Accounting technologist Randy Johnston and Brian Tankersley, CPA, discuss Client Advisory Services and how they have helped transform firms into being a valuable partner to clients throughout the year, as well as providing firms with steadier, year-round revenue streams. 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.
Randy Johnston 00:09
Welcome to the Accounting Technology Lab. I’m Randy Johnston with my co host, Brian Tankersley, we’d like to talk to you today about some Thompson Reuters products that have been released the market. Some have been a while, but they are for advisory services, and particularly, we’d like to discuss ready to advise and practice forward. So those are the two basic frameworks that we want to work from. So Brian, you know you and I have talked for some time about advisory services. And while there’s much talk about advisory services, what do you see them being
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 00:49
well, you know, realistically, there are again, two major groupings that we kind of put in, put them into. The first one is going to be the the primary services, again, the business and the personal planning, and in those again, you’re going to there, you’re just managing the tax and the business situations that these folks have to deal with. But then there are also primary, secondary and tertiary services. So it could be business valuation, it could be a wide range of different things in here to help people solve those unique problems. Because, you know, again, maybe you don’t see M and A transactions very often, but I guarantee you, for most people that have worked in their family businesses for 30 years, that you probably see a lot more M and A than they ever will. And so it’s a you know, think it’s important to consider that something they need these services. They’re highly valued. They want this advice. And so again, finding a framework where you feel comfortable and you kind of backstop yourself, and you know, setting up the tool sets you need to do this is, I think, a really important thing, because you know again when you have helped, you know again when working with somebody’s business is very much like dating their daughter, and when you have done this for a while, there’s a level of trust that exists that you Know where they need you to help them solve some of these problems. And again, it’s, I think, that in many cases, we’ve been letting a lot of people that are much less competent solve these problems because we didn’t know how to set up structures to do
Randy Johnston 02:37
it. Yeah, in fact, you know, we’ll talk more about the structures and platforms, but practice forward has been around for a while, and it has been framed so you can help your clients succeed and get paid for your value and really help you just enjoy accounting again, that’s part of what that platform does for you. But by the same token, there is a framework and ready to advise. So we see that there’s a lot of opportunity out there. And you know, you are right when you think about you may not see some of these things very often. That’s why I actually like you to build relationships for tertiary services where you can do concierge referral. And the fact that matter is that I believe that where you have relationships with your clients, you are highly valued, and they desire advice from you because they know they can trust it, that there’s really not a sales motivation. So, you know, I think advisory then leads to opportunities, too. Brian, so what type of opportunities do you see advisory having in practices?
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 03:46
Well, from a recruiting perspective, most of the young people entering the profession that I’ve talked to in the last five or 10 years really want to do advisory. Okay, and so you can’t use that same you know, you need to have ways to let them get involved in this and help them see some of the secret sauce that you put on these things. You also, again, they also need to understand that a big part of the job, like you just said, is to leverage your expertise and your network of experts to solve problems, because the thing that you’re delivering every time is trust. You’re delivering the fact that this person is not going to sell them down the road and give them bad advice, and if they do, then you’re going to fix it. So that’s a big deal here. You know, we’ve seen many times with advisory that Cas, and CAS in particular, has is the leading information of performance coming out of the coming out of things. And you’re going to see things doing the CAs that you will not see if you’re just looking at the stuff 10 months after the 10 days after the end of the month, you’ll see those excess charges flowing through the bank feeds. And you’ll see, you’ll say, Hmm, we’re spending a lot. Of money right now, what’s happening here, and so you’ll see that earlier than anybody else. But again, it gives you a lot of opportunities there where you can see need for other niche services that are transactional instead of ongoing, like business structure, business valuations again, or M and A. So there’s a lot of great opportunity in here that you can take advantage of.
Randy Johnston 05:24
Yeah, you know, to me, I like that. It lets you leverage your accounting expertise and your network of experts to deliver unique services to the clients for your firm, and frankly, gives your team members opportunities they wouldn’t otherwise have. Well, you know, there’s so much AI centric content out there. And Brian, you and I have talked about, you know, what is the right way to think about this? And in other technology, accounting Technology Labs, we’ve talked about the frontier models, the clods and the open AI chat gpts and copilot, 365, we’ve done quite a number of episodes on that, and I think those are still pretty accurate. But you know, why do we have to worry about controlling AI in accounting? You and I probably come from the same, I’ll say portion of cloth on this we’re probably cut from the same cloth. But I’d like to actually hear your current thinking today about controlling AI.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 06:32
I think we have to worry about where the data is being used and how and what the privacy is that’s going on with it and again, how that data might happen. You know, I actually just switched to a chat GPT for teams account so that my data would hopefully be less visible in chat GPT. I will say also that, in general, the AI will do a great job of summarizing things like you would have pulled out of an encyclopedia as a kid, or like, you know, again, summarizing large documents or other things like this. But we can never forget the experience you and I had when in January of or February of 2023 when we were sitting there with the CPA practice advisor thought leader group in the with them conference room in New York, and we ran a bio on Doug sleeter, and it said he was dead. I immediately texted a picture of it to him, and he laughed at okay, but I’m saying that because this aberrant behavior that happens with the AI models, where sometimes it just makes things up out of whole cloth. I don’t think you’re ever going to get to the level of trust that you have with your 20 member, 20 year team members, of them getting the right answer that you get, you know, out of the AI tools, just because I think they they’ve made so many epic mistakes over the years that caused people issues, but it can solve a lot of problems very quickly. And again, with review by humans, you can really productize a lot of these things.
Randy Johnston 08:16
Yeah, so you’re saying, in the words of Monty Python, you’re not dead yet. I’m not dead yet. Indeed, you’re not well. You know, we do and have taken the position that if you’re using AI, that you want to have accountants monitor the output. And we know agents are changing that game too. But you know, in the big picture, the public models, just like you said, you just changed to teams at hoping you might protect your data. By the way, I probably can make the argument, it still won’t be protected very much, right? But more than a free model, or, you know, a personal model, okay, I get all those positions, but the bottom line here is we actually have a fiduciary responsibility as accounting professionals to protect client data. It’s in the standards, and I am appalled about the number of accountants that are not protecting client data, either knowingly or unknowingly, which is really disturbing to me. But in large language platforms, that data is very hard to protect, but in private platforms, client confidentiality is protected, just like in an alternate accounting technology lab that we’ve recorded for you on the 2025 tax and accounting innovations, we talked about the privacy of a number of these products. So privacy matters to me. I think it matters to you, Brian, at the risk of putting words in your mouth, and I think it matters. A lot of our listeners,
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 10:01
yeah. I mean, the thing that gets me is, you know, I remember taking the ethics exam I had to after I passed the exam in November of 92 and one of the things I distinctly remember was that it said you will not disclose confidential client information. It doesn’t say, unless there’s a great opportunity, or unless it makes a great app work or anything like that, says you will not and I think that’s one of the red lines that I think we’ve got to watch very carefully as a profession, because if we’re found to be the source of a lot of leaking data, the level of trust we get is going to go down into the world of the used car salesman and other professions like that. We don’t where we don’t want to go.
Randy Johnston 10:42
Yeah, and there’s a number of platforms out there right now that are hoovering up data, as I like to use the British word there, because it just sounds so cool. They’re sucking all the data they can get because they’ve done all the public data, and now they want the private data,
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 10:56
and it sucks. It just sucks. You know, sorry, I couldn’t let that pun go through the strike zone ran,
Randy Johnston 11:02
well, I tried to give you a big, you know, softball to hit there, and you did a pretty good job at it. But you know, when it comes to AI, we do want you to leverage known and effective business cases that are structured to be, you know, compliant with regulations and legal approaches. And you know, if you’re in a private platform that’s got a little more control around it, you can get greater accuracy, and you can minimize your hallucinations, which we think are good further if you’re working in models, and you and I have looked at a lot of these different models now, where the analysis in the solution is quite good. It minimizes the time it takes you to construct something for the client, and in effect, you, as accounting professionals, can use your skills to identify and prioritize solutions for clients. So anytime I can get you to think about using a platform that’s already been configured to optimize accounting professional work. I’m kind of all in on that. Now, I didn’t say we can’t use things that are general tools, but I do think that the language of accounting, leveraged with AI is a wonderful thing.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 12:18
And yeah, and so given that we’re in the trust business, generally in accounting, that people trust us, and they trust that when we say something, it’s going to be right. One of the dangers with AI that has not been properly vetted, or that has, you know, where we’ve not reviewed the results and compared those to our expectations with it, is that we’re going to give bad AI advice, and we’re going to get into one of those I refer to as an emperor’s new clothes moment, where you’re standing out there saying, Yeah, Doug sleeter is dead, and then suddenly, Doug shows up and says, No, I’m not. I’m here. I’m just fine, you know? And it’s, I think we’ve got to acknowledge that we can use AI in the profession, but we’ve got to be very judicious, and we’ve got to check it and make sure it’s right, because there is no easy way to get your reputation back and get that trust back once you’ve made those critical errors with
Randy Johnston 13:12
AI, yeah, that makes great sense. Well, you know, I’ve got another couple of topics I’d like to discuss today. I’d like to turn our attention for a minute, Brian, to what clients want. So if you’re thinking about advisory services, what do you believe that clients are really looking for?
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 13:30
I think you know you have to remember that the CPA client relationship is never about you, the CPA, it is always about them, the client and what their evolving needs are, sometimes the problems that they need to have solved are not things that are normally in your wheelhouse. You know, I remember, there was a guy I used to work for 25 years ago, and he said that one of his things he did with one of his super high net wealth clients was he went out and helped this little old lady buy Cadillac about every two or three years when she decided it was time for a new car. You know, the thing here is that you can’t always put the advice that your clients need or want in the simple box of, I do tax, I do write up, I do client accounting, I do, you know, I do advisory. You can’t put it in that box. They need somebody to make things that are causing them stress go away. And so this, you know, again, it could be children’s education, it could be business succession. It could be, you know, I I’ve made so much money I can’t imagine my children will ever spend it in their lifetimes, therefore, let’s find let’s give it away, or maybe we need to preserve long term wealth, to protect a disabled child or grandchild or something like that. So meeting those needs, and again, figuring out how to solve those unique challenges, but also, again, maximize. Profit, minimizing risk and again, making things happen. That person has on their list of things they want to have accomplished that they don’t know how to do.
Randy Johnston 15:11
Yeah, you know, that’s actually the real trick on it. It’s personal planning. It’s business planning. How do we accomplish the things that are most important to you. How can we assist you to get that done? To me, that’s a real advisory service, and you know that many clients have similar needs, so you can actually get some leverage there. Well, that turns me, then I think Brian to platforms. Now, again, in my world of thinking about this today, I’ve only identified about a half a dozen advisory platforms that are out there. And, you know, you might think, well, I can use my own models. I’ve seen firms try to do this, you know, they get an area of expertise somewhere, and they build their word documents and their spreadsheets, and they have a lot of expertise in the area, but see, to me, that’s a bit more of a advisory service that’s very specialized and it’s not whole client centric. And while I clearly respect the thoroughness and the creativity and inventiveness of many of the accounting professionals that I’ve met, it’s really hard in a firm to leverage the skill of a few people and apply it to all the clients that have the needs as I see it. And you know, further transferring specialized knowledge is challenging. You think about how we fit, follow, accounting technology together, and how much you learn that I don’t know, and how much I learned you don’t know. And we try to share it with each other,
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 16:42
but when we’re exposed to the same thing, you and I come away with different things,
Randy Johnston 16:47
absolutely and so, you know, I am very cognizant that it’s hard to get leverage. AI is helping us get leverage and so forth. But why would you use a platform rather than your own models. Any other ideas on that?
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 17:03
You know, I think, generally that, I think the platforms do a better job of putting a bow around things okay, and generally in, in putting things together. And again, you know, when you go on your own, you’re, you know, the it, I think of going on your own, very much like I think of this, the streaking scene in the movie old school, where Will Ferrell runs out says, we’re good streaking and a party, and he is Buck ass naked, And off he goes. I actually you may have seen the link. Chris Gaetano actually linked this in an article that he got for me a while back. But I mentioned that to you here because thing, the things you can do on your own work until they don’t, and when they don’t, it’s not a good thing. Okay, that coffee the next morning in the in the student union is just quite different after you’ve gone streaking the night before and somebody saw you streaking, okay, and so I mentioned that to you here, because the platforms give you some bumpers around them to kind of protect you from unexpected things. They give you some protection in that they’re designed knowing that you can’t get things wrong. So they’re designed with guardrails around the aberrant behavior, or, again, the problematic behavior that the AI models get. Also, you know, again, we don’t want, you know, we want the financial information to get in there, and if we’ve got integrations or tool sets in there to ingest that information, work with it. I think you’ve I think you generally can avoid the death by keying that many of us experienced in the late 90s, early 2000s
Randy Johnston 18:59
so just like earlier, I can’t get it out of my head. Boogey Ray Stevens song. He ain’t wearing no clothes because I was a photographer on college campuses in the days of streaking, and I have some unique pictures. We shall say that’s probably TMI for our audience, isn’t
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 19:19
well, I will just say, generally, you know, the what I’m really trying to say with that, if I wanted to say it in a more elegant way, is there are things that you can’t unsee, so don’t show them.
Randy Johnston 19:30
Yeah, amen to that. Well, being a little more serious on this, you know, the practice forward platform, Thompson Reuters has been around for a bit, if I understand it today, they’re pushing 300 internal and client facing templates, so they have proposal templates and pricing calculators and others that allow you to do personalized consulting. And they also have a connection to other forward thinking practitioners that are also trying. Trying to offer similar services. So I think that is a benefit of the practice forward.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 20:07
It absolutely is. And I will tell you somebody you know, whether I’m in a whether I worked in a big firm or in a small firm, it’s always good to have that person in that community where you can say, I think I’m losing my mind, but this is what I’m seeing, and this is what the related thinking is from it. And again, having that it’s that gives you the confidence to take actions a lot of times that you might not take on your own. Yeah, and
Randy Johnston 20:34
you know, this platform has a proven sales process for engaging clients, to define service offerings and pricing, and so you can standardize support delivery and service delivery, which I think are good, and it also helps with transitioning clients to the advisory relationship. So that part of the platform is, I think, quite good, but the newly announced product for this year was the ready to advise platform. Now I know, Brian, you saw this initially at Synergy in 2024 and you know you were so excited about it. I recall I was actually traveling, and you called me while I was in Atlanta, because you had to tell me right away what was going on. It’s like, yeah, that is pretty cool, Brian. Well, that product is out and ready to advise. Can work on finding relevant tax strategies with client ready reports in an AI guided advisory delivery methodology. And the whole goal of this platform is to save you time and enable delegation, coincidentally, it will increase revenue for your firm, and it should client relationships, as we see it, but ready to advise is really for tax and accounting firms who are facing challenges around scaling advisory services that have really limited expertise and bandwidth and need to communicate their unique value approach. So you know, again, you’ve seen this for a while, but what other comments might you make and final thoughts on advisory services, perhaps using a platform like ready to advise and practice forward. What’s your thoughts there?
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 22:25
Brian, I think, if you’re, I think generally that you need to get into advisory if you’re going to and I think it is never going to be comfortable. Okay? It is that with the first engagement, is always going to be uncomfortable. Now, the fact, the real truth here is that many of you have already been doing advisory engagements, but just not getting paid for them for years. So this really gives you some structure and gives you some gives you again, a platform that will help you make these engagements more replicatable, and help you manage the risk associated with them, and again, help you do more effectively. And so I would just say that advice, you know, the advisory opportunity, is probably not going to get better than it is today. And so I think it’s time to get into it. It’s going to be uncomfortable. You’re going to have to learn new things, God forbid, okay, and you’re going to have to try new things, but I think it’s going to help you and your clients make the most of your practice and their businesses, and ultimately, I think that’s what we’re all in it for anyway.
Randy Johnston 23:38 You know, that’s so well said, I’m not even going to try to try to put a further bow on it. So that, being the case, we appreciate you listening in to today’s accounting Technology Lab. Brian and I look forward to having you listen to us again very soon. Have a fine day.
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