AI (Artificial Intelligence) Won't Take Your Job, But This Might...

Hi, welcome to ValuationPodcast.com, a podcast and video series about all things related to business and valuation. My name is Melissa Gragg, and I'm a Mediator and Business Valuation Expert in St. Louis, Missouri. Today we're discussing how "AI won't take your job, but this might", and I'm with here with Jesse Rubenfeld and Tom Zehentner from FinOptimal.

It's an accounting automation software company based in Houston, Texas. Jesse actually founded it to help accountants work faster and smarter, and it's a lot of based on outsourced accounting services or automation. Tom is a CPA and former auditor whose passion for this automation and business actually led him to FinOptimal, and he operates out of Brooklyn, New York.

1. What are the current issues in accounting?
2. What tasks does FinOptimal's software replace?
3. What are the traditional ways of automation?
4. What differentiates your software from the automation capabilities of AI?
5. When buying or selling a company, what financials are needed for review?
6. Let’s discuss accrual and cash basis – typically you need a process. How can this process be automated?

Melissa Gragg CVA, MAFF
Expert testimony for financial and valuation issues
Bridge Valuation Partners, LLC
Email Melissa
Call Melissa
Bridge Valuation
Mediator Podcast
Valuation Mediation

Jesse Rubenfeld, CPA
Founder & CEO
www.finoptimal.com
jesse@finoptimal.com

Tom Zehentner, CPA
Director of Growth t
om@finoptimal.com 516-216-3003

Hi, welcome to ValuationPodcast.com, a podcast and video series about all things related to business and valuation. My name is Melissa Gragg, and I'm a mediator and business valuation expert in St. Louis, Missouri. Today we're discussing how AI won't take your job, but this might, and it's an interesting discussion because I'm discussing this about some software, about some automation. I think a lot of people in our space have been talking about like, how do we work better in this space? But some of these things, and really, are you worried about ai? Are you worried about some other ones? But anyway, today I'm with here with Jesse Rubenfeld and Tom Zehentner with FinOptimal. It's an accounting automation software company based in Houston, Texas. Jesse actually founded it to help accountants work faster and smarter, and it's a lot of based on outsourced accounting services or automation. So it can help all of us, and maybe we need to focus on that. Tom is a C P A and former auditor whose passion for this automation and business actually led him to Finfin optimal, and he operates out of Brooklyn, New York. Welcome, both of you. How are you?

What's up? What's up? Thank you for having us. Thank you, Melissa. Hi.

So this is a very interesting conversation that has gone a lot of different ways as we've talked about having it only because I have some passion around ai, and you guys have some passion around automation, and nobody really understands either one of them, so it's perfect. That's

Perfect. But

Right now, where you guys have focused has been in a traditional accounting space, and for us in valuation, a lot of evaluators are also in the accounting space. So it seemed very relevant. But like, just to start off, like, what if you guys are in kind of, you're more in the tech space, right? And you're seeing what's happening on like advancements in technology, but what are you seeing as actually the current issues in accounting today? And where is it leading to? Like, are we, are we, should we be concerned about ai? Should we be automating things? Should I just be going in person more like, yeah. What are we seeing happening? And maybe we can start with Jesse.

Okay. <laugh>. Yeah. Tom, I can see you were ready to give your answer. I was ready to go now. I wanna hear your answer, but I'm still gonna go first because Melissa picked me. He's the boss. <Laugh>, look automation is absolutely important. On, on the one hand, and this speaks to is your job, if you're an accountant, really at risk right now, it's impossible to hire good accountants. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, it's, it's the hardest thing to hire for. We struggle with it, and we know that everybody else in our space is too. So in short, nobody's coming for your job yet. But ai, artificial intelligence and associated technologies are changing the way accountants do their work. And it's important to understand and leverage automation so that you can work smarter, get more value from your time, and therefore deliver more value to your clients.

If you're a evaluator, you need better accounting to do your valuation quickly. And if it's a garbage in, garbage out situation, you're gonna have to keep going back to the accountant and getting them to redo their work. Whereas if they're using automation, which is gonna not only speed things up, but reduce errors, you're gonna be able to do your work more quickly. They're gonna be a better partner. And so ultimately, somebody who uses automation and ai, which I know we'll talk more about, they could take your job even though the software itself is not likely to replace you.

Exactly. Accountants that use automation are gonna replace accountants who don't. Right. And same thing goes for all of the other jobs out there. I think the current state of accounting, like Jesse Z, it's really hard to find accountants. I, I, being an accountant is not as cool as being like a TikTok kid. So I don't think people are, you know, really caring about job stability anymore. It's

Cooler. It's cooler.

Yeah. I mean, debatable. I don't, I can't dance. I

Resent that remark.

I can't dance, but I could do math, so I kind of ended up in this bucket, but whatever. But yeah, ai, I mean, the way people talk about ai, right? Artificial intelligence, like this software that can operate like a human, right? It's like this silver bullet. They tell it as if it's not even a home run, but a grand slam, right? You have people trying to swing for the fence before they even know how to hold a bat, right? Like, you, you need, you wanna get on first base, right? If you've never played baseball before, don't try to hit a home run. Like, let's just get to first base so you can like, feel good about yourself. Hey, I did it. That's, you want to take baby steps? And that's really what we are talking about. That's really what we're doing and thinking about, right? How do you use automation to start slowly speeding up your process? Don't just try to jump to the end of the race. It's not gonna work out for you.

Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And I think that AI has been distracting people a little bit just because they don't understand it. And quite frankly, we've seen amazing benefits with using ai, but typically it's in like a marketing mm-hmm. <Affirmative> in a, you know content creation in these, like, it's an, has amazing abilities when we get into specific work, like we're valuing a business, we're, you know, doing accrual our cash basis financials mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, like we're, we're making all of those assumptions and, and things, you know, and having to do it. AI is not necessarily going to take away our jobs if we continue to be better at what we're doing. And right now we're wasting a lot of time doing things that maybe literally a computer could do, and we're paying, you know, staff level people or interns, and this whole accounting model is still based on this kind of flawed process, right. Billable hours. Yep. How do we bill a client like, okay, but what if you could do it all faster and still bill a client the same? Right? Like, that's kind of what you guys are talking about, right?

Yeah. The billable hour, it is, you know, if your accountant is billing you by the hour for recurring, like billable hours for project work makes sense. I don't know, I don't know what I'm getting myself into. This is my rate. I'll work at that pace, I'll get it done. Like that's absolutely a fair deal for both sides. But if you're doing, if your accountant's doing the same work every year and charging you by the hour, what incentive do they have to work faster? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> like, none. Why would you ever go faster? It's just more hours and more money in my pocket. So I think there is a little bit of, you know, if you're having your books done by someone who charges you hourly saying, well, what if I just paid you the same amount I've been paying you, but ask you to work faster, how would you do that? Right? And a good accountant should be able to say, oh, well, I'd go use this software to speed up my process, right? And I take on more clients to make up for any lost revenue. Right? Like, that's really how we should all be thinking about it rather than just trying to slow everything down to put more money in

Our pocket. But that commodity pricing system, I mean, because what, what's happening is certain accounting services that we're consulting in the past are now commodities. You know, like, okay, I need somebody to do my tax return, like just do my tax return. Yeah. Like, you don't need to be involved, right? And so you're going into commodity where you have a population that wants a cheaper price mm-hmm. <Affirmative> and doesn't wanna pay more. You have CPAs that should want to do it more efficient, right. I think that you have partners that are in place that have done it a certain way. You have young people that are probably using AI to help do their job and you don't know about it. Right? But, but it's also like you're, you're operating in a broken system and you have to start looking at, you know, like even traditional ways, you know, like what are some things like, you know, I started using, like, we even started using Zoom, like right below, you know, we are all capable, but what are some of these ways of traditional ways of automation that we would look to your product or we would look to any software and products to kind of help us.

Yeah. I I think it's, I'm, I'm not giving her a chance to pick me again. I'm just <laugh>

You're just gonna take the ball every time.

Because I wanna make sure before we leave the topic of ai and the big scary thing that we cover this in my head, I'm, I'm watching the the Arnold Netflix documentary right now, right? I think in a lot of people's minds, AI is coming for your job, like the Terminator mm-hmm.

<Affirmative>.

And it's this monolithic smart machine that knows how to do everything you know how to do and can just like, destroy you. I don't know how it works, but I know I need to fight it. And once you realize that the technology's really not there, it's not at that point. Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative>, you realize that using AI and generally using automation in your workflow is much more about picking smaller problems that automation can address. So what we, to, to answer your question, what are some ways we can approach automation? I think it's important to look from the top down and saying, we're not trying to build a terminator, and we're not trying to use a terminator. And we can talk more. Why I think ai, again, we're not gonna have a podcast about ai, I get that. But like, AI is not going to be able to look at an individual business, right?

About which there's nothing on the internet, right? Your business is unique and there's not a lot of precedent on Google, on the internet that's gonna train the AI to give a smart answer about your business. Right? That's not where you wanna spend your time. Where you do wanna spend your time. And what we do and what we're good at is taking a workflow like deferred revenue and improving the experience of booking the journal entries to QuickBooks online associated with deferred revenue, which without our software could be 10 or 15 times as long and more error prone mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. And for some companies, that's a major, that's a heavy lift. If you can save someone that much of 10 or 15 x on their time of booking deferred revenue recognition entries, that's a meaningful uplift without being a terminator.

Yeah. There's a lot of accounting tech too. Like, you think about what are the other types of automation, like accounting, practice automation and accounting automation. I think it's really important to draw that line. And if, if you're listening to this and you say, my accountants told me they use tech, you should ask what kind of tech they're using. 'cause When, when I think about practice automation, that's like the organization of their work, right? Who should prepare the work paper? Who should review the work paper? How did they spend their time? Do they have automated email follow ups for you when you don't respond to their questions? Those are things that automate the accounting practice, right? Like the administrative work, which can absolutely add, you know, add value for the firm, but is it adding value for the client? You know, that, that's a fair question to ask.

Whereas accounting automation is really where we're focused, Hey, how can we actually automate the work of the accountant, the calculation and the recording of a journal entry or the running of a report or the transformation of data, right? And I think we're in a unique position 'cause we're solving things that other people aren't solving. Everyone's focused on the easier stuff, workflow management, practice management, right. High level application of AI to write an email for you. But you really want to get to the crux of what's the most repetitive structured and, you know, task that if you automate them will actually give your accountants the ability to go do more work, take on more clients, or to just have more free time. Right? Right. What, whatever the, whatever the goal is, automating actual work will get you there.

Well, and I think it's interesting because in evaluation perspective, it, you know, we've had to identify what, what job, what, what duties, what tasks are just not essential for a human to do. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, right? Either they go away and we don't need to do them at all. Or we find a better automated method for it. Because again, I think as we go into the future, and you still are a consultant and you still are providing services, you are going to have to be efficient so that you make more money, right? On money keeping it the same, or, you know, competing with other people. Again, if I've automated some stuff and I can do it five times faster than you, I can still charge a little bit less than you and make a killing. Yep. And I think that people aren't necessarily going through and saying, okay, what of these, like for evaluation, entering the data from a financial statement or a is irrelevant. Like if you could just boop into our system, we waste a lot of time going right. In the past, or you're reviewing documents and you're like, next document, next document. Yeah. You know, all of this stuff, when we look at the software, you know, like what tax tasks does fin optimal software replace? Like what are the ones that you guys have at least identified that are absolutely not necessary for a human to continue to enter

Accruals and QuickBooks online? Number one, deferred revenue, prepaid expenses, fixed asset depreciation. Right? And for those of you that aren't familiar with those concepts, like for a prepaid expense, for example, if you pay your insurance for the entire year today, right? You really should recognize one 12 of that each month for the next 12 months. Right? That's a prepaid expense. Normally people are using spreadsheets or they're not doing it at all, which is a big no-no. Right? Or for fixed assets, right? If you are a restaurant, for example, and you buy a bunch of kitchen equipment that's gonna last you seven years and it costs you $200,000, that's not a $200,000 expense today, right? You should spread that $200,000 expense over seven years. So those are things that a lot of businesses are paying accounts to do very, very slowly. So accruals by far, number one, it's the reason we released accruer first, our Q B O app. But we've solved for a ton of other things too, moving data between systems that don't talk to each other, or systems that do talk to each other, but not in the way that an accountant wants them to talk to each other. Right? When I say that, you know, apps may say, oh yeah, we, we passed data to QuickBooks, we integrate with QuickBooks, but what

They're like, what Tom, give an example, like a payroll platform. Sure.

Go ahead.

Without mentioning any names, that's

What I don't wanna mention, right?

Like if you use, if you, if you use a popular payroll platform and you want to get your entries booked the way you wanna see them, right? Let's say by person, as opposed to just at the summary level, total gross salary expense mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, well, you're gonna struggle to find a payroll company that has the integration that books it to QuickBooks in a way that's gonna be conducive to doing other things with your books. Like allocating expenses by various people according to how they spend their time. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So get getting the payroll data into QuickBooks in a way that an accountant can make better use of it is a heavier lift than just booking a bare bones a, b, c payroll entry, which is what makes most payroll platforms do. 'cause They're building payroll workflows and selling payroll services, not doing accounting. They're doing the minimum amount of work to have a Q B O integration. And it's usually not very good if they even have one.

And we're talking about solutions here, right? But what's like, let's zoom out and even talk about like, what's the pain point of what Jesse just brought up, right? So if you have a hundred person business and you have eight different departments, and your payroll accounting is just one lump sum of payroll expense every month, how do you know which department is profitable? Am I spending too much on marketing? Am I, are my, the people that are project based making me enough money, right? How are you thinking about your business? And if you're cutting corners with the way that you're doing your accounting, you're cutting corners on the way that you're analyzing your business and the way that you're making decisions for the future success of your business. A lot of times when we come, we talk to people who need help, they come with one pain point, we solve that, and then they go, wait, you can do that. Can you also do this? And can you also do that? And then all of a sudden you start to unlock this wow moment of, hey, automating things that are important to me are a really, really good way of adding value. Right? Again, we're not swinging for the fences and hitting your grand slam on the first at bat. We're just trying to get you on first base. And once you do, you'll realize you can score a lot more quickly. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>.

Well, and it's something that I think that we should dial back that accountants probably understand very clearly, and I understand from seeing a tremendous amount of small businesses, everybody's default to reporting their financials is cash basis, partly because when you're starting out or beginning, like what the hell is a cruel basis anyway, right? So like, business owners don't even have a concept of that. They're just like, eh, I paid something the check, I wrote a check, I balanced my checkbook, and I don't know how much money do you have? I don't know. You know, and, and, and accountants have kind of played along with the game of allowing the cash basis and the i r s allows the cash basis, but it doesn't give a really good, and then we come in as evaluators and we say, we would really prefer all accrual based financials so that we can really see the clear picture of your cash flow, right? So in my mind, if accountants had the capability to come in and use this software to help businesses that are on the smaller side that need this accrual based accounting to understand their business, you could come in and really do, now you don't need to charge a ton because you've automated or you have automated, like, am I getting closer to what we're seeing here?

A hundred percent. Yeah. You can, you can incrementally add value in software for a fraction of the cost that it would charge to pay a human to do that exact thing. And I, the, the cash basis is such a good point, Melissa. You know, think about if you're a company that I get paid in August and I have a contractor doing work for me in September, and I pay that contractor in October, if you do cash basis, you had a great August, nothing happened in September, and you had a terrible October, that is true. Not the right way to think about your business, right? Yeah. So, you know, that's, that's the importance and the simplicity of cash through accrual. We, you know, people should not get intimidated by the word accrual, right? I think there's a lot of, there's words used in finance that confuse and intimidate people. I mean, you're in the valuation space, right? Right. Time value of money. It sounds like some weird like sci-fi premise to a non-finance person, but it's a very simple concept when you break it down, right? So I think it's important for people to not get intimidated by the phrases that we're throwing around, because at the end of the day, it's not rocket science. Mm-Hmm.

<Affirmative>,

I, I do think, I mean, Tom, this is something that you've brought up before, which I think is a great idea for, for, certainly for a non-accountants, what this kind of automation does, what the accruer does is it saves you from even really needing to learn accrual accounting, right? If you're the small business owner that Tom just talked about, right? With separate events in July, August and September, that need to relate to a really, they all need to consolidate to a single month on an accrual basis, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, even if you're an accountant, let's, for, if you're a small business owner, you don't have time to learn accrual accounting, right? It's like you said, you ship it to the tax return, you ship it to the valuation person, let them pick up the pieces and figure it out. But if you're an accountant, I'm sorry to say, many CPAs don't, they understand conceptually what accrual accounting is, but they don't understand a, a smart way.

They've never been taught a smart way to book it in a way that's repeatable, not error prone and efficient. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Right? And the accruer, again, this is an example of automation that saves time and lets you work smarter. It saves you needing to learn that Hmm. You just give QuickBooks the information it needs and the Accruer books all the entries on the background, like in the background so that your financials show the result without you ever needing to understand in the lay person's case what accrual accounting is. Or even in the accountant's case, what's a smart way to book accruals, right? Like, what's a smart way to book accruals that'll save, you don't need to, neither of those people need to learn those things. You just use this software and you save a ton of time.

That's, and theoretically, the people that are doing that, like those adjustments at the accounting firm are typically the newer people, the people that are kind of coming in and doing the, the monthly whatevers for, you know, and there'd be an overseen by maybe a manager or partner, but the reality is the person entering the information and doing those adjustments is not probably very knowledgeable about how to do it. And then you're, as a manager, you're forced to be checking not only like the important big things, but like all the little tiny details. And that also then adds hours to the project. Right.

Also just, you know, a call back to the beginning, it's hard to find accountants. What I'm seeing and hearing from a lot of people is I don't even have a staff or senior accountant, so now I'm using people with 10 years of experience to do the work that a normal college graduate would. And they're either billing their client an hourly rate that's way too high for the work that they're doing, or they're losing money right? On the engagement by charging a staff rate for a person that's costing the firm a director's salary. So yeah, this is, it's not only the extra review work, there's also cases of people just doing work that's frankly below their pay grade because of the lack of, you know, new accountants in the space mm-hmm.

<Affirmative> mm-hmm.

<Affirmative> also. 'cause It's somewhat hard. Yeah. Right? The reason why we picked this focus for our first software that we're releasing is that right, when I, when I say a lot, most CPAs that I've met don't know how to book accruals in a way that's repeatable and streamlined. I'm saying that because in my own experience as an accountant, 10 years into my career, I was still learning about different ways that people do it. And the trade-offs that you make when you book it one way or another way, are you going to use a reversal basis? Are you gonna book directly to the balance sheet when the cash hits? There's these choices that you make and there's trade-offs and it's just, it's not unreason, it's, it's not reasonable to expect that somebody who's doing the booking is going to have that knowledge. But if you, and if you save them having to learn it, you're gonna do a better job. And they're gonna look and see how the software does it and say, oh, wow, that's a good way to, and they're gonna learn more from using it than they would by trying to invent their own system mm-hmm. <Affirmative> just so they can get past it into the next job.

But you also have so many entrepreneurs that, you know, you, you work at a big four, you work at a big firm, and you know, even as a consultant, I was in a big firm that bought this a smaller firm, right? And so in those types of, of situations, you are having more 10, 15, 20 year experienced people are just having their own firm. So like, and they're just doing the work. And so that extent, like this type of, like, you have to, like, we don't, we have to send out engagement letters with online signatures. Like I don't, and that when it's signed, it gets sent to all parties. Like nobody has time to be doing all of that manual stuff. But if we pull it back around, like, here's where we have to start to understand, yes, we've, we've started this with ai, and yes, there is a tremendous amount that we could talk about ai, but AI isn't coming for our jobs right now.

Right? What's coming for our jobs is our inability to be efficient and, and no, and we're wasting ti if I waste two hours on trying to figure out an adjustment when I could have spent two hours researching the industry or looking at something else, I am too tired and I've gone through my budget. I can't give them anything else. But what is really differentiating your software from automation capabilities of ai, because ai, artificial intelligence from what I understand, is we're really inputting something in there, right? And then it's, and, and as long as we have good prompts and we are really telling AI what we want, it will spit something out. Delightful. but that doesn't mean that you then go and put that in front of your client. Like we still have to be in the client aspect of it. So aren't we talking about two co different things? Like, AI isn't automating it, it's, it's allowing you to create stuff, but this is really, we're talking about how do you work faster and make more profit, right?

Automation. Yeah. You know, think of your tech stack as a sundae. Like AI is the cherry on top, right? Right. We are the scoops of ice cream and all of the different toppings that lead up to it, right? So AI needs to be put on top of something, or you can eat an entire bowl of Marino cherries and get a tummy in. That's up to you. Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative>. But

I thought you were gonna do another baseball analogy. Tom, I'm refreshed

Baseball, ice cream, what else I had on, on my sleeve? No, but seriously, like, you know, it's, it's about the building blocks, right? Like we, the automation and not just our automation, all automation, right? Whatever. When you think about automation, you should sit down and think, what do I spend too much time on that I could hire someone off the street and go, just do this over and over again. If you could pluck someone off the street street and have them do it over and over again, that's an easy first use case for automation, right? Think about what's repetitive, what's structured, what's follow rules and build up, right? That foundation and then yeah. AI on top of that's great. But a lot of the AI we're seeing now is like language based, exactly like you've been talking about. Melissa, it's great for marketing, it's great for writing emails, right? Anything that's communication based, it's doing a pretty good job at. Although I've definitely seen really, really bad emails hit my inbox that I can tell are written by some AI thing somewhere. That's a quick unsubscribe for me. But yeah, you know, I, I think there's, at this point in time, they're solving very different things. AI solving language-based problems and automation, especially in our space, are either solving the accounting practice issues or the actual accounting issues in the optimal sense. Mm-Hmm.

<Affirmative>. And we're doing, we're we're booking journal entries, right? Ai, again, there's a how does, how is AI trained? Generative AI is trained on existing data that's readily available on the internet. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And there's only so much information about your business, right? Your QuickBooks data's not available on the internet. It's not everybody else's businesses' data, they're general ledger, even big businesses. It's not available, you know, to open ai. You can't use that as training data. And therefore AI is gonna have a very limited training basis to give you insight about your business. Hmm. I think there's definitely some people doing interesting things around reporting that kind of in my, in my look, I have, I have limited scope of, of knowledge here, but it looks to me more like an Alexa integration, right? Like, Alexa, buy this book for me. Okay, great. That's easy.

Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative>, you know, Alexa, show me my p and l for Q two with comparing last year's, like give me a column comparing last year's year to date also, right? That, that's basically, those are little scripts that can be triggered, but it doesn't feel like AI in the sense of taking a massive set of training data or like, and ai, something I can imagine AI doing well if they had access to the data is, Hey, I make widgets, right? Can you look at my competitors and say, and see how do my gross margins measure up to other company's gross margins? What elements of my cost of goods are high relative to comparable companies? Okay. That's something that if AI had that data available, I could see being a genuinely useful analytical response, but when it comes to booking journal entries, I need to spread the right, I think you could use AI to tee it up so that you could give spoken language commands to it. Yeah. But it's just hard right now. I, I haven't seen any tools that are going to speed up the booking of that,

Of that series of journalism. Right? They actually work.

Yeah, yeah,

Yeah. And I, and I think that, you know, in some capacity, even in the business valuation community, in the accounting community, I'm seeing people come out and say, Hey, here are some things that I've been doing that has helped my business, you know, helped me be faster and better, and you should try it too. And the reality is that's what you guys have kind of tried to create in this product, is how can you take some of that off? And we're looking at, at, you know, like, I think we go back to the 80 20 rule. 80% of your time is figuring out how to maximize your profits and lower your expenses and lower your time. And your main business 20% of the time is looking at, okay, what is ai? You know, like I, I'll do some research, I'll, I'll, I mean, because you have to put some time into some of these things. So in the meantime, as you're learning how you can utilize some of these really advanced technologies that could probably blow your mind if you really understood them. Because I don't think people, when they talk, I'm like, you don't get it <laugh>, you know, so instead focus,

I mean, who really gets ai? Exactly. Who really gets ai? Come on. Right?

And if you want to,

I've, I've been writing accounting code for, you know, 15 years and I barely get it.

Well, and I think you have to understand its limitations and its capabilities. And if it doesn't have direct correlation to your business today because you haven't figured it out or found the right people to guide you, then you have to go revert to other things such as this that are gonna help you compete. Because if you are gonna be off the technology train in a lot of aspects, then you better be on some of the efficiencies. And I do wanna go through kind of one more thing before we talk more about it, but we, we talked a little bit about the accrual and cash basis and like how you need a process. Again, I'm a financial person, okay? So I understand how this process has been automated because whenever I had to take my 1800 hours of accounting, I literally thought that this was the worst section of all. And so like, aren't you actually solving even this for account? Like, isn't this also like just the dregs of the accounting work? Or is this, and is this this just the one best one? Or are there also ones that are linked to this? So they're very similar.

So I think it's listen, accrual and cash base, like having a process management, people in management need to see cash basis figures. They need to control their burn. How much money is coming in, going out, and they can't, even though they need to be able to think about their financials on an accrual basis, you clearly need to be able to see how much cash do I have, how much, even if I spent money for something that I'm gonna enjoy for 12 years or even, or 12 months, or even if I received money from a customer that's gonna pay for a year's worth of service, I need to be able to see it both ways. And if you don't keep your accounting system in such a way that you only have to book entries one time, you're gonna have to maintain two separate processes. And that's where people really get in trouble in my experience.

You wanna book it one way, but have tools and processes that support booking the entry one time, right? Like pay the insurance bill on July 1st, but say for service between July 1st of this year and June 30th of next year, and that's all you do. You enter it once and know that your automation, like our accruer will book all of the entries in the background so that you can run a p and l and look at the cash activity and see what you spent sources and uses of funds. Or you can run in Q B O A P and L on an accrual basis and see what the monthly impact of those numbers is. But we only booked it once. The person only had to enter it once, and they're getting both cash and accrual visibility with the right tools and processes.

Okay. So I think that part of what we've done here is kind of maybe get you less focused on AI because it is a bigger, more robust kind of research endeavor, if you will. Like, you, you gotta kind of commit to some time and understanding it and, and looking at, but, but from a software standpoint or from an automation standpoint, you know, if they go to your website, what are they gonna, like, is this an integration type of thing? Am am I just like, it's a hub? Like let me understand a little bit like, because after this, if I would say you're almost doing a disservice to your clients if you're just listening to that. Like we do cash basis, we don't wanna pay for anything else. You, you are kind of the expert. You should be out there saying, well really, you probably need to look at like this and it's not gonna cost much more for us to do it this way. And it'll give you a great, like, you are almost gonna eventually be behind what everybody else is doing, especially if they can do it in an automated fashion. So what would we need to know about you guys, this product or process that would make us, first of all run to go get it? And I don't like accounting journal entries, so at all. So I would,

I'm deeply offended, <laugh>.

I would just say how much cash you got, what's in the bank? You know, but yeah, I mean, it, it is an important piece. So what would they, what will they find when they go there? What should they consider is, should I try out the software? Do I have to layer it in? Is there, in a process, what, what am I looking at?

If you, we, so we work with both,

Okay.

Accounting firms and businesses who have their books done by an accounting firm. And I'll use accounting firm as an all encompassing word here, right? If you're a single person bookkeeping shop, you got a few clients we work with you

Or, or a married person with a bookkeeping shop.

I meant, I meant an individual person, but yeah, Jesse, okay.

Okay, <laugh>,

We, we will check your your marriage status when we when when you get onboarded. No, but so either companies or firms, we will work with you firms, we will give you power tools to do the books for more clients or to do the books for your clients with less resources, more cash in your pocket, better margins, guaranteed. The accruer tool that we talked about today starts at just $15 a month for you. And there's a risk-free trial. It's not even an imple implementation. It's a little bit of a setup. People do it without me even helping them. So it's very, very easy to start using the Accruer tool that we talked about today. If you're a business, right, and you're either doing your own books or you're working with an accounting firm that's doing your books, maybe you have an internal accounting team, you're not doing it, but you're paying someone internally to do your books, we will help you understand exactly where you can achieve some real success with automation.

I will speak with you personally. I'll listen to what systems are you using, what's your business like, where are you getting slowed down and give you some free advice. Hey, try this out, try that out. And if you wanna work with us, it's gonna be this much money. We have a ton of different tools and systems and solutions that we customize for businesses. So whether you're a firm or you're a business, we can absolutely help you. There's no risk at just reaching out and talking to me and seeing, Hey, what would it look like for my business? 'cause I guarantee we'll add some value in that conversation alone.

Yeah. And, and I think that you know, we'll keep on adding everybody's information so we can talk about it. And I'll be really frank, you know, when we first started talking about the podcast, we did wanna talk about a lot of different topics, and I redirected them to talk about this topic because I am, I am actively paying attention to certain people in my space who are, are offering training and programs to say, Hey, you know, I'm doing it this way. It may not be everything, but it's, it's something. So I think that what I found in talking to both of you is that you were willing to kind of share these resource, like, Hey, let's make each other a little bit more efficient and better in this space. And, and that's why we kind of talked about this tool, because I actually think it's helpful for us as practitioners, right?

And so, and if it's economical or you have a pain point, like if you lose your main account entry person, right? Or you lose some of your staff, you know, you may go to working 80, 90 hours to try to fill that in when quite frankly there are just easier tools. You just have to stop and open your eyes and see that there is is an automation there. So, you know, you guys might even be able to tell them even other resources that are good in addition to the ones that you have as well.

Yeah, absolutely. I always do that. And, and I'm glad that you let us talk about the youer. I, I was, I was honestly planning to talk about valuations and aliens, but I'm glad we got on the topic of Accruer. 'cause Accruer is my favorite thing. So maybe we can tee that up for next time. Yeah,

Aliens, coconuts, unicorns, we love them all,

All of it. All of it. I love it.

Look, I think one thing that these, all of these things have in common, certainly valuation and ongoing accounting services, is that at the end of the day, and this is true, if there's one thing I learned from getting two different business degrees, right? What, what, what leads to sustained growth in an economic system is improvements to productivity. And we view fin optimal and professionals that are, that are in the industries that we serve as trying to improve their productivity for their clients so that they can deliver better services ultimately for a lower price. And that is helping improve productive growth in the economy, in our very narrow sphere of the world. So, you know, I think we're working together with with your listeners and you know, with accounting professionals, finance professionals of all kinds to make the world a more productive place.

Yeah. And I think that, you know, one area that we didn't talk about, and we could also talk about it in a future issue is you know, buying and selling a company, like those types of things. We need accrual based financials, and we just are in a world where we need these types of financials. Tom Tom's going on

Another, I think Tom got kicked out of his room. He got kicked out. He can't put a No,

But this was great.

You can't put a value on what a conference room costs in a WeWork, I guess. That's right. That's right. Oh, I was gonna throw hands. There's a name. You, there's a barb. I got kicked out. Name mentions. Can you gimme a sec? <Laugh>, I guess not. We're flexible here. No respect for the podcasters. You know, people just love no respect, no respect for the, the account. No respect to the podcasters. Yeah.

I love how you were flexible and made it work though. That was good. I'm glad this is at the end. This is a good outtake, right,

<Laugh>. Exactly. I'm a, I'm a, I'm a professional podcaster,

<Laugh>. Well, I appreciate you guys. I really do. And I think that, you know, if people want more information, they're gonna reach out to you. But I also think there may be additional things that we will talk about on future podcasts, because we gotta get better at this, right? We are competing against ourselves in this capacity, but I appreciate what you guys have provided to us, and hopefully we'll see you in the future.

Love it. Thanks Melissa. Melissa,

Thanks.

All right.

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