Automated Three-Way Reconciliation with LiveFlow

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

Welcome back to the podcast, everybody. And this week we have a friend and a guest. It's Anita from Live Flow, and we're so excited to have you here today. Uh, we actually use Live Flow, and we'll get into that a little bit, but, um, why Why don't you give us a little like intro about you and then we'll just probably just talk about all sorts of things today?

Absolutely. Thank you so much for inviting me. I'm super happy to be here as a friend and as a partner, I guess. My name is Anita. I'm one of the LifeFlow co-founders. LifeFlow essentially is the product for manual reporting automation that is widely rolling across accounting and fractional CFO firms. We met, I guess, around June, July 2023 with Sarah and Linda. And I think it was a great relationship since then. I learned a lot of things about law accounting myself, and I hope we as a team and as a product help you to make a little bit of progress with automation as well.

Yeah, most definitely. Yeah, we met— we had the great fortune of meeting at Accounting Salon.

Yeah.

Oh yeah, yeah, that's where it actually started. And that was a follow-up meeting at Scaling New Heights. So it started in May. Accountant's Salon was the one.

Sarah's only allowed to bring home one software after she goes to the accounting salon, and yours was it.

That was absolutely brilliant.

I'm glad I went. Yeah, it's a big one for us because it actually is helping us automate Well, we work with mid-market law firms, bigger ones with a lot of trust accounting, and this one is actually helping us automate the 3-way bank reconciliation. Until up to LiveFlow, it was very manual, especially with Clio, because we can't just copy and paste the data out. It doesn't line up. It comes out in a weird format. And the only way I could think to do it, I was typing them in manually, but I know sometimes you can take that client trust listing, but it doesn't always match the client trust, whatever they call that other report, the one you should use. So we ended up working with you all to figure out a way to automate those pieces, which has been— I know we mentioned it to our team and they're like, oh, I have this client, I want to do it. Oh, I have that client. Because some of them are really big and really tedious to work on.

Yeah, well, there's the product itself. What enamored me was your story and like where your background is and how did you co-found? Like, how did this come to be? How does LifeFlow come to be with an amazing woman like you as a co-founder?

Thank you. Okay, so, well, it's not just me, of course. There are 2 more co-founders on the team, my co-founder CEO Lasse and co-founder CTO Evan. It all started out of our personal pain of not understanding why there wouldn't be a solution for small and medium businesses to automate manual repetitive work that goes like in every month and sometimes even much more often. So we just decided to put together a prototype and see if the pain that we had was pretty much the same across other businesses. So before like even figuring out how this would work, we came to small businesses to understand how they do their finances. Surprisingly to us, we figured out that there was no solution in place and it would be, you know, someone who helps them If it's a very small firm, it can be like my friend's mom who does our bookkeeping, and we hope that things would work out the next day. So that was the big bulb and aha moment that it's not there, but it should be because, well, these are the ones that drive the economy and we do need to help them to make things work like big guys have it. Like, I'm talking about solutions like Anaplan and others that are much more expensive and built for corporates of this world and never for small-medium businesses. So having this raw prototype, an idea in mind, we went to Y Combinator. That happened in January 2021 to see whether it could have any legs and move anywhere. We were very lucky to be there, to be honest. One of the biggest and most impressive experiences in my life because essentially we're talking January 2021, the time of COVID Where everything is locked. You're spending your time in front of your computer. And it was such a great opportunity to connect with other founders across the world who have very big ideas and really want to change things while being locked in their own apartments. So that was a fantastic experience. Plus, we were exposed to Y Combinator's partners that are business people that have seen the growth of companies like Stripe, DoorDash, and many others. You name it, Gusta, you, I guess, know this company, Rippling, and others, right? So they have seen companies growing from an idea stage to multi-billion-dollar businesses, and they have this overview of how things might work and not work out, and they advise you on things. So that was very helpful. By the end of this 3-month acceleration period, we came out with an idea what exactly we want to build, and that's how it started. But I wouldn't say it was up and to the right, very successful, flourishing. It didn't happen. Why? I think the reason is that, first of all, we tried to work with small and medium businesses, first of all, but it was not really happening because coming back to square one, they still couldn't understand the language that we were speaking. And they would come and say, oh, this is like the financial projections. That's how we need to do things. And they still don't do it. whichever phrase we pull out, it doesn't make sense. So we started to think about people who speak the same language and just talking to them. So you would see me at the time reaching out to accountants and fractional CFOs on LinkedIn asking for feedback and advice because I just couldn't figure out the direction where it should go. And that was super helpful. So there were folks who responded, who jumped on the call and just shared that kind of feedback, what exactly they wanted it to be. And like, no one wanted at that time a baked-out solution that would be like, you know, yet another dashboard that is not flexible because you have so many businesses and use cases. You cannot build something that fits all. So the aha moment here was to build a solution for spreadsheets Because all of the finance folks would have their view of things. And if you talk about different industries, now we can talk about law specifically, it's widely different compared to other industries. Let's say P&L from QuickBooks for a franchise firm and the P&L from QuickBooks for a law firm are not the same when they look at the numbers. And the people who actually drive the value out of standard financial reports are accountants and fractional CFOs. So that's how the match happened and we started to talk to accountants and fractional CFOs more and more to deliver the product that many people see and use today, where essentially it's a platform on top of QuickBooks Online and currently Google Sheets, where you can streamline financial reports into any form and shape that makes sense to the end user, the business. And no one knows it as much as accountants do because you guys talk to them daily. You know exactly what the business needs to see which KPIs they need to track, what matters, what should be actioned. And there's no question what the value of LifeFlow is. So that's how we ended up being, I guess, loved and appreciated by accountants and forming partnerships with you guys.

Yeah, no, it's amazing because I think somewhere in our dialogue at one point was like every small business owner in some format has some sort of spreadsheet that supplements whatever data they're looking at to make sure. And this is true of accountants. It's true of anyone doing this type of work. It's like, where's the hidden spreadsheet? Because it's like, I believe what's in my report, but I need to see it like this. And you have transformed that language in a more streamlined way with these tools. And it just— and it's real time. The data is so— it's— you set the cadence for when this data comes in. So it's pretty phenomenal and amazing, I think.

Thank you.

It's funny, you had another tool that we used and we switched because— and this just goes to show how when you do have a workflow, sometimes it evolves. I mean, I know just for myself, we started counting our tools and I'm like, oh, wow. But this one in particular, because of the customization of it, Whenever you can connect something to the data and pull it out, it's so much more accurate. And the fact that it just speeds up the entire process for us, that's a win. You know, we're able to get, you know, and for our staff too, because typing things in manually opens the door for an error, picking the wrong number. And then the fact that it just— and it does the calculation. And it's also a really beautiful presentation to give to the client. So when we give them the report, it just looks so— and it's streamlined. So it's the same for every customer for us, which is really nice too. I think that's probably the biggest perks between the automation and then the fact that it saves us a ton of time.

I have a couple of questions.

Oh, you got him awake because he said you said KPI and then it woke him up.

Yeah, I know. I saw you looking at me when she said KPI.

I was like, his eyes perked up.

Yeah.

Let's go soon.

Oh, you ended up muting my friend.

Okay. So first question, 2 questions. The first one. Are the clients, are our clients able to access and create their own reports? And number 2, um, when these— I guess because I haven't worked with Live Flow, but I have listened to Sarah and Linda talk about it so much, I know I'll be pulled in there eventually. Um, is it where the format is set up? And then what happens if that's the case? What happens when something changes in QuickBooks? How does it handle those changes?

Oh, great questions. So let's take it one after another. So are clients able to access LifeFlow? Yes, totally. And I think there are different levels that you as an accountant can decide on. Of course, since LifeFlow lives in Google Sheets and the deliverables are in Google Sheets, you can share this Google Sheet with them, which will be like share this Google Sheet and give them access to it. That's one way. If your clients are a little bit more sophisticated, meaning that they understand financial reporting and they want to just drill down into some of the numbers, then you want to explicitly invite them to Liveflow. But you also don't want them to mess things up a little bit. So you can invite them as a viewer, which is a completely free seat within Liveflow where the client is able to refresh reports, as much as they want to, plus they can drill down into the underlying transactions. I say drill down because it's the term that came purely from accountants.

Yeah.

It's when you have a line item and suddenly it doesn't make sense. So the client calls you up, sends you an email saying like, I don't understand why this was categorized this way. I didn't spend this much. All sorts of things. So you say, okay, no worries, go and drill down and see the breakdown from QBO. So as far as I know, clients are not big fans of going to QBO, logging in, navigate into the report to the line item to look at the details. So we give them the simplicity of analyzing their own numbers. If they question something, right in that particular cell, just to see what exactly happened there. Another thing why people go for drill-down and clients as viewers is when you do uncategorized expenses at the end of the month and you need to get the context what exactly that was. As we know, there are so many ways to read uncategorized expenses. So yes, this is possible and it's up to you. How, how much they should know about life.

So I, I think, Steve, the way I've seen it too is it's nice when somebody— that's what they just want to see. They're not interested— to, to your question, I feel like more and more it's like, I just, I need just to see it in this pie chart or this way. As we know, uh, with our profession that we serve, they like certain bite-sized chunks, right, of validation. And then so I— it's nice because you can customize that and then give that sheet, and that's the sheet that gets updated without you having to update it manually. It's just updated in the background. So it's kind of cool. And then—

Keep them out of QuickBooks, Steve. We keep them out of QuickBooks so they don't damage anything. But then if they understand it's coming from QuickBooks, Then they're not going to say, well, maybe you typed this in wrong, because no, this came from your data. So that makes it a lot— because it stands on its own 2 feet that way, basically. If they have a question about it, we get the same questions every year. It's that time of the year where we get the, how come I have this in my account, but my bank statements equal that? I added them all up. Like, oh, really? Did you?

It's funny.

That's a good— it's a good question though that Steve has because it's just so intuitive to what we talk about as accountants and what our client— the client may not ask it the way he's saying it, but it comes out that we have to understand it that way.

And excuse me if I missed it, but is there client communication in LifeFlow?

Oh, that's a good question.

Great question. And the answer is it is not in LifeFlow, but in Sheets. So this is the output, right? And that's where we invite the client to have a conversation with us. So the way people solve it, they tag the clients in the cells they want to address, maybe to get their attention to something. It's just the environment of Sheets that you use in this case.

Google Sheets, you can have communication, you can just tag the cell and And then they get notified, like, I have a question about this. And, you know, then they can click into the sheet and then they can see the data. It's what we love about Google Sheets. It works so much better than the Microsoft product where you try to share an Excel spreadsheet. That to me doesn't seem to work real well. Maybe it does now, but when I tried to use it, I was like, this is frustrating. I couldn't get through it.

But with—

and I was so spoiled with Google Sheets. I just think that they— the way that it works is so much better. It works for us too because we're Apple people. So.

You know, that explains this part of the camp. Yeah, yeah.

She loves how we do things, huh, Anita? Like the way we are, like our— when she's talked to me, she's like, okay, that's interesting. And then, oh wait, I get it. She's like, figures out what I'm asking.

And yeah.

So what happens when you, you know, in the industry that we serve, the legal industry, sometimes they get pretty stuck on their programs that they're currently using. Like I'll use WordPerfect. Against Word as an example. Yeah, I know, I know.

Anita is too young to know what that is, I think.

Yeah, honestly, I don't know.

She doesn't know. See?

So they won't— they wouldn't be using Excel spreadsheets at all in the program, is what I'm hearing correct?

If I understood it correctly, are you saying that they're stuck in their, like, other tools? And it's very hard to pull it off.

Is Google Sheets the only platform for them to use?

Exactly. At this point. So I don't know how, Stephen, you now deliver reports to your clients. So, LifeFlow becomes super easy to implement and to use if you're already using Google Sheets and like the whole G Suite package because it's embedded and you can start from a template like the ones that Sarah and Linda built and you get the ball rolling in minutes. But what I think we're talking about is that It's very difficult to pull someone out of other things, other programs that people have been using for decades and say like, now this is a shiny new tool, come join us. It's a little bit more difficult for sure.

What about cash versus accrual accounting on the reports?

Well, both are available.

I love you right now. I'm good.

Sold.

Sold.

Where's my contract? You can get a special offer from ProperTrust.

Well, actually, so if you have a client that's just like, has, is, because we get these that are clueless about what Google is or what a Google Sheet is, you can download an Excel spreadsheet and give it to them out of Google. That's a thing you can do. Sometimes I do that just to get it into like Licio. So it's just saved. Christine, and we still leave the live report. We had a client the other day that they want— they were sharing a spreadsheet with us, and I'm in the background sending Sarah a message. We got to tell them we got to make it into a Google Sheet because we're not going to be going back to the paralegal every 2 weeks and say, can we have the spreadsheet you're using? No, we don't do that because we want to have a live fluid form. And you could tell that was a young girl, and she was like, didn't know what we were talking about. But— and then she's like, can my— but this other person in the office uses it. We'll have them go in it too. I mean, They just don't know. They don't use Google like we use Google.

Well, we do have a lot of clients that do use it. And regardless, the output— the nice thing is, is going back to the comment that you mentioned, Linda, is the output is coming from a source of data. That's your accounting ledger. It's being transformed in a way that's digestible to someone who is not. Yeah, sure, you can provide certain profit and losses and balance sheets to people and they're just They're like, okay, I, I understand what this says, but what is the true translation when you're taking the sales data? And okay, this is how many more invoices you had this month compared to the prior month, or is it how, you know, the hours needing to— like, what are the metrics that might kind of help solidify in your, your mind as an owner? Are we going in the right direction? Are we staying flat? And giving it in such a way that can be saved monthly, and that is based on that data, that live data in a different format. And it's pretty, it's beautiful. Anita, your background prior to this in the financial sector, what were you doing before this moment in your stage of life?

Yeah, absolutely. Just to put the cards on the table, I don't have any finance degree or anything like that. It all came through my experience working at a fantastic company, which is called Revolut. It's a London-based fintech that scaled tremendously. It's the biggest fintech in Europe for sure, probably the second biggest in the world after Stripe, if I'm not mistaken. It's really huge. I think the latest valuation was $33 billion. So I was lucky to join Revolut when it was going through the insane growth stage, meaning like we grew, I think, from 300 people when I joined to 2,500 when I left, and it's the period of 2 years. It was absolutely insane. And that was the place where you just learn things on the fly. I was incredibly happy to work there because I was doing business development part of the business for the product, which is called Rewards. It's now successfully launched, it's working. But at the time I joined, my role was to figure out how this would work. And I needed to talk daily to various businesses to secure the best offers For Revolut users, so just a quick context on Revolut. I just realized no one knows what that is like in the U.S. So Revolut is a essentially it's a bank. It's your card that allows you to travel and spend across the world like at home. So let's say if you now travel from the U.S. to Europe and you spend in euro or in pounds, you will not be charged currency exchange rates. So that's how it started, and it was very revolutionary for Europe because you have so many currencies across the borders and people travel a lot. So then it started. To develop like and add more products to it. And rewards was one of them to turn Revolut into your main card in the wallet. Uh, and of course it's very difficult when you fight all of the traditional banks. So that was very, very intense in terms of our growth and goals that we had. And for that rewards product, I needed to sign various businesses to provide the best offers for the users of the card, right? So I would go out and talk to Amazon and Uber and sign them. And of course, we were talking about them investing into these relationships. And I would build financial models that would make sense and then bring it back to the team and explain how this would work. And then at some point, we realized that it's not only about bringing the best offers and deals from the top brands like Uber and Amazon, but it's also going to local coffee shops downstairs and pizza places and also negotiating with them and bringing them because that's what people actually like and they love. local things. So we're talking like, when I realized that, I started to go literally door to door talking to these businesses. And I had such a terrible situation where I came to a pizza place, brought financial models, how this would work out. That's how much you need to invest. That's how the payback works. And that's your customer acquisition cost. And that's how things would work out for you if you partner up with us. And the person was like so confused with whatever I was saying. So he just literally just stood up and slammed the door. So it was really, really problematic. Yes. So that was bad because look, I didn't speak the language. I didn't quite understand that you could not bring the same financial projections and you could not use the same language for small businesses as you negotiate, let's say, with Amazon. It just doesn't work. And that kind of was the reason why I started to look deeper into it and why people don't really get it and like how we can get those over the line. And at the same time, we were working on the release of this product to other markets. And that's how I met my co-founder, Lasse, who previously ran small businesses, including coffee shops himself, and struggled with that. And we clearly saw the problem. And that's how we started interviewing people, understanding it way, way deeper. So it wasn't anywhere from our own academic background. It was more about understanding the problem and talking to people. And I think that's how we built LifeFlow right now, together with Evan, who is not an accountant or a CFO. So essentially what we do a lot, we do talk to users and that's our job every single day. So essentially it's a must for everyone within the company. to continuously talk to users to understand what they're going through. For example, it's not that we knew how law accounting works at all, but it was more about, okay, tell me which problem you want to solve and we see what we can do for you. We do believe it's possible. It's the question of how we use the live data and structure it the way that the business wants to see the end business. I'm talking about law firms, right? And you know how it happened. It wasn't that we gave you something like use it, we know it would work out. I have no idea how all the accounting works. It was more about you coming in and talking to us and continuously providing feedback and building with us so that it now has the shape that makes sense to the business. So that's how it's been happening with LifeFlow, and I think that's how we will continue rolling.

You're doing exactly what businesses do, though. You're at the heartbeat. What I love about the story is it's exactly what You don't go to school to become a dry cleaner. You don't go to school to become a coffee shop owner. You obviously had a different track, and then a passion came up, or you didn't mean to fund and turn into X, Y, and Z. So you emulate what we face in a in a lot of ways. And what I love so much about this is that it's the same, the same feat that we do is. Okay, we, we understand we're not going to walk in and, and, you know, be the attorney in the court of law. We're not even close to that. But we understand our side of it to support you. And that's exactly what you all are doing with us with this tool. And I just love the story. And I knew I was like, we have to share this because it just is exactly what small businesses are, as crazy as it is at times. It is, right? I mean, what do you think, Steve and Linda?

I—

Well, customization. I mean, this is what I'm hearing, customization and giving them the information that they need. I liked your example of the pie chart. You know, there are— our clients are very visual people. They want it quick, down and dirty, get the information, see what it is. I think that the pie charts and the different, the different ways of presenting it to them instead of just that black and white financial that they're going to glaze over and go, what does this mean? I really like that. I really like it. And it sounds like it's very customizable.

And working with our team, if you have to work— we've worked with so many different people on the team, and every single one of them are so knowledgeable, and they walk you through it. And you have a really great team of people that you work with, because every single person we had— Jan the other day, and Oh, he's on with us and he's so— he's so patient.

He was like one guy to all these females talking over each other.

We really like you.

And he's like very patiently waiting for his turn to, may I ask a question? We're like, yes, what is it?

Well, thank you. I'll make sure to pass it to the team. But yeah, I do think these people are exceptional. After some time, realized that whenever you work with customers, you do really need to understand what they're trying to communicate, whether like you have no idea or you do Like, you need to first of all listen to what they want to get solved. You can see that people working with customers have the background in finance and accounting just because it's all about, like, it's not about just, let's say, using Lifelong as a product. It's more about how do we solve the problem for the customer, and that oftentimes requires the knowledge outside of just the technology, but just more about the overarching rules of how things should be done.

Yeah, no, you also— I know for Linda and I, we were talking to you at— we were at Scaling New Heights and we were talking to you and you were asking these questions and you got interrupted. And Linda looks at me and she goes, I feel like she knows us, like the way you ask the questions. And it's just the exact same way that we have with our own clients. It's like we may not do the exact profession, but we know what we're asking and where we want it to go. And, and you then need to help design it with us in collaboration if that's where you want to drive your business to. We're here to support that. And I feel like that's just serving of the accounting community in general. So it's great to have partnerships like this that, that just—

Thank you.

Alongside of it with us. So Thank you.

If I, if I were to be a potential new client, okay, how would you sell— how would you, how would you sell LifeFlow to me to, to save my productivity, to increase my productivity?

Oh, so the first thing I would try to understand whether indeed you struggle with like manual financial reporting and it is a time-consuming exercise. So the first thing that I would do, I would not tell you more about Liveflow. I would ask you, like, what do you want to get solved? And then if there is something to get solved, I would love to talk about it. So it's never a prebuilt pitch where I come and tell you, like, okay, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, that's how things are, come buy it. It's more about how can I help you? So if you want, we can do a mock play.

Let me reach for the stars here because I'm just so intrigued. I'm glad I don't know a lot about Liveflow yet because It's really making me think about a lot of stuff.

When he sees it, I wanna tell you right now, he is gonna be like, I want this because I know Steve well enough now that he's going to see the customization piece of it. And I know you've even got— if you're not a person that's like me, I'm not like super highly skilled in making pivot tables and charts. There's templates already prebuilt so that you can actually data in and then they've already made Little KPI things, Steve, that you can go in.

I mean, I'll be in heaven. It'll be nirvana. So is there a feature in there where we could tell LifeFlow to send automatic reports like every week, every 2 weeks, every— I mean, can it just do it automatically?

Yeah, great question. I would say this is part of the flow in Google Sheets. So once the reports are set up, you can set up something which is called Notification Settings in Google Sheets. So if you go to Tools, Notification Settings, and then Edit Notifications, you can set up whenever you should be notified about the changes in the spreadsheet. So it's not live though, but it is possible.

That's awesome.

And you can see if somebody's changed the spreadsheet too. So if somebody goes in, you can go back and revert back to prior ones. Google Sheets are incredible. Like the things you can do—

So they're not locked down then?

No, no. I guess, can you lock a Google Sheet, Sarah? I'm trying to think.

Well, you lock cells and so forth, but you can go back in time.

You can, you can mess it up because you can always undo it. You can, yes. So you have the version history, that's what Linda is talking about, and roll back down to each version that was created. So I think it's the most recent update. So previously, you would just return everything that Linda has done, but it might be that Linda has been doing it for some time, and there are like milestones that you can roll back to. Like, not all of the work that she's done, but some of the parts to roll back to. So that's one thing that I really love about it. Then the second question was about locking things. So we all know that sometimes you don't want anyone to touch things that you worked on. So there are multiple ways Google figured out how people can do it. One is to completely lock the tab where you were. So for example, you invite the client, but there is like a deliverable that has a lot of hours put into it and effort, and it has like formulas and graphs. And if they come and just erase things, it's hard to understand what exactly happened unless you go back to the previous version. So you can lock the entire tab. For example, this is called a dashboard tab for the client. And you lock it, and the lock appears at the bottom, and only you can unlock it. So that's one way. Another way, when you have a dynamic sheet and you only want to lock a certain area, for example, these are the things that you need to look at, and they are dynamic, but I want you to provide the inputs here, and you color the area like in yellow for the inputs, and you call it inputs. So you can lock a certain area instead, and then They will see that when they click on this area, it says the owner, for example, Steve, of this spreadsheet locked these particular cells. And then they can work underneath in that comment area. So I think the engineers of Google did a very good job also understanding what people want to achieve with that because there are multiple scenarios how things can turn out.

Yeah.

And we have a template. We have a template for our 3-way. And what we've done is we've actually copied it, connected it to another QuickBooks file, and then we have folders that we keep it in. So, and then obviously we give it to the client. But most of the times, because it goes with our financial packet, we download it and we put it into the financial packet that the client gets inside of Alysio. We tag it so we know what year it is, what month, and all of that. And sometimes that's really helpful because if the client goes into Clio or LeanLaw or whatever and goes back and breaks something from the past, we now have something preserved for what happened. It's just we have to give it to them anyway. It's part of compliance. So it live up inside the, you know, up in Google. But it's also a good practice with the financial statements like you're pulling. I mean, obviously you can pull them out of QuickBooks at any time too, but it's just part of that workflow that we have. I think That's probably the best way to describe how we do the workflow, but it works for us. But the time savings of it's— once you've got it set up, it's literally just kind of bringing that data refreshes and you just bring that sheet in, you dump the data out of QuickBooks into Google, and then you've got the tabs and you've got the calculation. You've got a beautiful presentation for the client. It spots what's wrong. Here's what QuickBooks says. Here's what Clio says. And it's got the column. This is where it's off. And then you can see where it's off. You put the balance in for the end of the month, and you can put the transit transactions in. And it is just like a thing of beauty, Steve.

Well, that's a massive productivity time changer right there. Oh my gosh.

And we'll have to show you.

So tailored to the accounting profession on this podcast.

It is. This one is. Any attorney listening is probably like, maybe not though, if they know about the Yeah.

But the one thing I will say is I was on one of the webinars with your co-founder, one of your co-founders, or there's 3 of you. So one, I forgot which one now. But anyways, there was a CPA, and I was watching how he did this thing and this massive sheet he built with Live Flow and all the hard work. And I'm presuming it was like a joint effort the way he was talking to was obviously in collaboration with you all. And it was such an amazing way to think about within our own profession, a different way to slice and dice the information that was tailored to a whole other niche, a whole completely different profession. But it was like, oh, and I'm thinking to myself, oh, that's so cool. So we could do this and we could do this. And I'm like, my brain was like, okay, just let—

You sent it to me. She said, you have to do this.

I've been waiting for her to listen to it. But I was thinking, all right, First, let's just get this one down, get us going, and then, um, and then we go to the next one.

And we—

I mean, obviously, to your point, Anita, you said this earlier, we're not all the same. We even in the same style of business, we don't look at the data in the same way.

Mm-hmm.

We have to pull the data apart, or we use tools differently, so it presents itself differently. And QuickBooks is just the ledger hub of it coming in, and it does have these reports in it, but it's not at the level that maybe could be done so quickly and beautifully without all the skills and expertise that you would require somebody to have to build out privately for you. You just took something and made a conduit of information more sustainable and digestible for the rest of us. And I love that part of it. And there's a lot of tools out there that do a great job. We just have found it's easier for us, for our team, in the way that we work. This is a tool that actually works more in collaboration for us. So I've enjoyed it a lot.

And actually does something that the other one didn't do, which is the problem we had. So it was kind of like we had a way to do it, but this your tool solved the thing that we've been struggling with. And she came back with that, and she was all excited after being at the salon. And I, oh, I'm like, okay, all right, I'll take a look at it. And then I have a I think you came back and said, I think I have a way to make the 3-way bank reconciliation automated. I'm like, okay, I'm all in here.

Anita told you that? Yeah, based on what I was telling her, I was just describing.

Yeah, she was all excited.

Yeah. So yeah, I think that was like an hour-long conversation about, uh, law accounting. All of a sudden at a party somewhere in, uh, what was the city? Seaside, Florida. Yeah, that was like It was a very informal gathering, I would say, like, right? But we ended up going into the depth of things, and I was really curious to understand what is it that we are trying to solve. And yeah, that's how it was.

It was hilarious, Anita, if you remember. We were at the pool, engaged, totally engaged. This huge thing was going on around us, loud. At one point, you and I paused and looked back. We're like, what's going on over there? And then we continued.

Yeah, like people dancing, people drinking, and we took a low count, and that was fascinating. I think it was our first date. We were passionate.

I'm sorry, I'm sorry, that's just sad.

They were nerding out, you know Sarah.

That was so much like a therapy lesson, I would say, like something along those lines. Uh, that was good. But what I have to say, um, which is very interesting, so initially, um, I started working on this, um, deliverable to the client, the dashboard, with both of you. And it was like a light-touch version of it. And then you guys moved over to the implementation team and you worked over, I guess, several months delivering it.

Yeah.

To a completely new level. And when I looked at it again, when it became a publicly released template that is now branded as the Proper Trust template and everyone knows about it and people keep asking about it, like, you know, I made a couple of introductions to you because people want to talk to you. So it now turned into completely insane model on steroids where it's, it's first of all, very clear. Like, I think people without any background and any idea of what's going on with law accounting can figure out what's going on. So first of all, it's very clear. Second, like, it's so useful and helpful so that like anyone can say, okay, okay, that requires 3 steps. We have Clio and LeanLaw, we have bank data, we have QuickBooks data. That's how it works. There's like the left part of the equation where we make sure that every Everything equals out on one side, and then there's another side, and then there's like the third final output field where we need to see whether all of the 3 sources come to zero. So I think you, like, through this continuous feedback and through the hours of work that you put into it, you brought it to the level where it's a full-blown financial model that is incredibly helpful to businesses that work with law accountants.

That's exciting.

So with lawyers, I meant with attorneys.

Who was it that prettied it up? Because it was somebody that we had it, and then also the next time we met with you, all were like, oh, that's beautiful. I can't remember.

You mean someone on the team on our side?

Yeah, they made it so pretty.

We should have looked for you. It was Alicia, likely.

Oh, was Alicia? Yeah, I'm totally thinking because she really— she's brilliant, for one. Yes. And we What I built as a prototype for us to use as a base template, which was also just very in the lines of cleanness, but not with this flow of automation. And I kept thinking to myself, like Seth, our Seth David, our dear friend, he's like, if you're doing it redundantly, there's got to be a better way. Like, ask yourself that.

And I remember feeling that way, going, when do I But you did the one you built for us is, um, it was just because we were getting things back from our staff and they were all different. And so I was like, we have to streamline this because— and then she made it work better because a lot of times there's transactions, Steve, you can know, you know this, there's transactions that trust account, trust check goes into the, uh, operating account and you have to explain it to the client. And, and we actually have like a little Little canned pile of words on the side that we would put in that this, you know, action item, da da da da da. And it— we needed that column for those transactions that were wrong, or the client put this in, in Clio, but this is what happened at the bank. And we needed a way to explain it that they could understand it. And the way the final product ended up taking Sarah's and then kind of building off of that. And yes, she really worked with us with understanding what we were doing. It just came out so clean and pretty, and I think it's the best part is it makes it really easily interpretable by the client. Sometimes we go through with brand new clients. Sarah and I will actually pull it up on the screen, hop into a Loom video, and just explain it. So the first few times with the client, we're like, this is what you're gonna see from us. This is what these mean, and give the little backstory. Then after that, it's just a matter of giving it to them, because every month there's a lot of volume. There's a lot of things that can go wrong. And seems to be there's patterns that happen to go wrong.

Most meticulous and best. Yeah, it just happens. And it's, it's not intentional and we all know it, but it's having a data set that you can look at and understand at a global high level. What am I looking at?

Well, you know what I like from what I'm hearing here is your point, Linda, keeping them out of QuickBooks. And, and so if the error shows up on the Live Flow report, I'd rather have a client find it there than to go digging around in QuickBooks and messing everything up that's been reconciled and all of that, you know.

And breaking something. Yeah. Breaking something.

Yep.

From the past, the reconciled transaction, and they're in there and they think, I think—

How often do they, how often do they look at the QuickBooks or the Xero reports or whatever and they glaze over? Whereas what I'm hearing here when they see this beautiful report that's going to make sense to them, it's going to give them permission to ask questions.

Exactly.

Yeah.

And ask it in a way that's a little bit more digestible of the sense.

Yeah.

I looked at the number and it looked backwards to me, which is natural. Like, when you're looking at numbers sometimes in a format on a balance sheet, let's say, and you don't quite follow, like, is that wrong? Is that right? What It's not your profession. Why would you question it? But it is ours. And it's our love to like want to restate those numbers in the proper way.

That sounds really good to me. Do you know, like, what was the main value that you extracted from it? I actually never asked you, like, is it the time savings? Is it better communications? Is there anything else?

All of it.

Because Time savings for sure.

Yeah. The—

yeah, it's, it's also— it allows your brain to look at the data in a way that is more— it's almost like a little bit of a retrain. You are so used to interpreting it this way, used to doing it in such this manual mundane place that causes errors once in a while because you have to take another body out of the team to validate, did I look at this right? It's taking me 5 extra minutes to figure this out, where this extrapolates it, puts it in a space that you can easily make it repeatable, understand it. And I'm talking really high level here. So the listeners are going to be like, what is she doing? But in the end, the output is for you to challenge yourself to say, all right, I'm looking at this data. Why would this need to be? Where are these issues arising from? Maybe it was an entry that was done wrong. Maybe it was a duplicate entry. Maybe Someone made an entry in another software and forgot about it because they got interrupted, didn't take that entry out. Now it's doubled because somebody came along and put it in— the person that was supposed to put it in and put it incorrectly. And all of these things get exposed on the cadence that we want, which is a monthly cadence at the bare minimum to assist the firm to ensure that they're compliant. And it's Some jurisdictions, it's a requirement. You are required to have this. So the value to us being able to streamline all of this cut and paste and copy and rewriting and typing and duplicating, it's out now.

You automated a manual part of our workflow. You took a piece of our workflow that was very rudimentary. It was one piece that we couldn't really automate, and it automated it. And that alone speeds up time. It makes shorter time to do it, especially the bigger, bigger files. And automation always equals more accuracy. So it's only—

It challenges you, right? And it gives you a different viewpoint. So you're challenged a new way, which is actually kind of nice.

Well, you praise LifeFlow so much. It's music to my ears.

Thank you.

That's a lot.

Yeah, I've done audits.

You extracted a lot of value yourselves. Like you talked about things that I actually didn't think about, for example, helping them to be more compliant.

Exactly.

Which is very interesting. I never thought about it. But yeah, it's definitely helpful to hear feedback and understand that it actually helps you to drive things forward.

Well, you know, to Linda's point with the— or to Sarah's point with the balance sheet, and, you know, they— it makes no sense to them. However, if we can extract the data, bring it over to LifeFlow, have the client somehow approve it and initial off on it. And then 8 or 9 months from now, if we're helping them with an audit with the state regulatory agency, we can go back and say, we've got this extra step in place to help this client remain compliant. And here's where it went south. We already have it. And here's what we've done to fix it. And here's where it was fixed. I mean, this is just so invaluable for that.

Well, yeah, well, that's, that's really amazing. I mean, I didn't know about all of these things.

I've done audits. I've done audits on law firms for our state regulatory agency, and I've, you know, I've had stacks of paper and I'm digging through and I'm like, here's where it went bad and here's where it was fit. And this, I mean, this I could just walk in and go, bing, there you are. You know, I love it. And here's a pretty pie chart that shows it to you.

Or a graph chart. But I thank you for just like, literally, it's such a cool story. I love ownership stories. And like, you jump ship, but not in a way that like, it's just a supportive way. It's again, you're doing kind of what— man, what a crazy story to get slammed, you know, your door faced on a door face slam on you. And here you are pursuing and endeavoring into this like, oh, Well, that's a new way for me to do business. It's amazing.

Teachable moment, right? Teachable moment. When you walked out, you probably felt, wow, I feel like crap.

Somebody just slammed the door. That's a terrible—

not a great feeling. But it's in those times that sometimes something just switches over and you're like, I think I can do this in a different way.

So I love it. Yeah, your story is important to the whole thing too. Like you as co-founders, I feel like. important to the rest of it.

Yeah, thank you all. It's a, it's a huge pleasure to, to build this company. It's a lot of fun on the way, as long as we, you know, drive other businesses forward and hear something back. Even if it's not great, we are more than happy to hear it as well to improve the product and customer experience.

And you have a special deal for our listeners, right?

Yeah, I do. Right, so what we have here is a special offer for anyone who listens to this episode. We have a dedicated LinkedIn page, which is lifeflow.io/lowpod, where the listeners of the podcast can get 25% off LifeFlow for 3 months. This is active for the first 10 customers. You just need to have your promo code, which is PROPERTRUST, at the checkout.

Awesome. Thank you.

That's gonna be wonderful.

I wonder how everybody— you gotta at least look at it because I know sometimes you look at software and We evaluate our software and sometimes we're like, well, Ignition is one of them. I was like, well, it's expensive. That was expensive software, Ignition. But it solved the pain point that we had over and over and over again. That pain point's gone. And it's the same thing. It gets this particular one. LifeFlow fixed an issue we had where everybody was kind of doing their own thing. We kept getting these 3-way reconciliations. I'm like, that doesn't look like what we gave you as a template. And now we have it templated. And automated, and it saves our team time. The fact that they can plug it in and then they can look at it, and you know, you're taking an external software because that's what we do with, you know, LeanLaw and Clio, external to QuickBooks. And you can pull that data in, and the fact that you can look at it and it's gonna do the calculation, which is gonna bring it right to your eyeballs, what's off, and you can figure out why, and then let the client know why. That's, that's the time savings. And I can't say enough about it. And the fact that we've only kind of just started to Tap our toes in the water. We could probably do a lot more with it as we move forward into 2024.

So yeah, I'm very excited. I'm pretty sure you'll have a ton of ideas. Happy to implement them.

Awesome. Thank you. Well, Tiara, do you want to take us—

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Oh, thank you so much.

Thank you.

Yes.

Thank you.

Thanks for joining us, Steve, when you have a cold.

Oh, you bet.

You feel better?

Back to bed.