AI App Speed Dating: See 6 new AI Apps for accountants and bookkeepers

Trent McLaren: This session is the AI App Speed Dating session. Now, I've got a bit of a mantra. When I put these content programs together, I put a lot of hard, stringent feedback on the presenters to say, hey: practical, educational, help our audience out. They want to see what's real. Don't just sell me things. This session is not that. This session, you are in fact going to get an 8-minute pitch from 6 different app partners in a row, so strap yourselves in, it's gonna be a fun time. I am playing timekeeper today, so I've got my clock here. The group here has been briefed on the criteria, but just to spell the rules out for everyone that's attending: you're gonna hear from 6 different app partners, they're gonna get 8 minutes each to tell you what they do, what they solve, why you should care about it.

Trent McLaren: This is super fun. This is one of my favourite sessions, because it's always a great way to just learn quickly, and it puts the software vendors under pressure. No one's used to sharing what they know in 8 minutes or less. So, to kick things off, we have the wonderful Gus McLennan. Gus, I'm gonna let you share your screen before I start your timer and make sure you're ready to rock and roll. How are you, Gus? Can you hear me okay?

Gus McLennan: Yep, I got you, you got me.

Trent McLaren: I do! Your screen is shared? You tell me when you're ready, and then I will hit start on the clock.

Gus McLennan: I'm good to go.

Trent McLaren: Alrighty, kicking off our speed dating session with Gus from AI Dojo. Gus, the 8-minute floor is yours.

Gus McLennan: Thanks, Trent. Thanks, everyone. It's great to be the warm-up act. I'll do my best. At AI Dojo, we've basically built an AI platform to help support accounting firms with managing their workflows. That can be everything from tax research, general emails, but more recently, we've been focusing more on how do we help you with those compliance-specific workflows. And the way we've done this to date, since we launched in January, is really around building out a set of capabilities, or workflows, that are built on skills, for those that are familiar with that concept, and then actually working on how do we integrate more systems. So we've integrated to Xero, we've got ATO that's still pending, and we're about to turn on MCP later this week, which will give you access to a whole bunch of other systems. But that's not what I wanted to show you today, guys. While this solution that we've built works pretty well, these chat-based solutions, if I look at, say, an individual tax return here, they kind of work well, but they can be a little bit slow.

Gus McLennan: And they can cost a little bit of money, too. So this costs $1.98 to run this particular workflow, which generates a work paper. So what we decided to do was rethink how we would actually solve some of these workflows. And so, this is something that we've been building. It's currently in testing with one of our customers, and I'm gonna try and speedrun it for you today, but I do have one here that I've done previously, in case I do run out of time and just need to jump in at the end. So, really, the whole idea here is that you can set this up to run a year-end process for a particular group. So, I'm going to start my new group, I'm going to call it Hart Group 2. I'm going to add some people who are going to be part of this particular process. I'm going to add some entities. So, we've got Amelia Hart here. She's the director. Then I'm gonna enter a company.

Gus McLennan: And that's kind of all we need for this particular group. So, this is actually going to be a company tax return. I've already connected to Xero, so it's going to pull in my details for this particular entity, and pretty much now, I can create my job. So the first thing we're going to do is drop in some documents, and the first document that I am going to drop in… knew this was gonna happen… is what was my WIP for this particular client for last year. So I've just added in an extract that I've taken out of my practice management system. Oh, we're still processing data here. But basically what will happen is it will pull through last year's WIP, and then I'll be able to work through a job sheet.

Gus McLennan: As always happens when you're running demos, the demo gods aren't with me, and it looks like this is taking a little bit longer. So what I am going to do, given I'm at the 4-minute mark, is I'm just going to jump back in and show you the one that I'd prepared earlier. So, within here, I had actually uploaded the WIP. I could see it there. We could see what the WIP was, what had been billed. It basically builds out a job sheet for me. I can change this and adjust some of these figures. It's gonna give me a scope for this particular work, including the particular fees. I've already approved that, so I can move on to the information request. I'd already provided a whole bunch of details here, but what happens in this particular screen is it calls out what particular documents are actually needed to be able to support both of those returns.

Gus McLennan: Then I can check, see what documents have come back. We've already received a whole bunch of documents, here's some outstanding ones, and then I'm ready to jump into the actual return itself. So, now I'm in the company tax return for Ironbark Studio Supply. I can jump in and have a look at the actual work papers. So, we've already pulled in a whole bunch of details from the balance sheet. I can see the status here. We've got the profit and loss and the tax rec as well. If I go in, I can have a look at this particular workbook. There's already been a query that's been raised here. I can see my bank rec. We've even built in the ability to embed spreadsheets in this. I've also got access to see what that document was that was included. So yeah, I've got all of my various documents in here. I can have a look at my inventory,

Gus McLennan: and I can see that everything's reconciled. If I click on here, I can actually see where this came from, so balance from the ledger, supporting documents, so all those links are all in there. In terms of the profit and loss, it's going to pull through all those details, and then the AI agent is going to go in and have a look at all of these P&L accounts and see which ones potentially might need a review, because they've got some transactions that might have a tax impact. I probably should have mentioned that I did upload a whole bunch of documents earlier in here. The AI will go through, classify them all, and then basically link them all up. Then I get to my tax rec, so that's now been completed here as well. I can jump in and have a look at my tax return.

Trent McLaren: One minute left, mate.

Gus McLennan: Yeah. So this one is actually missing some of the details. Anyway, this tax return does get fully populated, and then we can jump into the financial statements after that. We can see the details: profit and loss, balance sheet has all been completed, notes, declaration. So essentially, what we've done here is tried to build a full end-to-end workflow for a full year-end compliance piece for a group. We're looking for beta customers. We'll be open for expressions of interest in probably December, or January at the latest, for those that are interested.

Trent McLaren: 10 seconds. Awesome. Thank you, Gus. Well done, mate. Demo issues can happen. Happens to the best of us. Gus, I'll let you jump off camera, thanks, mate. Alrighty, next to the stage, Mr James Rose from Content Snare. When you're ready, the floor is yours.

James Rose: Awesome. Alright. Hi all, I'm James, founder of Content Snare. Content Snare is the easy way to get information from clients. There's lots of different times throughout the year you need information, whether that's client onboarding, end-of-year tax, statements, periodically through the BAS periods, FBT. There's always stuff, and the way it normally goes is you send out a list of 10 questions, the client replies with seven, three of them aren't even the right thing, and now it just goes back and forth. Different people on the team are asking for the same document. You've got things across a shared folder and several email accounts and whatever. It just turns into a mess and eats up everyone's time. And this is exactly what Content Snare fixes. There's a lot of different ways to get information from clients, so why would you think about Content Snare? I think the main thing is a best-in-class client experience. We have so many people come to Content Snare from other systems, or even use us in addition to their practice management that has some version of this,

James Rose: and say clients just never engage with that, and they do with Content Snare. If you scan that QR code, you can view what it looks like to a client, even on your phone. But the things people love are automatic reminders. You can reject the things that clients got wrong when they inevitably upload the wrong thing. It plays in really well with AI, which you'll see in a minute. I talked about all those different use cases throughout the year, so there's lots of different things you can use Content Snare for. It's not just for onboarding or tax. Very easy to implement, very secure, ISO 27001 certified. So, that's why people use Content Snare. Now I actually want to show you what it looks like. Think of a request as a checklist for a client. These are all the checklists we've currently got out. We can see the progress down here, so at a glance, we can see where every client is up to. If you were going to ask a client a bunch of questions, maybe it came out of your work papers, or

James Rose: if you've just got queries that you were going to send on email, you can just paste them into this box, and we'll generate a lovely little structured request for that client. But for now, I'm just going to use a template. So if I go New Request, I'm going to search one of our AML ones. I'll pick this one. Skip over this, but this is where you're laying out all the questions. So, again, just think of this as a little checklist. So we're asking for name, address, whatever. We can have conditional logic in there, so, what's an example? Are you GST registered? If they say yes, then we ask the GST questions, otherwise we don't, right? So they're only ever seeing the things that are relevant to them. You can ask so many different types of questions, so you're always getting the right thing back. You can say, I need a PDF specifically, or a doc, or whatever. Ask them to enter information, choose something from a list, book a meeting, sign something, fill out a spreadsheet.

James Rose: And of course, with the Tranche 2 changes, KYC and AML. So we've got a full AML platform in the background. I'm not going to go into that too much today, but you can review all the matches that come back across all the global databases, and you're doing this all within one checklist for the client. And this is a template of ours that I dropped in, but you can customise this to your own, it's just so you aren't starting from scratch. And let's say with this client, I also want to drop in an extra little step for them to do their client-agent linking. So I'm just going to drop that in as an extra template here. And now they're gonna upload documents, choose answers, whatever, and also get walked through the process of linking you as their agent. All in one checklist. So if I go ahead and send this to myself now,

James Rose: I just pick the client. These are all automatically coming in from FYI and XPM as well. They can see the automatic reminders there that you can customise. Just for the sake of time, here's one I prepared earlier, so I don't have to wait for the email. But that's what the client's gonna see, right? An SMS or an email, bang, they click that link, they're straight in. In this case, I had enabled PIN, so I would hope your clients put something in more secure than 1234. But this is what the client sees, and this is the magic of Content Snare. It's just incredibly easy to use. One thing on screen for them to do at a time, simple checklist. They can type stuff in. I've answered a couple of questions there. They can upload documents. If they get stuck on something, they can ask you a question here, right? So we're just doing this all in a really simple way, so they don't get overwhelmed, and you get what you want.

James Rose: Now, if we go back and just have a quick look at what your side looks like now… actually, I have to dig up the previous one. Never mind. So, this is one of our most popular features. If a client had provided something that was incorrect, you get this ability to push back and just say, hey, that's last year's bank statement, you doofus, we need this year's. And that's all done within this one checklist, where they can clearly see that they need to come back in and fix that, and they'll get an email about that. So, how does this work with AI? This is the AI Summit, after all. Again, here's one I've prepared earlier, simply because I do not have time for you guys to watch AI do its thing. But this is Claude Code. I'm using it in Visual Studio, you don't have to do that. Any AI, you can do this. We're doing the tax return for this bakery. I want my normal end-of-year checklist. I want you to split the bank statements question: instead of just saying, give me all your bank statements, I want you to have one question per account.

James Rose: We've already got the rental statements, so don't ask about that, and we don't have any vehicles either. You could go a bit more advanced here and actually say, go into my SharePoint and check what documents we have and don't ask for those. But AI's done its thing, blah blah blah, and then it's gone, okay, here's the draft, and here's what I did. So that's all just been talking to Content Snare in the background. It's created the request, which I can just quickly have a look at. AI did all of this, right? It created all these questions, account ending and whatever, yes/no questions, so I'm guessing this is probably a conditional question. This is just a preview, sorry. But once I'm happy with that, I hit publish, and that's sent off to the client. So people are cutting down their tax return checklist process from literal hours to minutes, by having AI prepare these questionnaires and then send them out.

James Rose: So, you've seen what it looks like on the other end. Just quickly, the last couple of things I want to show you… I've actually got a little bit of time, so I might just quickly show you we've got this AML dashboard here. There could have been a step in there that was, like, verify your ID, they do the whole selfie thing and take a photo of their licence, whatever. So now they will appear in here, and you can go in and view the matches. If they've shown up on some database, you can go, actually, that's not my client, because sometimes, if someone's got a common name, like me, James Rose, insane, there's a lot of us, it will sometimes match people that aren't the same person. But we're building some features to help you identify whether they are or are not the right person. But yeah, this is getting really full-featured as an AML platform at this point.

James Rose: Yeah, so that's basically it. Some other stuff you might like: we've got the ability to bulk send requests, so, like, FBT, and recurring requests for statements every 3 months. Signing through Annature and FuseSign. The ability to do internal questions and stuff, so internal stuff that only your team fills out, so people use this as part of their internal workflow. And we're working on proposals at the moment, so as part of that one process, you're also getting them to sign a proposal. That's it. If you want to talk to our amazing demo man extraordinaire, Tom, you can go to ContentSnare.com and book a demo with him, or just scan that, and it'll take you to sign up for a 14-day trial. 801, Trent.

Trent McLaren: Where?

James Rose: I don't know.

Trent McLaren: I got 8.38, like, as in 08.38. That is well done. Well done, well done. Jimmy, there's plenty of love in the chat, and maybe some questions for you to answer. So for those that are speaking, once you've finished speaking, you might have some questions that come back.

James Rose: Yeah, I'll do that now.

Trent McLaren: In the chat. Awesome, thank you, Jimbo James. Nathan Harper from Ahoy Ahoy. For those that don't know Nathan, Nathan's a smart guy.

Nathan Harper: That's it. Ahoy! Thanks, Trent. Yeah, so, I'm Nathan Harper from Ahoy Ahoy, and today I'm actually going to do something a little bit different, rather than just show you some slides about us. What I'm going to do is show you how to vibe code your first Xero app using an AI coding tool called Lovable in under 8 minutes. Well, less than 8 minutes now. So let's go, and I can talk a little bit more about it as we go. So I'm gonna ask Lovable: build me a Xero dashboard (can't spell board) to show profit and loss and other interesting stuff. We're called Ahoy Ahoy Accountants (can't spell accountants either). Come up with a visual theme. Think pirates and yacht rock. Okay, so we're gonna set that off. What's happening now is that Lovable is using

Nathan Harper: AI to go off and start thinking about it, right? The first thing it's going to do is say, we actually need to connect securely to Xero. And so, they've got this built-in Xero connector. And what it lets us do is easily set ourselves up a Xero app. First thing we've got to do is just jump into Xero, developer.xero.com, and we're going to set up an app. We're just going to go web-based, we're not going to use it to train AIs. We're from AhoyAhoy.com, and we've got to fill in this little URI here. We jump back to Lovable, they've got this for us, so we can just copy that. We can go and paste it back into here, and we're going to agree. I'm gonna hide the presenting window, so that I can see my buttons, and I'm gonna press Create App. So, Xero has created a connector on their end for us. You've just got to copy this client ID, pop it back in here. I am rushing through this today, but the good news is that if you express an interest in Ahoy Ahoy at the end, I can send you this step-by-step guide.

Nathan Harper: You can also generate a secret and pop it in here, and what that's doing is making sure that the communications between Lovable and Xero are nice and secure, and that we're not leaking out our data to anybody. And so, we just authorise through the Xero end, and we say connect anyway, and away it goes. So what's gonna happen now is that Lovable's gonna start building our app for us. I'll tell you a little bit about us. We've been a Xero development partner since 2018, so we build apps for the Xero App Store, we help people connect to Xero in various ways. We're actually Xero's Global Development Partner of the Year, which is pretty exciting for us, and it's a recognition of all of that custom work and bespoke builds and integrations that we've been doing, all the sort of stuff that doesn't really fit into a regular App Store listing. You can see that the AI is hard at work, it's come up with a cool graphical theme for our site. Awesome. Let's let it keep working there.

Nathan Harper: And so, we work for lots of different clients, whether they're accountants or businesses. For example, we've got a client called B&P Medical in North Carolina. They actually go into hospitals and sharpen the surgical equipment, and they have this process where their technicians on site would have to fill out this regulated form for the hospital to show the work that they did. And then that form had to be turned into an invoice back in their admin team. We completely automated that for them, so that the technician can just drag that file into a OneDrive folder, and automatically it generates a draft invoice in Xero that's ready for review, with all the correct tax treatment on all of the different lines, and all of the detail that they require. So, we build both for Xero and for XPM.

Nathan Harper: We also do a lot of work with Stripe, so building payments into platforms for people, marketplace builds. We even have an app on the Stripe App Store and the Xero App Store that integrates between the two platforms. So if you're using Stripe for invoicing, we can make sure that all replicates over into Xero for you, and there's actually a presentation on that tomorrow. The application's called SubSync. We also help people with AI builds. So, as you can see, we're getting closer to a build here. Here it is. We've actually got something. And we offer a service where we can do what we call an AI production readiness review. This is like a fixed-price review of any of your AI-generated code, where we get an ISO 27001 certified, experienced developer to look over that code for you and check for security and scalability issues that you might or might not have. So, super cool. We've got our application now. You can see the AI has really leaned into our nautical theme here, and we've built the Captain's Ledger, we've got Treasure Hauled, we've got Ode to the Ship, Booty Kept.

Nathan Harper: It's done this super cool little chart for us so that we can look at the P&L over time. It's reviewed where the doubloons went, where we've spent money. And our favourite ports of call, so they're our top customers by amount invoiced. And you can see it's already done all of this cool stuff, like letting us roll our mouse over and see the details. And down here, we can see people who owe us money as well. So the cool thing about this was that that was a one-line prompt, right? And you can definitely go further, so you can start to ask it for more information, different information. You can have actual controls there, so you can have, for example, ways to make invoices. And all of this is very much straight out of the box, with very low cost, from platforms like Lovable. As I said, if you'd like step-by-step instructions, feel free to express an interest at the end.

Nathan Harper: We also have that AI Production Readiness Review, and we'd love to offer you a special deal on that as well. So all you need to do is reach out to us on AhoyAhoy.com, or on LinkedIn, or via the summit today, and we'll get back to you with some of the details of that. Thanks for your time.

Trent McLaren: You've got 20 seconds.

Nathan Harper: 20 seconds…

Trent McLaren: You got a fun joke?

Nathan Harper: Yeah, I really need to have, like, a sailing joke, don't I?

Trent McLaren: You need a pirate joke, absolutely. Thank you, Nathan, well done, that was awesome. That's genius. You forced us all to listen to you while the AI was building. I never thought about doing it that way. That's a great way to go. Good pitch. So, slightly different one, but if you're thinking about building something, you've got custom builds, Nathan is your guy. Alrighty, Nathan, I'll let you come off camera, and I think… Darren? How are you?

Darren Hosiosky: Good, Trent, good, how are you?

Trent McLaren: Yeah, good, mate. I'll let you share your screen, and you tell me when you are ready to rock and roll.

Darren Hosiosky: Should be almost ready to go there. Okay, fantastic. You ready to go?

Trent McLaren: Yep.

Darren Hosiosky: All right, good afternoon, everybody. Thanks for having me, Trent, and thanks for that introduction. Guys, I want you to imagine something. I want you to imagine a world where your firm never has to pay for e-signature software ever again. Imagine never chasing a client for the documents on a checklist. And imagine never re-keying figures into a Word template to build a cover letter ever again. Finally, imagine your client signing their tax return and paying the ATO in the same tap. So, many Australian firms are doing this today with Admiin. I'm Darren Hosiosky, one of the co-founders of Admiin, and that's Admiin with two I's. We keep building it for one reason: to strip out the laborious, low-value, high-friction work that your firm sinks into everyday administrative work. Now, I want you to stay with me, because at the end of this presentation, I've got something really special for the firms in the room today.

Darren Hosiosky: So, Admiin started inside an accounting firm here in Sydney. My co-founder, Brad, was an equity partner at a mid-tier firm for 17 years, and like most of you, they wanted to grow their client book, but every time they grew their book, they needed more software, more subscriptions, and more people to keep it all going. And funnily enough, a firm in Melbourne told me yesterday that they were actually more profitable when they were half the size. And look, I'm not sure, but maybe some of you can relate. So, we dug into this problem, and what we found was it was never the tax work itself, because, as you guys know, you collect fees against that work. It was everything around it. It was building cover letters in a Word template, re-keying information, merging the return in a PDF system, then loading it into a signing tool, and then ultimately chasing those signatures, sending the invoice, and then chasing payment.

Darren Hosiosky: So that is about 25 minutes of admin for one basic tax pack for one company, before any chasing. Now, when you multiply that across thousands of clients, that's more than 400 hours right in your busiest months. So work goes out later, clients sign later, and then, ultimately, cash flow's impacted and cash comes in later. So this is Admiin, Admiin with the two I's. One platform that runs the entire admin workflow between your firm and your clients. We have five stages: we onboard, we collect, we generate, sign and settle, through one client record where nothing is re-keyed. And the result of that is the 25 minutes for a standard tax pack becomes 3 minutes. So right now, you're probably thinking two things. What does it cost, and how painful is it to switch? So, cost first. The core workflow is free for the firm. Not a trial, it's free. We don't charge seat fees, it's unlimited team members, and e-signatures are free forever.

Darren Hosiosky: We've also built in AUSTRAC AML/KYC verifications, and that's pay-per-check, with no subscription. And now, the rollout question. I know a new platform sounds like a month of change, but it really isn't. We have firms up and running, sending their first batch of tasks to clients within a couple of days of getting set up. You don't need to rip anything out to start. You just pick a job, like your next round of tax packs, or verifications for AUSTRAC Tranche 2, and you run it through Admiin. So let me show you each stage, just quickly, 15 seconds each. Stage one is onboarding. You do one click, and your entire client book goes through the AML/KYC verifications, not one client at a time. And for trusts, our AI reads the deeds and pulls out all of the beneficial owners that are required to be verified under AUSTRAC Tranche 2. Two to three minutes, instead of 20 minutes going through and actually reviewing a discretionary trust.

Darren Hosiosky: Stage 2 is collect. The checklist that you guys need to send out to clients pre-tax time, you can set that up in 15 seconds on Admiin. It goes out to the client via SMS and email, and they upload through your dedicated client portal. The reminders go out on their own, and every document is filed into the repository against the client record. Stage 3 is generate, and this is really where our AI jumps in. It reads the entire return, it picks up all of the figures. It drafts the cover letter with the amount, the due date and how to pay, with the period and the company name, with your letterhead: all of the information that you would otherwise be re-keying, automatically done with a single tap. So nobody opens up a Word template. All your team does is review it and hit send. Stage 4 is sign. The client gets a text, they open it up on their phone, and they sign it. You see every step in your firm, timestamped: when it's sent, when it's opened, when it's viewed, once it's completed. You get the completed digital certificate of that envelope.

Darren Hosiosky: Now, in case I didn't mention it earlier, e-signatures are free, forever. Finally is stage 5, which is settle, and this is the part that nobody else does. Straight after signing, the client pays the ATO from the same screen. They can pay by card, bank transfer, or in instalments. They're paid on time, and there's nothing left for you guys to chase, so you're not acting as a mouthpiece for the ATO, chasing general interest charges. So that sits in that same workflow. So, why now? Well, two important dates just landed. As you all know, from 1st of July this year, the AML/CTF reforms now cover the designated services accountants provide. And so, for those services, you're regulated by AUSTRAC, and new clients need due diligence before you act. The existing verification tools were built for banks and SaaS, onboarding one customer at a time. A firm might need to verify hundreds, if not thousands, of clients.

Darren Hosiosky: So we built the AML/KYC verifications specifically for the accounting workflow. You can bulk verify your client book, or you can automate it on engagement letter signing. And the check sits in the same record as all of the documents, signatures and payments, without needing an extra tool to buy or add on. And then secondly, the big key date that we've all been discussing: the ATO has announced it's going to stop taking credit cards directly. That was due at the end of this month, but it's been pushed out till 30 June next year. But when this lands, clients who want the points, or the interest-free periods on their card to help with cash flow, are going to need a platform or a tool to make those payments. And Admiin is already sitting inside the signing step, upstream, at the time they complete their tax return with their accountants. You can ask some of our customers. We've got a few case studies on the admiin.com website. Looking at Logica Chartered Accountants: they've got 50 staff, more than 4,000 clients, and since moving onto Admiin, they spend about 75% less time on each binding pack.

Darren Hosiosky: They've recovered around 1,100 admin hours a year, and they're doing around 4 times the binding volume with a significantly smaller team. Beyond Logica, we now have more than 100 live firms, we've processed over $800 million to the ATO on behalf of clients, and if I can drop a small humble brag, Admiin was named a finalist in this year's Australian AI Awards. Now, I wish I had some more time with you guys today. I do feel like this is a bit of a ShamWow infomercial, but just to recap again: the core workflow is free to the firm. It's not a trial, it's free. There's no seat fees, you have unlimited team members, e-signatures are free forever. You have pay-per-verification, as low as $5.15 for KYC, and you have document request functionality built in there, and a dedicated client portal for your clients to securely upload documents, sign engagement letters, or view any historical tax documents, instead of triaging emails that come to you, avoiding the unnecessary email ping pong.

Trent McLaren: We are at time. Okay. You hold that slide for, like, 10 seconds. Thank you, Darren, that was awesome. Crushed it. Did you want to spend 5 seconds telling us what this is?

Darren Hosiosky: Just a quick offer for everyone here today, only for today. If you scan the QR code there, you get the white-label version of our tool for the client portal, valued at $799 a month. Everyone on the summit today gets it for free.

Trent McLaren: That was a question in the chat. I was gonna say, you should go through the chat, there's a few questions in there. Awesome. Thank you, Darren. Alrighty, we have Corinne coming up next. How are you, Corinne?

Corinne Smith: Yeah, good, thanks. Hi, everybody. Here's the token girl, come along to say hi to you all, and show you what we're doing in Abby.

Trent McLaren: We love your energy. I'll let you share your screen, let me know when you've got that up.

Corinne Smith: How are we looking there, Trent?

Trent McLaren: It is loading, yeah, cool, I've got the Abby way on the screen. You let me know when you're ready to go.

Corinne Smith: Yeah, let's do it! Nice. Hi everybody, for those that haven't met me, my name is Corinne, I am the founder of Abby. They call me the Crazy Ideas Girl, but that's okay, I don't mind. Just a little bit about me, so you can understand where this Abby product has come from. I am a chartered accountant, and I have multiple accounting firms back here in New Zealand. So, I suppose you can say I'm definitely one of you guys, and I'm the Abby girl as well. In my opinion, in our profession, compliance work papers are our biggest pain point. And if you're listening here today, you're in the right place, because Abby prepares compliance work papers for you in approximately 30 seconds. So, what does Abby do? Let's have a look at this thing. Abby automates compliance work papers for accountants. They are pre-populated and pre-calculated by integrating with your client's Xero Blue ledger, the ATO, and if there's any Kiwis on here, we do integrate with the IRD in New Zealand,

Corinne Smith: year-end bank statements and loan statements. And she can get all that data into Abby. It's all about getting the data into a very secure platform, and then from there, she can do some wizardry for you. She reduces the accountant's time doing this compliance work by up to 50 to 75%. I'm very confident in saying that, as my practices have been using Abby for about 19 months now, and my staff in my firms are just lots less stressed. Quickly, we're just about at 80% filing stats with the IRD here in New Zealand now, so we're really powering forward, creating some capacity and getting through our workflow. Thank you for the love hearts, all you people out there. Abby does over a thousand calculations and 40-plus work papers in about 30 seconds to a few minutes, depending on the size of the Xero Blue file.

Corinne Smith: I'll show you some of those work papers very soon. Our point of difference, don't forget, is they're done for you. There's no keying into manual Excel sheets or filing and loading up Xero work papers and spreadsheets and all that kind of thing. They are done for you, and at the end of the job, Abby will create a client meeting agenda, and also lots of insights and KPIs about this client job that you're doing for them. And that will help you move through and just make sure you don't forget anything for the agenda. Okay, so, sorry, my screens are a bit wobbly right now, so let's get back into… we're gonna jump into Abby now, and we're gonna share again. Here we go.

Corinne Smith: So hopefully you can see the Abby screens. There are 4 steps to get everything lined up. I'm not going to go through those, but they're on our website, cheersabby.com. I'll pop it in the chat after this. First of all, all the documents are loaded up and all the integrations are done, in a nutshell. Abby takes a few seconds to calculate all those work papers. But here you can see on the screen what the detailed work papers look like. So there's lots going on with these. Abby will give you a high-level view of all the work papers, on every work paper and every task. There's a lot of detail of what the work paper means and what the user needs to do. Great for training offshore teams, or any in-house staff that might be juniors, etc. You can add any client queries along the way to the client query list, anything to your meeting agenda, and also, if you do need to add any manual adjustments, no problem. Lots of flexibility in there.

Corinne Smith: So, as we go down the screen, let's look at this GST reconciliation. We have all of these work papers on the left-hand side, so I'm going to mention those in a minute. But here is the GST reconciliation that Abby has done for you. All these reconciliations are done for you. All of the ATO data and IRD data are brought in for you as well. Yay! This is why this particular solution is so quick. Abby will create a whole bunch of manual journals for you in draft as well, while she does the calculate step, so you can post those through into Xero. She'll pick up any interest and penalties on any tax work papers as well. All of the detailed general ledger transactions are brought in from Xero. They will be on each work paper, or you can find all of the items in here in the ledger tab, and you can do a whole bunch of functionality in there to find what you're looking for. Going back to the actual work paper, here we go. We also can upload anything you need. The activity statements will be there. You can create links to your document management systems, like FYI, etc.

Corinne Smith: Abby will archive anything that's not needed as well for you, and you can put any comments in too. At the end of a job, you can download a full PDF of all the work papers and any of the attachments that are loaded up. So, just to reiterate, because you will have questions about what work papers Abby does: she does a full suite of 40-plus work papers. It could be all your BAS, income tax, expense work papers, Division 7A, super expense and payable, inter-entity account reconciliations, which are done within that calculate step, franking credits, sales recs, etc, etc. So, you have a full suite of work papers. You can also customise anything if Abby hasn't done it for you, so that's a nice little add-on. Just a note, we have signed up with Open Banking, so if your client isn't great at getting documents to you, like bank statements, loan statements, credit cards and finance agreements,

Corinne Smith: with their consent, you can pull those from Open Banking as well, from the Abby portal. I know, I'm so glad about this now. Yeah, big hearts from me, too. It's going to save a lot of stress for your client, and less engagement, but you take control over the job for yourself as the accountant. Early next year (more questions, I know, in your head) we will be integrating with MYOB and QuickBooks, just to make sure we cover lots of the accounting platform integrations. Just like to say as well, we're taking on Australian practices now that we're live, very rapidly right now, and in New Zealand as well, we've been around for a little while. We have a couple of mid-tier firms, one in particular started in July, and I'm happy and very proud to say that they're saving at least half of their time preparing these work papers. For the jobs, we have different products, too. We have Abby jobs for businesses that are registered for GST, Abby Light jobs for no GST, like trusts and things like that, Abby Rental Properties, and a snapshot job, so you can do interim jobs at any time, change your dates

Corinne Smith: and run a job like that. So, I know I've only got 30 seconds to go. Our website again is cheersabby.com to book a demo and a free trial with us. We're offering half-price jobs at the moment, so if anyone signs up before the 30th of November, they will be able to run an Abby job for an annual client for $175. We have got lots coming next year, including job management and capacity planning to help with all of those fun tasks with your staff. And I really look forward to meeting you guys, if you'd like to jump on and do a demo and see what Abby's about, to save you guys time. There you go, Trent. I think I'm pretty much done, and I'll wait for any questions in the chat.

Trent McLaren: You nailed it! You did so good. You did 10 seconds there. There's a few questions in the chat, so I recommend you jump in and answer a few of those. But well done, good job.

Corinne Smith: Thank you.

Trent McLaren: Alrighty. Last, but certainly not least, one of my favourite people to hang out with and see in real life is Matthew Taylor from AccountKit. Corinne, can I ask you to stop sharing your screen as well, please? Thank you so much. I will let you kick off and get us going.

Matthew Taylor: Wonderful. Thank you very much, everyone. And yeah, definitely last but not least here, at the end of today's sessions. So, my name's Matt, I'm from AccountKit. Just a little bit about us: we were Xero Practice App of the Year in the most recent awards. And I think for those who use AccountKit, you'll know that we love working with everyone across the organisations and businesses that we do. We're all accountants here at AccountKit, so when you come to us and ask us a question, we can generally answer them on the fly as we go along. And I'm sure, as we go through this, even if you're a returning user of AccountKit, you'll see a whole lot more compared to the last time you looked at it. So, what's happened over the course of many, many years is we've taken a shift from working in one single solution, doing all of our accounting work and platform and processes, trying to drive everything through one tool.

Matthew Taylor: And what's happened over that time is all of those services and offerings have split out into wonderful software and services, or best-of-breed tools, as many of them in here today that you've heard from, in all of the different areas that help you run your practice. Having your client files in Xero, QuickBooks, MYOB, corporate compliance, document management, all sitting in different areas and tools that you might be using day to day, and your software stack is ever-expanding. Where AccountKit comes in now is we bring all of that into one place, and our little tagline at the moment is, we are the heart of your firm. We are a bit of an integration monster, as I like to call it. We bring all of these wonderful tools into one place, and do some really cool stuff with all of it once it's in there. What that looks like is AccountKit sits in the middle of all of the wonderful tools that you use,

Matthew Taylor: and then we two-way sync your data, primarily from XPM, and Xero Blue was our starting point to begin with. And for those who have used us or saw us many, many years ago and maybe haven't had a look, this is where we started. We started building compliance tools, working over the top of ledgers, and feeding data to and from your systems. Automating things like your equipment finance and loan postings, matching of data between two Xero Blue files without having to have them both open in incognito and all that yuck. You can do it all inside AccountKit. And then we thought, we're pretty good at integrating stuff. Let's go ahead and integrate the whole world. So our first port of call was to bring all of your document management solutions into one platform as well. Meaning that through AccountKit, not only can you see all of your client data and work in your clients' ledgers, but also save and receive documents directly into one singular platform. Meaning you log in once, which is something that's going to save us plenty of time.

Matthew Taylor: And then on top of that, we thought, why don't we bring in all of your client data that helps represent information around things like relationships, your companies, your trusts, maybe the way you communicate with clients, for things like SMS and email and messaging. And this is where we brought in all of our other connections to Google, Microsoft, Teams, SharePoint, all of that jazz in between. With all of that data, we do a bunch of cool stuff. So, we centralise all of your client information into one platform. You update anything in here, it updates down to your Xero HQ or XPM, and if you update anything in Xero HQ, it pulls it back up into AccountKit as well. With all of your other connections to other tools, like SharePoint and Google, you can see all of that information in AccountKit. If you drag and drop a document into AccountKit, it appears in your SharePoint or your Google Drive, or wherever you'd like to use it. Two-way syncing of data, making it easy to work in one place.

Matthew Taylor: We then bring all of that together into a workflow tool, so we can start to plan out your work. If you've got prepare tax and prepare BAS marked up for your clients, we automatically generate your BAS and your workflow for your compliance work for your clients, in the context of the services that you deliver for them when you onboard them. So there's no need to go in and set up a whole new template for every single client that comes on. You tag them as a monthly BAS client, and they get a monthly BAS job. That's the way it should be. We then tie in all of your email triage, so AccountKit now sits directly inside, in this case I've got Gmail, but it works exactly the same in Outlook as well, to save your documents down to your document store, and across into your email folder and correspondence inside AccountKit, so everything's at your fingertips.

Matthew Taylor: We can do PDF editing and e-sign integration directly through AccountKit as well, allowing us to do document redaction, hunt out all your TFNs and remove them automatically, shoot it off for e-signing, directly sent to Annature or FuseSign through the tool, and have it saved back into the platform automatically as well. Client mapping: you've got your client data and all that relationship information, we might as well do something with it. One click of a button, and we can start building our relationship and structure diagrams for our clients. And then on top of that, our compliance tools, which we've had since the dawn of time, being able to reconcile with one button all of the movements between two different related entities in the system.

Matthew Taylor: So, with all these tools that sit outside of AccountKit, that allows you to pick and choose what AI tools you would like to run over your various solutions. If you're a Copilot fan, you can run Copilot. If you want to use Gemini. If you like using a bit of Claude, that's perfectly fine. You run it over all of those tools, and all of that data then feeds into AccountKit, where you can start doing the cool stuff that we enable in our platform as well. Then, on top of that, we are now connecting with the ATO. And our biggest focus on this was really around security and where your data is stored and held. So we made a really conscious decision to push forward really hard in this space, and we've done quite a bit of work ensuring that we're certified in every possible encryption angle you can probably think of, and making sure your data is housed where you expect to see it, in Australia, and utilising it as you need to. And it's a big requirement of working with the ATO, and Xero nowadays as well.

Matthew Taylor: From there, we pull in your activity statement information, your FBT returns, your tax returns, your data. We then match that data directly against all of the different reporting fields that you might have in the system. Maybe you want to run a report by manager, by partner, by branch number, whatever it may be that you'd like to pull out of the system, you can do that as well. And on top of that, we then allow you to export whatever you've filtered into a format that works for you. So you can pull this out, feed it into Power BI, save it down to your SharePoint, run some tools over it if you wish to, meaning your data is secure unless you make a decision to apply all those cool tools around the outside to that platform. And then we give you some cool visuals inside with it as well. So we can see our lodgement statistics, our performance percentages: how are we all going in terms of our lodgement program up to the end of the year, where are we out of date or overdue? We've got all of those elements there as well.

Matthew Taylor: So I do recommend, please give this little QR code a scan on screen, and you'll be able to book in a time and a demo with myself or my good friend Ben, who is also a CA. Drop in, have a chat, and if you haven't seen AccountKit for a long time, we are a CRM for the future. Come and have a chat!

Trent McLaren: So good, well done. 15 seconds to spare and everything. Well done to you, Matt, well done to everyone. Audience, you've been engaged for this whole time, feel free to jump on that react button and give everyone here a good round of applause. It is not easy to pitch yourself when you've got a big product, in that short period of time. So, well done to all of our speakers today. You absolutely crushed it.