When Accounting Becomes Someone Else's Feature || In The Loop

[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to another episode of the Digi-Tools In Accrual World podcast brought to you by The Loop. I'd like to say that I'm joined by Kendrick from Fishbowl and Lee, who will be very familiar to everyone this time around. So it feels like ages since I've been on this pod. I don't know why this feels like this. Maybe it's because I've been traveling so much and not been doing anything on it. But it's great to be back on. We've got a solid bunch of really exciting news.

[00:00:23] And I will say that this time around, I know we've been AI heavy on pretty much every single pod for about the last seven or eight months, if not longer. But I think we might mention the old smattering of AI, but we're not going in deep on this too much. I think you'll be pleased about that. We've got some really interesting updates and insights on what's going on in the marketplace. And of course, because Kendrick's here and they've just done a really interesting acquisition. We talk a little bit about that and we grill him a little bit.

[00:00:49] We try not to let him get too marketing spiel on us in terms of what's going on under the hood and what can we expect to see. But Kendrick, you're over in the US, just back from ZeroCon over at Denver. It's great to have you on. How's things over there? So good. ZeroCon Denver was an awesome event and things are going well. Some exciting things out of the Zero team and a good conference over. I missed London, so hard to compare.

[00:01:15] But I heard from many that good energy at both shows and excited about everything that Zero's got queued up for the remainder of the year. Amazing. And Lee, you've always got some amazing insights, particularly on the Zero side as well. But broadly, what's going on in terms of how these apps get out into the marketplace? What stands out for you on the news today that we're going to be talking about?

[00:01:39] So I really like Trent's post that we're going to be talking about a little bit later on about where to and when not to build. I've had a few conversations with some founders recently where they're building stuff that really is in the crosshairs. They're saying you shouldn't build here anymore. And so the rate that that's changed from maybe a few years ago, where arguably you probably would never build these things anyway because you don't have things like Claude Code to help you.

[00:02:07] Just the ground moving under our feet at such a rapid pace is fascinating to me. So, yeah, we're looking forward to getting to that. Awesome. Let's get into the news then. We're welcoming Fishbowl to our podcast. Fishbowl is inventory and manufacturing software for businesses that have outgrown spreadsheets and bolted on add-ons but aren't ready for full ERP. They've got over 25 years building this product in the US and 15 years in Australia.

[00:02:34] And now they're showing up properly in the UK, both desktop and cloud working alongside QuickBooks and Zero. What stands out is their manufacturing depth. There's multi-stage build of materials with sub-assemblies, mid-build component swaps without having to cancel the work order and reissue it, and capacity and production planning, true landed cost reconciliation and all four costing methods, VIFO, LIFO, standard and average, which is rarer in this category than you'd think.

[00:03:01] The other thing worth knowing, when you're quoted, the price includes the product. So barcoding, AI insights, the reporting modules is all in. They're not on a list of extras. And when you call support, you get a lovely fishbowl employee. So the accountability always stays in-house. It's worth a look if your inventory tool wasn't built for the operations you're actually running right now. All right. So I have the pleasure of kicking off today with the first new item, which is around embedded advisors.

[00:03:30] So there's a really interesting LinkedIn post from the founder of Raver. We should be able to find the link to that in the newsletter that went out a few days ago. And he starts by talking about how styling took a little bit of heat when they started adding accounting tools in there. But it's really in his post-line opened up the idea of what if more vendors started just adding accounting services in there. This idea that accounting as a service becomes commoditized and essentially becomes a feature within a bigger product or a bigger package.

[00:04:00] It's a fascinating idea when you think about the fact that you've got some accountants moving slightly towards that software side. When you've got things like Mazuma that have done that, they kind of run a little bit more like a software company. They've got their own tech underneath. You've got this possibility that's gone on for a while with firms building their own tech stacks and trying to create this experience.

[00:04:22] And all of a sudden you've got this sort of shot out from, well, I say out of the blue, but we've talked about the uberization of accountants for a long time. But it just feels like it's now starting to get a bit more real as you get all of these quite large parties just making this big land grab about who owns the client and who owns that sort of central data point. It's a really interesting conversation.

[00:04:43] And I think that while some of the accountants that responded to that sort of balked it and said, well, like, yeah, let's just add accountants to it, you know, because the idea is ridiculous. I think there is a threat there for the profession. And I think there's nothing stopping them just creating a great hiring package and a great training package for ACCA graduates or finding ACCA grads and qualified staff overseas and plugging those into a software platform.

[00:05:11] Unless I've massively misread that, I don't think it's something that can be dismissed out of hand. But what do you think, John? You know, I think this premise, like we said, the uberization of accounting has been around for a while now. And I guess what we haven't yet seen is anyone kind of be super successful with that kind of premise at the moment. That's not to say that it's not going to be, but no one's really done it on scale.

[00:05:38] So it's interesting, like you say, to see this post and to sort of read about, you know, that viewpoint and where they see the success of failings of that approach. I think broadly, I mean, you know, we've talked a lot, haven't we, about the impact of technology and obviously AI on accounting and where we think that's going to take broad compliance services, you know, in terms of the commoditization of those and the price and value of those will drop as we go forward in the future.

[00:06:04] And of course, we always kind of use this like advisory services at the infield to kind of, you know, stop that erosion of profit and margin and sales. But if someone's going to say, hey, I'm going to just package all of this up in one place, I guess, what does that mean? What does that mean to the traditional accounting practice? What does that mean to a new competitor coming in and how do they sort of see that you're fitting together?

[00:06:29] It's interesting that you talked about your students as well, though, because literally just before we came on the podcast, I was reading something on LinkedIn about some stats on trainees. Now, it had a UK lens, but it was looking at numbers from ACCA, CIMA, which is the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants and ICAW. So it doesn't include all of the training bodies here in the UK.

[00:06:53] But they were saying that broadly there's been a, I think it was a 7% drop of student numbers, but actually a huge, huge drop with ACCA and CIMA trainees. And that drop that they'd experienced was massively compensated by a huge increase by ICAW. So a net fall, but actually ICAW had increased their student numbers. But there's no real explanation as to why that is potentially at the moment.

[00:07:17] Obviously, having Kendrick on here with his US lens, we've seen the training numbers in the US have been falling consistently for a number of years. Although I think there was a recent uptick possibly last year or maybe this year in terms of like what state of play is there. Yeah, I think we've rided to a degree, but it still doesn't make up for the decline that we've seen over the last decade.

[00:07:37] And interestingly enough, you know, one of the things that I think we've seen anecdotally from, you know, just different events I've attended and interactions in the industry is the gravitational pull toward what accountants want to do and what they don't want to do is becoming stronger and stronger. I don't know if that's happening in the UK as well, but, you know, folks that are figuring out they want to have a niche offering and there's things that they feel like technology is stepping on their toes to do.

[00:08:03] And so they'll, you know, as an example, firms we talk with, they only want to deal with tax or whatever it may be. It's interesting to see that shift. That's not something that I think I've seen quite so prominently as maybe just the last year. Yeah, I mean, interestingly enough, I was in the US last week attending a few events and we were trying to talk about the comparative position of the UK market versus the US market.

[00:08:28] I think that that approach to you adopting a niche, whether it's around a, you know, a specialism insofar as your compliance specialism or whether that's around an industry specialism or a combination of both. It's definitely something that we've had over here in the UK for a good long time, seem to be kicked off broadly, I think, by the cloud revolution and the ability for people who are working for maybe bigger firms to spill out and start their own firms.

[00:08:56] Because the barriers to entry has suddenly dropped quite a lot. You know, a couple of our guest presenters who do other things, like Alistair and Ariana and stuff, have had great success as a consequence of that. But yeah, it's always interesting to me to hear that the US market is sort of only just starting to adopt that. And interestingly as well, it's not to say that we don't have a lot of broad generalist firms still in the marketplace.

[00:09:18] And the biggest ones are still broad generalist firms, albeit they will have areas of specialism and niches, but more than one that they fall into because of the scale. It actually becomes a natural consequence of things there, doesn't it? And I think as we get into other stories around what's going on in the Appo's ecosystem, the same thing will echo there. But if you've got big players trying to move into a space, the natural response to that is will niche down so you become more difficult to dislodge.

[00:09:45] And that logic applies just as well for software companies, I think, as it does for firms. And kudos to Kendrick to say niche properly as well. So there we go. Go try and don't try. I've got an interesting news story from Fishbowl, which I'm sure Kendrick will be able to lean into a little bit more and tell us more about it.

[00:10:04] But they've gone ahead with an acquisition of RepFabric with the goal of trying to combine the data and information that Fishbowl have on the inventory management side with the sales and commissions and CRM data that you get in RepFabric. And bringing that together in one place. And we've not really seen much of that from, I would say, other competitors in the market. Although I guess you could say that the Zoho books maybe have some element of this given their history and background.

[00:10:31] But we have seen players in the market kind of tie together and do this broadly. So I think this is really interesting. And before Kendrick tells us how amazing this is, let me just give you some of the stats and information. We know that for a lot of small, mid-sized manufacturers, that kind of sales process can be very disconnected from the day-to-day inventory management side of things.

[00:10:55] And one of the risks, of course, when you're an inventory business is that you don't want the sales rep going out and selling a million widgets when you only have 100 in the warehouse. And you've got to suddenly find some way of magicking these up from nowhere. So that's always one of those challenges. So I think that helps broadly with that kind of operational management side of the business. And then I think the other thing is, quite often in these organizations, there will be incentives, right?

[00:11:18] Whether that's a sales incentive for the salespeople or whether that's an incentive for the customer in terms of being able to buy scale or volume or just understanding what else is potentially in the sales mix. And maybe seeing adjacent products in their sales mix that maybe they hadn't thought about because maybe the supplier is not good at talking about them and letting that customer know that they've got that in the mix. So there's a bunch of potential opportunities here, I think, that come from that.

[00:11:46] This was, you know, RepFabric is a fairly new business founded in 2015. So it's not that old in the grand scheme of things, you know, from a technology point of view. And, you know, interesting to see this come together. So come on, Kendrick, you can now give us the marketing and sales pitch that goes with this, right? Well, thank you, John. I appreciate that. You know, it's really exciting to think about where and how RepFabric fits. It's really a natural extension of what Fishbowl already does.

[00:12:11] You know, Fishbowl is there to manage what happens after an order comes in, you know, the inventory, the purchasing, the manufacturing, the fulfillment. RepFabric, on the other hand, is managing more of what happens before that in the sales pipeline, quoting, order tracking, and then commissions, which is one of their amazing strong suits. And bringing this together really gives manufacturers and distributors a more connected path from that first customer conversation all the way through production and delivery. And it removes a lot of the duplicate entry between a lot of generic CRMs out there, accounting and operational systems.

[00:12:41] It's really purpose-built for manufacturers, for reps, and for distributors. And, you know, the capabilities are awesome because it's AI-assisted and emailing and quoting and order tracking. And the integrations there are previous to Fishbowl acquiring RepFabric. They were already a partner so that the connectivity and the multiple customer base has already kind of been established.

[00:13:05] What's really interesting is that while they're not that old, RepFabric has spent an entire decade just understanding a really specific market, which are manufacturers and distributors, and how that fits in with multi-line sales organizations. And the value is not really just having a contact record or a sales stage like a lot of CRMs. It's the full understanding of where commission structures land, what territories look like, you know, how manufacturers' reps operate in the field, what quotes look like.

[00:13:32] And so they bring into the team a level of domain expertise that is really exciting, coupled that with more than two decades of inventory stuff on the Fishbowl side. And we've got a pretty strong offering there. You know, what's, I think, notable, and you mentioned already, John, the Zoho piece, this isn't really an acquisition designed to turn Fishbowl into another broad ERP.

[00:13:55] It's specifically there because we wanted to connect those workflows around what product-based businesses actually depend on. We want to keep businesses on the financial platform they trust, whether that's Xero or QuickBooks or what have you. You know, Fishbowl's really been designed for the last 25 years to be the operational system that's connecting the sales demand, the inventory, the production, the fulfillment, and the AI-driven decision-making with our latest push.

[00:14:23] RepFabric just fits right into that in a phenomenal way to grow out. Yeah, it's really cool. And maybe I can ask you sort of two questions, you know, maybe one which will be sort of more of a customer-related question and then more of an internal, your product-related question for you as well. Is that, I guess, when any piece of software makes an acquisition or another, there's always your concern amongst the customer base that maybe that piece of software might be shut off to any competitors, for example.

[00:14:52] Because, I mean, I don't know RepFabric that well, but let's assume that they potentially have integrations with maybe some other, you know, inventory management systems. So there's always a concern there. So I'd just be interested in your take and where you see the future of that and whether you kind of leave that open on or not, maybe. And then the other side of it, I guess, is more of an internal question, which is around the integration of the two products.

[00:15:13] Because obviously, you know, you've got two different products in different spaces, but we'll, you know, I guess assume at one point you want to bring those together to be a bit more functional, a bit more, you know, a bit more intertwined with each other. And that has technical challenges, software challenges, development challenges, et cetera, that go with it. Yeah, great questions on both front. In fact, I think they're interrelated to a degree. So, you know, the first half of that, you know, where is Fishbowl taking RepFabric?

[00:15:40] Well, the good news for anybody who's already a RepFabric customer is nothing's going to change other than more support and, you know, a broader footprint and base behind it. With some of our previous acquisitions, we've folded them right into the Fishbowl offering. RepFabric's a little different in that, you know, while they may not be in market as long, they still have a decade worth of customer base and folks who are specifically warranted to what they do. So you're not going to see the RepFabric brand disappear.

[00:16:07] You're not going to see the offering in its own right standalone evaporate. Those things will continue to offer. So we have the RepFabric group that will continue to market and sell it and develop specific for that niche market. But candidly, they have customers that go further upstream than what Fishbowl does in mid-market and enterprise level. And we don't want to disrupt that at all.

[00:16:31] Having said that, and to your second point around integration, as I mentioned earlier, we already had an integration working with them from the partnership that we've had. And, you know, multiple longstanding customers, you know, the immediate action is build upon that so that we can deliver in a better way.

[00:16:50] So what does change is, you know, better accessability to the data on both sides and kind of reimagining how we can more tightly couple that connection so that flow is even better. And to pull back the covers, just one more step, you know, Fishbowl has been heavily investing in the AI side for the last couple of years. And so standing up MCP servers side by side that allow us to really deliver to the end user a singular experience, even though it's multiple platforms.

[00:17:20] And we're fast on that track. In fact, within the quarter, you'll see the next release of that coming out. So a lot going on there to really extend it without disrupting anybody who's already on RepFabric. And to the final point of what about all the other connections that are in there? Yes, there are some competitive connections. We don't intend to break those out or to block those.

[00:17:44] Our approach rather is going to be showing those customers how much better it is with Fishbowl and RepFabric as a singular solution. But you both know and the world knows how difficult it is to replace essential business softwares and the disruption that that causes in businesses and something that, you know, we're going to try to chase down just to make a buck. The more important thing is making sure those customers are taken care of and they have a good experience.

[00:18:11] I love the fact that AI didn't come into that until like till you were like 80, 90 percent of the way through there. It feels like a really good organic match of products. But then when you talk about the data and you talk about those MCPs, I imagine there must be some really nice use cases there around supply chain reporting because that must be an absolute nightmare. But once you've got all that data in one place, you can attach it to an MCP. You can just let an agent go and say, right, give me the report on where this has come from. And that must be a dream for customers, I would have thought. Yeah, for sure. I want to your point, the data has to be right.

[00:18:41] The flow has to match. AI can do a lot to pull things together. But organically, it made sense and the position and placement and what RepFabric handles. We were talking before the podcast started about the value that RepFabric brings and the difference that it provides. So many CRMs are focused on the customer side, only as they should be. It's customer management.

[00:19:02] But the reality for a product-based business is looking at what's happening upstream on the supplier side is vital and equally important in order to do that. The example of a sales rep who wants to sell a million widgets and there's only 100 on the shelf, that struggle is real. And any of you who deal with product-based businesses know it. And so RepFabric really connects that in an extraordinary way.

[00:19:28] It brings up one of the news articles I had around Join Intelligence and what they've done. Join has kind of an interesting play as they're talking AI and bringing that closer into the decisioning later. And for me, it's not just write a nice paragraph about revenue. What they're trying to do is the whole ball of yarn, right?

[00:19:52] So build a report pack, clean up the chart of accounts, create the eliminations, diagnose, work, and consolidate balance sheets are missing and going wrong. And keeping the finance teams closer to live numbers, which we all know the closer that they have to real-time visibility is huge. And for anybody who works around ERP in the manufacturing area towards base, the more structured that operational data becomes, the more valuable the intelligence is.

[00:20:20] AI is so powerful when you feed it the right information. And I think what Join's looking to do here is really lifting on that. For product-based businesses, so many times there's a thought that the story begins and ends with the P&L, and it's just simply not true. Fishbowl lives in that operational layer. And we love being there because we can capture that data.

[00:20:43] Join being able to pull that accounting data, layer everything in, and have finance teams that can really, for lack of a better term, interrogate the whole picture so they can make better decisions. That's where it gets exciting for advisory firms and accountants to really dive in and say, here's what you need to change. There's all these could-dos and what businesses really want or what should I do.

[00:21:09] And I think the strongest use cases around that work are when the finance teams are really understanding what's happening. You know, there's so many problems around inconsistent chart of accounts and balance sheet issues and, you know, the, just the work around digging into that. And so the balance diagnosis agent that Join got is a really cool example.

[00:21:33] If you've got a consolidated balance sheet that's out, Join is going to jump in and point to whether the issue is a rounding problem or adjustments or an elimination that didn't happen properly or whatever it may be, so they can quickly get in there. That sounds well and nice, but when you zoom out on it, I think the accounting market in general is really moving from that static model of reporting back on what happened. And, you know, for how many thousands of years accounting has always been a report of what was,

[00:22:03] to see it kind of coming into that diagnosis and live interrogation is really exciting. And, you know, they're all doing it, right? Zero, last week I was at ZeroCon, they talked about JAX and the live financial intelligence. And Intuit's been pushing the Claude and ChatGPT integrations. Sodium's got the AI assistants. You know, Join bringing that same shift into reporting consolidation really helps empower.

[00:22:30] For mid-market businesses, that decisioning is just vital to what's happening. You know, from their ERP perspective, I think it makes good sense. And operational data working harder is great. You know, the way that Fishbowl helps a product-based business understand what's happening on the floor, Join's meant to help turn the whole finance picture into something that a board can act on. And I think that's pretty impressive. I'm curious, John, you know, with the Join-style intelligence that helped you move from reporting to what happened

[00:23:00] and explaining what's changing across the businesses, is it notable? Am I reading too much into this? Well, I thought it was interesting you mentioned some of the other solutions that have been in the market already because I think, you know, certainly JAX, because that's probably the one that's most familiar to me here in the UK, is the one that in the early days, you know, it took more work to ask JAX about the profitability of your organization than it did to just click the button to press the P&L report.

[00:23:29] And so I think what Join have done here is quite clever because, you know, they're not sort of saying, hey, run all of your reports from the chat interface, which is, you know, in some instances can be quite slow and not as nice an experience as just being sat in the product and pressing the buttons. They're doing some of the stuff that you said, which is like looking at exceptions, telling you when a consolidation doesn't balance because, you know, as a user that can be a real pain to kind of chase down and figure out what's gone wrong.

[00:23:57] And also some of the other stuff that you talked about where you've got an inconsistency in a chart of accounts across multiple organizations. Again, like how you categorize that and how you make sure that, you know, the telephone expense in one organization is mapped to the right telephone expense across the whole group organization just because you're using two different codes, just making that tie together. Again, it's kind of that small, little niggly things like that that actually take quite a long time to kind of resolve and fix.

[00:24:25] And some reporting products just don't handle that particularly well. So I think that's really interesting. I think the other one, the one thing that I spotted in the release when they talk about this, which I don't think we often talk about enough is as we kind of move into more of this agentic experience and you're thinking about your data again, particularly like here in the UK. And I know it's a, it's a big issue in the US as well, but you know, we have obviously GDPR to think about here in the UK is that, um, you know,

[00:24:52] when you're using Xero and then hand that off to Claude or to chat GPT is like, do you, do you as an organization truly understand what is happening to your data and where it is going in terms of, you know, is it staying in the UK? Is it moving to the US? Is it going somewhere else? Um, and, and join have decided to use like the AWS platform, which kind of gets forgotten about when we talk about elements and AI, because they've just been, they've been quietly just building their own infrastructure and then allowing you to plug in,

[00:25:19] uh, the models, but, but, but make sure that that data never leaves that infrastructure. So it's a really, it's a really intelligent clever way that AWS deploy this technology in a way that also gives you that massive reassurance. If you're, if you're a UK user with that data being held in the UK or in Europe, for example, which complies with GDPR, you never have to think the next step of, Oh, what happens is now that Claude or open AI or whatever it is has got hold of that data and where is it going? So, um, yeah,

[00:25:48] just one thing I think that, you know, like I say many, many firms do not think about this and do not, you know, maybe underestimate the potential risk or impact that it could have to their organization. That's a great point. And that compliance piece is, is all too often overlooked until it's too late. Right. Yeah. I'm an auditor at heart. You see, that's not, that's what I'm saying. There we go. So I'm going to tack on there with another story from, uh, from join. They've pushed out some, uh, some really nice report pack releases,

[00:26:17] which you touched on a little bit there, Kendrick, but I want to drill into it a little bit more because, um, it's grabbing some interesting data from across the, uh, across the platform that you've got in there. Uh, but they've added some really nice functionality around sharing that separately afterwards. So you can share the PDFs, um, to different stakeholders around the business with different user access levels. They've then got to, uh, retrieve a separate, uh, code from an email that's come out and then put it in to see it.

[00:26:45] So I think there's some really nice steps in here to help disseminate some of this information that you would, you would capture from this tool, uh, and pass it around the business and just get more people at the table talking about this stuff. Um, really beats some of the, you know, the traditional ways this would have been done, which is just invite a user in and let them poke around and, and see what they want to look at. But one of the nice things that caught my eye is that depending on your level of access, it, you know, you can share things through Excel as well as PDF. Um,

[00:27:14] and it will strip out data if you, you know, the drill down data, if you, if you don't, if you don't want that to be visible to a particular person that you've seen. Um, and I think, I think that's really cool. What I do miss from them though, and I've been frantically looking around the internet because the last time we covered join, they had a really nice little slide deck that went through exactly what they'd done and where it was useful. It was beautiful. And I can't find anything like that this time. I'm gutted. I was really looking forward to having a look at that. And I guess for me, as I look at this,

[00:27:43] the challenge with these things is you can push great products out. You can create all these scenarios, things that people could do, but then you leave them with the work to figure out how we're going to use this. And, and the, the tragedy then is a lot of these updates just get, they get missed and they get left by the wayside because people can't, they don't have the time to imagine how this would impact their workflow and how they would improve what they do through these bits of functionality. So I really hope when the next to a quarterly update, they'll, they'll give this a bit of love in there and,

[00:28:12] and sort of lay a few breadcrumbs for firms that might be using it. But, but John, have you seen much with this? I must admit, I haven't seen the new reporting that they've released. And I like you, Lee, I do miss a visual because kind of like tell me what's been going on with these things just to, so just so I can get a bit of a handle on it. Even if I, if I don't get the chance to kind of log in and see these things. I mean, look, the reporting space is a really interesting one, isn't it? Right. Because, you know, Kendrick was talking about this, you know,

[00:28:41] we've been a retrospective reporting force for like the last 2000 years. And, you know, and in many respects, it becomes a bit of a zero sum game, doesn't it? In terms of like, yes, you can knock out a P&L and you can knock out a balance sheet and you can knock out some of the bits and pieces. But, you know, truly like, where does the value lie with some of that other than making some of it a bit more visually, appealing and a little bit more easy to interpret? you know, I'm a, I'm a, you know, as much as I'm an accountant, I'm actually a big believer that,

[00:29:11] you know, you, you use this, use the numbers to tell a story. And actually you're having some visual representation of numbers because not everyone's a nerd like me likes to look at balance sheets and P&Ls. You know, just having something that sort of tells you the indication of where things are going. Is it going up and down? Is it trending? You know, is it seasonal? Can we see that in the numbers and stuff? Kendrick, I'm sure you probably have a view on this as well because you're, you see, you know, lots of systems and reporting all over the place. Yeah. I mean, it's,

[00:29:39] it's interesting to look at where things are headed and how people are using it. I think one of the things that oftentimes gets missed is, uh, what is it the end user wants to be able to do? And, uh, you know, what are their expectations around this? I think one of the things we're seeing and candidly have been guilty of at times is trying to build for what we think they want instead of what they actually need. Uh, you know, it's easy to, to jump into, this is the path that we think we should follow. And, uh, you know, at the end of the day,

[00:30:09] stepping back and looking at what is the outcome that we really want here, or, or rather not that we want, but that the end user wants. And then building that reporting is always the complaint and being able to understand how do we deliver data in a better way? So that those, those shoulds can occur instead of just what could I do as a, as an operator. And the one thing I'll say that I think is, is different now than we've ever seen, um,

[00:30:34] is the rate at which people need to make decisions and the rate at which change affects choices seems to be compounding exponentially. Uh, and so, you know, having reporting that just shows what happened last week, last month, or, or even in the last four hours, sometimes isn't enough. I have one customer in particular, I just happened to speak with yesterday who for the longest time, daily reporting was all they, they ever needed. And, uh,

[00:31:00] we had a really in-depth conversation around what they want to see for the manufacturing process on an hourly basis. And if you would have told me that 15 years ago out of that hourly, like you can't even turn around a project in an hour. Why do you need reporting? And now it makes perfect sense because they're getting real time feeds from their vendors on supply delays and real time updates on the payroll side from who didn't clock in when they were supposed to. And all of that changes everything that's happening in a way that now they can be more reactive.

[00:31:28] And so I don't think the need is, is there fictitiously, uh, all of these systems working together have, have put us into type or drive, uh, to make better decisions faster, which can be really exciting when done properly and really detrimental, uh, when there's a miss on our materials. In fact, the reason I was talking to them was, um, they, they misstated, um, the hours available in their, their work staff. And, uh, now they're behind a week and a half because of, of,

[00:31:58] over provisioning. Yeah, I agree with that a lot. And I, I think, you know, I mean, I mean, this sounds very contrived, but like I, even I get frustrated now when I make a bank transaction in the bank, it doesn't appear in zero until like an hour later. And I'm like, Oh, come on guys. Like I know the speech for an API. I should be able to see it like almost immediately. Um, yeah, maybe that's just my, that's my rampant need to reconcile everything. But like, that's, that's probably what's going on there. But, but I, I wonder if maybe that's the next boundary for kind of some of these reporting, interesting tools and stuff.

[00:32:29] And we, we've had flavors of this in the past, but you know, to really kind of give that user a reliable indicator of the quality and reliability of the data they're using to make those decisions on, because like you say, Kendrick, you know, the need or the demand for kind of like having almost like real time information and then being able to make prompts, prompt decisions off the back of it. It is definitely increasing. I see it all the time. I see it myself personally in my, in my roles. Um, and, and sometimes, you know, before you make a decision,

[00:32:58] you're almost having to like cut back under the data to click back into the systems that provide that just to give yourself the reassurance. What I'm looking at is genuine. And like, there isn't an anomaly that I'm not aware of, or if, or if you see an anomaly to give yourself that reassurance that that anomaly is arising because the data is correct. And there is something generally that needs to go off and be fixed rather than someone's just not done a task in a system that feeds that data through. Hey everyone. Give me two seconds to tell you about Sweet Files,

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[00:34:23] which is now part of TaxCount. They have been smushing out a lot of features that are expected to land, or have been landing over the last few weeks during August. So clearly they've had a busy prep for the summer break and stuff. And really, you know, what they've been looking to do is to like watch onto the back of the continued expansion in the UK market, particularly as they sort of start to target sort of probably slightly larger firms, because they were always in, you know, quite well set in the small farm, small firm market.

[00:34:53] And so what they've been trying to do is increase things like visibility. So this goes back to our reporting thing, I guess, in terms of like, you know, where jobs are at and making sure that jobs are completed properly when you're looking at the sort of like that task management side of things. They have the ability now for you to kind of see your proposals and letters of engagement full screen. So you're not kind of like, I'm to scroll through lots and lots of pages that kind of gets punched up on the side of the screen. You've got a fee review widget. So it just enables you to kind of go back through and make sure that all of

[00:35:23] your fees are at the kind of like right level or where you should have like an inflationary increase, or you've done your, you kind of provided too much service and not build enough for it. You can kind of capture some of those things. And I guess that brings them on parity with some of the competitors, certainly here in the UK, at least. And then also you've got the ability to put like automatic due dates through when you're bulk editing things, which is a really nice little feature to pick up because there's nothing more frustrating than being able to bulk edit a bunch of dates,

[00:35:49] but then the kind of due dates or the work dates off the back of that don't get updated as well. And particularly for us in the UK, where you're doing your VAT returns, obviously income tax, cooperation tax returns, those are all tied into specific like workflows and dates and things. And then, you know, broadly, you know, as I say off the back of it is like, look, they're trying to listen to their customers. So if anyone has an idea or suggestion that they want to work on, that should be developed, then they're all ears and they want to hear from you.

[00:36:18] and I think that's interesting because I think it was in the last podcast or maybe the one beforehand, we had Robbie White talking about someone who'd gone and built something that was in the, the zero suggestions list. And it had, I don't know, like 600 votes or something, which is quite a lot for the zero kind of like suggestions list. And then this guy built it and that kind of like fallen flat because there wasn't really any demand for it. So, so this is what I guess one of these like continuing challenges for a software business is like, it's great selling people that you listen to customers.

[00:36:46] I think the great that you allow customers to kind of give you direct feedback as well, but there is a very, like there is a very like keen kind of like balancing out there to make sure that you're not kind of leaning in one way to the detriment of other people or leaning in and using development time, which actually isn't adding a huge amount of value just because you've got one very noisy customer. And let's be perfectly honest, that used to be me in the past, you know, versus a bunch of other people are maybe a little bit quieter, but sitting there going, Oh, I'm really frustrated because this thing doesn't work, but I'm not, I'm not, you know,

[00:37:14] not going to shout too much about it because maybe we're too British and too polite, but, um, yeah, that's just the way it is. Right. I think we've got to see software companies lead a little bit as well. I know one was asking for bank feeds back in 2010, were they, you know, like it, I feel like we're missing a little bit of that slightly in the space at the moment is someone come out with something very innovative and go, no, this is what we're doing. I don't know. Maybe I'm looking in the wrong places. Maybe I'm biased, but I feel like we're trying to push that at fishbowl, uh, around the way that we're doing AI manufacturing,

[00:37:44] uh, you know, and without going into that sales pitch, just interacting with how clients are building things and what they want to see in the problems are really trying to solve for, the caveat there is we've got to, we've got to take the lead in building the way that we think they want to do it and adjust the way that they've been meant to think for, for 50 years. Now, uh, manufacturers have been conditioned to the way that traditional systems operate at, you know, order input and, uh,

[00:38:12] assessing what product needs I have and all those things and thinking about it in a new way where AI can jump in and say, Hey, what are we going to build today? Or why do we need to build this? How are we going to pivot the production schedule as a result of what happened in the real world? Uh, one of the struggles I think is meeting those folks where they're at and still delivering on an innovative way when, when, you know, for 50 years, they've, they've thought a certain path. Yeah. So that famous Henry Ford quote, right?

[00:38:41] Is that he didn't actually say as it happens, but he's the, the quote goes, if I'd asked them what they wanted, they would have asked for faster horses. He didn't say that. It's not him. it's, it's mistreated. Someone made it up, probably a software company that wanted to sell something new. I thought that was him. That's a good point anyway, right? Yeah. It's very true. One of the facts get in the way of a good point. You know, on that note of just changing the way that flows happen.

[00:39:12] Uh, one of the stories I've got does around bright pay and how they're using the cloud move to show what, what payroll, uh, can become, it's really less batch processing and we're around operational control, which, which payroll isn't always the most exciting thing. Um, but when you can innovate on something that's been around for a long time, I, I think it's great. Um, you know, the updates that they've offered are, uh, a whole handful of, uh, kind of friction blockers, uh, is the onboarding process reporting. We've been talking about, uh, we've been talking about already, uh, today, uh,

[00:39:42] payments, uh, you know, pay slip explanations and pension flags and tax reporting. Um, some great things. Um, uh, they, they've, they've got, uh, a new tool Oscar, uh, which is kind of the feature that they've led with our, their AI engine. Uh, and I know it's been covered on the podcast before, but that AI assisted onboarding and, um, you know, there's a solid review layer, um, before everything's committed to, to write, which I think is really nice, uh, from, from an ERP perspective and where I sit,

[00:40:09] I think the value in encoding the workflow and, and giving people not just a prettier screen and that kind of a cute name to, to work along with it, but empowering them to, to do those things. Um, they're, they're talking about a pay by bank inside of bright pay. And, and that's kind of another nice thing. Um, payments being embedded into that workflow, again, just time savings and automation. And look, that's not anything new, sage indexed and into a zero accounts IQ.

[00:40:38] Everybody's really tightening the gap there, uh, between having the system pay and, and the way the money actually moves. Uh, the other, uh, thing that I thought was really nice. And, maybe it's, uh, a bit frill, but the, um, pay slip comparator, which is meant to be a smart kind of hidden client feature. Um, I, I, uh, have spent a fair bit of time kind of working adjacent to HR. And so many times an employee comes and asks, you know, why is my pay different? What happened here?

[00:41:08] And so having that comparator tool that just explains, here's what your pay is. Here's what the tax looks like. You know, here, uh, are the things that have shifted. I think that could really remove a lot of repetitive questions and at the same time, empower, uh, you know, employees to get the data they want when they want it. Uh, so, so maybe not, uh, super exciting and glamorous, but pretty highly useful, which at the end of the day, uh, is really good. Now, the, the one other piece of this, uh, with bright pay,

[00:41:37] and I know this story all too well because we've, we've lived it as well is, uh, you know, kind of that balance, um, between, uh, the desktop solution and their, their cloud transition, uh, you know, having gone through that in our own right, um, a lot of people love the desktop side. And, uh, you know, this is true of fishable and of, of, of bright pay, uh, and moving to the cloud, uh, is not just a flip of a switch and, and frictionless bliss. Um, so yeah, I think these updates, um, are,

[00:42:05] are vital for them to be able to get the cloud version, not just up to where people were being forced into a path, but, uh, uh, delighting customers in, in providing tools that really make it nice. And that's at the end of the day, uh, that's, that's no small lift. Yeah, I think, I think you're right on that. And I mean, I guess for me, uh, you know, and I think, I think, you nailed it, Kendrick, you know, it's like the challenge obviously is that transition from a really well respected desktop products. Yeah. And let's be honest,

[00:42:33] bright probably didn't do a great job of deploying their cloud alternative as a replacement. You know, it wasn't quite up to par with the functionality. Didn't land particularly well. And they ended up pulling it and then redeploying it a year later. And this is a problem with payroll is it's not a product. You can kind of just launch at any time of the year because of the kind of cadence of the tax years that we brought up. It happened. And the natural position for transition is always an April for us here in the UK. Um, so yeah, they, they, they've definitely struggled a bit. I think, you know, let's be, let's be,

[00:43:03] let's be honest. What they're adding to the product is good. It's functional. It adds, it adds value. Um, but I think your broader point in terms of like, what do they do with that bigger bright suite? Now that bright pay is part of something much more complex is that I think from a practice point of view, what I would like to see is like, you know, how do I maybe sit in the practice management and manage work for those across in payroll and vice versa, such that I've got a greater visibility of like, you know, where's my payroll team up to? Are they performing in front or behind your tasks and try on track with

[00:43:33] getting things done? And you know, what's that capacity look like in terms of, can we grow up when expanding that functionality and things like that? So that, that would probably be the thing that I'd be looking at. I think the biggest misstep that you made though, Lee was you didn't ask Kendrick about his HR adjacent work. Cause I wondered what, who did it say or what he'd done wrong. That'll be for another session. It's a long story. Yeah. Well, I've been very HR adjacent in my career. So we're kindred spirits there.

[00:44:02] I don't walk the straight and narrow, but across it as often as I can. John was here on the naughty chair outside the office. All right. Running on from this one, we've got a story that zero have opened up their, their developer initiative or there's the zero developer growth program to practice tools, which is very, very interesting. So they are looking, applications are open now. They're looking for about five vendors of practice tools to, to come on with them.

[00:44:31] And the, the developer program, I hadn't really seen much about it until I looked into this story, but it's effectively a bit of a shot in the arm for a handful of vendors. Zero will co-promote them and, and try and help them take them to market and give them some preferential treatment, which is, which is lovely. So I think around the practice tools, like we said a minute ago, it's a really busy space. And I think there might be a little bit of kind of like firms been a bit like deers in the headlights, right? When they think about practice tools, what do you look at?

[00:45:01] Where do you go with it? There's so many parts of that workflow for a firm. Not everybody does all of it, but some do different bits. And it's not even like you can say, well, I just need to propose a bit of software anymore because that the ends really blur on what they do, right? Like some proposal software go right the way through to integrate into AML tools and all sorts of things. So it's very difficult. So I think that Xero supporting that and giving some guidance and helping sign post firms to,

[00:45:30] to certain solutions will be, will be helpful. It'll probably be welcomed by the profession. But I also think that this is just another interesting entry or data point on this journey around Xero and its relationship with its ecosystem, because as we'll come to this, there's definitely more points that we'll talk about today on the Xero ecosystem. And I think to some extent, especially around some of the announcements from XeroCon UK, where Xero may be rolling over a few of the apps in the ecosystem there,

[00:46:00] replicating functionality and bringing that in the core product, which causes maybe a problem for some of the long-term partners. You've also got things like Xero Force, which may actually enable firms to write their own workflows and kind of exclude a couple of practice tools from their stack potentially. So yeah, it looks to me like a little bit of, you know, Xero giveth and Xero taketh away potentially. My underlying feeling on this is like, is this just confirmation that Xero practice manager is now dead and that they

[00:46:29] want to replace it by basically turbocharging some competitors, which they then might go and buy or build into their broader product suite? You know, it's interesting to see kind of Xero overall. I think John's onto something with probably acquiring the next one that does it best or partnering with them. But as you said earlier, Xero giveth and taketh away. That's spot on to what they're doing in a lot of places.

[00:46:56] One of the stories I picked up was the API updates that they've made and are pushing out there, which lands squarely over the top of something useful does and a lot of solutions out there with back orders. And I had the, the better, I missed the Xero con lens. I missed that. I didn't get to go, but I caught up for it with Denver's rendition last week and had a good time connecting up with the Xero team. And we talked a fair bit about back orders and prepayments,

[00:47:23] which are two of the many updates that are coming in the API and the back order side. I think that just went live. And, you know, for track inventory solutions, connected apps can, can raise an invoice and then see when there's back back order there. It puts whatever the shortfall is on back order and then fulfill the ones dot comes in. And I have, I have a question on that for both of you here in a moment, but I'll get through the payments piece and come back around to it. Yeah, I think it's useful. And, you know,

[00:47:53] one of the details, it's not automatic. If an app tries to sell more than is available, you know, Xero will push back, but, you know, the app has to deliberately allow that back order. So the workflow, I think continuity in there, you know, today's very, for, for fishbowl and Xero or for others in the market, you know, like since Evan or Katana, whoever, to my knowledge, none of us interact with back orders. yet. And, uh, maybe that's something we,

[00:48:22] we should all be looking at is how that changes it and where, where it lives and sits. Um, the second one that they talked about, uh, in my mind was far more compelling. And, uh, we even had folks in the room at the developer day who, uh, pointed out, maybe that's not exciting. But for, for me, for fishbowl, uh, it was great to start talking about prepayments and partial payments and credit notes and everything that's coming out, um, because it, it gives, uh, third-party apps like fishbowl or, or others, uh, the ability to, to really book and, and create when,

[00:48:52] when a prepayment occurs, uh, it's constantly check, checking Xero to see what's changed. Uh, you know, if you can, you can write that forward, you know, it's just cleaner for reporting, for reconciliation, for, for the workflow where, where deposits occur. I can't count the number of times where, uh, a client's had to explain, look, we, we build this, uh, machine, we're manufacturing something and we're going to take 30% down or whatever the amount may be. Uh, and there's been a bit of a dance and some,

[00:49:21] some kludgy workarounds to post that out properly. So I got super excited when, the payments, the prepayments webhook came around and, putting credit notes on that one thing, these change it. There's so many scenarios where, you know, there's a partial fulfillment or a customer deposit or a supplier advance, or, you know, all the money arriving before the final invoice exists, um, for third party tools like fishbowl. It's exciting to see that coming around because it just finishes swing, completes the workflow. Uh, so maybe not super exciting for a lot of folks out there,

[00:49:51] but, uh, we, we certainly celebrated that. Uh, and you know, the nice thing in my opinion is zero wants connected apps to handle more of these kinds of awkward flows properly, uh, you know, less spreadsheets and less kind of still data and disjointed workflows. If nothing else, um, they're doing a good job in my opinion to, uh, kind of build out the ecosystem and allow users and third party tools to operate as they do and capture that correctly. So I think it's,

[00:50:21] it's more innovative than a lot of folks are giving credit for on some of these things like prepayments and credit notes, uh, that, that, you know, going back to the back orders one, I'm curious on, on, on both of your thoughts. Uh, when we put back order support into zero, how does that change the flow for stock-based businesses? Is, is it enough that, um, they don't need a tool like fishbowl or is it such that we need to think about building into that and connecting the dots or do we, we just let it be and understand that it's smaller. And that's maybe not a fair question to ask,

[00:50:50] but I'm curious, uh, what you all think about. I mean, my, my thoughts on this, Kendrick is that, you know, it's, it's interesting that you've picked up on this. I mean, it's interesting for two reasons. Obviously you're in the inventory space, right? But, but also the, the, the zero us approach to inventory is very different from their approach broadly across the rest of the world. You know, they started off with the acquisition that they made, uh, what now two or three years ago, of an inventory business, which is kind of rolled up into zero.

[00:51:19] And some of that inventory functionality that is there in zero us is not there around in the rest of the world. Um, and then I guess being able to sort of manage back orders, you know, that, that is broadly, I guess, sort of, let's say table stakes for, for, you know, anyone that's doing any kind of inventory management, they, they want to be able to do that. And so I think zero building that ends the product is, is good in some respects, but my,

[00:51:48] I think my broad challenge is that, you know, inventory management in zero has always been kind of like, it's, it's kind of like the, you know, it's the Tom Cattoy of inventory manager, right? It's the entry level kind of like, you give it to your kids. It kind of does what it, what you want to do. It's safe. It's not too dangerous. You can't go too wrong, but it, it doesn't really give you, it's not full bore, you know, like you say, the operational management side of inventory, which is much more complex and definitely needs a third party product. Um, and so, you know, the question then is, is like, you know,

[00:52:19] is, is adding this functionality table stakes, like I say, or is it kind of just starting to nibble away at the space that their ecosystem is providing out? And what does that lead to going forward in the future? Because, you know, from a user perspective, I just want clarity about, you know, where is my software headed? Like, you know, do I, do I want to, do I want to invest in a product like fishbowl and stick with it for the next, you know, five or 10 years, knowing that that will sit nicely with Xero or are Xero going to kind of like have

[00:52:46] this functionality creep that we've seen in so many other areas, which means that at some point down the track, I'm going to be looking at this going, well, you know, do I still need fishbowl or is there something else that's unique in that product that keeps it separate from there? and then the, you know, the question I guess that you posed was like, you know, should fishbowl as a product and should have maybe other inventory providers build into that functionality? To me, I think you should, because I, you know, I know that as a user, I like to see that full crossover functionality.

[00:53:16] So I can see transactions present in both systems, assuming it's available through the API. And I think that just makes everything a little bit cleaner and clearer, particularly when you've got your bookkeeper accountant head on, maybe sitting in the financial side, not sitting in the operational side, being comfortable seeing a transaction that is clear to you as a financial accountant, that might not be clear to an operational person sitting on the inventory management side. I love that perspective. Yeah.

[00:53:45] I'd say I've never really been in a stock based business and we're getting on for time. I'll tell you a really quick story to tell you, which reflects how I think about this inventory thing, right? Once upon a time, I had a little dog, a little puppy, Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, took him for a walk in winter. And we were near this lake and it's a fishing lake. So there was little wooden pontoons just around the edge, right? When he got to the edge of it, the lake, he was quite cautious. He was still quite young, so he didn't go anywhere. But when he got one near one of these little pontoon things,

[00:54:15] it was kind of half an inch under the water. He walked on that quite happily and then just walked off the end of it and like completely almost drowned out and yank him out by the, by the lead. And my point here is that I think there's, there's with this inventory and this back orders, there's a risk that you give people enough rope that they'll hang themselves. Because I would say if you're, if you're trying to deal with back orders and try to do that in core zero, then you're probably going to run into a bit of a mess there with that. Like you, if you're doing back orders and selling stuff when you don't actually have the stock,

[00:54:44] you should probably have proper inventory management system. And so you might find quite a lot of upset, cold, wet dogs that have gone a little bit too far down this path. And they go, Oh my God, I actually need to be yanked out. And they'll be coming to fishbowl and say, please save us. Cause we started selling stuff that we don't have. And we actually need to fix this now. So that's just the, that's my interpretation of this zero stock may have moved on a little bit since I was, I was in there, but I, that's, that's what I think about it. I like that perspective. Lee, and you know, to the point earlier that you made,

[00:55:14] John, you know, zero zeroes dabbled in this, the U S markets interesting with the locate was the tool that they acquired and then shuttered. Two years ago, they, they talked a lot about that, that Nashville zero con this year, there was no mention made of it. Uh, and the downside to that is, um, you know, like you just addressed with, with that awesome story, Lee, sad for the puppy, but glad, glad you got it out. But you know, when, when zero was pushing, uh, the zip, their zero inventory plus in, in the U S market here,

[00:55:44] it really helped us, um, because it, it wasn't enough to solve for the need. Um, and so it, it brought a lot of visibility to, okay, what do we need? We actually saw a fair few, uh, upticks in, in folks that were moving over to fishbowl, simply because they raised visibility to the inventory problem and didn't have a full solution to it. Um, so we, we love it when zero promotes their inventory capabilities, knowing that it's going to just draft our way. Uh, the, the point that you made though, Lee around,

[00:56:13] it's gotta be the full story I think is really important. And so, yeah, that, that we're already kind of thinking down that line of how do we integrate to it to empower the bookkeepers and the advisory firms to see what's going on, uh, without putting users in a place that they're, they're with a rope around their neck and not in a good way to, to manage everything that's happening within that product based business. Yeah. Amazing. Right. And I will move us onto the last story that we've got out news. Um, and actually I think it's, it's a really interesting little piece that we picked up.

[00:56:43] so the, the guys from journey, um, that, that many people will know that they're working on like sort of like the marketing go to market side of the ecosystem and the team behind it have also created a product called vinyl, which is all about, um, you know, meeting, it's a meeting note taker, but designed for accountants. Uh, and they were there at zero con Denver, um, last week, uh, as you were Kendrick. And, um, they've kind of just written about their sort of perspective on what they've heard from that. Because I, uh, I know that they were also at zero con London as well.

[00:57:12] So they've kind of had that, that message twice now this year in terms of like what zero looking to do, where they're going with the ecosystem, the API, what functionality and features they're developing and building. Um, and, and I mean, I'm not going to read the whole story out, but what I thought was quite interesting is it kind of had a bit of a pivot on like, Hey, if you're like, if you're a, if you're a technology business, or you're thinking about building technology for the zero ecosystem, like zero has quite blatantly eaten some of the stack that's out there. You know, we've already talked about this in previous podcasts off the back of, um, um,

[00:57:42] off the back of zero con London. And we will talk about a little bit more, um, in the future off the back of zero con and Denver as well. But they, they've identified five areas, um, which I think is like pretty keen in terms of like, where else is left to kind of build and like, what, what is left for the development space, uh, you know, that, that probably is not going to get nibbled away out in the same way that we've just talked about, about this. you know, probably perhaps not surprisingly for Hendrick, at least, Kendrick, at least is that, um, you know, we still got this thing about looking,

[00:58:12] leaning into the verticals, right? Still leaning into like, what's, what is it that zero is not going to build in the future? Um, and they're referencing back to like, what was, um, what was the winner of last year's app awards. And it was a rostering and invoicing, uh, product for disability and aged care, uh, inventory and jobs and then marketplace settlement reconciliation, which I thought, um, you know, is like absolutely like key areas that, that, that, you know, zero cannot cover in a lot of detail. I'm thinking that marketplace settlement stuff is like zero dabbled with

[00:58:42] integrations with Shopify and a bunch of others. And frankly, those integrations are not worth the time and effort so you can switch on because they just give you junk data, which is just makes the reconciliation process even more difficult. And there are way better products on the market. Um, and, and their kind of point on this is like, look, general ledgers, they do generalize and they don't specialize in like the things that are required to, to run up your business. It is complex. It has the operational management requirements, whether it's inventory, whether it's healthcare or something else that is there. So that's always going to be a place, uh, where you, uh,

[00:59:12] you know, where you could do that. And, and what I quite like in the story is a quick test was like, Hey, could it, could a zero, uh, PM, which Leo, Lee can explain in a second. Maybe can they describe your product to their own leadership in one sentence without using a single industry specific noun? And if they could, you're in the absorption zone. And if they couldn't, then you're still, you should crack on and carry on building, uh, which I thought was quite interesting. Um, they talked about the, the exception layer, and this is kind of going back to something we talked about a few times over the last few minutes is that, you know, this,

[00:59:42] this issue around data and the cleanliness of your data or the, the reliability of your data. Um, and, and the fact that, you know, um, you know, lots of feeds, lots of integrations can get quite complex. You know, the example I give is when you've got Stripe payouts, right? Stripe payout could cover one transaction. Sure. It could cover a thousand transactions. And off the back of that, you've got sales, credits, charges, fees, a whole bunch of other things that are going on. And, you know, depending on how that's managed through it, through an integration can either be very, very simple,

[01:00:12] or it could be incredibly messy and very difficult to kind of get to the nub of what's actually happened with that. Um, you know, that they still think there's an opportunity for somebody to potentially build, uh, you know, an exception app. Let's, let's call it that, uh, that, that allows you to kind of look at the quality of data and give you, um, uh, you'll give you some better insights. Um, and then the other things that they're leaning into is, is compliance on a jurisdiction level. Um, you know, because, um, you know, whether you're in the U S like,

[01:00:42] like yourself, Kendrick, you know, we know that U S taxes, particularly sales taxes are incredibly complex. And yes, there are some third party solutions that help to manage up. It's the same with VAT here in the UK and Europe. It's very complex. And there are, there are certain things that are not included in the kind of like out of the box solution that Xero have. Um, and of course you can then lean into making tax, digital, e-invoicing, you know, income taxes, corporation taxes, a whole bunch of other things that sit around the periphery of that. And, you know,

[01:01:09] and this has been a personal bugbear of mine in terms of Xero is like, I just feel like they have just ignored the mainland Europe opportunity that I think is there for them. And the pushback that I've always had from, from like senior management, whether it's, you know, Gary in the past and more recently, some of the more, more, uh, your recent appointees to kind of like that UK MD and EME role has been, look, we, we can't get into, we can't get into Europe because of the language. issues because of the regulatory issues, because of the tax complexities and stuff. And,

[01:01:36] and the only way to do that is to have third parties build onto their own product. Um, and I just don't think they've actually pushed that message enough because we haven't seen enough developers doing that. Um, yeah, the final couple of points that they make is like talking about, um, uh, what they called systems of action. So they're, they're kind of giving this point of, um, you know, uh, the fact that you're zero and now charging for you to get information in and out of the API particularly. Um, um, and, and,

[01:02:04] and they're talking about the fact that if you build in a sort of a poor way or a lazy way that you can make that, you know, very expensive. Um, obviously like, you know, zero have their own reasons for, for putting a paywall on the API in terms of like managing neutralization and stuff. Um, but they're talking about how to, um, uh, you know, how you could more effectively manage your use of the API and the data that comes through it by being a bit smarter, um, about using things like web clocks and other bits and pieces to kind of, uh,

[01:02:34] pull some of the data that maybe you don't need through directly through the API. So I thought that was interesting. It's very techie, but it's interesting. Um, and then the last one, which I think is a, is a prevalent point because we definitely talked about this before is about, you know, using agents. And, and actually, again, I was on LinkedIn. I was on LinkedIn earlier this morning, partly because Indy's been bullying me about posting about other things. But, um, you know, I saw a really interesting comment on it, which was actually a screen grab off, off, uh, effects. I think it was, which said, you know, I don't want to use your agent in your product.

[01:03:03] I want to use my agent in your product. And I thought that was a really like interesting thing. And this is effectively what the guys at journey have said as well. It's like, you know, don't just build another chat bot on your product unless it's going to be functional. And going back to, you know, Kenji, you were talking about MCPs. I, I think this is, again, this is the future. And, you know, I, I, I use MCPs all the time, every day, whether it's in Claude or chat GPT, you know, to kind of like manage the context of multiple products in one place in a chat space where

[01:03:30] I don't want to have to go and log into multiple UIs and UXs to kind of do those tasks. It's broadly because actually I can't perform those tasks just in one product. And so I'd end up with like three or four screens open. I know that's been a comment and a challenge that other people have said in the past. I think, I think this becomes much more prevalent now because in an accounting bookkeeping workflow, you know, moving between tasks is kind of safe because the task workflow doesn't mean that you try to move through a forwards or backwards trajectory.

[01:04:00] So it doesn't mean that you're not kind of like popping in and out and moving back and forth between products. But certainly on the operational side of an organization, you do that much more often. And so they've talked about this and you're basically saying, you know, look, having, having good integrations through an API is not enough anymore. Having good operational, sorry, good integrations that come through an MTP and allow you to interact with data across multiple platforms is kind of like the future of where they expect things to go.

[01:04:28] I completely agree with you on the MTP stuff. Like I'm not particularly bleeding edge on AI, but I've built myself a little, little assistant, little chief of staff. Often he goes off and looks at zero. I kind of created a little automated CFO called Frankie. Frankie just goes and looks at zero. Now I don't, I don't want to, unless I absolutely have to, like he can draft invoices and he can pull, pull figures through for me in my morning briefing. And I think that is, like I've talked about this before, but I think that's the danger.

[01:04:56] Like zeros fortress was around beautiful UI for so long. And I think we were already at the point now where you could create your own reskinned version of zero. So let's say for example, HLB, you go, well, we want to use zero, but zero aren't going to go into Europe. So let's create an HLB front end for zero. And then we'll modify that by territory for various things. And we'll just call the general ledger to pull the information out. So we know we've got a strong source in the middle. It's like a headless version of zero kind of thing. I think that's a big reason why they've put these API limitations in place,

[01:05:25] particularly if you want to go to general ledger, because that conceivably is possible now. And yeah, I think there's interesting opportunities there, but, but, but to the point around where people build around that, where would you start making a product now? I don't even know. Like it goes back to the, the safe bet is just niche down into something, but then I suppose the challenge is don't be too successful in it. Because if, if a big company then sees enough opportunity, then they're going to build something for it. Yeah. I know Kendrick, I'm sure you'll have some thoughts on this as well, but just very quickly. I mean,

[01:05:54] the other bit that is in this piece and I'll just, I'll rattle through this really quickly is basically the things that they're saying you shouldn't build anymore. So standalone OCR, completely agree with that. I mean, there hasn't been an opportunity in that market for about five years here, at least here in the UK, a generic small business accounts, payable solutions. Again, here in the UK, that's, that's a, that's an absolute like saturated market. Read on the reporting and dashboards. We've, we've done that to death already on the news. Um, chat with your books wrappers, because you can only do that with Claude and chat GPT. And we've, we've talked about that as well.

[01:06:24] And then, and then just broad like client sort of, uh, portals effectively that they're talking about. And again, I agree like client portals are like, so like, I don't know, 2003, like no one, no one should be even contemplating a client portal nowadays. Yeah. I mean, those things are spot on. And it kind of lends back to where my mindset goes is what watching zero and into it both. And that the shifts that they've made, you know, this year, they both monetized that, that API and for good reason, right.

[01:06:52] They saw the writing on the wall and where things were headed, you know, lead to your point about building that front end. They've got to find some way to, to containerize what, what's happening through there. And so, yeah, we're, we're all as integrated partners paying friendship dues to make sure that, uh, zero and QuickBooks data keep flowing along. And what I'm curious to know, I wish I had a crystal ball is to see where does it go from here? Uh, you know, with, uh, with both of them, those fees can add up pretty quickly. Uh, John, you mentioned it earlier that, uh, they, they try to drive it to,

[01:07:21] to be best practice, makes it more economical, uh, you know, into its version of that is that, um, if you have what they call, uh, core, uh, functionality that that's, uh, lessened or, or even free and to a degree. Um, they, they both have kind of a, a wellness review with the integration that they'll provide pointers and direction, but ultimately they want to monetize through, through partners because assuming data and, uh, you know, writing into their, their platform.

[01:07:50] And it's a great way for those hooks to occur. They, they know the dependence on third party solutions. And so they found a great way to, uh, to really tack onto that. And it, you know, the, the reality is, um, end users expect it. Like we can't just not pay zero and, and QuickBooks for, uh, data access and API integration or puts us up, down and, and, you know, eliminates the value of that integrated play. So good move on their part. I'll be it, painful for the pocketbook. Yeah.

[01:08:19] I think you must be one of the only vendors saying that, Kendrick, but I, I do probably agree with you. Um, absolutely. Um, well, amazing. Thank you. Thank you for all of the news items and the insights and stuff. It's been really good. Hope you enjoyed the news as always. Uh, a reminder, of course, if you want to find out more information about what's going on in this world, uh, you can sign up to the newsletter. You can follow us on LinkedIn. You can find all the other information that you need about us. You can go to the website, which is in the loop, not accountants, a whole bunch of information there. Uh,

[01:08:49] you'll see everything that's come out from, uh, the guys at fishbowl and Kendrick and, uh, the team there and what they're doing, but also all of the other insights that we have. A quick reminder as well, that we do have our, uh, awards coming up very, very soon. Uh, just the day before the night before, uh, context North, uh, and a few weeks in September. So if you want to come and join us at that, you know, we've been told that it's like zero con in the early days. So, uh, I don't know what that, I don't know how, how you feel about that Kendrick, but that's certainly what we've been told about it in the UK.

[01:09:18] Probably just means that there's like five of us in the warehouse in London somewhere, but, we're actually going to have 80 people in, in at least 80 people in Manchester, but that's how we're going. Uh, there are tickets available. You'll find all the details on the website, but of course you can ask one of us about it as well. And of course, we're always interested in hearing your news, your updates, your opinions, your ideas. Um, if you don't like what we're doing, tell us if you like what we're doing equally, tell us and rate us. We'd really appreciate it. Um, and, uh, listen out for the next episode next week.