Will you be left behind?
In recent years, cloud accounting has been all the rage.For some bookkeepers, though, it has been a challenge to implement for various reasons.
Here's the thing.
If those bookkeepers aren't willing to adjust and find ways to figure it out or hire people to help them, they will eventually be out of business.
According to Senior Business Development Manager for Intuit Australia, there is hope.
You just have to block out some time and evaluate how being in the cloud can help your business then take action.
During this interview, you'll learn...
How to choose the right cloud accounting software for you
Why automation is powerful for your enterprise
Why it's important to become a digital mechanic
To find out more about Trent, visit http://trent-mclaren.strikingly.com/.
Michael Palmer: 01:11 Welcome back to The Successful Bookkeeper podcast. I am your host, Michael Palmer, and today we have a great guest all the way from down under. He is a QuickBooks online business development manager for intuit Australia where he helps bookkeepers and accountants adapt and thrive through using this disruptive age of technology that we're living in. He is an expert in cloud accounting software and assisting others by helping them save time, grow their business, improve their marketing, and attain that true freedom and work-life balance. Trent McLaren, welcome to The Successful Bookkeeper podcast.
Trent McLaren: 01:50 Ah, thanks for having me. It's a, it's great to be here and uh, yeah, looking towards getting into some good discussion.
MP: 01:57 Yeah. Well listen, I wanted you on the podcast because I actually get a lot of the content that you put out and it's very valuable on LinkedIn and started following you and so I'm really excited to have you on the show today.
TM: 02:10 Oh, good. I'm glad that's, yeah, it's all good. Uh, to hopefully make a difference, which is, you know, the reason I do what I do, so yeah. Good to hear that it reaches, uh, the Canadian part of the world. That's fantastic.
MP: 02:20 Yeah, it's a crazy world we're living in. Speaking of that technology, disruptive technology. So tell us, let the listeners know a little bit about yourself and right up to arriving at your current place of Intuit.
TM: 02:34 Yeah, sure thing. So I have been working in the eCommerce space prior to working in the accounting industry, which was all about online payments and credit card processing. And through that, it gave me a really good chance to understand the whole world, which is only getting bigger and busier, especially I know in Australia it's one of the fastest-growing markets still. Everyone's getting websites and selling online and tiptoed my Wayne dig accounting software and how that all pieces together to make things, again, easier, quicker, faster. You know why I do it by hand if you can do it by machine or what computer or however it goes. But through that, I was working with all the major accounting providers in Australia walls, those working in that eCommerce space. And then through that, that led me to my role as I senior business development manager for Intuit.
TM: 03:25 And my goal and my role is really just to help empower other bookkeepers and accountants to know what I know to adapt into this spice as easy as possible because we all know that it's really not easy to change. I have it. It's after 20 or 30 years of doing something in a particular way and then if you look at the last five years, it's been nothing but constant change, which has made it a lot harder for anyone to adjust into that. And then, yeah, so it's been a fun ride, that's for sure. It's taken me all over the world at the moment, which is amazing. Or just at a small stint in Europe a couple of weeks ago speaking yet I accountant's competence over there on similar things in innovation technology and how we moved through this phase and bring constant change in as part of Addie and I as I bookkeeper and accountant.
MP: 04:17 Fantastic. I mean that's exactly what we want to learn more about on this episode today is you know, how do, how does one start to look at this? What is the, what's the big opportunity for them and what should they be thinking about? My motto with all these things is smarter, not harder, you know, working smarter, not harder. And I think if we look at traditional wise of how we would go about doing your task die to die, whether it was bookkeeping relied or just within a small business, there's otherwise that we can do this. Whether it's a automating it through different systems, integrating systems together so they're talking to each other even when we talk and communicate with their customers is completely different to the way it was, you know, five or 10 years ago, you've got a live video, you've got Scott and Facebook messenger and Whatsapp and name.
TM: 05:10 We're going to make video conferencing and video meetings, uh, soon virtual conferences. So if you've watched anything that the goal is that Facebook is doing as well. So in terms of where to get started, I always recommend having a look internally. You know, what sort of, what problems can we solve within their business, whether that's for a customer or for our internal customers, which is their employees. As soon as you start solving those problems, whether it's, you know, getting data on time, communication, whatever it is, you actually start making a bigger difference quickly because people notice that you've solved a particular problem and you know that it's something that will actually go towards something positive. The mistake, one thing a lot of people make is they start thinking of all these great ideas or oh, let's just thought about this and let's do that, but it actually doesn't have any real impact on anything within the business or within the customer and therefore it becomes a waste of time because we could have focused those efforts on things that were more important in the short term as opposed to the longer term.
MP: 06:16 Mm. So focusing on what, what they can do in terms of their own business and as well their customers, businesses. From a technology standpoint, where do you see there being the barriers to the industry moving towards this type of technology?
TM: 06:33 A lot of its education. A lot of it's knowing, where do I start? Where do I go to get this type of information from? Or who do I know that can actually help me with this sort of line of thinking. I find that most bookkeeping, accounting communities around the world are actually really supportive of each other. So you'll find that there are people that are already leading in this space that will be willing to Ah, you know, share their knowledge, come on shows like this and talking about their experience moving from one to the other, uh, conferences and events and everything I've seen on Facebook and Twitter in the last, you know, couple of months with things like QuickBooks connect and you've got Accountex coming up as well in the US, you see a lot of these people coming together and they just, they share all this knowledge with each other.
TM: 07:14 In Australia, I talk a little bit more sometimes around, you know, what the local education systems are doing to try and help implement this sort of stuff as well because it's, again, it's a new way of thinking and not something that's been rolled out across the curriculums especially see you, I can't imagine what it's like over there either. But generally what I find is it's all very similar no matter where you go. It's based on people that are leading from the front to teach others at the moment. And we're condescending a little bit from software vendors, which is good. And then it's just trying to find how do we scale that so that everyone can have the time access to the same learning
MP: 07:59 Yeah. I think for me, what I see is being a challenge for our listeners is time is a lot of change. There's a lot out there and, and these conferences I think like your recommendation, I think that is a really good piece of advice is that you can get a lot of information and see a lot that's changing and what, how people are using things by simply going to one of these conferences and really investing your time and attention on onto what's new and, and tower, what other people are using it.
TM: 08:30 Yeah, completely agree. And spending Thomas Sod to actually implementing it afterward, as well as the important part. And I hear it all the time. A lot of people talk to me about time and um, I think one thing I'll always know with, um, with people is that it's a lot easier to make time than it is to find time cause finding times impossible because we are so busy and we can fill it up so quickly, but it's something you actually have to make time for it to happen. So for me, I try to spend at least 10% of my time every week investigating and innovating into new things that I could be doing either from my partners or just trying to help out other partners, solve their problems. Cause I know they don't have the time for it at the moment, but I couldn't just have 10% of my time. It's that I, that I prioritize and schedule that time in. So I always recommend people that even if it's one or two hours a week that you can schedule, maybe it's your Friday afternoon time because that, you know, generally towards the end of the week we're getting a bit tired anyway. And it's, yeah, raping it to the weekend, spend that time investigating and looking into other things and practices that could actually become part of your business. Um, whether that's new applications, new solutions, and systems that you can use to cite, uh, again, side more time and side more money,
TM: 09:43 two great pieces of advice, block some time and do some research and have fun with it because it, uh, it can be daunting, but there's a lot of fun and seeing what's happening and the new things that that can actually help you and save you a lot of time and energy in the future. And uh, you know, it brings up another, I guess, question or challenge, which is people's frame of mind around cloud computing in this industry and the bookkeeping industry, like maybe like five or six years ago. It looked a certain way and it's very different today. So talk a little bit about how things have moved from where they were six years ago to where they are and I say six, maybe it's five or three, whatever you want to use there. But how things are like really changing super fast and that the quality and the power of what's being done is, is remarkable.
MP: 10:33 Yeah. I mean, you know, six, seven years ago or however long it was before Claire had hit the world and you know, it's come up in pockets, you know, six, seven years ago, but now it's getting to a point where it is slowly every way. And especially within tenor, especially within Australia, the USA it's very, very, very prominent. It's changed a lot because we're not focused on doing manual data entry anymore. We're, we're focused more so on how do we get the data into the system without actually having to do anything with, you know, myself personally. So I think that means that our role is changed from, uh, if we start Chindia thinking of doe, how do I do this without doing it myself? How do I do this? By automating it, that then puts us on the right thought process to start looking into the right things.
TM: 11:21 So whether that's looking for the right apple add on that can automate that process or whether it's actually investing in having great developer relationships, people that can do coding so that you can actually building the open IPI structures because it's all based on the triggers. As soon as you figure out, and this is something I really think will start to happen over the next two years, is that people will move beyond just buying Clara counting off the shelf, which is all we do at the moment. And we use all the automation within the Clara counting. But because of the nature of the platforms that they are all open API and they've got, you know, millions of triggers within that product, people will start to trigger out different triggers and recipes that they want to put together for their small business clients. That isn't really possible within an apps or an add on space.
TM: 12:08 So what I'm really saying is that this will become more technical and more digital-focused because we're trying to figure out how do we, how do we really leverage it more? We bought the car, but how do we nail suit that car up and give it to high-performance writing as opposed to it just being a standard car. Like every other car that's on the lock. So it's becoming that digital mechanic for the accounting system and that really for all the bookkeepers can be quite scary because you have those been doing this for 20 years, 25 years or however long you didn't get into bookkeeping to become a digital mechanic, that's for sure. So it's a, it's definitely a change of skillset and I believe it's probably more along, we'll call it partnerships can you forge with those corner people to make that happen?
TM: 12:54 And a lot of people are going to be in different spaces. They, you know, within the next five years they may be retiring. So it may not matter at all. They're like, you know what, I was doing what I'm doing and we'll ride this way. There, but for other people that are newer on their journey or midway through their journey, these are the kinds of things I need to start contemplating is what kind of, okay do we want to be in the next five to 10 years? Because if they try to keep doing it the way they're doing it, they will get left behind because there will be people that will forge ahead and start looking at again, new innovative ways to manipulate the accounting systems so that they just get all this data ring and start automating and doing things faster, quicker, cheaper, more effectively, more efficiently.
MP: 13:43 Yeah, you're absolutely right. And it's, it's a great place to go because what, what happens is now that in that investment of resources can be put into things that are much higher on the value chain. So you know, the data, the data entry, making sure that it's all accurate and today, you know, they still need, you could have computers do things, but you always need somebody to a, at this stage, check and checks and balances, make sure it's all going in the right place. But that's kind of like saying, you know, do we want to spend our time making sure things are done right or do we want to spend our time knowing that they're right and then using that information to help make better business decisions grow faster, you know, have more peace of mind, whatever it is that's important to the business owners. That's the real sweet spot I think for the next five to 10 years is transitioning to, okay, we've got this data, we have lots of great tools and technology to help us do our job better and more efficiently. Let, how do we position to our owners that now we have more value than we can give them
TM: 14:45 True race. And that's exactly when you know it's shifting from calling ourselves or you know, being known as bookkeepers is data entry to a year. That trusted valued advisor. Being able to give the right advice, being able to interpret the data that's coming out of the machine and then say, hey, you know, I can see that if you adjust a few things here, you can actually be making a lot more money over the next three to six months. And they're the types of conversations that really, you know, best had with the person that spends the most time in the data. So it's not saying that we're gonna take out our eyes off of what's going on in that small business and that we just set it on autopilot. It's more that we're letting the systems do the manual labor so that we can get in there and actually articulate an analyze all the data to then interpret it, break it down and present it to the small business owners so that I can make the best decisions on how to, you know, move forward progress and in Cape growing and scaling their business or whatever it is that they're trying to achieve.
MP: 15:45 It's fantastic. So let's, let's move into another conversation around technology but in a different area, more specific area, which is practice management. And you've written a lot about this, there's a lot of disruption to come and in practice management. Can you be a little bit more specific and share with the listeners what you see coming?
TM: 16:04 Most definitely. Yeah. I'm pretty passionate about practice management at the moment. I think it's just the season that we're in here in Australia as well. But practice management is the next thing. I believe that we'll get fully disrupted by technology. And I think, you know, again, if we look at how this happened with this topic in accounting, you know, we hit our desktop products, but we'd been doing it the same way for such a long time. But now we're starting to see these applications coming in and I worry that are really challenging. What is normal for practice management systems. So we're moving away from a desktop legacy by systems and for some reason, it's still quite normal for a lot of people. They look all year. That's okay. We don't mind if it's still in a desktop legacy space because they don't actually realize the, uh, the benefits and the guidance that they'll get by having a true-cloud practice management system now across the world.
TM: 16:56 There's a couple of really good ones there. They're at the moment, whether it's something like carbon, uh, Carbon or the guys, um, at Pascal workflow I've seen theirs looks really cool. And then you've got jetpack workflow as well. Um, the, the, there's three that are really sort of tipped in oil at the moment because they, again, they plug into of the Rod. You have different accounting systems as well. So the great little systems that will work across a variety of systems. So if you've got, you know, QuickBooks and then a couple of other systems in place, it'll work across the board so you're not having to worry about these practice management systems that are only working with one type of software. And that's been the problem I think with desktop systems is that there are only efficiencies in place if you're using one particular version of one particular branded product.
TM: 17:46 And because of that, it means that it's, as we started to bring in all these cloud systems, we started having a manually crunched the data and bringing the trial balances and I was chatting with a few different accounting terms yesterday. It's like half a die to get the data from QuickBooks into their legacy, Bryce to carrying system. But then I started talking about you know, how do we move this into the cloud or how do we streamline this with a variety of different apps and ad owns and then it's becoming a minute thing, not a four and a half-hour thing.
MP: 18:16 Yeah, no it's pretty cool. It's pretty exciting. And I know that this is a big problem for a lot of the people we work with is choosing the CRM, the time management, the tracking of what's, you know, the documents, all of that. So you've given us three options for people to take a look at. What's your recommendation around people that want to move into a cloud-based practice management tool? But there are some, you've given us three options. So how do they, how do they choose, how do they make those decisions? Because there's, there's time involved in actually evaluating and then there's also a ton of time involved in implementing, and I've just speaking with someone yesterday that implemented, spent like a year implementing on one of them and it's just not working for her. So she's now got to go and find something else. It's a big problem.
TM: 19:08 Huge problem. Yeah. And it's such a big system, like a big piece of the firm or business practices as well. So I think the first thing you got to do your research, but you've got to really understand what's the most important thing for me and my business. What do we need to be able to still achieve when we move into a new system? Because you could live in a new system, it has all these bells and whistles and it's in the cloud that's fast. And you got all these other three features that you'd never had before that if you're still not delivering on the core things that you need in your business and everyone's got a different process, right? Everyone's got different key deliverables. That's the biggest thing. I'm pointing out, no one has a really systemize, every country doesn't have a system-wise why in which we all do things.
TM: 19:48 The sign is the big thing I've fallen so that, that means that every different, so mechanics and my work with, they've all got their own different process on how they want to do something. So yeah, there's no point kind of going in and saying, hi, how do you do this? Because we both gonna have differences in your firms, so you've really got to understand what are the key things we need to be able to achieve still when we moved to the new system and then start researching that with these practice management systems. If you've got a big enough team, I would recommend, you know, give that project to one person to research and on in the end and then I can then present and bring that to you if you don't have the time, if you're the owner in your business. Otherwise, if you do have the time, this comes back to what I said before, two to three hours every Friday researching and analyzing what's going on.
TM: 20:32 Maybe that's a demo with the product, with the providers you want to look at. As I said, check out the three that have mentioned that they're all quite good and doing a lot of really cool stuff in that space. But then as you've understood what they do, does that matter against your needs are, if it doesn't, then you know maybe it's not the right product for you. And then if you find they all don't fit, then maybe you need to analyze what is it that we're doing that's holding us back and how are other people getting around this because developed people that are around it and they're using it and they're doing it great. And this goes back going to say before because we don't all systemize us, structure and processes and we'll do it differently. It could actually be worth analyzing. Well, why? Why are we doing it this way? And if other people are getting different efficiency guides, that comes into our own process improvement. And structural changes.
MP: 21:27 That's great. Great advice and it just has me thinking. What I'll do is we have a private Facebook group called the successful bookkeeper and for the listeners, if you want to go there and request to join that, it's completely free. But what we'll do is we'll start a conversation with our community on technology and practice management and I'll invite you as well Trent too, to come and give some feedback and thoughts and ideas and you can share products that you're seeing as you go. Because I think a big win for people is to just ask, what are other people doing? What are, what's working for them? You've given us three great potential applications that could be valuable. There are probably hundreds of them out there. If we look to really hard a, you've narrowed it down to three good ones. That's just saved everybody a ton of time and there are probably other people out there that can share their experience with those specific products as well. So I invite everybody to go and join the successful bookkeeper group on Facebook and that'll be a great forum for everyone to share. What's working and not working. This is great. Trent, let's talk a little bit about what's the things that are coming from intuit that we should be excited about and looking for and doing more research and, and as well share any links or places that you think our listeners, bookkeepers can be going and doing more research on what your offerings are.
TM: 22:51 Yeah, of course. Definitely. So, I mean across the board if anyone was at QB connect, they would've seen a, a lot of really good content from a variety of different speakers. Vitrified specifically narrowed down, there was a session is on good Zari, uh, presented, I think it was on day two. Uh, I was watching a little bit from Twitter, by the way, so my mind Boyd's farming on when things happen or be a bit off button. Suzanne was on stage talking about what's coming and what's next in the product. And for us. Uh, there was a few things we noted on with the first one or I'll probably touch on is the deeper integrations that we are starting to now build out with some of they are chosen that partners and when we look at our chosen that partners are really is based on volume of users who are the partners that have got a lot of customers integrated with QuickBooks online and that particular product in this example it was built or command sheets, two very awesome application and businesses that we work really closely with.
TM: 23:45 And what you'll be able to say, and this is largely Judy all over the awesome work we've been doing on [inaudible] infrastructure for the last couple of years. And then we've been rebuilding it cause you're gonna think we've been around for 32 years. So we've got, we had a few older code bases but now through being able to restructure and rebuild the codebase to make it a new Trimline new code base, it means that we can have bigger integrations and bigger advantages for our users now. And this is something that we can do that some of the other platforms can't do at the moment, which is also why it's quite exciting. So deeper integrations when we meet with t sheets and build up column when integration is live, you won't actually need to leave QuickBooks to approve your time from t sheets coming in so you don't have to jump between products.
TM: 24:34 So when we start looking at deeper integrations, the main goal is how do we improve customer experience and really change that around to make it a really more delightful process. And I think the biggest thing we found is that when you're dealing with client accounting, you plugging in things from everywhere, you're having to jump into different products all the time to try and update settings or approve things or whatever it may be. So what you'll see is that we do our deep integrations and we're in Australia, we do this really well with our payroll product. We've partnered with a company called key Kai in Australia, and that payroll product sits embedded within QuickBooks online. So when you click on the employees tab, you still within the payroll solution, but you've now got this really advanced payroll system already running, operating fully in the clouds. This is something we've been doing for quite a long time, but this was something we now are showcased with t sheets and build our camp and that'll be something that'll roll out across in all the different countries as it happens.
TM: 25:30 So then that was really exciting because as I said, it's just, it's time-saving, customer experiences a lot higher than our ways will be improved and it was before and it just makes things extremely easy. The second thing, they all know that all I was most excited about, and I would say the little video on this before QA connect as well, but it was excited that we announced it to the world. There was a video that we showcased on artificial intelligence or augmented intelligence, reality. And if anyone was familiar, was a better girl that was sitting in the back of a Tesla vehicle and she had a Lyft driver or an Uber driver. If you're not familiar with Lyft, and essentially she starts talking to a phone and QB was the name of the artificial intelligence Bot built into the product in that scenario.
TM: 26:19 And essentially just starts showcasing conversation between herself and QB, her, her IRI, about her business. He Sang, you know, high of just one, this customer, can you create an invoice for thousands of dollars? Can you set the schedule and send it to the driver, put it in their calendar. Can you then tell me how much money or the amount you know, I can make on that product too. They are talking back and interacting with the lady the whole time. But it gets to a point where to be started saying, well, hey, it's, you want to improve your margin. Have you thought about changing the supplies for the recipe that you're making through the bread? So you know what you can do is if you change supplier and you gain 20% of your margin back, except you'll have to pay upfront because you've got a pie upfront and you can't afford that.
TM: 27:04 So you might need a line of credit or you might need a loan. Here are three different options that are quite amazing where I like, it's just remarkable. It's crazy and this is more important before, where are we headed next? Like that's exactly where it's headed and then get to a point where that artificial intelligence, we're not just talking about small business finances anymore, we're talking about small business operations and song. Can you organize something that happened here and make sure that the other person's caliber and schedule are fully up to date. So I envision it if anyone is an oilman or an Avengers Fein, I can imagine that being something like Jarvis, which is on Maine's artificial intelligence person, just talking, being able to talk to that person who knows everything about your business. You can stop making things happen for you within the system and you just having that intelligent community conversation and being able to share that data with again, your account and your doors and your bookkeeper.
TM: 27:58 That was part of the public, I didn't mention at the end of that story, when she starts looking at the different options for finance and credit, she says, hi, can you send that to my accountant? Can you send that to my bookkeeper to review? The bookkeeper then responds 10 seconds later, a little video saying, hi, this is what you need to do, that. That's the best option I'm recommending. And then QB then says, hi. Yep. Got It. I'll do that. I'll put it in applies to you. So this is more so what else I think at the start of the podcast is how do we do things with that? Doing it yourself, and that's where the technology is headed. That's where like that's in the next maybe two years. So, you know, within five years, what does that look like within 10 years or I can't imagine what that looks like because with all the technology and the relationships we've had so far on a little neurotic, who's likely suggesting that within the next two years, we're going to say more innovations in the technology
TM: 28:51 then we've seen in the last 10. So that's, yeah, that's crazy.
MP: 29:02 It is crazy. It's, it's an exponentially changing, which is remarkable and daunting. And I'm sure listening to you, I'm a, I'm a lover of technology and everything you're saying I'm totally getting, but I know our audience right now is cringing and literally walking to the door and locking your door and looking up the window because this is, it can be extremely daunting, but my, my request is taking a deep breath. It's all good. We're all human beings and there will be a place for all of us in this new world, I'm sure. Correct.
TM: 29:33 Oh, completely agree. And infinite for those people. If you've heard any of this and just thought, wow, this is really different. That's like I, it is different and you won't be alone. There's a lot of people that are in the same boat. When we jumped into Clara County, like, you know what, this isn't for me or this is, how can I possibly do this? And this comes back to what I said before about having engaged communities that help each other move through the process. Our roles will change regardless. It wouldn't matter if it was this industry or when we started bringing you robots in the car, manufacturing factories, our roles changed. Things changed about how we did things. I think in the next 10 or 15 years or 20 years time, 47% of the jobs that we have today will be, uh, haven't even been invented yet.
TM: 30:14 You know, there's going to be 47% new jobs out there in the world that have only been created through the new technologies that we're about to develop. So regardless of which way you look at it, and my, my advice is don't be afraid of change. Don't be afraid of like, this is really different because everything around you is going to be different regardless of the next 20 years, no matter what, whether it's this industry or any other industry. So the best thing we can do is learn how do we get through that challenge? How do we bring change and adopt change into who we are as people? Because we're about to say a heck of a lot of it in the world regardless of what we're talking about today. So we can get really good at it or we can sit back and watch it happen. There are two ways you can go.
MP: 30:58 I love it. I love it. I love what Intuit's doing with their conferences and their education tracks and you're really supporting the community and embracing this technology and it's smart business. It's smart business for everyone. So this has been great. Trent, we're going to have some links. I'd ask actually that whole story and video. If you could send Dave the link to that, I'd love to post it on our website so people could have a look at it. I don't know if it's still available, but that would be something for the listener to go and check out. We'll have all the links that Trent has been speaking about as well. Awesome. Yeah..
TM: 31:33 I think it's a, it was live-streamed on Facebook, so that's the only way I know I can talk about this cause a, they were, you know, it was live-streamed anyway, so yeah, I'll send the link through and we'll go from there. But thanks so much for having me. It's been great to talk about. I love talking about all this stuff if you can sell. So it's a, it's great to be here and being able to share with people around the world. That's what it's all about.
MP: 31:54 Well, thank you. It's very generous of you and we'll look to have your back when new changes are coming in the new year. Amazing.
TM: 32:05 Thanks, Michael. You Bet.
MP: 32: 10 That wraps another episode. Thank you for listening. If you'd like to learn more about our guest today, you can find everything in the show notes at Thesuccessfulbookkeeper.com. Please subscribe to iTunes, leave us a review. We'd love to hear from you. Until next time,
MP: 32:17 goodbye