AccountEdge Product Evangelist Todd Salkovitz

Greetings, folks, and welcome to Small business show, episode 354. A little bit different today in that it's been a while since we've done an interview here, Shannon, hasn't it?

Yeah, well, we listened to folks and they, you know, I don't know why, wanted to hear us talking more about our experiences and things we've learned and topics. And we've done that for quite a while and. But we have a great interview today. Definitely worthwhile discussion about one of my, quote, favorite topics. And we have a great guy, Todd Sokolovitz from Account Edge, that's going to talk about accounting in a unique way. And also, this is not a.

He doesn't come on and shill accountage. I want to get that out of the way because I. Because if I were listening and I heard that, I might be like, maybe I'll listen to the next episode. I'm a little behind anyway, whatever that is. No, no, no, no, no, no. This is like, yes, he. He works for accountage. He's worked there with the software at different companies for 26 years. It' story. But he's also got perhaps more actionable advice in this episode than in maybe the last three episodes that Shannon and I have done together. So, yeah, sure. Like, this is good stuff. Trust us when we say this, we wouldn't have let. We wouldn't be releasing this if it wasn't a quality, like, valuable interview.

And so I think it might be one of the best interviews we've ever done. I know we will be referring back to it for many, many.

Oh, yeah, we're gonna get him back on at some point.

And he also graciously shared a resource with us that's not shared for anybody else. And we've got it in our show notes, a download for you that can be a life changer on the way you look at accounting and how it impacts your small business. So stick around. It's going to be a great show.

I think so. Well, that's what I got. Are you ready to Small business, Shannon?

I'm ready, man. I'm ready for some action.

Well, he's Shannon Gene. I'm Dave Hamilton and this is episode 354 of the Small Business Show. Hey, Dave.

You know, we talk about the importance of accounting all the time, right? Accurate data and. And I mean, it's just a constant.

You have to have it for your business.

Yeah, you do it. And I hate doing.

Whether you like it or not.

Yeah, that's right. And I don't like it. But maybe it's because I'm not that great at it. And I'm always looking for ways to get better and. Or partner with people. You know, I'm always trying to figure out what's the best way to do it. So. We recently talked about accounting. In episode 3 48, we spent time discussing specific brands of accounting software. Of course, I made some ridiculous comment about one of these companies.

I think. I think we both. We both shared that we're going to own that together.

Okay, good. So, of course it was great because they listened to the show and they got up in our grill a little bit to defend their product, which is fantastic. So Todd Sokolovitz has been with this company for over 26 years. That's a long time, man.

Yeah, yeah.

They're now part of Priority Software. And Todd is here to kind of call me out on my comment, talk about Account Edge. I'm really glad he did. Thanks for coming on the Small Business show to talk about Account Edge, Todd.

Thank you for having me. This is going to be fun. I'm looking forward to it.

Yeah, absolutely. It might be the funnest I've ever had with accounting. I'm always complaining about it.

The bar has been set low, let's put it that way.

I will jump over that.

Yeah. So 26 years, man. That's massive to be working on this product. Tell us about that journey, you know, back when it was best wear and what. What roles have you played at the various companies that have taken over this product?

Yeah, that's a great question. And I thought about that a lot because it is a lot of years. I'm not as young as I used to be, but I actually started my own consulting business back in the early. Early 90s because I went to a school named Drexel here in Philadelphia that required me to own a Macintosh, the original fat Mac for you old people. So I got an accounting degree, and I had a Macintosh, and I loved it. And I ended up going into public accounting. I was in private accounting. I actually worked at the spectrum, sold Dr. J and party Oilers. So after that, I got the opportunity to work for a guy who actually was a VAR for this other accounting software. And I realized, man, I can do this better without this guy. So I started researching Mac only accounting software. Came across this one product called myob. They were based in North Jersey. I'm based in Philadelphia, so you can tell from the accent. And I actually got to know them. I would drive up there and have lunch, and I would work in their trade show booths. And I basically became what I became their first certified consultant by going out finding customers, doing seminars at Apple in downtown Philly in South Jersey. And I kind of became Apple's go to accounting person in my little area. And then I went and did another trade show with MYOB in one of the New York CPA shows. There's a bunch of fun. And they offered me a job on the spot. And I was like, nah, you know, you don't want to hire me. I don't, you know, I work for myself. I'm all full of myself. Literally, a year later, same trade show, same hotel in New York, same situation, and I just had a kid. And they said, hey, you know, you should come work for us and actually create this consulting program. And I drove up to their office and the owner of the company took me out to lunch and my job interview. And this is completely true was one question on the way to the restaurant in North Jersey in Denville, New Jersey. He said, why should we hire you? I said, chris, because if you don't, no one's going to take you seriously. And I don't know where that came from. Wow, that's pretty deep.

That's a powerful comment.

That's bull. I like that though.

I still shiver over the fact that often they hired me. So I came on board, I said, look, the only thing is I'm a Philly guy. I root for the Flyers and the Eagles and the Sixers. There's no way I'm moving to New Jersey. It may only be 10 miles away, but it might as well be 100 years away. It's just. And they were like, fine work from home. So I literally been a remote employee all of those years.

Wow, so 26 years you've been a remote employee?

Yeah. Yeah.

That's amazing.

Came on board and I started their consultant program, which is called the MYOB Certified Consultant program. And I knew that there was a lot of like minded people like me that, you know, had business experience, some were accountants or bookkeepers. And you know, so we started a program where they would partner with us and pay a small fee just to make sure they got skin in the game. And then I was basically their conduit for everything except tech support at the company. So they felt like they had a voice and they were being listened to. And you know, hey, when you're dealing with software companies, it's always good to know somebody, have a guy. Yeah, I'm the guy. I'm the guy. For a lot of people that's Great.

That's cool.

You know, so over the years my role has evolved.

Yeah. You know, I mean, I'm always, as we're doing this, I'm sort of like dissecting on the fly and I'm thinking about you working remotely. Them giving you the freedom to work remotely allowed like, it allowed that, that line of thinking to extend to. Well, there's other people like me that are working remotely. Like they don't, we don't have to be in the same place to do this. I know this all seems super obvious today, but 20 years ago this was not obvious to most companies. Right. I mean we started Mac Observer 23 almost 24 years ago. And when, you know, we were remote and we've been remote the whole time, but it was not like people thought we were nuts. Like people didn't take us seriously. And I'm sure you dealt with some of the same stuff and had to figure out how to use technology to make, you know, these days we have Slack and we have Zoom and you know, all these things that didn't, wasn't, that wasn't a thing. You had your phone and Instant messenger, man.

And so I used to, I, the way I would stay connected was I actually drove up to their office every Thursday for going on 25 years.

Got it.

So I would leave my house at 4:30, because if you drive anywhere near New York and Even though it's 35 miles west, it's near New York, driving anywhere in that area was a nightmare during rush hour. So I would leave my house at 4:30, get there at 6, I'm the first one there and I would either leave at 3 o' clock or leave at 6 o'. Clock. So it was a pretty long day, but that was Fridays and then Thursdays for decades for me. And that's what got me connected. I can see people in the office, talk to people, you know, be in meetings, live. So I was connected without actually being there all the time.

No, that makes sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And so we're going to talk a lot about accounting, but I, but I don't want to overshadow this important thing that you know, as you transition to, from one company to another over this, you know, 26 year old or 26 year time frame, it seems to like keeping your role in place. That, that's, that had to be some work and is a real good indicator for success. Right. Because when somebody buys a product or buys a company, you, you always hear like, well, they cut this, they cut that. I mean, was the transition easy for you all the time or what's your secret?

Yeah, it actually was going from one company and a different ownership to the next. It really didn't affect what I'll call the Rockaway crowd. You know, all of us in the North Jersey office, because we kept doing what we were doing. We were developing, we were documenting, we were writing support, you know, doing help files, working with tech support. So all that had to be done, you know, the coding was all done. It's still done in North Jersey on a Mac, by the way.

Nice.

And, you know, so what was going on in the back end didn't really change at all based on what was going on at the levels, quote, unquote above us. And the people who we went from Teleware and Best Software bought us and they're long gone. I think they got bought by Peachtree maybe or Sage. And then we evolved into being owned by our distributor in Australia because we localized the app for the UK and Canada and at the time Australia and New Zealand. And then the Australian company actually ended up buying us and taking us public. And that's when it became known as MYOB, the company as well. And then in around 2005, my, my boss and his partner, another guy at the office, you know, our longtime product manager, basically took the company private. And that's where Clarity came from. Again, same people.

What year was that that you did that?

That was. That was 2005.

Yeah. Okay.

The company ceased to exist. But. But the product is the exact same thing. You go to the about box and it's the same stuff in the about box that's been for 50 years at this point. And then Priority Software came knocking in late 2017, early 2018, because they are an Israeli based ERP provider, a much higher end platform, it competes against the saps and the netsuites of the world. So that's not a natural segue from Account Edge per se, but it made sense because we do have customers who are just busting out of the seams of our app. And one thing I've told my customers, anytime I talk to them, use what's right for you. Don't use it because I'm trying to sell you, because it doesn't do me any good. I want to sleep at night. But use what you have to use to do what you have to do to do the processes you need to have done. Whether that's us or whether it's QuickBooks or whether it's any of these other guys. Use what's right. Don't use something because someone told you to find out if it's the best thing for you. So the folks at Priority were kind of of the same mindset except they were at the other end of the market and I, you know, beautiful twist of karma. A bunch of our customers upgraded to that.

That's great.

Made sense for them.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you got a path for the path for them now. Keep them in house. Right? Yeah.

I have a question.

Migration. So great.

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Yeah, I am a Mac guy. In fact, I mentioned Drexel University. So that was the school that I went to. And they required you to own a Mac. And I'm going to totally date myself. But that started with super bowl ad. That started with the January super bowl ad. In that March. It was the first time I ever touched a Mac. And it was. It was unbelievable. I mean, it was just, you know, it was a piece of junk by today's standards. I mean, I wish I had one still.

Right, yeah, of course.

In fact, little trivia for you. There is actually a thing called the Drexel Mac. And if you could pop it open with one of those crazy tools you had to buy Dave, I'm sure you got one of those.

The long handled Torx T8 screwdriver.

You mean the case cracker. But if you popped open a Drexel Mac, it was signed by Steve Jobs and all his group of people, Kawasaki and Wozniak. So yeah, those are hard to come by and I wish I still had mine. But yeah, so, you know, it kind of all started there. I was a Mac guy. I was always a Mac guy, you know, Coming into the MYOB world, they were Mac people, they wrote Mac accounting software. I had an accounting degree, so it was a natural fit. And the challenge we face is we were always a small company. We're still not a big company. We're small. We are who we sell to. In the end, our code was getting older and older and there was projects through the years to take it online that just never came to fruition. And then ownership would change. Unfortunately, we just never got that over the hump. And then when we made the final push several years ago to get to the 64 bit operating systems that Apple was pushing and making, you know, that was going to be the future.

Yeah, that mandatory future. That's right, yeah, yeah.

And our, and our code was just, it was just so old that it just, we couldn't get over the hump is what it came down to. And it was, frankly, it was a devastating day in our office when they finally made the business decision that, you know, we're just not going to get there and we have to move on because, you know, we have to keep developing what we've got. And you know, it really, you know, even to this day, it kind of bums me out that that happened. But I understand why it happened and how it happened and it just got to the point where we couldn't go forward with it. So we still, we made the commitment to support our, you know, OS 1014 and prior customers as long as we could. We're still doing that. And now it's like two years later, but along the line, about three, four months later, after all this happened, Apple came to us and said, you know, you're not alone in this whole thing. You know, there's a company called Codeweavers and they have a product that actually in essence lets you install. I think it's called Wine, the Wine Environment. It's a public. You guys may know more about it.

Yeah, WINE is a self referential acronym that stands for Wine is not an emulator. I dig into this stuff on one of my other shows. But yeah, no, what Wine does is it allows you to run Windows applications on the Mac without having to run Windows because it's not an emulator, it's just taking the frameworks and running them there.

Yeah, so what that means for our small business customers, there's no Start menu, there's no dealing with Windows, quote unquote.

Right.

And that's what scares Mac folks, dealing with Windows. Once you get into the app, the app's the app. And accounting is accounting. It's not glamorous, but it's functional. We looked at this codeweaver stuff and we realized with their crossover tool, which is kind of what it's publicly known as, we could actually do exactly what you just said, install our Windows version. Lucky for us, we've always had cross platform products. Our Windows product reads and creates the same data file that you could read or create on a Mac. By having a cross platform application, we were able to drop our Windows product into this Wine environment. After a lot of back and forth with the codeweavers folks, this took months and months and months. We finally got a version out of our single user product that enabled our customers to move directly from whatever they had, whatever version they had, onto this new version running on the latest Macs. Fast forward another year or so and even runs on the M1s and all the other chips and the latest OS's. And so yes, you are running the Windows product, but once you get into accountage, the functionality is like 90% the same, so.

Oh, I didn't realize that.

Okay, and so that's, and that's a localized version, it's not a hosted version, right?

That's correct. That's correct.

And I did put my foot in my mouth yet again, Shannon. It's not a long handled T8, it's a long handled T15 to open those old.

Get to get, get it together, man.

I know, I know.

Got to have that stuff going on there.

Yeah.

Got to have those Torx screws, right?

It's been, it's been a while. Yeah.

Yeah. The thing I love about that story, Todd, is, you know, we all face with certain realities of like, okay, well, we can't, can't make it happen. Don't have the resources or whatever. But it's, it's, you know, zigging and zagging and coming up with a way to, to make it work. You know, I've ran, you know, account edge on, through a VPN on an older Mac, you know, forever, as, as, as a solution. So I'm looking forward to trying out this new solution because I'm in deep on account edge and have used it for years.

So. Yeah, and that's what our customers. Exactly, that's exactly what our customers are telling us is, I love you guys. I, I've been with you for, it seems like everybody who I talk to tells me they've been with us 25 years. And I was like, oh, I got you beat by a year. They think I just joined last week. It's like Nah, I kind of been around. I got the lanyards to show it from all the trade shows. Yeah, but you know, one thing we can tell people is, look, you're not going to lose data. You're not going to lose your customers names and addresses or financial reports. All of a sudden when they start to get to the, you know, the practical stuff, like their data, their actual data, they're like, yeah, I don't want to start over, I don't want to re key it in or you know, exp imported. And you know, as easy as that is, between all the apps nowadays, what about all my sales invoices? Like, do I just give up on them? So when people found out that, hey, we can get you from there to here and keep going, they were thrilled by that. They realized, okay, it's Windows, I get it. And I'll be honest, there's some of our Mac die hard customers that still aren't happy about it. But it's like, look, we have a solution. We can take you forward and work with us on this.

Yeah, no, I think that's, I think that's great. You know, looking, doing some research here for the show too. And your background. One of the things that, that struck me as I was, you know, looking at your LinkedIn bio. You mentioned that one of the things you're good at is being the voice of the customer. And I can tell just by the way you talk about, you know, in your comment is like, oh, we're weird. You know, our demogr. Our customers are just like us, you know, small business, all that kind of stuff. Talk about that role though, if you can. It seems to me like every company should have somebody that has that voice of the customer. How do you view that?

Yes, as I moved more into product management because we needed somebody to look out for what we were doing in the roadmaps and all that fancy PM stuff. One thing that we knew we had to do is keep the voice of the customer in our heads. The way that we actually do that is in our product. Under the help menu we have a Send Feedback link. That's the primary way for our customers to kick us in the shin sometimes. And they could always call tech support or drop us an email. But this Send feedback link, we've actually used some technology, actually. Zapier, cool little app that we're building.

Yeah, we love Zapier. Yeah, yeah, they're awesome.

Virginia Zapier link. Not only do we get to, we actually use Wufoo for the form for all of these Send feedback requests, but we created a Zapier to send it into a Slack channel, if you're following.

Nice.

So what's cool about that is if you send me feedback, I get it literally instantaneously. Not only do I get it, my boss gets it, our head of development gets it, our QA people get it. And then we can go into Slack and say, hey, Jim from the home office in Indiana, he wants to be able to update his quotes because his vendor prices keep changing, because the economy's crazy, and he has no way of changing his quotes that are out there. And if he changes the item price, how is he going to change all these hundreds of quotes that he's got? So that happens all the time. In fact, that exact scenario happened last week and we all sat there and said, man, we're dumb. How did we not figure that out? So by the customer saying that and us listening, literally within the last 10 days, we implemented that for a release coming out next week. So now, because of the environment and the economy, customers have a lot of quotes, prices keep changing and stock is impossible to get. Wouldn't it be nice in a little checkbox, say, hey, update my quotes when I change my prices. So that's a super relevant recent example of letting the customers tell us what they want. The flip side of that is, just as an example, over the last, I have a spreadsheet of 14 years worth of these send feedback requests, and there's literally 7,256 of them. So the challenge is you can't do them all. In fact, you're doing very few of them, when you get right down to it. But what we like to do is start off our new releases with a story. Like, what's the story of this year's release going to be, in fact, this year's data sharing and interoperability. So what does that mean? Using things like Zapier. So we integrated with Zapier, integrating with Power Bi. So we're going to integrate with Power Bi. Integrating with. I'm not going to tell you the next one. So I won't let it out of the bag too soon. But our customers are the best source of all this stuff. And oftentimes they come to us not knowing that it's those nuggets of gold that when we go searching for gold, it's awesome to find it.

I want to rewind here and I'll put links into the show notes, but we're always looking for actionable things that our listeners can take and implement in their business. Today. And your idea, it's not just an idea. Your practice of using a Wufoo form that connects to Slack via Zapier, like that is such a powerful thing. It's such a simple thing. It's such a small business, scrappy entrepreneur thing to do. And yet it doesn't. You don't have to be a scrappy entrepreneur to do it, obviously, you know, case in point here, but what a great example. So I just wanted to kind of rewind a bit and highlight that because it's a. It's brilliant. It's awesome. Yeah.

And dare I say, it's free.

Well, that's the thing, right?

Yeah, yeah, but it's, it actually, there's a price you guys are paying, the way you think and taking advantage of the tools that are out there now that were not there before. And like listening to that story about it coming into Slack, first thing I'm like, oh, that's incredible. What a great idea. And then you just followed up with the next thing. I thought, oh my gosh, what a nightmare. How do you deal with all of it? The volume of data, you know. No, that's a great story. And I love your concept of starting a new release with the story. Why it's here. You know, we talk about story all the time and I don't usually hear software companies discussing that, especially like an accounting software. So that's, I commend you for that. Connecting with people that way.

That's great.

All right, I want to talk about.

I like to take credit for that, but my boss is all about the story, so we won't tell him.

He probably won't listen anyway.

So we're going to give you the credit.

All right, so now I want to ask some, some accounting questions. And let's just start off. I make. So I make just a ton of mistakes when I'm doing this stuff and that's why I always try to rely on somebody else. Are there, you know, being the voice of the customer and taking all that input? Are there kind of common mistakes that you see small businesses making when they're managing or trying to manage their accounting?

Yeah, there sure are. I guess the first one, the overarching one, would be expectations. Moving to any new system isn't going to happen overnight. And in some cases, sure, you could start using Microsoft Word and write a document and make it look legit and come up with something good that you can print and looks really good in a day. Not even a day. But with accounting, it's like you're Talking about all kinds of different lists, customers, vendors. Nasty thing called a chart of accounts. Your items, if you sell time, you've got activities. God forbid we talk payroll. So there's so much data that comes together, and people's expectations are, well, if I can't get this going this afternoon, then I can't do accounting. It's like, well, I can't fix a carburetor, but I can certainly drive a car. I mean, I know enough to get in and put the pedal down a little bit. So I guess the first one would be expectations. And if you start going beyond that, it really comes down to what reports do you need. So then you work backwards. Obviously, you need financial statements, and of course, every accounting system is going to give you those and keeping it clean. So some of the other mistakes I've seen are folks never reconciling their checkbook. Just never really. I call it like the Zamboni because I'm a hockey guy. You go to the hockey game in between periods, flyers left, blood on the ice. Somewhere the Zamboni comes around, it all goes away. That's kind of what reconciling your checkbook is. It fixes all your mistakes. It lets you know what you've missed. Because at the end of the day, most of our customers, most small businesses, start off with their bank, you know, their old school bank ledger, their manual, literally, their manual checkbook. And, you know, I tell people, you don't have to know accounting. In fact, we don't even try to teach you accounting. Although we do. You know, but if you could get a handle on your cash and then you work out from there. So people seem to run away from accounting. They're scared of it. They're afraid they cut those classes in college or they were too hungover. But. But, you know, for me, the reality is everyone's doing it. You just don't realize. Even my daughter, she's upstairs, she hates accounting, but she knows she's doing it because she's got to deal with her checking account. It's personal accounting.

Yeah, but it's still accounting. Yeah, but you're right. Like, high school should be teaching this stuff. I realize I'm preaching to the choir here, but, like, it's. It's. We. We are not. We don't. We don't have a system in place to prepare people to. To do this. And it's really not rocket surgery. Right? You just have to take the time and. And it's there.

Well, when I was a young, much younger business owner, I Used to just think, hey, if I could just make more money, I don't have to worry about reconciling. And it just, I just keep more revenue coming in. Oh, what a mistake that was.

And there's, there's truth to that because at that point you would hire a bookkeeper.

Yeah.

And yeah, that might be a good next step. But most small businesses, they're first employee is probably not a bookkeeper.

Yeah, that's right.

Salesperson or a technician or a service guy. So you know, should you hire a bookkeeper?

Yeah, it's a good question.

Yeah.

If you get a point where it's not your first hire.

Yeah.

And do you find that like most accountants customers are basically the small business owner and then they have an accountant and they kind of, you know, do the data dump or share the information. Now I also.

So the ones that I talk to, you know, they cover the whole spectrum. Of course I find that most do have somebody whose sole responsibility is the accounting. Whether that's quote unquote, a full charge bookkeeper, whether that's the spouse at home, or it could be the business owner who goes home and does it at night because that's all they can afford or you know, they don't have that volume of transactions. And that's for me what it really comes down to is how many transactions are you really doing? Some small businesses might sell $1 widgets and sell a million of them. That's a lot of transactions. Or you might sell a million dollar widget and sell three a year. Not a lot of transactions. So it really comes down to making sure you're recording everything. And that's probably the other mistake I see people do is just not knowing what to do with it, therefore just not recording it. And then their reports are just not that they're inaccurate, they're just not complete.

Yeah.

So, you know, there's ways around all.

So okay, yeah, now I have that, that's one of my questions as a person that just. I'm not good at accounting. And one of the most significant issues I face is just as you mentioned, getting all the data into the system. And a lot of times what I find is when things aren't working out, it's because it's kind of this garbage, garbage out problem. Right. And what, what do you recommend for people, you know, that to overcoming that kind of problem, which seems widespread, so they have accurate information in their stock?

Yeah, I kind of started down that path by saying, look at your bank reconciliation. So I'll take another shot at it okay, if you look at your chart of accounts, now we're getting into the heavy duty accounting, right?

Yeah, it's good. Everybody listening has to deal.

I'm getting nervous.

Yeah, you're getting nervous. I didn't mention debits and credits yet. So your chart of accounts, that's when.

We have to start taking shots, man. That's different.

They just can't equal each other. They can't.

So your chart of accounts is just your list of all your categories or accounts and they're broken down. Assets, liabilities, owner's equity. Hey, your balance sheet, your income, your cost of goods sold, and your expenses. Hey, your profit loss. That's really what it comes down to. So what I typically tell people is you should be able to provide backup for every single account in your chart of accounts. So, wow, their head explodes. But when you actually zero in on it or drill into it, your bank reconciliation is the backup for your checking accounts, however many you've got. Your credit card statement is the backup for your credit card accounts. Your sales tax liability reports are the backup for. So as you go through every account, you would actually have backup within your means, whether it's in Excel or in Quicken or on your, you know, on your phone or write in your checking account. You've got all that information. So it's just really, it comes down to putting your finger on all the pieces of it. And then when you can do that, then you know that you're recording it all. And then, you know when you do that, the reports you print will be largely accurate. So the second thing I see people kind of have a conniption over is I don't know what to record it into. Like, what do I post this accounting entry into? So I've always told customers, just. Just create, like, don't not record it. It's better to record it and not know if it's right to not record it at all and have it be completely wrong. So I tell customers, just go in your chart of accounts and create a fake account. Whether you want to make it an asset or an expense, doesn't matter. But name the account, ask the accountant. So when the accountant gets your financial statement, they're going to see this account, this expense account called Ask the Accountant. And basically every transaction that you just don't know what to do with, you'll post into that account. The accountant will see it, he'll untangle it, or she'll untangle it and basically give you journal entries to rerecord to zero out that account. And then as you're doing that process, then you'll know for next time, oh, when I get an insurance reimbursement, I want to debit cash and credit insurance expense or something crazy like that.

Now that's great. So.

Making our heads explode. But it's good. The reason you're making our heads explode is you're explaining this in a way that actually makes sense. And that might be the scariest part of it all.

So it's funny you say that, because I do. And this is going to sound weird, but I do remember being in college, sitting in auditing classes thinking, you know, this guy's a really. Teacher's a really nice guy. He's 175 years old. The book weighs 75 pounds. Cost me a fortune. But nobody does accounting like that because my school, one of the cool things about that school, Drexel, was they had a co op program. So you get to go out into the real world and actually live the life of that person. So I got to work in an accounting firm and they were like, audits, Nobody does audits. What do you. That's Fortune 500 stuff. Nobody in the small business world will ever do an audit unless either they're public or they got some kind of, you know, they got something they got to do officially. So the reality was, is I was taught to do accounting in a way that was never being done. I sat there thinking, what the f are they teaching me here? And that's when tuition was three grand a semester. It was a bargain. So I always thought there was an easier way. And I just. When I found myob, it finally clicked for me. Like, wow, this is a lot easier than what that old guy was trying to teach.

Well, and I think you've embraced that. You know, one of the things you sent me was an accounting 101 guide, if you will.

A PDF, baby.

Yeah, talk about that. You created this thing, and it's actually now part of the installation on the accounting job.

So many, many years ago, after hearing enough customers with the same rap, I'm not an accountant. I don't know how to do accounting. I don't understand it. It's like, dude, this is your business. You can't put it off on somebody else until you can hire somebody. But even then, you're still going to have to know what the hell they're doing and understand it all. So I realized that just the whole accounting thing just blew people's minds. And I'm like, it's really not that complicated. You got Debits on the left, credits to the right. Okay, I had to say debits and credits. There you go. And, you know, so I basically sat down one day and said I could explain this in about an hour to somebody. And I literally wrote it all out in. In pages and not even in pages. I think it was the predecessor to that back word processor. Might have been Teach, text, Mac, right or something. Mack, right? There you go, Mack. Right. And, you know, I basically wrote it out and said, what would I teach somebody who wants nothing to do with this? Like, who will spend limited time, but I also had to give them enough information? So I said, okay, here's what a debit is. All it is is the left. The left of a T account. What's that make a T? The left side's a debit, the right side's a credit. Oh, then what do you do with that? So I kind of went through and deconstructed that because I know everybody knows when they go to the bank and the bank says, we're going to credit you, people think that's debits and credits, but the reality is it's backwards. The bank's not crediting you, they're crediting their books, which means you're being debited. Then your head explodes. So I kind of took some effort.

Yeah, it does. It does.

So I took some time to say, okay, what is a debit? And then what's the impact on that chart of accounts? Your assets, your liabilities, your equity, your sales? What's the impact on those accounts in your general ledger when you do a debit and a credit? So I basically built this little document that not only explained what it was in everyday terms, hey, you bought a new Mac. What would you debit? What would you credit when you write a check? Or are you capitalizing this thing and then depreciation? And then I put a whole bunch of sample entries in and then showed the impact on the T accounts and then showed the financial statement based on the addition and subtraction of all those debits and credits and said, hey, if you're on cash basis, accruals don't matter. Again, we're not going to get into that. But if you're a little bit of a more mature small business, you do want to deal with accruals, meaning receivables and payables and all that kind of stuff. And then here's the impact on that set of financial statements. And if you read through it, it's, I don't know, 15, 20, pages. So we actually started printing it back in the day when we printed our 1200 page reference guide. And we actually had it in the box as a printed booklet called accounting101 because we didn't know what else to call it. And then when we went digital, we ended up actually installing it. So when you install our software under the help menu there's a manuals folder and in there it is accounting 101. And it's been there ever since. And I was telling you guys, I updated it just the other day.

Yeah, yeah.

So it's a great primer. It's a good primer.

And the thing I really appreciate it about it is it's written like for a guy like me, you know, there's some good examples and it's just like a casual discussion of accounting and things you need to be aware of and how this works and how does that work. So we're going to actually link to it in the show notes at BusinessShow Co, which are the only other way you can get a handle on it without buying the product. But I know you want to get countage anyway. So yeah, it's really well done not to be. It is maybe 15, 16 pages or something, or 20 pages, but it's, it's phenomenal. And look at that, it's about 24 pages. Yeah, definitely worth it, man, and very helpful. That's great. You know, thank you so much for coming on the show. Tell me what. So what's next for you guys? What's next for accountant? Are there priorities you're working on? The future that you can share with us?

Yeah, that's a good question. So the immediate future is literally next week we're putting out our 2022 version. I already mentioned, let the cat out of the bag a little bit that we're going to be doing Zapier integration and Microsoft Power BI integration and a bunch of smaller things. We've put new versions out every October, November, December, literally for the last 20, 27, 28 years. And you know, we get on what we call this merry go round. The US version comes out and then the Canadian version, Mac and Window simultaneously. And then we do a UK version and we used to do it Australia, New Zealand version. And they're all localized. They all got payroll for their local countries. They all have sales tax or VAT taxes. So we've been keeping that going. So what's coming is just the next iteration of it with a bunch of small features, a bunch of really big cool integration type features as we get into next year now that we've gotten over this Mac hump and we've got our crossover, our CodeWeavers emulation product working pretty well and we had the multi user version out, which is probably the first time someone's done that using the codeweaver stuff. The air has cleared a little bit. So we're hoping 2022 will really help us take a step back and say okay now what would we do to not only make existing customers more productive, whether that's user interface stuff or enhancements or reporting changes, etc. Or what would we do if we wanted to go say vertical? What if we wanted to create a vertical version of accountage for XYZ markets? That's something that's always interested us. We just never put our fingers on what that vertical is. But under the Priority Software where their ERP platform is this really deluxe, much higher end system, they're super proficient in the manufacturing world. So what's cool about being part of the Priority family is we could kind of steal their ideas. They've certainly looked at our ideas and taken some of them which is kind of cool. But we see how well they do in manufacturing. We're like damn, we do a lot of that stuff. It's really unbelievable what our little app that could, can actually do. So we're really not that far from, you know, verticalizing it if that's what it comes down to. So that's something that interests us a lot and we're not sure which way going to go, but it's something we've been talking about and be really cool to move into that kind of thing.

Yeah, absolutely. That's great. Well Todd, you know, thanks for being a good sport coming on the show. Talk about your product, help educate us, especially people like me. What's the best way for people to learn more about Account Edge and Priority Software?

Probably the best way just go to the website accountedge.com the best place to get some product information. You could certainly go to priority so-software.com and there you'll learn more about the ERP and the larger business solutions we've got. It's really not one or the other. It's really kind of like we're the small business focus and we're the more the medium to big, big business focus with hundreds of users. So kind of covers the entire spectrum of business solutions. But yeah, just go to accountedge.com and you'll see what's up.

Awesome. That's awesome. Yeah, thank you again man. We really appreciate it and thank you, guys. Keep in touch as things go. We'd love to have you come back on time and that'd be fun.

I really appreciate, appreciate your time and thanks for the opportunity here.

You bet. That was awesome.

Oh, man. You know, well, obviously that interview started because he reached out and said, I want to defend my company. You know, you're wrong. And so I was like, how are we going to get even 20 minutes out of this? And. And it wasn't an interview about how great Account Edge is. It was an interview that. It was an informal discussion about accounting from someone who knows how to talk to humans about accounting. That, yeah, what a bonus.

I had no idea. The lessons. The more I researched and kind of looked at it, I was like, wow, there's a lot to unpack here. And just working for one company as your product is acquired over and over and over and over, over 26 years.

Crazy.

There's a skill set in there we should discuss.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.

But it was.

It was great. I love their solution. You know, they ran into this problem, didn't really have the resources to rebuild the app from scratch. And then, you know, with some prompting from Apple for a solution, they came up with this, you know, Codeweaver.

Yeah, the wine thing. Yeah, yeah.

And I'm gonna try it out. I'm gonna give up my older VPN copy and try it out because I got to start. You know, the end of the year is coming up quick. Quick.

It is. I know it's coming up too fast. I've got. I've got some things that I was like, well, I'll just. As long as I get those done before the end of the year, it's going to be fine. And suddenly it's like, wait a minute. This is like, I have like three weeks of actual valuable time where I can get my accountants attention and things like that. So, yeah, and.

And I. And then the accounting 101 PDF download. Highly recommend all of our listeners. Go get it. Go up to the show notes businessshow.co. if you search for accountage. If you're listening to this sometime in the future, you'll find that episode and download that. It's really a terrific guide that can help you understand what's going on.

Very cool. Very cool. I'm so glad we got Todd on board, folks. Thanks for listening. If you have any questions about any of this or thoughts about anything else, really. Feedbackusinessshow.co. of course, check out our sponsors, shopify.com SBS and bambi.com/small. Thanks so much for listening and keep living that charmed life. See you next week.