Accountant

It was a delicate balance trying to change everything.

from the old school to the firm I wanted to build because my dad was the 24 seven accountant, seven days a week, call me on my cell phone.

And that was really hard.

And that didn't change right away.

Oh, absolutely.

Absolutely.

I've told my accountant, like, you need to charge more.

She did.

Keep accountants counting beans.

Contador cuentan frijoles.

Founders trying to raise some queso.

La vida San Diego.

For the green guacamole.

Keep accountants counting beans.

Contador cuentan frijoles.

Founders trying to raise some queso.

And now you've put them in a position whereby, hey, I don't know what to do here.

What am I meant to do? Now, accountants and lawyers may not talk to them because they're not the appropriate people.

They are going to be in a very, very stressful situation.

All thanks to having this cheap tax structure of being the direct only director and only shareholder.

They may get those, but what they're buying is... trust, confidence, and judgment.

And when I think about that, I think about when the personal computer, you know, came to bear in the market that didn't displace accountants.

And so I think where we are is we're in this AI movie and it's moving really, really fast and nobody knows what the end of the movie is.

So we're all hypothesizing on what that is, but no one really knows what it is.

And we're giving the people the guardrails, the knowledge and the guidance in order to effectively build.

And so that to me is the big pivot.

If you can get your head out of tech and, and get it back into that concept that I said earlier about the personal computer or the internet didn't change, we still have accountants, right? How do we maneuver through that? Well, the answer is that people have been consistent the whole time.

So you can't really purchase a transformation.

But typically what you'll find is that a solicitor will say, well, we can do the deed of trust for you, but you need to now go ahead and get a form 17 done by yourself or get your tax advisor to do that.

And sometimes if you're using a generic accountant, they won't know what a Form 17 is, never mind how to complete it.

And they may just charge you excessive fees because they need to understand it and go through the whole process, possibly for the very first time.

So once you've done all your details, what you'll get back from your solicitor all throughout online portal is a nice document that says a deed of trust.

When you are doing some tax planning, you need to look forward, not look back.

So hopefully that gives you an idea of what a deed of trust is.

Again, you can pay solicitors and accountants to do all this for you, or you can just use our online portal and then get it sent over to HMRC and be tax efficient.

Going forwards, what you would do from the date of this deed of trust and form 17, you would allocate the apportionment of income and the cost.

A few times.

Well, it's wonderful to have your perspective because we've been conducting this inquiry for accountants in practice, certified public accountants.

You guys, they're working in industry and in business, and AI is still affecting them.

So we're going to tweak these questions slightly and get your unique take on things.

We had a quote recently that's ubiquitous across all business, but it was the further you go down the wrong road, the more expensive it is to get back to where you need to recalibrate.

Nobody knows the full picture and nobody's got it perfect.

Question three, we're asking, and this applies to your management accountants and your CFOs and leaders of the finance function, Mike, what leadership decisions on AI are going to matter most over the next few years?

Well, I think, you know, the first big hurdle in accounting and finance with AI was getting accounting and finance professionals to deploy it and use it, right? I think they're naturally risk averse, right? Because they're the guardians of the

Thank you, Rob.

Charles, I'm going to click intro from you in a moment and your credentials to talk about AI to accountants.

But first, I want to want to five tech companies that are supporting this strategic inquiry because they're genuinely shaping how AI is applied inside accounting firms.

And just for context, This is mostly a North America audience, this podcast, although we are international in 153 countries, and Charles is our first UK guest on this show.

How can you think of AI as an opportunity to completely shift the way you do business? I mean, a lot of businesses, particularly outside accounting and kind of retail or back office functions like call centers are actually starting to almost swap out certain roles for AI.

That's not what we're going to do here.

It becomes much more a case of taking measured steps that say, here's how we can use AI to support the work that our accountants do and our tax advisors and our wealth managers.

And also to the earlier point, how can we help our clients give them more information, more data, more ability to understand and help think strategically about their businesses?

And I already can see that people are having problems with making attached digital submission through Xero because of the way that it works with MTD and HMRC systems.

both the client and accountants are struggling.

And that's being shown on Accounting Web already, which is a portal for accountants to, well, basically moan about stuff.

But if the moaning about Xero not working, then maybe I don't know if they've got it set up correctly.

In addition to that, we find that Xero is quite cumbersome when it comes to splitting income and expenses by property for MTD purposes.