In this video and podcast, Randy Johnston and Brian Tankersley, CPA, discuss Thomson Reuters SafeSend. Watch the video, listen to the audio podcast below, or read the transcript.
Or use the below audio podcast player to listen:
Transcript
(Note: There may be typos due to automated transcription errors.)
SPEAKERS: Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA, Randy JohnstonBrian 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 00:11
Welcome to the Accounting Technology Lab. I’m Randy Johnston with my co host, Brian Tankersley and oh my we are so pleased to have guests on today’s topic of Thomson Reuters safe sand. Now, of course, I’ve known Andrew Hatfield well for so doggone long. I almost hate to say it, because some of you probably weren’t born by that time. But we also have Thompson Reuters president, Elizabeth Beastrom. We have technical expertise with Rahul Chandra. I mean, we have a got a full house here today. So what I’d like to do is just give you an update on safe send, because the platform has been doing so many different good things, which we think are valuable. Let me just set it up by saying this, the majority of tax delivery today is done with safe send. Safe send operated as an independent company, the founders of which I know all of the cpaper Less company evolved over time. They integrated with almost every tax platform in the market, those from Thomson Reuters, those from Walters, Kluwer and Intuit and so on, and we knew them to do a great job on the delivery side. But in the past year or so, they began doing more gathering PBC with AI gather the type of capabilities, and they’ve introduced a new portal capability in the platform. There’s just so doggone, much technical stuff going on that it is a platform that is substantial. And when the acquisition of safe sin by Thompson Reuters occurred earlier this year, a little $600 million transaction that illustrated, in my mind, the dedication of Thomson Reuters to the profession in this platform. So Andrew, Did I say anything wrong there? Or what would you like to correct or add?
Andrew Hatfield 02:10
No, you were you’re very accurate. Randy, very accurate. It’s a very good summary of what’s transpired. I think we’ll probably get into this as we go along, but it’s not just safe center. I think one of the key topics is this shift with Thomson Reuters and how they view the build versus buy versus the siloed. Or, as I heard, actually, Brian put it perfectly when you when you had your podcast earlier about TR synergy is that Brian referred to it as mafia versus Super Friends, if I’m getting that correctly. And I think that we all know there was a time period where these large tax compliance vendors were very siloed or very in house. And I think there’s a big credit and why this acquisition and transaction happened, and why safeson was really on board with this. Is a leadership at Thomson Reuters today to be very open, to create that. Back to you, Brian, that’s super friends, where we create open partnerships, open integration, and we have a very similar vision to do what’s best for the market, and things like automating the tax process. And so it’s not only safe sin, but it’s been the acquisitions of sure prep, and the openness and the shift from TR, from the likes of people like Elizabeth bistrom as well, yeah,
Randy Johnston 03:34
and Andrew, when you were saying that, I was thinking, yep, sure prep, materia with the AI or efforts, and I I could keep going down, because it’s confirmation, and it’s become very obvious to me, and I think a lot of the buyers in the marketplace that this shift is occurring. And frankly, it seems like the technology behind these things is moving so fast, it is hard for legacy development and thinking to be well, good enough, is that a way to think about it? I
Andrew Hatfield 04:07
couldn’t agree more with that. That’s very much the case today, and we are in, as you mentioned earlier, we’ve known each other a very, very long time, both Randy and Brian, and as it turns out, you know, 20 years ago, 15 years ago, even 10 years ago, development of programs was a much larger resource task and a much slower task. And like all good things, as we trend forward with technology, we get a little less resource dependent and a little bit faster in what we’re doing. But I’m sure we’ll get into AI today at some point. And the uplift of AI, that’s a big question, like, what does it really mean inside of these, you know, solving workflow processes, when we can give some examples of that, but the uplift of AI has just made things speed up and move faster. And so you really have to be moving with that current, to stay current, and to stay in a place where you can can continue to develop at the pace that we need to. And we can dive into some of those things as well today, if you like. But you’re very accurate.
Randy Johnston 05:14
You know, in fact, as you were talking about, AI, that is exactly where I was going to go next with you, Andrew, because I am reflecting on the 88 portal competitors in the US market, some of which claim to have AI. And I’ve looked at it. And you know me well enough, I call some of it fake AI, and some of its real AI. I’ve written it, but you know, and there’s 56 practice management products, some of which are saying they’ve got AI in them and so forth. Well, you know the bottom line here is, you know, when I think about the way safe send works and I think about the opportunities across the profession, I believe that integrated AI makes a heck of a lot more sense to me. In other words, if you think about what’s going on with CO counsel and the whole AI integrations. What AI changes? Are you orchestrating inside safe sin today? What’s some things that make some difference? I suspect you’re not like meta, you know, firing 5600 programmers because AI’s taking that over. That doesn’t sound like Andrew Hatfield, safe sin and Thompson. Reuters, I don’t know. What do you wait? What can you tell us?
Andrew Hatfield 06:24
It’s not and I will let rochandra on here comment, because he does run our development group. So he’ll be, he’ll be good at letting you know the intricacies of how it’s uplifting the software and also how it’s affecting our dev team and the resources and our capacity. But what I can tell you is that, like when we hear AI, first of all, it’s kind of a flag that a lot of vendors wave, so I’m going to agree 100% with your assessment there, and sometimes that’s because if you wave the AI flag, you get a little higher valuation in your business, or you make a little noise, or you’re keeping up with competition, right? That is doing similar things doesn’t always necessarily mean that you’re applying AI at that time or in a way that’s like meaningful and I think it’s a fair question to ask, what does it mean in the narrow scope of what a firm’s trying to solve as problematic workflows or areas where you have to manual process that needs to be elevated. For example, we know there’s a large staffing issue that’s no secret, and the only way to solve that is through outsourcing of those resources, staffing or to be able to uplift with technology that replaces people or creates automated software which helps you sustain more work with the same number of people. So when you look at that, my question would be, as a firm, what am I trying to solve? What workflow Am I focused in? And then how does this company apply AI to be helpful in that solution and what my needs are? And that answer can be tricky, and that kind of gets into the finite points of here’s what we’re doing. So here’s what I can tell you, it was safe send one of the biggest areas that AI has been helpful to us, and one of the largest areas that you see in the industry now, moving from problem to solution, is in the front end of the tax process and around the gathering, the gather aspect. So of course, you’re getting all the source documents from your clients, getting those into the firm, getting the data that you need out and into the next prep phase, because that, over time, has been a difficult thing to get good accuracy with. So if you think about it. Randy Brian, I’d say you know why over the last 1520, 10 years, has nobody really stepped up as a vendor to the accounting community and solved the gathering problem like we all know that this is a hard issue to intake all of these documents and information. Every firm doing tax returns goes through it every year. They somehow get it done, because tax returns get filed, although a lot may go on extension for not having all the information. And it’s it gets the point of like, why didn’t somebody make this a better process when it’s such a glaring problem? And I would go back to the companies like safes and for example, or maybe Sure, prep and others were really working with OCR, Optical Character Recognition and products that you could get to a certain accuracy level. But nobody really sat back and said, we can apply this to gather in a way that we can be so accurate that we can really make this easy for the taxpayers to input the docs to the firm and for the firm to be able to get accurate information, documents recognized, classified and data extracted in a way that will actually be adopted now. Tax caddy, from sure prep started down this path about seven years ago, and that was one of the very first that I’m aware of to take a really hard run at this problem. So back to answer your answering your question. And for safe sin, we released within the last year a product called gather AI so safes, and as a company, decided to work on the back end, the last mile, the delivery side of the problem of delivering tax returns, rather than starting on the front end. Gather when we started our company in 2008 and along the way. And we did that because of the reasons I described. We didn’t think the technology the technology was there to do an accurate job. Now, within the last year, with the uplift of AI and especially around the accuracy and the ability to classify the documents correctly that come in, the ability to recognize the data, recognize unstructured data, we’ve been able to create a very accurate solution, which was fast and highly adopted by the community. We have over 800 firms running on gather AI, it’s been already barely eight months, and the accuracy is really incredible on it, it’s not just us. We could go through a list, and I know you’ve done some podcasts on companies that are entering this gather space, because the technology is there. Yeah.
Randy Johnston 11:05
And it turns out, I was picturing sitting in the office with Dave while in Southern Cal when we were trying to do that tax caddy work initially. And it’s like, oh my. And the iterations that we went through, it is a tough nut. And it’s not only the PBC and document request list for tax, but we got a similar problem in client accounting services and a similar problem in audit, and it is a bugger, as one of my favorite sayings from 2016 from a CEO went, if you say it real fast, it sounds easy. You know, you can gather this stuff. So Rahul, on the on the AI, what has your development team figured out that you can do on gather AI to make it more optimal?
Rahul Chandran 11:51
Hey, something? I covered it pretty well. But broadly speaking, AI is an exceptional rule for document classification, document extraction, data extraction, matching it up against a DRL, extracting a DRL, it’s just way more automation than we could have imagined without it, right? And it gives us enormous leverage, even increase the developer productivity. So you can really, like, turn solutions around a lot faster than you could in the past. But it’s just really good at dealing with documents like we read transmits, for example, in the delivery side, and figure out stuff with like missing vouchers, which don’t exist. So the fact that we could have been hard earlier, so, and this is just the beginning right, eventually you start talking about what agents can do and how much automation you can provide to the entire system. We are just getting started. In fact,
Randy Johnston 12:37
I I had just written an article on a genetic AI, which was published in the last week or so. So I do appreciate that. Are you using AI to leverage and get better OCR recognition too with your team?
Rahul Chandran 12:53
I think no, so yes and no, computer vision is like significantly better than OCR, and it’s almost at a point where I don’t think it’s fair to conflict it too. I think in the early days of like vision and layout models, you could have said, Sure, it’s like a successor to OCR. At this point, both the training and the tech are quite different. I don’t know much about OCR. I’m not going to make any claims about OCR. Vision is just better over time.
Randy Johnston 13:23
Yeah. In fact, when sure prep did the 100% guarantee on PDF recognition from original sources, you know, I thought that was pretty, pretty stunning. So now, Elizabeth, I’m going to kind of call you out on this one for a moment. Because you know, when you’re in your type of position, you wind up with this visionary thing. And obviously you’ve helped make the deal to bring safe send to the fold, to bring materia to the fold, and so forth. So. So do you have some sort of overarching, you know, strategy that you’re trying to execute here? I’m not trying to have you tip any confidences or any of that, but you know, you’re making a difference. I can say that for bloody Sure. So, so what’s going on? Yeah,
Elizabeth Beastrom 14:11
well, thanks for saying that noticing. You know, I’m going to say two words to you. I’m going to say efficiency and accuracy. That’s what we’re our products were always based on, and we were always striving to make the experience better for our customers and for our customers customers, for them to be more efficient in what they’re doing. And I would say, you know, with sure prep, with materia, with safe send, I’m going to add into that ease and use and integration, so efficiency, accuracy, ease and use and integration. And Andrew talked touched on it briefly, but this open platform, it’s a big deal for us now. We want to make sure that where our customers find value in the products, that we’re able to connect to that, and that’s what gets me so excited, in general, if you’re looking at the tax workflow specifically, and. If you break down the steps at the highest level, level, gather, compute, research and deliver we have products in all of these categories right now, and can have an end to end, seamless integration across that tax workflow that will result in more efficiency for our clients, continued accuracy and, more importantly, an ease in use and a very seamless, integrated experience. And
Randy Johnston 15:24
I’m pleased to hear you say that because we have talked about the Indian process, from business development to onboarding to gather all the way through to delivery and payment. So you know, maybe your future includes a little more on the front end, a little bit more on the back end, I’m not trying to speak for you, but it’s clear that this integration capability, and just as important in my line of thinking, the APIs, particularly for the larger firms, to be able to expose some of that is important. And based on the firms that I’ve been in personally in the last year, and that’s dozens and dozens of them. The inefficiencies in processes still abound. The personnel shortages are still notable, and trying to solve this with outsourcing has been the short term solution, but it sounds like AI might help us a little bit in a longer term solution, yeah, Brian, yes.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 16:25
I was just going to ask Andrew and Elizabeth and Rahul, you know, what are you having? You know, one of the, one of the opportunities that we’ve seen for some time is the retrieval of of source documents from all these different sources. And it seems like we’ve got that, you know, especially the financial services providers that have. You know, the 1098 and the 1099 misc and 1099 divs and and all of those forms. You know, they get delivered over portals like Black Diamond and others. Are you? Are you making any headway? Or is anybody making any headway? Are you seeing a light at the end of the tunnel that we might be able to have a way to retrieve those at some point in the intermediate term, possibly,
Andrew Hatfield 17:11
yeah, bro, I’ll let you comment from the tech. I mean, like, this is so Brian said, like, a very difficult solve, and it’s kind of like, agree, yeah, agree, yeah.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 17:27
It’s fraught with regulatory minds, but, but I figured I’d ask you all to question anyway,
Andrew Hatfield 17:32
see if it gives me Yeah. It gives me pause to even think about it. So we’ve, we’ve been aware and looked at this for a very long time as how do you solve across all of those disparate sources? How do we consolidate all this information into a firm? And there’s so many different variants of where this information is coming in from, especially when you get into the examples that you provided, that it gets it gets really difficult. I don’t know that anybody, including us, has a off the shelf solution for it today, it would be almost impossible to have a direct line of sight to every one of these disparate institutions. I mean, sure you could pick off a portion of them, and you could do that by who represents the largest percentage but 100% blanket of that would be very, very difficult. So it’s more about once he gets in, can we consolidate and recognize it all? And I don’t know role. I mean, since you’re closer on the you know what’s coming in the future side of things, from a technological, technological standpoint, I mean, the What’s your view on and how you do it? Yeah, what’s the vision?
Rahul Chandran 18:44
I mean, in theory, technology and speaking, it is possible, but there’s a bunch of legit issues, and it’s honestly just at this point, I haven’t spent too much time actually thinking about solving this problem. It’s something that definitely would add a lot of value if you could solve it. There’s just a lot of issues. I think it doesn’t matter. Yeah,
Andrew Hatfield 19:04
I think, I think our approach has been that we’re trying to solve the accuracy issues and the ease of use issues around the documents that are easier to control and to consolidate in from from the taxpayer side, and leaving the much broader, much more difficult problem out there for the solve once we get the rest, rest of it across the board done, and I think we’re making really fast movement across the accuracy and the gather AI program that we have to get the bulk of documents in outside of the scenario you described, Brian, but I don’t know, you know, and I talked to a lot of companies outside of ours that are, you know, coming in from the outside with, you know, the the newer technology that, the uplifting AI that you probably, you probably talked to a lot of these businesses too, of course. And I see some really lofty goals. Goals in in trying to solve this, and trying to solve a much broader scope of the entire workflow, from A to Z, from, you know, gathered to delivery. And I don’t see anybody that’s actually accomplished that that’s in the market, or I’ve seen a clear vision of how they’re going to do it.
Randy Johnston 20:17
Yeah, so, Andrew, your observation there, again, as Brian said, this is a bugger to solve. It’s tough. We are beginning to see some vendors that have platforms that are working, but these are really hard problems to solve. I’m going to call out a technical term, RP RPKI. We’re going to want to have all of these systems enabled that way, for example. And again, it’s beyond the scope of what we might talk about today, but there’s plumbing problems at a low level to solve this. And frankly, there’s a lot of low hanging fruit. And you know, I just go back to and this is going to sound old home week to you, Andrew. I just go back to a conversation I had with you and Jim about, look, I just want to get this stuff out the door and in the door and out the door. I think that’s the way he said it to me, in the door and out the door, making it easier to do so as I’m reflecting Elizabeth on your four you know, takes on what’s happening here. If we just make it easier, we could just grease the skids here of work that’s being done by the firms today. That really helps a whole lot.
Andrew Hatfield 21:31
That’s to that point. I’ll make this observation short, but, but to your point, Randy and I do remember, and you’re calling a conversation from a very long time ago, here for recollection, and you know that was spoken from you mentioned Jim, who was a tax technology partner at the firm that that were that you were referring to. And that’s sort of, to me, that’s what the market like. They don’t necessarily care how it gets done. They just want to be easy from from the client to get the information in, and they can turn it and get it out. And that really was a great summary, and that was coming straight from the horse’s mouth to somebody that was in the seat. And just wanted that scenario to happen. And I think that we are solving for that today. Maybe we haven’t solved the much broader, bigger issue, but we’re making it easier for that to happen, and with between the tax caddies and the safe send, gather AI, we’re seeing fast, high Adoption and Safe sin. Gather AI, at a very high rate. As I mentioned, we onboarded over 800 plus firms in a very short period of time, which to me, is a huge reflection of the problem in the industry, the trust from our brand, and the fact that we make it really easy to do it, and that really is getting a big clog in that in that drain pushed through and letting it flow into the firm at a much faster rate than the industry has seen it before.
Randy Johnston 22:59
Yeah, and you know, this whole issue about client experience, I can’t tell you how many practitioners I’ve talked to that said, you know, I just wanted to be easy. I don’t, I don’t really even want to know how the technology works. I just want to bloody work. And, you know, that’s, that’s kind of where they go. So do understand that there’s still much to be done in this area. So what I’d like to do maybe next, is just give any of the three of you as our guest just a chance to say, here’s something that’s significant about the safe send platform. Here’s something significant about our technology. Here’s something significant about the company that you’d like our listeners to know. So I’m leaving it pretty wide open for you there.
Elizabeth Beastrom 23:45
I mean, I’ll start it off with the company, and you know, part of the reason it was so important for us, and I’ll go back to 2022 when we started the partnership with safe send, you know, you look at it, and it’s a great product. It makes ease of use check the box for our customers and their customers agreed, integrates easily, as you said, it integrates with us and integrates with our competitors. And it’s the people, though you look at the people, and we’ve just spent the last few minutes chatting and getting you reacquainted with them, and it’s the people in the relationship. So safe send is a great product, but it’s based on great people. So this acquisition, to us, was critical, not only to help from that seamless integration within our workflow, but the talent that came with the safe send acquisition as well. I couldn’t be excited about both of those aspects of it. And you know, when you look at the company, it’s a fit. And I’m going to quote Andrew from another interview that we had done, but you know, it was the perfect match at the perfect time when we were coming together. And I can’t be more excited for the future potential that it’s going to bring for our customers.
Randy Johnston 24:57
Yeah. So Elizabeth Bucha. Ryan and I vet a lot of products, but our first vet is always the people. That’s number one, and then number two, there’s going to sound really odd too financial stability, because we don’t want somebody that’s going to be here today, gone tomorrow, and then it usually gets to Okay, you’ve proven that those two things are going to work, and I trust good people to do good things and the right things, and you got to have enough resources to get it done. Okay, so what’s your vision? What are you doing next? And that’s where the technology tends to set in. And you know, because we’re known as technologists, sometimes people think we’re technology first, but that people first vision, and frankly, in firms, to me, it’s team members first. It’s people first, inside the firms too, right? So there you go. So thank you for that observation. Andrew Raul, other things that you’d want to call out,
Andrew Hatfield 25:55
yeah, just a few things to call out. And look just a cornerstone on the foundation that Elizabeth and you Randy both echoed and laid about people. It really, it still is really about people. And I couldn’t agree more with that. And the tribe that you bring into a company that you’re building, and the tribe of people that you spoke off of the internal staff into relationships and partnerships, and, you know, people in the industry and your customers and like the tribe, just gets bigger and bigger, and it’s so important with safe sin, I think there was kind of a call out where, if a if a firm who’s a client of safe send if I’m talking to him at, let’s say, AICPA tech, or one of the conferences, or BDO or etc, and we’re chatting, and they say, you know, we really like safe sin. And I said, you know, one of the reasons that you really like it is because the clients, your clients, the taxpayers, don’t call you and complain about it. And if it’s quiet, if your phone line is quiet from customers you know who call in and say, I’m not sure why you’re making me do this process. Why can’t I just mail it to you? What happened to the old way we used to do it? I’m unsure what to do in the next step, I’m trying to finish my return and I can’t if your phone is quiet to those points, then we’re really doing our job, and it saves in one of the reasons I think that we succeed there is, look, we have a customer satisfaction rated CSAT score, 97.4 we have a net promoter score, MPs of 65 across our full suite, 98% retention. Obviously we got, you know, a good acquisition with Thompson Reuters, because they saw a great company. But the reason that this all works is it’s the people in the tribe, but it’s because we’re all very pragmatic and simple in our approach. We don’t try to over complicate what doesn’t need to be over complicated. For example, you could build the best gather or delivery products in the market, but if a taxpa, the client of a firm, calls the tax partner and says, I can’t figure this out. Why are you making me do this? Then what’s the point of having the greatest solution if people can’t get through the process? And I think we’ve never lost focus on the fact that it has to be easy to use and simple to use. And the other thing is, we don’t express ourselves to be smarter than every other vendor, smarter than the industry. We don’t dictate what the market should do. We listen to the market. And I know there’s a lot of rhetoric about that out there, but we truly believe it within our tribe. But Randy, you’ve known me a very long time. We started a company. And Brian, you too, and we started a company in 2008 so here we are in 2025 what we’ve built is a reflection of every client that we’ve acquired. So every client that we gained, we listened to their feedback, and we sent it to roll and roll into the development team, and he built what the clients were asking for it. And when you do that over a decade of time, you end up with some pretty good products. And that’s, that’s the magic, you know, sauce, that’s the that’s the magic of the whole thing, is listen to your client base and then build what they’re asking you for and try to make it as simple as possible.
Randy Johnston 29:09
Can’t say it better than that, but as you were saying it, I’m thinking, I’m from Kansas, keep it simple. Yeah, hey, yes, I’ve said that more than once. And under promise, over perform. You know, that’s right. You, you have done both of those for decades, honestly, and I’m so pleased with you and and your company result on that and what you’ve done for your clients. So Rahul, anything from your side, otherwise I’m gonna,
Rahul Chandran 29:37
I think, you know, just listening to customers, it’s true, but also me, personally, and everybody works for me, we had a lot of fun building what we did, and I think that just shows and I have a lot of confidence, and that’s really incredible.
Randy Johnston 29:48
Yeah, that is super well, Brian, you’ve been listening to this. You’ve been a little more quiet than normal today, but what would you have as key takeaways for our listeners from the conversation? With the safe send folks with Rahul Andrew and Elizabeth.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 30:04
It just really strikes me how different the technology is that we use in the profession today than when I joined it in 1992 with one of the big at the time, six firms to today, you know, and it’s it’s been such a privilege to go on this trip with you, Andrew, over the over the last 20 years, and Randy and the listeners, and it’s very excited about this open future that we’ve, that we’ve, that we’re moving toward today, and I can’t wait to see what’s coming next from you
Randy Johnston 30:41
well. So with that in mind, I do want to thank all of our guests today, Elizabeth bistrom and Andrew Hatfield and Rahul Chandran. Thank you so much for being here. And you know, I would just say if you are interested in a platform that can do gathering and delivery kind of an end to end experience. The folks at SafeSend have built that. It’s now part of the Thomson Reuters family. We know and trust these folks and have for a long time. And so if you’re looking for a way to solve that problem in your practice, do reach out to your Thomson Reuters rep in this area, and as ever, we appreciate you listening in today, and we’ll talk to you again soon in another accounting Technology Lab. Good day.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 31:31
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.
.
.
Thanks for reading CPA Practice Advisor!
Subscribe Already registered? Log In
Need more information? Read the FAQs
Tags: Firm Management, Income Taxes, Technology