Digi-Tools In Accrual World

Indi Tatla, Ryan Pearcy, John Toon
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The go-to place for all things cloud accounting and digital. Find out the latest in accounting app news and exclusive interviews with cloud pioneers in the accounting industry.

  1. 6d ago

    Who trains the juniors if the bots do the prep? || Be In The Loop

    Indi Tatla, John Toon and Ryan Pearcy are on the show together for the first time in months, and this week the AI conversation finally gets a bit more nuanced. Airwallex has launched T:0, an AI accounting platform for US startups that builds the chart of accounts as the business grows and reports burn and runway in real time. John Toon sees apps creeping into each other's patch. Ryan Pearcy thinks everyone's going after everything because it's so easy to build now, and it'll be the Wild West until the ones that work win on word of mouth. Aynsley Damery's Alldone claims a full set of UK limited company accounts in an hour or less, with the numbers calculated from the legislation and AI kept to the wording and mappings. Indi Tatla likes the cold review challenge. John Toon isn't convinced by a demo built on a perfect client, and Ryan Pearcy can't see small firms running two systems. Then John Toon's own OneSixth, which handles VAT margin schemes and partial exemption and posts the journals back to the ledger, is out in beta. AuditBot has launched AccountsBot, which reviews financial statements against a disclosure checklist from HAT Group. John Toon tried building the same thing with ChatGPT and couldn't get it past 80 per cent reliable. Intuit and Perplexity have connected QuickBooks and Mailchimp to Perplexity for US users, and John Toon wonders why they didn't make more of Perplexity's sourcing. Bill Gates picks accountancy as his example of a job AI will replace, which leads to the big question of the episode: if trainees skip the basic prep, how do they learn to check the bot's work? Ryan Pearcy brings in Michael Gould, co-founder of Anaplan, on swapping the spreadsheet nobody dared touch for an AI engine nobody can explain. John Toon doesn't think ticking boxes ever taught anyone much, and makes his case with a car analogy that even Indi Tatla likes. Also covered: a Startup Coalition report on the 11.2 million hours UK businesses spend each year proving who they are, and whether BizPass is digital ID by another name. And Joiin's new forecasting, with full three-way integration and the group consolidation John Toon is most excited about. 00:00 Intro 02:18 Advancetrack 02:56 Airwallex launches T:0 for US startups 07:56 Alldone: a full set of accounts in an hour 14:45 OneSixth: VAT margin schemes and partial exemption 21:09 AuditBot launches AccountsBot for disclosure checklists 23:49 Intuit and QuickBooks connect to Perplexity 27:11 Bill Gates on AI and accountancy: who trains the juniors? 30:00 Michael Gould on AI in finance and the spreadsheet problem 38:55 Startup Coalition: 11.2 million hours proving who you are 47:14 Joiin launches three-way forecasting 54:20 Outro

  2. Sep 14

    Influencer Gate, the Rule of 40 and the Xero AGM || Be In The Loop

    Ryan Pearcy is back in the chair, joined by Heather Smith and Indi Tatla for a bumper news episode, most of it about Xero and none of it comfortable. It starts with the reel. A paid influencer told her followers she had fed her Xero data into Claude and no longer needed the 800 pounds a month she spent on an accountant, and the community went off. Indi Tatla walks through the responses: Rachel Harris on how tightly brand partnerships are actually controlled, Alex Falcon arguing the profession should level up rather than take it personally, and Damon Anderson on the capability, accountability and trust clocks all running at different speeds. Ryan Pearcy has no sympathy for the influencer, then argues the thing that has really annoyed firms is not the advert. It is auto bank rec, and every vendor promising a business owner they can automate everything, leaving the firm to unpick it at the year end and charge more for the privilege. It was not a one-off week. Aaron Patrick found Syft Analytics reports going out under his practice's name without his approval, since switched off. Xero built accounts and tax filing into the product after Companies House closed the free route in March, then marketed it straight at business owners without telling the firms holding those clients. The panel keeps coming back to Ben Richmond on stage in New Orleans, promising Xero would never sell directly to your clients. Heather Smith brings in a long post from a former Xero employee arguing the board swallowed the Rule of 40 and built an executive incentive structure around it that cost them the customer. That runs into the AGM, where 70 per cent of shareholders voted against the remuneration report following an increase to Sukhinder Singh Cassidy's target pay. Ryan Pearcy thinks the restructure is defensible and the timing is what stings. Indi Tatla asks whether the conversation would be happening at all if the chief executive were a man. Xero gave the show its position directly, and it is read out in full. Elsewhere, Sage launched Salary Payments, so Sage Payroll customers can pay staff from their own bank account with no wallet and no second login, powered by Crezco, who now sit behind Xero, iplicit and Sage alike. Ryan Pearcy wonders what has happened to Modulr. Indi Tatla runs the employment law timetable, with the tribunal window doubling on 1 October, the duty to prevent third party harassment landing on 30 October and the unfair dismissal changes arriving in January 2027, and flags the Employment Hero webinar on it. Also covered: Heather Smith's ask of conference organisers to publish a harassment policy. Accrual acquiring Puzzle's accounting firm business on the same day as everything else, and almost nobody noticing. Private equity buying accounting firms alongside the software it already funds. And how a profession without a podcast is meant to make itself heard by the vendors. Chapters 00:00 Intro 02:45 Employment Hero 03:25 Influencer Gate: the Xero reel that blew up LinkedIn 08:52 Rachel Harris, Alex Falcon and Damon Anderson on being a paid partner 14:29 Why auto bank rec annoys firms more than the advert did 16:39 Heather Smith on who actually counts as an influencer 18:07 Syft Analytics reports sent to clients without approval 19:35 Xero markets accounts and tax filing direct to business owners 21:01 "We will never sell directly to your clients" 24:15 The Rule of 40 post from a former Xero employee 27:10 CEO pay and the 70 per cent shareholder vote 32:10 Xero's official position 35:41 Joiin 36:49 Sage Payroll Salary Payments, powered by Crezco 38:27 Employment law: October, and then January 2027 42:33 Harassment policies at accounting conferences 44:25 Accrual acquires Puzzle 47:06 Private equity moving into accounting firms 49:19 How should the community influence the vendors? 52:14 Disruptor Awards and outro

  3. Sep 7

    When Accounting Becomes Someone Else's Feature || In The Loop

    John Toon is joined by Kendrick Hair of Fishbowl and Leigh Stallard for a news episode about who ends up owning the client. Leigh opens on a LinkedIn post from Joshua at Reva, written after Starling took heat for putting books next to the current account. The more interesting move is embedding the service itself, advisers included, inside the platforms an SME already uses. Uprise is doing exactly that in the US. John's caveat is that nobody has done it at scale yet, although compliance is already being commoditised and Mazuma has been running like a software company with accountants attached for years. Kendrick brings the US lens on firms niching hard into tax as technology moves onto their patch. Fishbowl has bought Repfabric, and Kendrick takes the two questions customers actually ask after an acquisition. Does the brand disappear, and do the connections to competing products get switched off. His answers are no and no. Repfabric brings a decade of commissions, territories and multi-line sales work to sit in front of everything Fishbowl already does once the order lands. Kendrick then picks up Joiin Intelligence, which goes exception hunting rather than writing prose about revenue. Its agents clean the chart of accounts, build eliminations and diagnose a consolidated balance sheet that will not balance. John's angle is where the data physically goes once a firm hands it to a model, and why Joiin running on AWS matters to anyone with GDPR to answer to. He remembers early Jax being slower than clicking the report. Leigh follows with Joiin's new report pack sharing and the wider point underneath it. Firms do not adopt what they cannot picture themselves using, so a release that ships without a workflow attached quietly dies in the inbox. Then the Xero run. Engager, now part of TaxCalc, ships its August features, and John pushes back on listening to the loudest customer instead of leading. Kendrick covers BrightPay's Oscar onboarding assistant, Pay by Bank, and the cloud transition Bright had to pull and rebuild. Leigh takes Xero's developer growth programme for practice apps and John asks what it says about Xero Practice Manager. Back orders and prepayments land in the Xero API, which Kendrick has been waiting for and which Cin7, Katana and Fishbowl are not using yet, and Leigh explains why giving people back orders in core Xero is a dog on a half-submerged pontoon. Also covered: Trent McLaren's map of where there is still room to build in the Xero ecosystem, the test of whether a Xero product manager could describe your product in one sentence, and what it now costs vendors to keep the data flowing since Xero and Intuit both put a price on API access. This episode is brought to you by Fishbowl, inventory and manufacturing software for businesses that have outgrown spreadsheets but are not ready for full ERP. https://www.fishbowlinventory.com 00:00 Intro 02:14 Sponsor: Fishbowl 03:25 Accounting as a feature, and the fight for the client 09:57 Fishbowl buys Repfabric 19:45 Joiin Intelligence goes exception hunting 26:11 Joiin report packs, and why releases die in the inbox 29:38 Reporting people actually act on 33:22 Sponsor: SuiteFiles 34:21 Engager updates, and who you listen to 39:07 BrightPay, Oscar and the cloud move 44:06 Xero opens its growth programme to practice apps 46:46 Back orders and prepayments in the Xero API 53:45 Enough rope: back orders in core Xero 56:34 Where to build in the Xero ecosystem 01:08:19 Outro

  4. Aug 31

    Xero Tax Errors, OpenAI Roll-Ups and Active Accounts Production | Be In The Loop

    Eriona Bajrakurtaj, Alastair Barlow and John Toon go through the accounting tech week, and most of it comes back to the same question: is the thing being announced the thing that actually works? The headline everyone shared was OpenAI buying accounting firms. It has not. OpenAI took an equity position in Thrive Holdings back in December, Thrive owns Current, the roll-up formerly called Crete Professionals Alliance, and OpenAI engineers go into those firms in exchange for more equity and access to the data. Alastair breaks the structure down and lands on how circular it is. What matters more than the deal is the taxonomy forming around it, with roll-ups buying legacy firms, platforms buying and re-tooling them, and AI-native challengers like Amsterdam's Neno starting from nothing. Then the other end of the telescope. An accountant proofread a set of accounts produced in Xero Tax and posted what he found, including the wrong directors on the cover page and an inappropriate section 444 disclosure, in the same week Xerocon Denver was selling agentic workflows. Eriona is an advocate for AI in accounting and still lands on the obvious point, that an assistant saving you twenty minutes is worth nothing if you spend twenty minutes checking its output. John then admits Xero Tax double-counted the corporation tax on his own company, and blames his own chart of accounts rather than the software. On the compliance side, Active have released accounts production, taking a firm from trial balance to a filed set of accounts inside one platform, with Companies House filing built in. John has been tracking it for the best part of a year and reads it as Active going at Silverfin directly. Workiro released Workflows in the same week, which routes every step of a job to the right person with an AI summary at each hand-off, and Eriona asks the fair question of why a practice management system cannot already do that. The episode ends on Sodium and TaxCalc arguing publicly about an encrypted form, and underneath it a bigger question about who owns accounting data. Alastair's answer is the strongest few minutes on the pod. A vendor making it hard to move your clients' data has not built a moat, it has built friction, and the decision to use your own historic client data sits between you and your client. Also covered: OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar's target of a zero-day close, and why John thinks the phrase is too ambiguous to mean anything. Prosaic, an AI-native cash-based ledger out of New Zealand now past fifty firms. The Xero Global App Awards, won globally by Gojee and Ignition, with ApprovalMax taking the UK and SuiteFiles the US practice award. Updates to Xero's Auto Bank Reconciliation and what "confident" is actually doing in that sentence. WorkGuru's rebuilt workflows. And Repodo in Copenhagen raising the largest pre-seed Denmark has recorded to launch an AI-native audit firm. 00:00 Intro 04:42 The zero-day close 14:25 Prosaic rethinks the ledger 26:27 Xero App Awards 2026 37:56 Somebody proofread Xero Tax 44:42 How JAX decides 54:51 Workiro releases Workflows 57:22 Trial balance to Companies House 1:00:54 OpenAI has not bought a firm 1:13:31 Who owns the data 1:23:47 Outro

  5. Aug 24

    The big AI companies do not use AI to do their own accounts. So why should you?

    Indi Tatla is joined by Lara Manton and Billie McLoughlin for a run through the month's accounting tech updates, most of which nobody would call exciting and all of which somebody will end up using. Two from Xero. The bills page gets the same full-page treatment invoices and quotes already had, with contact editing and planned payment dates moving into the bill itself, and Lara makes the point that the people who will feel the change hardest are the ones who use it most. Then the builder story: Xero has released a Lovable connector, so an accountant can describe an app in plain English and have it running on live Xero data. Xero says one in five connections into its ecosystem is now a custom app built outside the App Store. Billie is not convinced, and reckons meaningful builds will come from the 1% of the 1%. Vinyl has moved from recording meetings to preparing for them. Pre-meeting briefs pull context from previous calls, open items in your practice management system and the calendar invite itself, which as Billie points out makes better preparation a data hygiene problem in disguise. Sodium has connected its practice management platform to Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini, giving them a line into tasks, billing, AML checks, document requests and client workflows. Indi's read is that Duane Jackson has built this shape before in payroll and in bookkeeping, and that boring businesses are the ones worth watching. The admin round. TaxCalc and Engager keep stitching themselves together, with tax figures dropping into bulk client emails and filed returns ticking themselves off. Otto Capture launches from With Otto at £9 a client, with Emma James running her own practice behind it, and goes to Xero and FreeAgent together rather than Xero alone. Sage is on the roadmap. Billie's line on all of it is how much manual glue accountants create day to day without noticing. Briefcase gets the longest argument. Sales invoicing and aged reports land in Briefcase Ledger, and Working Papers takes the month end out of spreadsheets with an immutable balance sheet snapshot. Billie wants to know where it falls short before she trusts it, and makes the case that the big AI companies are not using AI to do their own accounts. Lara asks whether it matters that this is an accounting app with AI rather than an AI app that does accounting. Also covered: MyDocSafe removing portal chat on purpose, adding a signature dashboard and making form consents compulsory. Chapters 00:00 Intro 02:40 Xero bills refresh 06:36 One in five is custom 12:50 Vinyl pre-meeting briefs 17:50 Sodium talks to the LLMs 23:10 TaxCalc into Engager 27:05 Sponsor: Joiin 28:13 Otto Capture 31:11 MyDocSafe removes chat 34:20 Briefcase Ledger invoicing 35:52 Briefcase and the close 42:20 Outro

  6. Aug 17

    Intuit AI Write-Back, ApprovalMax Pricing and Telleroo Interest || Be In The Loop

    Indi Tatla, Lara Manton and Robbie White on a week where almost every story turned out to be about payments. Intuit has taken its QuickBooks connectors in Claude and ChatGPT past read-only, so a business owner can raise and send an invoice from inside a chat window. Robbie calls the direction of travel genuinely exciting, then names the problem with it. The businesses most likely to switch it on are the ones with nobody in the building to catch it when it gets something wrong. Lara puts the consequence into a scene involving an auditor. ApprovalMax has rebuilt its pricing around tiered usage, bundling Capture and Pay into the core product and dropping the multi-client discounts. Lara uses it every day for a client and asks the question a pricing page cannot answer, which is whether firms decide the basic approvals in their other software will do. Telleroo is moving from pushing money out of a client account to also taking it in, holding it, and paying interest on it through Griffin Bank. Indi explains why she is happy for one vendor to make money out of her and not another. It involves bread. Also covered: Intuit's own business credit card, Dext Payments arriving on QuickBooks Online, Allica Bank launching Cashew, Sage and GoCardless adding pay by bank, and a developer who built an app off 589 Xero feature-request votes and found the demand was never there. Thanks to our sponsor Employment Hero - https://employmenthero.com 00:00 Intro 02:58 Intuit launches a business credit card 08:57 QuickBooks lets Claude and ChatGPT send the invoice 17:15 Dext Payments comes to QuickBooks Online 23:33 ApprovalMax bundles everything and puts the price up 29:54 Allica Bank launches Cashew 36:15 Sage and GoCardless add pay by bank 40:26 Telleroo will pay interest on the money sitting in the account 45:33 589 votes and the demand never arrived 50:09 Outro

  7. Aug 10

    Firm Models, Big Budgets and Nobody checking || In The Loop

    Almost half of UK firms say they plan to spend up to £100,000 on AI this year. John Toon runs the numbers on what that actually buys and does not believe a word of it. Indi, John Toon and Eriona Bajrakurtaj work through a month where the same question keeps surfacing from different directions. If software can file it, who checked it? In the US, CLA has partnered with Digits to build and train its own model on its client base and workflows, which raises the question UK firms are starting to ask out loud about their own ledger. Sage put the review layer question in a room with a round table on embedded accounting, picking up the campaign Lucy Cohen has been running in public. And FreeAgent has enabled MTD quarterly filing from the mobile app, which is the right call for a mobile-first cohort and removes a piece of friction that was arguably doing a job. Also in this one: Lord Vallance takes the chair of a new AI taskforce while funding comes out of other science, more than 120 millionaires ask to be taxed more, and the small business employment figures show a labour market that no longer looks national. Plus product updates from MIMO and Katana. This episode sponsored by Fishbowl - https://www.fishbowlinventory.com/en-gb   Chapters 00:00 Welcome, and what is in this episode 03:17 CLA is training its own model rather than buying one 10:36 Lucy Cohen and the review layer nobody has built 17:55 What UK firms are actually spending their AI budget on 24:26 A new AI taskforce, and the models we do not own 29:24 More than 120 millionaires ask to be taxed more 37:43 Small business employment and twelve labour markets 42:52 Mimo launches VAT review 45:10 Katana MCP goes live, Amazon FBM arrives natively 46:14 FreeAgent brings MTD filing to mobile 49:08 Wrap

  8. Aug 3

    Xero's C-Suite Churn, FreeAgent x Joiin and Vibe Coding the Ledger || In The Loop

    John Toon is joined by Ian Gregory of Advancetrack and Billie McLoughlin to work through July's accounting tech news, and it turns into a run of arguments about what a general ledger is actually for. Billie opens on the batch newly certified for the Xero App Store. Garfield, the UK's first SRA-regulated AI law firm, reads your Xero data, chases overdue invoices and drafts small claims paperwork for amounts up to £10,000. Autohive is a no-code AI agent that works inside Xero itself. That second one sets up her argument for the episode: firms may be about to stop shopping for tools and start shopping for workers, where you pick the task and the most qualified agent surfaces against it. John is not convinced that reduces the number of apps you end up running, and Ian asks the question nobody has answered yet, which is whether we adapt to Xero's workflows or Xero adapts to ours. Then the leadership news. Xero's CTO Rick Carragher leaves after 16 months, weeks after chief people officer Jeff Ryan went after 15, with Madhuri Dhulipala arriving from BlackRock as SVP of Engineering, Payments and AI Transformation and Maninder Sawhney joining from Adobe as chief business officer. Ian reads the payments hire as a signal about where Xero wants to sit in agentic payments, and makes the point that the future of receipts is the future of bookkeeping. Billie's concern is more practical. If the people who promised you a roadmap leave, does the promise leave with them? Then the ledger layer. FreeAgent now connects directly to Joiin for group consolidation, Acumatica has bought Vertrax to get into fuel and energy distribution, and Crunchafi has launched FRS 102 lease accounting for the UK and Ireland. Ian's line on the Vertrax deal is the sharpest of the episode: this is the operational detail a generic ledger does not understand, and a generic AI agent will not magically invent. Which leads to the argument the episode was always heading for. Someone vibe coded their way off premium accounting software over a weekend and wrote it up on AccountingWEB. Billie is not making her own butter just because butter has gone up, and she puts a number on the Saturday it cost him. Ian reckons it goes the way of open source, a niche for the dabblers and nothing mission critical. John has vibe coded a product himself and is still paying outside experts to check it before anyone touches it. Also covered: the Social Prosperity Network's plan to replace six taxes with a single national contribution, and the progress update on HMRC's Transformation Roadmap, where digital engagement is up and so, awkwardly, is the tax gap. This episode is brought to you by FreeAgent and Suitefiles: freeagent.com suitefiles.com   00:00 Intro 02:17 Xero's July app store intake: an AI law firm and no-code agents 08:38 Xero loses its CTO, and what the BlackRock hire signals 12:33 The chief people officer exits too, and a new chief business officer arrives 17:10 FreeAgent users can now connect straight to Joiin 20:55 Acumatica buys Vertrax and moves deeper into fuel distribution 23:27 Crunchafi brings FRS 102 lease accounting to the UK and Ireland 26:28 Someone vibe coded their way off premium accounting software 34:11 Replacing six taxes with a single national contribution 45:21 Outro

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The go-to place for all things cloud accounting and digital. Find out the latest in accounting app news and exclusive interviews with cloud pioneers in the accounting industry.

Information

  • Creator
    Indi Tatla, Ryan Pearcy, John Toon
  • Years Active
    2021 - 2026
  • Episodes
    100
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Copyright 2025 Digi-Tools in Accrual World Limited. All rights reserved.
  • Show Website
    Digi-Tools In Accrual World

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