Ep. 61: Jose Zavala - Cloud Accounting: What does that mean to me?

Contact Jose Zavala: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jzavala03/

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Mitch: (00:00)

Welcome back to Count Me In, IMA's a podcast about all things affecting the accounting and finance world. I'm Mitch Roshong and I will be your host for this episode. Today, you're going to hear Adam talk with Jose Zavala about how automation is the key to success of accounting and finance professionals. Jose explains the benefits, but he also addresses the challenges and pitfalls. He regularly helps firms save time and money through automation and has a great first and perspective on the topic. So to hear more, we'll head over to their conversation now. 

Adam: (00:35)

So Jose, as we begin 2020, it seems that automation is a key word in accounting and finance, whether it's through RPA or machine learning. How have you seen automation in general impact the accounting and finance industry? 

Jose: (00:56)

You know, that's a really good question. For me, what I have seen is it, at least personally on my level, it allows you to essentially provide a better service to our clients. You know, cause within this industry, at least my take on it is we need to be client facing. You know, they're our clients. We need to make sure they're getting, it's about customer service, you know, and if we're too busy in the weeds or heads down, you know, doing a lot of this taking care of kind of a lot of these administrative tasks or you know, doing a lot of stuff that we can maybe push off to a bot or to a software to do that takes away time from us to be able to be face first in front of our clients and helping them with those meetings as far as, you know, growth and things like that. So I think it's going to have a huge positive impact because it's going to essentially give us back our time to then to provide those better services to our clients and start being that advisor, you know, that investment for our clients to sort of be in what you don't have. A lot of clients see us as an expense. Oh, I got to talk to my accountant and I talked to my tax rep, I talked to my CPA. You know, where instead of doing that, they should be like, Hey, I want to make this move. Let me call them to get their take on it before and make it instead of, you know, making the move and then later trying to figure out, Oh, well did I do it right? Well, it's kind of too late. It's already done. So that's how I think go as far as automation is going to, help us in this industry. Because like I said, you know, give us back that time to be able to then give that time to our clients and provide them much better service. 

Adam: (02:35)

So as we look at that impact that you just mentioned of automation, you know, what about a more holistic view of its benefits? What are some ways that an organization can cut costs through those and through that automation? 

Jose: (02:45)

Yeah, no, I think that's another great question, man. So I was actually on the surge (Just want to make sure that is the appropriate way to spell the Podcast title)  podcast with JJ, the CPA, and what are the conversation or topics we hit on there was invoicing. I know, and my background is public accounting, worked at CPA firms my whole career before I went out on my own. And I remember one of the big things was always billing. So you would take two or three days to sit down, go through the bills and then having to do follow up calls and it was usually the managers, doing a lot of that work do that. So that was a lot of, to me admin time,  un-billable time that you could have. One of the things that just by, inputting something like a proposal software or automatic payment software that that builds your clients automatically, let's say on a monthly basis for a monthly recurring revenue, you can go ahead and eliminate that. The need to have to build that, to have to sit down and have those conversations and okay, this is what we need to do. We need to build this. We need to build that same thing as well. It removes, if you're printing invoices, stuffing them into envelopes, mailing them out, and then having to do followup calls and have an admin person doing followup calls. I'm trying to lock down those invoices. I feel like it takes a lot of time and there are too many people, too many hands touching it whenever it can be just one person making sure that these looking at the software, making sure the software is correct and then using that time, that person's time instead of non billable work, maybe move them into a little bit more billable work and, and you know, get a little more out of them that way. So that's how I think it can essentially cut cost is, is we can look at software and some of these, your friend's bots and things that are available to us as a way to, instead of paying a full time employee, we would pay them at and a third, a fourth, a fifth of the cost. And then make sure that the staff we do have, and not to say to replace a staff, but take the stuff we do, have them give them more higher value work and actual billable work that we can bill back to the client, which then in turn will keep them happier because you know, they're moving away from just entering checks into an accounting software or just entering deposits. You know, they're doing a lot more maybe client facing or maybe doing something else that you can play to their strengths. And then again, you know, you increase essentially their output, and by output is more essentially, you know, the billable output of them. So that's how I think it could cost that way. 

Adam: (05:14)

So what if you've mentioned all this to somebody and they're like, Jose, I am still not convinced. You know, you've given me these cost cutting measures, you know, the general impact. Okay, I can see the impact. But what are the real benefits to me as an organization? And how does that trickle down to my employees? You know, you mentioned one thing as a giving the employees more high value work, but what else? What else, what other benefits can they see? 

Jose: (05:39)

So I think one for you as a business owner, essentially it takes what it does. It eliminates a lot of those mundane administrative tasks that we have to do. Right now it's tax season we're having to, we're doing tax returns where, you know, if you're in public accounting you're in the grind right now. And one of the big things is, you know, having to go in and, and one having to make sure to okay do we have all our work papers in, you know, having to send emails and going through emails and trying to make sure you have all that information or same thing as well. You know, kind of going back to one of the things that I see a lot is trying to lock down lets say client meetings. So you're trying to do, have a client meeting and you spend three or four emails emailing back and forth. Are you free this day or you're free that day. And next thing you know, you know, when something could have been scheduled that week, it gets pushed two or three weeks ahead because you know, you're going back and forth and just little things like that kind of can help you save a little bit of time and bring a little bit of back of sanity back to you. And as far as your employees go, you know giving them the ability to essentially again go back to the higher level work, you know, so instead of actually going in and, and having to input deposit slips or doing just basic data entry, you can move that away from them and have them do a little bit more of the actual review...