Review of Aider – The Accounting Technology Lab Podcast – Sept 2024

Hosts Randy Johnston and Brian Tankersley, CPA, review the Aider Advisory Intelligence Platform. Aider is for accountants and bookkeepers who want to monitor their clients’ real-time business performance and build.

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Transcript (Note: There may be typos due to automated transcription errors.)

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  00:00

Welcome to the accounting Technology Lab, sponsored by CPA practice advisor, with your host, Randy Johnston and Brian Tankersley,

Randy Johnston  00:10

welcome to the accounting Technology Lab. I’m Randy Johnston with my co host Brian Tankersley, you know that we have a pension for advisory services and CPA firms, and there’s not very many tools in the market that actually do this. We’ve talked about other tools in our podcast that can support advisory work, but we wanted to make you aware of a product called Ader, a, i, d, e, r, which is coming to the US market from New Zealand, the founder and CEO, Brendan Roberts, we had the good fortune of meeting face to face at the AI CPA accelerator program this year, because they had a component of AI inside their platform. Now aid itself has very interesting Pricing and Features for advisory support. So I thought, Brian, we might start off by just talking a little bit of feature set in the advisory world on this particular platform, and then we’ll look at some of the other things. So Brian, what would you like our listeners to know about? So

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  01:18

just kind of conceptually aid is designed to provide kind of a centralized dashboard that shows you how you’re doing against key metrics inside your inside your clients. Okay? So you can see this, this major, major dashboard, this dashboard they have on their on their web page that they’re directly showing here you can see it actually shows 30 clients in here. The idea here is that, is that, you know, when you when you think about, you know, the mantra that we’ve had for years and years in mid market is we want to have real time data without real time work. And so the idea here is that this gathers all data from all these different sources, aggregates it together and then puts it in a single dashboard. In here, it also lets you set limits so that things can be, you know, a red, yellow, green, and you can just look at the dashboard very quickly and kind of see what you have going on. And again, the the idea behind this is that is to to, again, make it where you can just act, as opposed to having to having to gather the information and then to summarize it and so forth.

Randy Johnston  02:33

Yeah, so, Brian, you know, the the thinking here is that, particularly in the Down Under in New Zealand, Australia, zero is far more dominant than they are here in the US. Of course, Xero started out of Auckland, so that makes some sense. Ader integrated with that platform. They are expanding into other platforms, but the tool, if you are already using XERO in your client base, works beautifully now. They do have period closed tools, and they are trying to work on the automated annual, monthly reporting. They’re doing reconciliations in the platform. They of course, are producing PNL and balance sheets and doing reconciliation so they’re doing a lot of the administrative piece, and they are doing the reporting, as you point out now, like the accountant dashboards in these various products, they do give you an aggregated view of all the clients data. So the traffic light system that they’re using in that one Financial Dashboard can let you quickly see, oh, X client has a problem with cash flow or tax compliance, or profitability or data compliance, and you can use the alerted information to go get the details behind that. Now, as I think most people know, cash flow is always a bit of a bugger for small businesses. It’s at times a problem for a lot of different sized businesses, but the platform also produces accurate, historical and then relatively good estimated go forward cash flow reports. So as you pointed out, Brian, you know, close to real time information, really profitability being shown almost continuously, and some very good profit and loss indicators here. So the connection to zero on the platform is quick. You basically connect it to Xero, and in a few minutes, ADR will analyze the data and bring that client’s information into your dashboard. So you know, again, I happen to be a big fan of advisory services, and so many of our practices have expanded. Into decline accounting services without necessarily going the extra bridge to being a proactive advisor. So are there other things that you might note in this advisory realm? Brian, well,

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  05:15

I think the I think the challenge that that we’ve all got is, is that with the shortage of people in the accounting space, there is a need to use greater automation. And this automates a lot of the information. Again, it automates a lot of the data flows, so that, hopefully you can have, you can have, again, less work required to to roll up so you could be an advisor. The other thing that that we historically have not wired for in in accounting firms and is, is this real time infrastructure for data to to again, or kind of as Accenture calls it, the data supply chain, where you set it up, where a lot of the automation handles the transactions behind the scenes. Aider is is an attempt at trying to put that together so that you can have that real time information. Because when you climb the value chain into advisory and somebody’s got something on fire, you’ve got to be you’ve got to you’ve got to know it, point it out, and then take corrective action. And so that means that traditional historical after the fact write up financial reporting and and other reporting is just not going to be adequate to live in the modern world where we’re doing things in real time.

Randy Johnston  06:36

So one of the things I think I learned from Brendan in speaking with him directly, is many of the metrics are basically they’ve learned over time, and they pre analyze it with the client data. So you wind up with pre analyzed data from all your various zero clients. We think over time it’ll be QuickBooks and other platforms, but the target here is smaller businesses. Brian, earlier, you talked about the mid market place, and you can do a little more work. You can afford to do more work there, but I think you can let Ader do the analysis in a matter of minutes. You know, I will just mention that the visual insights that the platform has, I think, are good. You know, we’ve talked about closed tools in the mid market, but this is kind of a simplified, close to and it really works as an early warning system, so the AI features behind it are interesting. But now let’s turn our attention for a moment to pricing, because the current pricing, which may change over time in the US market, is to allow up to 50 clients to be attached for $500 a month, which is $5,100 a year. They do have multiple tiers. That’s all. They refer to them as up to 5051, to 151 50 to 300 301 to 505 101, to 1000 and so basically, you can buy a license which allows you to handle up to x number of clients. Now, as it turns out, they are doing the implementation with your firm, but they do charge for implementation and onboarding services currently, which starts at about $3,000 and then goes up from there. I believe that you can get pretty good information off their website. Do recognize that this is kind of early. We know that ADR is expanding their footprint here in the US, that the CEO has made multiple trips to multiple events, and I have seen him multiple times so far this year, and they are quite aware of their competitors. So Brian, any parting thoughts on the aider platform? I

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  09:04

just think it’s interesting that the Kiwis are coming. You know, seems like sweet. Files is out of out of New Zealand, and they’ve put their CTO over here. We have the CEO of aider coming over here. So, you know, if you talk to somebody and they have kind of an Aussie, like accent. It’s entirely likely that they’re an expat over here, from some, from, you know, some of the Kiwi startups trying to, trying to figure out how to, how to take these things that work well in New Zealand and bring them over to the US. And I think that’s that’s important, because the the banking system in New Zealand has been significantly more automated for decades than than what we have in this country. And so this, this, this inherent automation, I think, is, is something that is, that is needed very much in accounting firms. And again, if you can get to real. Time data without real time work. I think it makes your advisory a lot easier to pull off.

Randy Johnston  10:06

Yeah, well, and at the risk of somewhat distracting, you do not have very many choices at the low end of the market for advisory now, we still believe that the complete advisory solution out of the UK is the best overall management platform for advisory, and we are quite aware of the competitors of or impact data or so be analytics for advisory. But this is not financial reporting, friends. This is advisory guidance tools, and that is quite different. Likewise, I don’t consider this an outsourced CFO tool. There’s other tools, like VFD that do that type of work, but the tools that are pure advisory plays, that are not financial reporting tools, are few and far between. And so I want you to understand that ADR is one of those advisory tools that’s interesting enough that we thought you should be aware of it early in its existence here in the US market. So it is such a pleasure to have you along on a technology lab. We will be with you again in the near future, thank

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  11:21

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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