In this interview, an accounting practice owner from Bathurst, NSW (Speaker A) discusses how his firm replaced a costly, unstable Power BI‑based reporting solution and other SaaS tools with a custom, automated reporting system built with the help of Isaac and his team. He outlines the motivations—high annual SaaS spend ($24,000), frequent crashes, and reliance on a single specialist—and the vision for a client‑friendly, dynamic one‑page report showing breakeven, debtor days, cash flow, and comparative quarterly data. The project relied heavily on thorough documentation (screenshots, step‑by‑step process maps) and leveraged tools such as Xero, Practice Ignition, Carbon, Claude, and a Replit‑style development environment. The new system reduced SaaS costs to about $90/month, saved roughly eight staff days per year, and freed the team from repetitive, boring tasks, improving morale and recruitment prospects. The interview also touches on automating hire‑purchase (Division 7A) processes, the limitations of off‑the‑shelf software like AccountKit, and the broader excitement about AI‑driven automation in accounting practice.
Chapters
I mean, the cost savings too behind the scenes has been phenomenal with all this. So we were spending $24,000 a year for that other bit of software, as you know. But the time saving in that, because every job has its budgets and all that type of stuff, it was bloody phenomenal. The IASs will probably save us 8 days a year, which is pretty substantial. But it's not everything's about saving time, maybe it's about not letting our team do boring jobs because they don't want to do boring jobs anymore.
And even if you don't want to like join a firm to click buttons.
I could be sitting in Barcelona having a beer and someone's doing my work for me automatically. Yeah, okay, so I was an accountant by trade. I'm in a little town called Bathurst, New South Wales, 3 hours inland from Sydney. Population of about 45,000 people. Always had a little bit of interest in tech. I actually love it. Not very good at it, but I love it. And I've been a shareholder of multiple other businesses over my 30 years of doing accounting work. So from owning spare parts shops to kitchen businesses to car washes and all sorts of different things. So, but accounting's what I love. I love the tech space. Love Automation Town. And then obviously I've been watching lots of videos in automation town and I've sort of been playing around with it. It's very easy to get confused when you're busy doing accounting work. And I said, I know what I need at the moment, which is a new reporting system. We were using another one. I won't mention names, but it was backed on— based on Power BI.
Yeah.
And you've got to have someone really good in the team to be able to build the Power BI type stuff and maintain it. And it kept crashing a little bit and then Xero would change Some of the fields behind the scenes. And for Jacinta, who was maintaining all this, it was just a nightmare. Then she went on maternity leave. We had to find someone separate that we had to pay each month to maintain it for us. I said, bugger this, we're going to build our own. I wanted to take control of what I wanted from my reporting perspective because I'd honed it over a number of years. And the last bit of software we used just kept crashing a fair bit. And the maintenance, the cost benefit of maintaining it was just killing us. And with the way technology's moving, I just thought there was an opportunity control our own destiny and put our own flavor on it. So, so I wanted to build a system where business owners understood it, if that makes sense. So that was a problem I wanted to solve. I wanted to make my system easy for clients to understand and not use off-the-shelf stuff that looked really pretty, but the client didn't have a clue. We have a big picture report. We have breakeven points on it, you know, what our debtor days are, what our cash flow is, just all in one page so people could understand where their business is at. I think along my journey what I've seen, and I've been watching some of your stuff, a lot of your stuff, Chad, is I thought Claude was the area where I could play around with it, but I wanted some software like a Replit or something where I would build it, and I didn't know which way to pivot in that space. And then I reached out to you, Isaac, and gave you my dream. Now I actually like what you presented, Isaac, inside of Automation Town, and because Chad speaks highly of you, that gave you a lot of credibility because I really respect Chad. Sorry, Chad. Look, I think you're a bloody top bloke and you've earned my respect and you're more— you're a giver, not a taker. And I think that's a really important thing. I didn't look at anyone, any other organisation to help me with this. I just come straight to you guys. And as you know, our reporting system— well, I've got the first meeting today at 4 o'clock actually using it. So I'm a little bit excited by that. If I go back to our reporting system, Chad, That was a really big project for us, and we just did not have the time to do it. So that's where Isaac was fantastic, and we set a deadline to get it up and running by August because we wanted to get move away from Power BI, and it worked unreal. And I gave him my vision, and I think we documented that pretty well of what I wanted. A really big point in all this, Isaac, was our reporting was not static. We could change things on the fly because we could look at this quarter versus the same quarter last year versus the rolling four quarters monthly just by clicking a button. We could change it instantaneously in our system. And our clients have always loved that. I mean, the cost savings too behind the scenes has been phenomenal with all this. So we were spending $24,000 a year for that other bit of software, as you know. And I think at Repla at the moment, I'm spending $90 a month, but that wasn't probably the key driver behind it. I mean, obviously it's a nice bonus, but it's just having a little bit of control of your destiny. And then once I saw what you were doing, then I started doing a high purchase System for loans and stuff like that. And then in Australia, we have a thing for called Division 7A when people take money out of companies as loans and all that. And we were using some software, which I don't mind you mentioning, was called AccountKit. I've just got thinking we can build this ourselves. We don't need this software anymore. And then when I got to AccountKit, it has 100 features. We use 2 or 3. That's all we needed it for. It's almost like in some ways it's a competitor to Carbon. We use Carbon. So I didn't need all the features. And when it comes to building the HP, I just typed in what I I wanted and then just keep typing more and more in, and all of a sudden I had a product. It was pretty cool. I was just sitting on the lounge having a bit of fun. I've got a bit of inspiration from Automation Town, what you guys are up to. I'm going, bugger that, I'm an old guy. These other old guys are doing this. I'm having a crack. And so I did. Depends on the complexity of the project. So the hire purchase one for me wasn't a big one. Now I'm stuck on a little bit because I haven't had the time to devote to it. I mean, I'm still trying to run the accounting practice. You know, a couple hundred clients, you can't do it all yourself. I think it was the documentation we did beforehand. So we had screenshots of everything that I wanted, so we had it all documented, so we didn't come in blind. And I think that was part of the process. Isaac's doing that one for the IAS, so we took it out of Scribe. There's 52 steps of what we have to do to make this process automated, so that made the process a whole lot easier. Christina, who works for Isaac, went through it step by step and then come back to me yesterday, in actual fact, and went through what we can automate and what we can't automate because of Xero.
Yeah.
So I think it's all in the documentation is what made it work successfully, Chad. We do monthly retainers for our clients. We use Practice Ignition, and then we'd set the jobs up ourselves manually into Carbon. And we did an absolute terrible job the previous year, or the team did. So this year, that was the first job that Isaac did. I said, Isaac, I want PI to set the jobs up in Carbon when the client signs off. But the time saving in that, because every job has its budgets and all that type of stuff, it was bloody phenomenal. Very hard to quantify the— well, forget about the practice condition. That just saved us a bucketload of time. So the reporting system doesn't really save us time. It just makes us do our job properly. The IASs will probably save us 8 days a year, which is pretty substantial. But it's not everything's about saving time, maybe it's about not letting our team do boring jobs because they don't want to do boring jobs anymore. You know, we've got to make the environment a pretty happy place to work with because friends with a lot of accounting firms, getting people to work in accounting firms is near impossible now. So, you know, we've got to have that little bit of point of difference and make the work a little bit more exciting. One of my friend's firms, they've got 70 on staff, they've been chasing a manager for 8 months, had no one apply. I think that's a really big part of it these days. 'Cause no one's going to university doing accounting.
They're not going to university. And even if they go, they don't wanna like join a firm to click buttons.
This is why all this AI sort of stuff excites me, you know. I love playing around with Claude. I normalize some data and I chuck it in there and ask questions to analyze it and stuff like that. I mean, it's just bloody— that's the geek in me. That's good fun. You couldn't do that 2 years ago. Not really, because actually now we're in the middle of the start of that process on that IAS type stuff. They're real excited about not having to do certain jobs in carbon. I definitely recommend the part of automating your practice, and then you get good ideas off other people and go, oh, maybe I should do it that way, it's heaps quicker. And then you just change it, but you've got to start somewhere. I just think this stuff's evolving. Like, I'd like to be sitting here in 3 years' time, imagine what we're talking about.
I can't imagine, moving so quickly.
I could be sitting in Barcelona having a beer and someone's doing my work for me automatically.
