214 SAAS Spend Reporting for your Accounting Clients

Back in my day, you would cut a check for a piece of software and then you owned it, you'd put it on your server and that was that. These days I can't get the software I want without having to hand over money month over month. Then you forget what you have and before you know it you got 50 apps all suckling away or hard earned money. Whoa. We have this problem, but our clients have this problem too. So what if as part of a reporting package or some standalone offering, we helped our clients identify the monthly recurring costs that they shouldn't be paying? Because you know just as much as I do how much money people waste by setting this stuff up and then forgetting it. And it actually goes hand in hand with like ongoing reporting cycle. So we'll talk through how to do this, how to do the reporting, how to market it and how to package it to put a big old smile on your clients faces. Let's do it. Oh, come on in. Let's save some money. What got me hot on this is a, a tool that is kind of purpose built to do this that came out recently called Talisman. If you saw the main channel video yesterday, we talked about that looks like a really slick way for tracking business SaaS spend. And honestly there's a shocking lack of tools out there to track this for you. There's a number of like mobile apps and like little consum apps that will track recurring things for you. There's a bunch of apps I found that look like they do this for you on an automated basis but all they actually are is just a little thing for you to enter in your subscriptions and it'll give you reminders and all that which maybe that's better than nothing but what I want is actually something more automated. And as I was doing some research for this episode, my plan was I'm going to give you a giant list of tools that'll do this for you. And you know what, I just straight up couldn't find them. The only tool I have on my radar that does this for businesses that isn't like some free consumer product which I don't feel great about, you know, plugging into 40 different clients. Only tool I have on my radar that does this right now is Talisman. So we'll link that in the show notes along with a bunch of other stuff we're going to talk about today and kind of some, some explore some workarounds for like how you can still get good reporting even though we've got limited tools to do this. So we're going to talk about the tech to do it, how to report it, how to market it and how to package it up to sell. So, so the way Talisman works basically get talisman.com, you connect the bank account via Plaid, just like we do everything else these days. It tracks just your SaaS spend and identifies all of the vendors total by vendor. All that notifications for when that stuff hits every single month. Like just a really nice, visually represented way of managing a full list of all your subscriptions. Because frankly like in the average accounting firm, I mean you got probably 50 plus of these things these days. And accounting firms may be a little worse than your average small business here because we're supporting a bunch of clients with varying needs. So oftentimes you'll pick up a tool that you just use with a couple of clients, but a platform to manage all this. Super useful. In fact, the best place to start is probably in house. Like get the in house stuff sorted out. Particularly if you're using this stuff, you know, for your clients. Like make sure it's going to do everything that you think it's going to do for your firm before you start selling this to other people. Because it's one thing that we're probably not paying enough attention to. Talisman is free up to 30 tracked subscriptions and up to five connected bank accounts. Beyond that it's $200 a month for up to 200 track subscriptions and 20 bank accounts. And then there's an enterprise tier beyond that. Most of my clients would probably be just fine with the free tier. Up to 30 tracked transactions. They talk quite a bit like they go pretty in depth on security and what they do with your transaction data. Uh, they say all the right things here. But as with all anytime you're picking up a cloud app, you gotta do your due diligence there, work with your IT group to make sure it's the right thing for you. So that is Talisman. Nice thing about having a dedicated tool for it is it will do some of the grunt work of identifying those recurring things for you. Not that it's a particularly onerous task to like do manually, but the other nice thing is it will give you nicely formatted looking reports so that you don't have to reinvent the wheel when it comes to figuring out what's my deliverable actually going to look like. Now what? There's another solution here if we kind of zoom out a bit to like ultimately at the firm level and in any business these days, what is the Best way to manage recurring spend. The answer is virtual cards. So virtual cards now are still wildly underused. I first started tasting the rainbow with Divi real early days. Divi, they make it super easy for you to spin up as many physical cards as you need and as many virtual cards as you need. And the beauty of having a really good web platform to do this is you can give specific users access to that card. You can put like very granular limits on that card. Like it can only ever spend 100 bucks or every month it can, it can't spend any more than 40 bucks, that sort of thing. And this opens up a lot of flexibility for how you better manage your SaaS spend. It's much better from the standpoint as opposed to like, I don't know about you. I always had those clients where they're like, yeah, we've got this card that gets shared in the office and about every six months or so we have to replace it because the information gets stolen. And it's like they just have this card bouncing around that they'll hand to somebody when they have to go out like to, you know, get some office supplies or something like that. And I'm like, man, gang, there's a better way. So Divi Ramp is the other big one here. They're both doing credit cards. I think Ramp's doing credit cards. Relay and Mercury on the banking side, they have good debit card solutions that'll get you to the same place using virtual cards. In my experience, more traditional credit cards, like your Amex, stuff like that has nowhere near as good of controls around issuing cards and putting like user specific controls on those cards. Like we were on Amex and I went to Divi and it was like, so, so, so much better. They also do a lot of smart things around. You know, the user has the app on their phone. As soon as a transaction hits, they get a notification and you can identify exactly what fields they're required to provide for every single transaction, what fields are optional. So like you know, classification notes as to what it was uploading a receipt. It will continue to pester them until they provide that thing. So it's kind of delegating that record keeping component. And then when you log in as the accountant, you can see everything there and it's there already. It's interesting, you know, Expensify sort of opened up reimbursements and the sort of paradigm of employees going out. And now we have this free, you know, reimbursement solution and they gave you a nice platform for handling that sort of thing. In many ways, I think card management platforms have made reimbursements no longer make sense. Like, the better way to manage that employee spend is by employees having cards with limits. It isolates risk from the standpoint of, like, sharing a card around. It gives, I think, a healthy amount of, like, independence to your team. You can set those thresholds with those card limits and know that they can't be abused. But if you think about reimbursements now, like, reimbursements are really creating unnecessary work as compared to cards. If you're using cards, the reimbursement isn't necessary. And the card platforms now do a really good job of record keeping and making sure that everybody involved gets you the info that they need. So from a SaaS hygiene standpoint, anytime you start up a new SaaS subscription, the best thing you can do, in my opinion these days is quickly spin up a virtual card just for that subscription and use that for that app. And if you've never used these cards before, that may sound like a lot, but you can create an unlimited number of virtual cards. And the upside of doing this now is that you can set limits on that card to what that app is supposed to charge you. So if it's a $20 a month app, set the limit to 20 bucks a month. If they increase the price down the road, it's going to break, but you'll be notified. And I probably want to know about that. I mean, if you didn't want to maybe build in some padding there. But if it's a $20 a month app, why are we plugging it into a card that has a $40,000 monthly limit? Right? So, like, that's the idea. That's why virtual cards are the better move here. And from an organizational standpoint, it also makes it easier to see, like, what's going on organizationally when you have all those cards separate. This episode is sponsored in part by tech guru Pop quiz. Your computer just except explodes right now. What do you do? A, I'm gonna go down to Costco and get to get the best deal on a new tower that I can. B, call my IT group and let them figure it out because they're the professionals. The correct answer is B, you thought there was gonna be four options. I'll be honest, when I started that, I thought there would be four options too, but I couldn't think of anymore. Gang. We talk about delegation and the stuff that you ought to be worried about and stuff that you really need to get off Your own plate IT tech. Please just stop, okay? There's professionals for this sort of thing. I don't want Tina spinning up her new Etsy shop, going out and filing her own tax return. But computers? You got computers figured out, do ya? You just don't. Okay? You just don't. Tech guru. They just work with accounting firms. You know the stupid apps we have to use. They know the great apps we get to use. They know the. Oh, the cyclical natures of our business. So they're gonna get up off your back during busy season. But yeah, no, I'm sure that you know more about how to manage it than a company that literally just has a big old team of people that just talks with accounting firms about all their tech stuff all day, all night deals with it non stop. But yeah, no, I'm sure that you know better than they do. Why am I so upset? Check out the link in the show notes to learn more. We're getting to deadline season. If you don't have a good plan for it, just book a call with them now so you got something on the calendar to force yourself to circle back to it and put together a better plan going forward. This episode is brought to you in part by Team up. Helping you recruit top Filipino accountants without any ongoing monthly fees. The difference between team up and all the other offshoring options. So Team up helps you hire staff directly. No middleman. You work directly with your new hire in the Philippines. Hire the person, not the company. Guys, gals, gang. Here's just a few reasons to hire directly. You have access to higher level talent. Makes sense. You have complete control over team culture and training. They keep 100% of what you pay them and it's a lot more affordable for you. So you can retain your team for the long term. Team up can source accountants with experience working at US or Australian firms familiar with tools like Xero, QBO and Dex. Also recruit specialist roles. Team leaders, tax specialists, administrative assistants. Thought experiment. What if you had an executive assistant for the first time? This taxi just. Just throwing it out there. What would they do? Start at that email video I did on the main channel recently. Get help with that stanky ol inbox. I digress. Team up recruits these talented folks for a flat one time fee of 4,000 US American dollars. That's it. 4K one time. Somebody at Robert Half just did a spit take. Robert Half reference. We ever gonna get Robert Half to sponsor this spot? Not anymore. And they can connect you with an affordable employer of record. If you need help with payroll and compliance once you hire that person. Big fan of hiring in the Philippines. You know, I did a bunch of that. Check out the link in the description to learn more about team up now. One super common thing we all do. I think I shared this tip a couple weeks back. We try out a new app and we don't know if we're gonna like it or not, but we have to pay for it upfront. You don't ever really come back to it, but then nine months later you realize that you just paid for that app for nine months. Product people are gonna hate me for this if that's you and you're not sure if you're gonna wanna keep it or not. Create a virtual card with one month subscript worth of money on it. So if it's $30 a month, create a virtual card and it just has 30 bucks on it. Doesn't renew every month, it just has 30 bucks on it. It'll get you in the door and you can use that app for the first month. But then obviously after a month it's going to say, hey, your, your card declined, you get a notification or something like that. And if you're still using the service, you're going to see that and you're gonna be like, okay, and I'm gonna pop in, I'm gonna fix the issue, I'm gonna change the limits on that card or add a new card or something like that. But at that point, it's now opt in for you rather than it being opt out. And like, software companies big time rely on it being opt out. They have so many just zombie users who aren't actually using the platform but are paying for it. Same thing with free trials where you have to provide a card. If you really want, you can plug in a virtual card with like an itty bitty amount of cash on it. Use that for your free trial in the event that you forget to unsubscribe before that date comes up. And gang, some of these can be brutal. Like I remember a few years back I did this with LinkedIn Premium, which I think you can only buy like by the year. At the time that was the only way to get it. And it was a lot of money. It was like, I don't know, 600 bucks or something like that. But the first 30 days were free and I was like, okay, I'm going to give this a try, but boy, do I really not want to forget to cancel this before the charge hits. The solution there virtual card with limits on it. Now our SMB clients. Like this is 200 IQ stuff. And most of our SMB clients are, oh man. I mean in the US I'm still shocked how many of my clients are like writing paper checks every single day. Which I know for folks outside the US is just absolute heresy. And, and we agree. But what this means is this is actually a great opportunity for you to get your clients onto a better platform, be it, you know, a webinar, be it the sort of thing that you put in your email newsletter. I mean heck, go swipe the transcript for this Google YouTube transcript downloader, copy paste this episode into it, get the transcript for this whole episode, put it into ChatGPT or Claude and say take the virtual card hygiene tips from the beginning of this transcript and turn it into a 500 word blog post or an outline for a webinar or a slide deck or something like that. Knock yourself out. This is something that we can really help clients with and when our clients are on more modern platforms like that, it makes it easier to support them rather than them doing all these silly in house things that we may not have access to. So when we think about managing monthly software spend, look at a tool like Talisman. I mean if you got any other tools that do this well that you've used, drop them in the comments. I would love to see that cause I'd like to find more that do the reporting and all that stuff for you. Absent a tool like Talisman, some of these virtual card platforms like, like Ramp I think does this pretty well will give you like visualizations for your SaaS spend and sort of organize that stuff for you. Both of these are better than totally manual, but totally manual honestly is still an option. Like it doesn't really require expertise. It's not going to be a particularly fun thing, but start tracking a list of those recurring items for a client. Add and remove things as they come through the feed. Somebody just has to check that each month. It's not that big of a deal. I talked on social media the other day, I mentioned like the shaming associated with manual tasks these days. Listen, I am, I'm as big automation nerd as anyone. I ran a whole podcast called Automation Town that was a fictional town of people who are super into automating. If you haven't heard it, I don't know that you should, but if you do, just start with season two. Yeah, insert comment here, Romeo. So I'm, I'm obviously an automation nerd, but manual processes totally fine and a necessity for your business. Everything cannot be Automated. But if it can't be automated, that doesn't mean it shouldn't be systematized. And that's what I, that's what I see happen a lot is people treat automations as systems and they're like, okay, we got a system for that now. It just happens automatically. But then everything else we don't make a system for. Manual systems are a lot better than no system. Humans can follow manual systems and something like this where it's a great value add to your client and we're going to get into like the money savings and how we build messaging around the real financial savings here. Something that has real value for your client that isn't a big lift thing, like someone can do it manually. The fact that it's manual is not a reason to not provide this service. So how do we report it? Like how do we package something up for the client? It could be something that you just include with financial statements. We're going to talk about the marketing and how to sell it and all that. But what does it just look like? The deliverable? Because packaging does matter. Like it needs to look like you put some thought and some effort into it for whatever reason. It makes a really big difference. Accountants can like do a, you know, Sony can pay an accountant $5,000 to do this big old tax planning thing and the deliverable will be like a two paragraph email and if they're lucky the client will get a PDF report from the tax planning software that's absolutely like awful to look at. So like it does matter how you package this stuff up and deliver it. If your financials right now just look like, you know, the financials out of QuickBooks, it's not going to be hard to meet that bar. You could format something that looks similar and just have a template in Excel where you put all of those recurring things in there. If you're using a tool like Talisman Ramp, something like that, some version of what it presents in the UI you can probably pull out and include in your reporting. So it could be part of the financial statements, but it could also make more sense for it to be a standalone deliverable that you either do monthly or maybe quarterly. Because the reality is there's going to have to be some involvement from the client here to determine are they still using these apps or not. And if you make them do this every single month, that might be a lot as opposed to on a quarterly cycle. And it doesn't, don't do everybody on like the calendar quarter cycle, just do it every three Months and do that on different months for different clients. So they're not all hitting at the same time for you. But if we make this a separate deliverable, it actually gets it off the crunch of the month end close, which, if you run an accounting practice as your single greatest, like, bottleneck, the fact that everybody wants their financials as soon as possible. So the last thing that we want is to pile more work onto, you know, the first 10 days of the month, first 15 days of the month. So it might actually make more sense to spin this out and say, do it every three months. It's not going to hold up the month end close then. And then you've got a standalone report package that goes to the client on, you know, their current average monthly SaaS spend. What makes that up? Like, what are all the apps, how long they've been paying it? Like, total lifetime spend per app. Like, this is all really good information for them that they probably are not tracking at all. Now initially I was thinking, like, do you need to bounce a form back and forth with the client to, like, get them to sign off? Like, am I actually still using this app or not? And I think I probably wouldn't do that because I don't want to put myself in the position of, like, helping to cancel these things. I probably am perfectly happy just pushing that back on them. So I want them to pay attention to the reporting that I give them and I want them to go through here. And actually maybe as part of that, ooh, here you go. Maybe as part of that reporting is actually like a worksheet that they can hand to somebody where they sign off on each of these things and they say, yes, you know, they're still using this, or they fill in, here's the number of users, that sort of thing. So that it actually becomes somebody on their side's responsibility to sign off that those things are getting used. If I just give them a report, is is somebody going to look at it and is somebody going to actually confirm that those things are being used? I want to give them a report, but maybe there's actually more of a worksheet I could also give them where somebody can cruise through real quick and make sure that those things are actively being used. They don't have too many licenses, that sort of thing. This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Accruer. If you have not heard about Accruer yet, all it does is it gives a sick, sweet new skill to your QuickBooks. All you do in a QuickBooks online description, you Type for the period, start period, end, end period. And it posts accrual entries covering that whole date range. If this is a payroll journal entry that straddles month ends, you say the work period and it will automatically post a journal entry. If it's a sales contract, an invoice for 14 months, you know how much bloody work that is. Post every single journal entry, do the recurring thing, set up a spreadsheet to tie it out. Oh, and then it changes and you go delete all those things. Accruer one word, accrue all you do, you type in the description for the period, start date, end date. You might have to have a 2 between the start date and the end date, it posts all that stuff automatically. And if you got to go back and change it later, it'll do all that too. You change the date, it'll wipe out the old ones. Update it to be correct. And then when you log into Accruer, it gives you a schedule of all of your accruals. Plop that baby in the workpaper file and you got an easy thing to tie out to. Simple as that gang made by a bunch of accountants because it was a thing that they needed. Hop over to their website to do a demo. Demos are just 20 minutes. Or skip the demo and sign up directly@accruer.com with code Jason Daily One to try for just a dollar this month. Oh my gosh. $1. Code Jason Daily 1. Do it. I'll put the link in the show notes. Go use that promo code. What do you got to lose? This episode is sponsored in part by Live Flow discussion going on online this week. Frustration with accounting ledgers and the tools not always doing what you you want them to do. And so it's like, why are all these like additional kind of ecosystem tools necessary just to augment the core app with the things that I want. And oftentimes the things that you want are gonna be very different than what anybody else wants. And this is where LifeFlow can actually be a way to customize your QuickBooks experience because it can sync out to Google Sheets just about anything that's in QuickBooks reports. So Ledger act activity specific account balances. You can lift all that information out, organize it however you want, but then give access to that Google sheet to whoever needs it, like third party stakeholders, internal users, maybe even members of your team. And then because they have a consolidations product now, obviously you can use that to, you know, consolidate and roll up related companies books. They can also use that for internal purposes. If I'm looking at a cross section of, you know, 30 beekeeping clients that I have. There's specific things that we want to monitor or benchmark. We're really like augmenting the ledger experience and kind of building whatever we want in the spreadsheet. Because Lifelo bridges all that data from QuickBooks to Google Sheets can do a one time sync, can do like a sync that continues like auto updating anytime the data inside of the accounting system changes. I've always been a, like, let me kind of build my own solution sort of guy. LifeLow could be a good way for you to do that. Learn more about LifeFlow link in the show notes now how to market it. This is like what I like about this most is that there's real money here. Like real significant money here. So I mean, just a few thoughts. This is a case where you can pick out, pick out specific success stories. Steve saved $8,000 with this service of ours. There's not very many things we do that you can actually say that about. And it makes me jealous of other types of businesses. Like this is why I think cost Seg sells so well. R and D tax credits sell so well. You can't like really say this so much about tax or tax planning because it's like, well, they're doing something dumb before or doing something wrong before. Did I really save them any money? As opposed to here we're actually like killing stuff or pointing out stuff for them to kill to save them actual cash every single month. That's real money savings. So let's highlight that in the ways that we talk about it. So could be specific customer success stories. Steve saved, you know, $400 a month. Could be the average customer saves. That would be fascinating and worth tracking. If this is like an add on and we're going to, we're going to get into next, whether it should be an add on or not. You got to track like what it's going to save people on average. And maybe you find that there actually is a really compelling average savings. Maybe you find some people are on top of it, some people aren't. And if that's the case, maybe you go more the Steve route where you're telling the stories of individual people. But if you can say it saves the average person 300 bucks a month, great. Can I charge 200 bucks for that? Like that's kind of where this is going. A third idea I had here, go backwards in time to see how much money was lost. When you find these zombie subscriptions, it's not Just what am I saving them next month? It's what have they burned in the last 18 months that they haven't been using this? That's like the real savings. Because now every single month going forward, they're not going to be spending it. So the framing here is, you know, this person or the average client wasted X dollars on whatever you want to call them, zombie software, subscript subscriptions. And cumulatively, if you go back and this may require a conversation with the client to know, like, how far back were they not actually using it. But that is a, that's a big number. So if there's a meaningful way you can use that in your marketing, that's really powerful. There's going to be situations where this pays for a big chunk of your bill. I mean, if all you're doing for someone is bookkeeping and you can't charge them a huge amount and you start saving them some money on software subscriptions, like, this could take a big old bite out of the bill. But also, and like this money talks, like whether we like it or not, the framing of this makes a big difference for people and how they process. Well, is it worth me paying for this thing? And so you should like really think about framing it this way. But also it's a big, big win just to put it on your landing page to say, this is a thing that we do to differentiate you from every other accounting firm you. I mean, it's. We talk about this a lot. The notion that they don't understand what we do, clients don't understand what we do. So they make decisions based on the aspects they do understand, which are like dumb triv things, non technical things usually. But if they go and look at 10 landing pages and they all look the same, which hopefully yours doesn't because it's more specific. But if they get to one and it says we're going to help you manage your monthly recurring software spend, they're going to be like, oh, yeah, no, I'm pretty sure I'm wasting some money there. And they're going to go to that one. Right? So this can be as simple as having it on your landing page actually, like making a meaningful difference for your firm and making your firm look smart. It's a thing that may be kind of trivial to you, but we are really looking for anything to like differentiate us and make the firm look smart. So put that on the landing page last. How do we sell it? Slash, productize it. Should this be built into all of our reporting? Maybe it should. Maybe you just make the rule and say this is part of every single engagement that we do. Maybe it's a standalone add on where you're like every three months we're going to do this analysis for you and you're going to pay us an extra 120 bucks a month, you know, for this or something like that. And if you've got an admin that can knock this out in an hour, once a quarter, like, great, you're making good money on that. Another framing for this is if you organize your services into packages, this could be great, a great way to bait somebody into the package that you want them to be in. My most revenue growth every year almost always was from renewals because when we did renewals we tried to like trend everyone toward the packages that we wanted them to be on and try to work them towards higher margin add ons. So like I've talked about with our dental clients, how we would sell like, you know, cash reporting and this whole like bank deposit reconciliation thing that was a problem specific to dentists. These are both really high margin services for us because we're building a team in the Philippines. Our offshore team could handle pretty much all this stuff for us. But they were very specific to the business owner problems that were really painful. And so, I mean, we wouldn't start doing these services for the client unless they were going to pay another, you know, 500 bucks a month minimum. So these were high margin things for us. And it was during renewal time that we usually had these conversations about getting them to a package that we liked better. And working this recurring like software subscription reporting into a package may be a great way to bait them into that. And it's all about framing. Like if you're aware of the fact that they're, they're not managing this stuff very well or if, you know, your average client saves a couple hundred bucks a month from this and you can say, hey, I want to get you up to this package. It's going to be X cost. But the average client saves Y from us doing this reporting for them. It's all about, you know, the perceived value when they see those packages side by side. And this could be a great carrot to get them to a new service level because it's a thing that they want and maybe you would sell it to them separately. But in my experience they oftentimes aren't going to ask if I just put up a couple of different packages. And I'm like, Steve, I think you would really benefit from going to this package this year. And it Includes this and this is why this is going to be helpful for you. It may not even ultimately cost you anything more out of pocket because we're going to be on top of your software spend better. They're usually going to be like cool. Yep, appreciate that. Appreciate you actually thinking about something that would make sense for me and that's why I like this reporting is it's like it's founded in money and real cash that you can help people save. You may be able to make the same arguments for helping people get onto modern, modern card management platforms. Like there could be a similar argument to be made there where you teach them like proper card management hygiene and they're saving money either through managing software spend either through not having cards get stolen by maybe saving the business owner a pile of time because he can give team members like limited cards in ways that he, he or she couldn't have done before. But when you can bring it back to cold hard cash like that always sells like people can get excited about that. Even people who I don't know aren't like money fixated or whatever. Like there's a reason that that stuff sells and that like money stuff is always clickbait and people will engage with it. There's an element of, I don't know, I guess found money to it and so people will just be happy to pay for it. If you can show that there's a good likelihood it's going to save money and maybe it's as simple as that, we are actually saving money, people money by doing this. If you've had experience doing this sort of reporting or got a tool that you like for it, please drop that stuff in the comments so that we can all benefit from from it. I mentioned Talisman which I will link in the show notes. I'll link the other card card platforms we linked as well down there. But if you got any other like cool solutions for managing recurring software spend would love to see it because this would be a cool thing to sell on an accounting firm. I don't know that I've ever actually I've seen anybody do this in the wild like sell that reporting. So if you get any helpful tips there, be sure to share. I'll see you in the next one.