Case Study: Future-Forward Firm: The Zoho Impact on The Accounting Lab

Transcription:

Val Steed (00:08):

Good Morning and Welcome. See if we can get our slides up here and we'll be ready to roll.

(00:21):

My name is Val Steed. I'm here with Zoho. I'll introduce myself here. There we go. I'll introduce myself right now. I am an Accountant, CPA. I've got a background in the industry. The big important thing to remember about me is I've been in this accounting tech industry since the late eighties. I've seen a lot and there's reasons why I'm with Zoho, but that discussion, let's save for the booth. Okay, come on by. I am not here to sell Zoho In this session, we're here to talk about a great solution that we have for one of our clients. So come by and we can talk in the booth a little bit, maybe a little later today or something. Robert Craig, Mr. Robert.

Robert Craig (00:54):

That's okay. You keep that for now. Oh,

Val Steed (00:55):

Okay. I'll keep it for a minute.

Robert Craig (00:58):

Hi everybody. I'm Robert Craig. I'm the Chief Operating Officer for the Accounting Lab and part owner. We've been around for about 15 years with a previous owner. One of my colleagues and I bought the company, an employee also bought the company last year. So we're in process of making some changes, but we prepare about 10,000 tax returns a year. We have 135 employees in 35 different states. We have clients in every state across the country and we prepare about, I think I said 10,000 tax returns. So we are in this session today talking about the changes we have made over the last five years or so to serve the clients from our growth, which has been about 5 to 10% every year through word of mouth. So we needed to create a system that would help support that across all of our service lines, but we also wanted to not just stop there, but build something for the future for the anticipated growth that we knew was going to be coming or at least hoped.

Val Steed (02:10):

And that's one of the best ways to get clients too, that word of mouth. We learned that in our firm. I was with a small firm for many years. One of the smartest things we ever learned was to ask the clients you really do make sure you ask them to refer you to their friends because good people hang with good people, and that's usually where you can get some of your best referrals. Just a bit about Zoho folks, we're not new. We've been around about 28 years. We have a number of employees, I think it's actually about 16, 17,000 employees now globally. We are a global solution, 50 plus applications, 150 plus countries, and that's a real number there, that a hundred plus million users. Some of those are free users, but the vast majority are paying users. We are new to most of you, and that's partly my job to come in here and introduce ourselves and get us going. So that's kind of the background there for Zoho. Now the accounting lab, tell us about the accounting lab, Robert.

Robert Craig (03:07):

So I told you we're already working with clients across the country, preparing tax returns, doing cash work. We, we are remote. We have been remote for about eight years, so we really needed a system that would help support that, drive that forward, hold people accountable. So let's dig into it.

Val Steed (03:30):

Excellent. And the agenda, folks, we're not going to keep you here too long. I know we're we're standing between you and food, right? That's a tough position to be in, trust me. So we're going to really look at the accounting lab, their challenges. We're going to look and see what they did. How did they look at more of a real digital transformation in their organization to have information flow from one area to another area to another area in our industry. Remember for years, what we really hear, and I still hear it now, is best of breed. We hear a lot of is best of breed, but then you got to do integrations and then sometimes those integrations break. Well, instead what we offer is the suite approach. And what Robert's done with his firm with the accounting lab is tied that together in the needs of an accounting firm, which is really harnessing the power there of that whole integrated suite, which is really quite amazing. And that's one of the key reasons why I am with Zoho is for that particular look. And I'll let Robert talk you through some challenges here. You had a few challenges starting this whole mess. I think

Robert Craig (04:29):

That some challenges, it took us a while to find Zoho. We had heard about it but didn't really know about its functionality, its capability. But I'll get into a little bit more of that. But I really, even though we're talking about much more than a CRM today, I wanted to share these top 10 challenges. Sure, all of you have faced these challenges or may be facing these challenges right now, particularly to us. These were our firm's challenges. I'm sure some of these look familiar to you too,

Val Steed (05:00):

Silos boy.

Robert Craig (05:04):

But one of the things I want you to get out of this, and my hope for this presentation is I'm sure a lot of you are in process of making some decisions, discovering where you are in the process. And so my hope that your takeaway today would be I maybe spark an idea for you, maybe I think or say something that kind of puts you on a tangent to maybe collaborate with your team more or whatever it might be. So as I continue to share, that's my hope. Okay, so this was specific to our digital transformation journey. So these are the elements. Coalesced after about four or five years of working through this process, we had leadership buy-in already, but we needed to take the next steps of, we needed to build our process maps, identify our pain points, and really those pain points didn't come from me.

(06:05):

They came from my team. The collaboration, I can't emphasize enough, collaborate with your team. Don't make decisions on behalf of your team or for your team because you need their buy-in as you progress this process. So do that and then start your research. Figure out which software meets those needs, which ones will actually satisfy your pain points when you come back to your leadership team or your entire team. However, depending on how big you are, then you really want to focus on the higher level of here's how I plan to solve this. And here are the pain points that are going to be solved during that process. But if you get too deep in the weeds too fast, you're going to lose them. And so my encouragement to you in this entire process is keep the momentum going. So don't go too deep, too fast because you're going to get a lot of information and information overload can really derail the process. So that's one of the top 10.

Val Steed (07:07):

Can I ask you a question there too? As you say, you got top level buy-in, a lot of firms will decide on something and they'll say, okay, we're going to implement this new solution or that one. And to believe it or not, a lot of times it's the top partners that say, no, you guys do all that. I'm going to still use what I want. Did you guys have buy-in top to bottom and all your people adopted it? Or do you have some top folks say, no, I'm not going to really use all that?

Robert Craig (07:28):

Not immediately. We had the same situation. So what I did as a result is we now have a hundred percent adoption, but I drove that process by moving away from antiquated systems and pushed everybody toward the solution that I developed in Zoho. And so it forced it and what gets to anybody over anything else? Compensation go. So I built compensation dashboards that was pulling the information from our systems in Zoho, and I'll share a little bit more about some of those elements, but I drove all that through these dashboards and I'll share, as I said, I'll share more.

(08:17):

So as Val said, there is Zoho. One is an array of suite of apps. There's about 50 apps in the suite. It has a lot of functionality, a lot of integration with APIs. And that was really kind of what drew me into the Zoho world. We had all these disparate apps that we were using and they weren't talking with one another, and we really just needed a system overhaul. I knew that just solving a particular pain point with a software off the shelf would probably have been great at solving that specific problem, but I knew long-term, that's not where the former owner and now us as new owners wanted to take the firm. And so I really had to take a look at it holistically. And so when I saw these different apps, I started learning more about the functionality. I could say, okay, that one could solve this, that one could solve this, that one could solve this. So as I started working with our Zoho partner, who's here today and at the Zoho booth, he helped us think through those as well as other partners. And we really developed a fantastic network of people that we have worked with in order to develop what we're talking about today. But ultimately, the way that we use the Zoho suite of apps is like an ERP where everything's tied together.

(09:48):

So we have about 70,000 projects that we've completed. 12,000 are active at any particular time. We need to be able to track those. Our team members need to know what specific projects are assigned to them, what's changing, what client meetings are coming up, all of those things. Zoho Analytics is a tool that pulls in the data from all the different apps within the Zoho suite, but it also pulls in data from external apps, not in the Zoho suite as well as from Excel spreadsheets. So all that information can come in, we can display that information. So in the last few years, we've built about 200 reports, 20 to 30 dashboards. Each one of those dashboards for a team, that team can go into that and see what's just applicable to them. So if they're a tax preparer, they go into analytics, can see exactly which projects are assigned to them, keeps them focused and efficient. The manager looks at it, they can see their entire team, how many projects they have in play at any particular time. Each level of management has that level of access. And it's live, it's completely live.

Val Steed (10:57):

Folks, if you're familiar with Power BI analytics is very similar hooks to a lot of external databases and internal data. And that's what Robert's doing there to pull all that together to get the right dashboards that help drive the firm highly recommend to your firm. Look, I don't care if you do his whole thing or not, but really looking into the world of analytics going forward for your firm to drive, measure what really matters. I think that's the key thing.

Robert Craig (11:23):

Yes, completely agree. And one of the things we wanted to do is increase transparency both internally so that anybody in the organization could see what's happening with a specific project at any time, anytime during the day, no matter where they're traveling, what time zone they're in. Well, the reverse is true for our clients. We wanted to increase the transparency to our clients because we were getting thousands of calls and emails every single year saying, what's the status of my project? What about this? Do you have all my documents? We solved all that and provide that information through our client portal and analytics and projects, which is what that icon is and Zoho creator did for us.

Val Steed (12:05):

So was my return done yet? They can check and see Yes. And tell you whether they liked that or not, huh? That's right.

Robert Craig (12:11):

So we do use it as an end-to-end solution. So a lead comes in, whether it's through the website, it's automatically added to the leads module. If it comes in through email, through phone calls, whatever it might be, those leads get added. A digital engagement letter gets sent out, it comes back from the client. A project's automatically set up, it's automatically in the queue for that assigned team member project gets completed, it's automatically queued up in our billing through Zoho books. And all of that is just seamless end to end. And I can't tell you how many tens of thousands of dollars we lost in our previous process. And so we've certainly made that up. And then the document management module that we created was a series of processes we went through or decisions we went through. We looked at the landscape of the document management software out there.

(13:03):

We were not satisfied with how it could serve us and our clients. And so through one of the Zoho apps called Zoho Creator, we developed our own document management module. And so now our clients, our team members interacted with it first. We worked through that process. That was increased communication, but then we turned that to our clients, and I was very pleased to say that within a few months we had 30% adoption with just a simple PDF of here's how you use it. And so they really caught on to, and it was built very intuitively. And of course we did case studies and that kind of thing, but we're really pleased with the way that that came out.

Val Steed (13:44):

That creator tool folks is very flexible. A lot of folks will use it to create their own solution or modify an existing Z solution and tie things together. And in fact, many companies end up doing their own specific unique, very industry specific solutions through that. And it's not very hard to get done. It's a very, let's say, user oriented creation tool.

Robert Craig (14:12):

The next app that we created was client meetings. We have related entities. As all of you do, it's hard to communicate client meetings quarterly or ad hoc, whatever it might be, and make sure that everyone on the team, especially in a remote environment, are communicated to. So we built that app. The date gets loaded into the app, it automatically communicates through the entire system. The priorities are reestablished for the accountant or the tax preparer or whatever it might be. And it's all automated.

Val Steed (14:41):

That's the frustrating part. I still need to see what you've done there. That would really help. I think firms, yeah.

Robert Craig (14:48):

So again, like the document manager, we went out, looked at the client organizers. All of 'em were PDF. We wanted to get away from PDF. We wanted a better experience for our clients. So last year we built, the client organizers sent that out, and I'm pleased to say we had about a 300% return on that. So now we're preparing tax returns much more efficiently this year because we got client responses.

Val Steed (15:13):

Now, was that an electronic organizer they were filling out online?

Robert Craig (15:16):

Yes, it's through Creator and it's just a bunch of radio buttons. They answer, it integrates with the document management module, they upload their documents through there. It's all seamless. Now,

Val Steed (15:25):

What percent of your clients went electronic and did that and what panicked and still wanted to send you a PDF back?

Robert Craig (15:31):

Yes, there was a large percentage that still wanted to go old school, but they understood well their understanding as we walked them through the process. We had a little bit more handholding. I know you all have clients like that too, so take the time. We walked them through what we needed from them and really kind of smoothed out that process. We're making improvements, but we have the control now to make those improvements based on client feedback, which is really a point that I missed with the document manager is we get feedback from our clients and literally within a few days we can make those changes. And now we've responded to a client and we get more adoption from our client.

Val Steed (16:09):

And as we go down the road, more and more and more are going to be more comfortable by putting all that stuff in online. It's just a matter of education, supporting 'em and going down the road,

Robert Craig (16:19):

What you saw on my previous slide, educate, educate, educate. Not only internally, but externally.

Val Steed (16:26):

Absolutely.

Robert Craig (16:26):

But there's a payoff there. I don't think I covered that last button.

Val Steed (16:30):

Yeah, come back to it, chip. They'll let you go back.

Robert Craig (16:34):

Okay. So Zoho people is the HRIS that Zoho developed, and we leverage that by creating additional modules in there. We have a weekly kind of check-ins, what we call it. It's a review. We have a quarterly review. We built modules inside Zoho people for that. All of that information is tracked and then it's pulled into these dashboards that we created. As I said, we have compensation dashboards, so all those elements are right there for that individual team member so they can see where they stand, how they're progressing, so their manager can have all that information at their fingertips. That's made it very easy and really like Zoho people.

Val Steed (17:15):

Yeah, the HR side of Zoho people recruit very strong products a lot of folks don't even know about, and they really are well-designed and robust.

Robert Craig (17:28):

There's a companion piece too, but you can figure that out.

Val Steed (17:30):

Yeah,

Robert Craig (17:32):

Looking out at the future, we're building a cast fee management app, upgrades, downgrades, changes in services. That's happening all the time. We're using Zoho forms right now, but then the team members have to change and update the systems. We want all that done to be automatic throughout the system. So we're building that. We're currently transitioning hundreds of our clients from our old accounting system into Zoho books. And so people, Val and team have done a fantastic job thus far. We're going to buy October, we'll have transitioned 300, and then we're going to look at the next 300 given which platforms they're on and that kind of thing. So we're really pleased with that process.

Val Steed (18:13):

And I think a number of those clients are on Thompson's a CS, right? Yes. Yeah, moving. So for those of you looking for a solution off a CS, we haven't. Now if you want to move people over, so we have migration as well.

Robert Craig (18:25):

So we also are building an AI driven agenda and meeting app. There's all these communication elements that are out there, project statuses, notices, whatever it might be. This AI driven app will pull all those elements together to make sure that our team members don't miss something crucial on a client meeting, new client onboarding module. We decided that we needed a smoother process. We also want to make sure we get away from the client saying, well, I did send you that. No, you didn't. Yes, I did. Well, I sent you this other thing. No, you didn't. So we wanted to create just a step-by-step process where we send them a link. Client just literally works through that onboarding module so that we can ultimately deliver the service that they're wanting.

Val Steed (19:14):

Now, that onboarding module, essentially that feeds the client portal, right? That's what that is. It's

Robert Craig (19:18):

Through the client portal.

Val Steed (19:19):

Through the client portal. So they're getting introduced to the client poll right off the bat. Exactly. And push 'em through that. Has that been a big success with the portal with them and looking at their own data?

Robert Craig (19:28):

Very much. Okay,

Val Steed (19:29):

Good. You go anywhere now, like to the doctor or anywhere else, it's like they want you to set up your own profile and manage it first. I didn't like that, but now I'm like, holy cow, this is really better for me. Not necessarily better for them. Yeah,

Robert Craig (19:42):

And most of our clients are doctors, physicians, veterinarians, dentists. We do have quite a number of small business, but that kind of grew out of our medical community starting new businesses to help with tax minimization strategies and those types of things. So that's really the makeup of our clientele across the country. We continue to make those document management enhancements. As I mentioned, we also are changing our tax software to a cloud-based software so that we can take advantage of the API calls, integrate with our client portal and make sure that we increase that, continue to increase that transparency that I mentioned earlier. So that's about it. We've been on a journey for four or five years. We have done a lot. I've shared a lot with you. But through those decisions, we not only have increased team member retention, we have increased client retention, and we have literally saved hundreds of thousands of dollars a year avoiding recurring annual fees as well as just increased client adoption. So we are really pleased with where we are today and where we're set up to achieve in the future. It's a lot, but if we did it, you can too with Zoho.

Val Steed (21:11):

Thanks, Robert. Let's see how we do with questions for a second here, folks. But before we go though, I do have one question for you. As your firm moves forward, do you see the future growth in tax prep or do you see it more the cash side of the house?

Robert Craig (21:29):

Currently I see it in tax, however, some of the elements that were mentioned in the prior session are all the things that we've been actually working through for a number of years. And so we've set up the system so that we can track those elements as well. So we always know exactly where our client is, what's happening with that client, regardless of whether it's tax or accounting, specifically tax account.

Val Steed (21:56):

Excellent. Excellent questions. Where are we at here? Right over here, sir? Yep. Got a mic, Dan. Thank you. You we're going to make sure we repeat the question one way or another. We want to make sure everybody hears the question. Thank you and hears the answer. Yes, sir.

Audience Member 1 (22:11):

One of the things I've always not wanted to buy a suite is I can't modify it. In other words, they may not be first in class in this specific function. These are better. So am I understanding correctly? You can modify and make it so that works for you?

Robert Craig (22:34):

Well, that's exactly why I chose Zoho because of the flexibility and its functionality, but really the flexibility. We crafted it to be exactly what our process is, and we weren't forced into another process because when you do that, you're going to lose adoption within the organization. And so I wanted to match what our process was while improving on it while we were encompassing the technology piece.

Audience Member 1 (23:00):

How difficult is it to do that, to modify it to your needs?

Robert Craig (23:06):

A lot of it is very simple and very easy. We have used Zoho developers, Zoho partners that are developers as well, and we have a fantastic relationship. If you want to meet him at the booth, he's here and they've done a fantastic job for us. Zoho builds their Zoho partner group with some really great and talented developers. And so my encouragement would be to interview them, find the one that works for you, start building that relationship, build some connections and some changes that you can't figure out right out of the box. But there are a lot of changes you can make. Thank

Val Steed (23:46):

You. If you are a tech head yourself or if you have internal tech staff, you can actually use z crater yourself and do quite a few modifications as well. Right over here, Dan, can we get a mic over here? Thank you. Yeah, be patient folks. It's very important for everyone to hear the questions and hear the answers.

Audience Member 2 (24:05):

Okay, so full disclosure, I'm a Zoho partner and big fan for many years.

Val Steed (24:09):

Oh, a client.

Audience Member 2 (24:12):

And I don't want to complicate things from a tech perspective, but it sounds just, I'm curious, it sounds like you did some custom customizations beyond what is built into the native products that maybe didn't need to be done. I'm just curious about how you made those decisions about whether to use the native functionality. It sounds like you and I know that products have changed. I'm just curious how you made those decisions.

Robert Craig (24:36):

And it has, over the years that we've been using it, it's developed and it's gotten better and better every year. It's exciting to see that. But what we did is, again, back to my process maps, my pain points, I looked at those and I said, well, can we solve this with Zoho? Well, let me see how far we can get using that product. Do I need an integration? Do I need another app? And started talking to my Zoho partner, found out what the limitations were within the existing product that was available to us at the time, and then we made decisions. We made the decision to either build or do we need to go external and buy it. And I'll in hands down, in every case, we've made the decision to build it. And that's where that connection happened when we knew we needed to go beyond what the current software was capable of, yet it had the functionality that just, you had to cross the dotted line there, if you will, with technology.

Val Steed (25:36):

Thank you. It's a good question. Oh, I'll give you your $10 later.

Audience Member 3 (25:40):

I have a question and a mic, but if anybody else has a question, I want you all to go first.

Val Steed (25:45):

We're close on time, folks, and we do really respect your time. I want to make sure that we're not cutting into your time. So let's do this. We're at the booth, and as Robert has mentioned, his partners here, and we'll be here today and tomorrow. We're happy to answer all your questions. Come on by. And just, I think the biggest thing to realize is there's another option out there for you and for your clients in our suite, and just consider us and see if we fit. Fit. Great. If not, that's great. But I think we have a great option for you, Mr. Dan. I think we're done. Alright.

Audience Member 3 (26:15):

Excellent. Just one real quick question for Robert, if you don't mind. Oh, absolutely. Because obvious that you've worked very closely with Zoe, you're comfortable with them. Would you describe yourselves as super technologically savvy or what sort of level of technical technological expertise that you bring

Robert Craig (26:31):

To this? Right. So my background has a lot of technology. I am not an engineer. I don't know code and I don't write code, but I've implemented a lot of systems and I've seen a lot of systems and I've seen them fail and came from an organization, they spent over a million dollars and it was not a success. So I knew that technology can help you, but I know that you have to also kind of think outside the box, think about how this particular solution and the way it was designed can solve it. But your Zoho partner can help you think through that if you don't have that wherewithal. But the important thing is get your process maps, identify your pain points, present that, and then think outside the box and begin to dream what you can fix for yourself. So you're literally saving a lot of money. Right. Awesome. Thank you both. Thank you. Thanks Sam.