In this video and podcast, Randy Johnston and Brian Tankersley, CPA, review Zoho’s platform for finance and operations in their roundup of AI systems for accounting firms. Watch the video, or listen to the audio podcast below (transcript below):
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Transcript (Note: There may be typos due to automated transcription errors.)
SPEAKERS
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA, Randy Johnston
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 00:00
Welcome to the accounting Technology Lab, sponsored by CPA practice advisor, with your hosts, Randy Johnston and Brian Tankersley,
Randy Johnston 00:10
welcome to the accounting Technology Lab. Zoho has built a very interesting Finance and Operations package. It starts with the accounting product of books. But then it builds out even to more modules, and depending on how you put it together, they’ve got the building blocks to do things that most small and mid sized businesses need. So Brian, I know you have recently returned from Zoho endless days. We’ve been around Zoho for most of their I believe 29 years that they’ve been in business at this point. So quite familiar with this, 55 plus modules that they have. What would you like our listeners to know about Zoho finance group?
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 00:57
Well, let’s first, let’s first delineate this podcast, and then the next one that we’re going to do after this. Okay, so this podcast is to talk about how your clients can use Zoho and how it how it can be used internally, inside client businesses. Okay, it’s not as much tasked with the Provo, the providing of bookkeeping services for multiple fee paying clients, and tax services and those kinds of things. That’s the next podcast, okay, and Zoho can help very well with both sets of problems. But I wanted you to just kind of see this, because their suite includes things like a practice management tool that is really a ERP for accounting, and a PDF editor, and, you know, an accounting software called books and a free a, free for everybody, F, R, E, E, free for everybody. Tool called Zoho invoice that you can use to do, to do invoicing the way we people used to in fresh books when it was first starting out years ago, which
Randy Johnston 01:54
we have recorded in a prior podcast. And you can certainly learn about that, and we have continued to recommend that is a marvelous value. Even if it wasn’t free, it’d be worth paying for, but it free can be beat. Yeah,
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 02:09
and I mentioned that to you here because a lot of you have people that are massage therapists and, you know, and lawn contractors and and personal service folks, and they need a way to do to do invoices and to accept payments. And again, that’s a that’s an exciting opportunity there, but I got too much to talk about in here, and I’m getting too excited, so I need to move on here. But Zoho works. Zoho has a marketplace, and they integrate with a wide range of different tools across multiple platforms. Now, Zoho has solutions for just about every business need you would have, but they also have a tool called Zoho flow that allows them to have direct integrations into most of your major applications that you would need to use, which, by the way, includes, at this point, QuickBooks, online, and, again, just a wide range of other tools that will tie into their analytics tools and everything else that they have. But, you know, we’ve really got these, got the need to have these digital first businesses, but for that to happen, we’ve got to be able to also do the right kinds of compliance. And so since Zoho is an enterprise application, it has enterprise class compliance capabilities, and I’m just kind of showing these to you here because I want you to see that even if your small business or mid sized business or anything is an enterprise in a highly regulated field like banking and finance or health care or or, you know, some kind of some kind of manufacturing, they’ve got the They’ve got the compliance tools you need baked into their systems on a very integrated basis. And so I think you need to look at those in here. They again, compare themselves, again, to Zoho, Microsoft and Google. You know, again, they’re not the business of selling ads to anybody, and they are, and they do a lot of help with people. They are located all over the world, with data centers on all continents, including a data center in Canada for our Canadian listeners that that need to have Soho books hosted in Canada. So CRA is happy, but I just kind of show to you here, because they their footprint is actually very, very impressive, but all of their platforms do use the same underlying architecture, and here’s what it looks like. The first thing you’ve got is a unified data platform and then an orchestration layer that had that talks to all their tools. We then have some domain specific application platforms that run a wide range of workloads, a developer experience things. Notice that they have a pro code and a low code tool here. Okay, the low code means that you don’t have to be a programmer to interact with this, but if you are a programmer, they have tools to help you, tools and libraries to help you take advantage of it in a wide range of different ways. They also have a BI platform, an identity orchestration platform. And then we layer on top of that, there are 55 applications. Asians, plus their plus all of their other items that fit into here. So, Randy, you had a comment you wanted to share. You
Randy Johnston 05:09
know, I was just mulling over, Brian, the different tools that you’ve seen and talked about another technology, county labs, with me, Zia being one of those, the agent. And to just think that it’s down at the AI layer, not even really one of the 55 apps. And you know, if you think about the Business Intelligence platform, the Zoho Analytics, which is quite gorgeous, you know, I think the way that their Zoho is trying to position their platform. They probably aren’t giving themselves enough credit for all of them, you know, myriad of apps that they have and solutions they can provide. And if you are new to Zoho, you will find that it’ll take you a little bit to get your head around this, because there’s just so much to it, but it is not horribly expensive, and it is typically very capable. So the rule of thumb will be, you know, an old, well, an old rule that you’ve heard Brian from a former partner of mine, the Basic Law business prohibits paying a little and getting a lot. Soho may have the opposite side of that. Here, you can pay a little and get a lot
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 06:28
Agreed. Agreed. You know? The the thing about it here is that you the the hardest part that I find about it sometimes is that it’s like a novice cook going to the gourmet grocery store, okay? Because you go there and you say, Okay, you need some salt, you need some pepper. And then there are 30 different kinds of salt and 30 different kinds of pepper, and you have to figure out which one you want. And all you want is the McCormick standard grind pepper and the Morton Salt that came from Hutchinson, Kansas, you know. So, so it’s the again, the the thing we have to watch for in here is we have to stay focused as we’re approaching these problems, because it does provide a wide range of capabilities, and it gives you the ability to get exactly what you want. But if you don’t know what you want, and you don’t have a vision for what that is, it’s going to be, you know, your your results are going to be hit or miss, okay,
Randy Johnston 07:24
but by the same token, you know, it is enterprise capable. So you’re coming in with super good privacy and super good enterprise like CPA securities and other pieces, and that is so much easier to start with than to try to cure later.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 07:46
Yeah, I guess the way I’d say it here is that, is that, is that they, there will be very few forced errors that come from their platform, and most of the forced errors are going to come from your side, where you don’t know exactly what you want, okay, so, so again, and, and, but, but that can happen in any platform. But I want, I just kind of want to go through here with this. Now, as we look at this for the technology, you have some domain specific apps and point products that will build tailored solutions. You also have some very simple, low code, no code tools, as we’ve shown you in previous episodes. The idea here is that you can change things, and you can you can create tools on the fly and modify them as you need to to solve all kinds of problems in here. Now the Finance and Operations stack has a bunch of pre built applications that you can use, and they’ve got this, this idea of the systems of records, where we’re tracking creating transactions and the system of actions, where we’re creating automation systems and engagements, where we’re working with others in the system of intelligence that reports on top of all that. So as we look at the system of records, they’ve really got a single source of truth and a set of tool set, set of tools, between books, their accounting platform and inventory and Zoho expense and many of the other tools in here. They’ve got a setup to handle all of those things. The data is standardized and managed and can be cleaned and integrated with the CRM tool, whether it’s an internal CRM tool like that you’ve picked out like Salesforce, or whether it’s you to use Zoho CRM tool, which is very capable, you can do this. They have, they again, they have security compliance and governance surrounding all of this data. And to my mind, they are one of the most, one of the most fastidious of companies in our accounting space on handling privacy. The next thing we look at are the system of actions. And so this is where, again, we’re doing workflow automation. You have three different tools, creator or Kesley, and one more Q control, QR, Q and TRL, that are, that are workflow management tools that you can. Use inside their application. And that’s before we talk about the tools like Zoho desk, that lets you do, lets you track tickets, or, again, the wide range of other very capable solutions that they have, and they all integrate into the finance suite, so you can actually set it up where the operations activities generate the the you know, generate things without any action required on your part. So you really turn more into a plumber. And the idea is that we take all the cycles of all the business cycles of the different processes that we have, like order to cash and procure, to pay and hire, to retire and all kinds of other things like that, and they all can just integrate with each other. Now, the other thing to know is that you don’t have to use Zoho entire suite to get things done with them. So I want you to see that they have an orchestra. They have an orchestration layer that will work with you can work with Zoho, or you can work with SAP, you know, r4 or you can work with our for HANA. You can work with Oracle and here and again, you can use their tools. Or you can plug in Zoho 50 state payroll, or T and E system, or other things like that, into here to get things done. The next thing we have then is the system of engagements, and this is where, again, we’re collaborating with their outside clients. And so notice that we’ve got, we’ve got comments and actions where we can assign things to people. We can put com we can we can send things out. Notice people can initiate the chats to discuss things. You can see that we have ways to interact with vendors, customers, investors, outside, accountants, and again, all kinds of folks in here as an example. They actually, they actually are set up to show to do things with supply and dealership types. And so here’s, here’s an example that they have from India, where they have a they they work with a paint, with a paint manufacturer, a paint that has stores all over the country, all over the world, actually, and so you can see that they have workflows set up in here for the interaction and to automate the interaction between the paint company and the local the local affiliate, and the accounting software and the sales orders and the CRM and the payments, even, and all of this is handled in here seamlessly using Zoho. The next thing we have then is a system of intelligence, which includes a self service BI tool. And you can see, I’ve got an animated GIF here that actually lets you do inquiries here. This is what I was talking about when I was talking about the natural language queries that can be done inside of applications, you know, we talked about this with Acumatica, and talked about it now with Zoho. But the idea here is that you can create very compelling action, very compelling graphics and interactions in here, very simply by sim, by, by just putting those things into in just asking the question the way you would ask the question in a meeting of somebody that created it. There’s a financial assistant where, again, it’s asking you here, of you know, when you’re looking at this, at this item in here, you know, who owes me the most money, and would you like me to send a reminder to them. Okay, so notice auto nag built in here. We’ve talked about auto nag, you know, again, where it reminds, reminds our clients when they’re bringing information to us. But this is again, nagging people saying, Hey, pay or die. Come on, let’s go. They have, they also have some AI driven risk clustering, and this is something they didn’t drill into particularly deeply. But the idea in here is that it identifies fingerprints and and again, other other, other, other things that might cause something to be an anomaly. And it it puts all those together and then identifies the anomalous transactions for you in here. Now we also have aI data driven extraction. And the best example of this, of course, is the auto scan that you can do inside of their instead of their their expense tool, where, again, you just take pictures of receipts, and it, it will do the auto scan. Notice it has cropped and and zoomed in on things from the picture made it into where it’s just a black and white image, as opposed to this big, huge color photo. And then it’s going to extract all that information and show that it was seven, $11.75 and it’ll pull the date, time and the company off of there. This is the forecasting tool set that, again, uses some of the AI to forecast the monthly recurring revenue and other things like that in here. Now, within the finance suite, you can see that we’ve got, we’ve got a wide range of different capabilities in here. Zoho has all of these available to again, to help out, or you can work with other other tools. But you can see, you know, here’s a sample, here’s a sample workflow process, and. We might have, or again, how the how the data actually flows, and you can see that it’s messy, and it can actually handle this, and we can again, go through and automate much of the many of those processes and many of those flows so that human beings don’t have to enter data, 345, times into different systems, or otherwise do analysis to check to pull things out. It also facilitates development of vertical, focused applications like the Zoho Practice App we’ll talk about in the next section on ERP for accountants. But you know, here’s an ERP for paint dealerships that was again created in here to go through and help help folks manage this. Now, the last thing I would say here is that they’ve built, they built engines to handle the localization and the and again, the tax schemes and regulatory regimes that we have in a lot of the world. And so here, here we’ve, we’ve shown you, here some of the regimes that they’ve built worldwide to solve, again, common regulatory regimes that are needed for your business. So that’s where, that’s, you know, that’s what I learned at Zoho Zoho day, that that I think, could help your clients, and again, could kind of show you how it could again, it could help them to to have a more digitally reinvigorated business Randy, what do you, you know, what’s, what’s your reaction to that? And where do you think we go with this?
Randy Johnston 16:28
Well, you know the module coverage in finance, the reporting capabilities. You know, the improvements that Zoho is making across the finance suite over the last five years. Let’s just go back that far. Are pretty amazing. We understand that they run their own business on Zoho, and last I knew, they had about 19,000 employees. So you know, it’s not a small scale business. You’re absolutely right. Brian, they are themselves, operating multi jurisdiction around the world with plenty of presence in lots of places. So this is, you know, where you and I, when we talk about Zo, tend to focus maybe on the smaller side of it. This really feels and sounds more like the ERP side of it, just like you had alluded to the interfaces to SAP and Oracle. And I do know some very large scale businesses that have said, Look, we’re going to run our transactional system on SAP that’s dictated by corporate but a lot of these interface systems, we’re going to put Zoho in place and include them. And in fact, I had a discussion yet this week with somebody who said, you know, I really despise using Salesforce CRM, but it’s kind of our corporate standard. He said, I’d sure rather use something simpler, like Zoho CRM. And I said, Well, Audie, you’d say that, because while you’re talking to me, I’m taking my notes in Zoho CRM and and you could just see his face on the other end, you know, kind of, I’ll say, crack up, but he was adamant about, he’d like a simpler system to use. So simpler without compromising features, might be a way to think about this
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 18:20
super and and the, you know, the thing that I would just, I would just generally say to you here, is that, if you, you know, if you haven’t looked at Zoho, I think you’re missing out. I think you’ve got a lot of capabilities there. And, you know, it’s a lot of integration that doesn’t require programming to set up, that you can that you can get to save yourself and your clients a lot of time and to make your information a lot more accurate. Yeah.
Randy Johnston 18:51
So to learn more about the benefits for your firm, see us in another accounting technology lab, but do think about the benefits of Zoho for your clients, we’ve been pleased to have you with us in today’s accounting Technology Lab, and we’ll be with you again soon. Good day.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 19:10 Thank you for sharing your time with us. We’ll be back next Saturday with a new episode of the technology lab from CPA practice advisor. Have a great week.
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