Will AI Replace Accountants? It May Already Be Happening…

[00:00:00] It's crazy how much is just being resolved, solved, replaced by AI and now AI agents. It's the bread and butter of accountancy, isn't it? And it's literally all I did for the first few years as an accountant. That whole area will be replaced by something that can automatically provide you with that breakdown with those things. I guess ultimately, that's what we want from our vendors, isn't it? I think it's going to be a dramatic period of change. I just don't know when it's going to start.

[00:00:29] We would plan a budget for the year and then in Scoro, all the project managers would schedule their invoices and that allowed us to track how we were performing in terms of sales. I'm starting to see the traction. I'm starting to see it. The final wave is about introducing agenting AI specifically to do more complex tasks and even some decision making and things within the accounting system. That just in itself is a huge game changer. If you're doing forecasting, that agent says, oh, you know what, Ryan, looks like you're going to run out of money in three months.

[00:00:56] So that credit control agent actually needs to go and start banging on doors, as it were. That kind of interaction is really incredibly powerful. Be careful what you say. Be careful who you listen to because people are saying things incorrectly out there. And you could go down a path that will actually get you burnt by people that have probably not got your best interests at all. Hello and welcome to the DigiTools in the Cruel World podcast, the place to go for all your UK accounting tech news.

[00:01:23] This episode is sponsored by Employment Hero, the embedded HR and payroll platform now with free payroll. Makes sense to check it out, doesn't it? And we're also joined by Harv Nagra from Skoro, where we're delving into what a PSA platform is and how that differs to a practice management tool. As my ears were opened to a PSA platform in the last episode, we dive in a little bit more detail on the mechanics and how that operates.

[00:01:49] Before all of that, I want to welcome back to the podcast, John Toon. Thanks, Ryan, so much. Yeah, I didn't realise you'd miss me so much that it required such a big deal. I always miss you, mate. Yeah, I mean, again, yet again, Indy and I are playing like this whole one in one out game, aren't we? Where like, she's not here, I'm here. And yes, I know the rumours are going around that she and I are the same person. Who knows?

[00:02:17] It's a difficult thing to get sort of processed in my head. I thought you said make-uped up then. I thought that's where you were going with that. I don't think you could pull it off, John. I don't think you could. I don't. And although there are some rumours, you two are incredibly different. She is a lot smattier than you. Like, she's just got a dirty mouth, really. Yeah. Yeah, she's just not. She's not very reliable.

[00:02:45] And yeah, just like tends to miss meetings and not do the things that she's going to say that she'll do and stuff like that. So I can fully understand why it's much better to have me back than her. Of course, don't we love sarcasm on this podcast? But are you good, John? Are you getting some heat up in the Manchester area at the moment? Getting some heat? Yeah. Yeah, it is. It's definitely warming up. I don't think it's quite as warm as the south. But yeah, for sure. It's quite warm.

[00:03:14] I did sit out in the garden before and get a little bit of sun on my pale and pasty skin. So yeah, and I didn't turn red, which is reassuring. So it's very nice up here. Yeah. Yeah. And irony of ironies, I'm going out tonight, but I'm going to the cinema. So I'm going to be inside whilst I could enjoy a nice warm summer evening. But there you go. Oh, that sounds very pleasant. But that's not what I meant by heat. I meant are the cops after you?

[00:03:39] Because as we'll talk about in one of the news articles later on, they're after Finfluencers at the moment. And so I guess as we talk about tech, I wondered if you've had a knock on the door recently. Yeah. No, there's been no dawn raids or anything like that. Although I think, to be fair, it's only my team that jokingly refer to me as a Finfluencer.

[00:04:01] And I think with my measly followers on LinkedIn and the hundred or so desperate people that follow me on Instagram or whatever it is, I'm not sure I'm fully into Finfluencer territory yet. But I mean, I'm willing to promote dodgy investments for a fee. Maybe. That is a joke. But there you go. But keeping the moral integrity here of just selling out for anyone.

[00:04:32] Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. You tell me what to sell and I'll do it. Like, it could be dog food. It could be anything. Who knows? Cool. Well, before we start going to dog related conversations, I think we should pivot quite drastically into app news. This week, I'm going to kick off with follow on, I guess, from probably the last podcast. We were talking a lot about AI and its influence, its impact on the UK accounting space.

[00:05:01] And there was an article in Accountancy H that has talked about the end of, I guess, period end of month end. The fact that what we're expecting with AI agents is that all of those chores, all of those duties that we do to wrap up the books at month end will be eradicated, will be replaced by AI agents.

[00:05:20] And what I thought was that there was some surprising research that Sage had carried out because 75% of accountants in small and medium side businesses predicted that real-time financial data would replace month close. I'm not sure in conversations with people at the moment that 75% of accountants are expecting month close to be eradicated. I don't think there's any planning for that whatsoever in the accounting industry. It feels bold, doesn't it? Do you expect that?

[00:05:49] It feels, yeah, yeah, it does. It feels very, very out there. So maybe it was just one of those things where it's predicted, you know, it's what that kind of, the people that were asked are quite obviously going to give that answer. But, yeah, I know we expect it. We won't ask, but we expect it to eradicate period end. I think that's definitely going to happen. The timeframe, I'm not so sure about.

[00:06:14] But I think this may also have led into, I guess, some of the work that Sage are doing at the moment, maybe, and what they're doing with AI agents. So it kind of prompted or was pushed or was led to that answer by Sage. It feels a little bit like, you know, when they do the Xero review every year and it's like, oh, look, businesses and accountants that are on the cloud make more money. And it just so happens that they're on Xero and not the other platforms.

[00:06:44] And it's like, I wonder where this survey bias comes from. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I don't know how I feel about it, really. You know, it's something that doesn't really excite me too much, if I'm being perfectly honest. Well, it's the bread and butter of accountancy, isn't it? Closing year end or closing period end and doing all those jobs about reconciling what the balances are and proving what they are. That's kind of been, you know, what I was trained on.

[00:07:11] That was literally all I did for the first few years of my existence as an accountant. And essentially what we're saying with AI agents is that whole area will be replaced by something that can automatically provide you with that breakdown with those figures. And that does mean that as a profession, we need to pivot. And Sage does predict some new roles. They've got an AI compliance specialist and role or someone's being responsible for ethical and regulatory guidelines inside the business that's looking at what we're doing.

[00:07:40] And, of course, our role, although called slightly differently, our systems integrator, which is, in my opinion, going to be one of the biggest roles that comes out from this. You know, making sure the systems are there for those clients to enable the AI agents to do what they need to do. But, yeah, I think it's going to be a dramatic period of change. I just don't know when it's going to start. I think it's going to start soon, but I don't know when. And I don't know how long it's going to take to go through to fruition.

[00:08:07] Yeah, no, I'd agree that there's going to be a much higher likelihood of AI agents and stuff being able to take over some of these tasks that we have. And I guess the challenges around the kind of month-end procedures, you know, like payments and things are a frustration. Varying systems have some automation already in them to allow you to do that.

[00:08:28] But, you know, a classic example, I guess, is like, you know, Sage does have fixed asset register as does Xero and QuickBooks and FreeAgent, you know, to allow you to do more automated depreciation and stuff. But I guess in my head, you know, I feel like because we, you know, with the cloud accounting changes and then the bank fee changes that we've had, you know, I just feel because we tend to do bookkeeping more regularly. We just tend to keep on top of these kind of month-end, what we would call our month-end processes, maybe more regularly as well.

[00:08:55] You know, certainly, well, at least for me when I'm doing the stuff for the podcast, right? I'm doing the accounting there. If we get an invoice that needs to be prepaid, I kind of just do that prepayment there and then and then sort of do it and forget, really. I don't wait until, you know, the end of June or whatever to sort of pick that up and do it. So maybe that's just a, you know, change of approach, but who knows? Well, I think part of it is also that you're still doing it. And I think what they're trying to say is that we... True. No, I don't mean that in a bad way, right? But there's human intervention.

[00:09:25] Yeah. But the fact is we are still doing that, whereas the AI agents will effectively kind of take over. Which I'd be very pleased about, to be perfectly honest. So that's all good. Talking of AI agents, then, let's move on because Tom Herbert reported in Accounting Web because he had a bit of a jolly to the US. And he went over to see the Sage guys who had a big conference over there a couple of weeks, over in the US a couple of weeks ago.

[00:09:54] And, of course, the really big thing that was talked about there was the launch of a whole wave of autonomous agents that they're planning to come into their platforms and stuff. And this was a Sage Future conference, which was in Atlanta, Georgia. I don't think you and I got an invite to this, did we, Ryan? I'm not aware of that. We did not. I'm offended. Sage are kind of anticipating that this rollout will happen in sort of three waves.

[00:10:21] Wave 1 will be focused on performing specific narrow tasks. So I guess maybe some of this month-end stuff that we've been talking about. But also they talked about being able to read and extract data from invoices and classify and do that kind of transaction processing a little bit more in a more automated fashion. I guess to a degree, we've kind of already got that, though. And Sage already has that, of course, with their own tools as well that have acquired over the years.

[00:10:48] And then what they've been seeing then is the second wave, which has been around adding generative AI into the platform. So I guess that's the current stuff that we're seeing right now. And obviously being able to ask questions using natural language and maybe do specific tasks like chase creditors, chase debtors, rather, for money, which I think is really interesting.

[00:11:11] I think the challenge there that we've seen with some other platforms is that the agentic experience isn't as quick as the kind of in-platform experience, you know, in terms of just clicking the buttons and doing the tasks. So that's something that we've got to get over. And then the final wave is about introducing agentic AI specifically to do more complex tasks and even some decision making and things within the accounting system. So I think that's going to be a really fascinating thing to start to see.

[00:11:36] And that certainly bleeds into this conversation we've been having about the month-end process and where that might go. So, yeah, fascinating times. Definitely. We had Sage on recently in the Live Digest, and one of the things Helen was talking about is that they are leaning heavily into AI, and they're getting great traction. They've got 40,000 users in the UK utilising their AI. You know, we don't know the depths and the levels they're utilising their AI, but, you know, they're interacting with it.

[00:12:05] And something I would probably have to say out of all the small business finance solutions in the UK is that Sage probably have had the best, I don't know, initial traction, initial runway. With their AI co-pilot, but it is a co-pilot. And we're now moving into the realms of agents, and it'll be interesting to see how they transition from one to the other.

[00:12:22] And speaking of which, we talked on a couple of weeks ago, a few weeks ago on Digest with Aaron Patrick about what QuickBooks are doing and their announcement or kind of semi-announcement of AI-powered technology coming down the road. But they didn't really give any details. They just said, yeah, we've got this kind of AI stuff coming in, and we've got some basic AI tools built into our sole trader platform.

[00:12:50] Well, they've now announced what these are going to look like, and I think this looks fascinating. So they've announced four AI agents that will sit inside all of their QuickBooks systems. I don't know how much you'll be able to interact with them depending on what tier you're on, because my guess is that you'll get better agents depending on what paid tier you're working in. But essentially, they've got one called an accounting agent. This accounting agent is going to be focusing on keeping the books clean and accurate by automatically categorizing transactions, which they're kind of already doing.

[00:13:20] Detecting and resolving anomalies, which is a bit more new, especially if it's proactive in that. And reconciling accounts. So that whole period in close, identifying what the transactions should be and then making sure they're flagging that to who needs to approve them or needs to have them for their attention. That's just one agent, and that's already covering a huge amount. The next one, the payments agent, is focused on helping you get paid faster.

[00:13:45] So it's looking at your invoices in and your invoices out, monitoring your cash flow and optimizing your flow. So looking at do we need to defer payment on our suppliers because we need to wait because we've got a bad debt or a delay of payment for our customers. That's something we just don't really see at all at the moment. I think that's really exciting. And then if you've got a customer agent, this is sourcing leads from your inbox. So it's automatically now connecting with other areas of your tool set.

[00:14:12] And it's drafting and personalizing email responses and tracking every customer opportunity in a sales lifecycle. I mean, that's just beyond what QuickBooks do entirely at this point, right? They've not got a detailed CRM system that's embedded into your QuickBooks product. So that's really fascinating.

[00:14:31] And then a finance agent, so analyzing your financial data and automatically creating forecasts, highlighting variances and pinpointing the sources to help you stay on track and keep to your goals. Now, I guess we've had a little bit of this in the past. We've got tools out there that try and do this. So probably not as pioneering as some of the others. But all of these sat in your suite that you can work with. I mean, that just in itself is a huge game changer if they can deliver on what they're saying here. It is. I agree.

[00:14:59] And I think it's really interesting to see that your QuickBooks have taken this route of kind of like having dedicated bots to do specific things. You know, I know you said one of them was quite broad. This kind of reflects the experience I'm seeing in other industries.

[00:15:16] So, you know, I was at the AI Summit in London, you know, last week and both IBM and HP were presenting on the way that they see autonomous agents working in their environments and what they're trying to do in terms of, you know, I guess orchestrate those so that they work together.

[00:15:35] And they were talking about having a sales agent with an operations agents and stuff, you know, clearly being able to do individual tasks, but then with the potential to do connected, combined tasks. So, in the QuickBooks example, you know, you might sort of say, well, actually, if you're doing forecasting for a business and that agent's doing forecasting and then says, oh, you know what, Ryan, looks like you're going to run out of money in three months. We need to kind of have a look and see what we can do to improve that. And one of those is credit control.

[00:16:03] That forecast agent could do that forecast for you potentially and then say, actually, off the back of this as a response, we need to tighten up and improve credit control. So, that credit control agent actually needs to go and, you know, start, you know, banging on doors, as it were, and getting money in from customers and working a bit harder. And then you could sort of have a look at what's the impact of that and then go back and re-forecast.

[00:16:21] I think if you start to see that kind of interaction between these kind of things, that is really incredibly powerful because, I mean, that just takes, you know, it almost takes like running a business just away from you in some regards in terms of not having to be so hands-on and having to understand the nuance and the interconnectivity of these various things. Yeah, I mean, it's crazy. Think about it, right? They're breaking these agents up to replicate individuals essentially in your team.

[00:16:49] And then where they're going to now collaborate is it's now replacing those meetings or where those individuals would come together and talk for an hour and then finally get some agenda points. All of that now is done in a feed. And that's exactly how they want to put this forward. It's like you essentially have a business feed of what your AI agents are doing, making sure you're aware of what's going on. And also then inside that, triggering approvals or activities that you need to interact with.

[00:17:13] And then focusing all of that into a smart business insights with top 10 KPI, I guess, financial reporting KPIs as a scorecard. So, you know, as a quick glance, how are you performing? What do I need to lean into from an agent perspective? I mean, what they're trying to do here, how they're breaking it down, I think looks truly revolutionary.

[00:17:37] The trick is going to be delivering on it because they did say ages ago, you know, when they first kind of went, we're going to do the AI thing. Yeah, like IntuitSys is basically here. And then we've not seen it for a long time in the UK. So how quickly this, I guess, impacts, has traction properly rolled out in the products? I don't know. But what they're trying to do, I mean, tip your hat to them.

[00:18:04] Moving on then quickly, we'll take a little bit of a step back because, you know, we're talking about co-pilots. And we're also talking about Sage again. They also announced at their big events that they're launching a co-pilot into Sage X3. Now, Sage X3 is the big enterprise product. It's their largest scale product. You're incredibly complex, very powerful piece of tech.

[00:18:29] You're probably not that well known in the mainstream accounting sector just because your most small, medium-sized businesses probably don't touch on that too much. But you're able to ask questions about lots of different things with this X3 co-pilot. Yes. And I think I just, I do wonder after everything we discussed about AI agents, whether co-pilots now feel dated. It's crazy. We just talked about what Intuit are aiming to do.

[00:18:57] And it's like, oh, I can now talk to something and it's going to go and find me an answer. It just doesn't really now excite me as much. Yeah, I agree with you. I think in some respects it is. It's kind of, this technology is moving so quickly that we're kind of getting used to a status of, oh, this was new. And now today it's not. And it's almost not that relevant. I mean, we haven't even mentioned Jax, right? From Xero. And like, we know that no one likes it and it's not very good.

[00:19:27] So who knows what's coming next from them? So anyway, let's do one more agentic AI piece. I think that might be it for the news. Who knows? But we've got something from Thomson Reuters. They have been making big investments, acquisition investments into AI tax and accounting platforms. Gosh, over at least the last 12 months. I mean, I think they, I can't remember the name of one of the ones that they picked up fairly recently back in October.

[00:19:56] But that was a product that had only been around for about 14 months before Thomson Reuters came along and bought it. But they have just launched a product called CoCounsel, which is aimed at tax audit and accounting professionals. So you're able to do assignments like some tax planning work. You're allowed to research tax planning and then actually build out and put together, I guess, some advisory pieces for your clients.

[00:20:23] They're also talking about looping this into some of the platform technologies so that you can do tax returns and do some of the other like day-to-day work as well. So you've got that kind of agentic experience in there. And it will potentially as well do some of the file reviews and stuff. So where you've got someone maybe preparing tax work for you, you could run this through CoCounsel and then get certain compliance checks coming out with some output saying,

[00:20:49] OK, this is great. This is great. This is great. This is wrong. You need to go away and fix it and stuff. Like I say, only for the US market at the moment, but certainly we will be coming to the UK market at some point in the future. And again, just another fascinating development that we're seeing. It's crazy how much is just being resolved, solved, replaced by AI and now AI agents. And you thought it was the last article on AI, but it wasn't, John. I've got one more.

[00:21:15] Well, Carbon at their flagship event, Carbon Next, have released a plethora of new tools. Did we get an invite for that? I didn't, but I do know that we had to be all we know there. It was James and Francis K who went and basically looked buzzing by the time they came out of it.

[00:21:39] It was just crazy. Like when, you know, they go to the like account tech shows every year, but they went to Carbon Next and their kind of response was, well, there's so much we need to do. And this may be why. Carbon have embedded tax workflows into their practice management system. So you've now got a deep integration with Stanford Tax, which is bringing, I guess, a modern client intake experience, which organizes the work paper management directly embedded into Carbon workflows.

[00:22:08] You've got progress reports and real-time insights as you move through each tech stage. And you've got a FIFO, first in, first out workflow queue. I'd never heard this referenced in a practice management solution piece, but essentially as things coming out, prioritizing the fact that they are older automatically, this is something that, you know, we should be doing as the captains, but don't always necessarily do it, picking the stuff that is nice and easy to do at times, especially if it's the back end of the week.

[00:22:37] You've then got automated extension management, tracking management, managing extensions within Carbon to reduce missed deadlines and manual effort, and also a tech stack integration. So embedding more tech into the system, such as Intuit Pro Connect, Tax, Touchdown IQ, Tally4 and TaxNow. All U.S. focused. So that's definitely an area that they have focused on over there. And we're not really surprised with this because we've talked about it many times before.

[00:23:04] There is a huge resource, I guess, vacuum over in the U.S., where they just do not have the bodies on seats to help churn through work. Having a tool that can, I guess, will streamline significantly the amount of work that's being done. So you, as an individual, as a tax preparer, can do a much higher quantity will help alleviate the strain here in the U.S.

[00:23:30] But there are other tools that the Carbon are starting to release that also look exciting and will be far more global rather than U.S. focused. One of this, once again, agentic AI. So AI workflow agents will be embedded directly into task lists and timelines to automatically execute actions, fetch data, update statuses, and communicate with clients. All stuff you can do in Carbon already, but they're doing it manually.

[00:23:56] This is where agentic AI will overlay, as we've been talking about with the likes of QuickBooks and Sage earlier, and start to replace some of the stuff that we do, bring to the fore information that we need. Another one that I think is really interesting is it's going to have AI pricing recommendations. So looking at upcoming client proposals and agreements and what offer intelligent price suggestions based on historical data. So, for example, if you've worked with this client before and you think, oh, it's about 100 quid, but actually the clients that you've worked with in a similar nature were about 600 quid,

[00:24:24] it's going to tell you you probably got the pricing wrong. You need to look at that. That I think is really, really interesting. It's got enhanced collaboration features, so including delegated triage, email inboxes, and meeting transcripts with AI summaries. You've already got the triage bit in Carbon. That's been powerhouse for the system for such a long time. But the AI transcripts and summaries is actually now really going to help where we move more into an advisory-led firm. And I know people hate the term advisory, but it's just going to naturally happen, right?

[00:24:52] If all our compliance to be in a road, we need to go somewhere. Advisory is where we're going to end up. And then advanced integration. So integrated workflows will enable, I guess, more automation through the connections with the apps that are already out there. And they do give an example of the deeper integration that they've now got with zero. So I think this is phenomenal what, once again, a practice management solution is doing. And John, I'm starting to, I think, feel that we just can't keep up. Like, it's just too much going on.

[00:25:22] I'm not going to disagree with you, Ryan. I mean, I just think there's a staggering amount of stuff coming out into products. I mean, we've been rightly or wrongly critical of accounting vendors more broadly, not being that innovative in terms of what they're doing in products. And sort of, I guess, large language models and this agentic experience have really allowed them to turn the taps back on in some respects. And focus in on time-saving opportunities.

[00:25:50] And, you know, and I guess ultimately that's what we want from our vendors, isn't it? We want to be able to, you know, take that time to complete a task down as low as possible and try and be as efficient as possible. Because we know, you know, even in the UK, you know, probably a lot of firms are under-resourced from a staffing point of view. And, you know, want to take some of that pressure away and maybe want to do some more of those high-value other services as well to add to it. So, yeah, I mean, it's mind-blowing. You know, we're a Carbon user.

[00:26:20] So, I'm going to be really excited to see some of these changes come through and try and get my hands on them and really understand what the impact is. And I'm sure there'll be more from it. And, I mean, we've still got our own questions for Carbon in terms of some of the core functionality that we want to see improved and to be built out and made more workable for a larger firm like ourselves as well. Yeah, definitely. And, look, we talked about this at Countex quite passionately, John, while we were on either sides of the fence. We were talking about should we be doing something about ourselves?

[00:26:49] Is it really having an impact? And you were very passionate that firms should be, you know, trying to build some of this self. And I said, you know, I think we need to wait. I just don't think it's here yet. I think we've been promised a lot and we haven't quite seen the traction. I'm starting to see the traction. I'm starting to see it. It's there. I know we've promised stuff and we've not quite played with it, but we predicted by the end of the year, I think we're probably going to have this start to see this in Q3. I think we're going to start to interact with this stuff.

[00:27:17] But we can tell you about it. We can make you aware of it, but it's up to you to make sure that the listeners to make sure that you are happy with what these tools are doing. And the reason I say this is there's a crackdown on influencers by the FCA and that we may get bad, John. If we're stating that the people should be doing stuff and we're not, you know, being open to the fact that everyone should be doing their own research as well as listening to us. And please do this to us.

[00:27:46] We do like to think that we do provide some insight with the show. But across UK, Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, Italy, United Arab Emirates, a joint task force basically went and went after a number of so-called influencers. And they result in 650 requests for deletions. They were putting things out there on social media that were just not correct. They were lies. 50 takedowns of websites.

[00:28:16] So this is a much broader thing, right? Now they're putting things on websites that are just completely incorrect. Seven cease and desist letters. I mean, they're starting to go, you're probably going to get a big rap on the knuckles if you don't do something now. And four influencers were invited in for interview. I'm not arrested, but told you should probably come in for a chat. We need a stern chat with you, Mr. Finfluencer.

[00:28:41] And so although there were no arrests from us, at least not at the time of the article that I'm referencing here, there is quite a key message. Be careful what you say. Be careful who you listen to, because people are saying things incorrectly out there. And you could go down a path that will actually get you burnt by people that have probably not got your best interests at heart. I would wholeheartedly agree with that.

[00:29:09] But talking about people who do have your best interests at heart, the Accounting Excellence Awards finalists were announced very recently. So huge congratulations to everyone involved who's put through submissions for these awards. I will self-confess that we were in there and we have been nominated for one of the awards. I'll let you go and find that yourself because I don't need to blow my own trumpet so much. I'll blow it for you.

[00:29:40] Said the actress to the bishop. Yeah, very good. But I mean, there are a whole bunch of very well-known names in here. I won't name them all because otherwise I'll miss someone out and then get in trouble. But as usual, it is great to see the success of our industry being celebrated, the success of accounting firms and individuals, large and small, and the vendors themselves who are also involved in our work and our world, all contributing to the betterment of what we're trying to do.

[00:30:10] So I think the awards are on the 30th of September, I think it is, at the Roundhouse as usual. I'm sure it's going to be another cracking event because the team there always have a great event and they pull off a great party as well. And of course, an amazing celebration. I will just shout out Dale Rodriguez because he's on the main page that has been announced and he's clearly given the guys who were up on stage winning an award the side eye. So I'm not quite sure what it was.

[00:30:36] I'm not sure what upset him, but D-Rod, if you want to have your right to respond, you're more than welcome to tell us who that was and we'll shout them out as well so that they know that you've got your eye on them. Yes, there is quite an interesting picture of him, isn't it? But I think something we should reference is one of the awards this year was the ESG Excellence Award. And I think that's really interesting to see that that's now become quite a focus.

[00:31:04] With nine firms on the shortlist. So, you know, it shows that there's a lot of interest. Sometimes with these awards, you know, there will be a maximum amount that's on a shortlist. But if you put your name down, there's a good chance you're going to get on the shortlist. But, you know, nine firms being listed, there's a lot that needs to be as terrible. I think I've got terrible counting here. I think it's less than nine, maybe eight. But there's around eight or nine firms. Maybe check yourself to validate this data. But you've also got the Digital Transformation Award, which Beaver and Shudders are up for.

[00:31:34] Alongside Thorne Witchery, the XFP team. I always like to shut those guys up. Mostly because Sam's always so helpful in anything we're doing in the Theodore Descriptors. So I thought those were just a couple of awards I wanted to shout out. Obviously, you've got the relevant sponsors out there. The likes of Carbon, QuickBooks, Dext, you know, CCH, Woodridge, Clure, etc. Zero and Mercia, the standard ones. But from my understanding, it's an amazing event. I've never been.

[00:32:00] I probably just can't dress up fancy enough to get invited. No shorts allowed. That's the problem, Ryan. Oh, I'd always like to get my legs out. Don't we know it? It's not covering. Well, on that note, I think it's a perfect way to wrap up App News for the week. So we welcome back Harv Nagra from Scoro.

[00:32:29] And last episode, we talked a bit about why Scoro exists and what it is doing. But we also defined what they call themselves from an operating system. We touched on this term PSA. For those that weren't around for the last episode, what is a PSA again, Harv? It is a professional services automation platform. So it kind of covers the end-to-end workflow for a service-based business of any kind, really.

[00:32:55] So how it differs from a project management tool is PM tools typically are task management places. Maybe they do a bit of resourcing as well. A PSA platform starts with kind of coding and budgeting so that, you know, a business can do that. You can turn that into a project where you can track your time, your kind of expenses, your purchases. You can resource your projects against individuals in your team. You can, you know, invoice.

[00:33:24] And you can, you know, of course, track your projects and see how they're performing. But also have the visibility on finance across the business, across various metrics. And, you know, works fantastically well for multi-entity businesses, multi-currency businesses, whatever it may be. Yeah. And I always think that the operational system, the PSA in this case, is basically everything you do from revenue down to gross profit.

[00:33:53] And you're pushing that into your finance system. If it's below gross profit, you're kind of handling that external to the PSA. But anything where you're looking at, like how we're doing on a given job, a project, an engagement with a customer, multi-interactions across multi-entities, that's all done inside the PSA platform. And my understanding, Harvey, is that you tend to, you know, your system's built to kind of go from CRM, might not be, you know, as in-depth as a full-on CRM.

[00:34:18] But, you know, from CRM, lead tracking, all the way through to invoicing and receipting. Is that accurate? Absolutely. Absolutely. I think, you know, Ryan, the way I see it is that service-based businesses, they go through this growth and complexity journey. And at some point along the way, a PSA platform is something they absolutely need to graduate to at some point.

[00:34:43] They might come to that realization five years too late, in which case, you know, more work and kind of they've been suffering with kind of some of the pain points far too long. But at some point along the journey, they will need to graduate to it. Maybe somewhere, you know, at the beginning, they started with disjointed different systems, best-in-brained tools. At some point, they tried to integrate those. At some point, they might bring in more kind of robust project management systems like, you know, ClickUp or Teamwork or whatever.

[00:35:12] But ultimately, the SCORO element is that it brings finance to the same place. So that's how I kind of see it. Yeah. And finance is essentially the core of SCORO. As we talked about in the last episode, I love it because I'm, you know, I'm all about the finance, the accounting background. But the way you integrate into financial systems means that you can either push finance information in or pull finance information back.

[00:35:37] So depending on how you handle your, as you said, your expenses, you can have them in your finance system and then sucked back into SCORO. Or it could be the origination. Or you can have it as the interim going from like an expense management tool, just to Expensify, flow via direct API into SCORO against a redmond project or job. And then pushed into finance. You've got a lot of flexibility there because of the way you build the platform. Exactly. Exactly.

[00:36:01] You know, whether a customer is using Xero, QuickBooks, Sage, syncs with all of those, either direction or both ways. You know, the two-way sync is really useful. And also tools like Expensify, like you said. So your team can manage and enter expenses and have that kind of synchronized as well. And, you know, Ryan, apologies. I didn't totally answer the last question.

[00:36:52] Yeah. Your accounting tools. You add whatever you're using. It can synchronize with the system, essentially. Yeah. And you create the budgets. You put them into SCORO. You're reporting against those. But you can do that on a job basis. You can do that as a company or even multi-company basis. You can kind of see how you're progressing over time.

[00:37:11] So if you've got these goals, these objectives that you need to meet, you can actually look from the dashboards directly inside SCORO, either on an individual user basis or across the entire business, how we're performing. Totally. Totally. You know, one of the most useful things that my business, I used to work very closely with our finance director would do, is that we would plan a budget for the year. So we'd have our sales target across the 12 months of the year, calendar months.

[00:37:40] And then in SCORO, all the project managers would essentially, you know, once they want a project, raise their first invoices, schedule their invoices. And that allowed us to track how we were performing in terms of sales and book projects over the coming months and know if we were falling short on sales across any of our entities. But you're right. You know, there's a huge toolbox out of the box, I should say, number of reports that are available in the reporting section.

[00:38:08] But dashboards can be designed for any kind of user, whether it's the CEO or MD, the finance director, the ops director, or the project managers, or kind of the specialists. So everyone sees exactly what they want to be seeing on the dashboard. And you click onto any of those widgets and it takes you the full detailed report as well. And that's the beautiful thing is it doesn't need to be like a complex financial report.

[00:38:33] What we're used to as accountants, you know, the data that we love, but most operational people actually don't understand. You can make it very simple, like a traffic light based. Are we doing, are we hitting target? Are we on target? Are we in that kind of challenging area where we're close, but we need to do some work? Or are we in the red? Do we really need to kind of focus in this? And creating those little widgets, you can tailor those to the specific requirements of the individual team. And, you know, Scora is, and a PSA system is not something that is like simple. It is essentially out of the box.

[00:39:02] You can tailor elements, but to get it right, you need to focus on making sure it is built and tailored for you. And to you, like from a, I guess, implementation side, that's something that my interaction with your team is you focus on understanding what the business needs and tailoring the system to their specific requirements. Because it's, in my opinion, incredibly powerful. Mm-hmm. Exactly that. You know, this is a very comprehensive system, but it's configurable to whatever use case.

[00:39:29] You know, your size of business, whether you're multi-entity, multi-currency, whatever, but also the way you kind of work. So it is very configurable. And we make a point of being, you know, very guided. And that was my experience when I onboarded with Scora is that we had a step-by-step playbook to follow with an onboarding expert that kind of walked us through what we need to be doing, what we need to be prepping or sharing with them so that they could help us.

[00:39:57] There's also self-onboarding paths for anybody that's willing to do that themselves, but there's multiple options. And, of course, I think, you know, yourselves, you support customers with onboarding as well. Isn't that right? Yeah, that is correct. Yeah, I've been working not only on the onboarding side, but also for the tailoring to reporting. You know, I love working with what is the data that you need to get to and how do we work backwards to ensure we can deliver on that.

[00:40:20] But I guess how I would look at this, you know, for anyone that's in accounting space is we've had for a long time the term practice management system. And essentially, a practice management system is a PSA because you're still tracking time. You're tracking tasks and jobs to some extent. And you're doing your billing, your financial reporting directly inside the system. So anything that a practice management system does is essentially a PSA tool just rebranded for accountants. Is that your understanding as well?

[00:40:49] You know what? That's really interesting that you bring that up, Ryan. We're finding that more and more accounting firms are actually adopting Scoro as well. So I think that's quite interesting in itself. And also becoming kind of evangelists for it for their own customers once they understand that. So, yeah, definitely. We have customers that refer to it as a practice management platform because of that. You know, that's the vocabulary they're familiar with.

[00:41:18] And like I said, PSA is not something everyone knows or a term that people readily use. So I think we all have a different name for it. And, of course, people also just call it a PM tool. But it does a lot more than that. And it does all of the above. Yeah. And I think that's it. You're defining it based on its functionality. Whereas I just I don't find it a sexy term, PSA. So I tend to refer to it by other names.

[00:41:41] But in the end, it's still it's just a very advanced project management tool with finance at the core, which actually is a lot easier to say PSA. Right. Than try to explain it as all those things. Exactly. Exactly. But we know where I was before we were using or utilizing Scoro to help track tasks and track time and costs for an element inside an accounting firm.

[00:42:06] And I think that's the beautiful way it works is that we're so used to there being a dedicated system for accountants. Sometimes we forget to actually just look at what are the functional requirements of sourcing a system of deliverance on that. So I'm not surprised that Scoro is being used by accounting firms. I'm sure it's being used by pretty much any example of professional service business. And I know that I guess you for just utilization, you focus in other sectors, but you're pretty much broad range across any professional services business, aren't you, in the way you operate? Absolutely.

[00:42:36] Whether it's kind of agencies, you know, design marketing agencies, that kind of thing, consultancies of any type, you know, even architecture, engineers, engineering, construction firms, law firms, accounting firms, IT firms. So it's just really broad. If you're a service-based business, fundamentally, you know, some of the vocab might differ in terms of what you call a project and that kind of thing.

[00:43:03] But fundamentally, the way we work is kind of selling time and tracking kind of stuff. Yeah, yeah. So, so. And I'm picking up on what you said. I mean, like, especially architectures, you know, spot on. Construction very much depends if you're starting to look at materials and, you know, CIS, et cetera. That's definitely not a sweet spot of Scoro, and you need a dedicated system for that. But you do fit very well in this space. And I know a lot. You talked about evangelists before. I'm passionate about Scoro because I've loved it.

[00:43:32] I've worked with it so long. But there are many different PSA platforms out there. And I think the key thing here is that to understand what is project management and what is PSA. And finance is, in my opinion, a defining point for that. And so, no, thanks, Harv, for jumping on. Kind of explaining what PSA means, really. And so hopefully broadening the awareness of anyone that listens to this show. Absolutely. Thanks so much. And that brings another Digitals in a Cruel World podcast to a close. Thank you for listening.

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