2025 Roundup: Top 10 Noteworthy Accounting Firm Tech Releases

format. We'll take it from there. All right, welcome, welcome everybody. Thanks for everyone who's joining in. It looks like we have 8 people in the room. Uh, for those of you that don't know me, my name is Isaac. I am the founder of Opta.co, an automation agency that helps accounting firms run more efficiently. And we have with us a cloud accounting pioneer that's been running a remote accounting firm before it was cool, and that runs probably the only automation community that is specifically for accountants, automation.io. Uh, thanks for joining me, Chad.

This is fun. We did this last year and we kind of, we kind of winged it a little bit, but what did we do? We picked 5 each, but the most important thing was that we didn't know what each other was picking.

That's exactly right. So that's kind of the format for the people here. We have 10 picks, 5 each. I don't know what chat has picked. There might be some overlap, and we'll effectively alternate if we want to do it the same way we did chat, right? Like you say one, I say one, up until we exhaust all 10 top picks. A disclaimer, we were just chatting about this. This year it was hard to pick a specific app. So many cases we have more like categories, so like an app type of a feature set. As opposed to one particular app. So just worth noting for those of you that don't—

You make it seem like we colluded, but we did not. There was literally 5 seconds before you pressed go. You're like, I actually have a lot. I'm like, I just have categories. And then you're like, okay, good. I think this might work then.

Yeah. Excellent. Perfect. Well, with that disclaimer out of the way, I know we have, you know, we'll appreciate the time because we want to go through all of them. Why don't you kick us off with yours? Your first one, Chad.

No, no, no, no, no. Host always goes first. This is you.

This is— come on.

You put so much effort into this with the— with putting in what, 5% effort on the AI images? I mean, you almost deserve to go first at how bad they were. So this is your punishment.

Come on. My marketing lady will be offended. But sorry, that's fine. I know, I know, she knows, she knows you're kidding. All right, so okay, not surprisingly, many of my categories this year are AI related. That's not a surprise. Um, but the first one I have is actually AI vibe coding tools. So let me create a quick banner here because I didn't do that, but we'll do that in one second. There you go. AI bad coding. Effectively, this idea that now we have the power to create an app just through prompts. Super powerful idea. I think that people are still catching up to what that actually means and what that represents. But some examples I've already seen some accounting firms put in place, right? You see Hector Garcia creating like a PDF statement converter or Mike Lieber creating like a capital tax calculator for their Canadian clients. We have a client as well, Matthew Patrick at Patton Accounting, that effectively created like a meeting intelligence application where all the meetings come from effectively his entire firm and he gets to see the sentiment, if it was positive, neutral, or negative, to get a sense of effectively, you know, how are conversations across internally and both with clients going. essentially. Uh, some tools in this category, because I know some people are probably going to ask, Lovable, it's a big one, Replit, and Sight. And those are apps that have grown incredibly, incredibly quickly this year. Just for context, Lovable went from like $0 to $100 million in annual recurring revenue, I think in like 8 months. So it's an app that grew quicker than even ChatGPT itself. which is, I think, something worth mentioning. We're still seeing like low demand for it to some extent, but I think that comes out of education to tell the industry and firm owners what the heck we could even build in the first place because it's such a broad category that you can effectively build anything with. So, Chad, curious to hear if that was one of yours. And if I took that on from you, or how you build out that particular category of—

Yeah, it's hard not to include that in the list. But it's funny because you're gonna have the super nerds and the developers and the very, very risk-averse technical people say, that's a dumb idea. You should not be vibe coding anything. And you're gonna be abusing the code. You're gonna be abusing APIs. You're gonna be abusing the technical elements of it. And it will never be good enough.

And I—

and they're right. Just like, you know, if you start training in the gym, there's always a trainer that's smarter and knows more things than if you're just starting out on your own. But I think people are going to see the light when it affects their day-to-day. And that's what we're seeing in our firm. Uh, one of our, our controller and, and manager, his name's Brian, he built a really cool tool to work on audits where he has to rename things. And auditors are sticklers for file names, apparently. And when it comes to large requests, like, he built a tool that saves him a bunch of time.

Wow.

But most importantly, it's a tool that is acting as a gateway to solving more problems. And with the introduction of better models over the last couple months, Like, this is, this is single-shot working very, very quickly, and it's usable at the first prompt. Sometimes it's incredibly good. So I had that as a category too, and I built something myself in Lovable over the last 2 weeks that's completely changed the way that I show up to work every day. And I'm glad you talked about it first because, yes, there's going to be— issues, there's going to be concerns. And I don't advocate for people to start building connections into things without understanding the consequences and having guardrails, because you could delete everything. You could overwrite things. If you don't know the difference between upsert and up and up and post or something, you could just completely, like, wipe out years worth of work. So With some guardrails, with some caution, with some education, like this stuff is going to be changing the way that people solve small problems and then eventually get to bigger ones. So I'm glad you said that because I've been really happy with it over the last couple months.

Yeah. Perfect. Good to hear, man. And actually, you mentioned that auditor creating a tool for himself. We're building like a tax form reviewer UI in like a tool. for someone to review a tax form that someone else put together, easy links to their, you know, source documents. So I think that more and more people will start to think about, you know, what can we build to solve our problems? And whether, you know, when, especially when there's not something that exists in the market that's filling that need, it's kind of like something, like at least a good starting point for people to—

Just the stuff that you keep track of in spreadsheets right now, it probably can be connected into a tool. It probably can be, with users, and you can probably create easy authentication for your users and security that way. And you can probably have things in a web app that shouldn't— that like should not be in a spreadsheet because it takes too much time to update the spreadsheet. Anyway, um, talk about that for an hour, but let's move on to number 2. We are 1 minute over, so can't do that.

Okay, I'm gonna—

I'm gonna pick one that is, it's Canadian specific. So Americans hopefully don't drop off after, after you see this section. But it's, it's for the Canadians and it's, it's the state of neobanks in Canada growing up to a point where they are viable alternatives operationally to be in your tech stack now. So in Canada, for reference, like 5 major banks, 34 banks in total for the whole country. Like, I saw a post from a guy on LinkedIn. He's like, yeah, there's more banks in Idaho than there is in all of Canada.

Wow.

And we're like, okay, there's a problem here. And the problem is that we have not— we've not seen very much innovation. But 2025 marked the year where we got connections into Xero and QuickBooks from all the major neobank players, right? You've got the Vens, the Floats, the Loops, the Keeps, things like that. And you've got bank accounts in multi-currencies. You've got really good receipt capture that was relatively quickly rolled out, which is kind of making you rethink the whole, like, do you need Dex kind of stuff, kind of conversations. And It also allowed us to have like a new process for employee reimbursements. Like Americans have this with Mercury and Relay and Ramp and Brex and all that kind of stuff. And they've seen the innovation. But we just, we haven't been able to get there in Canada for a while. But 2025 was the year.

Yeah. Curious question. Do none of those big players in the US that you mentioned, Ramp, Mercury, etc., they don't play at all in the Canadian market? At the moment?

It's a— it's an interesting question. Let's just say, um, I don't— I forget what I've signed and not signed. So let's just say, uh, 2026 will see American versions in Canada more predominantly, but I don't want to name any names. And there's going to be issues with sales tax because it's a completely different type of refundable regime we have here versus the US. Um, we're going to see Canadian dollar issues, um, where there might be issues with some multi-currency domiciled stuff. Like, we don't know. So let's just say it's not here. It's not here yet. And it's taken a long time, uh, even for long players like Bill.com or whatever to even operate here. So— Yeah, it's cool. And there are people that use US stuff in Canada and they make it work. But 2026 will be the year when we see more US entrants, but that'll just fuel the Canadian ones to move faster. Yeah.

Cool. Well, that's— there you go for Canadian peeps in the room. I'm seeing more and more actually. Jonathan here, another Canadian firm. At least they're in Canada at the moment. I think he's originally from the US. But cool, neobanks, that's an interesting one. I'll talk about my next one, and this is one that's been around for a long time, but most recently we started to see niche versions of it, which is note-takers. Uh, this is like the year of note-takers for accounting firms, at least the year like many, a couple of them have popped up where the concept is the same of like we're gonna capture the the details of the meetings, and we're going to publish them to a repository where you can ask questions, and we're going to potentially bring context from other tools to help you effectively capture those meetings and then act on them accordingly. There's interesting vendors in the space that are, I guess, have different differentiators. Some of them are like pricing per usage, and others are kind of maybe combining that concept of meeting note-taker summaries with email, but I think the important thing is that there's some option now coming to specifically accounting firms. Some names— why this keeps hiding for no reason— some names in the space that probably you've heard of, Chad, and probably some people in the community: Vynyl, Ping, Abacore. Those are ones that have come up recently that are specific for accounting firms, and I'm sure there are others that I'm not aware of. Talking about though, like, I'm still wrapping my head around if I would recommend that over a more traditional note-taker like a Fireflies or a Fathom. I think for us integration is key. to what we do, so maybe we're a little bit biased. At least right now, we're still recommending more of the Fireflies, Fathom, Otter, more like established generic players in that particular space. But we're paying attention to understand whether that particular niche space develops further and gets to a point where we really be kind of the best solution for most firms. Question for you, Chad. Are you using one of those? Have you tested one of those? Are you still kinda sticking with the generic ones?

I'm personally sticking with, with my Krisp. I've had it for 2 and a half, almost 3 years, and it's every meeting I've ever done, and it just works really well with the automations I've set up. I think it brings up a good point, which is The technology of a meeting taker, meeting note-taker, is going to be prevalent. It's going to be in most applications. It's going to be the thing that is just another part of a computer and an application that you use. So that's why you see it showing up in places like Notion and even ChatGPT Record. It only works on Macs, but as soon as it turns into a PC version, and then you have— all of your stuff being able to go there. And then in the Teams version, it all puts them together or something. Like, you're gonna have this paradox of choice where how do you organize your team's meeting note-takers in an effective way? And that's why I'm rooting for the accounting-specific ones. Like, they're all good people.

Yeah.

And they're all building really great tools. But you just, it makes me wonder, like, This technology, when it becomes so ingrained in, I don't know, your Mac or your PC or just like whatever, and it's just there and like there's no cost and you get the team and you— and the things that make the accounting one special right now, which is, you know, the accounting-specific approach, like that'll be good for a few years for sure. But really the value for me is in the raw TXT file. Like the raw MP3 file, the raw whatever it is. Because as technology gets bigger and better, the ability to use that data from one place to the other is transferable and it'll be quick to update a brain, right? So I love the fact that the accounting one specific are doing custom prompting and private meetings and public meetings and team meetings and integrations into our tools like Carbon and Financial Sense and all those ones.

Bring in email as well.

And email. And like, Ping's doing a good job on that one too. It's like, okay, they're going to solve a lot of problems for a lot of firms in this interim. But I would implore people that are using those tools to make sure that you do have access to the raw text files, that you're able to download them and just nudge them a little bit. Just nudge them a little bit to say, hey, I would love some automation opportunities here because as much as I love what you're building, I have this one use case where I need to take that thing and then do this thing that I don't know if you're going to build yet. So why don't you just give me the opportunity? And I wanted to share my screen just for one moment to show you this matrix. Go for it. And this matrix right here is Something you kind of share inside of Automation Town a lot. Um, it's the current sort of state. You can see that okay, right?

Yep. Yeah. Yeah.

So Jason has this like, uh, prompt library thing, and I created this tab inside of it where all of the major ones, and then you have VinylPing and Abacore at the bottom, which like they don't have them that I know of.

Right?

Like, they could— I've talked to them and they're like, yeah, we have webhooks planned. Yeah, we have the API plan. Yeah, we have Zapier planned. I just don't know if they're there yet. So if anybody from those apps is here, comment on the video if you can, just let us know. But that's why probably people love the idea of Fireflies. And like, even with my Crisp one, I get it all through Zapier and through Zoom. You could grab things from Zoom and run them through other places. So That is— let me see if I can stop that one. It's just a good— it's a good reminder that there's different ways to start automations with meeting transcripts. But unless you are using them and storing them and having them in an accessible way, I mean, it's, it's, it's rough. So just, just start using it. It's the only advice. Just start using them.

Yeah, start using them. And again, I think at least what we're trying to avoid for clients is more silos, right? They come into us with drowning in apps sometimes, and sometimes recommending an app that will almost like be its own little island can be a little challenging for us. But I'm sure they'll come up with it eventually. I'm rooting for them, and we'll see how that, how that industry develops. All right, you're next, Chad.

Oh, uh, okay, let's do, let's do a little bit of a techie one on— okay. So something's happening right now. And we'll label this one spreadsheet add-ins. And it's pretty new.

Oh, cool.

Even though the concept has been around for a while, and the ability to use AI inside of a spreadsheet and using it outside of a spreadsheet is like nothing new. The idea that like there's a, there's a system called Claude for Excel, and this was released recently, and there's good and bad, but the general premise is that you now have a complete version of Claude or OpenAI or Copilot or Gemini like right inside of your Excel or your Google Sheets. to build stuff for you. And I did something this morning as I was testing Claude for Excel for another project. And the worst thing about it is that you run out of credits. Now I'm on the $100 a month Claude plan, and it was only able to do 2 things for me inside of 10 minutes. And then I ran outta credits until like 5 hours later.

Wow.

So, If it was important to me, like, I would have no, no qualms paying $300 a month for it if it meant that I had 20 times the credits. So here's what I did. I went to Xero and I exported all of the firm tech spend in our multiple accounts.

One tab.

I installed Claude for Excel and I essentially said, look, This is all the tech spend over the last 12 months. I need a really beautiful analysis with insights. I need it grouped. And I know that there's some issues with currencies here. I need everything normalized to Canadian. I need tax broken out. I need, you know, all of the things that you think would be important to someone looking at overall spend. Display it in a nice way. and go to town. It went and worked for 12 minutes or so. It came back and I was watching it work.

Holy shit. It literally manipulates the light source.

It's literally manipulating as you do it. It's the most gorgeous thing. And it came back. I wish I could share it, but it's all private information. I should have done it. But it's like it came back with colors and formats and insights, and it grouped smaller things that weren't noteworthy, and it put it off to the side, and it categorized the spend based off of the AI topics of spend. It broke out AI spend because it was different than the other spend. And I'm thinking like, man, this is a whole day. This is a project for somebody to go do, and this did it in 12 minutes. Imagine what your teams can do with access to tools like this. And because the models have gotten so good since middle of October, this is now possible. And the capabilities in Claude for spreadsheet use are just so good. Like, between them and OpenAI—

Just for the audience, just for the audience, because I suspect the audience might have this question. Is this something that just Claude has a version, or are there like ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini versions of what you're discussing?

So you can do this inside of agent mode inside of ChatGPT.

Okay.

But from an add-in, I actually don't know. I thought I— ChatGPT.

Looks like you've relied on the Claude one specifically.

Yeah, like, I don't— there is small little add-ons that you can do that in, like, GPT inside of Sheets. It's all like little apps. Yeah, I wouldn't say that it's as prevalent as the Claude for Excel one. But a lot of people that do the Excel stuff will do it inside of an agent mode. But anyway, watching it do this, um, and, and no, Luke, it doesn't work in Google Sheets just yet. Uh, you asked that question. Um, I wish it did. So just to give you like, we're a Mac firm and I had to like dust off Excel for Mac. And, uh, and like it worked inside of that. And then I asked it a follow-up question. And then it ran out of credits, but it like, you could keep going if you needed this stuff. And it's built for scenario planning and budgeting and all that kind of stuff. So we're going to have this intersection of Excel skills and accounting skills being augmented with this little assistant, like Clippy superpowers, like just like an enhanced Clippy on cocaine or whatever it is. Like, he's going to be incredibly good. So that's what I'm excited about on spreadsheets.

Yeah, excellent. Perfect. I like that. I wonder if there might be some at least similar options within the Google Sheets environment, like in the marketplace maybe.

Yeah, there is. There's a product called Aleph, A-L-E-P-H. And it's really good, really expensive. And there's a whole bunch of like YC or Y Combinator companies that are coming up that are doing spreadsheet Work for like the McKinseys and the private equity groups to kind of help augment and replace a lot of the labor there. So you are going to see a lot of these tools that are really expensive, but just like note-takers, like you're going to have frontier models and you're going to have specialists and there's going to be room for both.

Yeah. Yeah. Question for you, Chad. I'm curious how you feel about this. It feels like, I don't know, maybe 5 years ago, there's a lot of apps coming out trying to replace The spreadsheet, and, you know, it's been the king for the last 40 years. It does seem like they've given up and say, hey, let's join forces here and build on top of it instead.

I don't know, you're going to keep seeing people— what's the latest one? Shortcut is another new one for the world of Excel and Google Sheets replacements.

What—

there's a lot of noise, and there's a lot of great tools. And it's like, where do you, where do you put your effort is probably one of the biggest questions that any company and person has. It's not going to be long before these things just become part of Excel and Google Sheets. So again, I think firms, if we're talking just accounting firms, we have a lot bigger fish to fry than the latest Excel killer. Just talk to your clients. Price better. Do better marketing. Yeah.

Yeah. Definitely high leverage things for sure. All right, up next, and this is one for our tax firms in the room, the idea of AI-assisted tax preparation, right? And this whole concept that you'll be able to drop the documents and that's going to get the values you want, enter it into the return, build the work papers for you, potentially review as well. A couple of apps have come up in that particular category of helping firms streamline like the core work of their tax prep. Some worth mentions there that I'm seeing in the space are Juno and TaxFlow. These are, you know, we're still trying to see how that fits into the rest of their stack because it feels like every new app category in the tax space just stacks on top of the existing tools that already exist, right? You have the tax software, then you have the workflow, then you have the organizer. So we try to understand where that fits exactly. They're probably long-term wanting to, you know, touch on several of those areas. Um, to some extent, to me, I feel like they're a little bit of a GPT wrapper to some extent. So I'm not sure how much value I see in them, especially for firms that have a lot of returns, like thousands of returns, which we have some clients there. So it's still something we're evaluating whether it makes sense to recommend or if there's a billed version that would be more cost-effective over the long term. But it's definitely a developing category to help firms streamline a lot of their tax prep and integrate with the tax software and effectively do all of the data entry that needs to occur to prepare a return.

Yeah, it's huge. I wish we could have more of that in Canada, to be honest. Um, we can't do this topic without mentioning, uh, Filed. That's getting a lot of attention right now for that kind of stuff. Over in the UK, you've got things like, uh, Memo that was just released a couple days ago, a company called marble.ai kind of came out of stealth. And this is kind of cool. Like, I never want to write off a category too early, because I'm actually pretty excited for this. It's, it's people that are like working with accountants to figure out a better way to do accounting.

And Yeah.

of course, like, we want to protect ourselves. And we want to feel good about, you know, oh, no one can come in and help us. But like, the reality is, they can help us. And there is going to be improvements. But it's going to be a bumpy road. Like, no one gets it right off the start. There's so many differences between firms that one of the biggest hindrances is that our own version of what we think a month-end or a flow should look like is going to stop us from even entertaining a conversation about a different way. And I think that's what a lot of these tools are going to introduce, right? They're going to ease in by saying, we'll work with your stack. But eventually, there will be a better way to work when there's trust and there's results, right? So we haven't picked one yet because of the Canada thing and because of the newness of all this.

Yeah.

But I'm excited. I keep up on every new release that comes out, and it's really hard to see in detail, but they're all doing I won't say the same thing, but they're trying to get to the same goal, which is like, if you're doing something manually that a computer should do, they're trying to take that away from you to do that work.

And I mean, here's the thing, here's like a, a, like a fundamental technology that I think AI has enabled that wasn't as available or wasn't as reliable before. It's vision, which is often highly needed for some of these processes. where I feel like OCR was a thing of like you're trying to get the information from a document, but it had to be much more clearly labeled and much more cleanly written. And now with a good prompt, literally you can just drop the file and tell it, hey, just look for the line 14 in the schedule and compare with this other thing. And it doesn't take as much development as it used to, to try to like extract those values. And it does it so much more reliably.

Every day these new models that are coming out are so much better at vision than all the old— like, you could have 10 years of OCR history and I don't know, like, these new models can probably beat it, right? I know it's weird to say. We don't know all the technical things. But man, the speed at which they can do this is awesome.

Yeah.

And Sean writes black ore has really— yeah, me too. Um, they're, they're definitely popping up a lot.

Yeah, excellent. So, Jack, you're next.

I was gonna say, and we can't forget like the big, like Levi and, and, and Awin. Like they're, they're going upstream and like putting everything all in this all-in-one and using AI all throughout their tools too. It's like there's just different ways at approaching this and Are they releasing any tax prep-related things? I think it might be as part of their stuff. But I shouldn't speak out of turn. Okay. Levi Morehouse, if you're watching, you can comment. What do we got? Next up is— let's talk ledgers. Ledgers and crutches. That's what you can name this one. Ledgers and crutches. The ledgers, in terms of alternatives to—

Want to talk about QuickBooks?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we've got QuickBooks and Xero in our market. Some people are using Wave and FreshBooks, and overseas they've got other ones and MYOBs and all those things, right? But Xero and QuickBooks are the 2 big ones for most people. And you've got, of course, the middle of the market, which enjoys Intacct and NetSuite and all kinds of fun stuff. But you're seeing new ledgers pop up. up. And 2025 was the year of like, okay, we've got something, or we're ready to have people test stuff, or okay, we've raised $100 million, let's, let's go nuts on this stuff. So you've got Campfires, right? You got Rillettes, you got the soft ledgers, and then you've got Digits, and then you've got, uh, who else did I write down? Sorry. Um, Count on a smaller side. You've got like really small over Australia, New Zealand, you've got Prosaic. And with, with everybody saying, I'm kind of— I won't say angry, but I'm like, I'm a little angry at the big players for one reason or another. Accountants have a choice sometimes. And when the choices are getting really good, it feels like another disruption cycle, just like the early 2010s with Xero and QBO kind of going at it. And what excites me is that, like, our customers really don't care what ledger they're on, unless there's an integration to their operations that is so integral that it, like, would stop them from invoicing or something, or job costing or whatever. So if you can get to that same result in a more enjoyable way, like, why wouldn't you do that? And it will be a rough road while people transition, and you will see people start moving, and it'll either take off or it'll just kind of stay in the middle for a while. And no one knows what it's going to actually do. But I'm excited because I really want to, in 2026, release Like, a new ledger for our customers. And I want to make sure it's well tested. And I want to make sure it's going to work. But I'm excited to see what this alternative to Xero and QuickBooks looks like, where they grew up in this era of tech, and not in the last one. Yeah.

Question for you. I think the last time you were considering Campfire as that third player. that your firm might support. Is that still the top candidate, or is there anyone particular?

No, I think, I think they're all, I think they're all on the table now because Campfire has done a lot since I last looked at it. Softledger is kind of coming out more. The problem is the Canada thing, right? Because we need to make sure that things work well for input, input tax credits and provinces and addresses and contact records and things. So as long as these ones do— oh, and Everest. Everest is another really good tool. Have you seen that one yet?

I have not.

Everest-systems.com. So it's like, the website is ERP reinvented for the AI era. They feel like the real deal too. So like they've entered in— here, I'll just throw the thing in the chat. Yeah.

Everest question.

Yeah.

Which of these new ledgers coming up, do you feel like most of them, all of those that you've mentioned, are really trying to target mid-market and up? Or are any of those kind of small business, kind of direct-to-Quippos competition?

I think like all of them, they're going to raise their prices more. But like Campfire's pricing was really reasonable. It was like under $1,000 when I last looked at it for a couple entities and getting, you know, AI features as well. I don't know the pricing very much for the other ones. But I, I would assume it's a little higher. I could be wrong. I think that's actually a really good, good post to talk about. But the smaller ones, like Count and the other ones, like they won't be priced like that. And Patrick's right. Like, and Patrick, that's the reason why I kind of added this one up front is because you can't open LinkedIn or Twitter right now without seeing everybody upset over Xero's API pricing, right?

Yeah.

Like, it's making it really hard. So I remember I had a conversation with John Glasgow. He's the Campfire guy. And he said, everything that is on the screen is in our API. So if you want to build stuff, just do it. Like, we're not holding it back. Like, with Xero, the bank feed, The financial services API. You can never get it. Yeah.

Things like QuickBooks, they kind of hold back their secret sauce, so to speak. And I feel like that's probably going to be a big part of their demise. These new ledgers are going to come up with, you know, open market, go ahead and do, do your thing.

I want to see the same disruption that Xero gave to QuickBooks from these ledgers to Xero QuickBooks, because hopefully it pushes pressure on them to be more friendly. But because there's just such a stronghold, we probably won't see financial pressure for a while. There might be social pressure, but I don't know if it'll be financial pressure. So my, my hope is that these, these new entrants create pressure from both sides and we just benefit as accountants.

Yeah.

The reason I put crutches there is because we've got Mayday, got Translucent. You've got the things that can, you know, know, pack on the intercompany and the multi-entity work in between Xero and QuickBooks files. Like, it feels like a lot better of a time to exist with multi-entity accounting now than it did 5 years ago. And they're also benefiting from AI and technology getting better. So we're not as stuck as we were 5 years ago.

Yeah, excellent. And it's a big category. It's like the central place for where the accounting happens. So we'll see how that develops. Good stuff. Anything else you want to share there, chat?

I don't think we're allowed to. Like, we're going to run out of time. Yeah.

Okay. I'll go next then. Actually, what I had next is a feature within a ledger type of app, which is like these AI reconciliations. Probably in the last 2 months or 3 months, I've seen a couple of companies launch what is promised to be as simple as drag and drop, where you drag it back, where you drop PDF for the bank statement, and then you just get a green check mark back that suggests, hey, good, this is reconciled. Of course, I think it's still early and mostly untested. Some of those features are beta, but Xero has a feature around that AI reconciliation, and so does Digits, right? So the idea of being able to just drop it there, it will identify discrepancies, tell you what's wrong, and tell you if there's nothing you should be worried about when you just green check mark. I think that's an interesting concept that I don't think is yet fully, fully tested, but it looks like it's in the early stages of of development at the moment. And I wouldn't be surprised if, you know, next year this is actually a thing.

Are you adding it because you, you see benefit now or you see it as a trend?

I see it as a trend primarily, um, just because, you know, those several features came out recently for those 2 platforms, Zero and Digits. Based on early tests and, you know, limited usage from people, I don't, I don't think they're there yet, but looks like that's the direction they're going.

Yeah, yeah. I think, I think to, to say it's all bad is unfair to the people that built it and the beta testers that gave so much of their time. I think it's unfair to say it's amazing because it's so new and it is as untested as, as it is. I'll feel good about it when our team of bookkeepers has said they trust it for our types of customers and for our— and for the types of work that we're selling. I think it's really easy to generically talk about something, but we all have to recognize that we come from different lenses and different perspectives.

Right.

And different types of customers. So to say it's good or bad, I can't do that. But I will say I like that it's there. I hate the sensationalism and the sales pitch.

Yeah. Of course, they're trying to get users to test them, so they have to find a way to get the word out there. But I think what you're getting at— and honestly, this has been a thing for AI since it launched. Sometimes promises more than it can actually deliver on. To your point. But yeah.

Yeah. Okay. It's my turn, right?

Yeah. Go for it. Okay.

Let's do— okay. This is a fun one. Let's talk about proposals. Because proposals are part of every single firm. They are— they're so sticky, because once you pick something and you start using it, it's really hard to switch off. You are— you're kind of like succumbing to price increases, to—

Ugh.

Just major headaches if, um, if you want to switch, but you have other priorities in the firm. So we've got like major players in accounting, right? You've got Ignition, you've got Anchor, Noola, Socket. Um, who am I missing on the accounting side?

Whatever. Those are the ones.

Yeah.

AccountGroove comes to mind as well.

Right, right, right. And then you've got the accountant-adjacent proposal tools, like Better Proposals and PandaDoc.

Oh, yeah.

And like all those types of things, like the API-friendly ones. And Then you've got firms who are building it themselves. They're like, oh, this is just a Word— this is just a doc template that I'm taking all my data from. And like, that's where I'm at. We built our own proposal tool and we've been using it for years, like years and years. I don't even think we've ever used a proposal tool. Oh, Quote Roller. We used Quote Roller before it got sold to—

Never heard of that one.

Yeah, it was like early days, 2013, we used it and What I kind of love about the proposals world right now is like there is pressure. There's pressure for integrations. So Socket over in the UK, like they released a crapload of Zapier triggers, like an insane amount. So where Ignition has like 5 or 3, whatever it is, Socket has like 17 or 25, like anything and everything that could possibly be triggered in a proposal. with activity, you can have a Zap start for it. Anchor has an API. Yeah, that's right. Like, super, very robust because— and let's just not say robust. Let's say you can create a proposal and you can send through the API.

Correct.

Whereas in Ignition with their Zapier stuff, you can't create a proposal from Zapier. Zapier work, right? You know, opportunities and things, but you can't like do the proposal work. So what I love about 2025, it's like it was the year of pressure on proposal tools to pull up their pants, actually build stuff that we need, because I think we're getting into a groove where firms are used to change. And if there's a big enough reason, and when I say big enough, I mean dollar-wise, to use something that reduces manual work, you're going to want to change. And Anchor disrupted it with their $5 per pricing, right? And then you've got the Nulas and things that are integrating it with a lot more than just proposals. And like, the reason why we built our own was because we have our own company database, but we have our sales tracking database, we have our intake database, we have our billing and pricing stuff that goes out to Xero. It's like everything is so integrated that I just didn't want to— like, I couldn't piece it together. It's not that I didn't want to, I couldn't with the tools. So I'd like to see more people using Anchor's API because it is free, it is robust, it is awesome. If you're into the automation stuff, like Socket.IO is doing really cool stuff. I wonder if that's the pressure that's going to be put on Ignition to do more in Zapier or open up an API. Who knows what 2026 will bring, but I think there will be some pressure there.

Yeah. Healthy pressure, indeed, because we've been waiting for it for a long time. And actually, next week I'll be doing a presentation on live coding in a separate community. One of the use cases that came up as I talked to the members of the community, what they're doing and what they're live coding, was the proposal software. So kind of going back to my first category here, there are people building their own proposal software tools as well. I think that's a little bit— it can be tricky for the payment component. You have to make sure you do that right, but especially if they already have a separate platform for the payments like a Stripe or like a Rotessa, which I know you know.

Rotessa. Rotessa is so good.

Yeah, all of a sudden you can just build your own portion of the proposal and just interact with the payment, you know, payment platforms and processing platforms to be their vendors. And now you don't rely on like a platform like that. That we've heard from many people, like they feel it's pricey.

Okay, I have to interrupt for one second. The— we, we forgot the big players, right? Like Carbon. project management systems. Like, right, this is naturally where proposals should lie if you're managing work in those systems. So with Carbon announcing their proposals work like that, that is going to gain a lot of new customers because they want that to be related. They want it to be such integrated stuff, right?

Yeah.

And then you've got like Financial Sense. What's stopping them from, from doing it, right?

Like, Actually, they have it. They have their billing platform where you can build proposals. So does TaxDome. And those have been, you know, in the market for a while enough that, you know, they've, you know, been tested. And a lot of— we've talked to people that use them and like them.

It's kind of funny. I didn't really think that, like, going into this discussion with you, that, like, if we had to make predictions, we, like, we would land on this proposals thing. I never thought about it. But I actually think that the biggest change that a lot of firms may make in 2026 is proposals. It's related to, it's related to sales, it's related to data, it's a better client experience, it saves money if you're already paying. Like, I can, I can see that.

And can make more money if you're presenting your value differently than just, you know, a Word document or an email. So I think there's just so much value to get from, from, from that particular app. Yep.

All right. We're at minute 47.

We'll probably have time for Q&A for the people in the room. My last app, honestly, is the most strange. And I left it for the last one for that reason. It's not new at all. But it's newer to us this year. Let me give you the background. You know, we're big fans of cloud automation tools. right? The Zapier, Makes, and ANs of the world. As we've grown and as we've, you know, interacted with bigger firms that are, you know, sometimes 50, 100 people plus, we've recognized that for some of them in their IT security teams, they frown upon those tools and may not necessarily want a team to come in and use them. It's funny, I hire— we hire a consultant that's It's our main client manager, and he comes from a Big 4 company. And what he said is like, honestly, for the people that are in Microsoft and in bigger organizations, the only option for you to automate something, it's what's within Power— within the Microsoft ecosystem, which happens to be Microsoft Power Automate.

I don't want to listen to this.

I told you it was a weird one, but hear me out. Again, I'm not a Microsoft fan, but I've had to accept that 70% of the market is in Microsoft. And sometimes, actually, we've done several projects on the platform recently. We have an engineer that now specializes on that particular app and I guess I've reduced my guards around like being open to it, and actually it's pretty powerful too. By no means I would suggest it competes— technically does— with Zapier, Make, tools like that. They support so many more cloud applications that you'll probably end up using one of those regardless. But when you have desktop use cases which I know they're rare, but they're still a thing, especially in like tax world where you have a bunch of desktop software or you have a lot of like browser things that currently Zapier doesn't really have a good way for you to automate actions on a browser. So I think at least for now, our stance, as strange as this is, because tech release is kind of new to us just because we've started using it this year. For Microsoft firms that already sometimes already have access to the platform because they pay for a particular license, we'll be exploring more and more what we can do with that because it's infrastructure they already have.

Yeah, I shouldn't, I shouldn't, uh, knock it too bad because we kind of educated our team in Gemini before Gemini was really like usable. We did, we did it from a platform perspective, so Right. Totally get it. It's not there yet. And we shouldn't say it is. I think the Microsoft dedicated people will find ways to do it. And like, it must be so hard for you because you see all the other tools that are available. And then you have to force something.

Yeah, I'm like—

You have to do it 10 times harder.

Yeah, actually we call it the Microsoft tax. Literally every project we quote, there's a Microsoft tax that we know is going to take longer, it's going to be more difficult. But again, it's infrastructure the firm already has access to. We have buy-in with the IT people that are not going to want us to add another tool to the mix. And it's been such a, I think, good experience, honestly, for us to start building stuff there. and realizing that actually there's a lot that we can do with it.

Yeah, if you can find the right Copilot. Isn't there like 17 of them or something? Look, yeah, I don't want to, I don't want to hate it because again, we all want Microsoft to win. Like, yeah, 85% of all firms are on it, maybe even 90%. And it's like, yeah, if it works, Imagine, imagine a world where Copilot Studio really works and you have an employee who's done their job a certain way for so long. They've had so many ideas on how to make it work better, but they either haven't been a priority for IT to go fix their small issue, or They just don't have access to anything for support because they're not developers. They just have great ideas. If Copilot Studio and their agents can help that person get rid of some really bad work, right? The stuff that they shouldn't be doing, where they can enjoy their jobs more, do more accurate work. Like, that is going to unlock millions of people's abilities to just enjoy their jobs more. And like, that is a huge, huge, huge unlock. I always wondered like why it's taking Microsoft so long, but again, it's not there yet. It will, and when it does, it'll be awesome. But we have to be careful and like not try to oversell it because it really is a tax today, December 2025. Yeah.

Yeah, it is. But again, the way we like to think about it as well, if we're not going to be working with some cloud tools that already Zapier may— will have so much better support on, but it's going to be things within Excel, it's going to be things within desktop software or some sort of browser app that doesn't have any APIs whatsoever, and the firm is already on Microsoft and they're already paying for it, they sometimes not knowingly, then it's a no-brainer to— for us.

No-brainer.

And actually, something that a lot of people don't realize, but automation tools are so malleable that they really don't compete because you can send data from one to the other. So now you can start to think about, okay, we're gonna do this piece, but now we can send data to Power Automate to complete the other portion that's in the desktop app. So it's, it's much more compatible than you think.

Incomprehensive.

Exactly. Yeah, but more around like, it's not, it's not competing. It's not like saying, oh, we're not going to use Power Automate because we're already using this. Like, because they can integrate with each other and send data from one to another. If you, you know, know what you're doing, you know about webhooks and some of these other more technical concepts, they can get along, so to speak.

Yeah, I'm excited. I really hope 2026 is the year that this takes off. Because if you think about it, the only thing that's really worked well in Google and Gemini has been the things that have been released in the last 3 weeks, right? You've got Anti-Gravity come out, you did— you got Gemini 3 Pro, you've got these things that— Nano Banana.

Right?

Like, even just the accounting-specific use cases for image generation now are exponential. Like, using code to generate cool images, like sending them off, creating them. Like, yeah, like, they don't all have to be funny photos of whatever. They can actually be financial. They can be infographics. They can be slides. They can be whatever. Like, it really changed. So We act like, oh, you know, yeah, it's always been like this. Gemini is so good. Like, no, it's not. It's like 3, 3 weeks old for like the really good stuff. And all it takes is Microsoft to turn something on that they've been working on for a year and it'll be good. So maybe that's what we use for the last 2 is just we— you are happy with Power Automate. I'm hopeful for Power Automate.

Yeah. Again, I'm excited about it. I'm not necessarily saying it's the end-all be-all. But I think it gives us opportunities that we haven't had before.

You know what? Let's be specific. So, on— I learned a little bit from some people that were sharing inside of the Automation Town thing. There's like a 6-part series on Microsoft automations. And this guy Hunter did a great job. But he showed one about agents inside of Excel. But you know how, like, when I talked about it earlier with Claude, like, it was going to the internet and it was using Claude in the browser and I could connect to different things. The version that he walked through was like limited to one Excel file. It couldn't connect out and do any other data. It was very limited. And it's like, that's what we mean by Microsoft tax. It's like a 10% deployment of a tool. Versus what exists.

And I'll tell you this, for us to set up what's called an unattended flow, which means this is something that can just be triggered without someone having to go in and manually click it, we have to build this whole infrastructure. We had to buy a machine, pay $150 a month, set it up in a way. Then all of a sudden the IT team told us, oh, you have to be the owner. We have to drop that, then create another machine. Like, it was a lot of effort to even like have the infrastructure to then build the flow so we can run on the background. So it's not an easy setup that I would expect someone to go in, but at least if they're— if they have individual like use cases that are just for them and they can just download Power Automate on the browser.

Yeah, totally. Okay, enough Microsoft. Um, Jen wrote Google Workspace Agents. Like, I forget the date, but it feels like that was like 48 hours ago when that was released. And like, it looks cool. Like, I don't know if you've seen— have you played— seen it yet, Isaac?

I haven't seen it yet.

No, it's, it's like the version of Microsoft Copilot Studio, just like giving enterprise users the ability to go build and do stuff. And I haven't tested it yet. It's— I've been doing other stuff, but like, I think this is the one that's 48 hours. Jen, if you're still there, if it's the brand, brand new one, let me know. Um, or if you've tested it, if you like it. But yeah, like, this is, this is why we do these, just in case people haven't seen it. Go, go check it out.

Tia asks, do you have a list of apps that you recommend and what they are used for, or any prompts that are useful in ChatGPT and/or Claude? I think you share a resource. I don't know if that's accessible for the audience or Jason has that on his website or whatever. Um, we are actually coming up with a potentially like a database of like, hey, these are the tools we recommend for each category. Yeah. But looks like you, you share something earlier today.

I'll— that's, that's different. Jason did put through a, like a one-pager, and I'll just link it here and give all credit to him. That's, that's Jason's file. And it lists all the tools of like what he recommends and what are leaders and what are contenders. He works really hard on that resource. And it's a really good one. So props to Jason Stats for that one.

Excellent.

All right, chat, are we, are we ending on time?

We are, incredibly. So, um, I know we kind of went through quickly some, some categories. Appreciate you taking the time, of course. Appreciate for everyone that made it. Uh, some interesting things. And hey, I will definitely be down to repeating it next year.

I think this is an annual thing now. This is 2 years in a row. We got this. Thanks everyone.

We'll see you later. Awesome. Have a nice one, guys. Take care.