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Survey finds that clients are more responsive than your own co-workers; why accounting firm partners need to be role models for their staff when it comes to work-life balance; three ways to be more productive; and apps raise money for accounting integrations
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Show Notes
2:40 – Alright #TaxTwitter, I'm calling it. After 961 painful days of March 2020, #Marchternity is over. (Except in FL/NC/SC/AK.) Though our profession will never be the same after all this shit, we're very likely done with enormous tax bills in Congress for at least a few years. 1/— Adam Markowitz (@adammarkowitzEA) October 18, 2022
4:44 – Remote Work Drove Over 60% of US House-Price Surge, Fed Study Finds – Bloomberg
6:51 – Would You Take a Pay Cut in Exchange For a 40-Hour Workweek in a Beachside Locale? - Going Concern
14:02 – Art of Accounting: Importance of being or appearing calm | Accounting Today
19:55 – National Fire Some Clients Day – The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly Accounting Podcast
20:47 – 70% of Accountants Find Clients are Usually More Responsive than Coworkers
https://www.cpapracticeadvisor.com/2022/10/18/70-of-accountants-find-clients-are-usually-more-responsive-than-coworkers/71865/
25:08 – Three ways to be more productive from an Amazon engineer
29:00 – All my self-employed accountants - how many hrs per day do you work (assume 5-day work week)?
33:05 – Fat Joe is Suing BDO - Going Concern
39:32 – Fan who caught Aaron Judge historic homer may catch big tax bill | Fox Business
45:47 – One month after entering the spend management space, Rippling goes after global payroll
47:59 – Bookkeep Advances Mission to Eliminate Manual Data Entry in the Accounting Industry with a $6.6 Million Investment Led by Fin Capital
51:10 – Microsoft Excel update will give power users plenty to dig their teeth into | TechRadar
53:43 – Shopify adds tax support to product | Accounting Today
56:17 – Outmin raises €1.5 million to scale accounting solution
1:00:51 – Xero Announces Price Changes for North America
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The Accounting Podcast (formerly the Cloud Accounting Podcast) is the world's #1 accounting, bookkeeping, and tax podcast! Join us weekly for a roundup of accounting news, analysis, and interviews. Plus, earn free NASBA-approved CPE credits for listening with the Earmark app. Learn more at https://earmarkcpe.com.
Attention: This is a machine-generated transcript. As such, there may be spelling, grammar, and accuracy errors. Thank you for your understanding.
David Leary: [00:00:00] Are you tired of chasing clients for documents? Or even worse, your team wasting countless hours searching for things across multiple different platforms. Do you want a way to work with your clients? 19 times faster than email? How about having average response time from clients of only 6 minutes? Stay tuned to hear more from our sponsor, Liscio later in the episode.
Blake Oliver: [00:00:24] And here's the thing I think we don't think about enough in accounting is when you're self employed. The nice thing about working all that time is that comes to you. You make the profits, right? You. So you're incentivized to work really hard. Better than at a firm where they're just the profits go to the partners. But there's a cost to that, which is you're not healthy because you can't go work out if you're working those ten plus hours. The quarter of people who work ten plus hours a day, I don't know how you work out or do you have a family Like how do you spend time with your family? How do you do all that stuff? Because I haven't personally figured that out.
David Leary: [00:01:01] Coming to you weekly from the on page recording studio. This is the Cloud Accounting podcast.
Blake Oliver: [00:01:10] Welcome to the Cloud Accounting podcast. I'm Blake Oliver.
David Leary: [00:01:14] And I'm David Leary.
Blake Oliver: [00:01:17] Man David, it's been a morning for me. I got to tell you what happened. I was driving to breakfast. I think both of you and I have had issues with our cars recently. You not getting one and then me mangling mine.
David Leary: [00:01:29] But no, but my broke last week or the week before. My my.
Blake Oliver: [00:01:32] The.
David Leary: [00:01:32] New car, my belt, like my battery went dead. Confederate y. I go into the shop like you don't even have a belt.
Blake Oliver: [00:01:38] That's that great on the on the marquee. The new one.
David Leary: [00:01:41] No, no, no, no monkey has no parts. It's just a cell phone with wheels.
Blake Oliver: [00:01:45] Okay, You got that car? Well, so anyway, I was driving my car to breakfast because, you know, I wanted to go out and have a nice burrito, a breakfast burrito, so that I have plenty of energy to do this show. And I pull into the parking lot and I take a quick right. And I don't see the curb. And the curb is obviously been missed by a lot of people. So it's very sharp, you know, how curbs get.
David Leary: [00:02:04] Sharpened because it's in the wrong spot.
Blake Oliver: [00:02:06] Yeah. And so I hit the curb and like two flat tires. Two tires? Yes. Both the front and the back. Yeah.
David Leary: [00:02:13] So that was that.
Blake Oliver: [00:02:17] That was my morning. Luckily, I'm close by, so I was able to get home and now I'm doing this show. But anyway, I'm excited to be talking to you.
David Leary: [00:02:24] Almost did not happen then the show.
Blake Oliver: [00:02:26] The show could have possibly not happened, but, you know, the show must go on. So I'm here. I'm ready to talk accounting and tech. I don't have anything super burning this week. I'm actually hoping to catch up on some stories that I've been stockpiling. How about you?
David Leary: [00:02:40] I have a lot of app news and I just have two stories that aren't. But I think one thing we should acknowledge, the the final day is came and gone. And as Adam Markowitz put it on Twitter, he's been using that hashtag March, Eternity.
Blake Oliver: [00:02:56] March, eternity.
David Leary: [00:02:57] Yeah, it's finally over. So since March 2020, he counted 961 painful days, and he has a whole Twitter thread about how it went through all the different acts, right? And then on top of PBP and Ercis, and then there was 74,397 interim final rules. And who knows the final rules ever came out for anything. And it just he just goes on and on about how this is probably never going to be like this again, like the amount, the volume of legislation and acts and stimulus and yeah, that's just that has happened, starting with COVID really probably will not happen again in our careers.
Blake Oliver: [00:03:35] Almost a thousand days.
David Leary: [00:03:37] So congratulations, everybody.
Blake Oliver: [00:03:38] Yeah, you made it. You made it. Well, where do we start? Where do we start today? David, I've got stories about. There's actually one from Tom Herbert, who we saw at Intact Sage transform the intact conference. The Sage conference. He has a story. Is accounting as a platform the future of the profession? There's some interesting things going on in the UK similar to what we've got here going on with TurboTax Live and and QuickBooks Live, you know, firms that are software companies but also providing services. We've, of course, got updates on Microsoft, Shopify added tax to their product. There's some changes with crypto on tax forms. I've got work from home stories. I've got, oh, a story about that fan who caught the Aaron Judge historic home run and the tax consequences of that. I don't know. Like, where do we start? Like what?
David Leary: [00:04:34] Well, start with the oldest article that you've been that somehow just keeps making it to the next week and the next week. You never makes the cut, but it makes the cut to the next week. You start with your oldest one.
Blake Oliver: [00:04:44] Well, my oldest one was it's almost kind of out of date now where it's it's it's the headline is remote work drove over 60% of US house price surge Fed study finds this was in Bloomberg I.
David Leary: [00:04:59] Repeat that headline again on make sure I'm following.
Blake Oliver: [00:05:01] So remote work drove over 60% of the US house price surge.
David Leary: [00:05:08] Hope that makes sense, right? People at home. I need more house. I need bigger house. I need extra room. I need an office.
Blake Oliver: [00:05:15] And also people like me who moved from high rent areas to low rent areas and bought houses instead of renting. And we drove up prices as we moved from L.A. to Phenix, for example, which was my situation. But there were also people who moved from New York City out to more suburban areas that drove up prices and all the all the areas around. Right. And Austin got a huge influx of people from San Francisco. So the study was done by the San Francisco Fed and the University of California, San Diego, and they said that home prices rose 24% in the two years ended November 20, 21. More than 60% of that 24% increase is attributable to the rise in work from home during the pandemic, a trend that has persisted with six 30% of work still being done from home as of last month. So every 1% increase in remote work results in a 0.9 percentage point increase in housing prices, according to their research.
David Leary: [00:06:17] Is this. They're going to you know, there's all the logic things, right? Or is this just one of those two things like, well, baby calves were being born and that's caused the crisis. It's just because the two lines.
Blake Oliver: [00:06:28] Are correlation rather than causation.
David Leary: [00:06:31] Yes. Yes.
Blake Oliver: [00:06:32] I don't know. I didn't dig that far into it. But to me, I feel like it's very causation. Like I mean, I caused this. I helped to cause this. So and I see other people in my neighborhood who came from California, you know, now those signs that say, don't California, my Arizona really means something.
David Leary: [00:06:50] You take those personal.
Blake Oliver: [00:06:51] You don't see a lot of them. But I laugh when I see them. I've got more, I don't know, remote work stories. This is a fun one. Would you take a pay cut in exchange for a 40 hour workweek in a beachside locale? So, David, let me put that question to you. I mean, you don't really have a regular job anymore now that you're a professional podcaster, but pretend.
David Leary: [00:07:09] You're not much cut. There's not much room to cut.
Blake Oliver: [00:07:11] So pretend pretend you're still at into it with your golden handcuffs on, you know, making that good Intuit money, 18 years, they're 20 years there or whatever. And they offered you to go work at a beachside resort, but and you'd only have to work 40 hours a week. See, I don't know how much you were working before, but let's say let's say you they cut your hours in half and you get to go work at a beachside resort. Would you take a comparable pay cut?
David Leary: [00:07:39] Like how much is the pay cut?
Blake Oliver: [00:07:41] It was. Well, in this example, it's 40. It's about.
David Leary: [00:07:45] Almost half. Half, Almost half. Yeah. Let's just use our now. Are they paying for the resort. Is this a nice.
Blake Oliver: [00:07:51] That is not clear. But let's say it's in an area where it's very cheap, like the cost of living is at least half also. So you're getting you're working half as many hours, you're getting paid half as much, and your cost of living is half as much. Would you take that?
David Leary: [00:08:07] Probably not yet, but these three kids are almost in college and it's very attractive. Like if you're not locked down, it's a very attractive deal.
Blake Oliver: [00:08:15] Well, this is the offer that Citigroup is making to young analysts who typically, when they're in investment banking work 60 to 80 hours a week. And that has proven less and less popular with 20 somethings with young people. They don't want to work the crazy hours that their predecessors did. And so investment banking is having a hard time trying to recruit people into it. Citigroup is trying something new. So they're saying instead of working those 60, 80 hours a week, you're going to work normal 40 hour workweeks. We're also going to let you work from Malaga, Spain, Malaga, Malaga, Spain, a beautiful city on the southern coast known for its food culture and lovely weather. This is the AMEA Banking Analytics Group. They received over 3000 applications. Even though pay is about half as much as their peers that are not working at the beach.
David Leary: [00:09:12] But isn't this going to drive up the cost of living and home prices there?
Blake Oliver: [00:09:16] Well, yeah, I guess it's related, right? It will raise. Well, yeah, maybe. So anyway, they got 3000 applications and the initial cohort is 27 analysts representing 22 nationalities and 15 languages. And the reason I brought this to the show is because I feel like this is the offer that many cloud based firms are making to accountants successfully. They're saying, yes, you could go work for a traditional firm and you could work the long hours or you could come work for us. You're not going to make as much, but we're going to let you work remote. You'll be able to go to a low cost of living area and you'll have a reasonable work week.
David Leary: [00:09:54] So do you think this thought went off for me as I was listening to an NPR podcast and they were talking about the shortage of vets like you can't get there's not enough vets.
Blake Oliver: [00:10:03] Veterinarians for dogs and.
David Leary: [00:10:05] Animals, and especially in remote.
Blake Oliver: [00:10:07] Towns like.
David Leary: [00:10:08] And the city, like a lot of cities, at least there's a 24 hour vet available maybe in a city. And if you had a vet practice, you could maybe limit your hours. But they're all overworked. And again, it's young people quitting. So they have a lot of people entering, but they have huge turnover. You know, similar to other professions we might know, like accounting. There's lots and lots of high turnover. But do you think some of this is an age is it an aging demographic, demographic and a values thing, like truly long term values, or is it a lot of these people have not seen a tough day in their life And in the if the economy gets really tight, let's say we go into a depression, their attitudes might change and be like, hell, yeah, I need a job. I'll work 60 hours a week. But. Yeah, just thinking about that when I was driving around the car because the one veterinarian in Juneau, Alaska, is just like, come on, She to some extent, he thinks it's a very privileged point of view.
Blake Oliver: [00:10:58] Right?
David Leary: [00:10:59] Kind of privileged and spoiled.
Blake Oliver: [00:11:00] Right. And I see that. And I kind of empathize or sympathize with both points of view. One is, yeah, this to get good at what you do, especially in something like accounting or finance or medicine or whatever, to be a really good professional, you have to like really put a lot of sweat into it. You have to work hard. And the same in music, actually. You know, I'm a foreign musician. If you don't work.
David Leary: [00:11:22] Everything, everything is.
Blake Oliver: [00:11:23] Worth everything, right? So it's like the people who aren't willing to work are the ones who tend to fail. And so you look at the younger generation and they're not they don't want to work those long hours. They want to put in the sweat. And you say, Oh, these guys are lazy, right? These these young gen zers are lazy. They don't want to work hard. But then at the same time, you know, I'm sort of in the middle. I'm a millennial, I'm in the middle of that Gen X boomer group that worked their butts off. And then there's the Gen Z ers who don't want to work at all and, and the Gen Zers like have leverage because there's a shortage of workers, right? So they can demand it. But also I sympathize with them because the, the thing you're working for is so out of reach these days. So the American dream, right, the house in suburbia, the single family home, the nuclear family, the dog, the cars, it's so expensive that it's completely out of reach for the vast majority of Americans these days in major metro areas, which is where most people live now. And so why would I work my ass off if I can't have the things? And so that's.
David Leary: [00:12:30] On top of that. You're not seeing like we talked about a couple weeks ago with the firms. If you're a young employee at a company and you're like, Oh, the guy who worked so hard for 20 years and now owns the firm, or maybe as a partner or owns the veterinary practice, is still working 60 hours a week. He's not enjoying his life or her life yet. What's the point? Right. And I think there's some of that mindset. This episode of The Cloud Accounting Podcast is sponsored by Kanopy. Did you know that Kanopy has a partnership with the IRS? This means that you can now use Kanopy to pull your client transcripts. The integration is approved by the IRS and can be configured to automatically pull transcripts. You can easily monitor if and when something changes. Now, here's the best part. Once you have your clients transcripts, you can use Canopy's notice feature to help you resolve your clients notices. Canopy has a library of 350 plus pre-built federal and state notice templates that provide an overview of the notice type, as well as walk you through the recommended steps to resolution and Canopy can even create an autofill your IRS response letters. Canopy also integrates with QuickBooks Online Xero FreshBooks Crm's form Builder, spreadsheets, calendars, Email and Zapier even have a mobile app centralized file management filled with PDFs, a client portal, task management, and the list goes on and on. To get a demo of Canopy and to receive a $40 Amazon gift card, head over to Cloudaccountingpodcast.com Promo canopy that is Cloudaccountingpodcast.com Promo Ford can0py.
Blake Oliver: [00:14:02] And actually, this is a great transition because I have an article by our friend Ed Benowitz exactly on that topic. David He wrote about this this week. But before I get to Ed, Ed, I want to talk about my own experience, which was at a large firm which I sold my small practice, and I went to work for a big firm because I thought they're going to teach me how it's done. I'm going to really learn how to do this and I'm going to be a partner. And I washed out of there within a year. And one of the reasons that I left, I don't know if I washed out is the word. I washed myself out right, I left. But one of the reasons I left is because one of the partners, the youngest partner, was like in his mid-thirties. He wasn't much older than me at the time. I think he was in his mid-thirties and he was a really hard worker. He was really good with people. He was really good. And all the things you need to be good at as a partner managing. But he was trying to buy a house in LA not too far from the office. Yeah, he could not find a home he could not afford as a partner in a top 25 accounting firm, could not afford to buy a house in a neighborhood that would require him to commute less than half an hour. I mean, that's.
David Leary: [00:15:17] And you're in case you start doing the math and you're like, this doesn't make sense, right? So it doesn't pass the spreadsheet test, right?
Blake Oliver: [00:15:23] Yeah. So you're looking up to this guy and he's working the 60, 80 hours a week. You know, you put yourself in the shoes and you're like, Well, why would I work that hard if I can't get the the treasure, if I can't get what is promised, Right? Yeah. So I think that's part of the problem. And so I'm glad we're talking about this because I just read an article this morning by Edmund Lewis in Accounting today and you know, he's been a partner at I think it's with him. Is it? He had his own firm they merged in. He's he's famous. He writes every week. He's incredibly prolific.
David Leary: [00:15:54] He's like 5000 blocks or something. He's insane.
Blake Oliver: [00:15:57] He's been on my earmark podcast and.
David Leary: [00:16:00] He's a really good interview, by the way. Everybody should listen to it.
Blake Oliver: [00:16:02] He's great because he's like an old school partner, but he also has a lot of insight. And so I like to argue with him, but also I learn a lot from him and this is one of those things I agree with him on. So I'll just read some of the highlights. So this is from his Art of Accounting series. On accounting today. The importance of being or appearing Calm is the headline. This is the final day of the 2022 tax season and a period when many tax staff give notice. Recently, I had a few calls from partners complaining about good staff leaving as of today or the end of the month. They were upset, but after listening to them I tended to agree with the staff people and here are my comments. To start, here's the context of these calls. These were staff people working for at least four years for the same firm who had advanced rapidly and satisfactorily and whose work was exceptional. Most were leaving to work at. Other CPA firms are going to private in a similar or slightly elevated capacity at another company. Those that left were at all levels of experience. Some started with the firm and others joined after working at a few other firms. But they were at the job. They were leaving for at least four years. They all gave reasonable notice and reasonable reasons, but not what I think were the real reasons. There was a common thread. Each person who gave notice had a boss or immediate superior that was overworked, always behind, always too busy for general or in-depth discussions about the issues or the clients or overall situations.
Blake Oliver: [00:17:25] All instructions were hurried and something to get out of the way, with many not fully explaining everything that needed to be done or forgetting about important info they should have told employees about. Everything seemed to be a rush. Even routine recurring work and scheduling was quickly changed at the last minute to get other work that was improperly scheduled, completed, partially completed work was overloading to do lists with constant apologizing to clients. No day could be planned the day before. Keep in mind that these people like the work, the clients and their bosses, but they did not like the untenable, pressure filled, unstable working conditions. Some needed staff under them, but weren't permitted to hire their own assistants and their bosses involvement was always pushed forward. Those in public accounting saw their boss's situations becoming theirs if they remained and made it to partner but didn't want to emulate them. Money was not the primary driver for leaving, although every employer offered to match and then add something to the new salaries their departing staff would be getting. So what is the takeaway from this? Ed says bosses are responsible for maintaining an atmosphere of calm, control and staff support. You are your own worst enemy. You are the role model of what many of your staff will aspire to. Ask yourself if you would enjoy working for you.
David Leary: [00:18:41] So ultimately, if I'm hearing this correctly, yes, the CPA, everybody know all this stuff they want to do. We could get rid 150 hour rule we can get. It doesn't matter. We can do all this. But people are really mostly affected by their direct manager at the firm they work for. That's probably going to influence your decision in your career more than all this other stuff we talk about all the time.
Blake Oliver: [00:19:00] Yeah.
David Leary: [00:19:01] That's the vibe I'm getting from this.
Blake Oliver: [00:19:02] And that's, I think every job. If you have a good boss, it doesn't matter where you work, it's going to be a good job as an employee. I feel like most of the time. Right? Even really terrible jobs. If you have a good boss, it's good. And the problem here is that the staff are looking at their bosses, the partners, and they're seeing the partners are not in a good place. They're busy, they're hurried, they're overworked. Why would I want to be a partner? Yeah, right. So we have to solve this. We can't be busy all the time and and be miserable ourselves If we want to have staff that stick around, they're not going to want to take over. And so. How do we solve that? How do we be less busy? Well, Jennifer Wilson was on Long Island Wilson's podcast.
David Leary: [00:19:55] No relation.
Blake Oliver: [00:19:55] No relation. So Laura, Jennifer is the founder of Convergence Coaching and has been preaching remote work for decades, it seems like, And the pandemic proved her 100% right. So like if anyone was a thought leader in our profession, it's Jennifer Lee Wilson and she was on Long Island Show The Good, The Bad and the Ugly. Go subscribe to that It's great episode. She was on that show talking about how, you know, firms need to go fire clients. And the episode is called National Fire some Clients Day. And that's one way to build capacity in your firm so that you don't have these crazy situations where you're overworked and over hurried, right? You can't help everybody, you know, and think about it, not just from your own standpoint. It's not just about profit. It's about creating an environment in your firm where you have time to to just breathe. So that's one way to do it.
David Leary: [00:20:47] This this kind of ties into that canopy had a survey where they surveyed 150 accountants in the US, and pretty much 70% of the accountants said that it's easier to get a response from a client than coworkers.
Blake Oliver: [00:21:02] I saw that, and that's true.
David Leary: [00:21:06] And the two other stats I thought were amazing. This one, incidentally, they're both 37%, which is kind of interesting. But 30% of accountants say that they have missed a client deadline because of poor office staff communication. And then 37% said they've missed important information because their firm uses too many communication channels, which is.
Blake Oliver: [00:21:25] Interesting to many.
David Leary: [00:21:26] You already have chaos then you had too many communication channels and that can help you there.
Blake Oliver: [00:21:30] I mean, we didn't have Slack or teams when I was there and it was all email threads and the way people would try to deal with keeping everyone on the same page was to just keep seeing more and more people into every thread until you had like 5 to 10 people on every email thread and it.
David Leary: [00:21:47] Just became populations and everything else is. Congratulations. Please remove me from this thread and everybody please remove me from this thread. I know how this works.
Blake Oliver: [00:21:54] Yeah, it just became impossible to keep track of it. So. Yeah. And I know a lot of firms are still kind of operating that way, right? They don't even have teams. I mean, you know, get, get a chat tool or, or get some sort of asynchronous collaboration tool.
David Leary: [00:22:07] So that you workflow like, I mean, we're using process right now for our own stuff and being able to chat about the task at hand right next to the task at hand is huge.
Blake Oliver: [00:22:17] Yeah. In context, right?
David Leary: [00:22:19] Yes, in context.
Blake Oliver: [00:22:20] In context, yeah.
David Leary: [00:22:21] Because like, why leave the tool you're using to go chat about something to tell them in the tool we're using over here that you have to go back into and look at. Here's a screenshot of what I'm talking about. It's just, yeah, if you chat, maybe, maybe standalone chat things, you're going to all die just chatting in context in the actual app or workflows. Really the better experience by.
Blake Oliver: [00:22:43] Far and this is what we've said for a while, David it's like, why, why can't I in QuickBooks or in Net Suite or in whatever tax software I'm using, Why can't I mention people like when I'm looking at something and have a little chat sidebar open up so that they can see what I'm seeing and we can talk about that thing. Why do I have to even have teams or Slack, right?
David Leary: [00:23:04] I mean, we've, we've pretty much through our we've stopped using Slack. I know we kind of have Google chat, but I try to avoid using it with you because I'd rather just chat in the things. So it's starting.
Blake Oliver: [00:23:14] To. Yeah, certainly.
David Leary: [00:23:16] Maybe you won't need these other tools. You're as long as you're the tools use the other tools you select have chat built in. Now if you're on old legacy desktop stuff, they're never going to get this like it's time to move on. This episode. The Cloud Accounting Podcast is sponsored by Liscio. I have to admit I love email, but as soon as I'm in the zone, heads down, focused, working on a task, something may require me to go look at a related email to the task at hand. I jump over, open my inbox, and just like that, I get distracted and derailed by hundreds of other unrelated emails by the time I find the email I was looking for. I've wasted a half hour or more. If you and your team are still using email to communicate with your clients, I suspect you have a story similar to mine. Even if you don't using email with your clients, it's probably a bad idea. It's like sending postcards back and forth. Anyone can read. Not very secure. And let's admit it, clients are probably ignoring your emails anyways. Maybe it's time to move all your client communications out of your email inbox and into Liscio. Liscio allows you to have secure real time communications with your clients via a mobile app that includes reminders, task management, e-signatures, document scanning and uploading, and unlimited storage with everything inside of Liscio. Your team can just focus on the task for each client and won't need to jump between email inboxes and other tools to get work done. And if they need to communicate with a client, they can even save more time by using message templates or printing reports and documents directly into Liscio to instantly send to clients. If you are ready to significantly improve your staff's focus, collaboration and relationships with clients, head over to Cloudaccountingpodcast.com Promo slash Liscio That is Cloudaccountingpodcast.com Promo forward slash Elyse, CIO Liscio. Everything you need to do, Let your clients and your staff.
Blake Oliver: [00:25:08] So I guess we're kind of talking about oh, we're talking about how to run a practice better on that theme. So here's something interesting kind of related to this. I was watching YouTube and a video popped into my feed from a channel I don't follow. The headline of the video was something like three Ways to be More Productive from an Amazon Engineer. And I thought, Oh, I like Amazon. I admire Amazon. I wonder what this engineer has to say. And his name is Steve Hunn, and he's a principal engineer at Amazon. Principal engineers don't have staff. They just are individual contributors, high level.
David Leary: [00:25:47] There's their thought leaders to think about code. They write blog posts. Yes, Yes.
Blake Oliver: [00:25:51] Well, so he has this channel, but his job is just like working on code at Amazon, right? Yeah. And so he said there's three things that make him productive. One, set aside several hours of focus time per day.
David Leary: [00:26:05] I thought you were going to say not have a staff, which is.
Blake Oliver: [00:26:09] Well, the first part was like set aside several hours of focus time per day. And I thought, well, how often does that happen in an accounting firm where you as like a high level staff contributor, are able to do that? Like, I think if we're going to make accounting firms like desirable places to work where people can be productive, we need to say.
David Leary: [00:26:25] So I need heads down time, 4 to 6 hours a day. Is anybody saying several hours? So to me, the day not not a week like a day. I walked out every day.
Blake Oliver: [00:26:34] Yeah. And to me, that's like 2 to 4. For me personally, I prefer to have an entire half a day where I don't have meetings. So I can say after.
David Leary: [00:26:42] Friday afternoon for me that pretty much.
Blake Oliver: [00:26:44] Well, and ideally it shouldn't have to be on the weekends or nights, Right. But that's what ends up happening.
David Leary: [00:26:48] That's what happens.
Blake Oliver: [00:26:49] So I try to schedule most of my meetings, like in the morning or in the late afternoon. So I at least have that midday block. And then he says, Number two, once you have that time in your schedule, just focus on one thing per day, like make your objective to get one thing done during that time. That's also challenging to do when you have like a million things going on, but you should be able to pick like one really important priority. So I know maybe in tax that's like there's one big return that you got to get done that day, right? And you just say, I'm going to get that one thing done. Or maybe it's in outsourced accounting work. It's I'm going to get this one account reconciled and I'm not going to work on 12 different things. I'm just going to work on that one thing and I'm not going to be interrupted. And then the other thing number three is declutter your schedule or skip nonessential meetings. And so he just says if you have lots of meetings on your calendar, because that's the kind of place where you work, where people just invite you to all sorts of meetings. He just says, Just stop showing up. And if people really need you there, they'll they'll say, Hey, why didn't you come to my meeting? I thought those were really good tips. And it's something that we don't really like. Can you imagine an accounting firm partner encouraging staff to go offline for several hours a day so they can do heads down work to focus on just like one thing and then to like skip meetings. But that's what it is. That's, I think, what it takes, especially.
David Leary: [00:28:11] I think that's important for firm owners, Right. Small, small and mid-sized firms, because like, you get caught in the weeds and you can't work on your firm and then a year goes by and you're like, I made no progress on my firm. And so I think to build a block this out and the problem is the discipline. And there's a book called The One Thing called Identity and how you almost have to get your family, your friends, your coworkers, your employees to all buy into this as a system. Be like, you know, you have to explain to your spouse and your kids like, hey, by the way, if you ever call me between these two and a half hours, I will not answer the phone. Even if you're in a car accident. I am not answering the phone. You also have to. If not people just they wrote it. You're really good at it for two or three days. And then the roads away. Then you roads away. It's it's tough. It's tough to do.
Blake Oliver: [00:29:00] Here's here's something related. We're talking practice management, right? Here's a tweet from Laura who I mentioned her Good, The Bad and the Ugly Accounting podcast show is great. She surveyed Twitter back in September and said, All my self employed accountants, how many hours per day do you work? Assume a five day workweek. And 6% of the responses were 1 to 4 hours a day, 31%. So almost a third were 4 to 8 hours a day. 38% of the responses 8 to 10 hours a day. So at or more than a full workday. And then a quarter of responses, 25% were ten or plus hours a day. And that's on average, judging by the way she phrased this question. Now, it was during September, and I know that can be I get a busy period, but like if you're self employed. Isn't the whole point of being self employed so that you don't have to work those crazy hours. Like, to me that is that's the reason I want to work for myself, is that I get to control my schedule. So why do we have 38% plus 25%? So, you know, 58 plus five is 63%. So I can do second grade math. I have a second grader, 63% of self employed accountants. And this is 380 votes. Right. So this is a large group, 68%. So two thirds are working more than a full day.
David Leary: [00:30:29] Because I think when in a perfect world, you become self employed and you would only do that job. But you have things go wrong and you're dealing with like other products your company uses and you're dealing with a billing problem. You're basically the stuff, all the stuff that you need to do as a business owner, you have to still do. Yeah, and that's kind of work, but it's not the core function of your company and that all starts to add up. And this goes back to my premise of like, where is the full service? Like, we'll take all that off your your plate for you so you can just do 40 hours a week of running your actual business, right? Yeah, Yeah. Actually what you do, whatever, whatever your profession might be. Right.
Blake Oliver: [00:31:08] My problem with that.
David Leary: [00:31:08] Is back to my lawyer is only charged 2 hours a billable time of day. Right. And then, like, successfully collect like 1.6 or 1.8 because they spend the whole day doing other stuff.
Blake Oliver: [00:31:18] I'm pretty sure they're billing all that other stuff to their clients to like. Lawyers are really good at billing. It's accountants who tend to eat their time more than attorneys. We could probably learn something, although we don't want to.
David Leary: [00:31:30] Be like, they're not good at.
Blake Oliver: [00:31:31] Collecting. No, they're not good at collecting. Yeah.
David Leary: [00:31:33] Clearly the law firm software has all the data on this. They have all the data on how bad they are at billing for their time and actually collecting for their time. Lawyers are horrible at it.
Blake Oliver: [00:31:44] So there's a cost. Another show. And here's the thing I think we don't think about enough in accounting is when you're self employed. The nice thing about working all that time is that comes to you. You make the profits, right? You So you're incentivized to work really hard, better than at a firm where they're just the profits go to the partners. But there's a cost to that, which is you're not healthy because you can't go work out if you're working those ten plus hours. The quarter of people who work ten plus hours a day. I don't know how you work out or do you have a family Like how do you spend time with your family? How do you do all that stuff? Because I haven't personally figured that out. Like for me.
David Leary: [00:32:22] You have to be you have to wake up first and you go to bed last. That's the only way to do it.
Blake Oliver: [00:32:26] Yeah, but then you're sacrificing your health for your sleep, right? You're not getting enough sleep.
David Leary: [00:32:30] Yeah, it's kind of.
Blake Oliver: [00:32:30] You know, And so, like, there's costs to all this stuff, and we have to think about them.
David Leary: [00:32:38] Everything else I have is news. So I don't know where you. What else? You might have. That's not apnea.
Blake Oliver: [00:32:42] Is.
David Leary: [00:32:44] Just Bitcoin stuff.
Blake Oliver: [00:32:45] Yeah, TMZ reported an accounting story. Tmz it. Yeah, right. Fat Joe is suing BDO. That's the headline on going concern reporting on TMZ's story.
David Leary: [00:32:59] So I saw I think I saw this go by on one of the Twitters and I was like, I don't even know who this guy is. Like.
Blake Oliver: [00:33:05] Well, his name is Fat Joe. I'm an assume he's a rapper. He is suing his longtime accountant Andre and Shamas shamas C.H. Amos and Tammy's firm, BDO for alleged misappropriation of funds. Oh, Andy claims that BDO is running some kind of Ponzi scheme. According to TMZ's review of the legal documents, Fat Joe noticed, quote, some accounting irregularities, unquote, after Shamas assistant Vanessa Rodriguez was fired in July. Joe says that his wife, Lorraine, his name, was used to open Amex accounts and make huge unauthorized purchases, including $40,000 in charges for Uber rides and Uber eats deliveries, as well as tuition payments for Rodriguez's daughter. Joe also claims he discovered one of his entities, sneaker addict touring, was missing large deposits to the tune of more than $300,000. He says there were similar irregularities with other entities. As for the Ponzi part of the alleged scheme, Joe claims the firm also defrauded Jose Iglesias of Colorado Rockies. Luis Garcia of the Houston Astros and former Chicago White Sox player Deion Visto. So he says. So basically.
David Leary: [00:34:21] That's just the he's accusing them of committing some frauds. But I don't know. That's a Ponzi because a Ponzi is like you're selling people the dream of making money off the next people you sell, right?
Blake Oliver: [00:34:30] So in the suit, this is it's a Ponzi, I guess. So he says Amex accounts were opened under their names as well, and the money flowed between all of their accounts to keep the Ponzi going. So, I mean, it's not really a Ponzi scheme because they weren't paying dividends.
David Leary: [00:34:43] It was kiting.
Blake Oliver: [00:34:44] Yeah, like they were moving money around to to trick it. But basically. So it sounds like one of these BDO partners or accountant had an assistant who was doing all this stuff, creating, you know, stealing money from clients. And yeah, that's not good.
David Leary: [00:35:00] Well, didn't we just talk about somebody else is trying to sue BDO because they say that BDO is something get the restaurant or shutter doors venue Grant.
Blake Oliver: [00:35:11] Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. That was one of the comedy. Was it.
David Leary: [00:35:15] The comedy? The Comedy Store? Yeah, they were saying that. Yeah. So it's, I don't know, I think I saw something on Twitter this week, you know, with the deadline, people were like, at the end of the day, you're responsible for your taxes at the end of the day. And I thought that was kind of a this is kind of the same to at the end of the day, you're just responsible for your accounting. You're responsible for your taxes.
Blake Oliver: [00:35:33] Well, here's my take away from this. This has always been my fear as I hired people is are they going to steal from my clients? I can trust myself not to steal from my clients, but how do I make sure my staff don't steal from my clients? And so I was always obsessed with having controls in place where nobody could send a check or make a payment without either myself or the client, or ideally both approving it and then notifications every time money goes in or out of an account that I'm managing, there's notifications going to the client, so nobody can say, I didn't know. I didn't see it. Right. So even if we don't have a control before, we have one after and I feel like a lot of times I get skipped in firms.
David Leary: [00:36:19] And then I think I think you get to a point where maybe you have so much money where it's probably wise to always have a second firm.
Blake Oliver: [00:36:27] Just hire an accounting firm just to audit the first accounting firm.
David Leary: [00:36:30] Kind of in a way, right? Just like, hey, someone else is doing all the work. I want you every 90 days. Just go peek at the work they're doing. Just peek at it. That's all. You know, pop into the bank accounts, scan things, look for anything. That's strange. Actually, there's an app here. All these people that all their AI you got an app you could send a rich piece. So the rich people.
Blake Oliver: [00:36:48] Yeah. So we move into app news.
David Leary: [00:36:50] Now scan and make sure your accountant isn't stealing from me. Are you ready? We can't create this app because it makes it very, you know, not possible.
Blake Oliver: [00:36:58] Oh, you're saying this is an idea? That this is an idea.
David Leary: [00:37:00] For an idea. It's an idea, yes. Somebody could go build this app that, you know, they could call it like audit my accountant dot com and you could have that.
Blake Oliver: [00:37:09] Is the well, I mean, one way to deal with this is just always set up apps so that the client has to send the payment right they have to push pay. Yeah so even if my staff are setting everything up, the client ultimately sent pushed pay which, which is like signing the check. And that doesn't happen, though, like in a lot of business management situations. But this sounds like a wealth management business management, family office kind of situation where people will just like they'll set up accounts and they'll just start in that. Now I spend your money for you, right? And that's always dangerous. It's always tricky and you always get there is inevitably fraud that occurs because there are internal controls.
David Leary: [00:37:49] So this episode of The Cloud Accounting Podcast is sponsored by Relay. The other day, Chris Maskey of prefixed accounting tweeted the following quote, Not so hot. Take If your business banking cannot maintain a stable QBO connection, you do not in fact have a business account that's a cheap knockoff of a real bank account, end quote. And I could not agree more. What's the point of a business banking account if it doesn't integrate with your accounting? Tech stack really is a no fee. Online business banking and money management platform built for you and your clients really integrates in your tech stack with direct integrations to QuickBooks Online, Xero and Gusto, and improves your workflows by allowing members of your team to have their own set of secure logging credentials to clients banking data. No more bugging your client for two factor authentication codes. And did I mention the ultra reliable bank feeds? And your clients get powerful online banking features like 20 individual checking accounts and 50 physical or virtual MasterCard debit cards which can be assigned to their team members to stop fighting with, as Chris tweeted, a cheap knockoff of a real bank and instead get a business bank account that cares about you and your small business clients. Head over to Cloudaccountingpodcast.com Promo relay that is Cloudaccountingpodcast.com promo forward slash relay. Why?
Blake Oliver: [00:39:12] I got more stuff that we can catch up on next week. It's just it's fun to get through some of these stories. Like, well, I mentioned that one about the home run with the big taxpayer.
David Leary: [00:39:22] At least you previewed that. Okay. Knock out the home run one. And then because it's baseball related, you could talk about Sage for a quick second and then we'll wrap this.
Blake Oliver: [00:39:30] Yeah, well, so.
David Leary: [00:39:31] Sage in baseball, right?
Blake Oliver: [00:39:32] This is we're talking about baseball last week because Sage signed a deal with Major League Baseball to have the Sage logo on TV during baseball games for stats and stuff. So here's a baseball related story. We'll continue the trend here on the show. A man named Corey Youmans may have snagged a six figure tax bill when he caught Aaron Judge's record breaking 62nd home run Tuesday night at Globe Life Field in Arlington, Texas. And I guess this was more than just Tuesday night. It was a few weeks ago because we're catching up on the story. So Corey is a Fisher Investments vice president, so he's already doing pretty well. But the ball is worth potentially $2 million or more. And so the question is, well, when you catch a $2 million fly ball or home run home run, not a fly ball, what happens? And so Bloomberg actually, no, not Bloomberg. Fox Business wrote in a story about it about the tax rules for court balls because they are, quote, as confusing as the rules for the infield fly rule, unquote. The IRS declined to comment.
David Leary: [00:40:38] It's not sound because it's not sounding like this is simple. Like one day I'll sell it and then that cash will be a gain. It sounds very.
Blake Oliver: [00:40:45] Like well, so there's a question like, do you have income or do you have a taxable know? Is it taxable when you catch the ball? The IRS, which declined to comment for the story, has never stated its position on whether a ball becomes taxable when it leaves the stadium or when it's sold by the fan who caught it. The service has only said that Balls returned to the team are not taxable to the fan, and that's a tradition is you return the ball to the team. They save it as you know, a memento.
David Leary: [00:41:14] Document.
Blake Oliver: [00:41:14] With a historical right. And then usually they'll give you something in return, but probably not $2 million. Right. So some tax experts say that catching a ball is a taxable event. They point to the 1969 court case, CC Drini versus United States Caesar Arena. I guess a federal judge decided that a $4,467 found inside an old piano was a taxable windfall, much like winning a prize. But H&R BLOCK Chief Tax Officer, H&R BLOCK Chief Tax Officer Kathy Pickering disagrees. She's quoted in the article saying that if you hold on to the ball, you won't owe taxes. But I don't know. Others seem to disagree with that.
David Leary: [00:41:59] Kelly Did the issue at 1099 for catching this ball? Like, how did how do they even know you have this ball?
Blake Oliver: [00:42:04] Well, I mean.
David Leary: [00:42:05] Tv, IRS know.
Blake Oliver: [00:42:07] You're on TV catching it. You're in a new store. If I.
David Leary: [00:42:09] Find a suitcase on the side of the road with $1,000,000 in.
Blake Oliver: [00:42:12] It. Yeah.
David Leary: [00:42:13] And there's no record of it.
Blake Oliver: [00:42:15] Well, you're still supposed to report that income, David. You know, like, if you don't, that's tax evasion. Because all. What is the phrase? I forgot. It's been so long since I studied it, but it's, you know, all income from whatever sources.
David Leary: [00:42:28] So what if it's not cash and it's something I find a missing engagement ring.
Blake Oliver: [00:42:33] Yeah, that's a windfall.
David Leary: [00:42:35] So that's why you have to claim it.
Blake Oliver: [00:42:37] Yeah. Now, this question's. If you keep the ball until you die, does your estate tax. But that only comes into play if your estate is worth more than $12.12 million.
David Leary: [00:42:49] And was this ball court in New York or was it caught like in Houston or someplace like in Florida where there's less taxes?
Blake Oliver: [00:42:56] I don't know. I wonder if there's a state implication. They were only talking about the federal one. But if you sell the ball, of course, then you have tax on that. But the question is, is it regular income or does it qualify for capital gains tax rate? Because there's a special tax rate on collectibles. And if you consider the ball a collectible, it's a capital gains tax of 28%. If you hold it for more than one year, if you keep the ball from for less than one year, ordinary income tax rates apply to the sale.
David Leary: [00:43:27] So is it like gambling you so he can gambling, right? I can deduct all my losses in theory, yeah. Can I claim, like all the money I spent to working my way up to catching this ball that I spent at baseball games?
Blake Oliver: [00:43:39] You know, that's a good question. I'm going to say I'm going to guess no. But again, you know, I think, David, you should consult with your tax professional on this issue.
David Leary: [00:43:49] Because they're all in agreement on how this contract I see from this.
Blake Oliver: [00:43:52] Article. So the last time this question came up with the IRS was back in 1998 when Mark McGwire, who played first base for the Saint Louis Cardinals, tied Roger Maris, 1961 home run record. A sportswriter asked the IRS whether Mike Davidson, the fan who caught the ball, was liable for tax. And an IRS spokesperson said Davidson owed gift tax because he planned to give the ball to McGuire. Can you imagine? You catch the ball and now you get tax. Who is this idiot? Irish spokesperson. Right. The statement drew widespread criticism from the White House on down. Mike McCurry, President Bill Clinton's press secretary at the time, called it, quote, about the dumbest thing I've ever heard in my life, unquote. This poor IRS guy. Right? The IRS quickly backed down, declaring that no tax was due, no gift tax. They said that returning the ball is more like returning unsolicited merchandise than giving a gift. But there's no firm rule on this, so.
David Leary: [00:44:53] It's people if you're good enough tax attorney.
Blake Oliver: [00:44:55] Or if you donate the ball to charity, you can claim a deduction. So it seems funny to me that if you catch the ball right, this is make sense. You catch the ball and it's not taxable, but then you donate to charity and you get a deduction. How can you get a deduction?
David Leary: [00:45:11] Tick tock. If you set up another corporation in Delaware and then you put it in there and then they make the donation.
Blake Oliver: [00:45:16] Oh, yeah. If my LLC makes the donation, it's a deduction, right? Yeah. Yes. Anything through an LLC is deductible according to.
David Leary: [00:45:22] And I put it under the name of my.
Blake Oliver: [00:45:24] Car.
David Leary: [00:45:25] And then it all works out.
Blake Oliver: [00:45:26] Yeah. I mean, we shouldn't feel bad about giving ridiculous tax advice, David, because it's so bad out there. All right, so we get to app news.
David Leary: [00:45:35] Yeah, we can get tap news. I have an app news that continues on with remote work. If you want to go down that path.
Blake Oliver: [00:45:47] Let's do it.
David Leary: [00:45:47] So rippling rippling and there are payroll app is not the right word, right? It's like you hire an employee because of that. Now you need to. It ripples into other parts of your company. You need to issue them hardware. They need to be onboarded to all the software you use. Right. That's the ripples of hiring employee. But then like now, a month ago or so, they launched an employee expense card type product, but now they're actually going after global payroll, so they've launched a global payroll. Was it peo I always forget I never do the Yeah. Peo it is peo yes.
Blake Oliver: [00:46:22] So peo is when rippling if they have a peo they operate as the employer of record. So you know, if you've ever worked for a company and you just try it which I have. Yeah. Frenette is actually the employer on the W-2 and they're leasing the employee to the customer.
David Leary: [00:46:38] And so now Ripley is basically offering this globally. So they're going to compete with those other startups like Deal, right? A remote. Remote first. So if you and I want to hire employees in other countries, rippling can basically handle this whole thing for us. Now a couple funny things from this article. Apparently deal actually runs on replace.
Blake Oliver: [00:46:57] Really just.
David Leary: [00:46:59] Which is interesting so so which the startup deal actually runs on with link for that but yeah so basically now US based companies can hire and pay workers all over the world full time or contract and apparently you can onboard employees and contractors in 90 seconds and run payroll within minutes and everyone's local currency.
Blake Oliver: [00:47:18] And what countries can I hire employees and through this global.
David Leary: [00:47:23] P it just says everyone's local currency and global compliance so so.
Blake Oliver: [00:47:27] Every country in the world.
David Leary: [00:47:28] Every country. It sounds like I didn't see a list in the press release here.
Blake Oliver: [00:47:32] I'm looking forward to hiring an accountant in the Vatican if Deal supports that. Interesting.
David Leary: [00:47:38] There's probably a few that are there. There's a lot of money to be counted.
Blake Oliver: [00:47:41] Oh, yeah?
David Leary: [00:47:43] What else.
Blake Oliver: [00:47:43] Is. Oh, that's so okay. That's really cool. I'll have to look at that bookkeeping.
David Leary: [00:47:48] We had Jason Richardson from Brookhaven on one of the bonus episodes a few weeks ago. We chatted with him at Scary New Heights. They had a raise of 6.6 million.
Blake Oliver: [00:47:58] Congratulations.
David Leary: [00:47:59] About their their press release on this is they they actually call out they call out Uber eats they so they go on to say well, some software companies offer API access. Many don't have the infrastructure or deny access, including some of the most popular platforms like Uber Eats. They simply call that out. And really it's calling out an all apps to do this. All these big platforms that don't make accounting data accessible, it should be called out. And that's essentially what they're doing. And the other theme here is this goes back to some of the conversations. We even had it intact about their their importer for this Excel importer, right. That tool and this is kind of that same thing. So many people are still have legacy systems that are pumping out PDFs, CSV or Excel's. Right? And that's really where bookkeeping is really taken some leaps forward on getting all that data into the accounting systems. They'll take it. So whatever. If you have some weird point of sale system, they're going to be able to to take that export file from that point of sale, that Z tape maybe, and shove it into your accounting system. And that's where they're really filling that gap in need.
Blake Oliver: [00:49:03] Nice.
David Leary: [00:49:05] It was a 16 $6.6 million seed round.
Blake Oliver: [00:49:08] So David.
David Leary: [00:49:08] C plus.
Blake Oliver: [00:49:09] I need to make an instant correction on our show today. Sarah, who is in the chat, said a p.O. Is a special designation that is not, quote, leasing unquote employees. So I guess I've always thought that with a with a CEO, right? The way it works is mean. Maybe it's just a terminology thing, but that with a P.O., you know, they're the employer of record. And then I the company, if I'm using the P.O., is the employer, right? I pay them and they pay the employees. But I guess the term that is preferred in the industry is co employment component and leasing is leasing is reserved for temporary employees. But like I feel like I feel like this terminology thing, right. Because I mean, the P.O. is the employer.
David Leary: [00:49:56] Well, good news for anybody that cares. I actually listened to a preview of the Oh, My Fraud podcast last night. That's going live today.
Blake Oliver: [00:50:04] Yeah.
David Leary: [00:50:04] And that fraud is a P.O. company fraud. And Greg and Caleb go very deep. And so you get CPE credit, go listen to that podcast and you learn more than you want to know about peo companies, right? So. So if this is pique your interest, go listen to that episode that goes live. Well, it will go live before you hear this episode. So it should be live by the time you you're listening to this and thank you for the correction.
Blake Oliver: [00:50:26] Well, and so the difference is in a co employment relationship through a peo the PEO does not provide the staff for the client. That responsibility falls on the client. So the client has to bring the staff to the PEO and that includes hiring the new talent after the PEO partnership is a. Established all that stuff and then the least employees, right? That's where let's say I want to use, I don't know, one of those outsourcing operations in the Philippines that are becoming popular. And they go out and they hire accountants. And then I need an accountant for my work. I need a temporary worker for the busy season and they provide me at least employee. Maybe that's different. That's that's the right terminology. That's okay. Here's a microsoft Excel update. Power users.
David Leary: [00:51:08] They're not finished to keep up.
Blake Oliver: [00:51:10] Excel will never be finished. Right? So the desktop version of Excel will soon support a handy task automation feature previously only available to users of the web app. So interestingly, the web version of Excel has been getting updates before the desktop version. So now basically you can create, edit and run office scripts in Excel for Windows using the code editor and all scripts task pane that's now in the desktop. I guess these are scripts that automate repetitive manual tasks, so I wonder how these are different than macros. But I think I think it's just it's like the next generation of macros is what this sounds like to me.
David Leary: [00:51:51] Yeah, I haven't seen it, but I imagine it's going to be drag and drop. It's going to be.
Blake Oliver: [00:51:56] It.
David Leary: [00:51:56] Says this code.
Blake Oliver: [00:51:57] It says, Yeah, once programed, scripts can be shared freely across Microsoft 365 Accounts Office scripts in Excel Let you automate your day to day tasks inside Excel. You can record your actions with the action recorder. This creates a type script language script that can be run again any time. You can also create an edit scripts with a code editor and they'll be shared across organization, as we said. Hmm.
David Leary: [00:52:21] Sounds like the perfect vessel for viruses and nowhere.
Blake Oliver: [00:52:25] Malware.
David Leary: [00:52:26] Visual Basic, all the scripts that were always in Excel. Have you ever heard of the app called Katana? Katana?
Blake Oliver: [00:52:33] I saw them at a conference recently.
David Leary: [00:52:35] Yeah. So they're like an ERP platform that adds on really. It's really geared towards manufacturers, smaller manufacturers. So they just raised $34 Million. And a lot of the the reason for the raise or why they're growing is because of tech. The argument they're making right, is because of 3D printers, CAD cutters, all this stuff that people have access to now, they can do really small scale manufacturing. And then if you think about the rise of all the online smaller marketplaces that exist, so your Etsy and things like that, it's like the perfect combination happening right now. And ultimately because of the relationship with China, this China is becoming less important in this grand like everything must be made in China. It's a massive, gigantic factory anymore. Like smart manufacturing is coming back to the US, which is interesting. But I loved about their press release. They talked about what they're going to use with that $34 million and they said they're going to a bring manufacturing software to the digital era, which will include the rolling out of, quote unquote, more advanced accounting integrations.
Blake Oliver: [00:53:35] I'm like, what is that?
David Leary: [00:53:36] Like? Apps are listening. They're seeing the value in building better accounting information. Their integrations are going to spend money on it, which is great.
Blake Oliver: [00:53:43] Yeah, that's great to hear. Shopify has added tax support to their product. Shopify is a very popular e-commerce platform for online stores and retail point of sale systems. They announced recently the launch of Shopify tax. What this product allows you to do is track sales in each state, parse through state requirements to determine when to start collecting tax register with each state is required. It'll ensure that you are accurately collecting the right amount based on the specific tax rules that may apply to your store and your customers delivery address. It will help you remit the right amount to the right jurisdiction at the right time. With calculations based on the customer's precise address, they will stay on lookout for unexpected regulation changes and you can get suggestions for the tax category that best fits your product. It's free for the store's first $100,000 in sales each year. I think that's really smart.
David Leary: [00:54:39] And then ask, is that Shopify?
Blake Oliver: [00:54:41] Shopify? Yeah, it's inside of Shopify.
David Leary: [00:54:43] Stripe plot, Stripe, stripe tax jar, right?
Blake Oliver: [00:54:46] Yeah.
David Leary: [00:54:47] Okay. Got it. Sure. My brain.
Blake Oliver: [00:54:49] So it's free for the first 100,000 in sales each year. After that, a small transaction fee will apply per order in jurisdictions where taxes are collected.
David Leary: [00:54:57] So I wonder if they're partnering with somebody on this?
Blake Oliver: [00:55:00] I don't know.
David Leary: [00:55:01] You know, under the covers.
Blake Oliver: [00:55:03] So I think this is really smart because one of the big reasons that small stores don't sell online is because of the headache of sales tax. If I had a shop and I was selling locally in Arizona and then I thought, oh, if I'm going to sell into California now, I've got to do all this stuff. And I don't make a lot of money. And most Shopify stores, I imagine, are pretty small, right? Like, that's who they focus on. It's really easy. Cheap to set up, easy to start by making it free.
David Leary: [00:55:30] And the threshold is small. If I remember correctly when we talked about Wayfair, right, it's as soon as you hit $200,000 in revenue or something, you hit that whole new nexus tracking stuff, right? I don't think it's I don't think it's huge amount.
Blake Oliver: [00:55:41] It's it's go state by state. And the problem is a lot of states, they'll set the threshold as like a revenue number or orders shipped. And often if you're shipping like $10 widgets, you can hit that quantity number really fast before you get even close to the revenue threshold. And so then you have this filing requirement and you didn't really make that much money and it's going to cost you a huge percentage of your profit from that entire state just to file to have somebody do it for you manually. So.
David Leary: [00:56:17] So Irish. I'm going to call this another accounting firm. You know, with engineers, they're called out. Men or women. They just raised 1.5 million. This is a euros.
Blake Oliver: [00:56:32] And they're in.
David Leary: [00:56:33] Dublin. Just about then I went to their website. Oh, go ahead.
Blake Oliver: [00:56:36] They're in Dublin Out men. Oh.
David Leary: [00:56:39] Yeah. What's interesting about them on the website is they really lead and it looks like a Dexter, an auto entry style product. Hey, just upload all your receipts, your PDFs, your bills, just upload all your documents. Right. Thinking, oh, there's, they talk about how they use OCR and they scan and all that, but they really do is that it just becomes an accounting firm. It's like that's, that's you just upload all your stuff and they do the rest right. And they plan on. So they have 150 small businesses already, They plan on doubling their headcount to 48 in the next 12 months. And what I like is one of their tabs. They actually just refer to it as a finance team, as a service.
Blake Oliver: [00:57:15] Finance team.
David Leary: [00:57:15] As a service accounting firm with engineers. But they're leading with just the dot capture. Right. That that I think is some of these apps like call it the pre accounting, right? So they're just building the pre accounting as their lead to bring people into their accounting.
Blake Oliver: [00:57:30] Firm in a way. So that's kind of how it works. Simply upload your documents will process the rest, unlock full visibility of your finances with a dedicated support team by your side. They've got a really nice website. This is something worth looking at. If you are looking at building a new website for your accounting firm Out min min I Oh yeah. And they're getting people in with the software and then offering the bookkeeping as an ongoing revenue stream. They've got a nice app. It looks like this is accounting firms with engineers, you know, bookkeeper, 360 They do this as well. They have an app that provides you a dashboard. You plug in your QuickBooks file. And it's really smart because they use it with their clients. But also people will sign up on the QuickBooks marketplace and then learn about Bookkeeper three sixties bookkeeping services through it. It's sort of reminds me of how I built my bookkeeping practice on Xero, mostly doing Xero implementations, and then we'd catch the bookkeeping on the back end, and that would be a recurring revenue stream that really built the value of the firm long term. So this is having that that hook up front. And I like what you said, David, about it being a finance team as a service.
David Leary: [00:58:42] That's actually a good mark. I feel like I have not seen anybody refer to themselves like that. I've been to a lot of accounting firm websites and I think.
Blake Oliver: [00:58:50] They'll say they'll say like outsourced accounting or client accounting services. Actually, this.
David Leary: [00:58:55] Is what virtual CFO. I think this is like finance. We're going to be your finance team as a service. I think it's an interesting play on that. I that verbiage.
Blake Oliver: [00:59:03] I really don't like client accounting services. I really don't like that term that the CPA has chosen is chosen because it's really meaningless to clients. Like, think about it, there's three words in there. Client accounting services client is meaningless to them because they're it's that's from the firm's perspective, right? It's not from the.
David Leary: [00:59:24] Client, from the firm's perspective.
Blake Oliver: [00:59:26] And when you name something, it should be from the prospect or the client's perspective outside of your firm looking inward, looking at your firm, not from the inside out. So client is stupid accounting? Well, yes, accounting is something that needs to be done, but that's not what they're shopping for. What they really need is a CFO or they need a finance department or they need a controller. Right? Services is dumb because yeah, obviously it's a service. Well, what.
David Leary: [00:59:54] What's the big firm that just made the top 100? That's not an accounting firm. What's the name of.
Blake Oliver: [00:59:58] Your part time controller?
David Leary: [01:00:00] Yes, exactly right. Like it's very clear that's what value prop is.
Blake Oliver: [01:00:03] Yes, that's what you're hiring. You're hiring a part time controller. It's genius. And that's why they have 400 employees now and they're a top 100 accounting firm like. And they're not even they're not even doing, like, crazy complicated stuff with technology. You know, I talked with the founder of that firm on the earmark podcast, and he said, oh, yeah, you know, we were just going into everybody's office most of the time until the pandemic. Like they weren't like they were just doing really good focused accounting services in a mostly traditional way, but offering part time flexible options, like it's not that hard to do something that's different. Like you don't have to build your own app, I guess is what I'm saying. Like this is this is one way to do it, but the other way is just to have like good marketing. Yeah.
David Leary: [01:00:51] And not use the word cast and not, I think one last story we need to touch on. So zero is raising prices in both us and Canada. I don't know if you saw that.
Blake Oliver: [01:00:59] I did see that. I got the notification.
David Leary: [01:01:02] So there are different plans or early plans will increase by a dollar a month to $13 USD. Growing plans will increase by $3 a month to 37 USD, and established plans I guess established is like as an established business will increase by $5 per month to $70 per month. So you mean it's starting to inch up there a little bit? I think that was always the big value. Prop is like zero was so cheap. But you know, again, once you're established, they have to raise the prices because you're not you're not going to switch accounting goals. It's just too much work.
Blake Oliver: [01:01:33] Mm hmm.
David Leary: [01:01:34] Well, let's see the prices.
Blake Oliver: [01:01:37] I'm going to the QuickBooks pricing page and I'm going to the Xero pricing page. I want to see what how they compare these days. So you said establish it's going to be $70 a month. Well, so. So most zero companies, like if you don't need multi currency or project tracking or expense management, which to me are not core like GL function. Yeah.
David Leary: [01:01:58] Yeah. I still think that these are these three prices from Xero are QuickBooks pricing. You get through the six month or the three month promotional pricing. I think these are probably about equal to that. But then QuickBooks is still probably 25% more expensive.
Blake Oliver: [01:02:14] The $34 a month plan is the one that most people end up using, which is what's that going to? You said it's going up to 30.
David Leary: [01:02:23] That's going to go to 37. Okay.
Blake Oliver: [01:02:24] 37. So and what I like, what I've always liked about zero is pricing is they have this well, if you're an accountant, they have the cash book plan, which is like, I don't know what it is these days, 12, 12 bucks a month or something.
David Leary: [01:02:37] That's going up to $8 a month in.
Blake Oliver: [01:02:39] Us. Okay. It's cash. Yeah. Okay. So that's amazing because you can just basically do GL accounting, connect to bank feeds and do write up work consistently throughout the year. And that's so cheap to do that in QuickBooks. I don't even know what plan you'd need, what you could use. Simple start It's.
David Leary: [01:02:56] Really it's it's very expensive doing.
Blake Oliver: [01:02:58] $30 a month.
David Leary: [01:02:59] Or. Yeah, well, I think auto entry was able to do it. And then you don't just use that as you write up work and then export straight out to your.
Blake Oliver: [01:03:06] Yeah, that's, that's where I feel like all that put into it is kind of messed up with accountants is like offer a version of the product to accountants just to do the monthly write up with bank feeds. And we don't need invoicing for those. For a lot of customers, they're doing their own thing. We're just doing the write up work.
David Leary: [01:03:24] Or a version of that you just give for free for your pro tax customers.
Blake Oliver: [01:03:28] Yeah, exactly. Allow me to build the GL for my clients and pull everything in. Yeah.
David Leary: [01:03:33] Anyway, again, it goes back to Intuit. You just have the one plan for everything.
Blake Oliver: [01:03:38] Well, David, we're at the top of the hour. That's all the time we got. I got to jump off and go to the first session of the focus firm with Hector Garcia are new series sponsored by Abcellera. That earmark is doing it's seven free CPE hours. Hector is doing a whole eight part series about how to build a more focused firm, better accounting practice management. So I'll put the link to that in the show notes. Anyone is interested, you can catch the replay of the recording for the first session and join us live for the other ones and it'll be available both live and on demand and you can get CPE both ways.
David Leary: [01:04:14] So amazing.
Blake Oliver: [01:04:15] Mm hmm.
David Leary: [01:04:15] I guess I'll let you go, David. Nobody wants to find these things, but how do they get hold of you or find them?
Blake Oliver: [01:04:20] Well, follow me on Twitter. I'm at black tie, Oliver. How about you, David?
David Leary: [01:04:24] I'm on all the socials @DavidLeary.
Blake Oliver: [01:04:27] All right. Thanks, David. Great talking to you.
David Leary: [01:04:29] See you next week.
Blake Oliver: [01:04:30] Bye.
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Greg Kyte: [01:05:31] I don't care where you live in the United States. If you're a CPA, you have to take ethics, continuing education. And I don't care who you are and where you live, you hate taking ethics, continuing education. That's why me. Greg Kyte and my buddy Adam Braude, we created a podcast called Drunk Ethics where we unfold and expose all of the inner secrets of not just ethics, but how to become more ethical and to promote ethical behavior at your workplace. And we do that while we are getting progressively more faced during the course of each episode. In each episode, we take seven shots every 7 minutes. And so at the beginning we are scholarly and by the end we are drunk, yet still scholarly. If you're interested in this podcast, which I know you are. Anyone can listen to the podcast for free. It's out there, you can find it, but if you want CPE credit for it, Naspa certified CPE credit. It is a premium course on earmark. So if you're already a subscriber to earmark, it's going to be more than that. But listen, it's worth it because of two reasons. First off, you know your company, you know, your firm is going to pay for it and not you. And second of all, it's worth it. Damn it.
David Leary: [01:06:53] Want to get the word out about your newsletter, webinar party, Facebook group, podcast, e-book, job posting, or that fancy Excel macro you just created. Why not let the listeners The Cloud Accounting Podcast know by running a classified ad at the show notes for the link to get more info?