Track 3: 21st century firm technologies

Accountants have already begun to see the way tools like RPA, data analytics and AI can change their practices – and those tools are only in their infancies. This panel will look at where they'll go, and what other new technologies are coming along, and how they'll change the way your firm operates.

Transcription:

Chris (00:11):

We are now 23 years into the 21st century. And yeah, no, we don't really have the flying car yet. We're not really having moon bases or anything. But you know what? We still have a lot of really exciting stuff and a lot of stuff really has been heavily impacting the accounting profession in order to talk about some of these changes, their impacts, how we deal with this. We have some fantastic speaker first. Immediately to my left we have Tom Angelo. Why don't you tell us just a little bit about yourself once we have these microphones. Oh, jump the gun a little bit.

Tom Angelo (00:44):

Hey. Yep, sure. Still working. Welcome everyone. I'm Tom Angelo. I am the Principal in charge of the Mid-Atlantic region of HPK. We're a top 50 firm in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida, and a couple other scattered places.

Chris (01:02):

Alright. And we also have Seth Feinberg.

Seth Feinberg (01:04):

I'm back. Tell us a little about yourself, those of you who weren't in the last session. Seth Feinberg. I'm been a business journalist for over 30 years. Covered the accounting space for a little over 20. I worked with Accounting Today Accounting. I was the editor of Accounting Web these days. I have my own business. I'm consulting a lot with the technology vendors, service providers in this space to really for the betterment of the profession. I feel that a lot of those relationships are kind of broken or strained and I feel that they need to listen to you all more and a lot of your needs. And really it's perfect session title for kind of what I'm doing, which is saying, look, we are a quarter of the way through the 21st century. Technology permeates everything that you do or nearly everything that you do in your firms. And I would love for those relationships to be better. So I speak to firms regularly and vendors regularly to figure out where some of the blockers might be.

Chris (02:13):

Gotcha. Fantastic. And so I'm going to be starting off with some questions, but if you yourselves have any questions, feel free, just raise your hand. We want this to be a dialogue, a conversation between folks versus some sort of broadcast. But anyway, yeah, it goes without saying that accounting technology is going to change in the next few years. It has already changed over the last couple of years, but what do you think is going to be the biggest changes in technology of your accounts over the next few years? Tom, why don't you start us off?

Tom Angelo (02:43):

Sure. I mean, I think to make any kind of predictions on this is always tough because stuff is changing so rapidly and there's things that have come out that I don't even know that I would've predicted, and then there was things I thought that would be solved. But I think that one of the areas that we might see a lot more of is how to take the more menial tasks within our firms and automate that. So we've talked about RPA and all of that sort of theoretically, and I think that there's going to be a lot more of vendors in the marketplace that are actually going to solve some of these problems.

Seth Feinberg (03:21):

Yeah, for sure. And again, I might be a little biased, but I think as, and hopefully communications between the profession and the service providers who are out there improve, I think we will start to see some real innovation and some real solutions happen.

(03:39)

As you pointed out, a lot of things tend to be built and not really in consideration of some of the problems that firms are regularly having that technology has not solved for. And it's true, it would be kind of a fool's game to really think that we're going to know where even outside of two, three years, where technology's going to be. Remember the days of the 10 year plan. Who can even think that anymore in business or in your firm? Now it's two to three years, but to Tom's point, I think in general automation, looking at again, the most menial tasks, the things that are taking the most time look for innovations and technology to kind of solve for those. I know it's kind of general kind of broad, but yeah, I mean I think that's really the direction that most tech is going to move.

Tom Angelo (04:33):

Yeah, I mean think what we'd like to see is a little bit mirroring of some of the other industries outside of accounting. I mean, I think our industry has been dominated at least on the primary software vendor side by only a handful of vendors. And you've seen a lot of startups come up in the marketplace coming out with one-off products in our industry without giving away all those names, but they're solving for something, right? Awin came out and it's doing a tremendous job solving the billing and collections and really just front facing client experience. But what we need is we need the vendors to open up in other industries. If you think of places like Salesforce where the marketplace is wide open and there's just all of these plugins to solve individual business needs, I'd like to see that happen more in our space.

Seth Feinberg (05:27):

It definitely tax accounting for sure. Tax I think big time. And we've been hearing for years about how this look, how long it took tax, corporate tax to really go to the cloud. It's still not a hundred percent, still not really great. Things that you use aren't still fully integrated with other things that you use Practice management systems. Yeah. I mean, for example that what you guys use, but I'm sure you've dealt with that in your own firm.

Tom Angelo (05:58):

Oh, we're dealing with now and obviously we're a bigger firm. We've got close to 700 employees. We're implementing a new CRM right now, but has nothing to do with the practice management system. So we needed developers to make it all work as opposed to being the opt opportunity to say, oh, there's this plug and play CRM that works with our digital marketing campaigns and it just plugs right in. I mean, we don't have that and obviously as a bigger firm we're making those investments, but I'd love to see that be available for everyone.

Seth Feinberg (06:30):

 Absolutely. There there's not that sort of ubiquity that the promise of technology obviously there, there's always innovations. There's always sort of new things that say, oh, what, wait a minute, this thing isn't working, so someone's going to come out of the woodwork and kind of plug that in. But it really would be great to just, again, to have some ubiquity through a lot of the platforms that are regularly used just throughout the profession.

Chris (07:03):

So drilling down, I guess maybe it's more specific. So there are a lot of emerging technologies that are saying this is going to change accounting, this is going to have a huge impact on accounting, this will change service lines, change firm structures, things like that. But what specific ones do you think will wind up having the biggest impact over the next couple of years of the things that are always saying this is going to change everything, which one will change everything?

Tom Angelo (07:28):

It's hard to say, but I know I'm intrigued by, and I'm not even by far the most qualified person that to talk about AI, but I'm intrigued at what we can use this technology in the client discovery. So using AI to farm all of our tax return data integrated with all the other information we have on clients where we could literally produce full-blown proposal opportunities in an automated way as to what we can do to further sell services to clients. I mean, know from a business development standpoint, I mean, I think that would be fantastic. I mean stuff that just no one ever has time to sometimes do what let's deploy that technology in a way that benefits us on the top line.

Seth Feinberg (08:19):

Thanks. Yeah, and Chris, I definitely understand where you're coming from with that. The thing that's really going to be the game changer out there, and I've seen it over the years where everyone thinks it's going to be one thing and then it's just not, I think it was brought up yesterday about blockchain. It was like, oh, it's going to change everything. I don't know. I think that, I wouldn't say it's totally flopped, but I think a lot of it continues to develop. This is a developing story and I think it's the same thing with chat GPT and the future of AI in our space and everything that we do. It's just the next level of automation. Look, I remember looking back in talking to practitioners about desktop software being the game changer for how they work, getting them off the paper and onto the computer screen and that kind of did everything and then all of a sudden it was cloud, cloud's going to change everything that you do. And sure it's had a massive impact because this is just where technology went. Everything's a lot of things just went browser based. Did it necessarily kill the IT department?

(09:29)

I don't think so. I think it just maybe caused you to reimagine things. And I think the same thing with AI is the next level of automation, where the next level of automation comes from, who knows. But the more that the one undercurrent thing to underscore is that the more of your menial tasks will be, I don't want to say taken away, but they will be automated. So that you can continue to do, and I know that you've all heard this time and time again about doing the more meaningful work, the more higher value work, really being that person for your clients versus spending most of your time doing things that well that are eating your time and not really creating value. So a long-winded answer there, Chris, but that's kind of where I think we should all be thinking.

Tom Angelo (10:31):

Yeah, I think you bring up good points about, we keep talking about the menial tasks and I don't think it's meant to demean what we're doing. Yeah, not at all. No. And I just think about even in our own firm, the amount of time we spend on, and obviously as a bigger firm, our ability to pivot isn't even as nearly as fast as a smaller firm. So for us, we have to beta tech beta test and research and figure it out, but just extension processing in our firms, I mean, thousands of extensions get processed every year and AI can totally handle that. Absolutely. And it's not even just the, oh, you run the extension, but figuring out the email to the client about the money that they owe and how we can automate all of that and take away the fear of leveraging that to someone and being comfortable. Those are the kind of technologies that I think would be absolute game changing for the industry if it worked.

Chris (11:38):

So there are certain solutions and there are certain areas where the solutions for their particular problem, they're very high quality, it seems to have gotten the process down. There's a lot of other areas though that seems that it's ripe for more innovation. It seems that it really needs some more development. What are areas that we do need better technology for right now? What comes to mind?

Tom Angelo (11:58):

I think you just gave a great example. Oh, the extensions. The extensions. I mean, oh yeah, that would be a big one. Massively time consuming. I as somebody who thinks about client service and I guess client communication too, right? Well, and I was actually going to kind of further expand on the client communication we tend to solve in technical problems. The software tends to figure out what we're going to do, tax software, fixed asset software billing. But when we think about what we use in our daily lives in am, when all of a sudden you're talking with your spouse and it's like, Hey, we're at a toilet paper and you just click your phone and it's in two, it's so easy. You can order something, you can book an airline. I always feel like our business it, it's complicated to do business with us sometimes and we need a better front facing client onboarding kind of relationship with our customers.

Seth Feinberg (12:56):

Definitely the onboarding and I, I've heard that pain point from a lot of firms, large and small. Ultimately though it really is individualized. I don't know that there's going to be a one thing that's going to go profession wide that's just going to be okay, that's going to wipe that away because you know, have to look in your own practices. And I mentioned this in the last session about what is the thing that's causing the most pain? What do you think is absolutely broken or a blocker? And that becomes your must have, that becomes the thing, the 21st century technology that hopefully will solve.

Tom Angelo (13:39):

And I think everything else, I would say the CPA world is a little slower to adopt, a little slower to get things moving. I remember going paperless was the game changing thing. So even in our firm, but it just became less paper, less paper if we're having an M&A conversation with a firm and they're proud that they just went paperless. And I'm kind of like, I don't know what else is under the hood here. So we are a slow moving, adopting industry. So hopefully we start to accelerate that to take advantage of anything that does come out.

Seth Feinberg (14:20):

I mean, I think any professional service area accounting, including is definitely ripe for innovation. It's ripe for change. And again, I'll go back to just my core belief that vendors can't continue to just develop things and in silos, you know, you have to communicate with the profession and the folks who you are building this for, you have to know what their blockers are. You have to know what their largest pain points are. I just feel like it could be so much better and this profession really could really take off and completely reinvent. Its itself.

Tom Angelo (15:00):

I mean some of the technologies are already there being deployed in other industries and some of our clients, I mean I'm sure you, you've seen it in the health space. Maybe you take just the way your dentist systems interact with their x-rays.

Seth Feinberg (15:17):

Yeah, HIPAA, paperless, HIPAA created that. Like, oh, you can now share all of those game changer.

Tom Angelo (15:25):

I think we've got some work to do. And Seth, you brought up, I mean the valid point to me about the vendors opening up and integrating better would solve a lot of that, especially the smaller the firm, right? You're not going to build those things yourself. I mean you just want this stuff to work Exactly right.

Seth Feinberg (15:46):

Mean, obviously there's, again, leading back to the last session about innovation. Sure, there's definitely opportunity to innovate in some areas, but by and large, particularly the smaller firms, they don't just really have the time or take the time to think, well I'm just going to do this myself. I think you have to work in tandem with the vendor community, get your needs known and work with them on innovating. Sure. There's plenty of folks out there are a little more tech savvy that they've built app for apps for things. They build their own problems just like people in their own homes. People are a lot more handy around the house, around the apartment than others. And others would much rather just go, what can I just go on my phone and buy, go buy that, fix that. Yep, absolutely.

Tom Angelo (16:37):

And in some cases the technology's already here and again, it's just not always being adopted. I mean, how many people know their clients that their idea of building a bash a dashboard is to print their QuickBooks P and l and take the numbers and type it into Excel and then send that off as opposed to building something out in a Microsoft BI product or having it auto like real time. So the technology's always there. I, I think for us having the time to and the will to kind of adopt it too, there's lots of nice to haves out there, but we need to start focusing on the must haves, really, really embrace the rest of the 21st century. We got another few decades to do that, but it'd be great to finally see this profession and well, we don't have to all get started on the IRS who isn't quite in the 21st century. I think they just got rid of the Dom Matrix printer. Yeah, my goodness.

Chris (17:40):

So typically, how have you observed firms approaching technology? What has generally been their approach to technology and is this approach something that really they ought to be changing? What are some of your thoughts on that?

Seth Feinberg (17:55):

Yep. Yeah. Well again, it really depends on the firm's size. I tend to be more in touch with a lot of the, well, I think the firms that represent the majority of the profession, which are the smaller firms, their approach to it. Again, you always will have your leaders, you'll have your alphas that represents about maybe seven or 8% of the market right now. So they're doing a lot of listening to some of the alphas. These types of firms tend to be the loudest, those are the most innovative. They're kind of pushing things or they're more apt to try technology and share it. And I love seeing that going on now more and more through the profession, through social media, there wasn't really a way really for firms to share amongst each other unless you went to a state society meeting or what have you.

(18:57)

But so the approach is still very, very measured. I think that's was kind of the slower adoption phase. But I love seeing that more of the majority of the profession now are willing to try things out, willing to see what works, willing to maybe fail at something and really give things a try. Sure, there are definitely, there is definitely a segment of the market, I like to call them the LMAs Leia loans, meaning those are at one point I think represented a larger portion of the profession. They really didn't want to hear about all this new stuff coming in. They were maybe even a little afraid of it that represents a smaller portion and they're, they're going to go their own way and maybe make incremental changes. But I guess, sorry Chris to your question, I think the approach is still very measured trying. I love seeing that more firms are willing to try new things. I don't know if you have a process at a larger firm, you have a process where it's important for teams to continue to try out new things.

Tom Angelo (20:13):

I mean, as a bigger firm, I mean we have have some areas that are more difficult to navigate. So we don't want to necessarily adopt something that doesn't work because our risk of failure undermines our team's ability to have confidence that it's going to work. And when we're trying to move an entire team onto something, we really need to make sure it works. So we have a tendency to have a vetting process that we actually have an IT advisory committee that's made up of a segment of the team that kind of vets new technologies and evaluates them. And then when we actually do make a decision to try something, we bet a test it. We have 12 offices or so, and we might take that technology and implement it in one spot, get all the bugs out, what didn't work, what worked do we have to do better?

(21:11)

Because we don't want our team to feel like every time we change something and we have to be very, very careful about that, then they're just going to be like, Ugh, I'm not another thing that doesn't work. We have to be careful. We're in the process right now of rolling out a new CRM we with HubSpot and we were going to roll it out in the beginning of.

Seth Feinberg (21:31):

It's no small task way, no small task, rolling out a CRM system at a firm of your size.

Tom Angelo (21:38):

And this is our second go around. The first one failed. We used something else, it didn't work. Everybody was like, this doesn't work, it's taking too long. So what happens? The adoption isn't there.

Seth Feinberg (21:48):

So curious how long that took or how long did you take to get to the point of where you're like, this isn't working, you were just cut that off.

Tom Angelo (21:57):

It was probably, we probably spent a year implementing it and then another year as the ship, the CRM ship was sinking while the violins were playing. Yeah, I mean it was a good year, year. This is the worry with new technology, trying something new and just going, yeah, I just don't know. I afford for it to fail. Can we afford to spend that amount of time? And that's why this year to find out something just didn't work this year. We were going to roll it, roll out the HubSpot prior to busy season and we needed to integrate it with something else. So we have a practice management system. It needed to talk to that. So they weren't quite there and they're like, well, we think we could roll it out. We're fixing these bugs. I'm like, no, we're just going to push it off because we're going to lose everybody if this thing doesn't work so.

Chris (22:47):

So from that we can actually see that affirms tech decisions can tally be fraught. So in the context of all of these emerging technologies we've been talking about and that everyone has been hearing about and pretty much every single session throughout the past three days, what should firms be doing to get ready for these technologies? What approach should they have? Maybe Seth, you can start out,

Seth Feinberg (23:05):

And I know that I raised this in the last session, but I'm going to continue to, anytime you are looking to technology to solve for something, you have to really start with what is the biggest blocker in your practice? What is the must have versus nice to have playing around with chat GPT? I see a lot of firms doing that. That's great. Is that a priority right now? I don't know. I think it's still early days on that level of automation. It's going to continue to evolve. Sure, play around with it, see what works and with you in different scenarios, but really look at your must have, look at the things that really are getting in the way. Now if you're still very tax focused, look at again, you'll finally have a little time to breathe and look back at what really didn't go as well this past season.

(24:07)

I know that it seemed by and large, the firms that I'm talking to who are heavily tax focused, they're feeling like there is some sense of normalcy, at least for what they, it's like, yeah, it's still crazy busy, but back to the crazy busy that I remember pre pandemic versus now. But so you can really have a little time to breathe and look at like, yeah, this didn't really go as well. We really need to change this up. I think that's a great place to start always.

Tom Angelo (24:39):

I kind of just want to piggyback on what Seth said there. That mean I always think you should just reverse engineer at what you're doing. So it's easy to open up whatever publication or go to your favorite webpage in the industry and you read about something or what somebody else is doing. You're like, oh, I'm behind. I should do this. And maybe not because ultimately what are the challenges in your own business? If I'm a CAS only practice, do I care about all these tax tools? Probably not, right? What is the things that are going to make my life easier that might prevent me from having to add extra labor? So it's just looking at the tasks, reverse engineer where they are and then take those pieces of information and see what's available in the marketplace that's sort of ready for you. That to me, the small wins are always going to outweigh the big wins. The big wins are the battles that are harder to win. So if you could solve small problems here and there, it's it with technology in my opinion, you're going to feel better about where you're going.

Seth Feinberg (25:44):

Yeah and when it gets back to those are the must haves, even if it solves for a little thing, you know, can build on that. And by the way, don't let that feeling of I'm behind, look at what all these other firms are doing. Be your motivator definitely when it comes because kind of setting yourself up for a failure that you really don't want versus what I mean the failure that maybe you do want the kind of failure that's actually going to teach you versus one that's just going to make you feel bad about some of your decisions. I'm sure you went into that implementation not with the idea that we might fail at this. It actually taught you as it's painful as it probably was.

Tom Angelo (26:33):

Well it was. And you know, think, you know, have the right team making the right choices. And obviously in a firm, firm of our size, we try to DEVET that process, but you also depend on the vendor. We're not writing our own software depending on that. And sometimes they over promise and under-deliver, right? That happens. But we can't be afraid to fail. I mean we have to talk to our partners about making investments in technology and whether we're making it at the scale we're making it or there's tons of firms investing way more than we are. And then there's firms that are much smaller that when they invest money in technology it it's meaningful money.

(27:14)

But at the same time we can never be afraid to fail because you just have to keep going. It might not be the right solution and you have to rip it out. The smaller the firm, the easier that is to do. To a point to it still creates mental havoc, but

Seth Feinberg (27:31):

Exactly, exactly. And even in a six person firm, you still have the whole issue of getting everyone on board. It seems like, oh well it's only six people. It's like, yeah, well that's still just doing the math there. If you still have a couple people who aren't doing that's still a good quarter of your practice or third of your practice that doesn't want to use this isn't using it, that's a whole other conversation. But I think it's still very relevant and why there's still this slow adoption. There's definitely a lot, there's a lot of fear and that the failures will actually be detrimental to your firm to working with your clients all on down the line. But you shouldn't be afraid to try. But at the same time, you shouldn't be afraid that you're being left behind. I got to reiterate that point.

Tom Angelo (28:30):

And I think the biggest issue is right, everyone's busy in your practice, you're dealing with your clients, but maintaining a certain level of self-awareness about your own business and where you are, but also understanding what's happening in the industry at all times, right? It's easy to get sucked into your own world, but you have to have awareness about what's out there and the technologies that potentially can be the game changer for you and your practice.

Chris (29:01):

So you had mentioned being slow to adopt to certain technologies and I guess it can be tempting to be an early adopter because if it works, you have secured yourself an amazing competitive advantage. But if it doesn't, the guy that just bought a laser disc player, so I was talking to somebody yesterday and she was talking about how honestly you really don't want to be an early adopter. You want to let other people be the Guinea pigs first. And I was wondering maybe what your take was on the advantages of the risks. Do we want to be early adopters? Should firms be early adopters more often?

Seth Feinberg (29:36):

One, I was going to let you, oh you want me take it? I was going to let you take that one. Just being a firm representative.

Seth Feinberg (29:43):

So I think me answering it for the way our firm views it versus maybe someone else it, it's tough for us to be our early adopters. If this is an unprecedented technology, it's never really been tested and we roll it out to close to 700 people and it doesn't work, it's becomes a big mess. So yes, we probably take a bit more calculated, a little bit more of a wait and see approach on something. The whole V one of any new technology. Sometimes we're, wait now if I was a solo practitioner, I might, depending on what the product was, I probably might try to be an early adopter. I might say, what is my ultimate risk of failure in this particular thing?

(30:29)

I don't know it. It's kind of like, I don't know, how many times have you found some type of app that was a dollar 99 a month and you were like, what's the big deal? I'll adopt it and I'll try. And then if you don't use it, it's no big deal. You have to weigh some of that out or it's free. Yeah, or it's free.

Seth Feinberg (30:45):

Yeah. There's a lot of free, at least from a cost perspective. But yeah, Chris, to your point, I don't think that everyone should be consumed with being early adopters on everything I mentioned before. I think that with social media, with the content that's out there available already there, you'll see who the early adopters are. You'll see a lot of sharing. I see it all the time on people who are trying new things, using different platforms in their firm, really being public about what's working, what's not.

(31:25)

Definitely kind of dial in, get in touch and really listen to your colleagues about what's going on. But yeah, definitely don't feel like, oh well I've got to be the head of the curve on this. The end game is about doing things more efficiently. Solving for blockers in your firm. That's what I think.

Tom Angelo (31:48):

Yeah, I mean what you said about talking to your colleagues, I mean I think we all have industry peers and sometimes just talking with them and saying what's working for them, they might have already tried it, is a good example of where you can then pull it in. I mean, even in the top 100 firm space, I mean we regularly get together with our peers in that space and they'll give us, hey, we had success with this or we failed with this. And we really, because we are a sharing community, thankfully we don't really hold this stuff very close to the vest. So if something's working for us, we share.

Seth Feinberg (32:27):

I love to see it mean again with talk about one of the things that's been a game changer I think has been social. I think it has been you, the ability to just watch something on YouTube about someone going through a process or watching something on Twitter. Somebody created a loom to walk you through something mean these are all available out there. And time was not that long ago. You know, had to go to conferences like this and or socialize a bit more and hear about war stories with technology.

Tom Angelo (33:04):

Well, and thank God the media reviews and of this tech, the media's keeping up with this and there's plenty of data out there on what's working, what's not, what people feel like should be held off. But I also think anything else, the new and shiny and is always what's out there the most. And that may not be ready for full production if I would say, but there are the flashier things. I mean, for example, we have a client that was able to put robots into their warehouse to go pick the orders. That stuff came out a while ago. Yeah. Oh yeah. It's really just perfected now. I mean it's been out a while, so, so they were not early adopters. They got it now, but now it works. There's very little. So this is sometimes the benefit of waiting to see where it goes. Right. And tech has to evolve through its own failures. Yeah, I mean for sure Microsoft CRM 1.0 was basically outlook. It wasn't, it wasn't very much and now it's all integrated and I know people who absolutely love it, some people don't. But it's definitely tech is going to evolve because of you, the feedback that you all give the vendor community and also through talking amongst each other more. I know that's a point we keep bringing up again and again, but I, I'm stress it enough.

Chris (34:41):

So you talked about the new and the shiny and the new and the shiny has this tendency sometimes to also be the overrated. So for either one of you then, what would you say is the opposite? A technology that really is severely underrated. Things that people really aren't something that's around that people just don't seem to be appreciating enough that probably needs a little bit more attention. We can talk in terms of specific things. We can talk in terms of types of solutions, however you feel is germane.

Seth Feinberg (35:09):

The telephone, pick it up and actually talk. I'm sorry, I know I'm on this communication kick, but man you all got to talk to each other more and it's a great thing. But also I have heard, and I'm sure Chris, you have in your position too, have heard about the death of Xcel. I can't tell you how many times, but it's still a go-to for so many things in your practice. No, I'm not saying it's everything. It used to be, and maybe you don't use it for as much, but gosh you're just not going to kill that thing. It still has a lot of great uses,

Tom Angelo (35:51):

The most underutilized software in the world I think.

Seth Feinberg (35:55):

Yeah, but also underappreciated for what it can do, particularly in the world of accounting.

Tom Angelo (36:00):

Absolutely. Yeah. I mean I think there's a lot of software out there that is probably underutilized, but I think the computer itself is potentially underutilized some as much as possible.

(36:16)

I mean I think that there's just so many other things that we can find uses to make that better and how we use it and where we use it. Thank God. I mean I don't think anybody would've imagined trying to run your firm now without one. I don't even think that's humanly possible.

Seth Feinberg (36:35):

Or some device I knew back when laptops be sorry, tablets became a lot more ubiquitous. There's plenty of firms that just sort of preferred that platform to anything. It's light, it's powerful. The memory has increased exponentially right over time. But we could go on and hopefully you guys are all thank you for sitting through this. Hopefully you're getting something out of just planting seeds here. We're not solving for anything, but hopefully you're getting something out of what Tom and I are talking about and Chris is talking about.

Chris (37:17):

Actually. So it's about three 40 right now. We have about 10 minutes left. I was just wondering whether there were any questions maybe from the audience about anything at all.

Seth Feinberg (37:23):

Yeah. Did we not touch on something you're like, wow, I really was hoping they would jump into this.

Tom Angelo (37:31):

Be pretty broad.

Audience Member (James) (37:34):

Sorry for this and maybe it's a little off topic, but technology, but for hours and subscription based value. I'm just curious one, I guess one is do you employ that in your own businesses? Two. And secondly, if the company did want to go to the subscription based platform like that, what solutions or something?

Tom Angelo (38:14):

Yeah, so like a firm like ours, I mean we have components of our business that it are heavily subscription. So we have a IT division, a IT arm that almost everything's on subscription. So we have methodologies for software platforms that bill and charge people monthly and generate email invoices and things like that. So I think if I was to start anything from the scratch now I would go the subscription route. It's harder for firms like ours to change a lot of our methodologies that way. There's a recent book by Ron Baker out and I forgot the name, but he basically updates his value pricing to be about this new subscription economy. And he's really talking about doing it that way where everything is very easy, very automated, but you have to really change your business model. So if I was starting from ground zero, I would completely adopt that almost like a gym membership. Don't fear that you didn't do this work yet because it isn't month forward and you didn't collect this. You got to build your business model around this much money a month for this much.

Tom Angelo (39:38):

Time's up, time's up. Thanks James. I was zoning out on the name of the book, but it's good.

Seth Feinberg (39:45):

And that's not to say that you know can't have clients who you have on subscription, that also hourly still does make sense in some situations because the hourly bill still, it still prevents, it's the one tool against scope creep, right? I mean that's the thing that kind of cuts it off. It's very absolute. Yeah, it's your time. But as you know, the tie in with technology is as we have these things that automate more of what we do, and I'm sure you've been hearing this for years, but it continues to be a thing that you know shouldn't worry about. Okay now that this task now only takes maybe an hour to do versus a day, how do I feel good about charging for that? And definitely with the subscription model is it's definitely a little bit of that tight rope of when you first do it, you're like, oh geez, I have this them on the subscription pricing and they didn't call me this month, I didn't really do a whole lot this month for them.But that's not why they're doing it. They're subscribing, they're subscribing to you for when they need you. I guess that goes, that's kind of built into the whole, yeah.

Tom Angelo (41:00):

I don't know if that kind of addressed or you were looking more about the technology around managing the subscriptions, right? Oh, maybe

Audience Member (James) (41:07):

I interested what somehow.

Seth Feinberg (41:11):

Yeah, no, it's a good point.

Tom Angelo (41:13):

Yeah, yeah, I mean, like I said, if I, I was building something from scratch now I don't think I would want it any other way. But the subscription model, because I think it adds more value. But I also think, I don't know, it just takes away that it improves the client experience doing business with you. It takes that barrier away from listen in an firm, there's times I send invoices that I then I'm like, okay, I'm going to wait till after five o'clock to email this invoice because I already know they're going to call me. Right? Because it's way more than what they thought. I would rather have the client that it's this much a month and it that's look mean we don't do a good job of setting extra. How many times do you just do the stuff and then bill it later as opposed to them calling them up, well we have a scope change, we're going to need you to agree to this. No, that doesn't happen.

Chris (42:06):

Alright, we've got about five minutes. Yes. Right. Okay.

Audience Member 1 (42:29):

I thought something was wrong with me because I just see I'm this impact. So I think something document, yeah,

Seth Feinberg (42:59):

This is the next big thing. That's the next big thing. That's a great point. The hype, the grandstanding behind technology. And I'm sure you're probably thinking that's going on with chat GPT right now too. I still think blockchain jury's still out with that now and I'm glad things have kind of settled down and it's maybe something that's kind of more in the background because that is exactly the very nature of what blockchain is. It's something that actually kind of sits in the background and sits behind everything, particularly in the banking sector. So the jury is still out, it's still kind of a wait and see as far as its impact on the accounting profession as a whole. And I think with chat GPT and other forms of ai, it's still yet to be seen. I do still just in my gut, just covering technology as long as I have, I feel that is going to have a much larger impact than blockchain was promised to do. That's just my 2 cents.

Tom Angelo (44:05):

I, mean yeah, on the blockchain, I probably agree with you. I would go to events and they would talk about this and you know, have to have a blockchain practice and I'm like, okay, I've yet to have any, I mean, listen, we don't deal in public, our firm is big, but we don't deal in public companies. So we're dealing with middle market, lower middle market companies. No one has asked us to do anything in the blockchain. We had a discussion at the executive level two years ago, oh we got to build a crypto practice. I'm like, well who's asking for that? I mean the truthfully, now somebody is, but they weren't asking us, so we weren't building it, we just didn't, it's out there. But I don't think anybody, we just weren't, it was shiny, but it wasn't right there. And I think these are the kind of areas where truthfully, until blockchain becomes as evident as Apple Pay or something like that, I don't know that it's going to trickle down into our size firms, right? Yeah. The big four are going to deal with this stuff much sooner than any of us. They are, yeah, they, but even at that level, not as much as it was touted. Correct.

Tom Angelo (46:24):

Yeah, I mean it actually is something I know a little bit about just from our ERP practice, but we are obviously dealing a little bit higher than the QuickBooks, those kinds of software. So we definitely see the best in class ERPs being paired with market solutions. You've got ERP solutions that are complete out of the box. And I'm not going to pick on any vendors, but let's just use an easy one because NetSuite tends to be an all-in-one solution. But I don't know what if you are a specialized, obviously you're a veterinary organization, you need veterinary software, but I wouldn't use the veterinary software's ERP I would probably say, okay, what's the best ERP in that? I would integrate those two and then go with that. And we have numerous amounts of clients that use multiple, choose the best financial reporting package.

(47:28)

And that's not what is the front end. And I think you're going to see more of those vendors having more open marketplaces mean obviously mean Salesforce. I think they need to, what's that? Just to survive to his point. Absolutely. I think they're going to need to be more open. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean Salesforce has done a great job of saying what we are the CRM and we're just going to open this up and let everybody build on top of it. And I don't think being able to say, we're just going to go buy this one solution. It's going to do everything to solve all of our problems in the business is the future because how's that? How are they possibly going to keep up?

Seth Feinberg (48:07):

Yeah. So in that sense, yeah, there's going to be the death of that, but through every death like that, something else rises.

Tom Angelo (48:19):

Yeah, right. Yeah, I don't know. I think it makes sense and I think businesses that are able, if everything was wide open and everything was interfaceable, we would probably be further ahead. Some vendors are just more apt to allow that. And they've built a community. I mean there are vendors out there that literally have innovation funding for startups to build around their products so that they actually fund startups who are building platforms around the master product. They're not afraid of the competition. They're actually looking to say, you know what? We can't think of everything that needs to happen with this one product, so let's fund these innovation. I'd like to see more of that in this space.

Seth Feinberg (49:05):

For sure. For sure, for sure. And it's going to happen again. I mentioned again a few times about the communication with vendors. Really that relationship definitely has to improve for technology to evolve in the way that is going to have a better impact on this profession as a whole.

Chris (49:26):

Alright then.

Tom Angelo (49:27):

Well I think we're there. Oh, I'm sorry. I think we're there. Alright.

Chris (49:30):

Yeah, I was going to say it's 1252 right now and I want to thank both of you for just these amazing talk. It's been so much really good food for thought on all this. That's seven applause. Thank you.

Tom Angelo (49:41):

Thank you.