The Modern CPA Success Show: Episode 140

In this episode of The Modern CPA Success Show, we sit down with Jeff Seibert, CEO and co-founder of Digits, to explore how AI is transforming small business finance. We cover how Digits uses machine learning to automate up to 93% of bookkeeping, how their proprietary ledger gives you deep real-time analytics, and how their dashboards and reporting tools make it easy to translate numbers into action.

make it real time, can we, make it visual, can, we make it sort of arbitrarily explorable. And that
made me realize you actually just have to start from the ground up and build a whole new
ledger. [00:03:55][88.2]
Adam Hale: [00:03:57] Yeah, our introduction to Digits, when was this, Tom? It was like
Nashville. It was probably right whenever you all started. [00:04:03][5.6]
Tom Wadelton: [00:04:04] I think 2022 for DCPA, right? Yeah, and that was the first conference
we showed up to. [00:04:09][5.3]
Adam Hale: [00:04:10] Okay. So, and I still have a picture, I think on my phone, Tom, we had
those, you guys went to the speakeasy. You guys had this like real hipster vibe going. It was
pretty good. We had like the smoke and ice cubes, if you’ve ever seen that. And we were
actually there. One of your sales guys, he was super cool. And then one of your founding
shareholders was there. And I just, over and over, I kept asking, I’m like, what the hell you guys
do. And they’re like, well. That was it. They weren’t really sure at that time. They’re like, we’re
doing AI. We’re trying to figure out how to do this or that. And then we were kind of talking about
there was the transaction side of it. There was the analytics side of, it was three or four different
things. But at that point, I think it sounds like you guys were just kind of an idea at that point,
trying to just figure out where the market was and where people were. And obviously that’s
changed dramatically over the last four or five years. Like you said, like the whole, you know,
um, AI thing and the buzzwords around that, you know, we’re always talking about, is it
automation? Is it AI, you know, and then, you know, obviously on the machine learning side,
like, is it just chat? You know, because that’s probably one of my biggest frustrations right now
in the space that I haven’t been able to solve for. And I think is huge in the accounting space is
right now, there’s a lot of stuff that kind of sits on top of the work or, you know on top of the
numbers, but it’s like, you, know, Jeff, if you’re looking at your company and you want to know
what you did, you now this year versus last year, you don’t really need like AI to call out, you
had a $10,000 variance. It’s like cool. I actually saw that on the same piece of paper they just
read it from. You know what I’m saying? Like, I need to, I need to know, like, why did I have a
$10,000? Like, I think that’s where, um, so I’m kind of curious in your journey through the AI and
everything. And I’ve heard a lot of great things about Digits over the years. I was going to jump
on your guys’ council because I was just very opinionated about exactly how, like, what we need
as an accounting space. And, and I still am. I think that it’s, I was also foggy at that time on what
I thought we needed. But I’m just curious, like, where you all are at now, kind of in that journey,
knowing that like… Just the way we’re even talking to things like chat, you know, being able to
just kind of ask it questions and get responses, that’s ultimately what we really need to be able
to do from a financial side. You know, not that I’m off $10,000, but why am I off $10000?
[00:06:42][151.4]
Jeff Seibert: [00:06:42] Right, exactly. So yes, it was definitely a long journey for us. And we
stayed in stealth mode, really, until a few months ago. So we just officially launched in March.
And what we had been talking about back at DCPA years ago, and so on, was we were doing
some reporting tools, we were going some transaction review and sort of account and client
workflow tools. And we had built those in order to get the market feedback and really
understand that we sort of building the features that mattered. But we never admitted that they
were all part of the actual ledger. And we’ve kept that quiet because it just takes so long to
build. If you look at the history of the accounting software space, it took NetSuite five plus years
to get to where they had something really usable. And that’s the case today. So we really spent
five years or so building out the Digits product. And if you don’t do that, if you launch something
that’s sort of half-baked, nobody’s really going to use it. Nobody’s going to switch off
QuickBooks or Zero or whatever they might have for sort of a half-baked accounting platform.
And so that’s why it didn’t really help us to be too public with it. So we’ve really tried to re-
architect it from the ground up for machine learning, for AI. And your comment about chatbots
resonates directly. What has really struck me is that most products, whether in accounting or
not, are sort of bolting on AI to their existing product. And they’re doing it a way of like, oh, we’ve
added a chat bot for this, and we’ve a little insight with some sparkles for this. And I’m like, that’s
not the power of this technology. Like I don’t need something else to talk to. I already have too
many people to manage. I don’t need to manage this chat bot. I want it to actually do the work.
And so the way we think about it with Digits is the core sort of bookkeeping workflows, the super
tedious parts that no one loves spending time on that’s what these models can get really good
at. And so when you plug in your banks and cards and payroll and so on to digits, there’s no
rules engine. You’re not sitting there manually creating and managing rules that AI learns
instantly about your business. And now we actually put out a white paper in March. We auto
book 93% of transactions correctly. So our goal is to basically automate 90 plus percent of the
bookkeeping See you again. So that you and your teams can focus on the advisory work, on
reviewing everything, on developing the storylines for the clients and building that relationship.
And so we can provide all the just underlying math that there’s no value in you sitting there and
doing. [00:09:17][154.5]
Tom Wadelton: [00:09:19] Interesting. So the 93% are your sources, primarily things like
bill.com feeding information, bank feeds, credit card feeds. You’re saying we can take those
feeds and then… [00:09:29][10.5]
Jeff Seibert: [00:09:30] That’s exactly right. So it’s banks, cards, payroll, bills, invoices, your
stripe data, anything that’s sort of feeding into your business, we bring all together and book into
the ledger. [00:09:40][9.8]
Tom Wadelton: [00:09:41] Since we’re talking to accounting, I’ve got a follow-up around that. So
then what about as we think of like accrual-based accounting where things might be in a prepaid
ledger accruals, things like that, what kind of things are you doing around that? [00:09:52][11.0]
Jeff Seibert: [00:09:53] Yes, really great question. So basically, we book it in a cash basis slash
modified cash basis based on the info available, right? But if there is an invoice or contract, we
can understand that and we can book the accruals correctly. So when I talk about the overall
data, the 93% we book today is generally the more cash-based transactions, the more complex
accrual, we just don’t have enough info to do correctly today. As the models get smarter and the
integrations get more sophisticated, I see a path to like, start, start breaking that down. Um, but
as you know, accounting is extremely complex. There’s going to be areas that still require the
human. Uh, but we try to eliminate the base TDM. That’s just so repetitive. [00:10:39][46.3]
Adam Hale: [00:10:42] And then integrating with, you know, he mentioned some common stuff
there. I mean, what are the integrations looking like and what is that, you know, what’s kind of
the future there with those integrations? [00:10:53][11.3]
Jeff Seibert: [00:10:54] Yeah, so right now, we already have all the core integrations for sort of a
modern digitally focused business. So Bell.com, Gusto Payroll, Stripe, Mercury, I mean, 10,000
other banks and cards, all the top providers. And so as we’re looking forward, we’re now really
exploring what inventory integrations do we need to add? What more sophisticated point of sale
integrations do we to add. And so we’re literally just constantly building and shipping
integrations. So that is the full… Sort of power of the platform is just like as we add each
individual thing will support more and more types of businesses [00:11:29][35.1]
Adam Hale: [00:11:31] Okay. So, so what I’m hearing is you’re doing, you’re managing the bank
feeds. You’re doing those kinds of things. The reconciliations I assume as well, right? For all
those transactions and everything. Where, and I’ve seen some really good things over, you
know, even though they’re, mind you, like rules-based, I’ve seen some good things come
through in that space, you know, basically like the really low end. I would say what most firms
have already offshored for the most part, that function. And so, and then some of these
solutions, they’re quasi expensive. So, you know, even whenever you’re like trying to math, like
offshore versus like buying this software, those seem to be kind of still kind of level set. What
about like moving then towards, I mean, so there’s two other pieces of that. There is what Tom
was talking about, which to me is like the month in close process, like closing the books. That’s
probably the hardest thing to do. That blocking and tackling, you can give it to an offshore team
member. They’re hitting that stuff at 90 plus percent. You know, you wake up in the morning and
it’s all done or some automations do it pretty well. You know, that kind of a thing. But whenever
it comes to actually being able to do the month in close, is that kind the next step or are you
guys skipping right to business insights? Where are you going with that stuff? [00:12:53][81.4]
Jeff Seibert: [00:12:54] So it’s a great question. There’s pieces of it. So all the sort of initial
categorization is done as if you had an outsource team. Anything that AI can’t know or thinks it’s
low confidence on, we immediately throw out because the worst thing is you don’t wanna
mistake in the books. And instead we surface that in an inbox experience. So then you can just
quickly go through and review and confirm them. The big advantage with our technical
architecture is our models learn instantly from your changes or from your work. And so, if you
edit a transaction and confirm it, it’ll immediately start mimicking you on the next similar
transaction that comes in. And, so, it’s super powerful in really quickly learning the books of the
business. And we now have a bunch of examples of small business clients where actually the
digits say, I booked it 100% correctly for the next month after the accountant had done the work
on the first month cleaning it up. So that’s really powerful. In terms of the month-end close, then
of course we have reconciliations built in. You can do that in the product. Then you go through
and review. We basically prepare draft financial reports for the review step so you can see
what’s missing, are there any schedules or accruals you need to add manually or whatever it
might be. And then we have reporting in the products. So you can fully customize your reports.
You can send them out and share them securely with the client through the product. They can
go in and comment on the report and ask questions right there. We also have a full vault
functionality, so secure file sharing back and forth if you need to request additional details like
contracts or other invoices or whatever it might be. And we also have full bill pay and invoicing
in the product, so you can go and manage their ARAP and everything syncs straight through to
the ledger. [00:14:38][104.3]
Adam Hale: [00:14:39] Okay. Okay. And then what about so again, like thinking through it, like
just in stages of work, you know, from highest to lowest level, you have You know, you probably
have like an offshore team or your bookkeepers or, you know, first year account interns doing
the blocking, tackling, sounds like you got that piece dialed in. Then whenever you move
upstream and you get to the month in close, you usually need like a senior accountant or kind of
like a controller level manager type person overseeing that process because everything on the
balance sheet needs to be validated, right? You want to know why it took two weeks to get your
financial statements is because which turns in their expense reports. You know, I mean, like
somebody has to like service all that stuff. And so the hope or the dream is, and you were
talking about it with the reporting is like if you could dial in what all those schedules and reports
look like and bring all that information in, now all of a sudden a manager or a senior accountant
could come in and just instantly validate. You know, and then go ahead and make some
adjustments and move on. And then, then again, the other part is like, analytically looking at the
information. I can see that I have $10,000 discrepancy or my sales went up by $44,000. What
I’ve struggled with, unless I’m going and finding all these different data sources, like having
almost like this data lake of information, being able to just to, I want to be able to talk to. I want
to be able to talk to the data like I would a senior accountant. So if like, if you know, Tom’s my
CFO, and I’m a senior account, he’s like, Adam, why did it go up by $10,000? Well, I got to go
in, I gotta go look. And then if I’ve done all that homework, I’m like, well, Tom, it’s because we
don’t do this anymore. And we did this, and we have this, and we had that. And I can show them
all my screenshots or, you know I can pull stuff up and show them everything that I did. You can
skip that whole step and that whole process and that whole part of add on if Tom could just do
that without me there, right? It’ll save a tremendous amount of time, a tremendous amount of
cost, a tremendous level of leverage. Are you at the point where that underlining data exists and
you can you can queue up the data right there? [00:16:57][137.4]
Jeff Seibert: [00:16:58] So we made a major architectural decision, which this might get a little
techie for folks, but if you look at QuickBooks or Xero or Oracle or NetSuite, all of them, they are
relational databases. And that’s how ledgers have been built for 30 years now, maybe 30 plus.
And the challenge with that is they treat the individual transaction rows as sort of opaque. And
so if you, let’s say you have an Uber transaction, QuickBooks just sees U-B-E-R, right? It
doesn’t know what Uber is. And in fact, there’s a big limitation where in QuickBooks, you can’t
have a vendor and a customer with the same name, which is why people use all these tricks
and like a pen to V letter and so on to differentiate them. The result of that is you’ve basically
destroyed your data model. And if your data is not clean, then the insights aren’t going to be
clean and you sort of lose that’s why you need all the manual work to do it. So when we built
Digits, we decided day one, it was going to be an object oriented data model, we use what’s
called a vector Graph Architecture. Where everything is an object. Your transactions, your
vendors, your customers, your chart of accounts, your departments, locations, et cetera, et
cetera. We map the relationships between us. And that’s what allows the models to have a
really strong semantic understanding of each business. And that how they get so good at
booking the transactions. But the benefit on the review side is we can attribute any delta all the
way down to the object level. And so let’s say marketing jumped 10%, right? In digits, you don’t
see marketing jump 10%. I mean, it does tell you that, but that immediately tells you because of
X dollar amount increase with this graphic designer or whatever it was. So we do vendor and
customer level attribution of everything. And so when you look at things like Stripe, nobody
today connects their Stripe directly to QuickBooks because it can’t handle that volume of data.
Right? It falls over. Instead, you do daily or weekly or monthly journal entries to sort of make
everything that out. But now you’ve just lost all the power of the ledger. And so we designed a
basically a high volume data architecture as well. We feed in every single single strike
purchase, every item, every customer record, etc. So all that info is in digits. And when you’re
like, why is revenue down, we’ll tell you, oh, it was down because of a drop with these
customers. And that gives you a lot more powerful insight just instantly. You don’t have to go
and export data and pivot it and run your own report and so on. I can just ask it that question
and just type that in there. You can, you can type it in, or you can just click through to that, let’s
say your revenue category and it’ll immediately give you the analysis. So we just surface
analysis on every page of the product. [00:19:38][160.9]
Tom Wadelton: [00:19:40] Interesting. As you mentioned the product, I want to make sure that
our listeners and me are really clear. A lot of my clients are QuickBooks as Adam mentioned,
but then also Xero users. So if I’m like, Digit sounds awesome when I go there, what does a
product itself look like? And is that a conversion over or help me understand that?
[00:19:57][16.6]
Jeff Seibert: [00:19:58] Yeah, so you go to digits.com, you click sign up. It’s available today, you
can go use it. If you have QuickBooks already, you connect your QuickBooks and it’ll sync all
your data. And so you can start right where you left off in QuickBooks. If you wanna start fresh,
you start fresh. We gift you a chart of accounts. You connect your banks and cards and payroll
and so on and everything starts auto booking. And of course you can fully manage the chart of
accounts and everything in Digits. So you can customize it however you want. But yeah, super
easy to try out and get started. And we have a free trial. So literally would love folks to check it
out and give me feedback. I would love to know what you like or don’t like. [00:20:33][35.4]
Tom Wadelton: [00:20:34] And we’ve talked a lot at the transaction level. Do you wanna brag
about the dashboarding and reporting level because as you know, many people are, they have
a tool but no one’s really good at forecasting and reporting and then the detail just is never in
that. So we’d love to hear. [00:20:48][14.4]
Jeff Seibert: [00:20:49] Yeah, so this is probably what we’re most known for. We have
thousands of accounting firms who have used our reporting software. And unlike a sort of a
typical just black and white table of numbers, we went and built Google Docs, but for finance.
And so it is all live in browser customizable. You can upload cover photos. You can comment at
the row level detail right in the report. You can drag and drop custom charts and graphs and
visualize your cashflow. Basically imagine a sort of what you see is what you get report creator
in your browser. It’s all live off the ledger. So anything you see in the report, you can just click
straight through into the ledgler and see all the underlying data. And when you edit a
transaction, everything updates instantly. So it’s this incredible way to sort of visualize and
understand your finances. [00:21:37][48.4]
Tom Wadelton: [00:21:40] And even though you had said at DCPA, or maybe Adam is the one
who said, we don’t really know what we’re building, your salesperson did give a couple of
demos. And I will say the two things that really intrigued me were the transaction level detail that
was in there. So going from this looks weird and then going down saying I can see 12
transactions and the ability if I’m, I guess maybe anyone, but if I am the CFO reviewing the
notes, I can add a comment to something. So on a chart you can say, this variance is because
we overspend in marketing or whatever it is. And that way someone looking at the dashboard
can get some of my insight right there versus waiting for me to tell them or forgetting or things.
But those were two. Pretty cool things. Because as you can imagine, we do a lot of stuff with
dashboarding, but it’s very common when I’m preparing for a meeting to then log into the
accounting system, right and go look at the detail so that I can then explain it was these three
vendors when you look at that jump. Right. And there’s a very natural sort of hesitation. Okay,
I’ve now logged into four different things to get this answer where if it was present in one would
be a really value. [00:22:39][59.8]
Jeff Seibert: [00:22:41] I really appreciate that. Yeah. We spent over two years building the
reporting functionality because it is so important. Like that’s the primary output to all the
accounting work. People want to understand how the business is doing and they want to do so
intuitively instead of having to just continually export data to Excel and try to run your own pivots
and formulas and so on. So, we tried to build that into the product as much as possible.
[00:23:03][22.1]
Adam Hale: [00:23:05] Yeah, I do remember. I mean, the reporting was fantastic. And at that
point, that’s what we were trying to figure out, like, is it going to be its own thing? Or is it
attaching to other stuff? You know what I mean? Like, that was confusing early on was like,
okay, this is a reporting tool, you know, and it did have some really good insights. And I think
we’ve seen with a lot of products, I mean, you know, starting from scratch, where you are, and
then these other ones are like now trying to find this cool technology and bolt it on, it does seem
kind of like backwards, right? Like it’s really surface level, they’ve got the AI tool, it’s got the little
like sparkle thing at the top, but it’s like, the business insights just aren’t super. Helpful, at least,
you know, it’s been pretty disappointing in the space for the most part. So I definitely would
encourage anybody to check out Digits. And if you’ve made it that easy to be able to do, that’s
why I wasn’t familiar with that. So you’ve made the conversion from a QVO file. Pretty simple.
[00:24:00][55.9]
Jeff Seibert: [00:24:01] It takes literally two minutes. Yeah, it’s extremely fast. [00:24:04][3.2]
Adam Hale: [00:24:05] So would you say that’s more built for people that are on QBO, or what
about people that are, because there’s been kind of, I would say there’s been a little bit of a
migration for, you know, even like really small businesses have been trying to move upstream to
like NetSuite and Intact and stuff like that. Which I think it’s coming out with some. Kind of
enterprise QVO version or whatever, like where do people start and stop? I mean, obviously it
sounds like from Go, they can be with you, but is there a stopping point? Is there a point where
it’s like, no, you kind of have to go to one of these like light ERPs, or are you able to manage
that? [00:24:40][34.4]
Jeff Seibert: [00:24:41] Yeah, that’s a really great question. So the big limitations today in digits
are we don’t do multi-entity consolidation and we don’t do multi currency or like foreign currency
transactions. And so if you’re running a single entity US business, we can handle pretty much
any scale. Those aspects are on our roadmap, but honestly probably about a year or so out
because just the existing space is huge. And so today, people would move off digits to NetSuite,
just like you might move off QuickBooks to Net Suite. Down the road, we intend to keep building
out the features to keep them on digits as long as possible. And so the architecture supports it.
We just haven’t prioritized those yet. [00:25:22][41.8]
Adam Hale: [00:25:23] Which makes sense. I mean that that one’s a what about the other thing
is forecasting like so for us as VCFOs Forecasting is huge. Are you doing more predictive
analytics or are you doing or can you also do like logic based? Forecasting [00:25:39][15.0]
Jeff Seibert: [00:25:40] Sorry, that is a great question. So we acquired Basis, the FP&A startup,
about a year ago. And so their team had built out a full forecasting engine. We are basically
working that into our roadmap. And so that will come, but again, it’ll probably take another year
to build correctly. So we don’t do forecasting in the product today. We do very in-depth historical
analytics. [00:26:04][23.9]
Adam Hale: [00:26:06] I mean, you know, and I love predictive analytics, don’t get me wrong,
like there, I think they’re great. But for us, whenever we’re doing storytelling, and we’re working
with small businesses, we’re not dealing with like, you know, billions amounts of data, you know,
we are not working for PepsiCo. You know what I mean? We’re predictive analytics make 100%
sense. We’re dealing with. Hundreds or thousands of transactions a month, those require a little
bit more thought, like, why are we hitting these numbers? What are we going to do? You know,
building out those KPIs and those metrics. Those require like more logic-based forecasting in
my perspective. So, so you are kind of starting to work [00:26:47][40.2]
Jeff Seibert: [00:26:47] through that as well. Yeah, and we have KPI support. And so like if you
connect to Gusto, we’ll automatically pull in your headcount and track that month by month for
you. And so those are the building blocks that we’ll need to build out the forecasting. We just
haven’t invested in the full forecasting engine yet. [00:27:04][17.6]
Adam Hale: [00:27:05] Yeah, that’ll be really important because the payroll is one of those,
especially for a lot of the service based businesses. Well, one, there’s a way to get a ton of
metrics out of that, obviously, right? With time sheets and then the actual payroll. But then also
one of the more frustrating things and Tom, you know, this is like, you build out this like really
dynamic, awesome forecast. And then you’re like, damn it, why am I off? But the information is
inside of the gusto. You know what I mean? And just the time it takes to like go through and like
look through head count. It’s just not, you know, the juice isn’t worth the squeeze for the most
part. If you’re off 10 grand, it’s like, I don’t know, maybe Jeff didn’t, maybe we didn’t pay Jeff this
month. I don’t know. Somebody had overtime, you know what I mean? Close enough. So it
would be great if those two things can kind of talk. And then how does that work? Are you
bringing all the data into the digit space as opposed to it? Like, or is it just live connecting to all
these different tools and then bringing it in as you need it to kind of a thing? I don’t know.
[00:28:01][55.6]
Jeff Seibert: [00:28:02] Yeah, great question. No, we are the full stack ledger. And so everything
is imported from these connections and then remodeled within our system in Digits. And so
Digits becomes your system of record. We’re continually syncing with Gusto, syncing your bank,
et cetera, et. [00:28:16][14.5]
Adam Hale: [00:28:16] Oh, okay. And bringing it in. So it’s not just like, it’s not just going and
finding it whenever it needs to kind of the thing. It’s actually bringing and updating the data live.
Okay. [00:28:24][8.4]
Jeff Seibert: [00:28:25] Right, one of our sort of key aspects of Pride is digits is extremely fast.
Every single page loads in under a hundred milliseconds. And this has been an intentional sort
of design requirement, technical requirement and so on. Because you’re probably familiar, some
other ledgers can feel a little sluggish as you’re navigating stuff. That’s what I was wondering.
And the way that happens is all the data is in digits, modeled in digits to optimize for that
performance. [00:28:51][26.1]
Tom Wadelton: [00:28:53] So until the basis forecast is up, if I have my forecast built elsewhere
and want to use Digits Dashboard, is there a way to say, sure, you can compare to your
forecast and we’ll pull that in somehow in today’s. [00:29:05][11.9]
Jeff Seibert: [00:29:06] Environment. It’s a great feature request. We don’t pull it in today. You
could definitely attach it to one of your reports and so you can still share it with your client
through the product. But we don’t do the comparison analysis in the product today.
[00:29:17][11.8]
Tom Wadelton: [00:29:19] But coming, that would be, as I mentioned before, and this is still my
belief about most of the products, you’ve got great reporting tools that are not so great at
forecasting. But they’re saying they want to get there. You’ve got some really good forecasting
tools who say, we have dashboards and you’re like, yeah, but they are not that good at
dashboards. We end up in multiple products and if you’re able to add that, I think you really
could say, within one, now I’ve got the data and at the forecast, you could have detail that I
assume you could even say, well, now, I can tell you by vendor why you’re off if you chose to
plan at that level and I can compare those, which would be really rich data to have. That is
[00:29:51][32.0]
Jeff Seibert: [00:29:51] That is the superpower. And particularly for our sort of tech focused
businesses that use digits, being able to project their Amazon spend or their Google cloud
spend at the vendor level is super material to their forecasts. And so that would be a huge
power here. Okay. This sounds great. [00:30:07][16.2]
Tom Wadelton: [00:30:08] So I know you have a partner program with accountants. Tell us a
little bit about that. As you have accountants listening who I’m hoping are saying this product
sounds good and then you’ve also got a program. So what can that offer? [00:30:18][10.5]
Jeff Seibert: [00:30:19] Yes. So we launched the waitlist back in March, and we sort of teased a
bunch of this last year at Scaling New Heights. And so we now have 600 plus accounting firms
on our waitlist. Okay, we are currently actively calling them and getting them off the wait list. So
expect a lot of movement in that in the next few weeks. And we will be back at Scalling New
Heights this year for those who are attending. And we’ll have a bunch more detail on how that
works and how they can get in. But yeah, we are basically sprinting to unlock the accounting
firm access. Okay. That’s great. [00:30:56][37.2]
Adam Hale: [00:30:57] Are you going to have like an admin dashboard where it’s, is it going to
be really easy to get in and out of all my, you know, if I have 50 accounts on there, am I going to
able to do that? Am I going be if I had like, now I know you don’t have consolidation features
now, but in like the future, obviously you don t want to get client data mixed around, but can you
pull out analytics for your, um, for your own practice management, like my clients are able to hit
their cash reserves and my clients can’t, those kinds of things, will you be able to pull in those
Thanks. [00:31:24][27.4]
Jeff Seibert: [00:31:25] Yeah, this is exactly the plan. So today, if you go to digital.com and sign
up, you can only sign up as an individual business, like one client basically. Very shortly, I don’t
want to prefetch our launch, but very shortly, you’ll be able to sign up as an accounting firm, and
then you get your firm management dashboard, you can add your clients, you can jump
between them. The initial version won’t have all the comparative metrics, but that’s been a
heavy feature request. And so we are basically prioritizing, what metrics do we expose on the
dashboard? How can you filter and group your clients and so on? One thing that we do already
have is all the permissioning is in place. So you can invite your colleagues in your firm and
assign who has access to which clients and they won’t see the others and so. [00:32:08][42.8]
Adam Hale: [00:32:09] Yeah no that’s really important okay no it’s that’s great and then i
assume like all the white labeling like on the reporting and stuff like that are you able to do all
that stuff as [00:32:19][9.7]
Jeff Seibert: [00:32:20] So yeah, you can upload your firm logo and the reports are branded with
your firm and your name and so on. We don’t support like completely eliminating the Digits
branding like it’s hosted at digits.com and so one, but the reports will look like they’re issued by
your firm. [00:32:33][13.4]
Adam Hale: [00:32:34] Okay, you can mess with the colors so they match your brand and all
that. [00:32:38][3.9]
Jeff Seibert: [00:32:37] Yeah and totally custom cover photos which we have folks like
customizing per client which gets fun and like oh this type of business I use this report cover
photo and this time of year I use a holiday one or whatever. It allows you a lot of creativity.
[00:32:50][12.7]
Adam Hale: [00:32:51] Yeah, that’s neat. That’s great. [00:32:52][1.0]
Tom Wadelton: [00:32:53] That’s really nice. Well, as we’re coming to a close, Adam, you
probably remember this when we had mentioned the SpeakEasy event at the DCPA. And Jeff,
we got to know your team pretty well. It was a fairly small event. But one thing I remember is the
answer that Adam and I gave to many things like, well, how have you figured out the forecast
linked to this or that was we would talk about our technology director who we still have who
happens to be a CPA and is just great. And after like the third or fourth time we gave that
answer, they quickly became apparent. They’re like, I think we want to talk to him and like,
ignore you guys, just go have fun. But we get him like, as an employee’s advisory board,
something like that. So then we’re quickly trying to protect our team from that. But it was a fun
conversation, we could both brag about what we had in place in your team recognizing the
value of someone who can see technology and accounting and how all that fits together and
some [00:33:39][46.6]
Jeff Seibert: [00:33:41] on your own. Well, no, I appreciate it. We’ve also been very lucky to
have some incredible support. So one of our lead product managers is a CPA, was an
accountant in a previous life, and is now leading the product design for the core ledger. We
also, just two months ago, announced that Craig Walker, who’s the co-founder and longtime
CTO of Xero, has joined Digits full-time this past winter as head of product strategy. And so he
knows the space extremely thoroughly. And has just already been a massive value add. So
yeah, we’re really trying to build the team we need to be the sort of future de facto accounting
platform for SMB. [00:34:20][39.0]
Tom Wadelton: [00:34:21] That is great. Any final thought that you would give? I guess it’s an
opportunity if we’ve missed something in here, but as you’ve got accountants who are moving,
we hope our group is very much advisory-focused to helping bring new things to their clients.
What’s sort of a final pitch that you will give them? Yeah, I guess what I would say is
[00:34:38][16.3]
Jeff Seibert: [00:34:38] would recap is, I think the whole space is focused on the advisory
movement, which is fantastic. The benefit to digits and what we would really love to work with
everyone on is sort of replacing the need for your outsourced junior bookkeeping role almost,
because the AI technology is now at a point where it can do that work very reliably. And so as
you think about how you scale your firm, and how you manage that work, What AI now allows is
for that to be done 24-7 in real time with no management overhead or sort of HR issues or
anything like that. And it really allows you to free up your focus on advising your clients and the
more value add higher margin work that I think is really critical to sort of scaling and growing
strong firms going forward. And so we are here. We are super excited to partner. I would love
any feedback, any feature requests. And so check it out at digits.com and let me know what you
think. That’s great. [00:35:33][55.6]
Tom Wadelton: [00:35:33] The part of that, Jeff, that really speaks to me is that automation that
can get the underlying data accurate really helps your dashboards. And as we onboard new
clients, it’s very common that they want a pretty looking dashboard and we’re spending time like
with their time entry data and saying, hey, unless this is actually clean data, then these
dashboards are gonna be meaningless. So let’s spend some time there. And we also clean up
their general ledger and clean up there accounting. And so it sounds like you guys are focusing
in the right area of these nice looking pictures that tell you things don’t tell a very good story
when the underlying data is incorrect. That’s not [00:36:07][33.5]
Jeff Seibert: [00:36:07] That’s actually where we started because we built the dashboard screen
first and then tried it with a whole bunch of businesses and we were like, oh, that’s terrible. And
so then we quickly had to fall down the rabbit hole and fix the data. That’s really smart.
[00:36:21][13.1]
Tom Wadelton: [00:36:22] I can understand it. That’s great. Well, Jeff, this has been fantastic.
Thank you so much for spending time and this has really been enjoyable. Yeah, thanks for
sharing. Yeah, Tom, Adam, thank you so. Yep, have a great day. Now we wait for a minute.
Thank you for not being on our site. So, Jeff, that was great, man.