oh no, this is yet another excuse for partners to say, Oh, we'll do the cloud thing next year. Right? Well, we'll put off moving to desktop next year.

David Leary: [00:13:41] But I think the. Yeah. The takeaway is good. Good is take a long time to adopt, but. I feel like it's he did reach a little bit and it's hard to really see. I can see how he tied things together, but it's not necessarily really fully true. I don't know how to say that.

Blake Oliver: [00:13:59] So you disagree with his his key point?

David Leary: [00:14:02] There's a lot of ideas and maybe its ideas go faster now in this day and age. I mean, the iPhone took off fast. Now, yes, arguably his starting point is, well, they tried to make something like that in 1984 and the Newton and, you know, yeah, I think it's a big jump, like how VCRs are the reason we get great TV shows nowadays on streaming. I think it's a bit of a jump like I get I get how that allowed writers and story writers. Now, people could record an episode. Now the stories don't have to be 22 minutes anymore. Stories could go on for multiple episodes. I see that's high. But nobody invented the VCR with that being the result. And that's what I mean by the idea. Right?

Blake Oliver: [00:14:41] Right, right. He's looking backwards and seeing this long path of an idea when nobody really in the moment knew what was going to happen at the end of it.

David Leary: [00:14:50] And nobody when Sony was building Betamax and VHS, Panasonic and they're building up VCRs and 1979, 80, 81, they weren't thinking like one day we're going to have 15 long episodes of TV shows on streaming services. Right? He connected that together and he connected it nicely. He's a great storyteller. But yeah, I don't know. But at one thing, I think in general, the scary part of this is earmark. That's what I keep thinking.

Blake Oliver: [00:15:17] What about.

David Leary: [00:15:18] Earmarks? Earmarks A great idea. Now, does this mean it's going to take his 20 years before people start using it?

Blake Oliver: [00:15:23] Well, I hope not. Update for our listeners, if you're not on earmark CPE, you can get CPE for listening to The Cloud Accounting Podcast and many other fine accounting and tax podcasts. Download Earmarks CPE on the App Store or the Google Play Store. We are an ASB approved, Iris approved and I don't think it's going to take us 20 years because we've already got almost 4000 people using the app. David 4000 people have signed up for the app and we've got hundreds of subscribers who are paying for the unlimited subscriptions. So progress to be made, but there are hundreds of thousands of CPAs out there in the world.

David Leary: [00:15:58] The finite number of them to.

Blake Oliver: [00:15:59] Go after. There are a finite number, but, you know, we've barely cracked 1% or not even that maybe half a percent. So we got a ways to go.

David Leary: [00:16:09] So taking a step back because you tried, you tried Serena and you accounting firms, you tied them, which is my assignment, says Simon Sinek accounting firms. How are you going to tie Malcolm Gladwell to accounting firm behavior other than that silly joke you made about not adopting class?

Blake Oliver: [00:16:26] Good ideas take the longest time because they focus on the hardest problems. Well, I guess it's that we've been doing cloud accounting. Let's take cloud accounting as the example, right, If I wish. Malcolm Gladwell come out and talked about accounting technology and where we are in the big scheme of things with that. How long's cloud been around? Now, Cloud accounting started with arguably with in the US with net sweet, and that's been 20 years down.

David Leary: [00:16:50] 20 years now.

Blake Oliver: [00:16:51] Yeah, 20 years. So we're probably still at the early days of cloud adoption in accounting if you think about it. Big picture now certain areas like client accounting services or bookkeeping were at 80% or more adoption rate. Quickbooks Online is now, gosh, Hector Garcia was saying it's like 15% desktop, 85% online in his view at this point. But then you look at tax software and it's flipped. It's the other way where 80, 90% of the market is still desktop based and there is no alternative other than Intuit's cloud based tax product, like they're the only one that's true cloud. So that could take a while. That could take another 20 years potentially. But I do think we are. You know, somewhere in the middle of it, because all of those ideas that Malcolm Gladwell talked about were ideas that took, you know, 30, 40, 50, 60, maybe 80 years at most. Right.

David Leary: [00:17:51] And so look at the spreadsheet, though, that took like the instant, you know, Lotus went to three. What was the original one? Copy books. I forget what was called the first visicalc, whatever, whatever the first ones were. Yeah. Except, I mean, it took off.

Blake Oliver: [00:18:07] It took decade five, six period.

David Leary: [00:18:08] Your period. It did take 20 years for Excel to get traction.

Blake Oliver: [00:18:12] Well, for a computer, for a personal computer, to be on every desk. Every desk in every office did take. I feel like 20 years or something, right?

David Leary: [00:18:21] Yeah, that's true.

Blake Oliver: [00:18:23] I mean, more maybe. Anyway, it made me feel better about the pace of things, right? Like, we just need to step back and look in the big picture. You know, things are changing, actually, quite rapidly. And that's good.

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Blake Oliver: [00:19:47] So, David. Enough about the keynote speakers. What about the product? Our listeners want to hear about the product changes. Can you summarize for us the key product updates?

David Leary: [00:19:58] Yes, I'm going to bounce around my brain from a little station to station as I summarize. So the first kind of place was on.

Blake Oliver: [00:20:04] You mean the stations at the QuickBooks at the.

David Leary: [00:20:06] Conference? Yeah. So I won't say what the stations are. I'm just in my brain as an outline as I go through this. So QuickBooks Online itself, there's just some core functionality added that we're for small businesses, but a lot of it's around the navigation and the UI to make it easier for small business owners. So you can change the menus. If I don't use payroll, just turn the menu off on my QuickBooks. I don't need that. So you can customize the menus, restore the menus, have control over that.

Blake Oliver: [00:20:30] And I can do that as the advisor.

David Leary: [00:20:32] Not yet. I understand. Okay.

Blake Oliver: [00:20:35] Got it. But I could go log in with them. Yes.

David Leary: [00:20:38] You can help them customize, right.

Blake Oliver: [00:20:39] And help them customize. They only see the menu options they need to see.

David Leary: [00:20:42] Correct. So you have that was a huge one was check images. This has been coming, right? They started downloading bank statements a few years back. Now they're playing check images. So if you have a bank feed and it just says check 4552, you pop over to the other tab and the check images are pulled down. You can see the check and you figure out what it's for. Right?

Blake Oliver: [00:21:02] So so is that every bank I mean, it's got to be only select.

David Leary: [00:21:05] Wasn't clear, but I feel like Intuit tends to use those verbiage. Where are we checked? We we 85% of the people that need them that kind of verbiage, like.

Blake Oliver: [00:21:15] Yeah, it's a big bank.

David Leary: [00:21:16] True enough, right?

Blake Oliver: [00:21:17] The big banks got it.

David Leary: [00:21:18] And then the other big part of that was bank feeds. So there's certain to when you first import your transactions, you connect to a new client and you have three months of transactions in a bank feed. You've got to sort what they're doing is you kind of have almost like a Tinder style wizard, for lack of better words for it and into it's really digging in with the machine, learning to the bank feed and they're like, Hey, this is USAA, but is this for an auto loan? Is this for insurance? Is this for a retirement plan or whatever it might be? And they're using that to figure out all the rest of your transactions. So it's almost like a wizard to get you through, get the small business owner through that. And then the other piece they're doing, which is long awaited right now. If you have rules, it'll try to apply the rules before it tries to do a match, which is silly because if you have a transaction you need to match, just match it and you're done. You don't need a rule.

Blake Oliver: [00:22:10] Yeah, I think that one got some good applause when they.

David Leary: [00:22:13] Had the most applause. Yeah, I think that. Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:22:16] So it'll match an existing transaction and then if it can't match, apply rules as opposed to the current situation which is flipped.

David Leary: [00:22:22] And then for the Accountant's edition specifically, everybody gets a QuickBooks Online Accountants edition gets your firm's books when I call it that. So you have your team and your clients and then you have your books for your firm. Historically, a lot of accountants have not used that either because they set up their bookkeeping as a separate QBO file before QBO existed, or they don't use it because the people on your team. So if you're on my team, you can get into all the firm's books. Or maybe you don't need to be in the bookkeeping of the firm. You do bookkeeping for our clients, right, Blake?

Blake Oliver: [00:22:54] Right. Right.

David Leary: [00:22:54] And so they added granular permissions for the firm's books so I can keep you out of the firm's books if I need to, because you don't need to be in them.

Blake Oliver: [00:23:03] Oh, and that previously wasn't possible. Was not done with access to the accountant edition. Could see the books on the firm. Yes, the firms. Oh, I see. Yeah, I wouldn't want that necessarily.

David Leary: [00:23:13] So think about payroll reports, things like that that you don't want the firms book. Yep, yep, yep. They did a lot with payments. They are now in April launching their own bill pay. So remember we talked about that in the conference call. We did get to see that they're launching their own bill pay built on their own payments rails.

Blake Oliver: [00:23:30] So now this is not available. Now it's coming.

David Leary: [00:23:32] Coming. That's correct. All this stuff is supposed to come out in the next six months. I think that's than.

Blake Oliver: [00:23:38] What wasn't clear to me was is this payments network going to be just ACH, just digital or will I also be able to send paper checks with Intuit's payments network that's going to replace this is replacing I take it.

David Leary: [00:23:54] The bill pay side is replaced. Emilio, It looks like it's going to have similar options. You're going to pick and you're going to again, you're going to pay on speed. I think that's the future. All payments will probably be free. You'll pay on the speed of the payment that you want. So they're doing that. They're doing some new loan products with QuickBooks Capital and then the receivable side, they're doing the network. So you have that end to end. If I add my QuickBooks, I create an invoice, I mail it to you, you opt in, it shows up a bill in your QuickBooks, right?

Blake Oliver: [00:24:22] So I'm a bit skeptical, I got to say, about this payment network thing, David, because Xero tried to do this and it never really got adopted. The idea was you could link up one zero file to another Xero file and then send bills and invoices back and forth directly into the files. The problem I had with this is it's only a small subset of invoices and bills that get processed this way. And then if I have an external processing workflow for all the bills that don't, it doesn't fit together. Now I have two workflows, so I ended up just disabling all of that and having all the bills go through PDF anyway because they had to get OCR into the system.

David Leary: [00:25:02] It's the same discussion we had at Sage Intacct with their new lockbox acquisition, right?

Blake Oliver: [00:25:08] Yeah.

David Leary: [00:25:09] Right. So all these accounting platforms agree to move these between each other. It's kind of not very useful. Yeah. Not every single books.

Blake Oliver: [00:25:18] Exactly. So like, I don't want to receive some of my bills inside of QuickBooks and then some of them via email. Then I now I have two different processing like inboxes. I want one inbox for everything. So I hope that they figure out a way where I can say, if I don't want to receive them in QuickBooks, I can have them go somewhere else. That would be ideal. Otherwise, most accountants aren't going to be able to use this. And maybe that's why we didn't really see a lot of applause. Like I think actually some of the stuff.

David Leary: [00:25:47] It the most because you have your firm's QuickBooks Online, all your clients are in QuickBooks. That might be the only that's the for sure that's.

Blake Oliver: [00:25:54] The only usage case. I can send my firm's invoices into my clients, but that's only if they're all on QuickBooks, right? If I've got a mix of clients on different systems, I can't use that anymore.

David Leary: [00:26:04] That's true.

Blake Oliver: [00:26:04] So, yeah, I mean, there was it was interesting. There were some feature announcements that just fell really flat. David Do you remember that in the keynote like that people were not really excited about this payment network and I think the Intuit folks were surprised by that.

David Leary: [00:26:19] Yeah, I think it's they went pretty fast over it. But I think you're right. It's a wait and see on that payment network stuff.

Blake Oliver: [00:26:26] You know why? It's because all the accounting firms already have a solution. Ap Automation is the one thing that most firms have adopted in addition to payroll in the cloud and Bill.com right? We got Amelia, we've got these other AP providers, Even.

David Leary: [00:26:41] If it's not the business you're using, like CPA charge, they're doing other stuff to get paid and move that money, Right? Right. Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:26:46] So it's like this is not a problem that most firms have that this is solving. It's it's and I think that was why it didn't really get the applause. Do you remember what the biggest.

David Leary: [00:26:56] Maybe Malcolm Gladwell in the 20 year thing I. I remember in 1996 sitting through a slide presentations at Intuit of like invoices just moving from one QuickBooks to the other, QuickBooks and like, yeah, you know, maybe it's finally going to get here 20 years later, 25 years later.

Blake Oliver: [00:27:13] What was well, I'll let you finish and then I have a question for you. And then because. Because there was also commerce, right?

David Leary: [00:27:18] Yeah, that's what I was doing. So commerce, which is they really integrated very well. The trade acquisition, which I think was what, two and a half years ago. So trade gecko had inventory. Trade gecko was an commerce place. So if I have omnichannel, I have a Shopify store, an Amazon store, I sell medium shirts on the Amazon store, updates inventory in the Shopify store, and then wraps up those summary sales transactions into QuickBooks. Used to be a third party standalone app. This is now built into QuickBooks Online. So you have inventory and not only inventory, you have what you call, I say three D, but it's not three D, it's a when it's size and size and.

Blake Oliver: [00:27:56] Multidimensional.

David Leary: [00:27:58] Multi dimensional.

Blake Oliver: [00:27:58] Inventory, or they call them, they call it something else though. They call it. Yeah. It's like sizes colors in addition to like a skew.

David Leary: [00:28:06] Yeah. And you basically you feed that in, it's like an array and it creates all your items for you. If you already done that work in Shopify or Amazon will pull your items down into QuickBooks Online. And then QuickBooks Online will be your truth of inventory for those two channels. Now, right now they only do Amazon and Shopify. So if you have your own eCommerce store, yeah, it's maybe not going to work yet, right? They're not there yet. Hopefully they'll I'm assuming though.

Blake Oliver: [00:28:29] They want to go there though. They said they, they want that.

David Leary: [00:28:31] They want to get this they've added inventory. Did you mention entries.

Blake Oliver: [00:28:35] Did you mention this? The big thing for me was they're sinking the quantities back and forth. Did you mention that?

David Leary: [00:28:41] Yes. So they're doing that as well now. So you don't need a third party app to do that anymore.

Blake Oliver: [00:28:46] Right. Like, so right now, Amazon is Shopify and it'll sync the quantities between all the systems, right? So if I have the same inventory on Shopify and Amazon, QuickBooks will be my source of truth and will sync.

David Leary: [00:28:59] Yes, because sell your last medium shirt on Shopify, you need it to get off. You need to as sold out on Amazon, right?

Blake Oliver: [00:29:06] Yes. Yeah. So this is this is big, but it's not it's not public yet.

David Leary: [00:29:12] It's not public yet. It looks pretty close that it's getting very, very close. But it's very, very, very impressive. And prime, for most small businesses, you're getting very robust inventory built in. And I imagine when Xero gets done with locate integration, you're going to kind of see some similar inventory type functionality and Xero as well. And then the last thing they had was they created a bunch of new ways to migrate QuickBooks desktop. So right now, if I'm 100% cloud firm and I take on a new client that's desktop, I would have to go get QuickBooks desktop, put their file on it and jump through all these steps. Now, basically there's a place I upload their file and the migration happens through a virtual machine. And then when I'm done, now it's in QuickBooks Online. But the piece that I really like best that they've done and I feel like Hector Garcia said and this may be a good idea, is I swear Hector Garcia said this a decade ago. I'm not kidding about cross-selling. And he's like, They should just skin QuickBooks Online so it looks and tastes like desktop.

Blake Oliver: [00:30:09] And they have that now.

David Leary: [00:30:10] And they have that. So they can basically you can set a desktop setting and you get the menu on the left that looks like QuickBooks desktop software. You get the navigator, the QuickBooks desktop, you get all the high keys that you had in QuickBooks desktop. So it's like, there you go. 20 years later, a good idea showed up.

Blake Oliver: [00:30:29] Amazing. It makes sense, right? You're getting people to switch. The last thing that you need is an unfamiliar navigation experience. Just give them that map that everyone's so familiar with on the QuickBooks Home screen from desktop.

David Leary: [00:30:41] But in general, it felt like a lot of the functionality they were adding is real functionality that helps people put more clients on QuickBooks Online. There's it's a bunch of features. That's another excuse why you don't want to use QuickBooks desktop, right? It's tipping. It's tipping people over.

Blake Oliver: [00:30:58] Yeah. And that inventory once did. Was there any. Did they give us an idea of when it would be released this new?

David Leary: [00:31:05] Well, they had a little disclaimer on all the demos that said anything that's shown here will be released within 12 months. I think they have to do that because a revenue rack and all that kind of stuff.

Blake Oliver: [00:31:15] Yeah, probably something to do with being a public company and and giving forward looking guidance or whatever were the big disclaimers in front of every presentation. Like, you know, you can't rely on this on.

David Leary: [00:31:26] The desktop or whatever. Yeah. Before they start the presentation they were there. This episode of The Cloud Accounting Podcast is sponsored by ANP on pay is built for accountants, and with 30 plus years of payroll experience, they can be the payroll partner you can always rely on to get payroll and tax filings right for any client, even those with distinct needs like restaurants, farms and churches. When you use on pay to manage your clients payroll, you can balance that fine line between control and delegation for each client. Regardless, if you keep 100% control delegate payroll to somebody at your firm or hand off payroll duties to your client, on pay always takes care of all tax payments and filings, even the local filings. And with integrations with QuickBooks Online, Xero and QuickBooks desktop, you can use on pay across your entire client base regardless of the accounting GL they are using. I'm based Partner program offers free payroll for your firm discount to our Rev share and a dedicated support team of in-house payroll experts who will do all the heavy lifting from setting up your dashboard to adding your clients and their employees. They'll even enter any prior wages to make it easy to switch. So learn more about switching your clients to the award winning on pay payroll and HR, and to get free payroll through January 31st of 2023 for every client you switch to on pay. Head over to Cloudaccountingpodcast.com promo slash n pay that is Cloudaccountingpodcast.com promo Forgo NPA. Why be more confident about payroll with on pay?

Blake Oliver: [00:32:53] That was a great roundup. David. Yeah. Hey, what was the feature in the keynotes? What got the biggest applause? Do you remember?

David Leary: [00:33:01] I think I always the check images, which is huge. And then the other one. I cannot remember what else got a big a big applause if I remember all that. But you know, one thing I did like about the keynotes this year versus the previous year when it was recorded, all the executives were like robots. There's a script. It was really painful to watch the online QuickBooks Connect. This time I felt like Ted Callahan, Cassie, Ashley Sutter, They're all humans. And not only that, they're all a little self deprecating and even like, making maybe you can't crack jokes, making fun of QuickBooks in front of small business owners, but you can do it in front of Accountants and bookkeepers because you're all on the same page in a way. Right. And they made fun of their own support, right? And everybody giggled and they thought that was funny. And it was it was really good for them to come off very human.

Blake Oliver: [00:33:50] Yeah, I did feel that. I felt that throughout the whole conference. It felt very human. We didn't talk about the Expo floor. One thing that was very interesting that I've never seen before is the Expensify booth at on the Expo floor was not a booth, it was a bar. They just built a bar. And apparently it's a it's a recreation of the bar and their San Francisco office and it's just a round bar, like long oval shaped bar where you could sit. And they were serving juices and cocktails throughout the day. And it just had the Expensify logo on the top. And I've never seen anything like that. It was very creative, very fun.

David Leary: [00:34:32] And it's just like somehow Expensify always seems to stay one step ahead because at the previous conferences, the last 12 and a half months, all all expensive, I would have this double decker booth that was taller than all the other booths. Well, the way the this is a kiosk style. Your booth was in a kit, right? But all the booths at QuickBooks Connect were really tall. A huge.

Blake Oliver: [00:34:52] Wall.

David Leary: [00:34:52] Yeah, super tall. So you didn't have that visibility across the floor. So the Expensify bar. So here they go. Instead of having the tallest, they had the shortest, but it was open and approachable versus some of the other ones.

Blake Oliver: [00:35:04] I actually liked the turnkey booths and that's what they call them. When you go to a conference and all the booths are designed the same, they look the same. The conference organizers actually order those and then you as a vendor, you provide the specifications for the artwork and then it's all handled for you, which is actually really nice as an exhibitor because you don't have to bring all this stuff. Yes. And it creates this beautiful consistency in the experience. When you walk around the show floor, everything looks kind of the same as opposed to when you go to one of those exhibits where it's like everybody just brings their own stuff and it's all kind of random, more curated right type of experience. But that, that Expensify Booth was a nice different was very different than everything else. And yeah, the whole, the whole thing was just beautiful. It was much smaller than the Expo has been in the past, and I think a lot of sponsors were complaining that they couldn't get in.

David Leary: [00:35:55] This year there is over 1000 people on a waitlist.

Blake Oliver: [00:35:58] Possibly.

David Leary: [00:35:59] 1315 hundred.

Blake Oliver: [00:36:00] I heard 3000 accountants and developers in attendance and a waitlist of 1300 before they shut it off because they knew that they would never be able to get more people on the waitlist. So actually, a lot of people just came outside of the conference and came around the conference and and went to the after parties.

David Leary: [00:36:18] Were just hanging around. And the reason why they they apparently there was a second event happening at the same time. So they didn't have access to the space they needed to take on that many people at Aria, I could not get a firm commitment that the event was going to be held at ARIA again, no matter how many rumors I heard that it's going to be. But I think you may have mentioned it like the whole Vegas experience was just better for accounting bookkeepers.

Blake Oliver: [00:36:42] It's just so much easier to get to Vegas than to San Jose, and it's less expensive if you want to stay in a less expensive hotel and come over to the conference, like you can do that. There's just more entertainment. It's it's all contained. It's it's easy to get I don't know it had something for everybody. And so I hope they do it again in Vegas. And I really liked that they didn't have the small business owners. It was nice just having the accountants because I think Ted Callahan said this. It's very challenging to do presentations for both audiences. They're very different. And so you can just focus on the accountants and maybe they do something for the small business owners that's separate. I think that's good. The one thing I do miss is they had that wonderful market at their last QuickBooks Connect in San Jose when they had the small.

David Leary: [00:37:30] Business owner kind of style market. Yeah, Yes.

Blake Oliver: [00:37:32] And I actually bought my wallet, which I've had for years now. They're from like a Portland handmade leather wallet company, and they were a QuickBooks customer and that was kind of a cool thing. So I, I would love if they would even if they don't do the small businesses, it would be cool if they brought some of their key small businesses.

David Leary: [00:37:50] Small business owners, to.

Blake Oliver: [00:37:51] The event so that we could shop and get to know them.

David Leary: [00:37:55] I was like, how firms are bringing their teams? Yes, more and more so kind of rewinding. So ProAdvisor program, the ProAdvisor program is 25 years old. They're talking about. And they had this slide with like 405 pro advisors that have been in the program since day one. And that's.

Blake Oliver: [00:38:13] Amazing.

David Leary: [00:38:14] They bolded all the names of the 40 or whatever that were there at the event, and they stood up in the front and they were waving their arms around. Then they asked all the people that were at QuickBooks Connect for the very first time to stand up. And there was a lot yeah, maybe a thousand were there for the very first time. And it's because their firms, the firm managers, the firm owners are bringing their teams, which is like so good because if you don't include them, this people are going to leave your firm, right? They're going to quit accounting. Like, why should you use the firm or be the only one to enjoy this experience?

Blake Oliver: [00:38:43] When I was on the plane coming to Las Vegas, I was sitting next to this guy who was I thought he was going there for the rodeo. He kind of like had that look because the the national I don't even know it's world.

David Leary: [00:38:55] Rodeo.

Blake Oliver: [00:38:55] National.

David Leary: [00:38:56] Yes.

Blake Oliver: [00:38:56] Yeah. The Rodeo finals were in Vegas at the same time. So it was funny because you had, you know, 3000 accounts at the aria, but then you had tens of thousands of people in cowboy hats, you know, walking around in Vegas at the same time who are obviously there for the rodeo. And I thought this man was wearing his, you know, flannel shirt. And I thought, oh, he's got to be there for the rodeo. But no, he was there. He was going to Vegas for the first time for a conference of well drillers at the Mirage. Well, drillers and I think oil wells, you know, this guy like no water wells. He is a water well driller, a small business owner in Florida. And he was there and his trip was being paid for to come to this conference because his supplier gives him points whenever he buys equipment and supplies from his well drilling supplier. He gets points. And if he gets enough points throughout the year, they'll pay for him to come to the annual conference. And I didn't know this, but well, drillers have to get 30 hours of continuing education every year. And I thought, that's crazy. And he said, oh, well, it makes sense because we have to be really careful about water quality. You can kill a family if you dig into the arsenic well or whatever, right? So they got to test very carefully for water quality and that's what the C is for. So he comes to this conference for sea and to have a good time. And you know, it's 10,000 well drillers. And I said I tweeted when I got off the plane, I said, Hey, David, I think I actually stole this idea from you. Put on your QuickBooks shirt, go walk around the Mirage, and you'll have a whole bookkeeping business around well, drillers by the end of the three days, right?

David Leary: [00:40:29] Because they have people there. Oh, yeah. We use QuickBooks, but we're stuck on this. They'll just keep it. Yeah. Really? Totally, totally go. You know, each conferences if you're in. Yes.

Blake Oliver: [00:40:38] Yeah. So I don't remember why I started talking about the well drillers just now, but I thought that was fascinating. But it puts things in perspective, right? We have 3000 accounts coming from QuickBooks, but there's 10,000 well drillers coming to the Mirage for a conference.

David Leary: [00:40:55] This episode of The Cloud Accounting Podcast is sponsored by FreshBooks. I was on the FreshBooks website this week and saw this blog post. Five FreshBooks Features Accountants Love. So I figured let's share it with The Cloud Accounting Podcast audience. So without further ado, number one in-app estimates and proposals. With deep customization, you can create bespoke proposals for clients and even capture their e-signatures. Number two Pre-populated chart of accounts help you cut down on your setup times, and it helps clients feel confident when classifying their expenses. Three App Integrations Square Dropbox, HubSpot G, Suite, Gusto and Zoom time tracking allows your clients to take charge of their own time tracking payroll and make invoicing a breeze. Check out links you can require and collect payments up front to eliminate the need to chase clients that owe you money. If you want to learn about the benefits of working better together with FreshBooks, head over to Cloudaccountingpodcast.com Promo FreshBooks. That is Cloudaccountingpodcast.com Promo for Free HBO Case.

Blake Oliver: [00:41:59] So, David, was that it for QuickBooks Connect?

David Leary: [00:42:03] I think so. I did get a LinkedIn message from I'm going to say this last name and I might blow it. Heather Quit show, quit SKU, maybe I nailed that name.

Blake Oliver: [00:42:14] Know you might.

David Leary: [00:42:15] Have. And she sent a message on LinkedIn and she said, As members of the media, I hope you'll have a comparison of the various conferences this year. I'd really like to know how they differ from one to the next from your viewpoint. Obviously, product comparisons aside, but what's the actual demographics of the attendees? What's the sessions, what's the offerings? What are the conferences like? And now that we've done QuickBooks Connect, we could do this.

Blake Oliver: [00:42:39] So, David, I'll let you go first. How do you feel? We went to QuickBooks Connect, we went to Xero Con, we went to Oracle Net, Sweet Sweet World. We went to Sage Intacct Transform. We went to Was that it?

David Leary: [00:42:53] This year? Then you have a show, New Heights.

Blake Oliver: [00:42:55] Which is scaling new.

David Leary: [00:42:56] Heights, which is kind of. So we start with that one. So Skilling has multiple accounting goals there. So it was there, Xero was there, QuickBooks was not there, but a lot of the base QuickBooks people.

Blake Oliver: [00:43:07] Scaling new heights is the current biggest agnostic conference, so. Joe Woodard.

David Leary: [00:43:14] That's correct.

Blake Oliver: [00:43:14] Yeah. In the States, yeah. Joe Woodard Woodard group puts this on and he used to be pretty much QuickBooks only and now has opened it up. And it's the it's the premier agnostic. Agnostic. It's like it's like a religion, right. Which, which. Gl You use. Yeah. It's, it's open to anyone.

David Leary: [00:43:32] Yeah, it could be that way. So if I had to, like, recap all of them Oracle NetSuite, Oracle net suite seems is tends to be a lot of startups because a lot of startups take VC money, they push you that direction to Oracle and that's Yeah so you.

Blake Oliver: [00:43:46] Meet growth companies.

David Leary: [00:43:47] And they're CFOs and they're like we're going to hire 200 employees in the next six, six months and they're super hyper growth. It's very type-A personalities, right? I think they're using the product, right? And then you have the I'm going to say, like competition to implementers or resellers, right. That implement the.

Blake Oliver: [00:44:06] There's a lot of it, folks.

David Leary: [00:44:07] It's folks world there.

Blake Oliver: [00:44:09] Right. Because there's dedicated net suite administrators like the the pro advisors of networks are there but they are really more focused on less accounting and more on just general IT infrastructure.

David Leary: [00:44:21] Yep. And but you see a lot of the attendees are definitely people there to solve problems for their company. Yeah. Incorporate a lot of they make a lot of buy decisions so hey I'm having a timesheet problem. They select a payroll app or a timesheet app at the event in many cases. So it's weird, which I don't like about that. Well, I don't know if I liked or not, but I feel like all the sales guys that are at the booths are there to sell. And so if I try to just go up to make small talk, they do this and they realize I'm not a sell like get out of here you podcast Joker. It's just a bad vibe, right, that you get from them. I would say if you're going down now to Sage Intacct, Sage Intacct has growing businesses, but they're not those crazy hypergrowth. Like you'll meet people, they're a little bit more down to earth. Somebody. I was a cashier at the company. I've been working there for 12 years and then we merged with this other company and now we had to roll out Sage Intacct And they're growing businesses, but they're not in that insane growth, if that makes sense.

Blake Oliver: [00:45:14] More mainstream businesses, mainstream, not like high growth. We're going to take over the world kind of businesses and a lot of not for profits on fintech because that was one of their core industry verticals early on. And a lot of accounting firms because of the deep partnership with CPA Com that intact has.

David Leary: [00:45:31] And now what I saw with that is you have the controllers or CFOs of some of these companies, they're there, but the accounting firms actually bring their clients in to meet. So so a lot of people have virtual relationships and this is the event they they entertain their clients, they bring their clients. And so the firms are bringing the clients into the event so they can collaborate while they're there into the trainings together.

Blake Oliver: [00:45:52] And that's kind of unique because you don't see that at QuickBooks Connect or Zero Con or in that suite. It's really an intact where that happens.

David Leary: [00:45:57] Yeah, yeah. And then you have Xero Con, which is very similar demographic to the QuickBooks, that ProAdvisor demographic maybe slightly younger, I would say. This year I saw more QuickBooks people at Xero Con and vice versa. With QuickBooks Connect, I saw a lot of Xero people I could connect this year than ever before, and I think word's out right. I think I said this after Xero Con.

Blake Oliver: [00:46:19] What was funny was the QuickBooks folks who were like, Okay, don't take any pictures of me or don't post any pictures of me on social media. I don't want I don't want QuickBooks to know that I'm here.

David Leary: [00:46:30] Yeah, but, but it's a more mature view of the market and I think you can have clients on both. It's realistic. And I kind of joked with I think she was the VP of Xero in Canada. I saw her at the last day of Xero and I was like, Absolutely, you should support both goals because then you get to go to two amazing conferences.

Blake Oliver: [00:46:48] Yeah, exactly.

David Leary: [00:46:49] Exactly. Two gals.

Blake Oliver: [00:46:50] Yep.

David Leary: [00:46:51] And then QuickBooks is I mean, we just talked about who's at the QuickBooks Conference. A lot of pro advisors. You have your vase, I would say, at Xero. On and Coopers connect. The vendors are a little bit more approachable because it's a it's a long sale and it's not so it's not a 1 to 1 sale. I think when they talk to somebody, they're selling that product to that one business that's at Sage Intacct or or NetSuite. But in many cases that QuickBooks and Zero, you're selling to an accountant who has 50 clients. It's just a long sale. So that pressure is not there to make the sale instantly.

Blake Oliver: [00:47:22] It's more about just building relationships, relationships. And so it's more, it's more relaxed. Yeah, Yeah. I would say that QuickBooks Connect in zero. We're very similar this year in terms of the production value. They were both incredibly high production, just amazing events. The conference wrap party was fantastic at both. We didn't mention this, but QuickBooks Connect, they rented out the Jewel nightclub at the Aria and it was completely full. And that's probably the only time I will ever go to the Jewel nightclub, the Aria.

David Leary: [00:47:55] It's all branded up. It's all these new nightclubs have just LCD lights everywhere, so it's very easy for them to brand it whatever brand they want.

Blake Oliver: [00:48:04] It was like there were there were green numbers, like moving around all over the club. It was great. The music was great. I liked, you know, I really liked it wasn't too loud. Normally you go to a nightclub and it's way, way, way too loud. Like it's damaging. You're hearing because I feel like most of the people are already deaf who like go to clubs all the time, but they definitely like, we're cognizant of that and I really appreciate that. As a musician who watches out for my hearing, I didn't have to wear earplugs and I didn't come out with like my ears ringing. So health and safety standards. Thank you into it for following that, making us all comfortable.

David Leary: [00:48:40] Is that is that it? We beat it is around There's no.

Blake Oliver: [00:48:42] That wraps our coverage. Okay. We've got 15 minutes left. So I want to get to some listener messages that I've received, Patrick said on LinkedIn. Hi, Blake. It's great to connect with you. I've been listening to The Cloud Accounting Podcast Weekly since the beginning of 2022. I really like your and David's insight on what is really happening in the accounting world. I also had a nontraditional path to becoming a CPA. I graduated with a degree in mathematics and thought I wanted to be an actuary. I've never worked in public accounting besides moonlighting as a bookkeeper for about a dozen small businesses, I now manage the billing and accounting functions of a large law firm in D.C. It's an interesting perspective to see how a large non accounting professional service firm operates. I've also been using the earmark app to earn CPE credits. Besides The Cloud Accounting Podcast, one of my favorite podcasts is Oh My Fraud. Keep up the great work and look forward to the next episode. And dear listener, if you have not heard Oh My Fraud, you are in for a treat. Listen to Greg and Caleb talk about frauds. They dissect one in every episode and you can get auditing and accounting and a credit on the earmark app for listening to it. So it's very popular. Oh my fraud. Listen and subscribe to that. Just a warning to our listeners who are not fans of foul language. They do curse on that show. So you should know that before you listen. Joseph said he had a question. David And actually, I'd love to hear your response to this. Joseph messaged us on Instagram and said, Have you covered how to navigate client to factor codes when accessing client accounts, downloading statements, or reconnecting feeds? Please do it is my coworker and I is biggest annoyance over the last few weeks looking for an intelligent workaround rather than have staff send code to us or have to take client time to have them relay from their phone slash email. Have you dealt with this? David?

David Leary: [00:50:37] I have not, because I don't have a firm right right now, obviously. But I remember being at Bookkeepers. Com's conference and this was a huge discussion. They're kind of an open mic Q&A and this is a huge discussion. And when you listen to the workarounds people do for this, like, Oh, we get the text and we send it to a Google voice number, then the Google voice number, we use Zapier to stick into a Slack channel so everybody can just go get the code, the authentication code. But here's how you get around it. Switch to banks like Relay where everybody has their own log in and you don't have to deal with this anymore. Like that's the best option.

Blake Oliver: [00:51:10] It's true. Unfortunately, you're never going to get every client to switch to, you know, a modern bank like relay. So what do you do in the meantime if you can't? My workaround was like you said, David, use a Google voice number and use that for the for all the accounts. So I had one Google voice number and whenever we set up accountant access, we would put in that number for the text message verification codes and everyone had access to receive those and you could probably send a. You could probably figure out how to zap those into Slack or into Microsoft teams if you wanted to make it even faster. But we were on Google Apps, so it was easy. Everybody would just be logged in to the Gmail account associated with that Google voice number, and then they could just switch over to it and the text message codes would be in the inbox. Next, I think we just started forwarding them at some point to another like a Google group, an email distribution list. And so then that would just come through to everybody. And so if you had requested it, you would get it and you would know. And if you hadn't requested it, you would just ignore those messages. So you could do that with Google Voice, you could do that with RingCentral. I think sometimes, like some verification services have trouble with VoIP numbers or they used to. I don't think that's like so much of an issue anymore because now everybody is on VoIP.

David Leary: [00:52:28] Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:52:28] So yeah, that's my recommendation for those systems where you can't do that is use a shared number that forwards to some sort of email or slack. That's it for my listener mail. What do we want to talk about? David in the next 10 minutes? What is burning other than it's QuickBooks Connect? We got we got a story from our listeners that I could talk about, a local story. Scottsdale Startup facilitated massive amounts of pandemic related fraud. This was sent to me by.

David Leary: [00:53:03] I forgot.

Blake Oliver: [00:53:03] About this story. A number of listeners actually sent this over, so thank you everybody who forwarded it. This is highly relevant because for years we talked about PGP fraud. We were one of the first. Podcast really digging into the possibility of PGP fraud happening and all these reports keep coming out now, and we called it David. We knew this was going to happen to the LAX controls and we talked about it. We could probably go pull up clips where we talk about it, but.

David Leary: [00:53:31] What was this company? I think.

Blake Oliver: [00:53:33] So. So it was there's also a fintech tie in because they were based in Scottsdale. The company was called Blue ACORN. And I'm sure.

David Leary: [00:53:40] That correctly, like this is one of those companies that didn't exist, March of 2020. And then in April 2020, they existed in just I don't know how they did this so fast, spun up this whole company, and it's almost like they knew these loans were coming six months ago. It's very hard to build things. Amazing.

Blake Oliver: [00:53:55] They saw the opportunity. They saw the opportunity. And they, you know, to think about it, if you want to process PPP loans, you just needed like an online form, some sort of workflow software and then a partner bank or a number of partner banks where you could issue the loans and people saw the opportunity, they saw the lax controls around this program. It was started in April 2020 specifically to facilitate PPP loans for small businesses. It's called Blue ACORN, based in Scottsdale, where I live, and a congressional report. The Subcommittee on the coronavirus crisis issued a report that showed that blue ACORN, it looks like, facilitated massive fraud.

David Leary: [00:54:39] But let's be clear when that word gets thrown out, because they really didn't. Do the fraud. They just they made there. So checks and balances so easy that massive fraud was going through their system like. Right. They didn't commit the fraud themselves.

Blake Oliver: [00:54:53] Right. Well, what they did is yeah, they set up the system such that the folks reviewing the PPP loan documentation had 30 seconds to approve a loan. I mean, it was basically rubber stamping these applications that came through. And so they were maybe following the rule of the law or the regulations handed down by Congress and then the Small Business Administration. But they were not in spirit following it all. And yeah, so, you know, billions of dollars went through this company and now they've been investigated. Here's a stat blue acorns, partner lenders. So blue ACORN was the intermediary, you know, between banks and these PPP loan applicants. Their partner lenders facilitated almost three times as many PPP loans in 2021 than JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America combined. Yet the report found Blue Acre and only had one direct employee who assisted with processing PPP loan applications. One employee was processing more PPP loans than JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America combined.

David Leary: [00:56:01] It's insane. And right Kabbage to write Kabbage was pounding through I as well. Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:56:06] Kabbage did billions of dollars of loans loan reviewers working for Blue acorn, who spoke with the Congressional subcommittee, claimed they received, quote, no formal or informal training on loan underwriting unquote, and were told the review, quote, should take you less than 30 seconds, unquote. The report found blue ACORN gave priority to monster loans that will get everyone paid. So they were seeking those big loans that would get them the percentage, The big percentage, because these these lenders got a percentage of every single loan that they made. The incentive was really terrible, actually, the way it was set up, if you think about it. Blue Acorns Founders arranged PPP loans for themselves. In one application, one of the owners falsely claimed to be an African-American and a veteran, and they fled to Puerto Rico after getting many of their PPP loans.

David Leary: [00:56:59] So they committed fraud themselves in. So they did do their own.

Blake Oliver: [00:57:02] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

David Leary: [00:57:03] It just wasn't because they spun up something that no controls and they committed fraud themselves from day one.

Blake Oliver: [00:57:09] Yeah. And they made over $1000000000 to $1000000000 from processing these PPP loans. So imagine how many loans they issued if they earned $1,000,000,000. That's just a small percentage of the total loans. That's the one I think it was anywhere from one to a few percentage points.

David Leary: [00:57:28] Wasn't it. Wasn't it that.

Blake Oliver: [00:57:29] Yeah. So if they earn a billion they probably facilitated 100 billion in PPP loans and no review, essentially no review of any of that stuff. Amazing right in our backyard, David, Although they're not here anymore now they're in Puerto Rico and I wonder if they're going to get ever prosecuted for this. I feel like it has to happen. At least they're still in they're still in the US. So, yeah. Anything else you want to take us out with?

David Leary: [00:57:55] David? I got another Scottsdale story for you in your backyard. Okay. So a Scottsdale based company, again, it's another accounting firm with engineers or bookkeeping firm with engineers. They're called uplink. Uplink. They're what's.

Blake Oliver: [00:58:12] The what's the web URL.

David Leary: [00:58:15] You p line Q I.

Blake Oliver: [00:58:18] Oc.

David Leary: [00:58:20] Oh, they they're.

Blake Oliver: [00:58:20] Also dot com too. They have the dot.

David Leary: [00:58:22] Com dot com now as well.

Blake Oliver: [00:58:24] Okay. Ooh. I go to the website and I see this, this really cool dark mode website.

David Leary: [00:58:29] And machine.

Blake Oliver: [00:58:31] Robot moving little balls around with like cool charts and graphs that don't really mean anything.

David Leary: [00:58:37] So they come to the teacher.

Blake Oliver: [00:58:39] Welcome to the future of bookkeeping.

David Leary: [00:58:41] Yeah, sorry. Tech powered company that provides advanced bookkeeping solutions through data automation and machine learning. They announced they raised $5.6 million in seed funding and one of the investors with Live Oak Ventures, which is part of Live Oak Bank. Yeah, they're one of the biggest SBA lenders. And I guess what's interesting about this is and I feel like all these accounting pilots and the scale factors they all use is kind of loose terms where they say they have proprietary technology that comprehensively gathers and organizes and categorizes business transactions. But my brain is like how you're on the website right now, right? Yeah, Yeah. It's all these QuickBooks to you. Zero. They use all the off the shelf GLS off the shelf.

Blake Oliver: [00:59:20] Oh, they do. Where do they say that? They say that on there.

David Leary: [00:59:23] That's in the press release. That's in the.

Blake Oliver: [00:59:24] Press. Oh, in their press release.

David Leary: [00:59:25] If you scroll down, you can see all the stuff. So how, how do you have a proprietary system if you're built on QuickBooks? Well, isn't it staggering the data, not you at that point?

Blake Oliver: [00:59:36] Well, what they have built, I mean, if these screenshots are to be believed, is the visual interface that your clients would log into or that you would log into. That's pulling data from QuickBooks. And it's.

David Leary: [00:59:48] It's it's a.

Blake Oliver: [00:59:49] It's charts and.

David Leary: [00:59:50] Graphs and graphs maybe maybe a tool to categorize and categorized income.

Blake Oliver: [00:59:54] Yeah. And you know, you can always tell when these tools are built by developers because it's in dark mode, right? Which is something that an accountant would never choose by default. And it looks a lot like digits.

David Leary: [01:00:06] It just has a digits.

Blake Oliver: [01:00:07] Oh, yeah, Yeah. But it's like I don't know if dark I don't know if dark mode is what clients really want, like from their financials. Like it's the feel of it. Like it's a little jarring, right, to log into a system that's like dark mode all the time.

David Leary: [01:00:24] Yeah. Let's switch again. This looks like a dashboard app. It's funny how, like, dashboard apps are now becoming marketed as like automated accounting services. I don't know.

Blake Oliver: [01:00:33] Well, I think that they can be very powerful when they're paired with a really solid bookkeeping service and it becomes a really intuitive way for clients to interact with your company. And it's basically the next generation of a client portal, but it's hard to do it right. And ultimately. Most clients end up emailing you, right? And half the clients, maybe if you're lucky, half the clients will use the portal and half email you. Nobody has figured this out. Nobody has solved this yet. So it is, though. Something that differentiates you as a firm. And so if somebody is looking for a modern, super tech savvy bookkeeping service. I mean, they lead with the tech. Uplinks, machine learning technology and experienced professionals. Keep your book keeping up to date and transform your data into actionable financial intelligence all at the touch of a button. Yeah.

David Leary: [01:01:30] Then we communicate. If you're the small business owner, what the benefit is. Very well. And this is a lesson for all you accountant bookkeepers communicate what value you're bringing to the client.

Blake Oliver: [01:01:38] And they show the deliverable. And I think that's something that's really important is what is the client going to get every month? Even if it doesn't look as sexy as this, I think it's important to actually show them what they get so that there's there's it's more than just like I'm hiring somebody to do my bookkeeping. I hope it's happening, especially because I think business owners are getting smarter and a lot of them have gotten burned by hiring an accountant or a bookkeeper who then doesn't actually do the work. And they need some way to know that the work is getting done. And these types of dashboards help provide that assurance. It's a way of proving that the stuff's getting done. I can log in and see that you've done the work.

David Leary: [01:02:16] You should jump in and take a demo and show up in person. See, it's like it's got still.

Blake Oliver: [01:02:21] There, you know? You know, if we were investigative reporters, then, yeah, that's what I would do. So I think this kind of thing is neat. You know, the question, of course, is, you know, the execution is like, how good is the quality of the the bookkeeping where it's being done? Who are the people behind the scenes.

David Leary: [01:02:35] Making the calls?

Blake Oliver: [01:02:36] Yeah, Yeah. I mean, a lot of times that's the issue, is that it's a lot of cool technology, but. Not they don't have the people right. They don't have experience. And that's the challenge. But it's neat. It's neat to see like like Malcolm Gladwell says, it takes a long time. A lot of people trying. Yes. To build something like this and this whole accountant plus technology solution, is it going to be into it in QuickBooks Live? Is it going to be uplink? Is it going to be what are the other ones?

David Leary: [01:03:06] Just busy pilot. Yeah, it just goes on and on and on.

Blake Oliver: [01:03:10] Scale factor Oh wait, that one. Oh, and then crash and burn. Yeah, we did make it. So anyway David, we are at an hour, so anything else you want to say before we go.

David Leary: [01:03:17] Is a quick one. So AICPA is giving out $1,000,000 in scholarships for 2023 and they have a bunch of legacy scholarships to maybe an accounting student or a minority accounting student that's maybe going to become an accounting major, somebody moving from a two year school to a four year school, people that are going to become future CPAs. And, you know, the amounts on these are from like 3000, 5000, maybe 10,000. Right. But then they're offering PhD candidates 20,000 for their studies, because the reasoning is that the p h D students in accounting has decreased 40% over the last ten years.

Blake Oliver: [01:03:51] But we don't need more. That's all.

David Leary: [01:03:53] This. Exactly. When I read this, this what was going through my head. Do we need more PhD accounting students?

Blake Oliver: [01:03:58] Have you read any of like have you seen any of the papers that they work on? It's like, I can't I'm sorry if you're a PhD accountant out there listening, if you are writing an incorrect me on the record, But like most of this stuff, it's like the PhDs are who are screwing up accounting theory because they've never had any real world experience and they, they, they create complexity that doesn't need to exist to justify their existence. I mean, this is the this is what happens in a lot of academia. You know, you write papers to write papers because that's how you get tenure. Right.

David Leary: [01:04:33] And I don't know, I ran into somebody connect. She teaches at her university because I don't know where she's teaching at. That's not the point. The point is the textbook that they have actually has some screenshots of QuickBooks in the text, the accounting textbook. But the faculty told her of the business department she's not allowed to teach QuickBooks to these accounting students.

Blake Oliver: [01:04:55] I think traditional education is ruining accounting, and it's complicit with the big accounting firms and ruining the accounting profession. And it's not just in accounting. It's like all sorts of fields have failed to advance because traditional education and universities are just these monolithic organizations that they're going to be disrupted. They're already being disrupted. They're not going to survive. Most of them are not going to survive The demographic changes that are coming in this country with the population drop, that's about to happen and it's happening now. So get ready for the next 50 years. It's going to be wild as always can.

David Leary: [01:05:30] Get your go get your scholarship money, though, if you can get some of it.

Blake Oliver: [01:05:34] If you would like to rant at me and tell me I'm wrong. I love hearing that I'm wrong. I love hearing different opinions. And it was actually great. Like we had listeners that have been listening to the show that came up and said, Hey, Blake, you know, I, I hear you on the 150 hour rule, and I agree with you. But I also had some folks who were like, No, that's not the issue. It's this. We need to focus on this. We should leave the 150 hour. Hey, I love the debate. I love hearing from everybody. So if you disagree with me or agree with me on any of this stuff, I want to hear about it, especially those of you who disagree. Email us. Cloud Accounting Podcast at Earmark CPE. And I am Blake t Oliver on almost all of the social media's. How about you, David?

David Leary: [01:06:13] I'm just @DavidLeary and all the socials.

Blake Oliver: [01:06:15] And and.

David Leary: [01:06:17] Be sure you tag us in all these pictures you took. Oh yeah. Just connect.

Blake Oliver: [01:06:20] Yeah, tag us when you post. We get all of those in our feed and get free CPE for listening to this episode, download the earmark CPE app on the App Store or the Google Play store. Every episode becomes a free CPE course that you can then take. It comes out about a week after the episode drops, so if you don't see it yet, it'll be there. Subscribe to our channel. You can actually earmark our channel on the earmark app. It's a little bookmark app, a bookmark icon in the top right corner, and then you can easily find all of our episodes there and we're going to launch push notifications soon so you can then get notified when your favorite channels have new courses. I think that should help people a lot. David, have a great week. I'm going to go plow through the couch.

David Leary: [01:07:05] I'm going to go cover.

Blake Oliver: [01:07:06] Oh, yeah, I hope you feel better. I'm going to plow through my hundreds of emails now and try to get back to people and I'll see you here again on Friday.

David Leary: [01:07:13] All right.

Blake Oliver: [01:07:13] Bye bye.

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