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

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


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


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


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


FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Mitch: (00:05)


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


 


Adam: (00:50)


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


 


Blake: (01:01)


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


 


Adam: (05:19)


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


 


Blake: (05:38)


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