The Future of Accounting & SaaS in the AI Era | Andrew Hirst, Xero

Yeah, I think we're probably a bit the same on a smaller scale.

I mean, Pinch's growth has been primarily the result of being part of the Xero ecosystem.

So we see firsthand the fruits of the labor of the Xero strategy, building that ecosystem around the Australian accounting industry and bookkeeping industry.

When you talk about... you know, providing strategies to accountants that you're seeing other accountants use? Are you primarily talking about applications that they're using, software systems and things like that, features of Xero, or are you talking about something altogether different?

A little bit of that.

A lot of it's around change management.

So a great strategy which we talk about is you hear accountants saying, I want to change everything in my practice and we're doing it on 1 July.

Like that's like a really bad.

It's a great recipe for staff turnover.

So if you want to get rid of your staff, go get on that path.

Instead, we say, look, we've seen another firm go through a seamless lot of change.

And the best methodology I've seen, which I've repeated ad nauseum the last 12 years is make one big change every 90 days.

And I can show you like after two or three years, you've got this unrecognizable firm, but the staff internally and you as an owner, you can consume that.

If you do it all at once, you get a bit of digestion and you don't work through all the various nuances for each of those different parts.

So you break down your workflow and make one change.

Like payments is a great example.

Payments are chasing clients.

That can do this 90 days.

The next 90 days, let's talk about changing the way you onboard clients.

There's another tool for that.

So you can work through it.

And I think that guidance is, that's really useful for the accountants.

Actually, what we send our teams on, we actually send our teams to change management courses

to

show people how to make that change.