The Accounting Podcast

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Blake Oliver: [00:00:04] Auditors are not trained to figure out if bitcoins are real. It's like, you know, we can't take a Bitcoin and bite it in our mouth to see if it's, you know, gold, right? Like that's not our that's not our function. That's the function of like a bank.

David Leary: [00:00:19] Coming to you weekly from the OnPay Recording Studio.

Blake Oliver: [00:00:24] Hey everyone and welcome back to the show. This is the accounting podcast, your weekly roundup of news in the profession. I'm Blake Oliver.

David Leary: [00:00:32] And I'm David Leary.

Blake Oliver: [00:00:33] And this week we have coverage of three major industry events Intuit Connect, NetSuite Suite World, CCH connections, Wolters Kluwer Users Conference. We're going to talk about all the new features announced at those conferences. So much AI coming into these products. Really interesting to see the different ways these large companies are integrating AI. But first, David, let's thank our sponsors, our sponsors.

David Leary: [00:01:01] This week we have cloud accounting, staffing, canopy on pay and kick.

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David Leary: [00:02:28] Yeah. So both these events overlapped. So Sweet World started on October 25th, went through the 28th of October. Intuit connect started on the 26th, went through the 28th. So you're, you're talking about two major accounting GLS had conferences, what, half a mile away from each other, maybe less, I don't know. The strip is so deceiving how far that is. But, you know, two, two conferences going on side by side. And, you know, obviously there's lots of announcements, lots of press releases and I start going through and I'm like, they all kind of sound the same. So I'm going to cover both at the same time side by side. So obviously AI is like the theme. Intuit talked about their Intuit intelligence and how they're unifying their AI layer across QuickBooks into an enterprise suite and Intuit accountant suite. They basically have like 100 skill AI agents now. Um, and that there are categories like 4 million transactions a month. Netsuite has something called autonomous suite, which is kind of their version, which they've rebranded something called net net NetSuite next, which I don't even know what that is, where AI is coordinating and executing the work across your business processes. So, so they both have announced the suite of AI tools. Then even more similar, Intuit announced that they have an Agentic books closed, which is going to be an add on. Right now it's in a pilot for Intuit Accountant Suite, so you can upload your firm's standard operating procedures, and then it'll post the prep work. It tracks the reaction audit log and then leaves the accountant to supervise and approve. Well, Oracle also announced an autonomous closed workspace where they're going to let agents identify and resolve accounting issues continuously through the period instead of waiting for period end. So they both both companies announced agenda close.

Blake Oliver: [00:04:13] And then David, I want to pull up on the screen the preview screenshots of like what this looks like for our audience here. This is the Intuit accountant suite, uh, website. And they actually have a product tour that we can go through. So as you, you know, highlight these new features, we can actually see what they look like. So for instance, right, we can take a look at these cross client insights. There's a chat bot right there at the top of the screen. And you can ask any questions about your entire client portfolio. There's a chat sidebar and you can ask about trends, you know, across your book. Here's an example. Which of my clients showed above 33% increase in expenses last period? It's kind of a weird question. I'm not sure I would ask exactly that type of question about my entire client portfolio, but it's interesting to know that you can do that, right? You can you can ask a question in the chat bot in the AI, and it'll go look across your clients. And then of course, you can get those insights back. The playbooks are interesting. David, did you check those out? This is basically workflows to set up new clients automatically in stead of from scratch. So it's like pre-built prompts.

David Leary: [00:05:34] I think I saw these, and I think you're going to be able to add to these playbooks as well. And it's like, that's the problem with these announcements. It's really never super clear on what you can and can't do.

Blake Oliver: [00:05:44] Examples. Here are nonprofit organizations, law firms, dental practices, tech startups general construction, and it shows you which clients fit into that. And then you can tailor exactly which settings you want. You want the pre-built chart of accounts, the policies company settings to be the same. The templates for the the books close feature, that sort of thing. And then you can push those down to the clients that you want them pushed to. And then this is the part that's really interesting is this like custom automations area. So what this looks like to me is basically these pre-built prompts that then can run on a schedule. And we've got four examples here. We've got ready to post which reviews matched bank feed transactions and presents them for your approval. There's invoice write off fines, overdue invoices eligible for write off, and executes the write off via a credit memo with your approval. Fixed asset depreciation that identifies purchases, purchases that should be capitalized, drafts the depreciation schedule and reclassifies the entries, and then prepaid expense amortization. You can customize them and schedule them. And so this to me is like scheduled tasks in cloud Co-work. You can run them on a regular basis. So for instance, when you customize this invoice right off prompt, you can create the instructions. They give you the preset instructions, but then you can customize them and you can choose the frequency. So here it's weekly at 1 p.m. on Monday. And then um, you can also use it in the chat at any point.

David Leary: [00:07:30] But I think this might have been the Intuit Enterprise edition where I saw this, but instead of it just being a prompt that you store and have it automatically run, it looked a lot more like a Zapier type situation where if this happens, do this. And then if this happens, do this. And you could kind of create a workflow automation, not just a, a prompt. So it's interesting to it's great, right? Like, do you really care if an agent does it? Or if you build a automation in QuickBooks to do it? I mean, ultimately, you, you kind of want the agent to go build a concrete, deterministic workflow.

Blake Oliver: [00:08:06] There's also this inbox, I don't know if you saw this, David, but like clients can ask questions and then you can respond to them inside of this inbox in Intuit Accountant Suite, which could work if all of your clients are in there using it. But I worry that it might become just yet another inbox that you have to check.

David Leary: [00:08:24] Another thing.

Blake Oliver: [00:08:25] Inside of your email. Right now we've got email and teams or Slack, and we've got this inbox here. We'll have to see how well it works. Um, you can have alerts. And then here's the one. I think people are going to love multiple tabs, which is coming soon. So you can open up multiple different clients in a single browser, work across multiple files at once. Each client launches in a separate tab and you can toggle between them. I think that's been a big pain point. And then they've got a new support ticketing system where you can actually track them all in one place. So I thought that was nice that they've got this, you know, um.

David Leary: [00:09:06] And these are Intuit account tint function features, right? Yes, exactly. Intuit account. Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:09:12] All right. So back to you, David.

David Leary: [00:09:14] Back to me. So I'm going to lump the next three things together or next four, uh, all together at once. So let me ask you this, Blake, what is Sage historic? Why do people use Sage Intacct?

Blake Oliver: [00:09:25] Sage Intacct historically has been like really powerful for nonprofits.

David Leary: [00:09:30] Nonprofits, construction, manufacturing, right?

Blake Oliver: [00:09:33] Yes. Multi entity. You need a multi, multi ledger type accounting. You've got all these transactions across different entities and you need to allocate them, that sort of thing.

David Leary: [00:09:44] Yeah. So Intuit announced the construction additions. They're coming out with of QBO. Oracle announced that they're launching a construction suite agent. So they're both coming after construction. They both announced a manufacturing addition. So QuickBooks is kind of a manufacturing addition. And Oracle NetSuite has a similar thing called product suite Agent that's going to help you do inventory. I think Intuit even announced that their inventory features and Intuit Enterprise equals QuickBooks desktop now. So we might have finally, you know, it took like 25 years, but we finally might have parity with QuickBooks desktop. They also launched a nonprofit edition. Intuit said it's coming soon. And then Oracle launched a nonprofit suite agent. And then Oracle also launched a healthcare suite agent. Now, Intuit didn't have any announcements about healthcare. But if you look at these announcements, these are both now Sage is getting attacked from both directions. They're getting attacked from up market and down market. It's pretty, pretty big announcements. Um, the other thing too is the, uh, Intuit or I'm sorry, Intuit. Oracle launched a software suite agent that's going to help with revenue recognition, financial health, uh, compliance, things like that. And Intuit announced they're acquiring sequence, which is kind of a revenue management platform. So they're both kind of heading down those two paths. Um, and then you just showed some of these things, these, uh, AI skill agents, right, that are available. So Oracle announced suite skills, which they're going to have 45 pre-built business skills built into the NetSuite data, right?

Blake Oliver: [00:11:22] So those to me are like, like, you know, cloud skills, right? It's like these predefined prompts, like a skill or call on. Yeah, yeah. Inside of the app.

David Leary: [00:11:32] Yeah. Um, and then Intuit is launching, uh, a build your own agent tool, which you kind of touched on that a little bit. And then Oracle now, so now they're going to have something called Suite Agent Studio so people can build their own agents. So they're both very similar announcements across the board. Um, and then they both announced that they're going to have conversational natural languages just as QuickBooks connect to Claude, perplexity, muse, Gemini, ChatGPT Oracle is now going to connect to all of these through their MCP server as well. Um, contract to cache multi entity. So Intuit announced multi entity multi currencies coming soon. Um, AI invoicing getting paid faster. Um enhanced sales tax from QuickBooks. Obviously Intuit really pushed the new Intuit credit card which is really impressive. Um, and the other one that I thought was interesting is Netsuite's launching a free platform. Free. Yeah. For startups, it's, uh, they're calling it NetSuite quick start. And this is going to be for brand new SaaS companies because that's what happens. Like a SaaS company starts, they use QuickBooks, then they take VC money and they switch them to Oracle NetSuite. Like that's just the way the formula works. So they're hoping they can just get people on NetSuite immediately on day one. These startups so that they're launching that, um, obviously in two new to an accountant suite and their new pro partner platform as well.

Blake Oliver: [00:13:00] And that's the ProAdvisor program is now is now gone, right? It's called pro.

David Leary: [00:13:05] Partner.

Blake Oliver: [00:13:05] Pro partner. Yeah. That was gone. That was uh, years, decades. And then now it's pro partner.

David Leary: [00:13:12] Yep. And then the other announcement is, uh, Oracle said on stage that, uh, the feature, all the AI features are included at no extra cost once it's turned on. But Intuit said, uh, they did not say anything's free. Even a genetic books close that they're adding that after its pilot, there will be a, it'll be a paid add on. So, so yeah, which kind of makes sense. I I mean, for what you pay for Oracle, you better get. If you're spending $100,000, you better get the AI agents for free, right?

Blake Oliver: [00:13:42] Yeah, yeah. It's, um, it's, it's interesting because once these companies build agents, scheduled tasks, whatever you want to call them this like repeatable prompting into the products, I wonder how they're going to control their token spend. Because if they, if they make it free and people really take advantage of it. I mean, I think I was talking on the last episode about how out of control my clod coworker has gotten because I just got obsessed with it. I started trying to teach it how to do everything that I do, all sorts of different things. And I created dozens and dozens of scheduled prompts, scheduled tasks. I mean, and they're running every day, multiple times per day. And I saw my cost just explode, you know, on Monday or Tuesday, I would be running out of, of usage on my $100 month plan. And this month I spent like $2,500 on overages, and so I've really tried to get it under control now. And so if Intuit doesn't charge extra for this, I wonder how they're going to prevent Intuit.

David Leary: [00:14:46] Is going to charge.

Blake Oliver: [00:14:47] Oh, Intuit is going to not. Well maybe that's because Oracle's like it's.

David Leary: [00:14:52] Already a hundred grand or whatever you're spending. Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:14:53] Yeah.

David Leary: [00:14:54] Now the thing is I imagine though for Oracle though, once you have this agent working the volume, like most, most, a lot of companies using Oracle NetSuite have massive amounts of volume. They're paying 10,000 bills a month. The like that volume is going to add up. You're right. For their tokens. Yeah. I don't know how they're going to be able to do it.

Blake Oliver: [00:15:10] That's the problem with these tools is that like the way the AI works is that the more information you give it, the more context you give it, the better it works, but then the more expensive it gets. So that's why all these companies are like having so much trouble managing their tokens spend because you can, you can see the tokens getting spent. But if you don't set up these prompts the right way and they're just running all the time, it It can be really, really expensive.

David Leary: [00:15:33] So we talked about ramp, right. Ramp had a week where they spent 1.2 million or something on tokens. Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:15:40] Uh all right. Let's thank our next sponsor. And then after that we'll get into coverage of CCH connections. Canopy. Thank you for sponsoring this episode. Let me ask you something. How much of your day is actually spent doing accounting? If you're like most firm owners, 30 to 40% of your time is eaten alive by the work around the work. We're talking, chasing client documents, drafting the exact same emails over and over again, manual filing and trying to remember what a client said on a call last Tuesday. It's an administrative tax and it's killing your profitability. That's where canopy comes in. Canopy actually delivers on the all in one practice management promise. It handles everything from proposal to payment and all the steps in between. Smart client intake, tax workflows, month end. Close Automation and billing are all in one unified platform. No more duct taping ten different apps together. Plus, they have Canopy Coworker. It's a secure AI assistant that lives right inside the platform and actually does real work. It drafts context to where emails, summarizes client histories, takes meeting notes, and turns them into tasks automatically. Early access firms are already seeing what's possible when AI works inside your workflow instead of alongside it. To see what a truly modern automated practice looks like, head over to The Accounting Podcast dot io slash canopy. That's accounting podcast.io/copy.

David Leary: [00:17:10] All right, so we wrapped up Sweet World. We wrapped up Intuit Connect, but now you have one more conference to cover CCH connections.

Blake Oliver: [00:17:18] Wolters Kluwer, one of the three big tax prep software companies. I mean, arguably, you could say to Wolters Kluwer and Thomson Reuters, right? That's what the big firms are using. Anyone you know, seriously doing a lot of tax work is using one of those two companies products. And this is my first time at CCH connections. I've always attended the conferences targeted toward CAS practices, Intuit connect, Xerocon or conferences like Sweet World, targeted toward, you know, finance teams and some, you know, CAS practices that specialize in that software. And I've never been to just like a pure tax conference.

David Leary: [00:17:57] Who attends this? Is it, is it the tax partners at the big firms? Like who, who are the attendees?

Blake Oliver: [00:18:02] Tax and audit a lot of tax though, right. And actually on the plane from Phoenix, I was sitting next to a partner at a firm. And it's not just big firms, small firms too. I think her firm has three partners and they're on CCH access. And so, you know, she goes to this conference every year. It was in Orlando. They do it at the J.W. Marriott Grand Lakes, which is attached to the Ritz-Carlton. It's a great conference, great venue, beautiful place to be, great to take your family if you want to do that sort of thing. A really nice event, really, just really, really well produced. And Wolters Kluwer sponsored my travel out there and my attending and I made a video with my partner question. It's her first time joining me as a correspondent on the accounting podcast. We went to the general session, got to hear the updates and then toured the showcase. And this is not the sort of conference where like, there's a ton of other vendors, right? There were a few, but it's mostly focused on, you know, the CCH products, Wolters Kluwer products. And we got to see AI in action in CCH.

David Leary: [00:19:09] Like beyond a keynote or like up close, like it's.

Blake Oliver: [00:19:11] It's real. We saw a live demo and we'll talk about it in the video. It's exciting because up to this point, we've seen a lot of action, a lot of buzz about these AI tax startups. But so far most firms have not been adopting that tech because they're already deep in with their current tax software. And so it's not like you're going to just suddenly switch your firm off the tax software you've been using for years and years and years that's handles everything that you need it to handle. For a startup, that's like doing something brand new and maybe doesn't even like take care of all the returns that you need, right? And what's interesting about this is now we're actually seeing agentic tax prep, meaning like AI tax prep in, uh, well, not exactly in the product, but integrated with the product. So I'm going to play this recap of day one at CCH connections. We recorded this from the expo hall. They call it the showcase there. Uh, and this is me and Elka from Orlando. Hey everyone, I'm Blake Oliver, co-host of the accounting Counting podcast.

Questian Telka: [00:20:23] And I'm question from Arkansas financials.

Blake Oliver: [00:20:26] We're in Orlando at Cc-H connections. Walter Kluwer's user conference here through a partnership with Wolters Kluwer. We just came out of the opening general session and walked the showcase. And this is our field report for listeners of the Accounting Podcast.

Questian Telka: [00:20:42] So, Blake, can you tell everyone what was the big takeaway from the keynote this morning?

Blake Oliver: [00:20:47] Jason Marks, the CEO of Wolters Kluwer, said that the risk to your firm isn't AI. It's generic AI.

Questian Telka: [00:20:57] What exactly does that mean?

Blake Oliver: [00:20:59] The way I take it is I think about the AI tools that everybody's using. Um, Claude ChatGPT, I like to call them off the shelf eyes that are just trained on everything, all the knowledge of the world. They may have accounting and tax in there, but there's a lot of other stuff. And so as anyone who's used it as an accountant knows, it gets things wrong.

Questian Telka: [00:21:25] Oh yeah. Of course. Often that's why it's so important to check everything it's doing.

Blake Oliver: [00:21:30] And you know, the issue with that is we have to rely on it, or we want to rely on it for the work that we do, but we end up spending so much time checking it. It's exciting to be here because we've got companies like Wolters Kluwer that are now integrating AI into their products, and they're doing it with that domain specific knowledge.

Questian Telka: [00:21:50] And so it has the authoritative guidance that we need, eliminating some of the risk because it's not generic.

Blake Oliver: [00:21:57] And this is the first year that it's been deployed into the products. It's a very exciting time because most firms, they haven't really been able to use AI beyond just doing a bit of research.

Questian Telka: [00:22:10] That's right.

Blake Oliver: [00:22:10] But we're actually starting to see it doing work.

Questian Telka: [00:22:14] So we also went to the showcase today and we got to see a demo of an Energetic return. Prep the entire process. Explain to everyone what it was that we actually saw.

Blake Oliver: [00:22:26] We saw a live demo like this was not prerecorded. This was not screenshots. And what we saw was a upload of a previous year return, a W-2, I think it was a brokerage statement, basically source documents. It wasn't a ton. We're talking about a 1040, a simple 1040 to start with. And we saw all those documents get ingested. All the extraction of the data happened. And we could see all the numbers now on the screen. Here's the current year information in a column. And then here's the previous year information. We could compare it review it. They call that the gathering step.

Questian Telka: [00:23:04] That's right.

Blake Oliver: [00:23:05] And then after that we actually saw the diagnostic. Yeah. The preparation and the diagnostic basically putting the numbers into the return. Beyond that there was a review component. So like you said the diagnostics. But not just that. Like potential issues.

Questian Telka: [00:23:22] Yes.

Blake Oliver: [00:23:22] With the.

Questian Telka: [00:23:22] Return flags. Potential issues for you. Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:23:26] And so then you as the reviewer can look at those and decide what to do with them, make changes. You can edit. And then after that, you can actually have it prepare the return and create the work paper and the PDF. And they don't have e file yet. They're working on that. But basically soon you'll be able to just simply e file from this agentic text workflow in the browser. Right now you can go put it into CCH access and.

Questian Telka: [00:23:52] Then right and then file.

Blake Oliver: [00:23:53] It and then finish it from there.

Questian Telka: [00:23:55] So what about this stood out most.

Blake Oliver: [00:23:59] At a time. I mean, it's a live demo. It took like a few minutes. Obviously this was like a relatively easy 1040. Maybe it would take somebody 30 minutes, maybe even 15 minutes to do it. I mean, it would take me 30 minutes. I don't know about you.

Questian Telka: [00:24:13] But probably.

Blake Oliver: [00:24:13] Longer and I probably fat finger some keys in there. You know, some numbers in there. Uh, but what stood out to me was that it took minutes. That's right. And so if you're like a big firm or I mean, you're in a small firm, if you're just doing a lot of these hundreds of these, that really adds up.

Questian Telka: [00:24:28] Yeah. And he made the point. One of the points that he made during the demo was that it's going to save firms a lot of time.

Blake Oliver: [00:24:36] Yes.

Questian Telka: [00:24:37] So what are firms going to do with this extra capacity? Are they going to give preparers more returns. Or are they going to allow tax season to be a little less taxing on their teams?

Blake Oliver: [00:24:52] That's the big question, isn't it? Yeah. I would hope that given this awareness that we now have in the profession of burnout and stress and like the need to recruit people in the need to reduce hours, I think like we, we all agree as a profession, we need to make this a better place to work. That's right. Uh, my, my concern, though, is that the economics of firms will just incentivize them to.

Questian Telka: [00:25:15] Add more returns.

Blake Oliver: [00:25:16] Add more returns. Put more returns on the desks of preparers. If the firms are still billing for the compliance element and, you know, hours and you've like reduced the number of hours for prep, you have to just give more returns to the preparers to keep them busy and keep them billing. So they have to switch to some other.

Questian Telka: [00:25:38] Billing.

Blake Oliver: [00:25:38] Model or some other billing model. Yeah.

Questian Telka: [00:25:40] Which, you know, you've spoken about a number of times, and I think a lot of people agree with you that that's the direction that we should be moving.

Blake Oliver: [00:25:47] And maybe this will finally, like force it to happen. My other concern is that we've automated the prep or we've cut the prep down by, say, a factor of ten. What is going to happen to the reviewers? Because you can assist with it. And we saw that in the demo we saw the review is a lot easier because you've got all these potential flags items flagged for us, but somebody still needs to look at that return.

Questian Telka: [00:26:13] And if you are adding, if you have this capacity add and you add more returns and you can in the preparation phase, then you still need the reviewer phase. So what's going to happen to the reviewers? Are they going to get more overwhelmed? Are they going to rely more on the output from the AI and speed through it more quickly because they're overwhelmed?

Blake Oliver: [00:26:38] I mean, that's what would probably happen to me. I'm trying to remember like my time as a manager in public accounting, and if I had more clients, I would be tempted to just take as given the A's judgment. But then what does that do to the quality control in the firm? What does that do to our professional judgment? If we're just trusting what the AI is putting out there? That's right. It's a big question.

Questian Telka: [00:27:01] So maybe the real answer is that when they get that capacity, what they should do is use it to eliminate some of the burnout instead of adding Returns.

Blake Oliver: [00:27:12] And to do that, the firms are going to have to like really think about their business models, right? They're going to have to price for the value of the work they're doing, not the time it takes. And that's a huge shift for some of the firms here. So question one of the other bottlenecks is just gathering documents from clients. And you know you have a lot of experience with that. You did tax work. Yeah.

Questian Telka: [00:27:33] Tax work. And the same problem is an issue in CAS as well.

Blake Oliver: [00:27:38] You know, the example on stage, one of the examples that Jason and Kathy highlighted was K-1's getting like dozens of k-1's for, say, a high net worth individual client. They were talking about in that context how the software just like reads the K-1's and gathers the information, this unstructured information and, and maps it into the return.

Questian Telka: [00:27:59] That's right.

Blake Oliver: [00:27:59] Which is great. But like you're still getting those k-1's like.

Questian Telka: [00:28:04] On September 15th.

Blake Oliver: [00:28:05] If you're lucky.

Questian Telka: [00:28:06] If you're lucky.

Blake Oliver: [00:28:07] Maybe later and then you've got what a month to to do your work. Right. And so.

Questian Telka: [00:28:13] Limited.

Blake Oliver: [00:28:13] So here we are. We've got like, okay, it's mid September. That doesn't change. And we've got the deadline of like 1015. And in between that, we're speeding up all the return prep. But all that review, you know, is like still going to happen in that month.

Questian Telka: [00:28:27] And that's a lot of review. Yes, in 30 days.

Blake Oliver: [00:28:30] So I'm curious to see, you know, like, what does Wolters Kluwer do next with those bottlenecks? Because to really see ROI from AI as firms, there's only like two ways we can do it. And what we've been talking about is the first way, which is increased efficiency. Mhm. We can speed up the process, but that doesn't actually save us money unless we lay people off. That doesn't save us money. And so far, the AI is doing specific parts of the task. But I don't know if you've seen anything that can really replace the work of a tax accountant or staff accountant.

Questian Telka: [00:29:03] No, no. Definitely not. I mean that that Oversight is necessary. It's hard to imagine there ever being a time, and maybe there will, where that review and that oversight and that decision making and judgment isn't necessary and doesn't come into play. We also saw something else today that could help increase top line revenue as well.

Blake Oliver: [00:29:24] Oh yeah. That was exciting. Yeah. It's not out yet, so there's not much to see. But I think that's where like the potential really is. And that was the tax planner AI. And that's interesting because there's so many firms that are doing returns, but they're not doing.

Questian Telka: [00:29:42] Tax planning.

Blake Oliver: [00:29:43] Not much in the way of tax planning. Right on the screen. In the general session, we saw a list of clients and then possible like entity switches. So what would happen if you change this entity from a partnership to a C Corp.

Questian Telka: [00:30:00] Yeah. What kind of savings would you have? And adding that level of service to your clients, you can increase your revenue substantially beyond what you are charging in preparation fees, or you roll it into a package together, which we're definitely starting to see a lot of firms do.

Blake Oliver: [00:30:18] And then those hours that you're saving for your staff, you don't necessarily have to like load them up with a ton more work because you add the tax planning and then you can do fewer returns and make more money.

Questian Telka: [00:30:31] When we do that, we just make accounting that much more appealing to young people who are going into the profession, who want to balance. All right. Blake, so what is next today?

Blake Oliver: [00:30:44] So this afternoon, I am so excited to be recording a live podcast interview with Jason Marks and Kathy Rowe. And we're going to be talking all about the product developments, what they think is going to happen with firms. And that is going to be on the accounting podcast feed. So if you are not subscribed, do subscribe to The Accounting Podcast and you'll get to hear it. So we saw the focus on prep automating prep. I'm curious to see really what happens with tax planning. With the advisory component. There's so much more that tax firms could be doing with that. So I'm looking forward to that. You know, in the coming year.

David Leary: [00:31:29] I'm jealous because like the one regret I got sick this week. So I couldn't go to Vegas or I was sick last week. So it was a good idea to go to Vegas. This week is I did not. I had to do everything through like the keynotes and press releases, and it's hard to see the product. I would have loved to go and like, watch the AI take place on QuickBooks or go down to Oracle's conference and pop in there and actually see the AI. So I'm a little jealous that you got to do that and actually see it versus here's a press release that CCH put out. And that's kind of it. So a little bit on that.

Blake Oliver: [00:31:59] It's one thing to see screenshots on a on a website or in a press release. It's another thing to actually have the guy who's building the product there at the booth showing you it working, and you can see that it's a, it's a real product, right? We're waiting for it to process. The internet went out at one point and we had to reload. So, you know, it's real. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, I should also highlight they have some audit agents. You know, Wolters Kluwer does audit software as well. And they have agents that are going to analyze that are already doing this, analyzing engagement documents. So you can upload all of the documents that you're getting from the clients, and then it will organize them and review potential risks, provide risk assessment outputs, and help you as an auditor, then apply your professional judgment more quickly. Um, they've also got a new partnership with In-scope that adds financial statement preparation to their agentic audit experience. So, you know, as part of that engagement, maybe, you know, you're, creating some financial statements and now that is that can be automated more as well. And I think that is everything, major from, uh, CCH connections. So thanks to Wolters Kluwer for having me out there. Great to great to check it out. Can't wait for next year.

David Leary: [00:33:16] I two other small observations about Intuit Connect. One of them, I don't know, I think Pilot Meridian did the one. So the other big, tall, huge video board in front of the Aria. They were putting accountants on that board, pictures of accountants. And then I also saw, I don't know if this was Intuit who did this, but at the Vegas airport, they were putting accountants. So as people were landing the planes, their photo was on the big, huge video boards in the Vegas airport and on the strip. So like, that's what this should be about these conferences is like celebrating the accountants, which I do feel like Intuit Connect got away from a little bit and maybe the pendulum swinging back to, to doing that. Um, and then the other thing was the keynotes. So Intuit had Zach Cass. He's the global AI advisor and former head of go to market at OpenAI. And he did his keynote. And to be honest, AI could have wrote his keynote. It was all like, you know, go touch grass type stuff. You know, he's not anti AI, but but he made a funny comment to me, or at least I thought it was hilarious. He was talking about like, did you know you don't have to go to your bank's website to download your bank statements? Ai can just go get those. And I'm just like, Jesus, QuickBooks has been doing that for half a decade, maybe a decade already. Like, it's like, should somebody tell him? Should somebody let him know? Like we've been there for a decade. We don't need AI solving problems that we already have solutions for called bank feeds. Or maybe those.

Blake Oliver: [00:34:37] Don't necessarily give your bank login to an AI agent at this point. Yeah.

David Leary: [00:34:42] Yeah. You may not want to do that either. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's funny how he was like, he thought that was like this big novel thing. He has no idea. Cloud accounting has been getting bank statements and retrieving transactions for a decade. I just thought that was a little funny.

Blake Oliver: [00:34:56] I want to thank our next sponsor and then come back and talk about more developments in app news. First, let's thank our next sponsor and that is on pay. Are you tired of payroll headaches getting in the way of the client experience you want to deliver? Manual workflow is creating bottlenecks, compliance, nightmares, and endless support calls that go nowhere. Well, there's a better way for your team and your clients on pay is the payroll partner that accountants and bookkeepers actually love. Why? Because it's easy to use, packed with value, and backed by support that actually supports you. Their team gets rave reviews for being fast, expert, and actually reachable when you need them on pay handles the heavy lifting. You get a dedicated onboarding coordinator who sets up worker profiles and transfers year to date data from previous providers, all at no extra cost. There's seamless QuickBooks and Xero integrations eliminate manual journal entries, and they support any type of business. You serve farms, restaurants, nonprofits, you name it on Pei can handle unique requirements without adding complexity. On Pei keeps pricing simple to everything your clients expect, from multi-state filing to off cycle Pei runs. It's included. There are no hidden fees and no surprises. To book a demo. Head over to The Accounting Podcast dot com slash The Accounting Podcast dot promo forward slash OPAY. All right, David, here are some updates from a QuickBooks competitor. Digits. Digits has announced multi entity support, allowing businesses and firms to place multiple legal entities under a single organization login, subscription payment method, and bill accounting firms can also group multiple entities under one client instead of having to navigate disconnected accounts, and users can switch entities without having to switch accounts. Each entity gets its own ledger transactions close and tax identity And they have partnered with Reach Reporting to create the consolidated financial statements, dashboards, budgets and forecasts. So David, I don't know if this sounds like Intuit Enterprise Suite to you, but basically it's separate entities, separate digits, entities that then use a reporting tool to consolidate. And that's basically what it does, right?

David Leary: [00:37:18] In the same way QuickBooks people outgrow it, they get a second entity and then they have to move to Sage Intacct. Like we were just talking about that before. I imagine digits is at the maturity level now where 1 or 2 clients had to leave digits because they bought a second company and they needed consolidated financials and multi entity. And I think, and in my brain, I'm like, I feel like combining two entities, multi entity reporting in theory is probably easy for AI. So I imagine all the GLS are going to be offering multi entity. Now it doesn't it doesn't make sense for them not to do it.

Blake Oliver: [00:37:51] What's interesting is the pricing, because I think is the Intuit Enterprise Suite can get a little pricey.

David Leary: [00:37:57] Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:37:57] Digits says that on the essentials plan, each additional entity is free for its first 250 transactions per year and then costs $35 per month. So there might be some clients where this makes a lot of sense. Like I'm thinking real estate, you've got an LLC for each property or 250. Yeah, 250 transactions per year is, you know what, like 20 a month. And if you've got a bunch like LLCs for each property, just using that example, you could potentially have all of those for free and just be paying like basically one digit subscription for your like main holding entity. Like that's, that's interesting.

David Leary: [00:38:43] Because digits is again, they're digit that, that means they're billing on usage, right? Ultimately, you're building on usage and the other. What's the, uh, performance based billing that they announced before? Right? Until you. 95% or whatever it is of your transactions have no human involvement. You don't have to pay. Right. And so this is just another variation of them improving the billing model for the software you're getting.

Blake Oliver: [00:39:07] Digits also recently announced their own MCP. And this is interesting and it's interesting compared to. The way that Intuit is approaching it. So an MCP is like an API for AI. Wow. That's a lot of acronyms. It allows any AI like a chatbot like tool like clod or ChatGPT to plug into another app and either read or write or both. And digits. Their MCP is a write MCP. So what that means is that you can. And it's free. You could say use clod and you can write into the digits. General ledger from clod or from Cowork or. Wait, what's the Microsoft one, copilot.

David Leary: [00:39:59] Copilot.

Blake Oliver: [00:40:00] Or ChatGPT? So it's not just read only access. You can update records across transactions, bills, invoices, and the chart of accounts Recategorize entries. Edit fields, fix split lines, post journal entries. Agents can create code or correct bills, draft update or cleanup invoices. Add, rename or update accounts. You could do stuff like move miss, categorize stripe fees from software to merchant fees, or identify and book missing recurring expenses.

David Leary: [00:40:34] Isn't digit supposed to be doing all this stuff automatically anyways? Like, why do I need to use a separate AI for it to go fix transactions that it didn't post correctly? I don't get like well, because. Because.

Blake Oliver: [00:40:46] You know, it can post every. It can post things automatically. But again, if it doesn't have the context, it can only do so much.

David Leary: [00:40:52] You'd be wrong. Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:40:52] Yeah, exactly. And so cleanup there will always be cleanup, right? There will always be the need to clean up the files. And so anyway. Here, here's the, the difference right between there's two different approaches that companies are taking with AI. We've got digits and some of these other AI native gels that are creating MCC and actually gusto to. I have I want to talk about Gusto's latest announcement because that's really interesting. They're doing an MCP. Also. They have one. So there's opening up your database to MCP access, which gives a ton of flexibility to accountants because you can use it with any MCP enabled AI tool. You're not stuck in that app. Whereas Intuit seems to be taking the approach of limiting their MCP and zero as well. There's not a lot of you can't do a lot with them right now. You cannot do all the stuff that digits is saying you can do. And then if you want to do that stuff, though, you have to go into into its product or Zero's product and then set up the work from there. Use the chat bots in there. I don't see that as the ideal experience because what firm is standardized across a single GL and.

David Leary: [00:42:06] A lot of them like that, that's always been that that was that was some of Zero's issues of getting into firms. Right, right. The firms already standardized like firms are standard. They're going to maybe use two GLS at most.

Blake Oliver: [00:42:16] But you have to then like build everything in that product and those products, like what Intuit is building, you know, it's, it's developing, but it's years behind where we are with Co-work true or with chat Tptz version of that or with, you know, even copilot. And so if I'm a, if I'm a power user of these AI tools, I want the MCP and I'm going to Use the GLS that give me that MCP access. Like if I was building a firm again, I'd be like clamoring for this. So that's really interesting. And it's, it's, it's something that I hope that Intuit and zero and, you know, uh, let's like Wolters Kluwer and Thomson Reuters and all of these major software providers, NetSuite will allow because.

David Leary: [00:43:04] Especially if you have data locked up in these old legacy systems, you want to interact with it in new ways that you can't even imagine how you'd do it yet.

Blake Oliver: [00:43:12] That's right. So, uh, so I mentioned gusto. I want to talk about their MCP because that's really exciting. But first, let's go ahead and thank our final sponsor of this episode. And that is kick. Oh, and actually that's one of the apps, one of these GLS that has an MCP.

David Leary: [00:43:35] So if you're running a bookkeeping firm, you know, the monthly grind, hundreds of Uncategorized transactions, Manual reconciliations across every single client account. Having to open each client file one by one just to check if the books are actually closed. It's exhausting and it doesn't scale. That's why Kik exists. Kik is an agentic general ledger that promotes your firm from doer to reviewer. It drafts categorizations, reconciliations, and routine accounting tasks automatically for your review. It doesn't replace your judgment. It supports it. Plus, every AI action is logged, reversible, and fully under your control. But what really sets Kik apart is the multi entity support. If a client has four LLCs, that one client file and Kik. That's one client file and Kik not for inter entity transactions reconcile automatically and consolidations happen right inside the system. No more rebuilding complex spreadsheets every month. You can even connect Kik directly with Claude or ChatGPT to build custom workflows using live client data. And get this Kik will handle the moving of all your clients from existing desktop or cloud accounting goals, including the transaction level history. They'll even fly to your firm if you have hundreds of clients to migrate. Once they've migrated 200 clients for a firm in one day. Right now, Kick is offering 50% off for life if you migrate 20 or more clients to book your demo. Head over to Accounting podcast.io slash The Accounting Podcast dot promo forward slash KICK.

Blake Oliver: [00:45:03] And here's the page with the kick MCP on their website. From doer to reviewer kick, MCP gives you access to tools across both read and write examples of what you can prompt. You can run a 13 week cash flow analysis for a purchase or sale decision. You can surface all category changes made by your team across clients over the last month. You can record an asset purchase, calculate depreciation and book monthly entries. Apply a custom chart of accounts for one client across all your accounts and even more. And they've got this use case library here where you can, you know, see examples of all sorts of things you can do. And that that's brilliant, right. Like you can I've talked with the founder of Kik at events and it's like you could for a new client, grab all 12 months of bank statements, all the PDFs, you can drop them into clod and you can connect clod to kick and you can say, extract all the transactions from these bank statements and categorize them, right? You have clod work on the categorization with you. And once you're happy with it, like in a workbook, import these into Kik. You could do that all from like clod.

David Leary: [00:46:21] Or you could just tell clod import these in and create a profit and loss and a balance sheet. Like this is this like, this is this weirdness we're in right now. Like, like that's the next step for the Agentic models. They're just going to do it. And you won't need a gel product. Possibly. Well, but it's kind of.

Blake Oliver: [00:46:38] Weird because you need something that like ongoing. A business owner can work in, right? Send invoices, get paid, uh, you know, book journal entries, get audited, produce financial statements. And this is why your own home brew solution isn't going to do it, because ultimately it can't do the ongoing stuff the same way. And especially getting paid and paying people integrate with the accounting system with like permissions and an audit trail and all that stuff. Like it's not going to do that. Not securely. And, uh, you know, once you actually need to generate a set of financial statements that can be audited or at least reviewed if you want to like raise money or get a loan, you're not going to be able to do that with your home brewed cloud.

David Leary: [00:47:24] Yeah.

Blake Oliver: [00:47:25] Built G.L. and we have a comment here in the chat from Tate. Tate says, Blake, I know you always say it's hard to make a GL. How do they open source GL stack up. And the answer is not great, because the user experience is not something that's like exactly prioritized when it comes to open source projects. And so it's not going to be something you can use with your client. So you could do it. You could do an open source, maybe use that with Claude or you could like create your own. I mean, just do some write up work for a client into like a Google sheet or Excel workbook. But beyond that, right, beyond just doing that, like write up work, if you know, ongoing, you need to buy something.

David Leary: [00:48:17] But how do you hire somebody for your team? Like, oh, great. You know, QuickBooks, we don't use that here. We use this custom thing we built. Like you're going to have to retrain like it's people have a set of skills in the market, and you have to use the apps that people have the skills in. It would be like bringing somebody to be in and saying, I know you really know Excel, but we have our own spreadsheet we invented. Use that instead. None of your skills from Excel are going to translate over.

Blake Oliver: [00:48:41] That's the challenge.

David Leary: [00:48:42] You have to hire people that know how to use the software that you're using in your firm. Um, I have a story that's a little crazy. Um, just kind of shows where we are in this, in this, uh, startup AI world we're in. Have you ever heard of data vault? Ai.

Blake Oliver: [00:48:58] No.

David Leary: [00:48:59] So they're a Nasdaq listed company. I'll read you from their website what they say they do data data vault AI is a leading data sciences technology company at the forefront of transforming how businesses manage, secure and leverage their data. We own and operate globally patented, cutting edge web 3.0 data management platforms powered by supercomputing capabilities, setting a new standard for data integrity performance across industries and the way they describe their tools. So they lead with AI secure with blockchain so you can power your most valuable asset your data. Data vault applies AI to extract real intelligence from the data, then tokenizes it on the blockchain to ensure trust, control and long term value creation. Okay, you've.

Blake Oliver: [00:49:39] Just totally buzzword me out, man.

David Leary: [00:49:42] Yeah I know. Exactly, exactly. So this company though, they just had to, uh, they had to. Somebody called it one of the ugliest 8KS you'll ever see. They're going to have to restate their earnings. Now, what happened was, is they, um, sold shares of their company to a holding company called, uh, skylarks SCILEX. It's basically they agreed to buy $150 million of their shares via Bitcoin. And this was in September of 2025. But somehow or another, months and months later, they discovered, oh, this these coins don't exist. Mind you, this company is an expert in blockchain technologies. Right. Somehow. So what happened is they were they basically went to move the money to a different wallet and they discovered, oh, these don't exist. So instead of logging this, this crypto, this Bitcoin on their balance sheet as a payable from this other company, it was somehow got listed as an asset. So they've had to go back now and restate their last four years or their last four, uh, reports. Um, now from what I can tell is it looks like a BPM was the auditor, but that didn't, they didn't discover this was discovered as somebody said, let's move this crypto to our own wallet, a different wallet. And then they discovered it doesn't actually exist like the other crypto. But this is just this like another example of these companies in this, like, why are we letting companies pay other companies with crypto for their stock purchases and then put on the balance sheets? Like this is all going to catch up to us.

Blake Oliver: [00:51:23] This is the problem with the, the trust layer that we take for granted. The whole banking system is powered by this layer of trust. Because of all these regulators, all of these bankers working together to create a system where when you look at a bank statement, you go online and you see the money in the account that as an accountant, as an auditor, you can trust that it's actually there. Like it's not.

David Leary: [00:51:52] Theory that matches the balance sheet.

Blake Oliver: [00:51:54] It would be very unlikely to find like if you actually went into a banking portal and looked on the portal at the bank balance for that not to be real. It's possible. But I, you know, what's going to happen is, you know, your client fabricating bank statements, right? Like the actual bank getting it wrong. Well, we saw that happen with, what was it, synapse. But, you know, other than a few isolated cases, it's really rare because the banking system is trustworthy because of all this regulation. And I'm going to guess that the auditors couldn't have possibly caught this, because they don't have the ability to actually verify the existence of these digital assets. They are looking at some sort of, uh, report from the company saying that there is this Bitcoin here, but to actually verify, audit it, to audit it would require serious technical skill that auditors just don't possess. That is not that's not our expertise is like how blockchain works and the ability to verify that bitcoins actually exist. So this is the this is the thing that when you create some sort of like alternative, like payment system, like blockchain to audit that, you know, there's no regulations around it. There's, there's no auditors need to be paired with regulatory bodies that also are ensuring that these assets are real.

David Leary: [00:53:26] And it's the, uh, the layer in theory, they're experts on this, right? And they screwed it up. And it's all this creative accounting that we're seeing, you know, across all the I stuff, it's going to catch up. Um, it's so bad that their stock plunged 50% in one day and they're questioning if they can even continue as an ongoing entity. Now.

Blake Oliver: [00:53:48] We got a few comments here in the live stream. I want to highlight boring accountant life says curious how tax firms using AI protect client privacy. Is there third party certification or is the risk not controlled? If the same agent is looking at 100 clients, data would be mixed. And this is of course, the issue with why tax firms have not been using a lot of AI up until now is because the security and the trust is essential. And that's why, finally, we're starting to see the big tax prep companies build this stuff in a secure way and the same way they build their other software. And then now you can actually use it. You can trust it. It's not some startup. We've also got Angel here who says, if you hire people that understand the accounting cycle from source documents to financial statements, then the software doesn't matter. Even better, they will be able to identify control deficiencies and improvements. I have to say, Angel, I disagree with you vehemently on this. You can understand the accounting cycle and you can understand source documents and financial statements. But the software still matters because when we use software we can trust like something that's been around for a while, like QuickBooks or a NetSuite. We are trusting the controls in the software that the debits equal the credits and that, that you know, that the financial statements we are looking at, we don't have to reverify them from scratch. You know, if you are auditing something that was produced by a home brewed general ledger, you you can. There's a lot of things that we are assuming when we when we look at software that's familiar that we just cannot assume anymore. And it would add a ton of work. So it's not just about hiring people that understand accounting.

Blake Oliver: [00:55:42] You would have to then hire people who can audit IT systems. And that's not what we do. Same thing as the blockchain issue here with the with the bitcoins that are missing, auditors are not trained to figure out if bitcoins are real. It's like, you know, we can't take Bitcoin and bite it in our mouth to see if it's, you know, gold, right? Like that's not our that's not our function. That's the function of like a bank, but these, uh, holding institutions or these, these crypto exchanges are not regulated like banks. And then you've got clients that are just holding their own Bitcoin sometimes right in a in a wallet or a cold storage or something. And it's like we're not able to do that. Tate says technology is outpacing our understanding. Learning processes build business knowledge. Without that foundation, we could end up with powerful tools we cannot fully use or understand the logic behind. Yep. Um, I want to highlight Gusto's announcements at their, uh, fall showcase, which I attended. Thank you to gusto for bringing me out to that. Got to do an interview with Echo Xiong, uh, who spoke on the main stage and demoed a powerful new feature. Gusto now has an MVP, so accountants and business owners can connect gusto to Claude ChatGPT and other AI tools, just like we saw with kick or digits. And you can do all sorts of things in Claude or in ChatGPT or copilot that you used to have to go into Augusta to do. And it's it was so cool to see how quickly you can, say, add a new employee or get information about employees or, you know, um, do all sorts of stuff. I'm trying to find some examples here.

David Leary: [00:57:35] There are examples are horrible actually. And so did you see it do something better? The examples they give is like, ask it what my next payroll deadline is. Um.

Blake Oliver: [00:57:46] You can actually, okay, here's, here's what you can do. That's kind of cool. You can actually employees birthdays. You can actually, you know, you can, you can connect like you can connect it to your gmail and then you can go into cloud and you can say like, you get, let's say you get a, uh, the hours from a client, you know, a lot of times they'll just email you the hours. Here's the hours for each of my employees. You can say, see the email from my client and set up the payroll and gusto, and we'll go grab the email, get all the hours, set up the payroll and gusto, give you the link so you can go run it. That's something that I used to do as a bookkeeper every couple of weeks that would take, you know, 15, 30 minutes, maybe more depending on the client. And what if there's missing information? I don't have it. You know, that's really interesting. So that interview will be coming out in the earmark podcast this month. So stay tuned to the earmark podcast for that. Really great examples.

David Leary: [00:58:47] This MCP server, can you access it through cloud stuff or is it only through Slack.

Blake Oliver: [00:58:52] No cloud. And that was the specific example that echo did on stage.

David Leary: [00:58:57] Okay. Okay. So so then I guess there's slack integration through. It is just another chat interface through Slack.

Blake Oliver: [00:59:03] And it's interesting actually, like Slack is, is, is interesting because now you can connect these MCP servers to Slack and then in like a in a chat room shared with other people on your team, you can have a, it's like a, a conversation with the same AI agent, which has been impossible to do up to now. Right. It's been single user. Yeah. And that's interesting. I can actually see Slack becoming a very, very powerful way to use AI agents because now multiple human team members can interact in the same channel. All right. David, we are at the top of the hour. That's pretty much all the time we have for this week. Thanks everyone who joined us live. Subscribe on YouTube. Hit that notification bell icon and you can join us live. And don't forget to earn free continuing professional education by listening to this episode and our back catalog. Go to earmark.app on your web browser, or get the free Earmark CPE app on the App Store. Download it for free. Create your free account. Earn one CPE for free every week and for unlimited CPE and access to our subscriber only library of premium content. Subscribe for just the low price of $200 a year. It's the best deal in CPE that you can get anytime, anywhere. Stay on top of that requirement. It's the end of October as we record this the day before Halloween, and you have two months. If you're on a calendar year to get your CPE done. You can still do it and not have to do this all the week of Christmas and New Years, right? Don't don't cram it in at the end. Listen to some podcasts. Listen to one every week or one every day.

David Leary: [01:00:51] Pace it out. If you pace it out, you've got 60 days between now and the end of the year. You could do one hour a day and do it that way, but it's actually insane how many people wait until between Christmas and New Years. We will do 10% of our CPE and that window between Christmas and New Years. It's like spend time with your family, people. Why are you hammering out all your CPE? Do it now. Get it done now!

Blake Oliver: [01:01:14] I understand because I did the same thing. It's like we are so busy as accountants that like finding time to do CPE, especially if you're, you know, a solo practitioner or in a small firm where you're wearing all these hats, it's really difficult. And so that's why don't do it at your computer, do it when you're out taking a walk or driving, if you're, if you're driving cross country or, I don't know, even just a few hours for Thanksgiving or flying, listen to some podcasts. All you got to do is listen to a podcast like this one. Listen to us drone on for an hour as you drive. But hey, it's nice, right? It's pleasant. Right? You're not doing anything else. And then take a quick five question quiz at the end and you get an hour of CPE one CPE credit for an hour of listening and you can knock it out, get it done. And then yes, you can spend more time with your family if you like, but you can also just, you know, like in previous years say, oh, I've got to go do my CPE and go hide in your office, but you've already done it. So now.

David Leary: [01:02:14] Enjoy yourself.

Blake Oliver: [01:02:15] Yeah. Now you can watch YouTube or play video games or, I don't know, do work if that's what you enjoy doing.

David Leary: [01:02:21] This is now a life hack. This is life hack. I used earmark to give me one week of private time. Me time in. Yeah. That's genius.

Blake Oliver: [01:02:29] Thanks again to our sponsors. Thank you. To kick and on pay and Kanopy and Cloud account staffing. We really appreciate you. Uh, go check them out using those links in the show notes. Let them know you heard about them from us. God, we love on pay. And I'm wearing the t shirt right here today. They are so wonderful. Um, and, uh, yeah, that's all I got. David. See you around here.

David Leary: [01:02:55] Next.

Blake Oliver: [01:02:55] Week. I think we're going to do Monday because we got to catch up, but. Yep. See you next week. Bye.

David Leary: [01:02:58] Bye