? Start Up TV: WeCrashed, The Dropout and Real Stories From the Accounting Eco-system

Start Up TV: WeCrashed, The Dropout and Real Stories From the Accounting Eco-system

The Tech Buzz May 22 has just been released. Search and subscribe to Cloud Stories on your favourite podcast listening device today!

This Accounting Innovation and Technology Buzz for May 22 has as Special Guest, Trent McLaren, Head of Strategic Channels at DiviPay.

In this episode we discuss:

• Latest feature release from DiviPay Using DiviPay to pay (and easily cancel) subscriptions (notably those trial subs)
• A discussion around  Futrli acquisition by Sage, and what it means in the reporting space. https://www.futrli.com/post/futrli-acquired-by-sage
• Data Dear will no longer be available to Xero users
• WeCrashed and The Dropout.
•  A discussion around the Price Increase from Ignition (formally Practice Ignition)
• The new feature from XBert ‘Client Analytic Report’ which helps you quote for new clients https://xbert.io/blog/how-to-accurately-quote-service-fees-for-new-bookkeeping-clients/

Upcoming conferences

• 20-24 June 22 https://tropicalinnovationfestival.com.au/
• From the Trenches June 20/21 https://summit.fromthetrenches.com.au ;
• 10th June CA ANZ Future Focused Accounting Conference (I’m the host for two days) https://events.charteredaccountantsanz.com/event/ea5db209-8042-4fb7-84dc-f92382dd27a6/summary

Xerocon 2022

• London 20&21 July
• New Orleans 24&25 August
• Sydney 7&8 Sept 2022

? 15 Jun – Digital Practice Summit Asia 2022 Virtual

?Read how I strategically Partner with Apps http://EndorsementDisclosure.com

Where are you, Trent? What’s been happening in your world?

Trent: Hello, Heather. I am well, I am in Sydney and in my world. I’ve been on a plane and a train and a bus. You know, me, I’m always, always traveling on back on coffee. I think last time we spoke, I was off coffee. I’m back on coffee, because that feeds my energy and enthusiasm to do things. And I’m busy. We’re hiring, like we’re just flat stock at the moment. It is a it’s tough. Like everyone will say in every industry, it’s tough to find people, but we are hiring. We’re busy and we’re just bringing DiviPay to the world. Well, to listen to the Australian world, but it’s going well, it’s going really well.

Heather: All the apps are terrified that you’re hiring, because we’re worried to go and hire all that good stuff.

Trent: I catch up with most people and it’s like, I love that you guys are going so well, but please don’t hire any as much staff. And I said, look, I make no promises, but I’m not speaking to anyone in your team right now. But to be fair when people do ask me, cause then every now and then often we click somewhere. So are you doing this thing? So you’re hiring. Who are you hiring for? I always would last them. Cool. Have you, have you spoken to your team, have you spoken to them and said that you’re unhappy if you had that conversation? Especially if it’s the team leader is someone that I know, I try to give them that respect and courtesy, but, if they’re really unhappy or whichever, then they can’t sell them, whatever it is. Yeah. We’ll, you know, we’ll, we’ll have that conversation and see where we land.

Heather: Absolutely. The ecosystem is small and, you and I have both been in it probably close to a decade. And, you can see that, people evolve their careers, through the ecosystem, which is wonderful. But it is a small ecosystem and we need to be, and you need to be mindful that you will come into contact with that team, do what you need to do for yourself, but leave them in a respectful way. But it’s also good to see teams, having alumni, and being proud and championing their staff to move on, to learn and to grow in different.

Trent: A hundred percent. I mean, I, got a team member that I used to work with an insurance without you didn’t work at, in short when he came to DiviPay. But, you know, you have those relationships with everyone everywhere you go. I try to be super respectful of the PI or the, the ignition teams and so forth for the same reason of my guys. That’s a good thing. Like, you know, what are you, what are you looking for that you can’t currently get? And is this actually a good fit? You need them to make that decision. You don’t want to go. I’m not that person looks good to go and poach them and say, Hey, you should come and work for me because we’re better. Cause I’ve got a lot of respect for those organisations that I’ve been involved with before. So yeah, that’s hiring

Heather: Absolutely. There’s lots of opportunities and lots of different areas for people. So what’s been happening in my world. Well, we’ve, we’ve actually caught up physically in person. I can confirm Trent has legs. He even has a pair of jeans without holes in some.

Trent: Just kidding. Anyway, I do have some jeans that don’t have rips in them. I was wearing them on a stage. I actually even had a shirt and a blazer as well.

Heather: Oh, very good. Well, it was, that was, Trent and I spoke at the CFO symposium, which appeared to be going around Australia, a very professionally run event. Very impressed with it. So thank you to the CFO magazine and DiviPay for inviting me along. I was really impressed.

Trent: It was good. My role on every panel is just to make a few people laugh and give them a few bits of simple wisdom. I think I accomplished that and I think James Solomon’s added me as an alcoholic that should own a vineyard at the same time. So that was not a true statement, but funny, nonetheless.

Heather: I suspect one day it will happen. Yeah, it should have been.

Trent: I think it’s a good, it’s my equivalent of getting a yacht is just let’s bypass the land and grow some crops. Some gripes.

Heather: Very good. Very good. Well, I think we both, have been in and out of a lot of conferences, but before we sort of move to talking about conferences, let’s see what has been happening at DiviPay.

What’s happening in DiviPay in the last month?

Trent: So we, our hiring and we’re up to nearly 42 staff. So if anyone remembers my journey, starting with D pay, there was about 15. When I got here now at 40 is still another 60 to go, very busy few hundred businesses a month jumping on the platform, which is fantastic. We’re loving that the product was. We’re in the process of releasing what we call custom workflows or workflows. And it’s kind of like Zapier for approvals and expense management. So you create a trigger being. I made a payment over $500 and then I can create the action being on a, send it to my manager and then send it to the CFO to approve.

That transaction. This is really, really cool because you now have space to digital spend management payments, bills, reimbursements, et cetera. No, one’s gone this deep or globally, this deep on building a workflows tool for every facet of your payment functionality. Some of these workflows exist. Hyman’s, but not for bills, not for reimbursements, we’re building this so that it fits across our whole stack so that you can think of a scenario or a process that you want to create within your approvals expense management, extended chart piece, and you can do it. That launches in the next couple of weeks, we’ve got beta testers on at the moment, but early signs are extremely. Very very cool. Very slick.

Heather: So if I’m in office work and I wanted to buy a thousand-dollar chair using my DiviPay card, which is attached to my business and my standing there sending the approval to someone before the purchase.

Trent: No. So the purchase will always happen. It’s just that it needs to then be signed off post-purchase by one or two people. If it didn’t meet the criteria, the rule set, if, that didn’t go through, then it obviously comes back to the company and their policy on, well, what happens with that payment? Are we going to ask you to go and refund that transaction? That’s up to the organisation. But what most businesses generally ask for is we want to have oversight of all these payments and we want to be flagged when these things happen and then it’s up to them to decide how they want to tackle that scenario moving forward.

Heather: That’s interesting. But it’s, it’s a different way of doing it, but that’s interesting and I’m sure the workflows and, and, getting that information in front of the relevant people in the business is important. I have been listening to Greg Kyte. Who’s also a cartoon drawer. And he does a podcast called ‘Oh My Fraud’, and one of the people found out that they had something like a hundred thousand dollar limit and spent it every week and got materials sent to their home until they had spent over $2 million. So, approvals in the businesses, all these very important, very important for cashflow, very important for business survival.

Trent: A lot of businesses do this already, right? So all we’re doing is helping provide instant real-time visibility and notification on top of that. So like if you’ve got an Amex card or Citibank card and here’s a card with $10,000, don’t spend it all at once. That’s the feedback. They didn’t go through the bank statement and say, well, this one was manually or through the bank feed or whichever manually, what was this? What was this? What was this? So, what we’re doing is helping to drive and centre the attention of that post-approval flow to the finance team, immediately the moment these things happen.

So it’s creating a, a variance list or a, an alert of sorts to say, Hey, you need to look at this. And it’s allowing them the account and the bookkeeping team to create these rules for a business owner who wouldn’t know how to do this. The other one that we get. Outside of spend control limits. It’s if we don’t have a receipt, upload it on the transaction, don’t publish that to the accounting software, and keep it in DiviPay until it’s ready to go to the accounting software. So there are a few Juul approval on bills is the other one we get. So if you’ve got non-for-profits charities where it’s, every bill needs to have double sign-off, then now you can put a simple workflow in that for every transaction, or it could be for marketing themes, juniors, team members, whatever.

Heather: Yeah, well, that’s very interesting and, and something that’s very much needed in the industry. So the thing that’s, it sounded like a DiviPay advertorial now. But one of the things that, I did just recently, about three months ago, I, I want one of those voucher things that gave me three months free subscription to something. But part of doing that was I had to put in my credit card to access the subscription. So what I did was, I used the DiviPay subscription card and, then when it, I forgot, I should’ve put, I did put it in my calendar, but I missed it. And so it went to charge my subscription. And after three months, but the DiviPay stopped that happening.

I then jumped in and cancelled it. So I was never out of pocket. I was never charged for that thing that I didn’t want. And, and so what you can do is set up a divvy pace of screen. Generic subscription card. You can set it to have a budget of 1 cent. Thank you, Sarah Stein for suggesting that, and then any of those subscriptions that you sign up for for a 30-day free trial or whatever time period free trial that you don’t want to continue with, but you want to be aware of you’re continuing with that. So really good option to stop that accidental charge. And I know, and we’ll mention. Some of some apps in the industry, don’t let you stop paying them and you have to go, you have to jump through hoops to try and stop the payment. So I’m setting up something like that. So you actually have full control to actually stop that card rather than stock a whole credit card with so many things tagged to it. It’s a really simple solution.

Trent: One of the other Facebook groups that, you and I both frequent, which is the small business accounting taxation group mastermind. It’s a good group. Lots of people. Well I had one Saturday that just blew up for me. And I think I should have claimed it as a work day because people were, having a bit of event about a particular company that it was charging money, even though they cancelled the subscription.

I said, well, why don’t you just check your duty by card there, you can just cancel the card and you’re on your Merry way. And we just got flooded. Just people were like, oh, that sounds awesome. I want control back of all of my payments. I’m sick of people just charging me money when they feel like it because that’s written somewhere in their T’s and C’s so, yeah, it’s a very good, I do with my coffee card because my coffee card only has a $5 limit and, anytime I’m signing up to something, I just put that card there. And most of the time for the same reason that I can just, yeah, sign up for things, try it out. I like it. All right. Fine. Cancel. You’re gone. Yeah. But yeah.

Heather: Sometimes some of these charges are like $4,000, which you weren’t expecting. So. Yeah, absolutely. So let’s move on to the account tech news.

The big news has been that Futrly, which is the reporting, analytical software solution that’s been around probably for a decade now, has been acquired by Sage

Trent: It wouldn’t be a tech buzz podcast without an acquisition being announced. I think every. Someone’s bought something and Futrly previously crunched boards based in Brighton in the UK. I get acquired by Sage and Sage is on a bit of a bit of a run in that sense. So they bought auto entry a few years back then they bought dope proposal.

Then they now acquired Futrly. So you’ve got data in through auto entry. You’ve got your, engagements and. Pricing tools through a, which I heard was do more to drive UK, the empty, the MTD and everything around UK legislation for getting clients engaged similar to where, what we’re doing in director IDs here in Australia. That was part of why they wanted that acquisition of go proposal. Just what I heard someone else can tell you that maybe the full story and then, future on the other side. So I think they’re really building out. Stack and interesting stack on the side side, they’re not interested in having a thousand apps.

They’re like here’s the three or four best ones we think you should use. Was it a good purchase for side was a good thing forFutrly don’t know, I think cash for. Forecasting has had a bit of a hard run in the last couple of years. I think when you would think most businesses want this tool, especially during a pandemic, will they have enough cash? In my opinion, these, these apps did not flourish during that time. They actually withdrew team members. So I know she actually pulled some of the teams. It’s Australia. I know float did a similar thing here in Australia. So yeah. W was it a, was it a good acquisition or was it an acquisition of distress? Who knows? But either way, you know, if everyone’s happy, it’s good for Hannah. Good for Helen in the team. Well done to them. , startup life is, is no easy geek, so I, you always appreciate and should celebrate an acquisition with.

Heather: Absolutely. Absolutely. And, so rare to have female founders in the industry. So rare to have female tech founders, so well done to both of them, the journey they’ve been on, the learnings that they’ve had. They’ve always tried to share a lot in the industry. And, the solution will remain open, as per go proposal. And I’m assuming auto entry as well. When Sage does a take over it, doesn’t then restrict, what, who can use the solution, which makes life a lot easier for all of us. And it is still open. So you don’t need to worry about exerting a Futrly. So we wanted to talk about DataDear.

DataDear was an Excel solution actually built out of Malta. It was purchased by Intuit and they are stopping access for Xero users or anyone who’s using it unless you’re using Intuit. It is going to be built and embedded in.

Trent: This is the fear a little bit people have when acquisitions take place, especially when it’s a big software body like internal Xero or whoever, is that if you, if you buy my product and then, or a solution that I love, but it’s, you know, in this case, I’ve sort of pick up around also pitch, right? You got a lot of very happy Xero users, watching this acquisition take place like, oh, are you going to ruin it? Because that’s the feeling of what. The safe side of things and, interesting that this didn’t happen. This is, you know, companies buy those products for strategic, competitive advantage.

And, unfortunately, you know, Xero users that love that product and they are going to feel, feel that pain. This is a lot, you know, can you make a change or fix that everyone that starts these companies have their own personal, endeavours and ambitions that they’re pushing for? , yeah, I’m not surprised it’s, you know, it makes sense from a tactful. Perspective, I guess, if it means you’ve got to move your clients from Xero to TVOD, keep using it. I dunno if it’s a big enough pool, but, yeah, but I think importantly, what you’re pointing in this Facebook group threatened posts.

There are good alternatives we will want to run through

Heather: Absolutely there are some alternatives there and it is interesting that Intuit does seem to purchase and then close off the solution. However, they haven’t with MailChimp, which is the newsletter solution they purchased. But let, let me, before I, digress, let my, what I want to do is mention a few options out there.

Heather: So you obviously you can flip over and move to QBO. Haven’t seen any advertising campaign promoting that. Maybe you’re getting direct emailing. But, other than that, I’m not seeing anything. If you’re staying with Xero and you need to move from DataDear one of your options is geo icon, G a G dash ACC O N.

They’ll connect your Google spreadsheets to Xero. They’re a strategic partner of mine and you can go and connect with them and they’re offering 30% off for the first three months, but that’s, that’s one of your options. Another option, Lance Rubin, who was a very big advocate for DataDear, he is actually developed a solution called E X L C L O U D.io. It’s currently running in beta, so you can actually test it out and it will connect Xero with Microsoft Excel. Okay. And , GA countless Gioconda again and Excel cloud. Yeah. And, oh, there was another solution. There was another solution. Flex financial reporting.com. And that is by Rory McCarran.

He, it was called, it had another name. It was called quick-win. It used to be called quick-win solutions. It’s now flex financial reporting. He’s based out of Perth and it does a sort of a similar thing. So you’ve got a number of options there. I encourage you to look at them. I’ll post the thread up on LinkedIn to, to, to help people. So just connect with me on LinkedIn and see that. Or you can jump in the Xero mastermind group. There’s a number of options.

Trent: Thank you for spelling all those out. I think that’d be very, very useful.

Heather: Yes, yes, absolutely. I have just, I’ll interject and say, I have just purposely subscribed to apple TV so I could watch the, we work show. We crashed with Anne Hathaway and Jared Leto and, oh my goodness. That was a roller guys. Have you seen it?

Trent: I’m interested.

Heather: I would, I would encourage people to watch it. There’s a lot of accounting and VC talk. And I guess what astonished me was the number of, people who invested in the company and we’re talking millions. Like it was valued at billions of dollars who never looked at any financials. And that was what they were just gleefully going. Oh, I invest on passion. I invest on vision. I invest on you as a person.

Trent: That was still the case. I could get to a million, we could get millions over this, Heather

Heather: Once they stage $47 billion, he was, he was, he was, and, and, and, and it was like, Yeah.

That was really shocking to me. And, and we’re talking, that was like in the last few years, that’s not a long time ago. That’s all happened and rolled out in the last few years. So

Trent: The other one that I really want to watch that I haven’t seen is the TV show for bad blood, which was Elizabeth Holmes who started. Yeah, there’s a TV drama, maybe it’s Netflix. I don’t know, but I want to watch that as well. I’ve got the book and I started reading the book and I was just like, oh my goodness, this is crazy.

Heather: Yeah. Yeah. And the thing with tennis and Elizabeth Holmes, and again, that’s, that’s still happening. Like the male involved with it is actually, in court at the moment, but she was behaving deceitfully.

Frequently. And she had everyone in her team sign NDAs constantly, and they were threatened and bullied. He, he knew, oh, I’m thinking L I think it was Alex Newman. Like, we work gentlemen, built a cult. Was visionary and excited people and he didn’t lie. He didn’t, it didn’t look deceitful, align. He just got people invested in the solution. So. Both very interesting stories, but distinct distinction around, the, the weather was behaving. It was just astonishing what she was doing in terms of, and it was medical equipment. She was lying about.

Trent: Oh, yeah. I, again, I’d read some parts where she’s sitting in some interviews, she’s doing a live demo of the product that they’re just sending false positive data. As in they’re sending fake positive data through the system to say, look, see it worked. We just analyse this plot in 10 seconds or whatever. Everyone’s like, oh my goodness. That’s MAs.

Heather: And it literally had a sticker over it. And it was literally the competitor’s machine at some stages with their sticker on it. It was very wow. But, but yeah, again, people bought into the image culture. So moving onto a little, something a little more boring…

Practice ignition is the onboarding contracting, solution out there. There was a price increase from Practice Ignition. And I think there’s sort of been prices, evolution from decks happening.

Heather: They have posted about it in their Facebook group, which is Ignition app. Because sorry, practice.

The artist or the app formerly known as Practice Ignition, my apologies to everyone out there. And, and, and, the founder co-founder guy, person is actually going in and, and, and responding to people’s, comments about it, which I kind of think is, is, good. I think that that’s a good thing to do.

He’s trying to be as transparent as possible. They didn’t have a price increase for four years. But, pricing, well, price increases need to happen. And, and the good thing is a lot of, a lot of businesses apps put their prices on hold for the last two years during the very challenging times of the products.

Trent: Yeah. I mean, if you look at the price increase on paper, I think all they did was raise the payments processing. They actually just rise to the standard across the board. So the directivity pricing was cheaper than everyone else’s for. So, so, so long. And now I believe it’s on page with what you would normally pay with a go Carlos.

So was 1% cap. Or dollars or something along those lines. So, I think the feedback that comes out of it and some of the posters in, oh, I’m going to leave, I’m going to go and do this. And you know, I’m obviously I’m an ex ignition, employee, still a young person for, advocate, still an advocate. Where are you going to go?

Like it’s the best product in the market for a reason. Yeah. It’s a, there’s nothing you can go to unless you want to dis construct deconstruct that whole workflow and God I’ll use something else and then connect payments. And second and third, you lose the whole value prop and the benefits. So for the, the point of just onshore.

Bundled into your phase increase your, you should be increasing your accounting fees by 10, 10% a year. Anyway, that’s what most good accounting firms do. They lose 10 to 20% of their customers. They increase their fees by 10%. If you’re not doing that, you should be. Ignitions, just doing the same thing. , and the other students, you know, the amount of value it provides to, their customers globally.

And I’ve, I’ve seen them witness this. Yeah, I’m, I’m good on them. Like, yeah. I don’t have any quarrels with what they’re doing. In that sense. I, I appreciate that some people are going to feel some pain and may not see it that way. They may feel free to go and do it the harder way. That’s fine. If you want to go and do it another way and get it cheaper, you can, it’s going to be more work for you and you’ll probably get less money in the account. It’s 10 times.

Heather: Yeah. And, and it is interesting because I did think that the, the charges that on the, on the actual clip were, lower than actually go cardless.

Trent: So I was way before.

Heather: Countless max charges $4. So I think they still are, which sell it. That’s what I, I was reading it going, I don’t know. But, but I do, I do accept that there has been a pricing price and it is challenging, but, we’re accountants and bookkeepers and we know things have to go up. And I think last time I checked

Trent: Accounts and bookkeepers women going bankrupt though, like now, like everyone’s fees, if any of your increase you’ve got should be increasing. As I said, this government grants and saying, yeah, it’s hard for clients to get to pay more and so forth. I can like, if you’re not paying you, you’re going to pay someone else. And that person is probably just taking on more clients and it’s a B it’s all episode we could do

Heather: just by itself. , the pricing, the pricing story Lopez, not one of my funders topics, but I will say that, the Dexter academy released, which is the next academy podcast, released the interview with Ron baker and, sons of CPA just released another.

Ron Baker and they actually can listen to them back to back because they compliment one another. But he, he, eloquently talks about pricing. There are many people in the industry who talk about it, but it’s something that we need to embrace and talk to my clients about. It’s it’s part of advisory of what we offer our clients.

Trent: Yeah. And I mean, the other point there, right? Like the other pricing increase seems to come up a little bit. It’s been the depths, that XR, I guess, I think it’s, you know, it’s a Facebook group every other week. And I think price increasing is. It’s sort of like, it’s not always a good thing. I don’t want to pay for multiple things, but, it’s the communication, it’s the communication where these things fall down.

If it’s not communicated well, and there’s not a lot of notice or enough time and. Sort of justify how it is or if we go back on what we said we would do, I know Intuit had a problem with this, last year and their payroll pricing as well. Right. And again, another organisation I’ve been involved with once upon a time, if you go back on what you said, then that’s when people get annoyed.

That’s when people are getting frustrated is because we’ll hold on. I bought in at this price, because you said that’s what it would be. And would it be that for life or for whichever now you’re coming back to me four years later saying, well, actually we’re going to have some wine that I’m pissed off. That’s the opposite of why I put my trust and faith in you. So now it’s not even about the price increases that you broke my trust. How do I know that you’re going to stay committed to what you’re telling me?

Heather: Yeah. And, and I think you’re, are you talking about the $5 books that they, they used to sell lifetime

Trent: $5 per month through a QBO file with 10 employees included on payroll. And what they then did was unwind the 10 employees. And then I think are charging switch solidify, bill the file. But now you’re paying $6 per user on the employee side. So some people were going from. Let’s call it $25 a month for five closed files became three, $400 a month then. Yeah, they’re not making money on that $25 a month, but that’s what you saw.

Trent: That’s what you committed to your partner, your client. You’d never broken my trust. I’m like, why the hell would I do this ever again? Like this is, and again for insured short, maybe they need to cut their ties and say, well, this is costing us too much money. We need to write that off. Somehow. There’s a correction that needs to happen.

Heather: The, the, at the time the, I think it was an interim director of, Intuit spoke to me about it. And I was just like, I don’t want a client. Who’s only prepared to pay $5 for a GL, like that’s not my client. So, so trying to get that, that client who wants to pay, who values their accounting system at that lower price is always going to be pained by price increases.

Heather: So onto something a little bit more exciting than a price increase. I did want to highlight that a expert have a new feature, which is their client analytical report. So you attach it to a new client’s file and they will then analyse the volume of transactions that are happening in the fall. And the complexity of the file.

And they’ll surface that information for you, which you can then use as an informed position to quote for the client. So it actually kind of, you could use that before you move to a practising mission or whatever solution you’re going to use to actually engage them on it. I, of course, as a, if you price value pricing, et cetera, other things will, other factors will be involved, but it’s a nice way to surface that information quickly.

Trent: That’s pretty nifty. I think I saw something similar between Xavier before Tex acquired and drug proposal.

Heather: And they had analytics.

Trent: And that integration fed into go proposal to help influence the pricing on the proposal. So expertise ignition about the integration, because that could be a really cool way to say hi. This client’s doing 200 transactions a month is to then influence the pricing template.

Heather: Yeah, that’d be cool. Hi, well, I’ll be introducing the expert team to the Ignition. Trent, I want a clip of that, that, that relationship partner.

Trent: I won 20% of all business done on that introduction.

Heather: Very good. Very good. So I can, I can, I can already see, Rebecca talking about. Not that she has, but I can see it talking about it on an upcoming webinar about this list. Just prepare the webinar.

Trent: Forecasting their content plan for them.

Heather: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Let’s do this. Let’s move on to talk about, we have, had a number of conferences that we’ve been to, so I just thought we should just touch base on a number of those conferences that we’ve been to, not me.

Have you been to the Xero road show that’s happening at the moment?.

Trent: I have been, is there a road showed, you know what, this year I actually went to a lot less than I’d been to in prior years, not by choice. I was supposed to go to a lot. Melissa. My wife rolled her ankle the first five days in a new apartment, which meant she was off her, on her back for the next 12 days, which meant I couldn’t travel because I’m a good husband and looks after his boss. That’s what I’m telling myself, that list.

Heather: We were impressed.

Trent: Thank you. I appreciate the, the virtual applause that you’re all giving me right now. I went to Woolongong camp. I went to one of their lawns. They were good. Were some of them where Lexus attended the, maybe what we were expecting, but I think we have tired. The, in some sites were well-attended. I know you’re in Brisbane yesterday, and that looked like it was pumping.

Heather: And no, it was, I went to Brisbane yesterday and it was fantastic. Let’s talk about highlights to Sandra Lawrence. Cassandra, Scott, I always, I always get a nice touch.

Because she’s from Laura spooky thing. That’s why I get confused. Cassandra stood up and gave a 10 minute talk about the community and how the community had come together. During the last two years and half phenomenal that everyone had been and what we would we’d gone through. And that was a very emotional and, and, and, wonderful.

She was very eloquent talk. So, I’m in, I’m in talks with CAS about whether, how, how are we going to, showcase it and put it up out there so other people can see it. , I spoke to a lot of the apps and they said that they had a lot of people throw a lot of new people through for the first time who’d never been to a conference.

It was great to see. There was a lot of solutions out there and they put, they put up one solution. Oh, what was it? I think it was the workflow, the green workflow solution within Xero. I always get confused by the name. Let’s call it practice manager, but I’ve probably got it wrong. Yeah.

And then. We have, and I was, I wouldn’t say who I was sitting. Nice, dude. We have a modern new look for it and they put it up on the screen and I’m like, Ooh, looks like Lotus 1, 2, 3 to me.And I sit that and people around me went, oh, wait, it does. Doesn’t it. Cause I was obviously with all the, but Lotus one, two threes and fundable looking solution and what it was, it looks streamlined and it looked like an Excel spreadsheet. So.

Trent: Which has come full circle.

Heather: Some bookkeepers love spreadsheets. Was kind of funny, but we had scan gate, the scans ran out, but apart from that, it went well. We, we went to. W you and I went to the CFO summer, which listeners probably didn’t go to. We both went to the accounting and business expo. So well done to the team at AB expo, who organised that I coordinated 15 speakers and five events all went. Brilliantly. Everyone came on stage raw, brought it on stage. So many, thanks to everyone who joined me as a speaker, the audience were alive. It was electric. There was a lot of hugs. A lot of people hadn’t seen each other in two years, there was eight sessions running simultaneously all the way through the day. There’s this guy came out and talked about macro economics and Miller’s like heaving. There was so many people, outside, hanging around, trying to get in. It was quite spacious, which was good. And, some of the apps, well, most of the apps I spoke to said they were extraordinarily busy during the session. And, and, but some of, some of the apps I understand they didn’t have a great time, but I guess it’s, you know, first rodeo, big rodeo back, for the year. So we’ll learn, live and learn from it. But I had a great time, as did many of the people I.

Trent: We weren’t exhibiting, I wandered around just check it out and say I was caught up with, a few people. you could see that this was the first time in a long time people had come together. So it was good to see, you know, all that taking place. I think it’s. Another six to 12 months. So I’m hoping by Xero, I guess, that we start to see that influx and the vibe of what you had in Brisbane yesterday replicated in all the other states as well. So I think it’s going to take a little bit of time before that takes place. But yeah, no, it was, it was interesting. It was interesting for sure. I now what we’ll do or whether we’ll do that next year.

Heather: Well, it’s interesting because like, I guess you probably realise they’re running in the same day. One’s running in Melbourne. One’s running in Sydney across the same day.

Trent: Ah, come on guys. You act together.

Heather: So accounting business expo is running. Day one day two, but they’re day two crosses over on day. One of Accountex, which will run in Sydney. So, so that will be interesting to see, but I guess the thing is not a lot of attendees maybe fly in for these sessions. Maybe it will roll out would just be a challenge for the teams who have to have, marketing people on each, each area. I did want to mention before we move on, the, you organise and Devi pay, organise a CFO summit. That was really, really good. So congratulations to you, Trent and Adriana, I’m involved in so many conferences. It was, the content was excellent. The speakers was really good. That you can see the people listening in. You can go back, you can register for free and access it. The guy who spoke about macroeconomics, he did a really good job. He was very lively. Someone told me that the talk by Alina, A L E N A, Bennett was, I didn’t hear it. She said it was exceptional and she’s implemented stuff that, that the lady had talked about. I ran two sessions, which I have posted about on LinkedIn, but I particularly, I love Alexander Bond Burnett who runs the final session. I just love it to death. I love, she talks about how to impact people and how to use stories to, , share the message behind the number.

Trent: The safest summit was really, really, really good. I did very, very little for this summit. Other than maybe show, show the team how we’ve run summits in the past, but Ben and Adriana did a fantastic job of helping to pull all together. The sponsors, the speakers, the design. Yes. It was very, very slick, maybe more slick than some of the ones I’ve done in the past. But they did an amazing job. The feedback was through the roof. There was just over a couple of thousand people registered. It was over 2000 people that had registered and signed on and checked out sessions during the day. And the content was just awesome, like on fire. , so they, they did an amazing job, bringing that all together. I’m the CFO side. There’s some really cool things in the works behind the scenes for the second half of the year, that I can’t talk about today or break, break the news or gets your reaction to this either, but, to really cool things happening behind the scenes in CFO land, in terms of summits and some big collaborations. Looking forward to sharing that news into course, but we do have another trenches summit coming. On June 20 and 21. , so David and Paul had their podcasts from the trenches. We, helped pivot that into online, , counting summit of sorts. So we had just over 2000 people attending that. We’re expecting, we’ll get between two to three and a half days. And this year, just on all the things we learned, content again is on fire. There’s crypto there’s pricing, tech stacks, tech pitching. There’s a whole bunch of really, really cool, looking plan to and Dave, Tim and Paul do a great job bringing that all together.

Heather: Excellent. Excellent. The CIA and said our holding their future-focused accounting conference 10th of June. So it’s a bit, just a bit before that. And I’m grateful to be hosting that for the two days and I’m interviewing Don price from Atlanta. So that’s my biggest thing as to it. Well, biggest, I don’t know, business, celebrity to interview. So I’m excited and scared about that. 20th to 24th of June, I am at the tropical innovation festival, which is in Cairns. Okay. So if you’re listening in and won a trip to Cairns tropical innovation festival, it is. The first, Monday to Wednesday, it is at a hotel.

And then on a Thursday, it goes out on a mega yacht. And, we have like the founder of air Tasker. They’re the founder of, go one there, the founder of green CrossFits who’s also on shark tanks there. So a lot of things. I think people that it’s, that you will have access to. And, I’m sort of grateful to be leaving a few, talks on community and apps in the ecosystem. So there’s a number of other events, but we probably don’t want, don’t want to bore people too much with too many events after that.

Is there any other event that you want to touch on?

Trent: Oh, I mean, zircons, probably the next big one that we’re all looking forward to. I know we’ve, we’ve invested pretty heavily into it this year. So that’s, September 1st week of September, I always know that because Melissa’s birthday is in the same week and I’m always plied with, do I stay the whole two days? Do I, do I have to leave early because. We do a birthday week celebration normally, which means you don’t just celebrate one day, you get to celebrate all days of that week. So yeah, it’s a, it’s an interesting time, but yeah. Is there a con Sidney would definitely be, high on the list for everyone to get along to? I don’t think it’s going to be bloody fantastic. Pre-con parties, the works. It’s all, it’s all happening

Heather: Absolutely. In my news is that I’m actually going to Xerocon London in July, New Orleans in August and Sydney in September. So I’m, if you want to get in contact with me for those events, please, please do thank you so much, Trent, for joining me on the show today, really enjoyed having you we’ve both been extraordinarily busy with various things, but maybe it’ll settle down for a week or so now.

How can people get in contact with you?

Trent: You will find me mostly on LinkedIn and Twitter. So feel free to connect, say hi, send me a message to tell me, tell me if you liked what we talked about today. Otherwise Trent @divipay.com is my email. So feel free to reach out and say hello.

Heather: Awesome. Thank you for that. And as always, you can contact me on any of the social media platforms that Heather Smith a you, cause there’s too many heads of Smiths out there, but Heather Smith AU. So thank you everyone for listening in today. You’ve been listening to the cloud stories podcast. I encourage you to subscribe, leave a five star review so other people can find this podcast. And as always, I encourage you to stay up to date with the curated content I’m sharing by signing up to the accounting apps newsletter available at Heather Smith.