Ep. 218: Graham Stanton and Edgar Thomas - The State of Accounting Technology

Graham Stanton and Edgar Thomas co-founders of Advise  join Count Me In to talk about the current state of the market for accounting technology and the status of the industry today, which is constantly evolving. They discuss the lack of innovation in the accounting technology market and the pain points that practitioners face when using traditional tools. They share their vision for changing the status quo and making the accountant's job easier by reducing manual processes and reporting financial data more accurately and timely. The podcast also highlights the challenges of getting practitioners to adopt new technologies and the need for reimagining tasks to automate and reduce time spent on them.

Connect with our speakers:
Graham Stanton: https://www.linkedin.com/in/grahamstanton/
Edgar Thomas: https://www.linkedin.com/in/edgart1/

Full Episode Transcript:
Adam:            Welcome back to Count Me In. In today's episode, we have Graham Stanton and Edgar Thomas, the co-founders of Avise. A company that provides accounting technology solutions. Both my guests have seen many pain points that accountants face daily, and have worked hard to build solutions that address those pain points. 

Despite the available innovation, practitioners still use the same tools from 15 to 20 years ago because of the lack of penetration by newer tools. Both Graham and Edgar share their vision of making an accountant's job easier and reducing manual processes. Join us as we discuss how technology can help accountants and the challenges they face, adopting new technology.

Adam:            Graham, Edgar, I just want to thank you both for coming on the podcast, today. We're really excited to have the co-founders of Avise on the podcast with us, today. And today we're going to talk about accounting technology. And I figure we could start off by discussing what is the current state of the market for accounting technology, and the status of the industry, today? Because it's constantly moving and evolving.

Edgar:            Yes, thank you, Adam, really appreciate you having us both on, today. And, yes, it's a topic that we both feel very passionately about. For me, as an inactive CPA, but a practitioner that has worked with a lot of accounting tools, I've seen it from both sides. 

So, right now, as an entrepreneur, building a solution that solves a lot of the pain points that I saw in the marketplace. But also the pain points that we're getting feedback from our current clients and prospects of our own. It is an exciting time to be looking at it because there is a lot of innovation going on today. But quite, frankly, practitioners, today, are doing a lot of the same thing and using a lot of the same tools they were using 15, 20 years ago. Because there's been such little penetration by the tools out there, today, available. 

So when I was practicing as an in-house accountant, a lot of the tools I found lacked the vision or the understanding of what a practitioner needed to do. So they were focused more on FP&A and other finance functions. But didn't really focus on improving the lives of the core accounting suite. That the accountants had to do their jobs in on a day-in and a day-out basis. 

So if you go and talk to an in-house accountant, at a company, and they talk about their close. And they say that it's five days, it's 10 days, it's 15 days, or maybe even 30 days long. And when you, actually, dissect the things that they're doing, you immediately see opportunities for improvement based on the tools that are available today, but are not available to the accountants, yet. 

So that's one of the things that I feel very passionate about. Changing that and making it so that the accountants benefit from a lot of the tools and a lot of the innovation that we see elsewhere in the finance tech stack. 

So when it comes to tools like the ones we're building at Avise it's really focused on how do we make the accountant's job easier. To close the books, report out the information, the financial data more accurately and in a timely fashion, and reduce a lot of the manual processes.

Graham:        I'll add to that a little bit. Obviously, Edgar and I share this vision here, and when we were getting started there's a lot of real pain coming through in our discussions. I previously worked somewhat cross-functionally and had a lot of experience with the tools that the marketers get, and that data engineers get. Ultimately, FP&A was starting to get, and, for whatever reason, the accountants have been at the end of the line.

And there's been a lot of attitude of, "Well, accountants are paid to do this busy work, so what's the problem here?" And it's unfortunate, and, thankfully, accountants are starting to wake up and saying, "Well, it's the year 2022, almost 2023, we don't need to put up with this anymore."

Adam:            And I think sometimes the biggest thing is that if it's not broke, they don't want to try to fix it. We've been doing the same thing and using the same technology for 15, 20 years, as Edgar was saying. But why change things up and mess it up? What do you guys think is the biggest problem with the current technology, the state of the technology as it is today?

Edgar mentioned some of those things, people are trying to cut down the close, and those are some of the big problems that they're dealing with. But what's the problem with the actual technology that you think is causing them to not adopt it as fastly as possible?

Edgar:            Yes, I can take this, I like the way your insight there is that, for a lot of folks they accept this status quo as, like "This is the way things are and should be, or will continue to be." One of the things I really enjoy about my job today is that as we show our tool to folks, the response is very common one. Where it's just like, "Oh, I didn't even know that that was possible, or I didn't even think about how much time it took for me to do that task."

So a simple thing like a reconciliation month in and month out, may take an accountant 30 minutes, an hour, 2 hours, and it's just an accepted part of the job, "My job is to reconcile an account."

But then when you reimagine what a reconciliation is, and you automate a lot of the components of that reconciliation, and reduce that from 30 minutes down to five minutes, a light bulb goes off. It's just like, "Okay, these are minutes, hours, of my life that I can get back, and I can do more value added things for the business besides a lot of these things, which are, quite frankly, busy work."

So one of the things that we've come across is that there's a lack of knowledge. I've never seen this before among my accounting friends. I've never seen something like this before. And then it's like maybe a hesitation, like you said, "If it isn't broke don't fix it." If I know the system has been around since 1970 and, literally, my predecessors have been doing this, I know it works, and I will continue to do it. 

So it is a really exciting journey that we've been on at...