Financial Cents Updates with Shahram Zarshenas

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

Hello everybody, and welcome back to the podcast. We're so glad that you're here with us today. Lynda, Sarah, how are you guys doing?

Good, good.

It's nice.

It's good.

We're recording on a hot summer day. And you said you had a tornado down your way, Linda?

I wasn't here for it. I was up north, but yeah, there was a tornado. And I mean, I just saw pictures of it. The sky was absolutely black. We don't typically get tornadoes. We get that other thing that we can't say the word for this year. We're not going to have, but, um, yeah, so it was very unusual. And, um, I, the sky was black and the Target had all the carriages flying all over the place.

Wow.

That's crazy. Yeah.

That is crazy. Well, we have a special guest today, Sharam. It's been a couple years since you've been here with us. And Sharam Zarchanis, I did it, I goofed it. I'm so sorry. Zarchanis, I did it.

There you go.

From Financial Cents. And it's been a couple years since you've been here with us.

Yeah.

And there's been so many things that have changed with your software. And I'm one of your biggest fans. I'm all over the Facebook group every day. I was honored. And thankful to record a webinar with you guys a couple of weeks ago. I really enjoyed doing that. And I just, I can't get enough of Financial Cents and all the exciting things that are going on. And before we jump into that, though, I just want to share a couple of things here that you are, I'm sure you're so proud of. But just in, I saw in June, you guys became the, you were named the 2026 Inc. Best Workplaces list. Good on you.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's awesome. Also in, uh, uh, you also were named Best Accounting Practice Management Software for Ease of Use, uh, Capterra Award. So I mean, holy cow, look at you go.

Yeah, thank you. It's, it's exciting because like, I know when I think about what we want to build, it's— there's 2 parts to it. There's like, we want to build like the best platform for, let's, for accounting firms, but we also want to build the best workplace for employees at the same time. And I think both those awards kind of reflect that, which is cool to see and exciting. You know, culture is important to me and just, I don't know, we spend so much time at work. I would hope we enjoy where we work.

And well, your team is awesome to work with. I mean, they respond immediately. They answer questions. They're so patient. I mean, thank you for building such a wonderful team that we can all enjoy in our work. That's awesome.

Thank you for using it.

You bet. So if we could, if we could focus today on, and it's limitless. I mean, if you just want to jump in and go, and I've made my own list of things that have changed and that are coming along, you know, Financial Cents has to appeal to so many different types of accountants and it can't be a one-size-fits-all, but it can be a software that you can find your way through and find the parts that work best for you. And, you know, drill down into those pieces of it and really slam through your work and get it done effectively. And I just love, like, the other day I found, um, what was it? Um, I've got my whole list here. Just give me a minute.

Um, yeah, there's a lot. There's a lot to look through.

There's so much. Oh, expenses, um, and bills without attachments. Yeah, I was like, oh my God, I finally— I love that because I was having to, you know, do screenshots and Spreadsheets and all these sorts of things. Then when you put that in, um, I don't have to go over to month-end close anymore where I've created all these files. I can just go into that piece and find everything. It's just awesome. That's just one example. So there are different ways to work with the software and different ways to find doing the same thing in different places. So it's kind of cool how you're, how you're coming along and doing all of that. And I'll be quiet. You jump in now.

No, I mean, that's a cool— I mean, you talk about how like you have like, you've been doing this like in a spreadsheet or in other places. I think the ultimate goal of Financial Cents is, I mean, we can't build everything, but like we can try to organize all the information with your clients, your team, and your work in one place, right? And I think that's the ultimate goal is visibility and organization through centralization. Um, or I like to say that single source of truth. So when to hear you say like, oh, I was able to replace the spreadsheet because now I can do it in financial sense. Like, it's cool to hear that because it kind of goes into that. But, um, in terms of like, so like you kind of want me to just share some of like the big new things.

Um, you bet.

You bet.

There's, there's so much. It's crazy to hear you say, man, it was like a few years ago since we did the podcast. It's just like to think like how far it has come. Oh my gosh.

In 2 years.

Yeah, it's insane. But man, there's so much. And what's really cool too, I'll say this before I hop in. One thing that we're seeing is like, and we talk about like, everyone's talking about AI right now, whether you're a firm or like any, every business is using it to some degree. But like, I think the big thing with AI is it doesn't replace people, it supercharges people.

Mhmm.

And we have seen, and I'll talk about some of the stuff like we want to release, but And we just actually announced some of it today, but we have seen such insane productivity improvements on our development team from AI. I think it's like our output has increased like 6 to 7x. So we're running—

Wow.

7 times faster on feature product, like production. So now we talk about we release a lot of features, it's gonna get faster, which is crazy. And it used to be, oh, we don't have enough time to build. So now it's shifting to, oh, we don't have enough time to design and QA. And it's, it's, it's, it's, I think you're going to see the same thing happen to accounting firms.

Mm-hmm.

And one of the big things we want to do is now we want to take AI, like what we've done, be able to, we've seen the impact of supercharging the people in our business. How can we help accounting firms do this in their business? And I'll talk a little bit about that. But, Man, let's talk about some of the recent things. There's so much, but like I was thinking a little bit like, what are some of the high impact things? I'm curious if you'd agree. Like a big one, I don't know if you guys have used this yet or get value out of this. It depends on the firm type, is the tags for documents is a big one. So now like when documents, because a lot of people use our system to request documents from their clients, like there's, because like at the end of the day when it comes to work, you know, your team needs to know what, how to do it and Have the information into it. But there's also like the client side, like they're involved in the work, right? You have to get information from them. If you don't, like, you can't do the work. They're blocking the work a lot of the time. But like, when all those documents come into our system, it's hard to know, like, did someone action this thing? Did they look at it? Did someone review it? Has it been sitting here? Has it been downloaded and put it into another place? You know, there's workflows around that. So we've added Tags where like if a new document comes in, it's tagged with new, and then it can say this has been downloaded or reviewed or needs unreadable. I don't, you know, there's a million.

Do you want to know what a time saver that was for us? Oh my gosh. I just, you know, the new, just the simple thing of new. I'm like, when I see that, I'm like, I can grab that right now and get it off of here, you know, get it attached to the document or to the transaction in QuickBooks and it's done. Yeah, I don't have to sort and sift through everything.

Yeah, it's really intentional in the listing too, as, as what's there, you know what I mean? Like untagged, missing.

Yeah, it's because it was, it was, it was, uh, it was, it was, it was customer driven. I mean, honestly, it wasn't on our roadmap at all, and then someone was like, was it the Facebook group? They're like, hey, this is— I'm— my team is spending so much time on this, we have no idea, like, if Anyone actioned it. And we, they're like, if you did this, this would be— and we're like, wow, that's actually not that hard. And, and we built it like within a week and it was crazy how much people loved it. Same thing. Like, I don't know if you guys like the time tracker, like putting the client's name in there, something small.

Yeah.

But like so impactful for a lot of our users. It's just coming back to the feedback. So that was a big one. Viewing the portal as a client. Was one too we recently released. So like now, like—

I was just gonna bring that up. What a huge impact that has.

That's great for troubleshooting, like understanding what they're seeing. And like client says, hey, I don't see this. Like, well, really? Let me see what you see. Um, which is great.

It's been a great tool to kind of call their bluff on some when they're like, I, I can't, I can't do this. It's like, let's look at what you can do.

Yeah, I can't— do we have the ability for you guys to see when they viewed The client request, is that—

Let me see.

That's a big one. I think we, if we don't have, if we did release those big, if we didn't release this coming.

How's next Monday for you?

Yeah, maybe, who knows, with AI it could be possible.

I don't think I see it, but yeah, I mean, maybe you have it in some part, like maybe it's certain groups that are being able to test this right now, or That you have going on.

It may be testing.

Yeah.

Another big one was month-end close. You know, you highlighted that, Stephen. You talked about how the transactions without attachments, like that's just one little piece of the month-end close. And I think the goal there is what we found is a lot of the work, especially on the bookkeeping side, they're going to QBO to do all this bookkeeping month-end close work. And, you know, they're reviewing these transactions, they're having to download this stuff into spreadsheets and they're having to review them one by one. If we can pull— we already integrated with QBO, we already pull in all this data. Can we create a report where you have your filtering or your system that flags the issues you want to see? So it instantly says these 10 transactions do not have attachments. You don't have to go through and review them one by one. Or, or, you know, they don't have, um, associated vendors or, or what, whatever, or uncategorized transactions. Like all those classes, classes, like there's so many different types of reports that would take so much time to go through and manually check yourself. Like, we can flag it so it identifies it, and then you can easily ask the client about it too without putting it in a spreadsheet and sending it to them and push it to QBO. So that's been a big one, is the month-end close, because it really helps on the bookkeeping side, which we really like to serve a lot. It has been, has been super, super powerful. Probably one of the biggest updates I think we've released in the last year.

Could you talk about Um, a couple of things I want to talk about WorkflowCon. That was just really impactful this year. And also if we could touch on your plans for integration with Xero.

Yeah. So WorkflowCon has been amazing.

It's huge. Love it.

It's every year it doubles in size. I think we had 5,000.

You had 4,000, didn't you?

4,000 or 5,000. Yeah.

I was wondering on that number.

Which is insane. And this year we're gonna get— it's gonna get even bigger. I mean, I— we love WorkflowCon because, I mean, we're, we're a big believer in like everything starts with your workflows.

Mm-hmm.

You can do all this other stuff, but if your workflows aren't intact, whether it's your team or your client workflows, you're, you're, you're just gonna struggle to grow and scale. I mean, you're gonna— everything's gonna be— you need workflows in place if you wanna start to delegate work or build a team or take on more clients. So even if it's just you, right? Like you need a strong process to make sure you're efficient. And if you wanna automate things, you need to have that process documented and standardized. Or if you wanna apply AI, right? You still need to be able to have the process for steps for AI to automate. It's, you can't fix a broken work— I mean, you can't do anything with a broken workflow. So I love WorkflowCon. It's so much fun. It's crazy. I remember when we originally had the idea, like, Tocine had it actually, our head of marketing. She's like, let's do WorkflowCon. I'm like, yeah, this is cool. Like if you can make this happen, it'd be great. And she knocked it out of the park first year. Then we had some over 1,000 something. Then we had like 2,000 something and we had like 4,000 the third year. And this year, I'm sure they got some big lofty goals.

Well, you know what's cool is you don't have to jump on an airplane, go rent a hotel room, do all of that stuff. I think you attract a lot more people because of that. You know, and the energy was just, you knocked it out of the park with the energy on the thing. I mean, People were— I've never seen so many posts, hearts, firecrackers, things on the screen as I saw during WorkflowCon.

I love it.

It's a good point. I mean, I think you see there's a lot of great conferences in the space. Like, we love Scaling New Heights, we love QuickBooks Connect, and like a lot of these other conferences. But I think it's A lot of them aren't accessible to a lot of people. It's hard to take like 3 or 4 days to go to the— they're exhausting too. You're busy. And I think it's like same thing with like the whole premise of Financial Cents when we started was we want to make practice management easy. And like now we want to also make AI easy. We can, we can talk more about that. But like, and that's the same thing. We want to make learning and content and collaboration and peer To peer connection easy through WorkflowCon. You don't have to get on a plane. You don't have to pay $1,000 for a ticket. You can just show up and tune in for a few hours one day and get the recordings and watch them another. Like, I think accessibility and ease is so important. And that's why I love WorkflowCon. We've talked about, do we make it in person? We're like, no, let's make it easy to be accessible. And then you start getting bogged down in the logistics of it on our end. And we're not as focused on the content and the people. So it's, it's been great. It's been great.

Loved it. Absolutely loved it. Let's, let's talk about Xero.

Uh, Xero.

Sarah, let's, let's— you and Sarah can have this part.

Okay, let's hear.

So I don't have like a specific ETA on Xero, but I'll say what I'm seeing in the space. I'm seeing a lot of people are really upset with QuickBooks right now, and I think more than ever, We are hearing from our firms and new firm prospects, like, I need Xero. Like, I may not be a Xero firm yet, but in 5 to 10 years, I probably will be.

Yeah.

Because everyone's just sick of what QBO has been doing with the pricing. Yeah, there we go. The pricing, the customer, the coaching clients from their firms that use QuickBooks. Like, it's And then QuickBooks is like, we're here for the firm. But like, I feel like everything they do, their actions show they want to try to replace firms.

Mm-hmm.

Uh, that's what it feels like. And I think people see right through that. And it's showing like, like us as a, as a practice management, we need to have that. Otherwise we will fall behind as people make that migration. So I am seeing that shift in the market because it's always been like QuickBooks still owns majority share, but like it's hard to get off QuickBooks. It takes time. And I think people are starting to slowly make that transition. And really take Xero more seriously in that regard.

To me, it's exciting having been a multi-firm ledger system for so long and really absolutely adore working within the Xero platform. But I will say that you're right, in the— in our space, in our profession, it's not an easy switch because it's a whole learning mechanics. And I can't imagine on your side as far as building goes Because you've built to a certain, you know, for ledger details, it's built a certain way. We, in a financial sense, had some zero ones where I literally ripped out templates of like, okay, we built it this way. Nope, this is not gonna work. This is not gonna work. Because to me, it's ease of use, and it's simplified in a lot of ways. And I feel like that's what's really hard for this profession is it's so simplified. How could it be right? Is the question I hear. And I'm like, no, it is. You just have to work with it a little differently. You cut out, like, multiple steps. But clients prefer, given the opportunity and seeing the space, 9 times out of 10, I see a higher, like, I'll do the blue one. That's what I hear. You know, like, I don't know what you call it sometimes.

Yeah.

Okay.

That's fine. But it It translates, especially for creatives, a lot easier. It's just more intuitive to how you run a business. So that's— Yeah.

So you think, you think Xero has done a really good job on the client side? And like a lot of like the, like the endpoint business users, users that the firms serve, like are preferring Xero over QuickBooks from what you're seeing?

Yeah, I, I've always felt like if given a choice, I mean, a lot of times I feel like, and Lynda, you're— you and I have seen this. What do you care what we use? When you're a new firm, it's hard to be able to have that conversation with a client because the client might just dig in. But there are use cases where we are really strategic and like, does this firm really need to be on this QuickBooks platform, or do— should they just be on the Xero platform? Because we don't need more than this much of the platform, right? Like, you have to kind of ask the question. As an experienced firm owner, Lynda and I, we— I mean, we're— we've turned into our clients. We're multi. We have a lot of— we own a lot of businesses.

Mhmm.

A lot of our clients do. It's the nature of what happens. And so we're seeing that not everything needs to be on the green side of the, the whole way through, especially cost-wise. I think where a lot of firms have most of the disrupt is cost and delay of use in product.

Yeah.

There's been a lot of issues with it. So it's a great product for what it is when you've got the right use case. It's overcumbersome for a simplified method for sure. Yeah.

So, I mean, I think, I think majority of the market just wants it simplified. Don't, doesn't need the overcomplicated. And that, I mean, that's like, I completely agree with that because that was like the whole thesis of Financial Cents is you don't need all that stuff. You just want simplicity and something that really solves the core problem and then it's more simplified experience. And that's, that's kind of what we've banked on and it's resonated well. So I, I, I understand that completely.

Yeah, it makes sense, right? And, you know, it's interesting because you see it a lot of times with people that are moving into the other ledgers like Puzzle Digits and all these other ones. What does that look like? Does it work for every market? It doesn't always work for every market.

Yeah.

It does for some, but I, I think for the 3 of us here between Steve, Lynda, and I chatting one day, it was like, what is a, a trusted ledger that, that is flexible for us to use that we know that's been in the market long enough and has tenure? Well, second best to that really for us is ease of use is going to be Xero. And so I, I'm not surprised. I'm actually excited myself because of obviously being a part of the Xero community for some time. I'm super excited for that. But I honestly, I think it's a great— people should have a choice, really. So, yeah.

Yeah, I agree. I believe in choice, but I actually curious the AI ledgers, like Puzzle and stuff, like, are those working? It's just, I feel like it took so long for Zero to build up. They're talking about too, like, you want to use a platform that, you know, has A reputation and been— wow, I can't imagine how hard it is for them to break into the market.

Linda, you take—

well, I was just gonna say, they, I mean, they can make them, but then they don't have any connectors. So if you have payroll, how do you have to get paid? You can't get paid to it. So there's a lot of missing parts that, you know, QuickBooks was smart. They made a general product and brought all these apps in and said, here, do this. And then they turned around and charged everybody. But, you know, that's another thing. But yeah, I think that that's the biggest issue is we don't get We don't have the, you don't have the pieces together. We can't use it for law firms unless they don't need a software for legal because there's not really anything that connects to it. It's even hard to get anybody to connect to Xero. We've got Clio, but that's it. There's not really any other ones that will connect to it. So, you know, but Xero is, I mean, Clio is big and that's, that makes it worthwhile because it's such a big company and it's a popular one.

Well, and to your point, to your question, Sharam, I think that Xero is seeing an opportunity.

Mm-hmm.

With QuickBooks, with what's going on with QuickBooks, that, that, you know, that was good for them and, and they appealed to an audience pretty quickly. But like, um, oh, Digits. Digits is moving along. I mean, it's a slow process. I think, you know, I tried it out a few years ago and liked it, and it's changed quite a bit.

It's expensive though, Steve. I looked at it for a client that, you know, I thought, well, maybe see if there's an alternate because He doesn't like QuickBooks and it's, it's just as expensive as Essentials. I might as well just put him in what he knows.

Right. Right.

Has to be worthwhile to do it.

Yeah. The, the, the app ecosystem is a very big one though. It's like, that's a really hard one to do. It takes time, a lot of time and buying. You need critical mass to get the buy-in. So it's like, yeah, that's why QuickBooks has been so hard to dethrone.

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

True. I mean, it's, it's important for you as a business owner in your space to decide what is important. Like you're saying, like, customer needs versus relevant information. Do you make a multi-product like this? And I'm sure, as you've seen with others in, in your space, probably their evolution, or might have shared with you what they thought as how they evolved. But it's got to be so interesting from your perspective versus ours as practitioners in the space. So.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I can't imagine, to be honest with you.

Sharam, could we, could we touch on all the reports that are coming? I know some of them are in beta right now. Um, you know, the, the profit loss, the statement of cash flows. Statement of cash flows will be huge for so many people.

Have y'all used it? Um, well, I think the profit and loss one is in beta right now. I don't know if you have used— are you all on that beta?

No, no.

And then the balance sheet comes closely after that. But yeah, so that's like, that's the extension of the month-end close, right? So you have like the reconciliation, the transaction review, the vendor and account management. And then after that, it's quality control piece, right? Like looking at the statements, making sure everything looks up, seeing like, like one last final check. And that's going to be Really exciting. So like right now, like V1, what it looks like is you see the P&L, you can— there'll be some filters and customizations you can do to the view. You can see the variance between the months to identify like where were there swings and changes. You can collaborate on that internally and say, hey, you know, uh, uh, Linda, I just noticed this. Do you know anything about this? So you can collaborate on it, and it all happens without you ever having to leave that project in financial sense. So being able to do it right there in the workflow is so powerful. And the next piece is, is being able to take that report, you know, add like, I don't know what you maybe like footnotes, maybe you call it, you can, and then like you can share the P&L with the client and have footnotes of things you saw and they can highlight.

Oh, cool.

Yeah.

And kind of like what you think and maybe even use—

And they can respond back on within the footnotes. Is that coming?

I don't know, but if it's something that's value, yeah. I mean, I haven't got that far to it, but like, yeah, you could deliver the report with your, like, let's call it your analysis or the things you notice. And maybe even there's some point where like you can use AI to kind of, if you want to like take the first shot, tell you what it's seeing and then you can kind of just emphasize or reword it or something. So that's a, that's a big one, um, on the quality control. That's like the, the big, I think, last chunk to completing that month-end close automation.

And your file renaming feature, I'm really excited about that. And it was so funny, I, I looked at it and I went in and looked at all the settings and all the stuff, and then I got interrupted and I haven't gotten back to it. But then the next day I get an email from you asking me why I looked at it. So that's something to the effect of why I looked at it but didn't use it, and do I have any questions? I'm like, Man, Sharam is watching here.

Well, I'm watching everything.

I was like, I better, I better do my homework here.

Yeah, no, it's, it's, it's crazy. So let's talk about this. So like I talked about earlier how we've used AI, we always call it like operationalizing AI internally to like using it, building it into our processes to make us more efficient, help. Like right now we've basically 6, like, X the amount of work a single developer can do. What if we can do the same for our firms? The problem is you guys are busy.

Yeah.

Like, it's easy for our dev team to do it because they're tech guys. Like, they look at AI every day. They read about it. They talk about it. They love it. They understand it. It's very technical. Even for me, it's hard. Even on our, like, sales and marketing teams, we're still trying to figure out how to best implement it. But the dev team is a world ahead of everyone. But it's, it's hard when you have a full-time job and you have clients and work and all this other stuff and in a life to keep not only just figure out how to first use AI, but then let alone keep up with it.

Yeah.

So fast. So like our thought and what we're seeing is accountants, they're not going to have time. And even if they did have time, they probably wouldn't be able to do it the best way possible because they just don't have time. So They're actually, and they don't also want to try to adopt a whole new AI native platform, right? Like, that's a lot of work. So they're, what we're seeing is like the opportunity is like practice management should be that partner to help them move into the AI world. And like, I think like AI sounds scary. Agents is like a big word and it's actually not that complicated when you demystify it. So like our thought is like to create effortless AI for accounting firms, right? Like build it into where they're already working and show that it's happening, but like have it just happening. Like, so a good thing— thought is like the file renaming. We could have just released file renaming and you could— we could have made it to where you had to train it and customize it and do all this stuff. But the way we release it now is it will actually look and see, understand your naming conventions based off the documents you have in our system and suggest Or maybe if that's not released yet, it's about to be released, where it will suggest your naming conventions without you having to train it or set it up yourself. And then if you're editing it, you're just, you know, like, let's say you're like, it suggested and you edit it, it's going to learn off like what you're changing and then start to make the changes for the future. So it's like effortless. It's just happening. You don't have to set it up. You don't even really have to understand fully how it works, but I just know it's getting me the rename and the output that I want. And from the early tests we did with it, we saw a 90% acceptance rate on the renames already. So it's like—

It's great.

90% of thousands of file renames were accepted. They weren't edited. They, they, they were just accepted as is, which is great. And that's a, that's a big thing that saves a lot of time. You have to go in, you have to click it, you have to read it, download it, rename it. And then so, so now the thought is, okay, now what can we do? Right? Because like, I think our goal is to automate all those little things that you hate doing, the renaming, the routing, the validating. So next step is client. Let's say you request a bookkeeping statement for January, and we can look at the project and the due date of the project and the accounting period to know without you even— you just say, get upload bank statements. It will know based off the project details. That you need a January one. You don't even have to specify it. So when the client uploads December, it tells the client, hey, we were expecting January, not December.

Wow.

You upload January. So it validates it and lets the client know before you even have to check it. So you don't find out 3 weeks later you got the wrong document.

Yeah.

Um, and then it renames it. And then—

Wait, there's more.

Yeah, there's more.

I love it.

You can route it. So like it will suggest like, hey, this is a January bookkeeping statement. Do you want to add it to the January folder under bookkeeping on the client's files or in your Google Drive? And just click yes. And then if you trust it enough, you can have it automatically routing and renaming and validating all the time. So it automates all these little tasks that would take you, you know, so much time here and there per client. It adds up. So that's, that's the start, right? And then there's just so much more you can do based off that.

That's huge though. That's, that is one of the biggest time eaters of all.

Well, you know, what's interesting is I think it's a mix of like, if you're a solo firm, you, like you said, you don't have the bandwidth or the time. So to have a partner in it that you already utilize the tool, it's more intentional this way, I think is, is a true value point. It's a game changer for sure. It's, it's kind of like in the beginning, Remember everybody was slapping on AI and I'm like, well, what now? What am I doing here? You don't know what it does.

Yeah.

But I feel like as firms evolve and grow and those that are, you know, have a certain tenure of capacity or a certain level, we're gonna have to look to like dedicated teams. Like we had dedicated teams during certain things and you're so on the money. I love what you said because developers, It's been frightening for— if you think of college right now, computer science, computer engineering.

Yeah.

To today, right? But if you can have a team person that gravitated that could help build this, I feel like it's starting to evolve a job description that could support what needs to happen. There used to be like onboarding teams. Now there's— there might be a slightly different Metric to it and how it helps you deploy these agents and help you. It's funny that you bring this up because I did it with both of my computers. Lynda and I have 2 computers, and I was like, every— I am— I'll admit, I do not like renaming or looking at my screenshots. So I need it to be renamed every night. So I've got these 2 agents running on 2 different clouds, renaming and putting things in the right place because I'm not doing it.

Yeah.

Yeah. Don't do that kind of housekeeping. That's not gonna happen.

No, it's, it's, it, I agree. And like, the thing is, like, it's really cool you were able to set that instance up in Quad.

Yeah.

But how much time do you think that took you to set up?

Oh my, it was nothing. It was honestly, I mean, I will say out of the 2 of us, I've, I've been kind of, and to our benefit, Lynda and I constantly have to divide and conquer, right? So for me, it's constantly like, Just, I have to dive in and try it to be able to talk about it with the team, help empower the team. And I'm sure you feel the same way. You probably have moments where it's like, well, let's just see what this will do. But for me, it was a matter of a couple minutes. I was just sitting there one day and I'm like, screw it. I don't want to do this anymore.

Yeah.

I want my— I just, I want it renamed in CAT. And I went as far as setting it up and then telling Claude, okay, now you're gonna do this with it. You cannot change it, but you need to make sure it's placed in these areas and grouped accordingly. And if it's not clear, it needs to be date grouped or whatever it is. And yeah, it runs in the background on both. I have 2, 2 quads running because I'm, I kind of compare both and play around with it.

And it's crazy what it can do. I mean, yeah, our, like, going back to the dev team, like, we got it to the point to where, like, now we can take all the feedback from our Facebook groups, from our customer support calls or sales calls.

Mm-hmm.

Like our Canny board, our internal Slack teams, our Intercom. It all just gets pulled, all that customer feedback data gets pulled in and it categorizes it into features automatically. And then now when we say build this feature, it creates a design that is centered around all the feedback from all these different sources. So now it's not just like, oh, I heard we read all this and like, we think we should build it like this. Like it And it follows our design codes. And then it's, it's crazy. It's just insane what it can do.

It's amazing because on the marketing side, for us, you know, with multiple businesses just between Lynda and I, we have somebody working very part-time, but we dropped some brand exposure into it and said we need a revamp and a brand identity that's more cohesive between these 3 entities. And it's doing it, and this individual is working with it in tandem, and it's pretty neat. So I think for our profession, our accounting firm profession, there's so much more capability, like you're saying. But it's the— where do you, where do you start? Like, how do you ask? And I feel like what you said, Sharam, is you start with what is the easiest piece, right? Like, what, what's the workflow?

What, what's the result?

What Yeah, well, what do you need most help with?

Is it—

are you literally going to sit there every night and look at 50 different downloads you did for the day?

You have to get creative with it too. So I mean, you did something this morning, and I was sitting there thinking to myself, I wouldn't have thought of that. And you had taken— we have a client that's kind of difficult. And, and she took the communication between the client and, and the The team. Yeah. And ran it through and it said, this is what I see, that this client doesn't see the things the same way you are seeing it. And then said that the bookkeeper's too nice and that she needs to be more direct and firm because it's not getting anywhere. But, and it was just interesting how it read it and it, when it made suggestions on how to make improvements in it. And that's some of the things, there's so many things you can do with AI. That's just one outside of the box thing that she thought of that I'm like, oh, that That's pretty cool. Like, what, you know, communication ball got dropped in, you know, it's talking 2 different ways of speaking styles, and, and it was beautifully written.

So I think it's just the power of talking about it. Like, Shriram is telling, you know, like, I've got all of these mediums of where data is sliced and diced. How do I collectively bring it back to give me some level of certainty of like, am I seeing stuff the right way?

Yeah.

Like, saving time.

He's all about saving time for, For us.

Right? Yeah.

So it's saving time for us, which is important. We'll take that any day of the week.

Yeah. But it's the same for clients. It's the same for all of us. It's like, how do you make it relevant? And then how do you— but how do you know what you're looking at too? Because that's the other thing. We still have the issues of what it— how truthful is it? How confident is it in what it's providing us?

Yeah. So you can't trust it blindly. That's for sure.

No. You need to know what you're doing. For sure. You need to know what you're doing.

And that's like, where did you get this from? And it's like, Oh, I don't know.

Well, that would be an, oh, I don't know, AI friend.

Yeah. Yeah.

That's funny. Oh, that's so cool.

Oh my gosh. Yeah. But you know, the, the back circling back to file renaming, it reminds me of, of rules in QuickBooks, except on steroids. On steroids.

Except it works.

It works. Yeah.

It doesn't put it on uncategorized assets.

Exactly.

So I can't thank you enough for that, Sharam. I was like, When that came out, I heard harps playing and clouds in the sky, and I was like, yeah, I can sleep tonight.

You might want to hire Steve as your marketing person because he's very good at marketing for you.

He's going to have harps behind him.

It's a really cool stat.

Oh, we need to do the harps thing. Yeah, that's right.

It's exciting to see where it's going to be in the next year. I mean, start like, yeah, probably like Let's start with the most time-consuming, painful thing people do, which is like, like the, the, the downloading, the validating, the renaming, the wrapping.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Build trust and then you can start to do some of the, even build on the cooler things. You could categorizations, right? For the transactions. You can, going back to like you're delivering the P&L or the profit and loss to the clients, summarizing financial summaries based off analysis. I think the next big one for us is going to be smart intake. So like, one, we're building a form builder, but how do you, how do you make that, especially for like tax firms is probably the biggest use case.

Yeah, sure.

And this is where like the renaming and stuff also comes into play. Like dump all the tax documents, match it up with the right things on the request list, validate it, rename it, organize it into a work paper, import it into the tax system. But also like for bookkeeping firms, the onboarding piece with the forms as well. There's just so much you can do.

So where does Shahram and team see themselves? I don't know. Is it maybe 3 months, 6 months, or a year from now? Where do you— what do you see happening in your space, in your development?

I think AI is going to become a very big part of the PMs. Like, you're already seeing everyone lean into it. I just think it's how you lean into it. Like, yeah, I personally disagree with the slap AI powered and give it a really cool name. Like, Whatever. And it's like, again, it's, it's just sound— I, I like the idea of, like, demystifying it. Like, you don't have to give it a cool name and make it sound like this big thing, like AI file renaming. We could have called it Finn, your file.

Yeah.

But it's like, what does that even mean?

Yeah.

Phineas is over there hanging out.

Yeah. Yeah. We, we joke like, we're gonna, we're gonna bring back the little Clippy that you—

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

That's what I thought of. Yeah.

He thought the same.

That would be kind of cool. But I think that's gonna be a big part of it is like, it's shifting the platform from being like, we use the term system of record a lot back in the day, which is like where all the data is housed, right? Like the work, the team, the clients' data. We're helping organize and we're helping people manage the work, right?

Yeah.

And with AI, it's kind of like this is shifting not from a system of record, but to a system of action, which is Now you're actually helping people do the work, whether it's the actual client work, or it's in the deliverable work, or it's the practice management work, like the file renaming and all that admin work. So I think that's the big shift you're gonna start seeing in the next 6 months. Now, whether it works well or not, but I also think a lot of— you're gonna see like product move faster. I talked about how our output Is like 6x, and it's gonna continue to, like, continue to increase. We're barely scratching the surface. So, like, and I think it's not just gonna be us, it's gonna be a lot of the other tools out there. So I think you're gonna start seeing more feature, like, less, like, difference in features from a lot of the platforms.

Mhmm.

And I think that's where, like, the design and ease of use is gonna become more important because everyone's gonna kind of have the same features. It's how do they, how do they provide those features? How do, how do, what is the intuitive interface on those features? So I think, I think that's gonna change a little bit just because product is becoming easier and cheaper and faster.

Mhmm.

And, but for us, like, the big shift is keep making it easy to use and keep saving firms time and help deliver a better client experience. So, and this is going back to, like, product is gonna be cheap and fast. One thing we're banking on is let's not optimize as much on the The build. Let's optimize it more on— I talked about pulling data from all these different resources, from client feedback. Let's get really good at synthesizing that data and putting that to where it's not who can build the fastest, it's who can build the best.

Mhmm.

I think the people that understand what the client's needs and wants are the best are the people that are gonna build the best. So it's not optimizing on speed. Yes, you wanna do that, but it's more optimizing on insights from what people truly want in an objective way through AI for our product. It's kind of— I don't know if I answered your question. I went down a little bit.

No, no, I think you did. I mean, honestly, it's, it's, it's exciting to hear because it's, it's hard to know from our point of view, like, where product is going. You know, fear is a consolidation of apps is what's— it's kind of so like the market choice will shift. And I, We can say that in, in the legal industry, we— there's so much capacity, but I'm sure there's going to be a shift in that as well because legal has really advanced in their uses of AI in so many ways. But for our, our area, our profession, it's, it's interesting how it's been around since, what, 2022? And the adoption of it and the acceleration of it and how it's shifting and the fears behind it. It goes up and down. I think it's some, you know.

Yeah.

And honestly, it just depends on like how you utilize it and their comfort. It is, I will say, like having my son here interning for the summer. His only thing right now is accounting and AI and making things for Linda and I to use in a better way in our team. But it's shifting that mindset for that generation coming up. Because that's, that's what's gonna happen. That's what you're gonna hire for.

Oh, yeah. I think today, like, for us, like, we won't, we won't even look at a candidate if they don't have any experience with AI at this point. Like, it is, it is a must. Like, you don't have to be an expert, but like, are you using it in some capacity?

Yeah, don't be afraid of it.

Don't be afraid of it. Being open to the, like, the idea of it and being creative. Creativity, I think creativity is gonna become very, very important over these next few years because it's like you're standing at this blank chatbot. Like, what do I ask it to do? It's like a million things you could do. How do you get creative? And it's a big— I can use it the best, and the most creative are gonna be the most successful.

Well, I think it's— I just wanted to know because I feel like it's a great way to wrap up, to understand where Financial Cents is going and all the stuff that you've done. And we just keep cheering you all on because, yeah, it's an amazing group of people. And it's—

You have a great team.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

So, well, Sharam, thank you so much for being with us today. I can't tell you how much we appreciate it and all the new information you could bring in. And, you know, our podcast has grown exponentially over the last couple of years and we have such a huge audience now. I know there's a lot of people out there that'll, you know, maybe not using your software yet, but after watching this, they'll go like, okay, I'm going to make the jump now. So yeah, how do they find you? What's the best way besides just searching on the internet? I mean, what do you want them to do? Call to action here. We'll wrap it up.

Well, I was gonna say type in Financial Cents. Okay, we're done. Yeah, I mean, honestly, like, just check it out. Like, if you like it, talk to someone on our team, learn a little bit more. Like, no pressure. But, and I just, if you're not using something like us now, like, it's, there's no better time to start. So, it's, it's so important to get something in place to, like, get your systems, your processes, your workflows together, especially if you're gonna be trying to move into this AI world. I hate saying the word AI a lot because it feels like it gets overused, but, like, it is becoming very— it's becoming a necessity at this point. Yeah.

And you have a million YouTube videos that people can look at and learn from and A great informational library within Financial Cents so that, you know, there's— it's all out there, folks. So thank you again for being with us today. We really appreciate you.

Yeah, no problem. Thanks for having me.

Thank you.

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