Ep. 50: Blake Oliver - So what's the big deal about the Cloud?

Jirav: https://www.jirav.com/
Cloud Accounting podcast: https://www.cloudaccountingpodcast.com/
Blake's website: https://www.blakeoliver.com/

More About Blake:
1) https://www.cloudaccountingpodcast.com/about
2) https://www.blakeoliver.com/bio

Contact Blake:
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/blaketoliver

Twitter - https://twitter.com/blaketoliver/

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Mitch: (00:05)

Welcome back to Count Me In, IMA's podcast about all things affecting the accounting and finance world. I am your host Mitch Roshong and I am happy to share our 50th episode of the series for this conversation. My cohost, Adam Larson, spoke with Blake Oliver. Blake is recognized by Accounting Today as one of the top 100 most influential people in the industry. He's the director of marketing for Jirav and is the cohost of his own podcast, the Cloud Accounting podcast. He joined Adam to talk about technology trends in accounting, like automation for reporting and forecasting as well as other things affecting the accounting and finance world. So without further delay, let's listen to their conversation now.

Adam: (00:50)

So Blake, you're recognized as the leader in the accounting industry and you've spent much of your career connected to the cloud. Can you maybe give us an overview as to what trends you're seeing in the industry?

Blake: (01:01)

Sure. And thanks for having me on your show. A real an honor to be here and talking to the IMA base. So I started at the very bottom of the accounting career ladder as a, as a bookkeeper. And a lot of what I know about technology is, is based on that experience. I was a in case you're curious, I was a music major in college, not an accounting major, not a finance major. So I think that's helped a lot, helped me approach things with a fresh set of eyes in a lot of cases. Okay. So what happened is I graduated from college and I had this useless music decree and I was still trying to freelance and maybe have a professional career and I picked up bookkeeping as a flexible kind of day job I could do. And so I was doing QuickBooks data entry mostly and I had some clients on the side. A lot of what I did, I would say 80% of what I did was keying in transactions into QuickBooks from PDF bank statements are actually more likely printed ones at that point. So, you know, people were sending me there bank statements they were receiving in the mail. I'd key those in categorize their transactions and create reports. And I liked it cause it was kind of a mindless, the thing that I could do in front of the TV or listening to my favorite music and anybody who's been paying attention to what's been going on over the last 10 years knows that we don't really do that anymore. At least in the world of small business. Manually keying in data is not necessary. We've got online accounting, we've got cloud accounting, we have bank feeds, we have API integrations and when that started to all happen around 2010 was when it really started to get big and become, you know, easy to do with off the shelf software. I jumped on that. And so within about five years, I had automated about 80% of my own job as a bookkeeper. Uh, and I started a business doing that and it was a cloud accounting from, we were virtual. We did bookkeeping in a new way. We could lower our prices off for clients more. It was a big business, you know, we grew to 200 clients in three years and I was able to sell that thing. So that kind of proves just how a successful automating inputs can be and so a lot of what we've scene over the last 10 years, both on the, on the small business side and now creeping up into the mid market and enterprise is basically automating that entry of transactions that getting the data into our ERP system or our accounting system, whether that's QuickBooks or zero or NetSuite or Intacct or Oracle or SAP. It's all the same concept. And I think it happened first in the small business side because small businesses are very price sensitive. And so there was this need to automate that, that entry of data. Lot of business owners, they just can't afford accountants or bookkeepers mean the vast majority of business owners do with their own accounting and so there was a motivation for developers to build that stuff. It's been slower in the mid market because, yeah, at scale when you're a big business, it's, well not that expensive really to hire a staff accountant right out of school and make that person just a import transactions manually every day and reconcile the bank account manually and all that, but I think that that's starting to change in some organizations have really figured out how to automate data flow. Some not at all. Right. And some are blocked because they're on, on premises ERP systems. It's very expensive to switch. So we're at this interesting place about 10 years after the birth of cloud accounting where we have some cutting edge folks that have completely automated most of their data entry. We've got folks that are continuing to do it exactly the same way they did 10 years ago, and we're going to continue to see over the next 10 years real divergence among those groups and it's gonna make people's careers or break them. I think.

Adam: (05:19)

So I'm sure there's a range of people listening to this podcast right now, whether they've started some sort of automated reporting and forecasting or some others who hadn't even, haven't even begun to there. And like you said, they're still doing accounting like they did 10 years ago. Can you maybe discuss some of those barriers that they may run into and how could they overcome those?

Blake: (05:38)

Yeah, the biggest barrier that I see is when a finance team or an accounting team is stuck with an on premises ERP system and for whatever reason it's decided that it's too expensive to change or perhaps there's not a solution out there that's customized enough to their business. There's always, you know, reasons for keeping old technology and you have to just figure out how to adapt. And that's been the big barrier to adopting cloud is if you don't have API's, if you don't, by the way, API is application protocol interface. It's simply a way for computer programs to talk to each other. And cloud makes us easy because you've got apps hosted in the cloud and they all have API APIs. A lot of them do these days. And so it allows you to hook them together and transfer data. Well not as easy to do when you've got an on prem system. It typically doesn't have an API and you could pay somebody to develop it, but that's expensive to maintain and it usually out of reach for a lot of organizations. So we've had this divergence where folks who are on cloud ERP systems or cloud accounting systems are able to take advantage of all this automation and those that aren't, aren't, well, there is a technology out there that has been talked about quite a bit and I think this is actually one of those technologies that is not a bunch of hype. It's going to have a real huge impact. And that is RPA, robotic process automation. And it sounds really fancy, but it's actually ...