In this episode of the Accounting Technology Lab, Randy Johnston and Brian Tankersley, CPA, tackle a critical strategic decision for accounting firms: whether to adopt an all-in-one software suite or build a best-of-breed technology stack. They explore how suites from providers like Thomson Reuters and Wolters Kluwer offer convenience through integrated workflows, unified interfaces, and simplified vendor management. However, these benefits often come with tradeoffs, including limited flexibility, higher switching costs, and potential vendor lock-in.
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. Brought to you by CPA practice advisor with your host, Randy Johnston and Brian Tankersley.
Randy Johnston 00:09
Welcome to the accounting Technology Lab. I’m Randy Johnston, your host, with co host Brian Tankersley, and we’ve been mulling this next topic over for some time, and we’ve discussed it in our consulting in CPA firms for some time. And that is, do you buy a suite from the major publishers, the CCH Wolters, Kluwer, Thomson, Reuters, type of companies, or do you buy best of breed? And of course, there’s a couple of other companies that would like to have you think that they’ve got a suite into it certainly falls in that category. Iris falls in that category. And there’s more that are trying to build full suites. But in our line of reasoning generally, we’re looking for a one stop shop that would let you get almost everything you need, from practice management to document management to work flow to tax to audit platforms to guidance to research, and you’ll notice I just described pretty much what the Thomson Reuters and Walters clear companies have traditionally done. So Brian, that’s a lot of setup again. But you know, do you have some thoughts on why you might choose an all in one suite versus best of breed.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 01:23
Well, the, you know, the there’s a lot that you have to do to make the independent things all talk to each other. Okay, so it’s really, it’s for the convenience of the data flowing back and forth with you having to do minimal to minimal things to make it work, so you don’t have to do things more than once in more than one application. So again, you look at this, and you know, the CCH access suite has this, you know, again, you firm flow and go file room and again, Thompson’s Engagement Manager. Again, the idea here is that you have one throat to choke for making all this stuff work together. It also, in most cases, it will have some similarity in the look and feel. It’s not always going to be super consistent, because many times with Thompson and cch, they’ve acquired some, if not all, of these products, or they’ve been different development teams like, you know, Thompson with their you know, in the pre early days of Thompson, there was a development there were developed neat teams in Dallas. There was one in Dexter, and those two didn’t talk to each other very much, and that’s part of why, by the way, that they’re probably discontinuing the file cabinet CS product, because it’s, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s going to take too much to get it to a cloudified or whatever. But as we look at this, though, you know, again, the idea here is having everybody in one portal does make a certain part of it easy.
Randy Johnston 02:46
Yeah. And, you know, another concept on this, just again, we’re not trying to rehash old things. We’re trying to think forward with you on this. It turns out that Brian and I had done an accounting firm operations Technology Survey nationally for a good number of years, and it was statistically valid, and we saw the trend towards best of breed. But I got a little bit of a shock, I will say, when I was consulting for a firm Alliance in a partner level retreat where, independently, three of the partners said, you know, all this best of breed stuff we’ve been trying to do, it takes an awful lot of work to make it all work together. I think we’re going to go back to sweets. And it was like, Well, that’s an interesting conclusion. And I asked why. And so over the last six months, I’ve continued to reflect on this issue. And again, we don’t want to say, Oh, you can only do sweet you, but what we want you to do is be thoughtful about what a suite can do for you, and if you’ve got the ability to actually maintain all these best of breed integrations, yeah.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 04:03
And there are costs, you know, the, you know, all in one suites are not all rainbows and unicorns, okay? There are, again, you want to be careful with the all in one suites, because there are things that, there are a lot of tools that are not, that may not be exactly what you want. Okay? So you’re picking from the cafeteria instead of picking off of a menu, and you have what the cafeteria has, and if you don’t like what the cafeteria has, then you’re out of luck. The exit bill also matters. With this getting divorced from these legacy vendors and getting your data out gets harder and pricier every year. You also want to make sure that the tools will do the job that you need, especially if you’ve got specialty practice areas like business valuation and lit support and advisory, the tools may not directly make you know you know, because you can get advisory there, there are many different models that make up advisory, and your advisory may be completely different. From somebody else’s advisory. So, so again, that’s, that’s what we have here. Again, the other problems we’ve had, and we’ve seen some of these where there are data centers that go down and it takes down an entire firm during tax season or immediately after tax season. We’ve seen situations where that happened. And then finally, you have the Ghostbusters problem. You know who you’re going to call if you’re, if you’re, if you get a renewal price, and it is well in excess of what you really want to pay for this and what you’re willing to pay for it, your option is to re implement everything. And so it’s the cost of a divorce grows geometrically as you have more and more stuff on a platform.
Randy Johnston 05:37
And I think one of the motivations for many of these discussions was pricing. We know that there’s been very aggressive pricing from all vendors, increasing the cost to you and your firms, not saying those aren’t justified. I just know that they’re real. And you know, as you’re looking at your licensing expense and you’re thinking about new spin for artificial intelligence, or, you know, other legacy things that you might need, like training and so forth. You know, you just are maybe feeling a bit of a squeeze on that. On the other hand, you can go down the path of really building your own stack, the best in breed approach,
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 06:21
and so in this best in breed approach, you’re really picking the stuff that meets exactly what you want. Okay? And it’s very much like the difference in buying a, you know, in building a race car, versus, versus buying a car off, off the lot, okay? With the race car you can get, you know, if you’re doing, you can get the special tires you need for drag racing, or you can get the you can get the tools you know, you can get the steering rack that works perfectly for turning left every single time, 500 times in in this situation, on the other hand, when you’re getting something off the rack, you’re getting something that works for general purposes, but it’s not for everything. And so again, where there are these things, people are setting up these bespoke suites of tools, where they’re again, where the integration is a little more uncertain, a little more technically complex, but again, they will typically handle the messy workflows that the general suites will miss. So, you know, you’re thinking about giraffe for forecasting, or you’re thinking about, you know, some other kind of niche tech to keep your firm from falling behind. The idea here is that you can, you can use the things that you know the optimal applications for everybody, and then if you’ve got the sophistication to link them all together, then it can stop a lot of the daily headaches. Now, there still will be data flow headaches that have to be dealt with. But again, the tools for that have gotten significantly better. You know, you look at what’s happened with Zapier, what’s happened with Data Prep, you look at what’s happened with Microsoft to flow and now called Power automate, and some of the other tools like that, Zoho flow, certainly, those are all better, and they do the low code, no code integration that a lot of folks are
Randy Johnston 08:01
looking for, and so this idea of it getting easier is good, but notice we didn’t say easy. In other words, if you’re looking for a big red easy button, that’s still not quite the case, but it is notably easier to do these best of breed integrations now than it would have been maybe two or four or six years ago, absolutely, however, you still have to do all of this maintenance, and there are going to be disconnects, and maybe the disconnects are fine for you, I don’t know. Now, the other thing that I could have called out earlier on the suites is the expectation of the data flowing back and forth maybe still is not as good as you would like to see. And you know, Brian and I both look at all these products, and we are cognizant to say, you know, would we like it to be better? Yes. Do we ask the vendors frequently to make their products better? Are they trying all the time? Yes and yes. So again, we’re not throwing rocks at anybody. We don’t want to throw a stone at a single supplier unless they’re doing, you know, illegal and illicit stuff. But bottom line is, it’s just different approaches, and I don’t know which different is better for you.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 09:16
Okay, now as we think about the app overload, one of the things that that you can do to kind of address this, you know, so that everybody doesn’t have 40 different passwords they have to keep up with for the apps they use every day, is you can set up single sign on using technologies like OAuth, so that you don’t have to hunt for lost passwords. You’ve just got the authentication already built in. You also want to stick to a few core tools. Again, it’s better than making people learn five different ways to solve the same problem. If you have an app drawer and there are things that there are things to do the same job, pick one ditch the other, there are also home bases for this authentication, like Okta. It’s an easy way to make sure everybody finds what they need too fast. And then you want to think about the switching costs. Okay, every time somebody jumps from slack to carbon, they lose their flow, and there is some loss here. You know again, when you hire new people in from other organizations, they’re going to have skills in different applications, and there is a learning curve that they’re going to have to go through that,
Randy Johnston 10:15
and in many cases, a tool that they use before they want to use again. So they’ll sell you on the concept of using the tool that just works so much better because they were used to it. And you know, when you look at the way these tools work together, Brian’s admonition on getting rid of tools that are duplicative. And what you’re going to discover is, when you buy different tools, they have overlaps on features. And not every feature is going to be perfect inside the platforms, but you’re going to maybe pick one that’s good enough, as opposed to the best in some particular area. And here I’m just going to pick on something near and dear to both of our hearts, workflow. You know, we might pick a good enough workflow product instead of the one that we think is the best because it’s integrated with our systems, or whatever the logic is. So don’t think that you have to have best of breed. Just think you might have some that are good enough and reduce clutter less applications is better than more. And that’s another thing that is a big stumbling block with Best of breeds, is we keep picking band aids to put on new wounds instead of actually putting on a pair of gloves.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 11:37
And I will say this that you know in my personal world, one of the things that has been a bee in my bonnet for some time is Adobe Acrobat. Okay, I want to work with PDF files. I don’t want to work with Adobe Acrobat. Okay? And part of the challenge, you know, just like some people, you know, you look at Microsoft Office, and some people say that, well, I’d really rather work with Apple’s office suite of, you know, digits and you know, their tools, and there are open source alternatives, certainly, like, you know, like Libre Office, okay, but Libre Office is clunky, okay? And so it as we’re looking at these things again, you’re the, the thing you’ve got to decide is what the things are that you will not part with. Like, in my case, it’s probably Microsoft Office Okay, and I have to live with Adobe Acrobat for right now. But I keep praying that Satya is going to come around and say, Hey, did you know we’ve built in PDF editing into Microsoft Office now so you don’t have to do you don’t have to buy Adobe Acrobat anymore. That would be a good day for me. But again, figuring it, figuring this out, and then going getting that in here is important. Now you also want to unlock your data, because you’re having data in these old spreadsheets and clunky legacy systems, is a potential liability point for you with data governance. So again, is practice management your home base. You want to check and make sure that that’s what it is. Stop typing the same data twice. Okay? Because you’re going to make mistakes in one or the other, then you’re not going to know what’s wrong. And then next time you’re looking for it, you’re going to see the inconsistency, and you’re going to have to spend twice as much time figuring out is which one’s right, this one or that one. Again, you think of power automate or Zapier, or, you know, some of the Zoho integration tools as your digital pipes. And the idea here is to let everybody have a single place to find the latest files and the most current ones in there. So, you
Randy Johnston 13:24
know, we always talked about master data, gold data. You know, there’s other names for that, but for many firms, the primary client data either lives in tax or in practice management, those are the two places that are most commonly there as your master data, and you need to be thoughtful about where you believe your best copy of client information lives.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 13:50
Yeah, so again, you want to keep things pretty straight, pretty straightforward here for the you know, for areas where there aren’t a lot of alternatives, like tax filings and standard compliance work, you know, don’t kid yourself. Okay, there aren’t that male you know, if I’m talking about your average accounting firm, you’re probably not going to switch your tax software anytime soon, even if there are advantages to going to it, because that’s just there’s such pain associated with it. But we can layer additional tools on top of it. We can look at how the tools talk to each other. We can use some of the built in connectors. Again, you only want to buy the niche models if your main software really can’t handle the job. So as an example, there was a client I was working with a few years ago, and they had, they had two or three clients that were publicly traded partnerships, and they had 1000s of K ones they had to send out of those ptps, and they had to use a different tax software because the one they were using, which will go nameless, would not handle that many different K ones. And so as we’re again, as we’re thinking about these things here, I want you to be very careful with it. Again, look at your workflow, see if they’re bottlenecks. And again, you want to do. Clear war on those bottlenecks as quickly as you can.
Randy Johnston 15:02
And for many of you, your systems of record is tax data. Okay, well, who’s going to have the most capable tax tools in the market? It’s going to be the big, sweet vendors, Walters, Clewer, Thompson, Reuters, is where most of that’s going to live. Now, we understand there’s new products coming along, but where is your best data? And you know, you may conclude, oh yeah, we’re going to do practice management and switch there. Again, be thoughtful about is the nature of this particular podcast.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 15:37
Now let’s talk a little bit about picking text tech that grows. Okay. So again, we want you to look at the roadmaps. We want you to ask the vendors about how they’re going to help us use AI. You also want to watch out for those old systems. You know, it’s really not fair to ask new graduates coming into the market to use tools that were written before they were born to solve modern problems. And so again, we’ve got to go through and figure that out. You know, do your software partners care about the same rules and regs that keep you up at night? You know, again, the things that cause you to lose their your house if you make a mistake are not the same things that they have. And again, you also want to make sure that things are the vendors are innovating fast enough to support your moving into advisory now with fixing things before they break you again, there’s there with full sweets. There is value to having one throat to choke, whether it be a Thompson Reuters or an intuit or a Walter’s clue or an iris. But you will likely have to juggle several help desks, and there may be quite a bit of hot potato where people say, well, that’s their problem, or that’s my that’s somebody else’s problem. How much time are you going to spend on the phone or again, dealing with these issues? Again? It’s going to your time is going to grow. Is going to at least double when you start managing double more than one vendor, although time can be because of the way folks are segmented into divisions and other things that certainly can happen with a single vendor too. Again, you want to lean on dedicated account managers to cut through your red tape or billing or complex setup issues. Okay, yeah, so there is
Randy Johnston 17:10
complexity here. I will illustrate with a situation this week, and actually more than one, because we’re at the day we’re recording. This is still in tax season, and we had a firm who could not process tax because of a Microsoft issue. And it’s, you know, is that Wolters Kluwer problem, or Thomson Reuters problem or intuits problem, or is that Microsoft’s problem? And how many of you are going to get Microsoft to respond to fix their problems so you can continue processing your tax auditor, Cas, and I think the probability of you being able to solve that problem is very low. So again, I watch those I feel so bad for firms that are having those type of issues, but in many cases, it’s beyond the firm’s control and beyond the IT teams control.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 18:05
So again, you do want to give yourself several months to settle in when you’re moving to a new system and you’re going to want to try to schedule things, schedule implementations and training prior to busy periods. Again, you can drop in specialized tools that are point solutions in small steps. You can also, if you have broken workflows right now, you can always throw a standalone tool in to fix the gap instead of waiting for a total overhaul. And you want to look beyond the sticker price, okay, because, again, time is still money. And so even you, even though you may be billing based on value, you still want to look at the time and find those bottlenecks in your processes so that you can make them the best that they can be. Now, when we look at your when you look at your tech stack again, you want you to look at some of the integrations that are there. Many of you are using tools like QuickBooks and Bill and don’t have them integrated. And so you want to make sure one where integrations exist that you are using them where it’s possible. Now, one thing you got to watch with built in integrations is you need to try them, and you need to work with them before you go in and you rely on them in production. And part of the reason that that’s so critical is that many times you have to lay you have to use the tools, one tool or the other tool, like, maybe, you know, I used, I had a time and billing software that used to integrate with QuickBooks Desktop, 25 years ago. And the problem was I implemented QuickBooks before I implemented the Time and Billing tool. And the problem was that the Time and Billing tool would not required me to Set Up QuickBooks a certain way for the data flow. Okay? And you will have situations like that where you need to rationalize that. You may have a solution like that, where you have to go back and re, implement it or re, architect the data in an existing tool for these things to work. Now, there are API connectors. You can move back and forth, and you can use vibe coding and other things like that. With this, you want to stay away from the CSV uploads. They’re slow. They have mistakes. People will their problems. Does your data really flow both ways in here? And so you need to know which ones are one way, which ones are two way. And finally, in here, you want to find the instances where somebody has to key stuff in more than once. Okay, because that is where your inefficiency is coming from. Now, to own these things, you want to check and see if your tools will read and write, let each other read and write data many times. There are limitations. For example, in QuickBooks Online, there are certain things that you can’t write. Okay? You know, like writing payroll data to most accounting software packages is limited, if not blocked altogether. You also want to watch out for walled gardens. You want to watch out make sure things will that makes the tech stack will work with your custom reports and your daily dashboards you want to make sure, again, your main vendor isn’t blocking rivals just to keep you trapped. Okay, again, that’s the thing about the walled garden with Apple, is that, you know, Apple went in there and they set up their app store for the iPhone, and then they said, if you want to do anything in here, you have to give us, if you want to sell anything through here, you have to give us 30 us 30% of the revenue. Well, the courts have struck that down, but it took 10 or 15 years for to make through the courts to or actually almost 20, now that I think about it, to for the courts to get it to that point. And the money for the first 15 years is just gone forever. And so just understand that that’s one of the things you have here. Now for software cost, you want to also look at the you want to make sure you’re using everything in the big bundle before you pay for the deal. That is, if somebody’s not going to use this particular tool, then you want to make sure that it’s there. Also does the price tag pay for itself? Now, you want to watch out for the integration tax in here, because many times there will be additional fees. You know, there may be API charges or other kinds of tools here. You may want to lock in lower rates by signing long term deals, but you want to watch those long term deals, because if you have a merger, you don’t want to have to continue to pay even for a tool that the merged firm is not going to use anymore, and that’s the danger, is that you’re effectively taking on a liability that you may not want to continue in it, you know, beyond the change in control, but it and so that may drive down the price
Randy Johnston 22:12
you get. And one other comment in that area, where you used to get discounts for multi year agreements, three year, five year agreements, you could get significant price concessions. We’re noticing that the contracts being issued this year no longer have a guarantee of price lock in, and in fact, there is an escalation clause in many so where it was a strategy to try to save money by negotiating a long term deal now it may actually cost you dollars or certainly not save you what you thought.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 22:46
Yeah, all right, so when we’re looking at this now, you want to, you want to turn your practice software into where every client detail lives. Okay, so it could be CRM. It could be a traditional practice management, the issuing of invoices and sending bills. May be an ERP. It may, you know, in a tool like practice ERP, it may be in, you know, you may be calculating and pricing things in a tool like ignition and then having it flow into a tool like QuickBooks or something like that. You also want to check the hubs like cch access to see if they’ll talk to the tools in here again, stick to one system and stop tying typing data twice by tracking work in more than one system. You also want to look at things and see if the platform can handle the load when you handle more advisory services, will it handle the different ways you need to price and Bill and track these systems? It’ll get look for a dashboard that you have in here that will make boring things feel faster and make things feel like they’re happening more quickly. Now, you do want to also figure out who your ideal partner is. If you do want something everything in one place, you can certainly get that from cch and Thompson. Or do you want to get raw power from specialized tools? Again, the question is, do you need this deep automation? Can you handle five different vendor contracts and the related support liabilities and training liabilities there? Or do you just want one bill and one set of training? You also need to think about your advisory work, because, again, the data supply chain, as you would call it, the data flows supporting advisory are much more important, because advisory is a much more proactive service than after the fact bookkeeping and after the fact tax. So you want to be sure that if you’re going to set up these things, that you’re not you know, and many of you may look at this and say, Oh, well, I’ll get somebody offshore just to code the interfaces between all these tools. And you certainly can do that. The problem is who’s going to fix it when it breaks? So we have to be realistic about that. Now, you also want to check your tech ROI. You want to see what’s actually making you money, what’s losing you money. Again, cutting license licensing fees does put cash back in your budget, but it may be short sighted if the tool is being used in. Particularly critical workflows, the depreciation. I mean, you may get to keep a little more of your revenue. Are your best people going to stay in here? Because, you know, again, if you’re talking to Gen Z and you’re giving them tools straight out of 1979 they’re not going to do that. Okay. Also, ditching the heavy server gear does slash the monthly bills you have to pay to keep the lights on, and we’re seeing the industry respond by having more robust NAS is and other tools like that, showing it home for us here.
Randy Johnston 25:28
Well, the other thing that on that point, though, Brian is we are not anti public cloud, Azure, AWS hosting, but we also recognize there’s a lot more variable cost to that, and we’re seeing firms who move to the cloud saying, You know what? These cloud costs are getting out of control. We’re going to have to figure out a way to manage those. And so near and dear to our heart has also been materials that Brian and I have been writing. So we thought summarizing this sweet versus best of breed. Thinking for you today might be helpful as you’re trying to make decisions that affect your firm for 2026 and beyond, as ever, we’re glad to have you with us in accounting Technology Lab, and look forward to having you listen again in the very near future. Good day.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 26:21
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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