035: The AI Revolution in Accounting: Sean Rogers' Blueprint for the Future

In this episode, my guest is Sean Rogers, President and Founder of Digital Financial Officers, a company revolutionizing small business accounting and finance through AI and technology. Discover how Sean's innovative platform is transforming the way CPAs and financial advisors serve their clients.

The insights he shares during this episode will be valuable for CPAs and financial advisors looking to enhance their service offerings through AI and technology.


Sean's Background and Journey
- Sean shares a bit about his early career in the wealth management and family office space.
- As a personal CFO, Sean managed the day-to-day finances of ultra-high-net-worth individuals, providing them with transparency through financial reporting.
- His passion for helping small business owners navigate their financials and operations deepened during the COVID-19 pandemic when he assisted businesses in securing funding and realized the need for cost-effective CFO and accounting support.


Advantages of Working with Digital Financial Officers
- Sean talks about the benefits and advantages of working with his company compared to traditional bookkeeping firms or accountants.
- Sean explains that Digital Financial Officers leverages AI and machine learning platforms to automate bookkeeping processes, reducing the need for manual data entry and streamlining the coding and posting of transactions.
- Additionally, Digital Financial Officers integrates other key metrics, such as marketing KPIs, into the financial dashboards, allowing business owners to have a comprehensive view of their business performance.


Elevating Services and Adding Value
- Sean agrees and emphasizes that embracing technology and AI allows business owners and their teams to free up time from repetitive tasks and focus on higher-value activities.
- He suggests that CPAs and financial advisors, who are growth-oriented, can use technology to elevate their service offerings and provide more value to their clients.


Building a Partnership with CPAs and Financial Advisors
- Sean shares Digital Financial Officers' vision to partner with CPAs and financial advisors to integrate their technology and processes into their practices.
- Sean highlights the cost-effectiveness and efficiency of their AI-powered platform, which can help CPAs and financial advisors scale their practices and deliver high-level CFO and accounting support.

The Future of AI and Its Impact on the Accounting Industry
- Sean and I discuss the future of AI and its impact on the accounting industry. We agree that AI will revolutionize the way businesses operate, and those who don't embrace it will be left behind. 
-Sean encourages CPAs who are on the fence about adopting AI to reach out and give it a try. Speaker 2 offers a trial period for CPAs to experience the benefits of AI in their practice and see how it adds value to their clients and helps grow their firm.

About Our Guest:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/srogers2626/
Website: www.digitalfinancialofficers.com

About Your Host:  Paul G. McManus is an accomplished author and expert in helping financial professionals grow their businesses. With over eight years of experience working exclusively with financial professionals, Paul has helped his clients generate tens of millions of dollars in fees and commissions.

Claim your free audiobook copy at: www.theshortbookformula.com

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:32

Welcome to another episode of the Million Dollar Producer Show. I'm your host, paul G McManus. Today, I'm excited to welcome Sean Rogers to the show. As the president and founder of digital financial officers, sean has been at the forefront of revolutionizing how small businesses manage their accounting and finance functions with the power of online platforms. But what truly sets Sean and his company apart is their advanced application of artificial intelligence, which Sean and his team utilized to streamline complex financial processes, making them more accessible and efficient for business owners everywhere. For our listeners today, who are CPAs and other financial advisors working closely with small business owners, sean's insights into leveraging AI and other technology to enhance your service offerings will be incredibly valuable. So if you're ready to unlock new possibilities and elevate your practice, let's dive in. Welcome Sean.

Speaker 2: 1:29

Thank you, paul, appreciate having me and looking forward to this podcast episode.

Speaker 1: 1:33

Definitely. Thank you for being here Just to start out and frame things. Who are you? Who is Sean Rogers, and how did you get to where you are today?

Speaker 2: 1:40

Very question and sometimes I'm not 100% certain how I got on the path that. I am but super happy of where we are as a company and ultimately where we're going to go in the next 10 to 15 years. A little bit about myself, sean Rogers, born and raised Long Island, new York. I worked predominantly in the tri-state area and really entering my career into the wealth management space, specifically within multifamily offices. I really was able to utilize the education I learned, especially in my master's program, receiving my MBA in financial management and really fortunately just started working with ultra high networked individuals.

Speaker 2: 2:18

For all of those seven years within the family office space, my angle was more on that personal CFO side. So throughout most of my career, specifically handling individuals and their families day to day finances so paying their personal bills, managing their household payroll, handling all their different real estate entities, all their different properties, liaising with the property management, etc. But ultimately then providing transparency to those individuals through financial reporting. Since we did the accounting, since we held the books and records, we were giving insights into their own personal and day to day management how much income they're generating from all the different entities, how many expenses by house, by vertical, whichever entity we're talking about really just allowed them to have a more deeper insight into their own personal financial management, not just what their investments look like but how their personal income and all those different sources really affect their personal bottom line and ultimately their net worth. I love doing that.

Speaker 2: 3:23

Super good opportunities amongst two different RIAs that I worked at. Really my passion pivoted to business owners specifically when COVID-19 happened, businesses economy shut down, a lot of different funding opportunities and stimulus packages came from the government. We really started to build those connections with the small business owners fighting ultimately to get funding from the government to keep their operations going. That truly just pivoted my whole career trajectory and ultimately my passion to help small business owners navigate through their own financial and their operations but also just allow and provide a high level service to ultimately small businesses that most of them really didn't believe they could get. But now there's so much technology and other outsourced methods that there really is a cost-effective solution to get real high level CFO and accounting support.

Speaker 1: 4:20

Very cool I'm going to disclose to our audience. I'm personally looking to hire Sean and his company to come on and help us out here at more clients more fun beginning in the new year. I'm excited about it for a number of reasons, especially the artificial intelligence that he brings to the table and I'm a big fan of. But maybe, just using me as an example, I know we haven't even got started yet, but so for a small business owner like myself, what are the advantages or the benefits of working with a firm like yours? How is it different or better than more of a traditional bookkeeping firm or accountant?

Speaker 2: 4:58

I'm looking forward to eventually getting started with you, paul, I definitely could add value. And just to take a step back and give you a little more details on what digital financial officers is truly about, because it's not just me anymore building the team, really building a company, more than just me as a consultant. We're leveraging AI and machine learning platforms to handle and automate the bookkeeping. So, instead of historically a bookkeeping firm or an individual doing data entry utilizing the keyboard and manual efforts and hours, plugging into your QuickBooks and plugging into your financial institutions, all the different credit cards checkings that you are running through your business, allowing all that to be flown through the platform and, based on the AI and the historical trends that the bookkeeping has been done previously in prior years, by a human, it's able to facilitate the actual coding, recognizing the type of transaction as it comes through the financial account and then accurately being able to post it to the correct expense account, correct income account. And you may say, oh, I don't really need that, I only want to look at it once a month. But just imagine having daily bookkeeping done which flows into nice custom financial dashboards, and then at month end you get an automated reported package specifically and customized to you and your business and the insights that you want. But now, because of those dashboards, you're able to have a beat on your business at any point. You always know where your P&L sits, you always know what your outstanding AR is, you always know what your outstanding AP is, how that affects your balance sheet, your cash accounts all the stuff that you ultimately review, maybe once a month or once a quarter. From a traditional bookkeeping firm or CPA firm. It's just going to give you more key city kingdom, more insight straight at your fingertips so you can make better business decisions, knowing how things impact your financials throughout the month or throughout that quarter.

Speaker 2: 7:03

And all that is not possible with that technology, in my opinion, and really just allowing it to be more mobile accessible. All our platforms integrate, all our platforms are online and it just provides that efficiencies. But someone like yourself will know that you're doing marketing. You're doing marketing efforts, whether it's through LinkedIn, facebook, google, whatever the platform, we're able to integrate those KPIs as well. So, instead of having to go to your Facebook page or your LinkedIn page and see how many clips you got, how many followers, where are those followers coming if you get that type of geographical or industry specific, and we're able to ingest that data and present it in a simple financial dashboard for you to not only see your financial data points but all the other different KPIs that you're gonna be tracking while growing your business. So it's really just scratching the surface and super powerful.

Speaker 2: 8:02

But a lot of things that my clients laugh at and say when they really take a step back is like how did I do this without this type of information? How did I run my business for all this long when this just wasn't readily available? We're all about transparency and it just goes a long way knowing that, whatever you wanna know, here's exactly where to look for it and it's always up to date with the latest metrics or data points Interesting, so I did not realize that I was thinking about it just from more of an accounting and bookkeeping standpoint, and so I'm actually now even more interested.

Speaker 1: 8:36

maybe we'll need to start sooner. So unpack that a little bit for me. More so, aside from the accounting and bookkeeping, how does that work and why is that integrated? Why is that important? Or why did you make the decision to integrate those things outside of more the traditional bookkeeping?

Speaker 2: 8:52

Yeah, now great question. And everything we do truly starts with bookkeeping. I believe it's the bloodline of the business, besides human capital and true capital. But you need good books and records. You always need to know where your financials are and a lot of small business owners only look at it once a year and it's just for a very low cost that we offer fraction of a cost of what a human bookkeeper would be saying, and I will say the word human a lot, because it's just part of how we differentiate, because technology can not replace a compliment and I'm a firm believer that it's not gonna replace, it's only gonna compliment and help everyone with their job to just more with less.

Speaker 1: 9:35

I would just to jump in for a second.

Speaker 1: 9:37

I would add, this impacts my company, but I've also been having this conversation with clients and I think, just like outsourcing, which has been around longer what I think happens and this is a positive, or at least I think it's a positive is it allows business owners and their existing team to elevate the tasks and the projects that they work on, so that they can increasingly get away from some of the busy work or the I don't wanna call it low value, but some of the repetitive tasks that they might be engaged in today and find ways to add even more value to their clients. That would be the way that I would say that the more you embrace technology and AI, it creates the opportunity to provide that much more value to your clients. Now, of course, conversely, if you're maybe a big corporation and you're just skating by and you're not really engaged, yeah, you could lose your job, I think Correct. But for someone who actually is growth oriented, once that value elevate their skill set, do more I think it's a complete game changer and a positive way.

Speaker 2: 10:39

Yeah, absolutely. I said this to one of my clients financial advisor in the Northeast who is handling their bookkeeping week to week, spending probably four to five hours a week, 20 hours a month, 240 hours a year for the cost and it's just a simple ROI for the cost that they're paying me to automate that but also oversee that. Don't get me wrong. We're not a company that is just letting technology run completely start to finish. We're just now having that much more time to review activity, get more analytical. But going back to my story, that low cost, now they just have about 30 days back in their year. All they need to do is get one or two clients to offset my costs but let alone be able to compile that.

Speaker 2: 11:21

Cause to your point, business owners, they're good at what is generating the business. If you're a doctor, you're good at being a doctor. Yes, you could have some business experience, which you will and run the business. But Doing bookkeeping should not be something on your plate, especially when either you're that high of a professional. But if your job is to either service or generate revenue, you should not be doing administrative tests when there's such low-cost AI. But technology has a whole solution. So complete, firm believer and there's just a lot in store for digital financial officers. But ultimately what we're trying to target are those CPAs and those financial advisors that are providing similar services to their client base and partner up with us and instill the technology and the processes into their own practices, which will then have that trickle effect to their business owner client. So there's a lot going on and I'll stop there in case you have any questions. But to lead into kind of how we're doing that, yeah, 100%.

Speaker 1: 12:26

Just before we go there. I just wanted to reflect on. I'm one of those business owners who works a lot passionate about what I do, but I naturally gravitate towards the things that are, to me, creative and that help me grow the business, and the bookkeeping is the last thing that I personally want to do. I've come up with a great solution the past number of years with my dad, who is basically retired, but he has a passion for bookkeeping and accounting and so he's been helping me the past number of years do this, and I found it immensely helpful to just once a month review the books, right as that.

Speaker 1: 13:01

I'm a small business owner, but it's just that once a month snapshot of okay, this is where we're at, this is our cast position, this is what we need to do, and it helps me make better decisions. So I am looking forward to everything that you bring to the table, because it's just going to make the process all that more in real time. Now, in all transparency, I did not fire my dad. I just want to put that out there. I let him know that we're going to be adding some new resources. He's welcome to stay. I think he took a look at your website, and I think they can do a lot of this without me.

Speaker 2: 13:32

That's funny. So now he is.

Speaker 1: 13:34

So he's 85 years old, he's moved into a retirement home. You are helping him free up his time so he can have enjoy his retirement a little bit more. That aside and really the reason I wanted to talk to you today and have you talk to our audience, is that we have many CPAs on the show that listen to the show, many financial advisors, and I think this conversation will be probably a little bit more geared towards CPAs, but I think it's applicable for financial advisors and if you can just paint the picture right, show us or tell us what's a current CPA doing. What does their life look like when it comes to offering the services, or potentially not offering these services and losing opportunity, or just not being able to grow to where they want to grow because of the logistics and the demands and all the different things that are involved in providing the services, to what's the transformation, if you will, in terms of as a business opportunity, where can you help them get to in their practices vis-a-vis helping their business owner clients?

Speaker 2: 14:29

Great question. So right now, cpa practices that are offering bookkeeping services are, I would say, definitely heavy on the human capital. They're relying on their staff members to keep up, which goes into many other areas of how this could provide a better solution. But when you have staff, you're going to have attrition, you're going to have retention issues or go the extra mile to retain them, and also they're not. A traditional bookkeeper is only going to have so much capacity within their 40-hour work week. They can only so much hand manual efforts of keystroking, entering transactions, running reports. So mathematically you're always going to have a ceiling.

Speaker 2: 15:10

But when you get new clients you then hire another person and then you hire another individual because once again they have capacity issues. But when it comes to actually the client service aspect in my history there's always a priority list within your clientele, just naturally across all industries. But when it comes to bookkeeping you have to do one at a time when it comes to doing all the bank breaks, performing the month, then close and then ultimately issuing financial packages. So some clients may get it in the first week of the month for the prior month, but then it trickles all the way down and you can't close out a month, usually until the 15th or the 20th, and that's usually the CPA turnaround, because a lot of them are waiting some month then to do a lot of the work. So that's currently where it's at, for when I'm about to then say what the opposite and the new transformation looks like.

Speaker 1: 16:04

And just to add one more thing is during tax time, what tends to happen which is, I think, on a good month, it's at the end of the month, right During tax time, when you're bogged down and you're just trying to prioritize what needs to get done. I think oftentimes it can get even more problematic. Yeah, I wanted to be very benefit of the doubt.

Speaker 2: 16:24

But there is that seasonality aspect to it.

Speaker 2: 16:27

But then there's also obviously with year end, and I guarantee you a lot of CPAs I wouldn't say everyone has maybe put a client on extension because they don't have the prior year's books, and is that the best service to the client? No, but it's okay at the end of the day. I mean that painful season come November to April for a CPA practice, getting ready for a year end could be simplified and solved if you had a technology driven solution keeping the books and records of your clients throughout the year. And I guarantee you tax season will be much simpler when CPAs really embrace and incorporate technology and AI into their practice. So there's two falls.

Speaker 2: 17:10

What we're offering is efficiencies and scalability to CPA practices. Because of that reason, all the clients, daily transactions and bookkeeping is being done in real time. Reporting packages are produced by the fifth business day amongst all your clientele. If you have five clients or 500 clients on the platform, you're getting all your client base month-end close reporting package issued on the same day. That's unheard of, sounds too good to be true, but it truly isn't. And we're partnering up with CPAs exactly for this reason. They are coming out of the October 15th deadline and the past three weeks, fortunately, has been a lot of good business development conversations because they don't want to go through these painful tax seasons. A lot of the extensions are because 2022 is not necessarily caught up and now they're doing mass data entry and mass accounting work 10 months later.

Speaker 2: 18:07

So just think of a world where you're a CPA not to say that you're going to now just not have a tax season, but I guarantee you it's going to be a relief or your time is really focused on those bigger tasks and compliance strategies and just planning overall for your business. So I'm not focused on when the books and weapons are going to be caught up and able to be utilized. So it's a lot going on. But that's really just. How do you provide more efficiencies and scale abilities within the CPA firm? What I believe that real output is how do you give your clients, being those small business owners, a better experience? How do you give them more insight into their financials throughout through the automated reporting and those financial dashboards?

Speaker 2: 18:54

But then the realizing on the cake is CPAs, and I'm going to use a word CAS, CAS, client Advisory Services. That's where CPAs need to go to. They need to be more proactive, starting to get into the business advisory, because I do believe the tax prep is eventually going to be commoditized or truly automated. I would say in the near term. For those simple tax returns, nothing crazy, obviously, with complex situations and you're always going to have a professional, but they're going to lose clientele because they're going to start getting pitched with firms that are giving more than just a tax return and low frequency bookkeeping. So there's a lot of different areas but our core services around bookkeeping, so we could do more through reporting, through bringing in other metrics that the business requires and then presenting them with technology solutions as well as analysis because we are accountants and analysts by trade, so we're speaking to these clients but also training CPA staff on how to advise small business owners from an accounting and finance perspective.

Speaker 1: 20:05

As you're talking. This gets me thinking about a number of different things. I work and have worked with a lot of CPAs over the years, specifically those that are looking to create what I would call a virtual family office, meaning that they have their expertise and they know that bookkeeping and tax preparation compliance work. It's increasingly commoditized and they need to make that transformation into offering those higher value services. How do you do that? Where do I find the time? All these different things Along the lines.

Speaker 1: 20:34

I'm thinking that a number of, let's say, high-level CPAs, especially the ones that want to do more of the advising and maybe they're already doing it might still think there's some value to providing services such as bookkeeping and tax prep and things, because I think, just from a marketing perspective, oftentimes that's the entry point for clients. A lot of new clients are going to come to you because of the more the basics and then the right clients are going to want the more advanced services. I guess all that to be said is that with what you provide, is there a leveraged approach, meaning that if I was a small CPA, solopreneur, small team, what have you? And I didn't really want to get into the bookkeeping, but I saw it as a value add. Simply to offer the service in a leveraged way Is, what you bring to the table, something that I could employ to make that a service without having to spend much time actually doing it, but get the benefits of it.

Speaker 2: 21:26

Yeah, absolutely that's what we're now branding, co-branding with other CPA practices, where it's Paul McMahon, a CPA bookkeeping powered by DFO. That way it's not an in-house service that you're providing, but you're just outsourcing it more of a strategic partnership rather than a true outsource, because we then help that CPA come up the curve on those clients' financials. So, as a CPA who is maybe smaller in size and doesn't have a support staff, they're then liaising with us to gain insight into their own clients' businesses. So we also prep them, give them the highlights of what they should be really monitoring and what it really goes hand in hand and even just, I would say, a small, simple strategy or proactive approach of. Now that you have the bookkeeping automated, now you are going to always know where the revenues and the net profit will be. You can just start making simple suggestions of hey, I see your profits going to be 500 grand, why don't we do some retirement contribution?

Speaker 2: 22:31

But a lot of times CPAs really don't find out how their clients performed until after the year. And obviously there's things in timing that you could still make those strategies. But just imagine being able to do that more proactively and be able to create that strategy with the client. If the client made 500 grand, they're going to go buy a new boat for a quarter of a billion. But if you can make that in the strategy and make those quarterly contributions or whatever the case is, so that's like the simple day to day situation that I always play out when I'm speaking, but it really I've seen it many times.

Speaker 2: 23:08

Even some of the larger clients that have supported previous career in my previous firms the CPAs can sometimes, not that they're not existing, but giving them that transparency just allows them to just be more proactive, because all they're doing is quickly gaining insights from the dashboards and they're not compiling anything or funding reports. So it doesn't make the conversations better with the clientele as well, but a lot of different avenues. But we do partner from an outsource method with those CPAs or we train their own staff, had a really fun platform and provide those services with their internal staff. So they're going to build a very flexible.

Speaker 1: 23:47

Another situation is coming to mind for a CPA or CFO maybe a fractional CFO who is looking to provide more CFO, fractional CFO engagements. One of the things that you said earlier which I wasn't aware of was it's not just the bookkeeping in the financials, but it's also the potentially the marketing dashboards, those things that I'm really I think for a proactive chief financial officer, or metrics that can be incredibly valuable for them to help guide CEO in the business to increasing their value and increasing their multiple, etc. Number of people. I work with their CFOs, but they're also business growth advisors, ultimately helping business owners increase their valuation so that they can exit. But I think the pain point for many is just access to the data. Right, they don't have the data in a simple place where they can really get insight and help advise them, and that's scenario. I'm assuming that what you do could also help support that CFO or fractional CFO through your technology, or can you share more about how you can potentially work with them to be able to position themselves better for that proactive CFO world?

Speaker 2: 25:01

Exactly great topic because we just started working with. I guess before I met him he was a competitor, another fractional CFO doing more of that realm rather than the bookkeeping, but we're supporting them. Exactly what you just mentioned. They have clientele, they have a lot of metrics that they're monitoring, but they're doing it more manually or not as frequent because there's manual efforts to it. So what we do is we use power BI, which is a Microsoft product I think it's the best data visualization tool out there and, through setting up API, is either creating them already, having them established. We're then able to plug into any sort of platform, whether it's a LinkedIn or Facebook business account, whether it's Salesforce if that's your CRM system and there's good data which always will be within a CRM system really any other platform. To be honest with you, right now we really only work with CRM systems and more marketing related tracking platforms, but a good analysis we were just doing with the CFO was taking their Salesforce, which they use as their pipeline monitoring and all their open opportunities, and really then just dissecting that data.

Speaker 2: 26:13

How does your pipeline translate into future revenues? Are you going to? How much revenues could you possibly close, but then how much more support of expenses, whether it's personnel or whatever the case is with your business. Are you going to have to hire and taking historical trends, overlaying it for future opportunities? Really just help support their three, five, ten year plan, because now we always know one. What is the pipeline need to be to continue to hit those growth targets? But also, depending on the stage of that sales cycle, what's the probability at a high level of how much revenues were going to project? So we go very I'm an analyst by trade.

Speaker 2: 26:55

That's what I say. I'm not even so much more accounting by trade, I'm more analysts. I've worked with Michael Bloomberg's family office, being a financial analyst within Bloomberg LP. So I spent two years specifically working with data visualization tools, but also just dissecting large organizations and really seeing how all the data connects. So that's like our icing on the cake is here's your financial data, but did you ever think how the marketing spend on LinkedIn is really connecting? Could we pump more money into the marketing spend, which will then have a greater ROI and generate more revenues? And that's just where our mind goes. But the only reason we have that capacity is because we're automating the bookkeeping and then leveraging historicals to project any sort of future outcome or strategy to support. So it's really cool and what we're doing.

Speaker 2: 27:46

Fortunately so far, I think we maybe have two clients that are in the same industry, not CPAs, the fractional CFO, the CPAs they're more of the client facing, so we don't necessarily talk to them when they're just utilizing the technology, but we're just taking different areas across different industries and just playing them into. One thing happening in a construction company could be relatable to a retail management company, or whatever the case is. We're just getting that exposure and then giving that insight into other clientele as well Obviously, not client names, but just other trends that we're seeing that could be applicable. So it's really cool what we're doing and a lot more to come Really only tapped into the AI world.

Speaker 2: 28:29

One of the coolest things that we'll probably do in the short term is embed chat GBT within our dashboard. So not only do you may not have to look at Excel's and PDFs anymore, you may not even have to. You may not have to think on how to analyze. You just simply type in a question and chat GBT is going to respond based on your own financial data set. So we're always automating analysis as well, which would be remarkable to an extent, of course, but I think it would be very cool for people to have that capability.

Speaker 1: 29:02

Yeah, 100%. I use chat GBT on a daily basis. I'm just as a quick aside. I'm fascinated by AI myself and I'm always keeping on track of all of these trends. I don't know if you paid attention, elon Musk he's in xai. They've come out with their own competitive version of chat GBT. But, just as a fun aside, it has a sense of humor. You can ask it questions and it's going to give you. If you say, make it more vulgar, it's going to make it more vulgar.

Speaker 1: 29:27

So it doesn't have the same restrictions that chat GBT has in place, and so it's going to be at least be very entertaining.

Speaker 2: 29:34

I didn't see that. I do need to look into it.

Speaker 1: 29:37

I wasn't thinking about that over the weekend yeah, I think it's a beta testing and then obviously, open AI and chat GBT was taken the world by storm. Just in the last week, I think. Literally today, I opened up my chat GBT and there's already a new set of functionality that wasn't there yesterday. The learning curve, or the growth progress curve maybe progress is the better word the progress curve on this is exponential, right? I think if someone's in an industry that hasn't already seen this been very impacted, they will soon. I know my industry has and it sounds like you are taking advantage of this as well to help people benefit.

Speaker 1: 30:12

But just one year, three years, five years out, we're going to be living in a different world, right? This is just my own two cents and my own advice For anyone that's sitting on the fence thinking oh, that's probably sounds good and I should probably embrace it at some point. The time to make the decision was yesterday, if not. The next best time is now, because a week from now, a month from now, you are going to be seriously behind the curve. One more thing that kind of came up in a conversation recently is that sometimes people that haven't had as much exposure to using AI technologies I think sometimes they're a little bit skeptical about accuracy and all those things, and the analogy that I give them is think about self-driving cars. A self-driving car is essentially an AI, and this is something that we trust our lives to right. It's not yet so commonplace that we're all using it, but it's starting to be right. Probably in a couple of years it's going to be more the norm.

Speaker 2: 31:02

And if you didn't know, Paul, not to interrupt you, I do have a Tesla sub and experiencing self-driving for the last three years. A perfect analogy that you're going with.

Speaker 1: 31:10

Yeah, this thing is that when a year or two from now and maybe you're already there because you have the Tesla, is that at some point you're going to be like I don't want a human to drive that would be crazy A human. They get distracted, they're easily distracted and emotional. There's no way I would have a human drive my car. I think that's probably a future that's a year or two away now, and so just I use that because for anyone that's AI does, that really does it, do it as well. Those are pretty darn good and in many cases it does it better and it doesn't remove the need for a human, but it really.

Speaker 1: 31:38

I call it superpowers, right, I feel like I have superpowers that I didn't have a year ago, and so that's just my two cents on the whole AI. I'm just before we close out. Just love to get your sense of AI, the direction of it. Are we going to live in a bright future where there's abundance and peace and prosperity? Are we going to live more in a terminator, doomsday scenario where we're trying to run away from the AI? What's your crystal ball telling you?

Speaker 2: 32:01

Definitely one on an optimist by heart, but it's definitely the the sunshine's and pot of gold at the end of the tunnel, because it's not automating, even though it could, but it's not replacing the human brain. If you're a CPA, you have a designation and a license. That's what you should be focused on. You shouldn't be focused on worrying about bookkeeping, but it is important. If you're a financial advisor or a portfolio manager, you should be managed. You should be focused on managing your clientele's portfolios. You shouldn't be worrying about your business bookkeeping and just very simple little things like that.

Speaker 2: 32:39

It definitely optimistic on AI and for those SCPAs listening, if you are on the fence, what I would like to say and offer is rip the bandaid off of you being on the fence and reach out to us and we will give you a trial for a month or two on a select few of your clients. I definitely never recommend completely changing a firm's process on day one. There's always an implementation and a transition period. But if you like what you've been hearing, if you want to give it a try there's no cost to it We'll roll it out for a month or two for a couple of your clients, just so you can really see it for yourself and see how that additional value could ultimately add to your clients and grow your firm in a much bigger way Very cool.

Speaker 1: 33:24

So two final questions before we wrap up. First question is is there anything that we haven't covered today that you think would be useful for our audience to know? And I'll give you the second question in advance when can people find you or reach out to you?

Speaker 2: 33:37

So the only thing that we didn't touch on, and very important, is the onboarding is very simple.

Speaker 2: 33:42

It's not a big undertaking. It's not implementing this whole big CRM system. It's truly a plug and play Every client. If you had all your ducks in a row, which you would know before, onboarding should take about two to three minutes and then about four or five business days. It's on autopilot, so you could onboard a lot of clients at once. So that's always like a fear that most people have a technology, but it's truly a plug and play and you could onboard your own, so we're not a bottleneck in any way. We had to reach out to us Sean at digitalfinancialofficerscom, Sean the SELT, SEAN or go to our website, wwwdigitalfinancialofficerscom, or our LinkedIn page as well, but looking forward to hopefully touching some of the audience and really hearing them.

Speaker 1: 34:29

Thank you so much for your time today, Sean. It's been very valuable information. I know that I learned a lot and I hope that our audience learned a lot as well. This has been fascinating for me. I hope it's been fascinating for our audience and I'm even more excited now to plug in, not just for the bookkeeping benefits, which was I was already anticipating, but now the marketing one. Thanks again for your time today. Thank you, Paul.