Ep. 149: Kevin Au - Accounting in 2025 and Beyond

Contact Kevin Au:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevinwau/


Bill.com: https://www.bill.com/


FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPTMitch:
(00:05)
 Welcome back to Count Me In, IMA's podcast about all things
affecting the accounting and finance world. We're happy to have
you back for episode 149 of our series. This is Mitch Roshong,
and I'll be your host getting you ready for today's conversation.
In this episode, you will hear from Kevin Au - bill.com's head of
product marketing, accountant, and wealth management. In a
moment, you'll hear him talk about lessons learned in the
accounting industry and what the profession can anticipate as far
as roles changing and skills needed in the future. So without
further ado, let's transition over to the conversation now.
 
 Adam: (00:47)
 So Kevin, thank you so much for coming on the podcast
today. We really appreciate you taking some time out of your busy
schedule to be a part of count me in.
 
 Kevin: (00:54)
 Great. Yeah. Thanks so much. Thanks for having me. I'm a
big fan of podcasts, so great to be here.
 
 Adam: (00:59)
 Thank you. So there has been a tremendous lessons learned,
and changes across society and business over the past 18 months,
we've all been affected by it. You and I were just chatting about
it before we started recording. What have you seen in the
accounting industry? And do you think those changes are here to
stay?
 
 Kevin: (01:16)
 Yeah. So what we say in the accounting industry as small to
size business markets is that the innovation and the adoption
it's been accelerated about three to five years. And while every
industry has been disrupted by digital transformation as a result
of pandemic and working from home, right? This industry in
particular has been ripe for disruption like for years. We've
been just saying that over 90% of SMBs rely still on paper-based
processes and checks, and that realization will be over-reliance
on outdated labor and manual intensive ways to do business. As
you know, bill.com works closely with the accounting community
work with 85 of the top 100 firms plus 5,000 firms in total. And
I remember I was talking with a couple of accounting partners and
one partner in particular. I heard a horror story, literally
during the pandemic, they had to use Uber and Lyft to transport
documents between houses to get them signed. And they even use
bike messengers. Like, I mean, this isn't sustainable, whether
it's pre pandemic or post, and we believe that this community
deserves innovation and we're here to deliver it.
 
 Adam: (02:24)
 So when I hear innovation, I think of keywords like
automation and AI, the, the buzzwords that we're hearing all
around, and these are powerful tools that accountants need to
have in their toolkit. Can you tell us a little bit about what
bill.com harnesses, in your solution?
 
 Kevin: (02:39)
 Yeah. So as, as part of the industry deception that we
talked about earlier, you know, we believe that digital tools
that all, that all three help our customers and partners to see
it's really important, right? And automated those back office
tasks and day-to-day activities. It gives our campuses actually
more time and focus on areas of interests and right. So like
inviting automation into the office, ultimately it just provides
the accounting professionals just more time take control of their
careers and just have more of a better work-life balance. As an
example, you know, one of bill.com's customers is a wealth
management firm and they mentioned that when they use bill.com,
they experience a say percent time savings by streamlining all
their accounts payable processes, but just then allows them to do
something more that matters to them around financial planning and
then managing their clients assets. An example for us on our
platform, we do use artificial intelligence and we have a tool
that we named, IVA, which stands for intelligent virtual
assistant. And what IVA is, is a feature that just uses advanced
technologies like machine learning that helps us extract invoices
and vendor information from documents in our inbox. So that helps
you actually create vendors and bills faster. So it takes
information like the invoice number, like the, the amount you
have to pay the due date, the amount. And it makes us so simple,
like just literally imagine if you had a camera and he took a
snap shot of your invoice and it gets automatically loaded in and
IVA can read it and put all that data very easily for you to just
help you get paid, to get paid faster. And that's, what's really
exciting about, you know, automation and AI space.
 
 Adam: (04:15)
 That is very exciting. Cause it, it allows you, it takes
time away from the menial tasks, sometimes those tasks that take
up more of your time and allows you to do other things
right?
 
 Kevin: (04:25)
 Exactly. Exactly. It's always about like the stuff that,
you know, what would you be doing on a Friday night? Would you
rather be doing all the manual checks and everything, or would
you be going out having dinner with your family? And what we do
is like with our technology and systems, it allows you to do the
latter.
 
 Adam: (04:39)
 So it sounds like the accountant's role is expanding and
has been expanding, especially during the pandemic, you know,
maybe they're saying, "Hey IVA, print me out my invoice". I
don't, I doubt it's voice activated, but you've talked about a
new Renaissance of the adversary accountant. What does that look
like?
 
 Kevin: (04:56)
 Yes. So even before the COVID pandemic, we saw, we heard
businesses had a clear, and active need for advisory services.
During the pandemic they became the go-to person, when they're
helping clients through their PDP loans, through changing
regulations and so much more. And they were the lifeline, they're
literally the heroes, I think for a lot of the SMBs offering
their clients the best, the latest information and advice
actually keep them afloat. Like it was a really tough time. And
we heard like accountants were just working endlessly nights and
weekends to make sure, like they have to figure out how to do the
PPP loans. Right. And that was a big thing that they did and
their SMBs where their clients were also thankful for that. So
now, as we're kind of getting out of the pandemic, right,
accountants are just taking the opportunities to redesign their
day-to-day jobs, especially by putting more time and focus
through these advisory services. And they also offer things like
client analysis and strategic counsel. And the goal here is not
to add more hours to their already busy Workday, but instead it's
about optimizing the work. And so for instance, you know, build a
compromise, a lot of different tools, insights, and data, and we
believe that data is going to be necessary to provide that
efficient and essential path for that advisory services. How?
It's that it can raise up all those data insights by unlocking
that data in real time, in, in ways that they couldn't have done
before. We're like in the past, this data will be trapped in some
hidden spreadsheet or in a separate system that you can lock up.
Now you have these systems and tools to bring this up to light
and show it at the right time. And so we believe that the shift
in like the bookkeeper's role is going to be actually more
rewarding. It's also a really smart time for these firms in terms
of growth and what we did like bill.com, in 2019, we had a fire
hire index survey and we just asked them like what they're doing.
And one of the things they said is like more than half of the
S&P participants are actu...