Randy Johnston and Brian Tankersley, CPA, discuss two recent Zoho conferences they attended: Zoho SMZ in San Antonio, Tex., and Zoho Balance in Salt Lake City. The conferences were geared toward accounting professionals, but Zoho is a small business platform used by a million businesses worldwide, and with more than 130 million paid user subscriptions. This makes it one of the largest small business management and accounting platforms in the world. Watch the video, listen to the audio, or read the transcript. The Accounting Tech Lab is an ongoing series that explores the intersection of public accounting and technology.
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Transcript (Note: There may be typos due to automated transcription errors.)
SPEAKERS: Randy Johnston, Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 00:00
Randy, 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. Brian and I would like to talk to you about recent events that we attended, Zoho Balance in Salt Lake City, and Zoho SMZ in San Antonio, two completely different events, but I really think worthwhile. So the Zoho balance was really conceived by Val Steed And Nathan and others of the Zoho team to introduce accounting consultants to the Zoho platform. And as it turns out, you know, Brian was invited, and I was invited as well. I not only attended, but you know, was able to speak on a panel. And the balance piece, you know, gave us the opportunity to speak with influencers of all kinds, almost anybody that you could recognize that had long term contacts in the profession. Was there, I was able to talk directly with SIVA and Prashant, the primary decision makers on the accounting platforms in Zoho and, you know, along the way, the conversations at the event were very strong. I was really quite surprised how many accountants did not know about the Zoho platform. Didn’t understand anything about the company, the strategy. And you know, today with Zoho, number of businesses you know in the million plus range, and the number of seats customers in the 100 and 30 million range. Most people are just surprised when they learn about Zoho. So Brian, I know you attended both events as well, so we did spend a good bit of that week together. But what observations would you have on Zoho balance?
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 02:11
Yeah, so just kind of put a lid on Zoho balance. I think it was really more of a introduction of the Zoho finance platform. And again, they built it out pretty nicely. We’ll talk more about it a little bit later. But again, it’s got Zoho expense, Zoho inventory, Zoho we have books, we have invoice we have a payments platform. We have, you know, there’s just literally a subscription billing platform. There’s literally a whole suite of tools. That’s just the finance suite. And I think we’ve actually got a separate slide on that, but I think this was really more packaged as going after accounting influencers and presenting the Zoho value proposition to them. You know, we’ve heard a lot of frustration from QuickBooks Pro advisors at the treatment they’ve received from intuitive late of you know, the taking back of discounts and the just double digit annual price increases on desktop, and then just not selling desktop anymore. And then, you know, pretty substantial price increases on online as well. So, you know, I think that generally Zoho is in a good place, as is Xero and as is FreshBooks to come in as alternatives to QuickBooks Online.
Randy Johnston 03:36
Yeah, so the Zoho balance event, I think will cause you to hear more about Zoho from whatever influencers you might be following, because again, I was amazed how many people were in the room, just about everybody who was anybody
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 03:53
in the main profession. Clayton Oates came over from Australia for it, yeah.
Randy Johnston 03:58
And you know, bottom line was, very few people were clued up, but I think it’s probably from a product perspective, Brian good that we turned our attention to smz, which was the Small Business version that Zoho produced. Now you and I have been fortunate enough to go to Zoho influencer events for some time, and I know you’ve been to one earlier in the year, but the SMC was conceived by Sandy low and the management team, in fact, we had one of the founders, Tony Thomas, start us off in San Antonio with presentation. But this was focused around small business, users and influencers and so, you know, Brian again, was there, and we were at a very nice hotel in San Antonio, but, you know, Sandy low, basically tried to frame what they were accomplishing with this particular event, and I think did a pretty good job. Now, bottom. Line on small businesses is we’re going to talk to you about five or six announcements that they made in San Antonio or new updates to products. But if you are a small business centric accounting firm or a small business, there are some products that we have talked about in prior podcast and in prior accounting lab, like Zoho invoice. But for example, big in is a small CRM product that can be used by startups. And the idea is that you can start small with Zoho products like Biggin and convert to their larger version, like Zoho CRM.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 05:37
And so think of bigin as roughly comparable to a Lunchables, where Zoho CRM would be a a three course lunch, you know? So the thing about big in is it doesn’t require as much customization, and it’s more set to work out of the box, as opposed to having to set up workflows and steps and all kinds of other things like you do in the traditional CRM,
Randy Johnston 05:58
yeah, but it is not incapable. It’s a very capable platform with very little configuration much stronger than the old contact managers like act and Goldmine and all those. And you know, other pieces in their platform are designed to start small, like Soho mail and grow up in the workplace. Now we’ll talk about this growth path, because remember, this was a small business event, and if you’re doing business development on startups, which there are going to continue to be a lot of startups right now, these platforms may well help you with that client
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 06:34
base. And I do want to say, I do want to say that Zoho invoice is free for all users. So if you have somebody that’s self employed, like my lawn lady, that’s going to be coming later today, hopefully we’ll get the recording done before she comes here. But you know, if you have somebody just needs to do basic billing so you can have completeness of revenue. Invoice is free, and there is a there’s a single upgrade path into books, which is their full GL
Randy Johnston 06:59
package. And we’ll also learn today, in today’s podcast, that they have a another complete platform called solo, which is also free. So there is a high probability that your clients could start on invoice or solo using start and again, the whole thing here will unfold. But Zoho has begun to think about all their various modules. Is systems. They have 50 plus modules, and we heard about that in both Salt Lake and San Antonio, and the focus is around the three needs of every business, serving customers, empowering employees and running operations. And in a prior accounting Technology Lab, we talked about the 50 state payroll that Zoho now has, for example. But the concept of serving, marketing, sales and support on the customer side, and all of the modules that can go on, that which can be bought individually or used individually or bought in suites, is a deal, and it turns out that besides the customer facing products, they also have the employee facing products. And the employee facing products are for communications and collaborations and business intelligence. And then finally, the operations products include their HR products, their finance products, like books and other inventory and commerce products. And we’ll be talking about commerce here a little bit later. So you can buy these individual modules in suites, or you can buy them all in one so if you start thinking about it as kind of a front office operation, you know, Zoho CRM plus and marketing plus and service plus can be, you know, the way you buy bundles collaboration would be workplace or project plus. And the back office is finance plus or people plus, or you can simply choose to, you know, get everything together in a product called Zoho one, which is what we have been using on our k2 you know, business for some time. So we like to recommend Zoho one, but it is also quite clear to us that you can start small and grow. Zoho did tell us that once people get to two modules on their system, they frequently update to Zoho one, just to get everything. And that’s a pretty common strategy. The other significant announcement that Zoho made in San Antonio was the upgrades for their Zoho Zia, the Zoho intelligent agent, their AI for small business, and this Zia is actually optimized for business as a proprietary LLM. They are doing contextual, integrated AI. And some of the demonstrations here were quite good. They also have produced. Some AI agents and use them across a variety of the platforms. So, you know, this evolution really got me thinking again that it was time for us to update you on some of the goings on with Zoho. So I want to turn our attention though to a larger product, Zoho commerce and what we watched, demonstrated by Zoho was an end to end onboarding process. Now we’re not going to go into all the technical details. I was so doggone impressed with the, you know, simplified domain name acquisition, Email Setup, e commerce setup along the way, that I believe that you could set up a complete business with integrated inventory in a matter of a few hours. And why do I think that’s the case? Because I watched them demonstrate this doggone thing in a matter of a few minutes, which is also pretty amazing. But on the commerce side, they have a full scale e commerce integrated storefront that integrates all the way back to the inventory items, and they’re improving their capabilities to compete against the likes of Shopify with this particular platform. And the inventory is pulled in real time from the back end. So in effect, if you can get inventory items, including services set up in the system, you can enable a complete shopping cart, enabled business to business or business to consumer environment, and they do handle the whole end to end workflow process, from orders and payments to shipping and delivery tracking. So Brian, you got to see this commerce platform demonstrated as well. What would you want our listeners to know
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 11:58
about that? Well, it also can be used as kind of a point of sale. It’s a little more rudimentary as a point of sale, but it fits there. They really have redone the whole user experience in this to make it a much easier product to work with. So I’m quite excited about that. And I think it’s a, you know, I think as we get into this world we live in where people want to buy things online and pick them up at the store. You know, this is the reality of what a lot of small businesses need, so that people can, you know, book appointments or book, you know, services, or book things online and then electronically pay for them and then have them just happen in the background.
Randy Johnston 12:41
Yeah. So Zoho did disclose some of the strategies, like working towards more sophisticated point of sale and verticalizing more but we have talked in the past about Zoho being a privately held company that’s been profitable since inception. They’ve been around about 30 years at this point, and so they have a higher security profile than just about any other vendor in the market. But one of the things that they really promoted was their idea of, you know, supporting small businesses. So I’ve already called out a product called Zoho solo. It’s really proper name. Is actually solo for solopreneurs is so low one and you know, one of the things that may not be obvious to you is there are loosely, 70 million freelancers in the United States, and about 1.6 billion freelancers worldwide. And we’ve watched the Census Bureau numbers here in the US for decades without exaggeration there, and we believe there’s loosely, 34 million businesses in the US, 28 million which don’t have an employee. So you know, when we start thinking about these businesses and the startups that are out there, there’s a lot of opportunity for you, if you can help startups take off and grow. Now, Solo has many features, but first I’m just going to call again. Solo is free, so this is, you know, all of these things that a user can do in their solo account. They can manage tasks and contacts. They can do Income Management, expense management, they’ve got tax management capabilities and reporting and security. Really, it’s enough to do everything that a small business needs to do to manage day to day functionality. And you know, the basis of this is different modules, but they’ve all been glued together into a single user experience. So Brian, when you know you saw the demonstration on solo, is there any particular things that you might call out?
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 14:56
Well, I mean, if you think about Zoho one as being designed for enterprises. Is, and then who solo is really designed for, again, the self employed people. And so it’s really a very much stripped down version of the Zoho suite, not necessarily in functionality, but in complexity. So it’s designed to make it easy, to run everything off of a mobile app and to just to just go forward with it, but it’s got tasks and contacts and income and expense and tax reporting and reports and, you know, security settings, and again, you can run the whole thing from your mobile device. Yeah.
Randy Johnston 15:32
In fact, in another context, they claimed, not only did they have the 50 plus modules, 55 is the most non common number we saw a quoted by Zoho, but they had over 100 mobile apps that were integrated seamlessly into their system. And they did use some statistics of mobile phones globally, including us and Africa. And I, I thought those statistics were fantastic enough that I actually took pictures of them. So I said, these are really good, particularly if I can back those up. But you know, another product that just got my attention, and if I had one motivation for this podcast episode for you today, it’d be to make sure you knew about Zoho start. Zoho has gone to the trouble of supporting their idea of from seed to tree. Now, again, remember, they are very small focused, small business focused, and they want to do everything they can to help small business form and Zoho start now supports all 50 states for formation of LLCs, and for a, you know, a very small fee, typically it’s the filing fees at the Fed or states, they can now file all documentation for formation and get a tax ID in all 50 states.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 16:58
Now the tax ID, I think, is 50 bucks. Don’t spend it all. Don’t spend it all in one place,
Randy Johnston 17:03
exactly, but that’s the fee that they’re charging. They’re not really charging anything that I could tell for the platform itself. Now I might be wrong on that, but bottom line was, I watched the formation process and our demonstrator did the entire process end to end in about two minutes. So think about how many businesses out there should be properly formed. Now they’ve started with LLCs. Their intent was to get all 50 states working so they knew how to make things connect. And then they’re going to form the other types of businesses, the sub S’s, the partnerships and so forth across the various states. But I thought that was a really significant step forward in terms of the Start product.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 17:52
I think it’s quite interesting that they’ve layered that into the zone suite so that you can so that you’re starting the application and you have all your business data in there, and then you have all your reporting out of it. And again, they’re really making it into honestly, you know, since they have CRM and all the other things in Zoho one, it is a infinitely more complete platform, especially at the Zoho one level, than what you’ll have with pretty much anything mid market, you know, and for the entry level folks, you know, the nice thing is, you can start out with Zoho start and Soho Solo for solopreneurs, and then you can graduate up to stuff are just literally supported in organizations with millions of employees that you know, again, in the Zoho one suite,
Randy Johnston 18:46
yeah, so you know, they did make a few other announcements or improvements in products. Some of these products have been around and they expanded them. For example, the Zoho Biggin product was very interesting light duty, pipeline, CRM class product, it maintained all of the contacts in the system and the companies and actually products and so forth. I mean, it was, you could run an entire business off of Biggin. And what also then happened was Biggin was connected to another new product called contracts. Now, contracts are just starting out. There’s a lot more to be done on this, but it’s a doggone good start. And the contracts are set up that you can actually do a draft of the contract, get it approved, go back and forth, negotiating, get it signed and make it active. And the we I asked about various, you know, capabilities in the platform during my one on one meeting, about the contract manager. And, you know, some things were in there that I expected, some were not, but it was clear that you could do all of what I would call your lead. Goal paperwork here, including e signatures with the Zoho sign, which was included as part of the contract. So you could do NDAs, for example, or you could actually do business contracts, and you could also do employment agreements, for example. So anything that would be associated with onboarding employee and all of the supporting documentation there,
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 20:25
and autumn and workflow automation for these. So you can have your approval process in here, and you can actually configure it where there are multi layer approvals as well as different approvals for different again, for different paths. So pretty interesting tool,
Randy Johnston 20:41
yeah, and they started with a variety of different documents, and they included templates for software licenses, product sales, reseller agreements, e commerce, vendor agreements, non disclosures, Master services agreements and so forth. And really they were just trying to show how the cycle time was so much quicker with these types of automated contract tools, and the forms that they could create were fillable by fields which were extracted from the Zoho systems. So just like you’re used to mail merge in, let’s say Microsoft Office, these are automatically drag and drop field capabilities inside this system. So think of it as kind of a report writer with automated fields with verification so you actually have legally binding contracts. And what was fascinating in the discussion around this is they talked about how in most countries in the world, the contracts were needed in the legal systems, whereas, you know, here in the United States, we have places where we need them, but we’re not quite as adamant about having a contract in place. But they were quite adamant about how that worked in so many countries, and it’s like, well, that’s fascinating, because as accounting professionals, of course, we always want engagement letters in place, but many industries just don’t have these binding contracts, and particularly at the small business level, that just didn’t happen. Well, one other interesting product that they released, and there were some more, but we just want to pull a few that I thought were useful right away, was the Zoho notebook product. Now, many of you have used OneNote and all of the other competitors, and in our k2 business, we’ve taught a lot of these notebook class products, but the meeting notes here was a little different take on it, because they had an a built in audio transcription of the meeting. And it was more like an AI meeting tool. You could the audio clip was recorded with the minutes, but it kind of did a script and a next action plan, and who attended, and all those types of things. And in the meeting minutes, for example, in a notebook, it would take you to that point in the minutes so you could go back and listen to the speaker on that topic. I thought that was pretty doggone useful in terms of style.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 23:23
So I will say that I’ve been using otter for some time, and that capability, which is also present in the tricked out version of teams where it will transcribe the meeting and take the notes and summarize it for you, is really been a just a godsend for
Randy Johnston 23:40
me. Another Thank you, Brian. And another thing in the platform that I thought was interesting was how you could get the major topics in a tree map, including who was talking about those items. So it got them, the concepts mapped in a meeting discussion, very rapidly and automatically, which is probably important as well. And they also had personal spaces. So, you know, this would be, you know, very similar to some of the capabilities that we’re seeing built out in Microsoft Office Suites as well. And zoom has some things like this and so forth. So anyway, the notebook piece, though, is included inside their system. Another thing that was is a competitive piece. Many of you have used Calendly or other bookings, those types of products that we’ve talked about in prior podcasts, but they also have now a booking page inside their notebook and meetings platform. So you really the way I like to think about Soho. They find a problem and solve it. They make everything work, both computer browser based and. Mobile based, so you can watch end to end workflows inside these systems, if you will. So doesn’t matter whether you’re mobile centric, iPad centric or computer centric in the approach. And the other thing that they have worked on is their integration with products like QuickBooks, so their invoices can flow through, or their payroll can flow through, so you may have a transition capability here that you’ve not seen in any of these other platforms. So that really brings us back again to the big end product, because it really is an end in workflow for your startup clients, and it integrates into the notebook platform as well. So when we start looking at how Zoho is going to morph the Small Business Platform, I think they may have the platform of choice for startups and the most automations to make everything easy for you, the professional, to do for the small business clients. So Zoho. Biggest shortfall, as I see it right now, is awareness. There’s so much of their tools that if the market figures out that they have, they’ll get used. But maybe, because of today’s accounting Technology Lab, you might make, you will become aware, and you make, might make clients aware. So Brian, any other things that we learned from our visits at smz or the balance in San Antonio and Utah,
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 26:42
well, the pace at which they’re doing development is going up pretty significantly, and part of that is, honestly, because they’re using AI to write some of the code or to clean up some of the code. And again, they’ve got literally, probably hundreds of millions of lines of code at this point across all their platforms. And so it it’s really pretty amazing some of the things that they’ve been able to do with that tool set. You know, I we didn’t really talk as much about the Zoho finance suite as we possibly could have, but I will say that when you start looking at their finance suite, it has books, which is a very competitive, I would probably say a kind of you can do. You can use it for small business, but it goes further upscale. In fact, they said that Zoho books is actually used internally by Zoho. Their subscription billing platform is perfect for people that are setting up these recurring revenue model businesses where your card gets charged automatically. In an example that might be my car wash that I go to where I pay basically 20 bucks a month that I can go through as much as I want. The invoice product I’ve talked about a little bit earlier, but again, it is free for everybody, and it also has merchant service integrations that you can work with. The expense management product I’ve always thought of as the gateway for the Zoho finance suite. Interestingly, there are free versions of just about all of these products that you could use with things. There’s also a Zoho payment solution in here, as well as Zoho inventory, the commerce tool we talked about, and the whole the whole suite of low code, no code integration tools and workflow creation tools in here. So there are, there’s just, there’s a whole lot in the world of Zoho. And the biggest challenge, I think, for new users to Zoho is really just figuring out how to get your arms around it, okay, because it’s a lot of stuff, and figuring out the Venn diagram for what goes where and how it integrates together is sometimes a little bit difficult. So it’s a, you know, it’s a journey, but literally, they have tools that you could replace, literally everything you need. They have a meeting tool, they have an event management tool, they have CRM, they have a remote access and support management tool. They have a ticket tracking tool, you know. They have literally everything you could imagine, plus they, you know, and you may be nervous about them having not heard of them, but anybody that’s dealing with Enterprises has definitely heard of them, because they also run, they also own manage engine, which is the, which is a it’s used in big, serious enterprise. It and their directory is used in big, serious enterprise. It all day, every day. So and in fact, they actually operate their own data centers and cages inside big data centers, they don’t actually use public clouds at all for their stuff, so their equipment is all segregated from other places. And they’re very serious about privacy. You know, in this age of AI, one of the things we all worry about is getting our data pimped out by somebody to create, you know, more detailed marketing programs. Files of you, or leak your sensitive data, or other things like that. The people inside of Zoho can’t even look at their customer data without you granting them permission inside the support app, and then it’s only for it that small period of time. So I don’t think you have to worry about folks snooping around if they’re doing what they say they’re going to do in their privacy policy. So there’s a lot of great stuff about Zoho that I think people need to consider as they’re trying to again, as they’re trying to figure out what their solutions are going to be.
Randy Johnston 30:31
Yeah, well, and to your point, Brian, they’re running Zoho books internally, and they have 20,000 plus employees globally. So this is no small company.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 30:41
I didn’t even talk about their multi client interface for accounting firms. That’s kind of a, you know, equivalent, kind of similar to Q, B, O, A, or some of the other multi client tools called Zoho practice. You know, they’ve literally got 60 something applications, and they and they all do amazing things.
Randy Johnston 31:02
Yeah. So if you want to learn about that, go to zoho.com/cpa, that’ll be a great place to see it. Well, we appreciate you listening in today. We’ll talk to you again soon in another accounting Technology Lab. You have a good day.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 31:18 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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