BDO Hong Kong

Um, so I approached the Western Development Commission, under whom the Connected Hubs are all managed, and, uh, I was introduced to Liam Horan there, who looks after the Connected Hubs, and he immediately got it, and he said, "Great, you want to put art into my co-working spaces?" And I said, "Yes, I do." And then the question was, how are we gonna pay for the art? How are we gonna buy art? So I am delighted to say, and I think this is something you may not be aware of, but we had three corporate sponsors who gave us money to help us buy the art, and one of them in particular I want to give a shout-out to, because I know this is Midlands, is Midland Steel.

Midland Steel in Portlaoise, Tony Woods, straight away, I met him at, um, I met him at an industry work event, and I told him about the project, and he said, "Tell me what you need." And, uh, so he has been sponsoring us on this project for over three years, so has, uh, BDO International, my former employer from years ago, and the .ie domain registry, WeAre.ie.

So, um, they all have committed to supporting this project for the last four, three, four years and given us the funding, so we were able to buy art from almost 100 artists over the last three or four years, buying paintings from them.

That supports so many artists.

Step one of this so-called crackdown was to get in touch with those people.

And a partner at accounting firm BDO, Poppy Crawford, says it's a prompt to review the basics.

The thing that often surprises people is that cryptocurrency or crypto assets are treated as property in New Zealand, and they're not treated as currency for tax purposes.

So what that means is in New Zealand, we don't have a comprehensive capital gains tax.

And if you look at where the company is now, what's kind of the client base? Like what type of clients on the accounting side are really the best ones or are you going for small, big, everything?

So from the accounting firm side that are using the software, it's basically everyone, like all of the small firms, but bigger firms, even KPMG, BDO, like the big players with 20,000 clients and so on are using Pennylane.

But then on the SME side, it's for small, medium enterprises.

So anyone from zero to a thousand employees.

So I think you start very small, right? You work with very digital forward-looking firms, with smaller firms that are growing with you.

That's, I think, easier in the beginning.

Like you can't sell to BDO right from the start, right? There are so many complexity missing features so that you do first, hey, let's get the first 20 happy accounting firms, make them really, really happy.

And then you can move on to the next step and go to the next 50 and see, okay, there are 10 more edge cases that make them really happy with the best customer service.