What iplicit's fraud detection, Intuit's Anthropic deal and Xero's bill capture mean for your firm right now

[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to another episode of the Digi-Tools In Accrual World podcast, the place to go for all your accounting tech news in the UK and beyond. I am delighted to be joined by Eriona from Majors Accountants today. Eriona, thank you for joining us. What should we, I guess, expect from you today?

[00:00:16] Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited. Today we've got a few interesting stories. A couple on Intuit with their launch on the Intuit Accountants suite and also a rollout that they're doing for the education system in the UK and financial literacy, which is, I think, very welcome. And we've also got, obviously, it wouldn't be an episode without AI, right? So it's just looking at how accountants are using AI and seeing how deep we're going and changing the way that we're using it. So exciting.

[00:00:45] Brilliant. I'm excited for that. And we've also got Ian Gregory, CTO of Advanced Track. Welcome back, Ian. What are we going to expect from you today? Well, as somebody who spent half of his life looking at AI, we've got various to see how some of the most recent things out in the market are going to impact accountants. Really interesting to hear Eriona's perspective on it as well.

[00:01:04] Well, I'm glad you referenced Eriona. I probably don't have anything to add, to be honest. So I'll just be here in the background. But I'm going to jump in with some stuff from our place. It's a very cool functionality, I think, anyway, but I'm nerdy. And we've got some releases from Xero, as well as their, I guess, insights from their small business review that they do on a regular basis, which I always like to touch on in the show.

[00:01:28] But before any of that, the thing I really want to dive into is it's Account Tech's Week. I mean, one of the big conferences of the year. And I'm wondering, what is it that you two are looking forward to? I assume you're both going, are you? What are you looking forward to Account Tech's?

[00:01:42] Yeah, of course, I'm going to Account Tech's, right? That's like our one event in the year that we really look forward to. So I'm actually speaking both days. First, I'll be speaking with ACCA and some of their trends that they've noticed in the workforce and what that looks like for our profession.

[00:02:00] And second day, I will be with Access talking about AI, what it actually means and how we should be using it. So there isn't this hype about just it's great for marketing, but how can we actually make real use out of it to get benefits? But apart from that, I guess it's going to be catching up with everyone. It always feels like this period, we see people every day and then we go through the rest of the year not seeing them.

[00:02:23] So it's been a while since we've seen everyone, but also just going to see what else is out there in terms of tech and those that we already work with, just seeing what they've come out with and what we need to be aware of that we may not necessarily have noticed in the, because not everyone shouts about their releases, right? Unless you're watching this podcast and you'll be able to. Yeah, it'll be, I think it's a great time to catch up with everyone.

[00:02:47] Yeah, it is. And if anyone is going to Account Text Assisted Show, I strongly encourage you to go to the after party between both days. And the reason for that is you get to have conversations, I guess, more real conversations with people out there, not only your peers, but also the vendors. And if you are going to be there for a few days, it's probably something they should be going to on the day before, isn't it? Yeah, I've got a really busy week. We've got the Advanced Track Conference on Tuesday, which I'm speaking at. So I've been busy prepping on my slides for that.

[00:03:17] So that's been keeping me busy. And then we've got Account Texts as well. So we've got quite a big stand and I'll be on it, answering questions from customers and potential customers and seeing all the people I haven't seen since the best big show. Yeah. So they don't roll me out very often these days. We get to experience you in person, Ian. It's brilliant. Yeah, it's always an exhausting couple of days or three days for Ian.

[00:03:45] But I do find we come out with lots of ideas, lots of insights and lots of things we can take forward. And there's a few vendors that I've been keeping an eye on over the past year or so. And I know it's going to be at Account Texts. I just want to give them a bit of shout outs. So you've got Acting Office, so it's stand 1550, I believe, which I think is kind of back right near the App Advisory Plus stage. And they're trying to make this huge difference in the practice management space.

[00:04:10] I guess be that kind of all-encompassing thing that handles task management, practice management and compliance as well. So if you're, I guess, a practice going through or wanting to experience change and trying to find that thing that does everything, they're definitely worth a chat with. You've got Artifact AI, which is one of those new AI power kind of document management and ledger-based systems. And they're at stand 108. So I've not really seen them at many conferences.

[00:04:35] So although they've been around, I think they launched last year, this might be one of the first big ones they've been to. And they're back middle, so it might be worth checking them out. You've got Sweet Files, who I know have been in the space for what feels like forever, but pretty dawned, pretty quiet. But I know they've been doing some crazy amounts of releases over the last few months. And they're going to be stand 931 in the front middle.

[00:04:57] And then finally, an interesting one for me, because I'm nerdy and I call this sector-based tech, is Fishbowl at stand 565, which is on the edge of that new FD area, which, from what I can tell, is a different colored floor. So it's the orange colored floor, that's how hard to find that. It's kind of on the left-hand side in the middle. And if you've not come across Fishbowl before, they're an inventory manufacturing software for businesses that have kind of outgrown that traditional spreadsheets and kind of bolted add-ons. But they're not for ERPs.

[00:05:26] You're not kind of going fully in on them. They've been around for 25 years, kind of building this in the US, and then 15 years in Australia. And they're now properly come over to the UK. And the reason I like them is, I guess, the inventory manufacturing space feels like it's a bit stale in the UK for a while. And they're, I feel, going to come over and kind of reinvigorate, refresh it. And although they're, I guess, their backgrounds in desktop software, they're now really developing and pushing forward in the cloud.

[00:05:53] They've had quite an embedded cloud inventory system for a while that's now bringing across a lot of their manufacturing operations. And their manufacturing operations are really strong in depth, from my understanding, with stage builds or subassemblies, build component swaps, and, yeah, other brilliant things that I can never remember the details of. But the other thing that I think stands them out is they can do FIFO, LIFO, and average-based costing. And as you can tell, I'm a nerd in this because I'm getting into the detail there.

[00:06:23] But it's just rare. It's rare to kind of find systems to do that. So, yeah, I think it's definitely worth kind of exploring them and giving it a look if you're trying to find an inventory or manufacturing-based tool. That's account text. That's what I think you should experience if you go there. You've got a little bit of insights into what we're going to be covering. On that note, we should probably jump into app news.

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[00:07:16] Everyone wins. Head to employmenthero.co.uk to see why thousands of UK businesses and bureaus have already made the switch. I am kicking off app news this week. And I've got a little thing from iPlicit. I say a little thing. I think it's actually quite a big thing. Essentially, what they've released is AI Detect. Now, this doesn't, from I guess the name, doesn't really give you much of an insight into what it is.

[00:07:41] But essentially, this is what I class as real-time fraud detection inside your finance system. So it is going through and looking for any anomalies, anything that is out of the ordinary, and also picking up anything where I guess the system is thinking, this is not what we would expect at this time, and then bring it to the fore. So if you do something, for example, outside of business hours, when you normally operate, something's happening in the system, it's going to pick that up and bring that to the FD or whoever you kind of nominated for this to go, this is an off transaction.

[00:08:11] What should you do with this? Is it something that is completely expected because you were working at one? Or is it something where someone has hacked your machine and trying to do something that it shouldn't be doing? So the whole point of this is in two ways. It's to help detect fraud and identify and put to the fore high-risk items. It's also helped to reduce errors. Like if someone posted something somewhere they shouldn't do, that's probably a bit more expected. So I think we've seen some finance systems. But the AI Detect as a whole, I feel, is the core of something that could be much bigger.

[00:08:40] Something where we can start broadening into proper real-time audit that we've not experienced, not come across, not even dreamt of before. And I'm really excited to see how this evolves over the coming months and years. And the other little bit, they've had quite a lot of releases actually in the last rollout. But the other two things that I should probably pick up on is they've now got accounting period frequency alignment. So if you do 445 rather than just normal monthly reporting, then you can do that now inside IPC.

[00:09:08] And they've enhanced or further enhanced their AP automation. So they've got supplier matching has been further improved. You've got manual checks that have strengthened their kind of data analysis and matching. And they've now got a new option where they've added the ability for legal entities to be flagged if they're not registered for VAT. So that ability automatically, when it's detected that legal entity, to go, we're not extracting VAT off this document, and we're putting the right tax ban against it.

[00:09:37] So yeah, it feels like some big releases from IPLICIT. I guess have you two come across anything like this before? No, I haven't. But I think that's hugely someone who I work mostly with high-level investigations for our clients, VAT being one of them. And there's a lot of VAT fraud going on. Having something like that that will detect, you know, should this have VAT on it? Is it correct? Should we be claiming it or not? I think will make a huge difference to accounting teams in general and helping to train their staff.

[00:10:07] Because although you try to ensure that everybody is trained, sometimes things fall through the cracks that there's almost like another reminder of, well, check this. Have you noticed that that's inaccurate? Or maybe follow up with the client. The client may not be aware that they are being defrauded, right? Because it happens all the time. So I think being able to focus on things like that is going to make quiet. I want to use the word quiet, although we see that word all the time. But a difference which doesn't necessarily, it's not something that we'll be able to shout about,

[00:10:35] but it will make a difference in the background of the day-to-day working, I think. Yeah, definitely. And I think the fact that if you kind of look at a lot of the smaller finance systems, with IPs being a mid-tier one, you've got the fact that a lot of them have to rely on bolt-ons. So you can kind of get this data analysis, but it's a bolt-on. You have to be in a different system. And therefore, it's just looking at whatever it can connect through the API. The way I believe I've done this is they've embedded this really deep inside the underlying technology,

[00:11:01] which I think makes it not only more powerful for what it can do straight away, but it manures it to do a lot more in the future. Like, Ian, do you think that when, I guess, technology providers are building this stuff out and they're kind of building AI features, they should really be looking at how do we get this as deep into the product as possible? Or does it not really matter how the AI is structured around however their existing system is? It's a good question. I mean, I think one of the challenges you've got with organizations like Iplicit

[00:11:29] is that they're moving very quickly around their own AI and you've got the likes of Anthropic and OpenAI moving very quickly as well. The challenge is how do you keep the, you know, make sure that what you're investing in AI is just not going to get wiped out by some changes by people who've got billions and billions of dollars of funding. And I think as a CTO, you've always got this balance of what do I invest in myself versus what do I integrate in? And that, I think is, I'm sure my CTO is having those thoughts.

[00:11:59] And there's an argument that says, you know, build it in as much as you can, but then you risk it becoming obsolete. So the general consensus seems to be build an interface and then use whatever the best tool is. So you build the interface centrally. But then if, let's say in a year's time, it's better to switch to a different model, it's relatively easy to switch. So it's, you know, it's so dynamic at the moment, the way things are going. And I think that may be what they've done to be fair. And I think what they've done is they've built the architecture

[00:12:28] and then it kind of pings out to like an AI model and then pings back kind of depending on what the analysis is. And it enables them, as you say, to then pick whatever model, right? Depending on the price, depending on the functionality, depending on how good that AI model is. And I think that's the other difference, right? Is that you need to kind of build that level deep into the system rather than just overlaying or partnering. And I think, you know, we're seeing a lot of these kind of AI models come out and they'll go, oh, we can handle finance.

[00:12:54] But unless you've got the deep insights with the data that is reliable, you're always going to get these kind of these errors or these hallucinations. Yeah, I mean, we're coming to some stories later on this sort of thing. And it's, you know, there's this big debate in the tech community as to what extent you need to actually guardrail the AIs to make sure you get the right answers. And particularly in finance, audit trail is a massive thing. And yeah, it's still very early days and you can see things going on.

[00:13:21] And it's making things extremely interesting right now. I mean, we're right at the cusp of it. Move on to some huge updates from Intuit. And that's around their latest launch from around the new Intuit Accountants Week. And it gives a really interesting glimpse into where the profession is heading over the next few years, I think. And what Intuit are essentially doing. They're saying that accounting firms are no longer just buying bookkeeping software. They're moving towards an AI-powered operating system for the entire practice.

[00:13:50] So the focus is no longer simply compliance work, but it's about how the technology can actually manage workflows and servicing problems proactively and automating repetitive tasks and giving firms more real-time visibility over clients and their teams. So some of the new features are quite significant. For example, the new system can now proactively alert firms if there is a bank feed which may disconnect, for example, or a third-party integration which has failed before finding out at the end of the month or end of the quarter,

[00:14:19] whenever it is that you're working with that client. There's also an AI chat functionality where accountants can ask questions in plain English, for example, such as, I want to know the cash flow trends or age debtors or client performance insights. And you'll receive immediate responses from live financial data. It's really interesting the direction of tax and accounting becoming fully integrated, especially in the cloud ecosystem. I mean, historically, firms have had separate systems for bookkeeping,

[00:14:48] accounts production, tax, workflow management, and client communication. But what Intuit are trying to do is to centralize that and bring it all into this one ecosystem where firms can manage everything from one dashboard. But I think the bigger conversation here is what it means for accountants themselves because AI is clearly no longer positioned as just an assistant tool. It's starting to become a digital team member. And Intuit even describes these AI agents as acting like a virtual team,

[00:15:16] handling workflows, reconciliations, reporting, and operational tasks. And for firms that I think embrace this properly, it does create huge opportunities because there'll be less time spent on manual admin, which means more time spent on advisory, strategy, client relationships, and helping businesses make those decisions in real time. But at the same time, it also raises the pressure on firms that are still heavily reliant on traditional manual processes. And perhaps the clearest sign of where the market is heading

[00:15:43] is that Intuit has confirmed that the QuickBooks online accountant will actually sunset in December of this year. They're encouraging firms to move over and migrate to the new AI platform. So overall, it's not just the product update, but it's another signal that the accounting industry, I think, is moving rapidly towards AI-augmented firms. And it's where technology handles much of the operational heavy lifting and accountants increasingly have to become strategic advisors rather than just compliance processes.

[00:16:11] So I've been playing around with this myself for the last few weeks. One thing I will say, it does look really interesting. It does look like it will be able to provide a lot of insight. The only thing is from practice, a lot of accountants who use the Intuit platforms, when they set up their own profile, if they're using QuickBooks, for example, to process their own books, they set up a license as a client, not with the QuickBooks online accountant, which was supposed to give you more insight and you'd get that free license and so on.

[00:16:40] So it's going to be a little bit difficult for those that have migrated, but actually their old platform was empty anyway because they never used it. They had their own firm within the client list. So it's going to require, I think, a little bit of help from Intuit to bring all of those accounting firms onto this to actually make good use of it. This is something we actually discussed at one of the accountants' councils when they told us that this is the direction they were going in. And we were like, yeah, it looks great.

[00:17:08] The only problem is how can we migrate onto that to actually make real use of it? And I think this is where the majority lie. So does that mean it's in the UK now that people can use it now? So I think it officially launches in May. I don't know whether everyone has been given access to it. We have had access to it. And for a couple of weeks now, we migrated over. But again, we need to take time to actually populate it with information for our own practice. But being able to look into clients and ask questions,

[00:17:37] what I'm really looking forward to is, and this may be something that will evolve over time, but it is having that trend analysis for clients. I think it was 2018 maybe, QuickBooks Connect. They had Sazan, who's the now CEO, and they played a video of what QuickBooks will look like in the future. And in that, it was exactly kind of what we're starting to see now that you could just ask the system, I want to know what's the latest trends in this industry, for example.

[00:18:06] If you have clients in different industries, then you're able to benchmark a client against other clients in that industry, in the client base. So you can look at if, for example, they're buying supplies that are way too expensive compared to the rest of the client base. Is there something we can do to help them? So the information that's going to come out of it, I think it's going to be absolutely amazing. It looks super, super exciting. I still think we need some time to get there, and that's making sure that accountants are properly using this

[00:18:35] and that involves helping them. And it sounds like it helps if they're using it in scale, right? Because the more clients you've got there, the more power it's going to have. And I think actually of everything you said, the fact that they're going to sunset the old dashboard, the old account suite, that's probably the biggest news. Because that's how you have to do something. You can't just sit there and solve it. Oh, yeah, a giant one. I'm looking forward to it. Looking forward to seeing what it can do. I think Intuit, it's interesting. And that sort of brings us on to the next story,

[00:19:03] which is that despite all of the investment that they've made, the area loan is just so wonderfully described. They've just gone into partnership with Anthropic. And that's a really fascinating and important move at this point. So what they're saying in their press release is that their core products, so TurboTax, Credit Karma, QuickBooks, MailChimp, and Intuit Enterprise Suite are now going to be available directly inside Claude. And so in the same way that Aereon has just described,

[00:19:30] everybody going onto the Intuit platform to get all this data, now they can do it directly from Claude. And there's a little bit of me going, okay, that's really fascinating that they felt the need to integrate with basically the competition in terms of the user interface. And it's almost like saying, actually, we need to be on the iPhone as a platform. It's that level of change in the industry. So really, really important there, because it's not just another AI supplier.

[00:19:59] It's a fundamental, it's a channel. And it's a strategic distribution layer. Yeah, so... Yeah, and I think the thing for me... No, that's right. The thing for me is that doesn't everyone just integrate into Claude and ChatGP now? It feels like if you're not integrated, you're behind. I assume it's going for MCP servers. I assume it's still the underlying data, the underlying code inside Intuit. And the main thing, I think, for this is that,

[00:20:27] as you say, and that was a perfect analogy there, but Claude and ChatGP, Co-Pilot, et cetera, just becoming the new interface, the new way we interact with everything we want to work with. The challenge for them is if Amprofit start releasing finance operations directly inside their system that does compete, and that would then... They'd already have the full client base because everyone's interacting through Amprofit to get to Intuit. Yeah, a bit of a risky play.

[00:20:56] Well, I think... Yeah, we've been using Claude internally for several months now. And every week, there's an email coming out going, we've got all these new connectors. So we're beginning to add them in. What I see the way Claude working here is it's not just a case of you chat and go, what's my cash flow for next month? It's like, please can you write me my management accounts pack for next month? And two minutes later, you've got it in Excel perfect.

[00:21:23] Part of that, it's incredibly unnerving for the industry. The part of me going garbage in, garbage out to make sure that what's in the ledger's there. But it's an interesting move. I do wonder how much of it's down to the drop in Intuit share price since Claude launched Co-Piart, Co-Work. But it is fascinating. So I think it's a big one to watch. And the way the industry's going, it's all about everybody having their own personal agent.

[00:21:52] And I think that's recognizing this as a step. And I think people will be using things like Claude to access systems like Intuit going forward. My thing is, one thing that I've noticed is that everyone is integrating with Claude or Anthropic, right? So that will mean, what does that mean for each brand of all the softwares we use? Because if people are going straight into Claude only to get all of this information, surely they'll lose some of that brand identity because all of our clients, for example,

[00:22:20] will go straight into Claude and do everything they need without ever having to go into any of the other softwares. Yeah, I think so. I think it's a massive issue. And the other thing, everyone talks about how great Claude is. It's great, right? But I have never argued with someone as much as I do with this. I see all these posts that are like, it's so great. It's amazing. It's better than all of, you know, ChatGPT and all the others. But I'm just like, the information I'm getting, and I like that it's honest, where I'm like, where did you get those statistics?

[00:22:50] And it comes back with, now you got me. To be honest, I made that up. But why don't you... I like that. So what about someone who just runs with those figures, you know? Yeah. That sounds pretty legitimate. So I'm going to go with it. But I ask it, like I want the source of where you got all of that. And I'll go back and research it to make sure it's actually understood it correctly as well. And the amount of times it's just come back to me saying, hell you're joking. You know, pretty much.

[00:23:21] You know, so garbage in, garbage out. It feels like, you know, that your honest child where you, it says, they say something other than Sam, right? You tell the truth. Most of the children just go, yes, but at least God just goes, no. Oh, God. To be honest, I made it, listen, at least it's honest, right? Because it could be worse and it was trying to convince you that this is accurate. Trust me. But yeah, no, looking forward to seeing what that will look like and how that will affect, I think,

[00:23:50] brand identity of all of these softwares. I think it's a little bit risky, but I would love to talk about Intuit again. I don't know. I think hopefully this is our last discussion. If we've got you on, we've got to talk about Intuit, right? A really interesting story, which I actually think is one of the most positive things that we've seen is around the fintech and accounting space right now is that Intuit is expanding its Intuit for Education program into the UK, which is all about improving financial literacy and entrepreneurship skills for young people.

[00:24:20] And I think this is actually a much bigger story than it first appeared. So the program's already been running in the US, but this is the first major UK rollout and the ambition behind it is huge. So Intuit stated that their goal is to help 15 million students globally to become financially literate and confident by 2030. To launch it in the UK, they hosted a financial literacy forum at the London Stadium in partnership with West Ham United Foundation. And they brought together around 180 students

[00:24:49] from East London schools for hands-on business and money management simulations. And what's particularly interesting is that this isn't a traditional classroom-style financial education. Students are actually using real business tools like Intuit, QuickBooks and MailChimp to simulate running businesses, managing finances and creating marketing campaigns. And the timing of this I think is really important because statistics behind it are quite alarming. According to the research in the announcement, only about 26% of young adults

[00:25:19] in the UK say they receive financial education in school, despite nearly 60% expressing interest in owning a business one day. So I think this reflects a much wider shift happening in fintech and accounting. We're starting to see financial literacy move from being seen as a nice-to-have to being treated as an essential life skill, almost like digital literacy because whether someone becomes an entrepreneur, a freelancer, a landlord, content creator or employee, understanding money, tax and budgeting and cash flow is now fundamental.

[00:25:50] Yeah, well, I've got to say I'm not to kind of joke about Intuit at times but this is a massive plus. This is a huge win and something I'm 100% behind. I think the likes of Rachel Harris have been pushing very hard for a long time about getting financial education into schools and we need to see more of it. It should be a core fundamental life skill that is taught from a young age. Honestly, I think younger business owners right now, they're growing up digitally native and they expect

[00:26:20] real-time data and instant insights and they're using technology as technically collaborative. They won't tolerate waiting nine months for historical information. Then programs like this are indirectly shaping the future expectations of what clients entering the market over the next decade will want to see and I think we see that already anyway. Where I'm working with young entrepreneurs are becoming younger and younger, they expect things now and they don't understand why they have to wait however long to get that information. We need, one, we need to make sure

[00:26:49] that we're up to date with that but if a lot of them are understanding financial literacy they might have more knowledge on how that works in terms of a business as well for the future so that when they interact with accountants it comes from a different stance they understand a lot more and hopefully those that maybe take an interest will actually think about coming into the profession because you know that's dwindling so hopefully this will be something that helps to kick start that interest because the profession has changed so much right, it's not what it used to be I think it's actually really interesting

[00:27:19] with all the tech and that's where the younger generation are not seeing what can be done so yeah I'm really excited and as an example my family we, accounting is all we ever talked about right because it's a family business when my sister first started work bearing in mind she was raised around people talking about accounting and tax all day long when she got her first pay slip she was like why have they stolen my money what is this and she's someone who has heard that her whole life

[00:27:49] what about those haven't so I think this is so so needed and probably one of the best things that they could have done yeah it's lovely to see that they're putting so much into community generally I think it is something we really need going forward so that brings me to another story again we're back to AI I'm afraid so this sounds really technical and it's about API limits data egress and integration benchmarks but really it's much much bigger than that so a company called Fivetran who are an

[00:28:18] integration provider have published a new benchmark looking at how easily businesses can move data out of major SaaS platforms and some big names score really badly so Workday Rippling Slack get called out on egress fees and we saw Zero take some heat on this too previously and the timing is important because every software company is suddenly talking about AI agents as we were a few minutes ago but the agents are only useful if they can actually access the data across payroll across HR

[00:28:48] across messaging across sales across operations and what seems to be happening is the vendors are making it harder so they're making it harder by charging money to get the egress they're controlling the number of times you can ask for data in a given minute they are looking at how you control authorization on various records and we've sort of got two camps here we've got the legacy vendors like Intuit and Zero who are trying to make it harder because they've got this really valuable data

[00:29:18] and they want to get it and on the other hand you've got the people who want it it sounds like five trying to perhaps one of those and they're basically saying well we want you to be able to use AI with all of your data and the vendors are going no actually we want you to be on our platform so it comes back to this argument around who owns the ownership to the AI so it's another part of that interesting and I think it's going to be really fascinating to see how that pans out in terms of the power between the people who want access to the data and the people who've got it

[00:29:48] it's going to be really interesting and it's got some massive implications for the app ecosystem if there's an app you're trying to build a new app and suddenly there are a load things to get the data and restrictions on what you can do with it it really changes what you're able to do and it increases the power of these vendors quite significantly so essentially if they've got a low score then just so I make sure I understand this correct does that mean that they're keeping hold of the data you can't get to it in a way that you want to is that what the low score means yes okay cool I wonder if because we went through this whole open banking thing right where the

[00:30:18] banks were holding on to their data and then the government stepped in and went no you have to allow people to access that as they need and that generates so much more I guess evolution in technology and then Australia was thinking about doing a whole access to any data no matter where it is I think they curtailed that and went down the bank route but maybe that's where we need to get to so as a society it's our data you are just holding it for us and if we authorise our data to be shared then we essentially have the power to do that

[00:30:48] I think we're a way off that and I think that will take quite a while to get there but yeah it is ironic right you see these kind of the upstarts from a while ago where they go yeah we want to share our data then they start as they get more mature to start putting their arms around it or go no this is ours come that kind of monolith so yeah I mean it's scary time hopefully hopefully we get past that I've got something from zero it's more I guess of a step as they've been moving forward it's not a big ultimate change

[00:31:18] but they've been releasing kind of smart capture over a lot of document types in their system they've finally got it into bills now you'd think this is ironic right they should have it in bills from the start well actually they kind of had it in via an email extract all the information out of that document in line items which is now going to start

[00:31:48] writing a lot of those data capture systems from something you can use directly inside Xero but it's also going to do some smart stuff so it's going to be looking at is it a duplicate have you already put this in there have you got a bank payment that we can automatically reconcile directly off the bat inside the system and so what I guess Xero are trying to do here is we have a land grab of some of their core partners that have filled this space that Xero have not had for a long time I'm not sure this is intentionally a land grab I think what they're looking at is that this

[00:32:18] functionality is now a lot easier to build and it makes sense to have that as an option inside Xero some of their big and I guess long-term partners have built so much more functionality around what they do that if you're a bigger business you're more advanced it still makes sense to be on those app partners but Xero definitely moving into this space I think this is something that the Intuit have had or are developing for a while so once again one of them does something the other one reacts and then catches up

[00:32:47] so yeah it's interesting not huge but it's that story of them trying to be everything right bringing absolutely everything into as you say Intuit has had this for a while their document extraction tool wasn't the best but they've been working on improving it over the last couple of years so I think it is getting better and better at what it does if it works it would be great especially for clients if they've got

[00:33:17] that for example sense they have to do it because all their rivals have it right exactly we have another story with AI but it's a really interesting real world use case and that's how accountants and firms are now starting to use AI for practical operational work rather than just the headline grabbing automation so there was example this week of

[00:33:47] someone who used plaud AI to take sage invoice pvf and completely rebuild it into a working zero invoice template and it might sound more on surface but I actually think it highlights something quite important about where AI adoption in accounting is really heading and what the AI effectively did was analyze the original sage invoice design understand the structure styling correctly map out all of zero's merge fields things like invoice numbers client names line item tables and then generate a

[00:34:17] fully usable word document that could be uploaded directly into zero as a custom template so instead of someone spending three to four hours manually adjusting tables formatting fonts aligning logos and trying to figure out the field mapping in word the process was done in minutes and this is where the accounting profession is starting to mature in its understanding of AI because a lot of the conversation initially focused on will AI replace accountants when actually the most immediate value is often far less

[00:34:47] so of that but more commercially useful I think it's these small operational bottlenecks that will drain time across firms every single day like template building document formatting workflow setup email drafting restructuring data cleanup individually they seem minor but across an entire practice they create huge inefficiencies and what's interesting is that they're the exact type of task that AI is exceptionally good at so that structured repetitive rule-based

[00:35:17] work with clear outputs and the bigger takeaway from this is that AI adoption doesn't need to start with massive transformation products right and projects it can start with solving one annoying task that everyone has been avoiding for weeks and then moving on from that and I say that the entry point because it's low risk is the time savings of media it helps teams build confidence and practical understanding where AI genuinely adds value so although it just looks like an invoice template story

[00:35:46] I think reflects a wider shift of what's happening across accounting firms moving AI from experimental hype into real operational efficiency and I think this is what we're going to start to see more and more as everyone starts playing with I wonder if it can do new AI powered invoice templates not that long ago where you can just drag in your

[00:36:16] brand colors and it creates the lovely invoice for you and now this takes that one step further drag in an invoice template into AI and basically map this to zero this is stuff that as you say we used to do for clients and spend three or four hours doing so if we can quickly do that it's already enable us to provide a much more effective service and we at Digital Disruptors do exactly what you say we essentially take transcripts from meetings we have we write it into AI with a report template and it writes a report that is far better than I could do and would take me hours to do so this is

[00:36:46] the exact thing that firms should be doing if you are doing manually still you're in the dark I think another thing to add there is that the change with agentic AI is instead of prompting at once you can design a script that says this is how you do it and you can repeat it over and over again very consistently so one of the first things I did with Claude was to automate my vendor due diligence process so

[00:37:16] when we use a piece of software I have to go and vet it and I just got it to do that and it comes up with a nice Excel sheet and it does it very consistently over and over again and that saves me hours but it's actually quite a tangential thing to the core of

[00:37:50] but the story is that the national cyber security center which is the sort of public arm of GCHQ in the UK basically saying that passwords are done it's a very practical story and actually it's a lot bigger than people think so what NTSC are saying is that we should now when the opportunity is there should use what's called a passkey so what a passkey is Windows hello is the obvious one or it's a bit like face

[00:38:23] certificates they're called and then when you look at your phone it goes yes you can use that and it sends a certificate doesn't have

[00:38:53] go around it if they want to hack in so I think it's the beginning of a chain of events that will lead us to use more and more device based authentication and for me part of it is dreading it because suddenly I'm having to think we don't actually allow phones in the office in India so that is a problem for me do I need to get everybody your phone so they can do pass keys and then you're thinking what happens if somebody loses it because if you've got

[00:39:23] two pass keys one on your laptop and your house burns down how do you get access to zero the next morning these are the sort of things we need to think about so I think it's a massive change over the next few months and it's not just how do we make it more secure but certainly as an accountant data security is massively important it's something you need to be looking at and planning for over the next year or two

[00:39:53] really the sooner the better well yeah from my end I agree with you I think that it all works perfectly when the tech works but then when you lose it's like two factor authentication zero the amount of times I get a call from a client I've lost my phone I'm now you have to contact zero directly and they're going to have to go through these questions and answer you to verify who you are can't you reset the password no that's security

[00:40:23] I can't go in and reset your password that's not what I can do it's brilliant when it works because it's so locked down so secure it's really hard to unwind but we have to move from the small business review from zero and essentially they've been looking at what's the impact of the petrol and gas prices impacting trade around the

[00:40:52] world and if you've not heard go in the right direction Australia has been leading the way at just under 11% which I think is phenomenal growth in the current global market you've then had New Zealand at 5.5%

[00:41:22] I don't know why with their geography so close one is not doing about half as well as the other one then you've got the UK at 5% so we're middle of the road just where we like to be boring Britain and you've got the impacts of the fuel crisis which is ironic considering they've got fuel everywhere in Canada so that is an

[00:41:52] odd one the main things on this is how are the businesses handling that up fueling cost and it looks like most businesses are a bit of a crash now it could just be timing it could be that we're seeing a lag before we see a dip but let's all feel positive for once and say no we're doing

[00:42:22] well because they're getting materials that there's delays of them coming from abroad and prices have increased because of everything that's going on but they're still for some

[00:42:52] reason and it was the same thing in the pandemic as well that industry just was super resilient and just powered through all of it so but obviously that has meant that you know as you've mentioned that the costs have been passed on to customers and they're paying it and same with restaurants what they've done because their heating and energy bills have gone through the roof they've also managed to increase their prices slightly it may only be a pound per dish for example but it has made a huge difference and for customers a pound per dish is not making a difference for them

[00:43:22] but at scale if anything they've been more profitable even though they've had higher costs which I think goes to show more around what we should be doing with pricing anyway increasing generally every year but so far I think we've been pretty resilient but I agree with you I wonder whether that is just because of the dip as in we haven't seen the dip yet and it will be a lag and there'll be loads of news around oh my gosh this is what's happening we're not doing well effects of everything that's going on but so far so good to be fair to zero they did say it's

[00:43:51] not shown the impact yet the big word yet and I of your meal and then maybe you'll consider maybe I won't go in three months time I'll go in five six months time so that lag then comes in right between when you felt

[00:44:21] the impact as a customer and don't spend so yeah I thank you thank you yeah and if you are going to account text please come and say hello Ian will be on the advanced

[00:44:51] track stand where are you speaking Ariana day one on the ACCA stand and day two good question I don't remember where it is but it's with access that is fair that is fair and I'll be at the back right hand corner on the app advisory stage and stand helping them out and as I said if you get the chance to check out sweet files artifact AI acting office fishbowl and of course advanced track and intuit through

[00:45:21] yourself Ariana then please do and if you haven't already had a look at this please