technology is disrupting the profession, but for the better.
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the disruptors
with liz farr for 卡塔尔世界杯常规比赛时间
the silver lining of the pandemic is that it forced accountants to move to the cloud and to develop distributed labor models, changes that are here to stay, hitendra patil, author of client accounting services: the definitive success guide, tells cpa trendines in the latest episode of the disruptors.
more: mike whitmire: re-think your hiring and training practices | hector garcia: success strategies of a quickbooks youtube superstar | blake oliver: why tax work yearns to be free| private equity explodes in u.k. | brannon poe: the status quo must go | accounting nerds, unlock your super powers | disruptor: jason statts shakes up the status quo | think small to think big with matt wilkinson | when financial statements go extinct with corey schmidt | can geraldine carter save accountants from themselves? | re-inventing accounting with tyler anderson
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we can’t fight the rapid technological changes – we can only leverage them to provide better service and insights to our clients, patil says.
pro members always get all nine top takeaways, patil’s bona fides, and the full transcript.
technology puts advisory services within the financial reach of more small business owners, he adds. but the superpower accountants still have is the ability to connect our client’s goals and aspirations with what’s happening in accounting. it enables conversations on a higher level – instead of pestering them for bank statements and receipts, we can ask about trends we see in the financials.
nine more takeaways from hitendra patil:
- the silver lining of the pandemic is that it forced accountants to move to the cloud sooner than previously possible: migration that would have taken three years happened in a matter of months, patil says.
- a good side effect of the distributed model is that firms with clients in multiple states can service those clients better when they have staff in different time zones.
- because accounting is still among the 20 or 30 most profitable professions, the incentive to change must come from within the profession.
- without technology, growth is very, very hard. you can’t do things manually and expect to be profitable and growing. if you’re spending a lot of time processing the work, you don’t have time to think about your clients’ businesses.
- technology puts advisory services within the financial reach of more small businesses. the time and money those small businesses save because of accounting technology mean they can afford the advisory and oversight that an accountant can provide on the books as well as on the business.
- one thing that software cannot do is connect your clients’ goals and aspirations to what’s happening in accounting. technology enables higher-level conversations. instead of asking clients for bank statements or receipts, you can ask about trends in sales or inventory levels.
- make your staff more competent on a wider scale so that they can all answer questions, whether a five-minute phone call or a two-minute email. don’t force all questions to come through the bottleneck of the partner. the longer your clients wait to get questions answered, the less they will want to ask you questions.
- look at all your processes and question everything. is it benefiting the client? is it benefiting the firm? ruthlessly cut down steps in every process that you can if it’s not adding value to your firm and your clients.
more about hitendra patil
hitendra r. patil is the author of “the definitive success guide to client accounting services (cas),” establishing him as one of the profession’s leading experts on cas strategies and implementations.
patil has been named by accounting today as one of the top 100 most influential people in accounting. he is among the top 10 accounting influencers to follow on social media and on the top 100 accounting social media leaderboard. he is a regularly published author in many leading publications in the united states accounting profession. he parted ways with accountantsworld where he served as head of customer success after uk-based iris acquired it.
his previous best-seller, accountaneur: the entrepreneurial accountant, has been bought by accountants in 12 countries across four continents. patil frequently provides fresh, actionable insights to the accounting profession about cas, practice growth, entrepreneurship in accounting, and emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, blockchain, and cybersecurity.
patil’s frequent contributions to 卡塔尔世界杯常规比赛时间 can be found here.
transcript
(transcripts are made available as soon as possible. they are not fully edited for grammar or spelling.)
liz farr
welcome to accounting disrupter conversations. i’m your host, liz farr from 卡塔尔世界杯常规比赛时间. and in this series i’m going to be talking to thought leaders, consultants and other changemakers in the accounting world. some may be well known to you some you may have never heard of but these are all people have interesting ideas about how to move accounting into the future. my guest today is hitendra patil, head of customer success at accountantsworld by iris, and author of two books and cpa trend lines. welcome to the show hitendra. how are you today?
hitendra patil
thank you for having me here. liz. i’m doing great. and looking forward to very great discussion with you today.
liz farr
thank you so much. all right. well, let’s jump in. now accounting talent in the us has been really scarce for years, and covid made it worse. what are your ideas on how to make things better? and what have you seen firms do successfully?
hitendra patil
you know, interestingly, liz, when the pandemic started somewhere in march of 2020, everything looked so uncertain out there, including the world profession, how things are going to go, what’s going to happen, the government was coming up, or planning to come up with those ppp loans and whatnot. and we were getting really, really worried about accountants, because we’ve been working only with accountants. so their business, possibly suffering from the pandemic was always a big concern. and it was all hazy picture. but we actually saw their accountants became more busy, especially with the government help, and there were obviously processes around it. and they wanted to get their clients, you know, out of the woods and make sure they survive. so accountants became actually more busy in the initial few months, i believe that actually created a better bond between the accountants and their clients. and the typical thing that accountants like to talk about that they’re the most trusted advisors in that first four or five months period that was truer than ever before, accountants being the most trusted advisors. so that was good that the tax season tax deadlines were postponed a bit. so they were busier for longer period. and we did find after that really, you know, things coming to a different perspective altogether with this work from home, picking up as the trend, people moving out of the bigger cities going towards lower cost, towns and cities. and fortunately, the pandemic also forced quite a few firms from desktop to cloud. there was no other way to operate. so that was the silver lining of the cloud that actually made the current work world very much possible in the accounting profession. so it’s more like a distributed thing. many firms did go from being in the office to virtually on the cloud, work from anywhere. and with the reluctance of staff to come back to offices to some extent, that made it possible actually, for the firms, to develop those business models to work virtually across different geographical locations, even. so the accountants did adjust to the scenario pretty fast, from what we would have expected right at the beginning of the pandemic. so from that angle, it’s all good. cloud definitely as the more i spoke with the different people in the industry, more or less, i got this pretty different and pretty unique, but a common perspective that maybe the profession graduated to cloud three years faster, which means what would have taken x number of years now, the firm’s to go into the cloud, maybe three years, that happened within months. so from that angle, it was really, really good. from the staffing point of view, there has been more flexibility in the way the firms try to manage their practices, whether forced or adapted, or, you know, by welcoming those kinds of changes. accountants did make that shift. and i’ve always seen accountants adapt to situations much quicker than possibly other professionals. so from all of that, i don’t see much of a problem really, but distributed working or virtual working is something that is here to stay, and firms need to adapt. i still see some firms trying to sell ok let’s come back to offices and things like that. that’s that’s going to be a long journey, i guess.
liz farr
it’s gonna be tough. and and i’d like what you said about firms moving to the cloud in just three months, is i remember reading a mckinsey research article some time ago, that said that that was the case across all companies that everybody moved to the cloud. the, you know, in times that they thought were, there was something like 20% of the time that they anticipated earlier that they thought it would take five years, they did it in one year or less. so i think that’s all good. and, and i do agree that remote work is here to stay. you know, i’ve been working at home for years, and i can’t imagine ever going back to an office.
hitendra patil
yeah. and, you know, for accounting firms, typically, that kind of grow a little regionally, even nationally, not the big firms are kind of mid-sized. even the smaller firms, they have clients in 20 states, 25 states, for them, this is become actually a positive thing. because if you have staff in different time zones, you’re able to service those clients a little better. so that’s like all the good side effects.
liz farr
yeah, yeah, you can really play the timezones. yeah. it really works. now, until recently, the business model for accounting firms really hadn’t changed. they’re still billing by the hour, they were still using these pyramidal organizational structures with just a few of the top and a whole lot down at the bottom. but we’re beginning to see a few changes. what kind of changes are you seeing?
hitendra patil
good question, liz, i do see that the moment of pricing by the hour changing, but it’s a little deeper than that. from a client perspective, or the accounting firms customers perspective, bringing in price predictability, or consistency is a good thing. that’s where we see the packaging happening, fixed fees happening. three different levels of services coming in, you know, depending upon how much work a firm does for the clients. so for clients, it’s great. you sign up a contract. you know exactly how much you’re going to pay the end of the month. there is no surprise. there is no real questioning, why did it take so much time? it’s not just time, it’s expertise also it’s experience also right. but at the same time, it poses a challenge in terms of how do you predict your profitability in a reasonable way, which means your costs may be still calculated based on the hours that you put in. you still might have some timesheets in the office, or if your model is matured enough. so you kind of know, okay, yeah. so we’re almost there. our formula is working, we don’t really need to maintain timesheets, but we will take a look at how profitable we are every period, maybe it’s a monthly thing. and if we see deviations, then we go back and look into, hey, are we doing something that’s increasing our cost, so that that shift towards predictable billing, coupled with the measurements based on time, was definitely there. and it still is there, if some firm is predominantly hourly charges basis, and they want to graduate towards this for some time, they will still have to maintain? how much time are they taking to produce the work. tracking time is not necessarily a great measurement of the work value, because you hire let’s say, a new staff and you’re training that person for six months. and during those six months, that person is taking double the time to produce the same work or the same quality of work. you’re not supposed to be you know, really billing that to a client, right? so those kinds of things, but this is maturing pretty fast, fixed fee has come across as the topmost thing, right.
is it growing? is it expanding? is it shrinking? is it really going going into a more inventory for example, this is going to cause you more work, for example. so you can only see that in three to six months time as a firm. so that’s why the initial period flexibility in pricing even if you pitch fixed fee pricing. that seems to be the trend that’s happening. and one key thing that has happened because of all of this, and also because technology’s moved really, really fast in the last few years, is there are plenty of efficiency gaining technologies now. so the work that you would have done by hand, or would have taken you more time or was complex, is now being done by integrated technology. it’s not necessarily from the same software company, multiple softwares across the cloud, from different companies are able to integrate with each other, which means data, once created, can be reused in different solutions, all of those things are really helping drive the efficiencies, and provide more time to accountants to really apply their minds. now, that’s the key accountants are professionally educated differently than their clients. and they’re the experts, accountants have the experts to apply those minds, the more time they get to apply that knowledge into client situations, the better it is in terms of delivering the value. so from that angle, the business model does seem to be changing. accountants seem to be upgrading towards more value driven, value delivering, advisory kind of services. so that’s definitely changing is i do see you even smaller firms asking how do i provide advisory? what should i do? you know, earlier, you will possibly, you know, get those questions from little bigger size firms.
liz farr
yeah, you know, i’m, i’m very happy to see people moving away from just charging by the hour. and even when i worked in public accounting, they didn’t really actually always charge by the time, the the bills that the clients got were not always completely correlated to the time. sometimes there would be big write ups, sometimes big write downs, because that was what the partner or the manager felt the work was really worth to the client. and over an audit, it really didn’t make any sense to track time because these projects are going out on a flat fee basis. so why why do we need to track time in the first place? it just didn’t make any sense to me.
hitendra patil
that is true. and again, it all boils down to the profitability of the firm. and if the overall profitability has been good enough, then it becomes a reason not to change. only when it starts hurting us oh, my god, we got to do something different.
liz farr
yeah, and until until now, you know, and really continuing accountants are really still making a good living billing by the hour and using their old billing practices. it still is working, it’s still a very lucrative profession for many.
hitendra patil
yeah, i do believe it’s one of the top 20 or top 30 most profitable professions in the country even today. which also means the incentive to change comes from within, not from external triggers, you know?
liz farr
yes. now, what about growth? are there different strategies for growth for a one person practice versus a multi partner practice
hitendra patil
it depends on what you’ve chosen to be your focus in terms of niches or the services that you offer, for example, big large, firm audit heavy, would have different motivations and practices for growth versus smaller firms. but the smaller the firm, the lesser the resource that you have in terms of time as well. and that’s where your limit comes into, know where you’re growing. so obviously, you want to grow into more profitable niches. so even if you do the same amount of work, for example, if you’re making a little more in terms of profit percentage, that’s where you should look at. so that’s just a basic fundamental thing to look at. but as you try to grow, technology becomes a huge component of your growth, enabling, you know, policy or practice. without that it’s very, very hard. you can’t do things manually and be expect to be profitable and expect to be growing because again, you’ve got to spend a lot of time processing the work, and then you don’t have time to apply mind on to the businesses of your clients. so i personally see more and more firms going into niches for example, construction, physicians, hospitality and things like that. and that’s, that’s logical and natural as well, because the more you work for, let’s say, a construction types of companies, the more they talk in that network, they talk, hey, i have this problem. and i don’t know what to do. they say, oh, my accountant is great on that i never had that problem. who is your accountant, right? so you get those referrals in those niches slowly and surely. so even if you take all sorts of clients, or if you find that you’re more working more towards some industries that are coming to you, it’s natural, you’re doing something good out there, that’s kind of spreading around even without you knowing about it. so that’s another thing that you definitely want to see. client accounting services has become a rage now in terms of popularity and people wanting to do it. because now suddenly, many firms recognize that, you know, the time consuming work of processing transactions is now moved towards technology more and more every passing day. so that becomes an easier thing to do. it’s not expensive to implement those technologies at all. your profitability actually increases, the more you implement those automation and integrate technologies. so it actually becomes a level playing field. plus, the bigger thing is, the client,s the businesses, especially after the pandemic, now it’s two years almost. and they have to focus on their business, they cannot do too much of admin and accounting work. plus, they also know now that, look, technologies are there, the firm of my accountant and keeps everything, i can just log in and see every time i can get notifications. so they know they don’t have to keep accounting in house, the more they recognize that the more they want accountants to do that work. so that’s definitely going to happen even next two years now, pandemic has really taken a dip in terms of the business survival guide. and you know, the chances every business person has to focus on his or her craft, and let accountants do their work. so that’s another thing that’s really driving business towards accountants, i would say.
liz farr
i remember when i was at quickbooks connect in 2019, this would have been fall just before the pandemic, i heard that only three out of every 10 small businesses is connected to an accountant. so that tells me that there’s a huge need and so much need for accountants to reach out and work with these small businesses, who really, they should be focusing on their business and not trying to keep the books.
hitendra patil
that’s right. yeah, so let’s say the the numbers, let’s say, there are 12 million, 15,, i don’t know what that real number is, small businesses. now, the small the words call itself will have small, medium, large, even then they’ll be called small. for for business, to be able to afford an accountant’s professional input in their businesses, i think that’s where the challenge comes in. and if it’s a really, really small business, in accounting, charging x number of dollars, and if that fee goes beyond certain percentage of the total revenue, then the business starts thinking, oh, my god, i’m not making so much profit. so how do i afford this. but then that’s where technology comes into picture, a lot of automation, a lot of, you know, the work that needs to be done, for example, 10 years ago, i remember anybody wanted to do books from the bills, invoices, you know, all the paper, it will definitely take time for entry now that all of that information can get exchanged between software’s. so which means the time and money that a small business is saving because of technology. from there, they can definitely afford some of the advisory or some of the oversight that that an accountant can provide on the books as well as on the business. so that’s definitely going to change going forward. the business market for accountants for sure, in just in terms of sheer numbers of clients that they can service within the same resources. you know, we have this classic example at our company, and especially in the payroll side. you know, some three years ago, somebody comes to us and now with two full time payroll staff members processing, let’s say 98 to be precise payroll clients, the same two staff members now process 400 plus payroll client. that’s a lot of efficiency gains, and that’s because the software’s are becoming more powerful more and more intelligent, more intuitive to work with. and all of that is available for you to really go and leverage out there. all that you need to do is try that out. in fact, i remember one of our clients from i think south carolina or north carolina, one of those. so he has an experimental capital, meaning out of the total revenue that the firm earns, he puts 1% aside, just to experiment with software every year.
liz farr
good for that person. yeah, that’s, that’s really what you got to do. there is so much out there that you’ve got to just try it. and there are so many different possibilities. you know, it used to just be quickbooks or nothing, quickbooks desktop, or almost nothing. and now we’ve got accountantsworld, we’ve got xero, we’ve got, you know, everybody is trying to be a bookkeeping service, even the banks are getting in on it. so there’s so many things. now, it used to be that to be good in accounting, you had to be really good with a 10 key. or you had to keep the irs code in your head. but that’s changed today, because all of that is in our computers at our fingertips. so what skills do accountants need to be successful in the future?
hitendra patil
you know, you make an interesting point, liz, i’ve been saying this for quite some time. now, the more the software’s evolved in the profession, the more the knowledge goes inside those lines of code, and the software has tax calculation, very complex tax calculations can happen pretty easily. but obviously, those are related to several applicable tax laws, that an accountant would kind of, you know, have years of study about, keep updating himself or herself, and then kind of connect the dots, those dots are getting detected by the software. so as time goes by, you will also see more and more such complex things going inside the software, software, that’s why are becoming knowledgeable and intelligent. and you can only leverage this and you can’t fight it, clearly. it’s all there for you to make your business bigger if you’re an accountant. so from that perspective, the work that an accountant does day in day out, that also shifted to something else or is shifting to something else. for example, if more and more focus was, let’s say 10-20 years ago was get the data from somewhere, receive, process and produce the outcome to deliver so that you charge your client, right? now that is that has changed, receiving and processing has been reduced by quite a bit of percentage. and now you’re looking at the data that’s kind of semi processed, and you kind of give the finishing touches and then you apply your mind, even analytics is going into the software. so if you’re doing the same analysis day in day out for different types of clients, the software’s kind of learn that and give you that in on a platter in terms of whatever reports, you have more intelligent reports. but the one thing that doesn’t really happen, the software cannot really do is how do you connect your clients goals, aspirations to what’s happening in the accounting profession for that you got to talk to that client. and human beings are complex people. so in terms of what all goes in the minds, right. so for example, if somebody wants to grow the business, they know that this is great business, there’s profitability, i want to grow in five different locations, or in the same locations, i want to do more marketing, i know, the trend is changing, i want to invest in inventory right now, because it’s cheaper so that i can produce more later and make profit. there’s so many things calculations going on the heads of these business owners. and that’s where you’re connecting the decisions made by the business owners or not made to the numbers that came to be because of those decisions are not made or made. now, that is a very interpersonal skills kind of conversation to have a skill to have. and at the same time, keep that focus on the business to connect these dots between, you know, the heads of your clients, and what accounting insight is showing you. that’s that’s hard to move to technology. so maybe 10 years, 15 years down the line, something will happen. but even now, next few years, even if ai comes in, i personally feel that’s not easy to really do. and that’s where your most trusted adviser thing comes into picture. you already have that leverage with your clients. and instead of having discussions around data information, hey, you didn’t send me your, the bank statements, you didn’t send me invoices, all that operational stuff can give way to hey, you know, let’s look at this thing you know, you, you made three consistent months of profit, and the next three months have gone down and i see your inventories increase. why did you buy so much? you know, those kinds of real business making decisions, you know, those are the ones those are the discussions that accountants will have. so in other words, not just communication skills and interpersonal skills, but also looking at things. from your customer’s point of view, if you were that business person, how would you manage that business based on the financials and accounting information? you see, don’t look at it only from a professional accountants point of view, you know, where your clients had? and now go and see, okay, this is what my accountant gave me what we like to check if your clients are asking those questions, if they are, they are great, but if they are not, you plant those questions in their head say, look, mr. client, you know, if i got this balance sheet from my accountant, and our profit and loss statement, here are the five questions that will instantly come to my mind, you know, those are the questions you should be asking. and many times you’ll see customers look at you how do you know my business? right? because i’m a professional, i can see the secrets in your numbers that you may not be able to see. so that’s definitely there. so that also leads to your client service skills. now, predominantly, most of your staff has been towards the back office processing, not not much interactions with your clients, and you got to enhance them. because the more the clients have to wait for a few people in your firm, so that they can discuss the more they’re going to not talk to you because they’re busy in their businesses. so make each of your staff that works on a client’s account, capable of having those client interactions, even if it’s a five minute phone call, or an email where you answer two different questions. you know, don’t let that you know, just keep coming to the partner level, because then it’s a bottleneck. so all those also change towards business models, you’re making your staff more competent on a wider scale.
liz farr
and that makes the work more interesting too
hitendra patil
absolutely.
liz farr
because, when i worked as a cpa, what was most fun, was talking to the clients and finding out what they wanted, what their goals were, what their hopes were, and what they were hoping to get out of the business and then translating what we had in the financials or the tax return to helping them to fulfill those dreams. that was more fun.
hitendra patil
well, absolutely. some staff may still have their comfort zones, for example, yes, they might be extremely experts in certain aspects of things. and then you become an absolute specialist in that, not necessarily every staff has to undergo everything, but you essentially leverage that foundational strength of each, and then build on that.
liz farr
yeah, and it just makes it more more interesting. and i really like the idea of empowering the staff members, even down at the very bottom levels, to have those conversations.
hitendra patil
the changing customer experience. dramatic.
liz farr
yes. oh, yes. yes. because it’s not just having to filter everything through the partner or the manager and waiting for them to have time to call or to respond to the email, but it’s empowering the younger people to be able to have those conversations. and that that is how they learn to become leaders themselves.
hitendra patil
yes. you know, i remember a few years ago, i don’t know who it was, if somebody did that quick survey on the profession. the clients of the accountant say, why do accountants clients leave the accountants? and one of the top five reasons was my accountant doesn’t return my call. and that’s because most of times, it’s the top level of the firm that is talking to the client, so everything becomes a bottleneck. that needs to change, absolutely.
liz farr
yeah. and that’s, that’s a very hard thing to change. now let’s, that’s a good transition to my next question, which is, well, what should accountant stop doing immediately?
hitendra patil
i think everything in terms of transition towards a different business model, or adapting to current times is a process. so you don’t really, you know, switch off something like a light. so there’s always going to be some transition period. what i think the biggest thing is, look at your processes, look at your day to day tasks. and really question everything. by doing this. is the firm benefiting? or is the client benefiting? or both or not? and you will find many of the tasks are just done because there is an internal consumption of certain analytics reports or whatnot, is it only for your kind of satisfaction that okay, everything is accurate, for example, okay, it gives me peace of mind. but for that, how much time are you going to spend on you know, really checking, double checking and things like that? so question every single step, and literally ruthlessly cut down on certain steps in every process that you can, that’s the first thing to do for sure, in terms of stop doing, what’s not adding value to your firm, and your clients.
liz farr
still, those are very hard things, to for accountants to figure out, because they’ve been used to doing things in the same ways for so long, that it can be hard to let go of the way that things have been done.
hitendra patil
that’s right. change in any any field, ultimately, humans find it very, very difficult. so you got to have either an incentive for a change, or a technologies. if i don’t do this, this is going to be a big trouble for my firm. so as long as you identify the risk of status quo, and the benefit or the reward of change, and you focus on that, as a leadership, i think you can do that. it’s not very difficult. i’ve seen, you know, accountants asking, hey, i don’t know, but i have a gut feel that maybe, no, we are not doing it correctly. do you know any accountant who has done this, and can you share some insights? that keeps coming all year round, whenever i speak with accountants, you know, so it’s which also is a good good sign that at least accountants are willing to consider and look and seek change. whether they implement is a different story. the first step is always seeking that change, so which, which seems to be happening far more frequently than my previous years in the profession, because i can see that distinct shift, which is really a good thing to notice.
liz farr
well, that i’m glad to hear that you’re seeing more change. and now now, accountants often know what it is they should be doing. they should be adopting more technology, they should evaluate their pricing strategies. they should evaluate their staffing strategies. but too often, they just don’t. what are some of the things that keep accountants from changing?
hitendra patil
yeah, so that’s a big, deep question. there’s so many things that can stop you from doing some of the answers. you know, in fact, when we did the client accounting services survey, and we said, the firm’s that are not doing cas, why are you not doing cas? and the reasons that came up, you know, oh, we don’t have the staffing. okay, so are you a solo practitioner? two people firm? so essentially, you’re fully utilizing all the hours of your staff, in whatever processes you have. they might not have moved to technology, for example, liz, i get all year round, people moving from desktop onto cloud technologies, the purchasable solutions, and suddenly they see oh, there is so much of efficiency gains, just initial three months, they can see 25% efficiency. so what do you do with that time now? now you can say you don’t have time. so you got to look at things you have to experiment for sure. so that was the first thing oh, we don’t have the technology. we don’t have the client. we don’t know how to get clients. lots of things. and that’s where i kind of recognize there are two things that really help the change. one is the danger to your current firm in terms of your profitability. see, if you have bulky and manual processes, your cost is going to be higher, so your pricing will reflect that in the market and if the next door cpa is very tech savvy and offers a lesser price, and maybe better value, you got to see the shift. the pricing pressure will tell you that you got to look at something. so instead of that pressure coming from outside, take a look at it proactively. that’s one, right? and two, but when you talk to your clients, you they talk to their friends and connections in the industry, when somebody comes to you, and starts asking you a question, you’ve kind of noticed that they might be asking things that you’re not currently doing. but it doesn’t seem like no, you don’t need, you don’t need too much to really learn to offer those services, which means it’s right in your wheelhouse, but you’re not doing it. and there is demand. so cater to that demand, you know, once you see the money in the door, you got to find ways to get that money inside the door. so that might be resources that might be technology that might be processes. so both ways, the positive and the negative thing, meaning, don’t be forced to change. but at the same time by changing if you can grab more business, deliver more value to your clients, why not do that?
liz farr
you make it all sound so simple, hitendra.
hitendra patil
working for as we work only with accountants, so i speak with accountants, day in day out all sorts of firms, right, from small to big to different niches to different services. and anytime i see people happy accountants feeling happy about the progress they’re making. so what did you do that made it possible for you, oh, we just, you know, implemented technology, we found integrated solutions. you know, we looked at delivering more services to our clients. in fact, many times, accountants have told me that their higher dollars came from existing clients by offering more services, because those clients were going to somebody else for obtaining those services. instead, we started offering those services by creating capabilities. now the client interacts with us more our relationships are becoming stronger with the clients because we offer multiple services. that’s another thing that came out from the cas survey, non-cas firms offer about six services per client. cas firms offered 12 services per client, double the number.
liz farr
wow. wow. well, you know, the big thing right now these days is cas services. what do you think is the next big thing? i want you to use your crystal ball?
hitendra patil
yeah, the first thing is get into cas. you know, that’s why i wrote the whole book, because i saw so many questions coming through. cas is definitely going to be here for next three to five years is going to be really spreading across the profession irrespective of the firm size. at the same time, you will see a lot of venture capital money going into the technology solutions in fintech, especially apis and ai and machine learnings and all that. but no, just purely from a technology point of view, not as a technologist interested in those technologies, but you look at it, how those technologies are being planned for using and implementing in the profession, for what purposes what new outcomes. so that is a big interest area for me. and that’s where i see a lot of effort going towards, how do i make accountants’ work more easy, faster, more economical, more profitable, and more insightful. that’s where those implementations of those technologies are happening. for example, machine learning and artificial intelligence in the typical transaction processing workload accountants, you know the transactions that are coming in through bank feeds directly into your accounting software. and you’re applying your accounting knowledge to it to classify those transaction to the right chart of account codes and all that. now that’s been happening for quite some time. now the software is learning artificially what’s the accountant doing with these transactions and by the time you bring the transactions in your accounting software, it’s already knows that you’re going to be coding it like this. of course, it gives you an opportunity to change if you wish to but that is changing the way accountants do their work. so if all this work will used to take maybe six hours for client now it’s take 15 minutes so you got to do something in those other hours either you find more clients and fill up your pipeline and get more business or apply your mind get into advisory and deeper insights for your client, you become a consultant to the client so a lot of these things will apply on to the traditional work of ai machine learning big time right now, the next thing, possibly the blockchain, especially in the in the larger ticket size where the transaction value is high. and you need absolute guaranteed accuracy of the two transacting parties not going back on their words. so it’s indelible truth, the third ledger, so that’s going to happen. and that’s right, right now happening already on the larger or enterprise grade kind of businesses, it might come down a little over the period. so that’s definitely going to happen right now, as i see, the future is about automated data exchanges between multiple software’s in this profession, that’s going to grow much faster than ever before, as more and more software has gone on to the cloud. so that’s the trend for the next three years, for sure. integration, as we call it right now, or the app economy of some solutions. all of those are based on this core concept of integration and data exchange. so that’s going to grow for sure.
liz farr
well, i’m definitely a big proponent of integrating data. the firm’s that i worked at, some of the data didn’t really work, right. and even even with the same software platform, we’d have to enter the same information in two or three places, which made no sense to me at all. but yeah, get people away from entering numbers or transferring numbers, because the more you do that, the more opportunity there is for errors to pop up. so if you can get it right from the bank without touching it, then that, to me is absolutely ideal.
hitendra patil
that’s already happening quite a bit. big chunk of the profession is still not gone there. so there will be migration towards that. more and more firms will do that. and once that becomes like a new normal, then what? that’s the real question, you know, the vision hat has to come in now. so what happens next? let’s say everybody is on the cloud, maybe 95%? a lot of data is getting exchanged automatically. after that, what what do accountants do in that case? what do clients pay for? that’s another thing. currently, your processes deliverables are very well defined. i do this and for that, you pay me this, then what after after your technology does most of the things? and maybe the clients know it already? they think they can do it, then what what are you going to charge for?
liz farr
well, then at that point, it will have to be adding value from the ideas in our brains.
hitendra patil
exactly. i did an article quite some time back, “excuse me, may i rent your brain?” that’s what will happen in the profession.
liz farr
yeah, because, you know, i didn’t go to school and take all those accounting classes just to be a data entry clerk.
hitendra patil
exactly. right. exactly. right. yeah. unfortunately, that was the requirement based on pure desktop technologies in the past years. it was a necessity that data has to get in and somebody has to do that job. but unfortunately, that almost labeled the profession that oh, this is what you do. if you do a quick survey, what is the number one thing that you remember when you see the word accountant? many people will tell you balance sheet tax return financial statements. that’s not the only thing that you know, there’s so many things that that accountants do other than those three.
liz farr
yeah, yeah. and i think that that variety of things will really be the future. yes. yeah. well, this has been wonderful talking to you hitendra. i want to thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me and allowing me to rent your brain for a little bit. now, if listeners want to connect with you, what’s the best way to find you?
hitendra patil
yeah, the best way to find me is on linkedin. just search for my name and you will see and you can connect with me there i published quite a bit of things on my own through linkedin as well. both of my books are available on 卡塔尔世界杯常规比赛时间 exclusively so you can find them there. and most of times, if you’re an accountant and you send me a connection request, i accept it in a blink.
liz farr
yes, i can verify that because i think you and i have been connected for six or seven years now. so that is very true. well, thank you again, hitendra, and i hope that you have a wonderful rest of your day. thank you.
hitendra patil
thank you, liz, for having me on your podcast in this episode, and it was wonderful talking to you. and you asked me a little different questions that generally i would answer. so i’m really glad that i could, you know, share some of the insights that i’ve been gathering for years and years now. and hopefully your audience finds this useful.
liz farr
i’m sure they will. thank you again.
hitendra patil
thank you.