What's New from Intuit Connect, CCH Connections, & SuiteWorld

0:14Blake Oliver: This podcast is brought to you by The Accounting Podcast.

0:30David Leary: news in the profession. I'm Blake Oliver. And I'm David Leary. And this week, we have coverage of three major industry events, Intuit Connect, NetSuite Suite World, CCH Connections, Wolters Kluwer Users Conference. We're going to talk about all the new features announced at those conferences. So much AI coming into these products. Really interesting to see the different ways these large companies are integrating AI. But first, David, let's thank our sponsors.

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2:14David Leary: And please do use those links when you check out our sponsors. It helps them know that they came from the Accounting Podcast. They love knowing that, and it really helps us. So David, let's get into our coverage of Intuit Connect and Sweet World.

2:28Blake Oliver: Yeah, so both these events overlap. So Sweet World started on October 25th, went through the 28th of October. Intuit Connect started on the 26th, went through the 28th. So you're talking about two major accounting GLs had conferences, what, half a mile away from each other, maybe less. I don't know. The strip is so deceiving how far that is, but you had two conferences going on side by side and you know obviously there's lots of announcements lots of press releases and i start going through and i'm like they all kind of sound the same so i'm going to cover both at the same time side by side so obviously ai is like the theme intuit talked about their intuitive intelligence and how they're unifying their ai layer across quickbooks into an enterprise suite and the intuitive accountant suite they basically have like a hundred skill ai agents now um and that there categorizing like 40 million transactions a month.

3:20Blake Oliver: NetSuite has something called Autonomous Suite, which is kind of their version, which they've rebranded something called NetSuite Next, which I don't even know what that is, where AI is coordinating and executing the work across your business processes. So they both have announced the suite of AI tools. Then even more similar, Intuit announced that they have an agentic books closed, which is going to be an add-on. Right now it's in a pilot for Intuit Accountant Suite. So you can upload your firm's standard operating procedures, and then it'll post the prep work. It tracks every action audit log and then leaves the accountant to supervise and approve.

3:58Blake Oliver: Well, Oracle also announced an autonomous close workspace where they're going to let agents identify and resolve accounting issues continuously through the period instead of waiting for period end. So both companies announced Agenda close.

4:13David Leary: And then, David, I want to pull up on the screen the preview screenshots of what this looks like for our audience here. This is the Intuit Accountant Suite website, and they actually have a product tour that we can go through. So as you highlight these new features, we can actually see what they look like. So for instance, we can take a look at these cross-client insights. There's a chat bot right there at the top of the screen, and you can ask any questions about your entire client portfolio. There's a chat sidebar, and you can ask about trends across your book. Here's an example. Which of my clients showed above 33 % increase in expenses last period?

5:01David Leary: It's kind of a weird question. I'm not sure I would ask exactly that type of question about my entire client portfolio, but it's interesting to know that you can do that. You can ask a question in the chatbot, in the AI, and it'll go look across your clients. And then, of course, you can get those insights back. The playbooks are interesting, David. Did you check those out? This is basically workflows to set up new clients automatically instead of from scratch. So it's like pre-built prompts.

5:33Blake Oliver: I think I saw these, and I think you're going to be able to add to these playbooks as well. That's the problem of these announcements. It's really never super clear on what you can and can't do.

5:44David Leary: Examples here are nonprofit organizations, law firms, dental practices, tech startups, general construction. And it shows you which clients fit into that. And then you can tailor exactly which settings you want. You want the pre-built chart of accounts, the policies, company settings to be the same, the templates for the books close feature, that sort of thing. And then you can push those down to the clients that you want them pushed to. And then this is the part that's really interesting, is this custom automations area. So what this looks like to me is basically these pre-built prompts that then can run on a schedule.

6:29David Leary: And we've got four examples here. We've got ready to post, which reviews matched bank feed transactions and presents them for your approval. There's invoice write-off, finds overdue invoices eligible for write-off and executes the write-off via a credit memo with your approval. Fixed asset depreciation, that identifies purchases that should be capitalized, drafts the depreciation schedule and reclassifies the entries. And then prepaid expense amortization. You can customize them and schedule them. And so this to me is like scheduled tasks in Cloud Cowork. You can run them on a regular basis. So for instance, when you customize this invoice write-off prompt, you can create the instructions.

7:17David Leary: They give you the preset instructions, but then you can customize them and you can choose the frequency. So here it's weekly at 1 p.m. on Monday. and then you can also use it in the chat at any point but i think though this might have been the

7:32Blake Oliver: intuit enterprise edition where i saw this but instead of it just being a prompt that you store and have it automatically run it looked a lot more like a zapier type situation where if this happens do this and then if this happens do this and you could kind of create a workflow automation not just a prompt. So it's interesting to, it's great, right? Like, do you really care if an agent does it or if you build an automation in QuickBooks to do it? I mean, ultimately, you kind of want the agent to go build a concrete deterministic workflow.

8:06David Leary: There's also this inbox. I don't know if you saw this, David, but like clients can ask questions and then you can respond to them inside of this inbox in Intuit Accounting Suite, which could work if all of your clients are in there using it. But I worry that it might become just yet another inbox that you have to check outside of your email. Now we've got email and Teams or Slack and we've got this inbox here. We'll have to see how well it works. You can have alerts. And then here's the one I think people are going to love, multiple tabs, which is coming soon. so you can open up multiple different clients in a single browser, work across multiple files at once.

8:49David Leary: Each client launches in a separate tab and you can toggle between them. I think that's been a big pain point. And then they've got a new support ticketing system where you can actually track them all in one place. So I thought that was nice that they've got this, you know.

9:06Blake Oliver: And these are Intuit Accountant function features, right? Yes, exactly.

9:11David Leary: on the Intuit account. Yeah. All right, so back to you, David.

9:14Blake Oliver: Back to me. So I'm going to lump the next three things together, or next four, all together at once. So let me ask you this, Blake. What is Sage historic? Why do people use Sage Intact?

9:25David Leary: Sage Intact, historically, has been really powerful for nonprofits.

9:31Blake Oliver: Nonprofits, construction, manufacturing, right? Yes.

9:34David Leary: Multi-entity, you need a multi-ledger type accounting. You've got all these transactions across different entities. and you need to allocate them, that sort of thing.

9:44Blake Oliver: Yeah, so Intuit announced the construction edition they're coming out with of QBO. Oracle announced that they're launching a construction suite agent. So they're both coming after construction. They both announced a manufacturing edition. So a quick question again about manufacturing edition. And Oracle NetSuite has a similar thing called product suite agent that's going to help you do inventory. I think Intuit even announced that their inventory features in the Intuit Enterprise equals QuickBooks Desktop now. So we might have finally, it took like 25 years, but we finally might have parity with QuickBooks Desktop.

10:21Blake Oliver: They also launched a nonprofit edition, Intuit said it's coming soon. And then Oracle launched a nonprofit suite agent. And then Oracle also launched a healthcare suite agent. Now Intuit didn't have any announcements about healthcare. But if you look at these announcements, these are both, now Sage is getting attacked from both directions. They're getting attacked from up market and down market. It's pretty big announcements. The other thing, too, is the Intuit, or I'm sorry, Intuit. Oracle launched a software suite agent that's going to help with revenue recognition, financial health, compliance, things like that.

10:58Blake Oliver: And Intuit announced they're acquiring Sequence, which is kind of a revenue management platform. So they're both kind of heading down those two paths. And then you just showed some of these things, these AI skill agents, right, that are available. Oracle announced suite skills, which they're going to have 45 pre-built business skills built into the NetSuite data, right?

11:22David Leary: So those, to me, are like, you know, cloud skills, right? It's like these predefined prompts.

11:28Blake Oliver: Like a pay bill skill. Call on. Yeah.

11:31David Leary: Yeah, inside of the app. Yeah. And then Intuit is launching a build your own agent tool, which you kind of touched on that a little bit.

11:40Blake Oliver: And then Oracle now, so now they're going to have something called Suite Agent Studio so people can build their own agents. So they're both very similar announcements across the board. And then they both announced that they're going to have conversational natural languages. Just as QuickBooks connect to Claude, Perplexity, Muse, Gemini, ChatGPT. Oracle is now gonna connect to all of these through their MCP server as well. Contract to cash, multi-entity. So Intuit announced multi-entity, multi-currency is coming soon. AI invoicing getting paid faster, enhanced sales tax from QuickBooks. Obviously Intuit really pushed the new Intuit credit card, which is really impressive.

12:23Blake Oliver: And the other one that I thought was interesting is NetSuite's launching a free platform. So yeah, for startups, it's their client NetSuite Quickstart. And this is going to be for brand new SaaS companies, because that's what happens. Like a SaaS company starts, they use QuickBooks, then they take VC money and they switch them to Oracle NetSuite. Like that's just the way that formula works. So they're hoping they can just get people on NetSuite immediately on day one, these startups. So they're launching that. obviously new to an accountant suite and their new pro partner platform as well.

13:00David Leary: And that's the pro advisor program is now gone, right? It's called pro partner. Pro partner, yeah. That was years, decades, and now it's pro partner.

13:12Blake Oliver: And then the other announcement is Oracle set on stage that all the AI features are included at no extra cost once it's turned on. But Intuit said, they did not say anything's free. Even agentic books close that they're adding. After it's pilot, it'll be a paid out on. Which kind of makes sense. I mean, for what you pay for Oracle, you better get, if you're spending$100 ,000, you better get the AI agents for free. Yeah.

13:44David Leary: It's interesting because once these companies build agents, scheduled tasks, whatever you want to call them, this repeatable prompting into the products, I wonder how they're going to control their token spend. Because if they make it free and people really take advantage of it, I think I was talking on the last episode about how out of control my Claude co-work has gotten. Because I just got obsessed with it. I started trying to teach it how to do everything that I do, all sorts of different things. And I created dozens and dozens of scheduled prompts, scheduled tasks I mean. And they're running every day, multiple times per day.

14:22David Leary: And I saw my cost just explode. On Monday or Tuesday, I would be running out of usage on my$100 a month plan. And this month, I spent like$2 ,500 on overages. And so I've really tried to get it under control now. And so if Intuit doesn't charge extra for this, I wonder how they're going to prevent their token costs. Intuit is going to charge. Oh, Intuit is going to. Oracle's not. Well, maybe that's because Oracle's like... It's already a hundred grand or whatever you're spending.

14:53Blake Oliver: Yeah. Now, the thing is, I imagine though, for Oracle though, once you have this agent working, the volume, like most, most, a lot of companies using Oracle NetSuite have massive amounts of volume. They're paying 10 ,000 bills a month. Like that volume is going to add up. You're right. For their tokens. I don't know how they're going to be able to do it.

15:10David Leary: That's the problem with these tools is that like the way the AI works is that the more information you give it, the more context you give it, the better it works. but then the more expensive it gets. So that's why all these companies are having so much trouble managing their tokens spend, because you can see the tokens getting spent. But if you don't set up these prompts the right way, and they're just running all the time, it can be really, really expensive.

15:34Blake Oliver: We talked about Ramp, right? Ramp had a week where they spent$1.2 million or something on tokens. Yeah.

15:40David Leary: All right, let's thank our next sponsor. And then after that, we'll get into coverage of CCH Connections. Canopy. Thank you for sponsoring this episode. Let me ask you something. How much of your day is actually spent doing accounting? If you're like most firm owners, 30 to 40 % of your time is eaten alive by the work around the work. We're talking chasing client documents, drafting the exact same emails over and over again, manual filing, and trying to remember what a client said on a call last Tuesday. It's an administrative tax and it's killing your profitability. That's where Canopy comes in.

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17:10Blake Oliver: All right, so we wrapped up. Sweet world. we wrapped up Intuit Connect, but now you have one more conference to cover.

17:17David Leary: CCH Connections, Wolters Kluwer, one of the three big tax prep software companies. I mean, arguably you could say two, Wolters Kluwer and Thomson Reuters, right? That's what the big firms are using. Anyone seriously doing a lot of tax work is using one of those two companies' products. And this is my first time at CCH Connections. I've always attended the conferences targeted toward cast practices, Intuit Connect, ZeroCon, or conferences like Sweet World targeted toward finance teams and some cast practices that specialize in that software. And I've never been to just a pure tax conference. Who attends this?

17:58Blake Oliver: Is it the tax partners at the big firms? Who are the attendees?

18:02David Leary: Tax and audit. A lot of tax, though, right? And actually, on the plane from Phoenix, I was sitting next to a partner at a firm. And it's not just big firms, right? It's small firms, too. I think her firm has three partners, and they're on CCH Access. And so she goes to this conference every year. It was in Orlando. They do it at the JW Marriott Grand Lakes, which is attached to the Ritz-Carlton. It's a great conference, great venue, beautiful place to be, great to take your family if you want to do that sort of thing. Really nice event. Just really well produced. And Wolters Kluwer sponsored my travel out there and my attending.

18:38David Leary: and I made a video with my partner, Question Telka. It's her first time joining me as a correspondent on the accounting podcast. We went to the general session, got to hear the updates, and then toured the showcase. And this is not the sort of conference where there's a ton of other vendors. There were a few, but it's mostly focused on the CCH products, Wolters Kluwer products. and we got to see AI in action in CCH.

19:09Blake Oliver: Like beyond a keynote or like up close?

19:11David Leary: It's real. We saw a live demo and we'll talk about it in the video. It's exciting because up to this point, we've seen a lot of action, a lot of buzz about these AI tax startups. But so far, most firms have not been adopting that tech because they're already deep in with their current tax software. And so it's not like you're going to just suddenly switch your firm off of the tax software you've been using for years and years and years that handles everything that you need it to handle for a startup that's doing something brand new and maybe doesn't even take care of all the returns that you need.

19:51David Leary: And what's interesting about this is now we're actually seeing agentic tax prep, meaning AI tax prep in, well, not exactly in the product, but integrated with the product. So I'm going to play this recap of day one at CCH Connections. We recorded this from the expo hall. They call it the showcase there. And this is me and Question Telka from Orlando. Hey, everyone. I'm Blake Oliver, co-host of the Accounting Podcast. And I'm Question Telka from our Concile Financials. We're in Orlando at CCH Connections, Wolters Kluwer's user conference, here through a partnership with Wolters Kluwer. We just came out of the opening general session and walked the showcase, and this is our field report for listeners of the Accounting Podcast.

20:42Blake Oliver: So, Blake, can you tell everyone what was the big takeaway from the keynote this morning?

20:47David Leary: Jason Marks, the CEO of Wolters Kluwer, said that the risk to your firm isn't AI. it's generic AI.

20:57Blake Oliver: What exactly does that mean?

20:59David Leary: The way I take it is I think about the AI tools that everybody's using, Claude, ChatGPT, I like to call them off-the-shelf AIs that are just trained on everything, all the knowledge of the world. They may have accounting and tax in there, but there's a lot of other stuff. And so as anyone who's used it as an accountant knows, is it gets things wrong. Oh yeah, of course, often.

21:27Blake Oliver: That's why it's so important to check everything it's doing.

21:31David Leary: And the issue with that is we have to rely on it or we want to rely on it for the work that we do, but we end up spending so much time checking it. It's exciting to be here because we've got companies like Wolters Kluwer that are now integrating AI into their products and they're doing it with that domain-specific knowledge. And so it has the authority of guidance

21:52Blake Oliver: that we need, eliminating some of the risk because it's non-generic.

21:57David Leary: And this is the first year that it's been deployed into the products. It's a very exciting time because most firms, they haven't really been able to use AI beyond just doing a bit of research.

22:10Blake Oliver: That's right.

22:11David Leary: But we're actually starting to see it doing work.

22:13Blake Oliver: So we also went to the showcase today and we got to see a demo of an agentic return prep. the entire process. Explain to everyone what it was that we actually saw.

22:26David Leary: We saw a live demo. This was not pre-recorded. This was not screenshots. And what we saw was a upload of a previous year return, a W-2, I think it was a brokerage statement, basically source documents. That wasn't a ton. We're talking about a 1040, a simple 1040 to start with. And we saw all those documents get ingested, all the extraction of the data happened, and we could see all the numbers now on the screen. Here's the current year information in a column, and then here's the previous year information. We could compare it, review it. They call that the gathering step. That's right. And then after that, we actually saw the diagnostic.

23:09David Leary: Yeah, the preparation and the diagnostic basically putting the numbers into the return beyond that there was a review component so like you said the diagnostics uh but not just that like potential issues yes

23:22Blake Oliver: with the return flags potential issues for you yeah and so then you as the reviewer can look at

23:28David Leary: those and you decide what to do with them make changes you can edit and then after that you can actually have it prepare the return and create the work paper and the PDF. And they don't have e-file yet. They're working on that. But basically soon, you'll be able to just simply e-file from this agentic tax workflow in the browser. Right now, you can go put it into CCH Access. That's right. And then file it. And then finish it from there. So what about this stood out most? at a time. I mean, it's a live demo. It took like a few minutes. Obviously, this was like a relatively easy 1040. Maybe it would take somebody 30 minutes, maybe even 15 minutes to do it.

24:10David Leary: I mean, it would take me 30 minutes. I don't know about you.

24:13Blake Oliver: Probably longer.

24:14David Leary: And I probably fat fingers some keys in there, you know, some numbers in there. But what stood out to me was that it took minutes. That's right. And so if you're like a big firm or I mean, even a small firm, if you're just doing a lot of these, hundreds of these, that really adds up.

24:28Blake Oliver: Yeah, and he made the point, one of the points that he made during the demo was that it's going to save firms a lot of time. Yes.

24:37David Leary: So what are firms going to do with this extra capacity?

24:42Blake Oliver: Are they going to give preparers more returns? Or are they going to allow tax season to be a little less taxing on their teams?

24:52David Leary: That's the big question, isn't it? Yeah. I would hope that given this awareness that we now have in the profession of burnout and stress and the need to recruit people in, the need to reduce hours, I think we all agree as a profession we need to make this a better place to work. That's right. My concern, though, is that the economics of firms will just incentivize them to... Add more returns. Add more returns, put more returns on the desks of preparers. If the firms are still billing for the compliance element and, you know, hours, and you've, like, reduced the number of hours for prep, you have to just give more returns to the preparers to keep them busy and keep them billing.

25:34David Leary: So they have to switch to some other billing model. Some other billing model, yeah.

25:40Blake Oliver: Which, you know, you've spoken about a number of times, and I think a lot of people agree with you that that's the direction that we should be moving.

25:46David Leary: And maybe this will finally force it to happen. My other concern is that we've automated the prep, or we've cut the prep down by, say, a factor of 10. What is going to happen to the reviewers? Because you can assist with it, and we saw that in the demo. We saw the review is a lot easier because you've got all these potential flags, items flagged for us, but somebody still needs to look at that return.

26:13Blake Oliver: And if you are adding, if you have this capacity add and you add more returns and you can in the preparation phase, then you still need the reviewer phase. So what's going to happen to the reviewers? Are they going to get more overwhelmed? Are they going to rely more on the output from the AI and speed through it more quickly because they're overwhelmed?

26:37David Leary: I mean, that's what would probably happen to me. I'm trying to remember my time as a manager in public accounting. And if I had more clients, I would be tempted to just take as given the AI's judgment. But then what does that do to the quality control in the firm? What does that do to our professional judgment if we're just trusting what the AI is putting out there? That's a big question.

27:01Blake Oliver: So maybe the real answer is that when they get that capacity, what they should do is use it to eliminate some of the burnout instead of adding returns.

27:12David Leary: And to do that, the firms are going to have to really think about their business models, right? They're going to have to price for the value of the work they're doing, not the time it takes. And that's a huge shift for some of the firms here. So question, one of the other bottlenecks is just gathering documents from clients. And you have a lot of experience with that. You did tax work. Yeah, tax work.

27:34Blake Oliver: And the same problem is an issue in CAS as well.

27:38David Leary: You know, the example on stage, one of the examples that Jason and Kathy highlighted was K1s. Getting, like, dozens of K1s for, say, a high net worth individual client. They were talking about, in that context, how the software just, like, reads the K1s and gathers the information, this unstructured information, and maps it into the return.

27:59Blake Oliver: That's right. Which is great, but, like, you're still getting those K1s. Like, on September 15th.

28:05David Leary: If you're lucky. If you're lucky.

28:07Blake Oliver: Maybe later.

28:08David Leary: And then you've got, what, a month to do your work.

28:11Blake Oliver: Right. So it's still limited.

28:13David Leary: So here we are. We've got like, okay, it's mid-September. That doesn't change. And we've got the deadline of like 10-15. And in between that, we're speeding up all the return prep. But all that review, you know, is like still going to happen in that month. And that's a lot of review. Yes. In 30 days. So I'm curious to see, you know, like, what does Wolters Kluwer do next with those bottlenecks? Because to really see ROI from AI as firms, there's only like two ways we can do it. And what we've been talking about is the first way, which is increased efficiency. We can speed up the process, but that doesn't actually save us money.

28:50David Leary: Unless we lay people off, that doesn't save us money. And so far, the AI is doing specific parts of the task. But I don't know if you've seen anything that can really replace the work of a tax accountant or staff accountant. No, no, definitely not. I mean, that oversight is necessary. It's hard to imagine there ever being a time, and maybe there will, where that review and that oversight and that decision-making and judgment isn't necessary and doesn't come into play. We also saw something else today that could help increase top-line revenue as well. Oh, yeah, that was exciting. It's not out yet.

29:26David Leary: so there's not much to see but I think that's where like the potential really is and that was the tax planner AI and that's interesting because there's so many firms that are doing returns but they're not doing tax planning not much of the way tax planning right on the screen in the general session we saw a list of clients and then possible like entity switches so what would happen if you change this entity from a partnership to a C-Corp.

30:00Blake Oliver: Yeah, what kind of savings would you have? And adding that level of service to your clients, you can increase your revenue substantially beyond what you are charging in preparation fees, or you roll it into a package together, which we're definitely starting to see a lot of firms do.

30:18David Leary: And then those hours that you're saving for your staff, you don't necessarily have to like load them up with a ton more work, because you add the tax planning and then you can do fewer returns and make more money.

30:31Blake Oliver: When we do that, we just make accounting that much more appealing to young people who are going into the profession, who want to balance. All right, Blake, so what is next today?

30:44David Leary: So this afternoon, I am so excited to be recording a live podcast interview with Jason Marks and Kathy Rowe. and we're going to be talking all about the product developments, what they think is going to happen with firms. And that is going to be on the Accounting Podcast feed. So if you are not subscribed, do subscribe to the Accounting Podcast and you'll get to hear it. So we saw the focus on prep, automating prep. I'm curious to see really what happens with tax planning, with the advisory component. There's so much more that tax firms could be doing with that. So I'm looking forward to that, you know, in the coming year.

31:29Blake Oliver: I'm jealous because like the one regret, I got sick this week, so I couldn't go to Vegas or I was sick last week. So it was a good idea to go to Vegas this week is I did not, I did everything through like the keynotes and press releases. And it's hard to see the product. I would have loved to go and like watch the AI take place on QuickBooks or go down to Oracle's conference and pop in there. and actually see the AI. So I'm a little jealous that you got to do that and actually see it versus here's a press release that CCH put out and that's kind of it. So a little bit jealous on that.

31:59David Leary: It's one thing to see screenshots on a website or in a press release. It's another thing to actually have the guy who's building the product there at the booth showing you it working. And you can see that it's a real product, right? We're waiting for it to process. The internet went out at one point and we had to reload. So you know it's real. Yeah. Yeah. I should also highlight they have some audit agents. Wolves Clure does audit software as well, and they have agents that are already doing this, analyzing engagement documents. So you can upload all of the documents that you're getting from the clients, and then it will organize them and review potential risks, provide risk assessment outputs, and help you as an auditor then apply your professional judgment more quickly.

32:49David Leary: they've also got a new partnership with Inscope that adds financial statement preparation to their agentic audit experience so as part of that engagement maybe you're creating some financial statements and now that can be automated more as well and I think that is everything major from CCH Connections so thanks to Wolters Kluwer for having me out there great to check it out can't wait for next year

33:15Blake Oliver: I had two other small observations about Intuit Connect. One of them, I don't know, I think Pilot Meridian did the one. So the other big, tall, huge video board in front of the ARIA, they were putting accountants on that board, the pictures of accountants. And then I also saw, I don't know if this was Intuit who did this, but at the Vegas airport, they were putting accountants. so as people are landing the planes their photo was on the big huge video boards in the vegas airport and on the strip so like that's what this should be about these conferences is like celebrating the accountants which i do feel like intuit connect got away from a little bit maybe the pendulum swinging back to to doing that and then the other thing was the keynote so intuit had zach cass he's the global ai advisor and former head of go to market at open ai and he did his keynote and to be honest, AI could have wrote his keynote.

34:07Blake Oliver: It was all like, you know, go touch grass type stuff. You know, he's not anti AI, but, but he made a funny comment to me, or at least. I thought it was hilarious. He was talking about like, did you know, you don't have to go to your bank's website to download your bank statements. AI can just go get those. And I'm just like, Jesus, QuickBooks has been doing that for a half a decade. It may be a decade already. Like, I was like, should somebody tell him, should somebody let them know? Like we've been there for a decade. We don't need AI solving problems that we already have solutions for called bank feeds.

34:36David Leary: Or maybe don't necessarily give your bank login to an AI agent at this point.

34:42Blake Oliver: Yeah, you may not want to do that either. Yeah. Yeah. It's funny how he was like, he thought that was like this big novel thing. He has no idea cloud accounting has been getting bank statements and retrieving transactions for a decade. I just thought that was a little funny.

34:56David Leary: I want to thank our next sponsor and then come back and talk about more developments in app news. First, let's thank our next sponsor, and that is OnPay. Are you tired of payroll headaches getting in the way of the client experience you want to deliver? Manual workflows creating bottlenecks, compliance nightmares, and endless support calls that go nowhere. Well, there's a better way for your team and your clients. OnPay is the payroll partner that accountants and bookkeepers actually love. Why? Because it's easy to use, packed with value, and backed by support that actually supports you. Their team gets rave reviews for being fast, expert, and actually reachable when you need them.

35:34David Leary: OnPay handles the heavy lifting. You get a dedicated onboarding coordinator who sets up worker profiles and transfers year-to-date data from previous providers, all at no extra cost. Their seamless QuickBooks and Xero integrations eliminate manual journal entries, and they support any type of business you serve. Farms, restaurants, nonprofits, you name it. OnPay can handle unique requirements without adding complexity. OnPay keeps pricing simple too. Everything your clients expect from multi-state filing to off-cycle pay runs, it's included. There are no hidden fees and no surprises. To book a demo, head over to accountingpodcast.promo.com.

36:12David Leary: That's accountingpodcast.promo.com. All right, David, here's some updates from a QuickBooks competitor, Digits. Digits has announced multi-entity support, allowing businesses and firms to place multiple legal entities under a single organization, login, subscription, payment method, and bill. Accounting firms can also group multiple entities under one client instead of having to navigate disconnected accounts, and users can switch entities without having to switch accounts. Each entity gets its own ledger, transactions, close, and tax identity. And they have partnered with Reach Reporting to create the consolidated financial statements, dashboards, budgets, and forecasts.

37:02David Leary: So David, I don't know if this sounds like Intuit Enterprise suite to you, but basically it's separate entities, separate digits entities, that then use a reporting tool to consolidate. And that's basically what IES does, right?

37:18Blake Oliver: In the same way QuickBooks people outgrow it, they get a second entity and then they have to move to Sage Intact, like we were just talking about that before. I imagine Digits is at the maturity level now where one or two clients had to leave Digits because they bought a second company and they need consolidated financials and multi-entity. And in my brain, I feel like combining two entities, multi-entity reporting in theory is probably easy for AI. So I imagine all the GLs are going to be offering multi-entity now. It doesn't make sense for them not to do it.

37:51David Leary: What's interesting is the pricing, because I think IES, the Intuit Enterprise Suite, can get a little pricey. Digits says that on the Essentialist plan, each additional entity is free for its first 250 transactions per year and then costs$35 per month. So there might be some clients where this makes a lot of sense. I'm thinking real estate. You've got an LLC for each property. 250 transactions per year is 20 a month. And if you've got a bunch of LLCs for each property, just using that example, you could potentially have all of those for free and just be paying basically one-digit subscription for your main holding entity.

38:39like that's that's interesting because digits is again they're they're digit that that means

38:46Blake Oliver: they're billing on usage right ultimately they're billing on usage and the other what's the uh performance-based billing that they announced before right until you 95 percent or whatever is of your transactions have no human involvement you don't have to pay right and so this is another variation of them improving the billing model for the software you're getting digits also

39:08David Leary: recently announced their own MCP. And this is interesting. And it's interesting compared to the way that Intuit is approaching it. So an MCP is like an API for AI. Wow, that's a lot of acronyms. It allows any AI like a chatbot, like tool like Claude or ChatGPT to plug into another app and either read or write or both. and Digits, their MCP is a write MCP. So what that means is that you can, and it's free, you could say use Claude and you can write into the Digits general ledger from Claude or from Cowork. Or wait, what's the Microsoft one? Copilot. Or ChatGPT. So it's not just read-only access.

40:03David Leary: You can update records across transactions, bills, invoices, and the chart of accounts, recategorize entries, edit fields, fix split lines, post journal entries. Agents can create code or correct bills, draft, update, or clean up invoices, add, rename, or update accounts. You could do stuff like move miscategorized Stripe fees from software to merchant fees, or identify and book missing recurring expenses.

40:34Blake Oliver: Isn't Digit supposed to be doing all this stuff automatically anyways? Like, why do I need to use a separate AI for it to go fix transactions because it didn't post correctly? I don't get it. In theory, it should just be doing this, right?

40:46David Leary: Well, because it can post things automatically. But again, if it doesn't have the context, it can only do so much. It should be wrong. Yeah, exactly. And so cleanup, there will always be cleanup, right? There will always be the need to clean up the files. Anyway, here's the difference. There's two different approaches that companies are taking with AI. We've got Digits and some of these other AI native GLs that are creating MCPs. Actually, Gusto too. I want to talk about Gusto's latest announcement because that's really interesting. They're doing an MCP also. They have one. There's opening up your database to MCP access, which gives a ton of flexibility to accountants because you can use it with any MCP-enabled AI tool.

41:30David Leary: You're not stuck in that app. Whereas Intuit seems to be taking the approach of limiting their MCP, and Xero as well. You can't do a lot with them right now. You cannot do all the stuff that Digit is saying you can do. And then if you want to do that stuff, though, you have to go into Intuit's product or Xero's product and then set up the work from there, or use the chatbots in there. I don't see that as the ideal experience because what firm is standardized across a single GL?

42:05Blake Oliver: And - A lot of them. I think that's always been, that was some of Xero's issues of getting into firms, right? Right. The firm's already standardized. Like firms are standard. They're going to maybe use two GLs at most.

42:16David Leary: But you have to then like build everything in that product. And those products, like what Intuit is building, you know, it's developing, but it's years behind where we are with Cowork. True. Or with ChatGPT's version of that, or with even Copilot. And so if I'm a power user of these AI tools, I want the MCP. And I'm going to use the GLs that give me that MCP access. If I was building a firm again, I'd be clamoring for this. So that's really interesting, and it's something that I hope that Intuit and Xero and, you know, let's like Wolters Kluwer and Thomson Reuters and all of these major software providers NetSuite will allow.

43:04Blake Oliver: Especially if you have data locked up in these old legacy systems, you want to interact with it in new ways that you can't even imagine how you do it yet.

43:12David Leary: That's right. So I mentioned Gusto. I want to talk about their MCP because that's really exciting. But first, let's go ahead and thank our final sponsor of this episode, and that is Kik. Oh, and actually that's one of the apps, one of these GLs that has an MCP.

43:34Blake Oliver: So if you're running a bookkeeping firm, you know the monthly grind. Hundreds of uncategorized transactions, manual reconciliations across every single client account, having to open each client file one by one just to check if the books are actually closed. It's exhausting and it doesn't scale. That's why Kik exists. Kik is an agentic general ledger that promotes your firm from doer to reviewer. It drafts categorizations, reconciliations and routine accounting tasks automatically for your review. It doesn't replace your judgment, it supports it. Plus every AI action is logged, reversible and fully under your control.

44:11Blake Oliver: But what really sets Kik apart is the multi-entity support. If a client has four LLCs, that one client file in Kik, that's one client file in Kik and not four. Inter-entity transactions reconcile automatically and consolidations happen right inside the system. No more rebuilding complex spreadsheets every month. You can even connect Kik directly with Cloud or ChatGPT to build custom workflows using live client data. And get this, Kik will handle the moving of all your clients from existing desktop or cloud accounting GLs, including the transaction level history. They'll even fly to your firm if you have hundreds of clients to migrate.

44:48Blake Oliver: Once they even migrated 200 clients for a firm in one day. Right now, Kik is offering 50 % off for life if you migrate 20 or more clients. To book your demo, head over to accountingpodcast.promo.com. That is accountingpodcast.promo.com.

45:03David Leary: And here's the page with the Kik MCP on their website. From doer to reviewer, Kik MCP gives you access to tools across both read and write. examples of what you can prompt. You can run a 13-week cash flow analysis for a purchase or sale decision. You can surface all category changes made by your team across clients over the last month. You can record an asset purchase, calculate depreciation, and book monthly entries. Apply a custom chart of accounts for one client across all your accounts. And even more, and they've got this use case library here where you can see examples of all sorts of things you can do.

45:45David Leary: and that's brilliant. I've talked with the founder of Kik at events and it's like you could, for a new client, grab all 12 months of bank statements, all the PDFs. You can drop them into Claude and you can connect Claude to Kik and you can say, extract all the transactions from these bank statements and categorize them. right you have claude work on the categorization with you and once you're happy with it like in a workbook import these into kick you could do that all from like claude or you could just tell

46:22Blake Oliver: claude import these in and create a profit and loss in a balance sheet like this is this like this is this weirdness we're in right now like like that's the next step for the adjunct models they're just going to do it and you won't need a gl product possibly well but it's kind of weird

46:38David Leary: Because you need something that ongoing a business owner can work in. Send invoices. Get paid. Book journal entries. Get audited. Produce financial statements. And this is why your own homebrew solution isn't going to do it, because ultimately it can't do the ongoing stuff the same way, and especially getting paid and paying people, integrated with the accounting system, with permissions and an audit trail and all that stuff. It's not going to do that. not securely. And once you actually need to generate a set of financial statements that can be audited or at least reviewed, if you want to raise money or get a loan, you're not going to be able to do that with your home brewed, cloud-built GL.

47:27David Leary: And we have a comment here in the chat from Tate. Tate says, Blake, I know you always say it's hard to make a GL. how do the open source GL stack up? And the answer is not great because the user experience is not something that's exactly prioritized when it comes to open source projects. And so it's not going to be something you can use with your clients. So you could do an open source GL maybe use that with Claude or you could create your own just do some write-up work for a client into like a Google Sheet or Excel workbook. But beyond that, right, beyond just doing that, like write up work, you know, ongoing, you need to buy something.

48:17Blake Oliver: But how do you hire somebody for your team? Like, oh, great, you know, QuickBooks, we don't use that here, we use this custom thing we built. Like you're gonna have to retrain, like people have a set of skills in the market and you have to use the apps that people have the skills in. It would be like bring something to be in and saying, I know you really know Excel, but we have our own spreadsheet. We invented use that instead. None of your skills from Excel are going to translate over. That's a challenge. You have to hire people that know how to use the software that you're using in your firm.

48:47Blake Oliver: I have a story that's a little crazy. Just kind of shows we are in this this startup AI world. Have you ever heard of Data Vault AI?

48:58David Leary: No.

48:59Blake Oliver: So they're a NASDAQ listed company. I'll read you from their website what they say they do. Data Vault AI is a leading data sciences technology company at the forefront of transforming how businesses manage, secure, and leverage their data. We own and operate globally patented, cutting-edge web 3.0 data management platforms powered by supercomputing capabilities, setting a new standard for data integrity performance across industries. And the way they describe their tools, so they lead with AI, secure with blockchain. So you can power your most valuable asset, your data, data fault applies ai to extract real intelligence from the data then tokenizes it on the blockchain to ensure trust control and long-term value creation okay you've just totally buzzworded me out man yeah exactly exactly so this company though they just had to uh they had somebody called it one of the ugliest 8ks you'll ever see they're gonna have to restate their earnings now what happened was, is they sold shares of their company to a holding company called Skylex.

50:03Blake Oliver: S-C-I-L-E-X. It's basically agreed to buy$150 million of their shares via Bitcoin. And this was in September of 2025. But somehow or another, months and months later, they discovered, oh this these coins don't exist mind you this company is the an expert in blockchain technologies right somehow so what happened is they were they basically went to move the money to a different wallet and they discovered oh these don't exist so instead of logging this this crypto this bitcoin on their balance sheet as an a payable from this other company it was somehow got listed as an asset it. So they've had to go back now and restate their last four years, the last four reports.

50:53Blake Oliver: Well, from what I can tell is it looks like a BPM was the auditor, but that didn't, they didn't discover this was discovered as somebody said, let's move this crypto to our own wallet, a different wallet. And then they discovered it doesn't actually exist like the other crypto. But this is just this, like another example of these companies in this, like, why are we letting companies pay other companies with crypto for their stock purchases and then put on the balance

51:20David Leary: sheets like this is all going to catch up to us this is the problem with the the trust layer that we take for granted the whole banking system is powered by this layer of trust because of all these regulators all of these bankers working together to create a system where when you look at a bank statement, you go online and you see the money in the account that as an accountant, as an auditor, you can trust that it's actually there. Like it's not.

51:52Blake Oliver: In theory, that matches the balance sheet.

51:54David Leary: It would be very unlikely to find, like if you actually went into a banking portal and looked on the portal at the bank balance for that not to be real. It's possible, but you know, what's going to happen is, you know, your client fabricating bank statements, The actual bank getting it wrong, well, we saw that happen with Synapse. But other than a few isolated cases, it's really rare because the banking system is trustworthy because of all this regulation. And I'm going to guess that the auditors couldn't have possibly caught this because they don't have the ability to actually verify the existence of these digital assets.

52:39David Leary: They are looking at some sort of report from the company saying that there is this Bitcoin here. But to actually verify, to audit it would require serious technical skill that auditors just don't possess. That's not our expertise, is how blockchain works and the ability to verify that Bitcoins actually exist. So this is the thing that when you create some sort of alternative payment system like blockchain to audit that, there's no regulations around it. Auditors need to be paired with regulatory bodies that also are ensuring that these assets are real.

53:26Blake Oliver: And in theory, they're experts on this. right? And they screwed it up. And it's all this creative accounting that we're seeing, you know, across all the AI stuff. It's going to catch up. It's so bad that their stock plunged 50 % in one day, and they're questioning if they can even continue as an ongoing entity now.

53:48David Leary: We've got a few comments here in the live stream I want to highlight. Boring Accountant Life says, curious how tax firms using AI protect client privacy. Is there third-party certification, or is the risk not controlled? If the same agent is looking at 100 clients, data would be mixed. And this is, of course, the issue with why tax firms have not been using a lot of AI up until now. It's because the security and the trust is essential. And that's why, finally, we're starting to see the big tax prep companies build this stuff in a secure way, the same way they build their other software. And now you can actually use it, you can trust it.

54:26David Leary: it's not some startup. We've also got Angel here who says, if you hire people that understand the accounting cycle from source documents to financial statements, then the software doesn't matter. Even better, they will be able to identify control deficiencies and improvements. I have to say, Angel, I disagree with you vehemently on this. You can understand the accounting cycle and you can understand source documents and financial statements, but the software still matters because when we use software we can trust, like something that's been around for a while, like QuickBooks or NetSuite, we are trusting the controls in the software, that the debits equal the credits, and that the financial statements we are looking at, we don't have to re-verify them from scratch.

55:22David Leary: If you are auditing something that was produced by a home-brewed general ledger, there's a lot of things that we are assuming when we look at software that's familiar that we just cannot assume anymore, and it would add a ton of work. So it's not just about hiring people that understand accounting. You would have to then hire people who can audit IT systems, and that's not what we do. Same thing as the blockchain issue here with the bitcoins. that are missing auditors are not trained to figure out if bitcoins are real it's like you know we can't take a bitcoin and bite it in our mouth to see if it's you know gold right like that's not our that's not our function that's the function of like a bank but these uh holding institutions these these crypto exchanges are not regulated like banks and then you've got clients that are just holding their own bitcoin sometimes right in a in a wallet or a cold storage or something.

56:21David Leary: And it's like, we're not able to do that. Tate says, technology is outpacing our understanding. Learning processes build business knowledge. Without that foundation, we can end up with powerful tools we cannot fully use or understand the logic behind. I want to highlight Gusto's announcements at their fall showcase, which I attended. Thank you to Gusto for bringing me out to that. I got to do an interview with Echo Zhang, who spoke on the main stage and demoed a powerful new feature. Gusto now has an MCP. Accountants and business owners can connect Gusto to Clawd, ChatGPT, and other AI tools, just like we saw with Kik or Digits.

57:06David Leary: and you can do all sorts of things in clod or in chat gpt or copilot that you used to have to go into gusto to do and it's it was so cool to see how quickly you can say add a new employee or get information about employees or you know um do all sorts of stuff i'm trying to find some examples examples here.

57:35Blake Oliver: Their examples are horrible, actually. And so did you see it do something better? The examples they give is like, ask it what my next payroll deadline is.

57:46David Leary: You can actually, okay, here's what you can do. That's kind of cool.

57:49Blake Oliver: When are my employees' birthdays? These are the questions.

57:52David Leary: You can connect it to your Gmail, and then you can go into Claude, and you can say, let's say you get the hours from a client. A lot of times they'll just email you the hours. Here's the hours for each of my employees. You can say, see the email from my client and set up the payroll in Gusto. And it'll go grab the email, get all the hours, set up the payroll in Gusto, give you the link so you can go run it. That's something that I used to do as a bookkeeper every couple weeks that would take 15, 30 minutes, maybe more, depending on the client. And what if there's missing information? I don't have it.

58:36That's really interesting.

58:38David Leary: So that interview will be coming out on the Earmark podcast this month. So stay tuned to the Earmark podcast for that. Really great examples.

58:46Blake Oliver: Now, this MCP server, can you access it through Claude and stuff, or is it only through Slack?

58:52David Leary: No, Claude. And that was a specific example that Echo did on stage.

58:57Blake Oliver: Okay, okay. So then I guess their Slack integration through it is just another chat interface through Slack instead.

59:04David Leary: It's interesting, actually. Slack is interesting because now you can connect these MCP servers to Slack, and then in a chat room shared with other people on your team, you can have a conversation with the same AI agent, which has been impossible to do up to now. It's been single user. And that's interesting. I can actually see Slack becoming a very, very powerful way to use AI agents because now multiple human team members can interact in the same channel. All right, David, we are at the top of the hour. That's pretty much all the time we have for this week. Thanks to everyone who joined us live.

59:50David Leary: subscribe on YouTube hit that notification bell icon and you can join us live and don't forget to earn free continuing professional education by listening to this episode and our back catalog go to earmark.app in your web browser or get the free earmark CPE app on the app store download it for free create your free account earn one CPE for free every week and for unlimited CPE and access to our subscriber only library of premium content subscribe for just the low price of$200 a year. It's the best deal in CPE that you can get anytime, anywhere. Stay on top of that requirement. It's the end of October as we record this the day before Halloween, and you have two months if you're on a calendar year to get your CPE done.

1:00:39David Leary: You can still do it and not have to do this all the week of Christmas and New Year's. Don't cram it in at the end. Listen to some podcasts. Listen to one every week or one every day.

1:00:52Blake Oliver: If you pace it out, you've got 60 days between now and the end of the year. You could do one hour a day and do it that way. But it's actually insane. But how many people wait until between Christmas and New Year's? We will do 10 % of our CP in that window between Christmas and New Year's. It's like spend time with your family, people. Why are you hammering out all your CP? Do it now. Get it done now.

1:01:14David Leary: I understand because I did the same thing. It's like we are so busy as accountants that finding time to do CPE, especially if you're a solo practitioner or in a small firm where you're wearing all these hats, is really difficult. And so that's why don't do it at your computer. Do it when you're out taking a walk or driving. If you're driving cross-country or, I don't know, even just a few hours for Thanksgiving or flying, listen to some podcasts. All you've got to do is listen to a podcast like this one. and listen to us drone on for an hour as you drive. But hey, it's nice, right? It's pleasant, right?

1:01:50David Leary: You're not doing anything else. And then take a quick five-question quiz at the end, and you get an hour of CPE, one CPE credit for an hour of listening. And you can knock it out, get it done. And then, yes, you can spend more time with your family if you like. But you can also just, like in previous years, say, oh, I've got to go do my CPE and go hide in your office. But you've already done it. And you can enjoy yourself. Yeah, now you can watch YouTube or play video games or, I don't know, do work if that's what you enjoy doing. This is now a life hack.

1:02:22Blake Oliver: This is a life hack. I used Earmark to give me one week of private time, me time. That's genius.

1:02:29David Leary: Thanks again to our sponsors. Thank you to Kik and OnPay and Canopy and Cloud Account and Staffing. We really appreciate you. Go check them out using those links in the show notes. Let them know you heard about them from us. god we love on pay and i'm wearing the t-shirt right here today they are so wonderful um and yeah that's all i got david see you around here next week i think we're gonna do monday because we got to catch up but yep see you next week bye

1:03:06Blake Oliver: time for the classifieds

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1:03:41Blake Oliver: Want to get the word out about your newsletter, webinar, party, Facebook group, podcast, ebook, job posting, or that fancy Excel macro you just created? Why not let the listeners of the Cloud Accounting Podcast know by running a classified ad? Hit the show notes for the link to get more info.