Randy Johnston and Brian Tankersley examine Keyveve, an emerging accounting-firm platform that brings together document management, workflow, client communications, client portals, and AI-powered automation into a unified engagement hub.
The discussion explores how firms can eliminate information silos, automate document classification, improve collaboration, and create a centralized system for tax, CAS, audit, and advisory work.
The Accounting Tech Lab is an ongoing series that explores the intersection of public accounting and technology.
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Transcript (Note: Some errors may appear due to automated transcription.)
SPEAKERS: Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA, Randy Johnston
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 00:00
Welcome to the Accounting Technology Lab, brought to you by CPA Practice Advisor, with your hosts Randy Johnston and Brian Tankersley.
Randy Johnston 00:09
Welcome to the Accounting Technology Lab. I’m Randy Johnston, with co-host Brian Tankersley. We’ve both reviewed a product called Kaviv, which is a new generation portal product, but it’s got more than just portal in it, and it, the workflows and the document management, and other features in there are actually quite interesting. Now, Kaviv says that there are secure engagement core for modern accounting firms, and they’re bringing all of the elements together: staff workflow, document management, the communications, and AI agents, all inside a platform. So, Brian, I know that you’ve had demonstrations of the systems. I’ve had demonstrations of the system with the founders there. Nick Hellman is one of the founders, and the other founder, Udemy. Ekmim, I may not have his last name right, sorry, Udemy, but in any case, he’s been behind the coding, and you know many of these platforms that we’ve looked at, there’s been a visionary founder and a visionary coder, and we saw that with three or four different of these portal products, they see the problem, they know they can solve it, they take a different approach. So, what would you want our listeners to know about Kavi?
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 01:31
Well, it’s really a, it’s really a tool that will store your data, and it will let you do word searches off of it. They’ve actually got some libraries that lets you do do heavy duty search off of here. They also have some AI tools that will recognize information off of here. You’ve got client portal, you’ve got staff workflows, and again, there’s there’s just a lot in here. You can, you can do threaded email. You have again this document studio, and the version I saw actually had a a cloud-based tool that would let you edit this again, and I think this tool could easily be paired with a, again, it was, it was using a tool that was based on Open Office, looked like to edit it, but I believe they’ve said that they’re working on a Microsoft 365 integration, so you can just edit it with your 365 tools. Within here, you also have, again, the standalone AI in here. The idea is to have this be kind of the center of your document flows that used to be paper flows back in the back in the good old days when everything was on paper. They’ve also got AI engines that layer on top of it, and again many, many other things.
Randy Johnston 02:45
Yeah, so this combination of, you know, what I used to talk about is a multi-threaded communication approach. We’ve talked about a few products that have built this, because many of your clients are sending you documents via, you know, a text message, which is, you know, really awful, because it’s a JPEG, and you have to convert it to PDF, and it’s a separate communication channel, and some are coming in through email, and, and so the real problem is, How do we consolidate all of these phone conversations and different sources of documents? This week alone, Brian, I’ve been in both a CPA firm consulting and presenting for a managing partner group, and I heard this, you know, both places the documents are coming from us every which way. How do we control them all? And I thought one of the suggestions from a managing partner about, you know, having a single email address and just forwarding it, the admin team, malt looks at it, or a single person responsible, and so forth. Well, this automation really helps with all of this. The client portal is really good at uploads and messaging, and you can actually work from both the staff and the client side. In this, to me, it looks like the potential for a light duty document management system, and with the discontinuance of products like File Cabinet CS over the next year and a half, the December 30-first of 20-seven, this might be a landing zone if you’re a File Cabinet CS shop, because it’s a central place to store and organize and work and collaborate on internal and external client files, and that collaboration, by the way, is a pretty big deal, because we’ve talked about that with Microsoft 365 co-editing before, and there’s only a few document management systems that really have co-editing as part of their document management net documents, I might call out as an example, there, and it’s much more expensive product. So, the workflow in here is also good at tracking tasks and deadlines, and who’s responsible ownership, if you will, and a lot of times the workflows get disconnected from the flat files and the client. Client messages and the AI analysis that goes on, but I think this team has a lot of the workflow analysis done correctly, and then they’re leveraging AI for chat and summaries and analysis of documents, and it’s permission aware, so in effect the platform is one of the ones that I see that can handle tax and client accounting services and audit and advisory work in a single platform, and I was asked that question just yesterday, and I answered it with Kaviv as one of the options for that group, because they were just looking for something to be an all-in-one portal, and you and I have been on the same piece of sheet music on that for some time,
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 05:51
and the problem with so many solutions is that there are a lot of good document management solutions, there are a lot of good portals, and there are a lot of good workflow tools, okay, but something, but but the problem is that I don’t need those three engines all working within separate silos, I need them to work together, okay, and the so this really is a tool that provides that that work together in here, you know, there are tools like, you know, the Open Source Paperless Plus tool is great if you have the technical knowledge of how to set it up, and you don’t need to share things outside with clients, you know, it’s, it would be great for somebody running, you know, an auto repair shop or something like that, but the challenge here is that there are a lot, again, there are a lot of great solutions, but, but finding something again that brings all these things together, you know, again, this again, when you go from client upload to staff review, the work moves back and forth. We have AI classification, and that’s something we’re seeing in more and more products through this, where you basically can specify, you know, just like you do in your tax software, you specify the file name that you want the PDF to be exported as. You have a standard format that it’s going to be in, you know, maybe it’s last name, first name, year of tax, tax form, so you know it’s tankers, they comma, Brian 2025 1040 and and then you know it kit, but the AI can also classify those things and put those things in there. So
Randy Johnston 07:25
Brian’s point is very important here. Notice to a degree, this product can do auto naming and auto classification, and we think that’s a feature of new generation document management that is occurring. So this classification thing, it saves you a bunch of time. Now we saw it in the manual old days with products like Docket, and you know when Docket was first doing that in the early 2000s it’s like, wow, that is a big time saver. And this new generation of AI naming and classification by looking at the content for you is far better than all the manual rules that had to be encoded in the past, because so much in the past, so many of the document management systems of the past, we had to apply metadata, and there was all sorts of manual coding, and it was easy to type names wrong. Sorry to step in on you, Brian, that well, it’s such a big point that you made,
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 08:23
but if you think about it, here, I mean, you know, let me give you a couple of use cases here. Okay, so again, if you think about the way that things used to work back in the back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, and we got paper from clients, you would get a big envelope full of stuff, and then you would sort, you go to a conference table, and you’d sort, or in Dr. Bob’s case, a pool table, and you’d sort it all out, and you would, you would then figure out, you get it in your order, and you’d have to spend human time doing this. What if you defined what the structure needed to be, how they needed to be laid out in your working papers, and then the AI just put it in that format for you, and bookmarked it, you know, similar to what we’ve seen with the scan and organize tools that came in, you know, 1520 years ago. What if the AI just did that in the background? Also, you know, if you, if you’re, if you’re thinking about this, you know, the auto nag is a very important part here, where it will, you can automatically send these friendly reminders to people again to solve things in here, yeah, but again,
Randy Johnston 09:23
you might, you might, and you’re right on that, and you might be thinking to yourself, How’s it doing all this stuff, and I’ve never heard of them, are they brand new, and the short answer on that is no, they’re not. This company has been around since March of 2021 they’ve been kind of flying under the radar, developing, so you think about it, kind of a five year cycle, and they were building, I’ll say, traditional, and then all of the AI broke loose, and it’s like, oh wait a minute, let’s rethink our strategy here before we go to market with that,
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 09:56
you know, and again, if you, if you think about this now, the AI. Is valuable because if now if I if I have my email flows and my work tracking and my documents and my client, my client portal in here, I can now ask questions about what’s happened in here with this, you know, again, I have, you know, we talk about this model context protocol that we use to know that the so that things have the context of what we’re of what’s going on, so the AI can make better decisions. Well, this really lets the lets us use the AI to get the context to of what’s going on, so it’s almost like an MCP server for your intelligence to say this is what’s going on, this is what’s happening, and now you can, you can be in a better position to have your arms around what’s going on,
Randy Johnston 10:48
and you know another thing that I admired in the way the product was structured was you could create the engagement dynamically, might be a way to say it, they, they provide templates for, you know, tax, you know, so you’ve got personal and business tax, and it’s got some audit work papers, and so forth, but if you’ve got specialty engagements, and I’ll just say business valuation, you know, I know they don’t say they do that, but I’m just thinking, yeah, I could probably do a business valuation in here, and you could create your own structured templates and workflows for your way of doing things, so you know out of the box tax audit CAS and advisory, and that’s great because we have not seen many platforms that can handle all four major areas of the practice and could be flexible enough to handle other areas of the practice, so I’m pretty sure that that part is something worth your review.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 11:51
Yeah, again, the the idea here is that we, we get rid of, we’ll get rid of the chase, and we get more visibility and smarter, firm knowledge. So, anyway, that’s that’s a little bit about, about Kyiv, keep,
Randy Johnston 12:06
keep, yeah, the name is a little hard to say, Brian,
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 12:10
that’s a little bit about that product. Okay, so you know,
Randy Johnston 12:15
you know, I do get it. So, in the big picture of things, I’m happy that the name is hard to pronounce for a product that can work well for your practice. We appreciate you listening in on another new product that we’ve discovered that we think can have merit to be used in your firm. Kavy, talk to you later. Good day.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 12:40
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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