AI and ML with Rob Hamilton

Welcome to Accountants Law Pod, where accounting professionals and law firms converge, hosted by Lynda Artesani, Sarah Prevost, and Stephen Libhart.

Welcome back to the podcast, everyone, and this week we have—

Welcome to Accountants Law Pod, where accounting professionals and law firms converge, hosted by Lynda Artesani, Sarah Prevost, and Stephen Libhart.

Welcome back to the podcast, everyone. And this week we have a special guest, and his name is Rob Hamilton, and he is— you're a part of Digits, right? So you can give us the intro. But Digits, I have to say, is one of our more exciting software, mostly because it's— it is the most gorgeous software out there. I have to say, the interface is just stunning. But I'm gonna toss it to you, Rob, so you can tell—

I'll send that over to our design team so they can make—

Yes.

Oh, it is just beautiful. Every time it's It's got a wow factor too, because it's not your vanilla. You open it up in front of the client and they're like, yeah, because usually you get the old, I don't want to look at software anymore, another piece of software. And then they go, oh, and can I do this? I can do that. So yeah, so I'm going to toss it to you to tell us your position there.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And just in general, like, love to hear that because ultimately that's part of our intended goal is I think all of us can probably like agree and know when working with clients, like a lot of times viewing a financial statement is, you know, something that is hard to deeply understand for every single business owner out there. And so if we can use more consumer-grade UI to make it something that they want to dive into and want to look at, like, ultimately, that solves multiple problems. It educates clients on how to engage and understand their finances, but it also gives you a much nicer looking reporting package to be able to provide and include in your services as well. So hopefully we're solving from kind of both sides of the coin there, which is exciting. But— Kind of taking a step back. My name is Rob Hamilton. I've been at Digit for a while now, about 3 years. I'm leading the go-to-market team at Digit. So partnerships, working with accountants and all the above on that front. Previously, just briefly, I spent time at Twitter, Alexa, and Twitch, all generally focused on API and relationships with both brands and individual consumers. Ultimately, really looking to just bring the latest technology to users and find that really intersection between technology and like human interaction, whether it be someone streaming on Twitch and how they engage with a, with a streamer or how children and adults engage with Alexa. So I think now we have a whole new realm of interaction between like how technology and accounting really intersect, which is, is awesome. And so that kind of brings us to Digits, which ultimately, like our mission is that we want to enable the firm of the future. Like, I think we've probably heard Firm of the Future from the AICPA and, and others a bit, but from a Digits perspective, what that means is let's figure out how we can eliminate the tedium and manual workflows that you're constantly dealing with every single day. And what that hopefully allows for is then you to scale your clients nonlinearly. How do you basically bring on more and more people without having to think about bringing on more and more headcount? It also allows you to focus on saving time so you can focus on the human elements of the profession, which I think we can all agree is where ultimately accountants want to be spending their time is how do you build those relationships and help these business owners be successful? So how can we really help you drive towards that, that future? And like at the end of the day, our mentality towards this as we build is that we don't believe that AI is going to like replace accountants. We more fundamentally believe that early adopters of AI will outpace the industry in their ability to get new clients. And so that's what we want to enable and move forward and excited to just chat more today. So should be great.

And actually, Steve, you're the one that kind of came to me and Sarah and said, I've got this software I use. And he was actually even more excited than I was about it. Introduced it to us, and we have to introduce it to our folks at the Law Lab too. So Steve, you want to tell us how you use it at your firm?

Well, we haven't been using it a lot lately just because we've been bogged down in one super intense trust project for the last month or so. However, we're keeping track of what Rob and his folks are doing and we love like the email that came out this morning. One of the things that really excited me a couple weeks ago, I saw in some QuickBooks transactions the dialogue between the client and us. Right there on the transaction in QuickBooks. And I'm like, well, there's my answer. I did, you know, it came right over from Digits. I love that. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you.

Our team loves it. In our meeting last Friday, every Friday we do what's coming, what's new, what's exciting, what do we want to go towards? We sort of put it towards that. And we talked about in the last quarter of this year, I wanted to do it in the second quarter of this year, but I didn't get there. Because of this big project we were on. But in the last quarter of the year, we're going to finally bring all our clients into Digits because we've grown that much more since the second quarter. I just love how easy it is to read. To Lynda's point, how beautiful it is. The clients do embrace it. What's so cool is when a client calls me and says, what about this transaction? I saw it in that little rocket ship program. I'm like, digits?

Yeah.

So they're paying attention. Yeah, you're getting—

I like that the clients are paying attention to the little quirks and fun personality traits we put in there too.

So yeah, yeah.

So Sarah, you, you, you, you can probably speak to this as well as I could and Steve could about working with attorneys and the way they interpret as financial. They try to— obviously they want to act like they know everything about accounting. Right. But Some of them have probably fessed up to us that this is not their strong point and, and, and it's easier to give them software that they can understand and interpret.

I think the wow factor, it honestly is the customization within the product and like to Rob's point is we're taking a big thing that nobody really enjoys looking at and making it more digestible and, and in a way that you can move the cards, you can reorganize the data to pinpoint possibly what you're hearing as a concern. So you can set up a set of reports that can go out, you can set up a whole system, but really on the other side of it, I think the interaction and some of the conversations we've had of like our feedback wishlist items— Mm-hmm. Like for future things, is well received. And to your point, Rob, it's— yeah, you built it for Lynda. Let's just say that.

No, I'm kidding.

Shiny.

Lynda does give great feedback.

She does. She does, really. But I love that you can take something that for every— just flat across the board, regardless of the profession, unless you're like so ingrained in the manufacturing, you need to know certain factors to move your business. When you're in professional services, it's not always the first forethought of this kind of stuff that we build. And oh, you just, you could just put that together. Like we heard from a client that was like, oh, I thought that was really easy. You just move these accounts around. Like moving accounts around.

Those probably have tax implications. You might not want to do that.

You may not want that decision to be made in that way. But I like that in the product you could not manipulate, but you could display it, I should say, in a way that people can go, oh.

Yeah. And that's honestly our hope to continue to push down that path as well.

Sure.

Absolutely. A traditional P&L balance sheet, cash flow statements, like those are needed to run a business. Like, hey, I need to go get a loan or I need to do this or I need to do that. But how do we push the bounds to make some of these things a little bit more consumable to some extent? And there's like really little things we've thought about where, hey, yes, like last 12 months, P&L, how do we simplify that so it doesn't look like a wall of data to the client? And so we started introducing like sparklines and little trend charts so you can see like, oh, this is seasonal or oh, this is spiking and the quick hit things that you're ultimately trying to get out of that data. But the other part you're speaking to, which we've had a lot of fun with recently and Steve just mentioned what we put out this morning in our email around we're introducing our AI into reports as well. Uh-huh. But we already are doing an AI-driven executive summary where we're running the variance analysis on your behalf, pulling out the high-level nuggets. Obviously, you can still edit those. We just want to give you, in effect, the ammo to tell the right story because we don't necessarily claim to know, like, what your clients care about or the right things to highlight. But what we do want to do is show you the biggest kind of, movers and shakers and what's happening. And in that, you can drag and drop in all the different metrics and things that you need. But what you can do now, which we're starting to kind of like bring in a little bit more and more, is you can go ask our AI, like, who were the top vendors for a year to date within a specific category or otherwise? And that allows you to just get a little card with a visual and a chart and the information, and you can just drag it into the executive summary. You don't need to go like, run a report, do some VLOOKUPs and like build these things up.

Yeah, trying to build it out.

Make it look pretty. We'll just make it look pretty naturally and you can bring those things in.

So. Well, to your point, so I, what I enjoy about the product very much is you have this bar, like especially in expenses where the spend is, where the first thing people are after a lot of times is like, where am I spending my money? I don't understand. And you've got this laid out so kind of like nicely. It's just like, here's the month, here's the percentage increase, plus minus, right? And then graphs to go with it. But also the largest, the growing, and the shrinking of your highlights. That's just, that's just standard stock that's in the product and super easy to look at.

It's, yeah, it's one of those things that we're really doing our best to try and push the bounds of how to interpret these things where I think in a lot of cases that's viewed as like, oh, I need a new report, which honestly feels really heavy for what that is. Like, sure, it's all structured under a report, but at the end of the day, like, if we can just surface that, it feels a lot lighter to understand. And like, no, these are just the things that are moving within the company. And I don't, I, even as the accountant, I don't have to feel like this heavy burden of like, oh, I have to go, like, build this thing on behalf. And so the more of those types of things that we, we can build into the product related to that is ultimately like what the whole profession has been amazing at letting us know. And so it's been super fun to engage with just the accounting profession in general on what are your needs? Because I think there, we can all probably agree there isn't a dearth of things to potentially automate and think.

Well, you bring up a really valid point in the, in the space of teams. So we're, Lynda and I are not in every single file at this granular level. And if we're in a session and somebody's asking us a question, that we need to know, I think we have that opportunity now to be able to get that data at a quick, you know, quick look and be able to say, speak to it better and drill in based on what we're seeing because it's all right there in front of us.

Yeah.

So one of the things I have a question on is where are we with the Cruel Cash piece inside the product? Because that's the big, big one, right? For some of us. On professional services.

Definitely. And it's, it's absolutely something that is on the, I'll say, nearer term roadmap. I don't want to make our like product team upset around like—

Crazy.

But it's definitely something that we are actively thinking about. We did start with accruals just because that is probably like slightly more scaled businesses. Most of them move into that, that space, but certainly have heard how important cash is just in general to be able to do that with folks. But it is one of those things that like we do want to roll into the product. I don't have exact timelines I can—

Oh, that's all right.

Yeah.

But at the end of the day—

Just knowing that it's in there.

Yeah.

At the end of the day, like our intent is to really like build the foundations and go up from there. And we're still very much in this foundational phase. I think Digits Reports itself just launched like a little bit over a year ago. And so it hasn't been around for a super long time. And I think we're making a lot of really good product progress to keep in touch with what is needed and try and innovate on those things. But in our mind, like, a rising tide raises all ships here. So the more we can make it more efficient and the more interactive and easy to use we can make for your clients, like, we all win in that scenario.

Yeah. Well, I know Lynda wants to—

oh, sorry, Lynda.

I was gonna say, I think— I know you wanna talk about that, what he just brought about innovation and that talk that we heard at Scaling New Heights. Yeah. I was just saying we Just scaling.

And I think one of the, the one session that you all presented on, I think you could have heard a pin drop because every, we in the hallways, everybody's talking about ChatGPT and how are you using it and what are you using it for? And people are like, well, I take my client's financials, I strip the name off and I dump it into ChatGPT and, and I play around with doing this, this and that. And it makes, I know some of them use the plugin, use, use the 4.5 version, use the plugin and then add the Excel piece and it will do formulas. And then when you guys got on the stage and started talking about ChatGPT and showed the results of some of the commands you could give it, if you want to expand on that, it was—

I don't think—

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's one of those, like, it's not necessarily funny when it involves real data, but it's one of those things where, like, a generative model is eager to give you an answer. And it's confident about its answer.

Yeah.

It might not be right, But it's confident about it. And so that's, that's hard, especially when it comes to like, we're in an industry where precision and like being accurate is very important. And so it's one of those things where the hope of being able to do that copy and paste something in there, like, if we're just going from the basis is, this is gonna save me time on doing analysis. But at the end of the day, if you have to question whether or not the analysis being done is actually accurate, are you really saving yourself any time? And because then you have to go through and double-check all the numbers. And specifically, Lynda, what you're talking to, our founder Jeff spoke on stage and kind of like showed a video of himself integrated, like doing exactly this and giving some numbers, asking for some light level analysis and kind of went through like, what of these answers is right? What of these answers is wrong? And sure, some of them, some of it, it got right. But in many and multiple of those cases, it was completely off or incorrect. And it's one of those things where the intent of that is to show that generative models are not good at math just generally. And this is well known. Now, this will change and evolve and they will get better, to be clear. And there already are some— like, you could probably use like the Wolfram Alpha additive, you know, thing to GPT. Like, there's some things you can use. But at the end of the day, understanding that the generative models are, at least today, not necessarily a trustworthy source of doing the analysis in that case was what we wanted to show off and kind of talk through from an industry perspective, let alone the security pieces of like if you're just copying and pasting into ChatGPT, like who knows when that data is gonna get hallucinated back to another customer. And hallucination being used as like that actually is a technical term, like in the industry where it's—

Yeah.

Hallucinating something back versus— it is funny. It's easy to laugh at, like, oh, what an interesting term. But that is kind of like what it's called when it just is like bringing something from somewhere else into a different answer.

Sarah and I played with it. We actually went into chat and we asked it for a bio on ourselves. And we were like just blown away by all the things we had done, huh, Sarah, that we hadn't really done.

Yeah, just in the actual ChatGPT thing, but in the report section, like, in, like, to see this, to hear what was presented, and to now have a way that, like you said, in product, ask the questions. Fascinating.

That's where you want to see it though, because it's securely connected to QuickBooks. It's been vetted. It connects securely to QuickBooks. And now I'm in a product that I can ask questions, and I know my data is secure. It is reading QuickBooks, but I've given it the permission to do so. Mm-hmm. And I think that when you get into, this is what we're all gonna have to be. I think that's the next level of all of this. When we start to get into more of this automating and technology going forward, we really have to consider security at the utmost. Because I, I'm amazed sometimes, my husband sends me like 3 to 5 emails a day that I is, he has questions box. I'm looking at like one the other day, I showed the girls. I'm like, really? He had to ask me if this one was okay. I mean, it was clearly a very bad one. But, you know, I'm like, just don't click anything. And you have to teach your staff that too. And I think that this is the same thing when it comes to this stuff. I don't want them popping in anybody's financials. No, that is a company policy. No, Sarah and I, no, no, no, we're not gonna do that.

So—

And that's, and that's, but at the same time, like, ultimately what you're talking about is what Digits wants to be able to enable. You shouldn't feel like you can't use the latest technology to make yourselves better. But, but you do need tools in order to engage in the right way. And that's ultimately like, that's what Digits has built out with our, with our AI functionality within the product where we've really looked to combine the conversational power of GPT with our own proprietary underlying models that understand double entry accounting and—

The math is right. Yeah.

So like what we built out was a new financial modeling engine, which does all the math. But still keeps your data safely encrypted at rest in our system. So then what we use is redacted tokens. We don't need to— I don't know how much we want to get into the nitty-gritty details.

This is good. This is good stuff.

But ultimately, like, no raw financial data is ever shared with ChatGPT. And then the actual numbers and entity names and things like that are substituted from the tokens so that we can tell the right story back within the product. Ultimately, that allows you a safe way, I guess, in order to engage in this type of, and like use this technology in a way that you can still take advantage of it. At the same time, we will, we have like put some steep guardrails on like what it can answer as well. And these are things we're going to slowly expand. But as we've probably seen the news when like some AIs like go off the rails, like I think one the other day started asking people on dates. So like we don't necessarily want that happening within the product.

So we've limited like— Yeah.

If you're asking tax questions, stuff like that, we will direct you back to a professional, things along those lines. And so we want to make sure we're building this in a responsible way that takes into account not only security, but how do we make sure that this is in line with industry expectations and all the above on that front too.

That's nice to hear for us in the profession. Steve, go ahead. I'm sorry. I just feel like that's a great, nice—

I'll follow you. Go ahead.

Yeah. It's a nice— just confirmation. It's like that whole adage that you did in the beginning. It's like, I'm not going to hook up my bank account. That's not, you know, like you don't want it attached to your software. I'm like, all right, come on already with the encryption level data and so forth. So I appreciate you highlighting that and sort of giving us a little bit of background behind it. What is happening? Speak, speak, speak. Yeah, it's wonderful. Steve, go for it, my friend.

That helps us understand it. Yes, Steve, go for it.

So I wanted to drill down a little bit deeper into the vendor realm within Digits. Is there or has there been any discussion or requests from various accountants out there to give us the ability to see when there's been a W-9 provided by a vendor and attached in QuickBooks, or in the case where maybe we're working with a smaller law firm and they're not really good at getting W-9s, but it might— It might prompt us when they've reached that $600 threshold.

Yeah.

You know, those sorts of things because 1099s with the legal industry are a real pain.

Boy, oh boy.

Yeah, I imagine you have like lawyers who are submitting like checks that they're paying like people at courthouses and like all random smattering of places. So it's got to be quite the endeavor. To get that together.

And so will there be a way to build that information out where we can pull it and, and see?

I would say ultimately yes. But this is again one of those things where the amount and the areas of potential automation are— I'm not going to say endless. Obviously there is an end. But in the accounting industry, there's just a lot of like manual work. And one of the areas where ultimately we would look to move towards something that starts to have a little bit more information there is in— we already right now have a proprietary vendor database of over 150,000 vendors that has all their logos, support documentation, like details about what the company does, all of these types of things. And that's a database that we're continuing to build out. And W-9s is like an aspect of what would ultimately come into that type of functionality. It's like, great, we know who this vendor is. And we know how to contact them, we can go get this information on your behalf or otherwise. And not to presume anything on the product side, and this is probably something that's a little bit further out if we're talking about from a roadmap perspective, but ultimately like is a next iteration of that vendor database. Because like what we really want is for this to be super robust because that vendor information also feeds into our predictive models on—

Sure.

We see a transaction string that's super obscure or it's from like a coffee shop in Rhode Island that like you've never seen before or a brewery in Oklahoma or whatever it may be in that case where it's like you have to go spend 5 minutes like Googling and figuring out what's going on and who is this vendor. And the more we can layer in that information into Digits in the right way, we want to do that. And there's a bunch of really new, probably, I would probably arguably say like, bleeding edge type aspects of AI. They're gonna help automate that even further beyond what we've done. They're called autonomous self-critical agents. And really, they're— this, I talked about this a little bit in a breakout session at Scaling New Heights, but basically is like a task-oriented bot that you can tell to go do something on your behalf. And so in that case, like, they can Google and they can find the right you know, the right vendor and then takes that even little bit of work off your plate in order to go figure that out. So we want to continue to iterate that vendor database and not only in bringing in more vendors so that we can cover even the long tail, but at the same time, there's a ton of other information with regards to vendors, especially around W-9 and implications on how much time it takes you to collect that information, how much time it takes anyone to to gather those things and file them on their own. And so a lot to be broken down and understood there and added. But we are super interested in, you know, making all of that a lot smoother over time.

So thank you very much. That's one of my favorite things. Don't you think, Steve? I love looking. You have the logo, you have the little information. I love it. It's like—

I thought you meant 1099, Sarah.

No.

What?

1099s are just so beautiful. Yeah.

They're so much fun. She loves January. Love them. Love them. So yeah.

No, no, no. Yeah, I love it.

You're right. Like, and we, one of the other things I didn't mention about our vendor database as well is that we do build into the product recurrence detection and things like that as well.

Yes.

When you start thinking about AI, like we will then within a company's books start to flag like, hey, we've seen this transaction X amount of times. Like this recurs yearly, this recurs monthly, this recurs on a fortnight. Things like that that are just different amounts of time that something might recur, which, you know, is kind of a pain to have to calculate on your own. And so, and even things that if you wanted to see what vendors do I need to pay 1099s, we are not pulling that information from QBO today, but you can go into the product and pretty quickly run a list of who are my top vendors for the last year and like draw a line on who's $600 or more.

How would you set that up? That would cut out a bunch of time.

Sure.

Exactly.

And so there's a few things where we're trying to take the initial steps, but like obviously like recurrence detection, there's a pretty easy leap there of like how do you just automate AP schedules and like AR schedules and depreciation schedules and all that kind of stuff. So there's, there's a bunch of like next steps of where these things can go that are just super exciting to be able to think about.

So. That's one of the things I like. I get that monthly, I think it comes out monthly and it shows like the, variables like maybe it should be Apple Store instead of Apple or vice versa. And it just like calls it out so I can go in and look and it just kind of, I know as accountants, we just like to see per—

perfect books.

So when I see those little things like that and I can just hand it off to the team and say, here, fix this to make sure these look right or just fix it myself. It's so easy to do right in the product. And then I feel like, oh, now my data is nice and clean for my clients. I mean, you want that.

Well, if you think about it too, we're educating, any of the account— in the accounting profession, we're starting to educate not just the business owner, ourselves included, on the purchasing demands. Or like one thing that came up, what I was most excited about is I had a client that was like, when they came to Lynda Artesani and said, we just want to know on AP, like their cash flow, but in a micro moment, literally day to day or week to week. That's how tight cash flow was. And so we had to come up with the list of recurring, where was it paid from? And to your point, right, trying to do another report is, I mean, I'm not running out the door to create a custom report for you, friends. It's just not on my roster.

Well, and it also comes into one of those things like as the industry moves more and more towards subscription-based revenue or like recurring revenue versus hourly, that's one of those things that kind of comes up as like, okay, but this isn't scoped to what you're currently paying me. And how do I account for that in this new setup and world. It's an aspect of it is like a new thing that the profession needs to think through as to like how you structure those plans and things as well that you're providing for your clients. Because like, what's the— I don't know what this is ultimately called, but it's kind of like 80% of the questions come from 20% of your customers. Yeah. Generally like plays out in most support types of things. And I've seen that, I think, play out a little bit in accounting of like same thing happens with like the asks from the clients as well. And making sure you account for that in the right way and communicate in the right way is obviously like deeply important too.

So—

I feel like you're— the company— but what you said earlier definitely has always aligned with the way that I personally operate. I— your foundation is the most important piece. To stabilize or revamp. And then we can talk about opportunities from there of where we're going to go. But like the whole adage of garbage in, garbage out. But yeah, what is inside of— where are we stable? Do we have a firm foundation to, you know, look at practice area in our profession, to look at where expenses are derived from, either client-generated or not, you know, those sorts of things.

Yeah.

And where are these landing in our financial statements? And so when you have a tool like this, I feel like what we're doing is it's taking the burden off of people like ourselves as owners of our firms and empowering our employees to be able to handle this as well. Because the time it takes us away to sit there and look at it and digest it and direct it and orchestrate it and then go, oh, guess what? You're going to go meet with the client. Yeah.

Yeah.

This could easily just take that off. So I feel like we're at the stage where the product that you're building and that you guys are constantly pushing the envelope on is going to actually, if you embrace it right, it's going to actually help you in other ways that you didn't see as opportunities. And I love that. That's so exciting.

And we're excited to keep pushing that too. In all the different ways, like when you, when you start to break down like AI, there's basically like 2 ways it can be applied today. There's both generative models, and then there's predictive models, which both ultimately have like 2 different potential outcomes. We talked a little bit about generative models, but it's basically just guessing on what it, what the next thing is. So like the quick brown fox blank, and then it will kind of like fill in what the next type of thing is versus predictive models are going to like take an input and make predictions based on trained material on how that goes. This is great for like transaction strings where you pull a transaction string and it says like, oh, this is from Southwest. So— that goes into travel and airfare because that's how I've traditionally seen these things handled, etc., etc. But like, as you play that out, there's tons of different ways. Like generative AI is gonna be great at like writing emails, drafting client engagement letters, generating image and photos. Like it speed boosts creativity and things along those lines.

Yes.

But predictive AI is gonna be great at transaction categorization, vendor identification, pattern and recurrence detection, like really automating the tedium of the work.

Yeah.

And the marriage of these things are going to start to be really interesting as we, as we move these things forward, where if Digits is building in both of these worlds, like you start getting to the point where you could just type in, hey, generate me a report that like tells this information and then boom, it just spits it all out and leverages our predictive models, the financial models that we run on our end. And builds you what you need versus you even needing to like think about that, which to the reason I was thinking about this was the empowerment of your team.

Yes.

And how do you train them to have these conversations in the right way? And if we can do our best to like lower the barrier of entry to advisory services, that's a huge—

We need to do that. We need to do that.

Adding and training that is like a very, very difficult thing. And so the more that you can push the bounds on that.

Yeah. Yeah.

It's super—

And I think sometimes with the training of it, I mean, that's really like our experience with working with clients and seeing the records and the data. So now you're going to have something that can do that. To your point, getting the staff and the team being able to be confident. If it spits out a confident report, they'll be able to talk to the client and explain what we've spent years learning. Will it be as good as our brain and our life experiences? Probably not because we have the ability to kind of interpret it in a different way. But I think from the get-go, that's gonna be able to allow some people who are really new at this to be able to get going. Because if they, if they don't have the ability to do that going forward and, and this stuff gets really good, like bank feeds go in automatically someday where everything's pretty much right and then it reconciles itself. I mean, there's a whole bunch of steps that we've been doing for years that's gonna not be a job anymore. Compliance stuff.

Mm-hmm.

So, yeah. And I think it's, it's ultimately like a part of, like, on our end, we almost try to think of it less about, like, this won't be a job anymore, but just a reframing of where you're gonna spend your job.

Exactly. Upskilling it. Right? And, and the upskill, I think now for accountants and bookkeepers, I really think, especially the younger kids are just getting in this, learn how to work in, in chat and talk to this, learn how to work with digits and talk to it, practice it. It is a learning skill that you have to upskill your your level of knowledge of how to do this, because it's just like Google. If you're trying to ask Google for a specific thing, or even like in Clio, Sarah, where I'm trying to look for a name of something, how many times have we seen clients go in and they type this long name that they know this matter is? It like, all you needed to do was put Jones, you know, Fred Jones in or whatever, and it would've pulled it up. But you went in and wrote this big long thing, probably didn't space it right. So it goes. I don't know what you're asking because you don't ask it a big broad thing.

You mean don't be smarter than the software is what I always laid with.

I'm like, please, let's just keep it simple here. Start with 3 letters.

What's so fun about this though is that we are like in the early stages of all of this.

We are.

What you were just saying made me think back to when they were like, and maybe this is a problem, different problem, but just to articulate it, it's like back when I was like younger and there were multiple like I would go to Ask Jeeves instead of Google.

Oh, I remember that.

All of these different like search engines and you would use one versus the other because how you could ask the question or like what it would come back and ultimately like these things are gonna evolve and change on like how they really push things forward. And being there to like see how these things evolve and change are only going to inform how you can use it in the right way and what it's good at, what it's not, and how you can employ it into your firm as well.

So—

Which is why you need to practice it, you know?

One of the most beautiful things that I like is it takes the client out of the books. There's that danger is all gone. They're not in there fiddling around with things trying to figure out an answer. They can go right into Digits and pull things.

Not changing anything.

Right. Not changing anything.

100%.

But breaking it down.

I will love the day when we can finally lock the clients out of the books and send them into something like this and say, get your answer here.

Yeah.

It's one of those funny things that like when you talk to business owners or like when we talk to them and alongside of y'all as well, like they're like, I just want my books done. I want reports and analysis that I can engage with and I want my taxes filed. Like they don't, they don't want to be doing it. There's a reason they're outsourcing it., you know, to the accounting industry to get these things done.

But I had a great conversation with a client yesterday, and he, he's a solo, and he said, you know, I, I want— I have to tell you, he had us do a big cleanup, and he was so happy with the work back and the product, work product. He said, it was just so beautifully the way you sent it back, and it's so neat and clean and orderly, and I'm so happy with your, your staff, your team, your company. I didn't know this existed, this, a bookkeeping firm just for lawyers. And then he said, but I don't want to just hire you going forward and then never look at it again till tax time. I want to understand this stuff. Will somebody help me understand it? And, you know, like with Sarah and I are like, of course, absolutely, we will help you learn this and understand it. That's also typically the person that never has time to meet with us, but we'll definitely do it and we can do it.

Like we're— Like the interest from the business owner is not like the interest isn't there. But like, it's time. It's like, this is a little bit intimidating.

It's not— Very intimidating.

It's my background. And so the more— and this is where Digits has really tried to like bring a consumer-grade UI into all of this. I think we talked about at the very beginning, which is like, this needs to feel a little bit more tangible for the downstream business owner. If the technology you're using is just redisplaying like accounting concepts they already don't understand, you're not necessarily solving that problem. It needs to feel like I can explore this without getting confused. I want to be able to look at this in a way that helps me understand because like if they, if let's say there's a business owner trying to like come into their bookkeeping on their own, the second you start going down the like, hey, do you need to like throw this into a schedule? They're like, I don't know what that means. Like, what am I supposed to do with that? Whereas like in Digits, they'll just see the little recurrence detection thing. They don't need to know what schedule is. And so like, how are there's these little just touches, whether they're visual or otherwise, that display things and talk about these things in a, in a more seamless way so that I as a business owner can quickly understand what's going on. And because not like these people are like, these people are smart. They're running businesses.

They're very smart.

Yeah.

And it really just comes down to like background and what you're familiar with in many cases.

What's the impact of your decisions? Ultimately, how do I make this decision? Do I do it this way? Do I do it that way? And the impact of that moment, if you don't know what— I mean, I'm not going to walk into court and know how to do what I need to do there. But I can sit here and look at it mutually as a business owner and say the impact of making that decision and putting that on this financial sheet versus this one and what are the rules and guidance behind that? Is a huge difference than just the layperson going, oh, just put this over here and put this over here and call it good. Okay, we got issues.

Sarah's really good at this too. She's very good about like taking out all the fluff and then just saying, okay, that's a profit, that's a profit and loss type of account. And what you just mentioned is all is now on the balance sheet. So we can't interchange, interchange these two. And then sometimes it's just the terminology, like I want it to say this. Well, you're an S corp, we can't have it say that. And we'll, we'll have to have those discussions. But I know one question you need to have Digits answer someday is if you've got the business owner looking— Sarah's smiling, she knows what's coming— and they put their profit and loss in and they're going to say, hey, Digits, how come it says I made this much money, but I don't have that much money in my checkbook? Because isn't that a question we get every year?

Yes, all the time. All the time.

Every year.

It's like—

Net income does not equal cash in the bank.

Hello? Stamp it.

You're keying in on such like an interesting problem of the industry.

Yes.

Which is like, that feels really intuitive to you as an accountant.

Right.

But as a business owner, I'm like, oh, net income, that must equal cash. Like that feels intuitive to the business owner who doesn't necessarily understand the nuance between what goes into a cash flow statement to some extent. And there's also then if you're working with accrual-based businesses, even more of a confusion because like the business owner's thinking about this The business owner almost always thinks about their books in cash basis, whether or not they're doing accrual or cash accounting or not. And it's like, how much do I have now? Can I pay my bills? Are the people I've invoiced paying me? And the simpler you can make that and have them understand that, the better. And it's definitely something that we're thinking about as well on our end on how can we help translate that exact question in the right way.

We found with our clientele that if we present them, like we were using Fathom, it was put inside of QuickBooks at one time and using Fathom was a lot easier because sometimes when you bring a big report full of numbers, you can see that glazed over look on their face. Like, you know what, I don't want to look like I don't understand this, but you've lost me, especially if you pull a balance sheet up. But with the graphs and the charts, I think that helps them kind of conceptualize it because they're more verbal type of people anyway. So the fact that they're able to see, they see the pictures, I just think it kind of connects it in their brain. It makes it simpler, I think. And I don't know, it just seems like it makes it— they understand it better. And that's the key. That's what we're all trying to go for in working with our clients.

And there's a ton more work to do in that area as well. So something that we—

But it's really— I mean, every time I get the emails, like this morning, I was like all excited when I said, oh, what's new in Digits? Because it really is. If you haven't seen it and you're listening to the podcast, you can sign up. You get— do you still get 5 free accounts, Ron? Mm-hmm. One email. So you get 5 free accounts. Log in, put 5 of— put your own company on so you can really look at it and then put 4 other companies on and play around with it. Well, nothing says AI versus machine learning versus generative is that attorney that went and asked it to make a case. What case can I use in my court case for, you know, whatever it was? Right. It made one up. And he didn't check it, and the judge called him out. I wonder how he knew the judge knew. Like, he— well, Smith versus Jones, that should have been his first red flag because that was the name.

Really?

But, you know, and he— yeah, he got called out on that, and he got chastised. I think he really got, like, I don't know, sanctioned or something because he did that.

Nothing. Yeah, no, it didn't— I don't think it went well. Um, yeah, but at the same time, like, those are the pitfalls the accounting industry can fall in as well. Like, you don't—

Yeah, it's like cutting and pasting and throwing it into chat and then hoping it made you the right answers. Because if you didn't check it, just like you guys demonstrated at scaling, I mean, it was like, oh, and he just— you're, you know, they—

your colleagues—

Boy, is it confident about its answer.

Very confident.

Sure is confident.

Up Smith versus Jones.

That's real.

Yeah. It's scary.

It's really scary.

You gotta love the legal profession.

We've got the cat on Zoom. How do I get this off? The cat.

Phase, and then now this. I mean, you just—

You're right.

Yeah, the legal—

—together.

Always stepping right into this, this, the front view of all of that stuff.

You learn.

And there's been—

well, that it passed the bar and then it passed the CPA test. I mean, it was able to do both of those things. So, you know, pretty interesting. I wonder if any of them passed the ProAdvisor test.

At the end of the day, with all of this, like, We just find this like deeply energizing because this is an industry that I think hasn't had the evolution of technology to some extent that a lot of others have. I think to some extent for good reason, like there's a lot of manual and tedious work that actually requires a human level of like context gathering in order to accurately do something. So there are very good reasons why the technology hasn't necessarily like evolved in the same way as a lot of other industries have where like adoption of the cloud and these types of things has just been like faster in other areas and all that kind of stuff.

Yeah.

But as we move towards AI, this actually feels like one of those foundational level changes that will be able to be adopted and truly take on some of that work and really help you move up and out of the tedious bookkeeping and more towards like your team can do more quality checks on the books, do more analysis, do more of that focus of client interaction. Or you could just like keep your same amount of clients and go on vacation. You know, on how you wanna, how do you wanna approach it?

But yeah, same time. Partnership with your clients. I mean, you, I, it, I've always spoken to this level of this is a team partnership and we, I mean, we're on the same side. Some people make it transactional. The moment you make it transactional, we don't have a great relationship. Might as well reconsider it right now. If you want to keep it in that collaborative spirit, awesome. And I've always led with that. I love it. I love it. Yeah. Thank you. I've personally led with that because, I mean, it's not that life is short. It's just like the time of value, the time that we're spending together. I want to be on your team. I mean, I enjoy my relationships with my clients.

And you want them to be successful.

And I want them to be exactly— I want to help you understand why are you having this lull? Why is this personality personnel shift happening in your firm that's causing such disruption? It triggers me inside personally and be like, why? You're such a great person. Let me help you out. It's that mentality. So, yeah. But tools like this, we definitely, to Lynda's point, a lot of people want to shy away from it because it's intimidating. Understandably, but we want to embrace it to, to support each other in the community because we have a profession that's not— we don't have a backlog of people wanting to sign up to be accountants.

No, we have a problem.

There's nothing cool about this right now.

I think we can make it cool. Like, we can, we can make accounting cool for sure. But I— maybe I'm like weirdly optimistic about this, but But like, it seems like there's an opportunity where this could be one of the leading professions able to adopt and use this technology. Yeah, I'm with you. Which then does like really quickly flip this on its head and make it so much more interesting where you could get a leg up in your profession and career long term by starting in accounting because you get to leverage these new tools in like new and unique ways that I don't know that that opportunity, that opportunity probably exists less for a lawyer, just because there's like some of those—

Or a doctor or any of them. Like, just because you created it doesn't mean it's going to happen in that, you know what I mean? Like, yeah, I agree.

In my head, I'm just like, I'm excited about what the future of this can evolve into and how it's going to evolve, how accountants can ultimately like use their time and leverage their time in a I mean, I don't think anyone wants to be doing all this tedium that you constantly have to be doing. And now we're in kind of a realistic, more realistic ability to automate because I think folks have been talking about automating accounting for a very, very long time. And that promise has been there for years and years.

The first terminology of bookkeeping needs to be tossed out. Like that just needs to go because there's just, we're just not in that space. We do not sit with these little green hats.

The behind, you know what I mean?

Yeah, but what's cool about that is like, what should it be called? Like, what's—

Yeah, it's got to have a different name.

What is this new thing named? Like, I think there's a story of when like data science became like a career. I think Facebook basically invented it where just by instead of calling it like data engineer or data something, they changed the word and really like flipped the script on people being interested in taking that on because it felt new, it felt interesting, and felt like a next step. Like data science certainly feels a lot more interesting than like database engineer or something along those lines. Not nothing against database engineers.

No, no, no.

There's tons of like very interesting aspects of all that, but that like shift changes people's mental perception of like there's a, there's a mental perception now on what bookkeeping is. And so what is that then evolve into that can kind of bring interest back around? And don't know what the answer is, but like I'm personally just very excited to see how all of this continues to evolve over the next couple of years.

I think— When I tell you every time we talk to you, I don't sleep for like 2 nights. My head just starts spinning.

I'm like, oh my God, we got to do this.

And, you know, to new bookkeepers out there, if you think you're getting into this field just to do data entry, you're not going to make it. You've got to really embrace things like Digits and to, you know, just something that you were saying a while ago, Lynda, you know, attorneys, when they go to court, they are painting a picture of whatever happened. Mm-hmm. And I think that that's why in our particular niche, we're getting so much excitement and feedback from our clients because they get this pretty thing. That makes sense, that gives them what they need quickly, and it appeals to that side of them because they're very visual, um, you know, in a way of, in the way of presenting and painting that picture. And that's, yeah, it's totally why you guys appeal to them.

And probably love that metaphor. It feels really, really like applicable and interesting as to how this evolution will continue to push forward.

So I love watching lawyer shows on TV. That's about all I do.

Lynda Artesani knows Oh, he's hooked on Suits now.

Hey, it's a good one. I think I've done 4 seasons of Suits. I don't know if I finished the series.

I did them all. There's 8 or 9. I did them all. Great show.

The only problem with Suits is I always came away feeling like I needed to dress better. I'm like, everyone just looks so good in this show.

They do. They do. They do.

They're painting that picture in court. You know, I love to watch that in Suits. They're like, Your Honor, this is how it happened. This is what it looked like. This is what it smelled like. This is the emotion. This is the, you know, the whole bit. And that's, I think that's why Digits appeals so strongly to people, you know, because it's dressed really well with its use.

It's dressed like Suits.

Oh, this was great to have you, Robin. You're going to be at Connect too, right?

We're still working out if we'll be at Connect. But we will definitely be around. We're planning on being at DCPA for sure at the end of the year. And because we— yeah, in general. So we're just excited. This was super fun. And always like every time we have time to connect, I just feel like, cool, we could just keep chatting for like 2 hours.

You can keep going for like 2 hours.

I feel the same way. It's so nice to have conversation with people we enjoy having conversation with. Absolutely.

All right, Tiara, you're going to take us out? Thank you, Rob. Thank you.

Thank you. Absolutely. No, this was a lot of fun. It was good to see everybody.

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