Digi-Tools In Accrual World

Ryan Pearcy is joined by Billie McLoughlin and Kevin Fitzgerald from Employment Hero for a fortnight of app news, from a quieter year for accounting startups to who gets to pull the plug in an app ecosystem. Kevin opens with Y Combinator, which backed seven tools for accountants last year and only one so far this year. His view is that accounting software is one of the stickiest products in the cloud, and few businesses or firms are itching to rip it out for something new. Billie thinks the money is moving from the tools to the people who use them, and that “AI-powered” has stopped meaning much. The better question is simply whether it’s any good. Ryan covers Xero’s quieter work on user permissions, including the long-requested option to hide bank statement lines and feeds from standard users, with purchase orders and inventory permissions on the way. Billie’s advice is to charge clients for setting it up, and Kevin sees it as a sign of bigger, more sophisticated businesses using Xero. Billie then brings the story of Xero removing the GovReports integration in Australia overnight, with no grace period, leaving firms with what she calls AI-powered copy and paste. Kevin calls it systems continuity risk, and Ryan follows with Briefcase being cut off from Xero after launching its own ledger. The panel debate whether Xero should publish a page explaining who it disconnects and why. On payroll, Kevin shares a scoop: Employment Hero will launch an integration with Crezco in the coming weeks, so employers can pay staff from the platform using faster payments, at no extra cost. BrightPay has also added pay by bank through Crezco, though Ryan questions beta pricing of 60p per employee per run when 25p per payment seemed to be the going rate. Also covered: Engager, now part of the TaxCalc family, bringing multiple offices into one login, and Billie’s question on whether billing and WIP follow. Digits shipping multi-entity without consolidation, and its partnership with Reach Reporting. And Combinely’s AI co-worker Coco, which leads to a debate on what happens when you need to let an AI employee go. Don’t forget our AI hackathon on 18 November. Follow The Loop on LinkedIn to grab a place. Chapters 00:00 Intro 02:48 Ad: Employment Hero 03:26 Y Combinator backs fewer accounting startups 08:04 Xero user permissions get granular 13:59 GovReports switched off overnight 21:42 Briefcase cut off from Xero 25:32 Employment Hero payroll payments with Crezco 29:35 BrightPay pay by bank through Crezco 33:21 Ad: Joiin 34:28 Engager: multiple offices in one login 37:55 Digits multi-entity arrives 41:49 Combinely’s AI co-worker Coco 53:18 Outro

Indi Tatla, John Toon and Leigh Stallard work through a week where the ledgers kept reaching outwards, into practice tools, the bank and even the phone. FreeAgent has added tofu as a practice integration, pulling line items out of invoices and receipts and learning how each client codes things. John thinks extraction is table stakes now and the firm knowledge is the interesting part. Indi likes FreeAgent bringing in specialists rather than building everything itself, and Leigh explains how he used Claude to connect Adfin to FreeAgent without writing any code. That takes John somewhere bigger: if Claude can do the work, why log into Xero or ApprovalMax at all? Leigh isn’t ready to call the death of the interface just yet. mika has raised €6 million with a headline about making German tax advisers optional, building on top of DATEV. Indi questions whether investors know what they’re buying, and John has a theory about mika’s pop music namesake. Then an analysis from Diligent Capital of 30 AI-native finance startups suggests standalone month-end close becomes a feature within a couple of years. John isn’t sure it was ever a category, Briefcase is already heading that way, and Indi asks him about Anthropic’s finance agents. QuickBooks and Revolut have deepened their partnership into bills and payment status. Indi sees a door opening for lenders and private credit who have never been able to see small businesses properly, with Sage and FreeAgent with Mettle on similar paths. John has heard this before with open banking and asks who actually drives it forward this time. Intuit Intelligence is rolling out internationally in beta, and over at AccountsOS you can now phone Finn, its AI accountant. John isn’t sure how often anyone wants to ring their ledger. Leigh remembers when nobody did bank rec at a bus stop either, and raises a newer worry about prompt injection. Gusto has launched AI agents for payroll prep under Gusto Pro. John sees a scale play rather than an advisory one, Indi wants to put it to Kevin Fitzgerald at Employment Hero, and the hosts look at what BrightPay, Joiin, FirmCheck and Plaid are doing with agents. RevealOS, from founder Miles Udemezue, starts from the transaction that’s missing evidence and goes looking for it in the client’s approved inbox and supplier portals. Will clients let a tool into their inbox? Leigh thinks it beats getting them to send everything themselves. John thinks it’s easy to copy, remembers Dext trying supplier portals, and tells Miles to go broad and go fast. Also covered: the AIR Network’s MTD for Income Tax readiness scores for 171 products, with FreeAgent and Clear Books near the top and Sage, TaxCalc, Bright and IRIS Elements further down than you’d expect, plus The Loop’s first hackathon with Xero, GoCardless and Lovable in London on 18 November, free for accountants in practice. Chapters 00:00 Intro 02:37 Fishbowl 03:44 FreeAgent: tofu and the ecosystem play 12:24 mika: making tax advisers optional? 17:58 Month-end close: a feature, not a category 22:45 QuickBooks and Revolut: where the bank meets the ledger 33:24 Intuit Intelligence goes global 40:28 AccountsOS: phone your ledger 46:15 Gusto: AI agents for payroll 52:07 RevealOS: ending the document chase 59:57 MTD: the software readiness scorecard 1:07:41 Outro and The Loop hackathon

John Toon, Ryan Pearcy and Heather Smith work through a busy week of accounting tech news: assurance for AI, a run of Xero releases, three MCP launches, Joiin’s Q3 deck and a lot of Briefcase. Heather opens with the AICPA’s new service for assuring AI systems and agents. John likes the opportunity and doubts the practice: the people who build these models say they can’t fully explain them, and the work could easily end up with the Big Four. Ryan's line is that if nobody can assure AI, that’s the bigger problem. Ryan goes through Xero’s latest product updates, including bill approvals due in November. He thinks it lands on ApprovalMax’s patch, with Dext and Apron nearby. John says rules-based approvals are already behind where AI tools are going. Heather asks vendors to announce features in plain English. She’s also an active Google Gemini user, so she has views on Xero’s new Gemini connection: when it’s good it’s very good, and when it’s bad it’s horrid. Xero’s remote MCP is now generally available, and John explains what that means and what still needs a developer plan. WorkGuru’s MCP server is in beta and can write but can’t delete anything. Heather covers Digits’ Write MCP, which former Xero CTO Craig Walker says solves the locked period problem: an edit to a locked period goes into a queue for an admin to approve. The hosts make the case for proper backups now that agents can write to the ledger. John walks through Joiin’s Q3 release: forecasting out of beta with group consolidation and an Excel round trip, forecasts out to 60 months, a KPI library, a performance map, and new connections including FreeAgent and Fortnox. Fathom, they’re coming for you. Briefcase gets three stories. Ryan covers Briefcase on your phone. Heather covers payments and approvals at 25p a payment, and Ryan explains why payments are the biggest fraud risk in a business. John covers Xero pausing Briefcase’s integration soon after Briefcase launched its own ledger, and asks why Xero didn’t just buy them. Ryan closes on Dext and the idea that data quality now matters more than the ledger. Also covered: the Digi-Tools hackathon with Xero and GoCardless in London, with Alastair Barlow, Billie McLoughlin and Alexis Kingsbury. Chapters 00:00 Intro 01:14 FreeAgent 02:15 AICPA: assurance for AI 11:13 Xero: approvals are coming 18:45 Xero: Gemini joins the party 22:20 Xero: remote MCP goes live 26:56 WorkGuru: an MCP that can’t delete 29:09 SuiteFiles 30:06 Digits: Write MCP and the lock period 37:19 Joiin: the Q3 deck 42:47 Briefcase: on your phone 44:10 Briefcase: payments and approvals 48:23 Briefcase: the Xero pause 52:53 Dext: data quality over the ledger 57:05 Outro and the Digi-Tools hackathon

No studio again this week. John Toon and Indi Tatla took the microphone round day two of the Digital Accountancy Show at ExCeL and sat down with the vendors on the floor, one at a time, to hear what they are shipping. Dext gets two chairs. Sabby Gill, fresh from Dext Insiders Day, explains how three separate systems (Receipt Bank, Xavier Analytics and Greenback) became one platform, why everything starts with the source data, and why he thinks the system of record now comes second to the experience a business has with its numbers. Asked about the doomsday clock that says accountants are done by 2028, he gives the Y2K answer: nothing happened then either. Paul Lodder picks up the product detail with John: AI Assist, the new AI connectors to ChatGPT, Claude and Copilot, the delayed index and time-spent-per-document insights, and an optimisation score on the way. John asks the VAT question nobody likes answering, and they get into whether the general ledger is becoming a repository rather than a place you work. Stu McEwan at FreeAgent says MTD numbers have doubled what they expected, with 200 to 300 of HMRC’s 700 beta testers running a full year end through FreeAgent, and unrepresented customers getting on with it better than anyone predicted. Tracking groups and management reports are the move upmarket. “Not AI native, but AI in it.” Paul Sparkes from iplicit talks through the all-new UI and a single prompt inside the software, and why iplicit is a restaurant rather than a sweetie shop when it comes to AI and your data. Chris Downing shows Indi Sage Period Review: the Sage ledger consumed by banking partners, Tide first, so a sole trader categorises in their banking app and the accountant reviews, fixes and files from Sage for Accountants with no bank feed to set up. Indi’s question: when did Sage turn into such a speedboat? Tushir Patel at Capium has gone from baby steps to adolescence, with Capium 365 as the data capture layer for sole traders and landlords and a largest client running about 20,000 clients through the system. Henrik Grim at Mimo has spent 18 months all in on Mimo Associate, agents for the financial close that sit on top of whatever ledger a firm already runs. His bet is the shift from doing the work to reviewing it. Asked if accounting ends in 2028, his answer is one word. Jonathan Gaunt from Socket, Release of the Year at the Disruptor Awards, wants deeper handoffs into Senta, FYI and Karbon, runs Socket through Claude himself, and thinks MTD is battleships waiting to sink practices that are not charging for it. Then the microphone changes hands. Kendrick Hair from Fishbowl interviews Ryan Pearcy on the Fishbowl stand about why Ryan’s firm partners with them: 25 years of inventory and manufacturing software rebuilt for the cloud, an agent called Juno on top, and a UK inventory market that had gone quiet until someone turned up to disrupt it. Kendrick’s observation from the US side: UK business owners lean on their accountant in a way American ones don’t. Johann Gorée closes with Engager’s latest releases (multiple addresses synced with TaxCalc, hyperlinks in checklists, dynamic date formats) and a warning about firms feeding client data into the free tier of ChatGPT. A car can do more than 70 miles an hour. That does not make it legal. Chapters 00:00 Intro, day two at the Digital Accountancy Show 02:21 Advancetrack 02:59 Sabby Gill, Dext: the ledger comes second 11:30 Stu McEwan, FreeAgent: MTD is a numbers game 16:42 Paul Sparkes, iplicit: a restaurant, not a sweetie shop 21:53 Paul Lodder, Dext: too much time chasing clients 28:39 Chris Downing, Sage: Period Review and Tide 33:30 Tushir Patel, Capium: the dark horse in purple 38:35 Henrik Grim, Mimo: from doing to reviewing 48:03 Jonathan Gaunt, Socket: MTD is battleships 55:59 Kendrick Hair and Ryan Pearcy, Fishbowl: disrupting, not going anywhere 63:51 Johann Gorée, Engager: AI, responsibly

No studio this week. Indi Tatla and Alastair Barlow took a microphone round the Digital Accountancy Show at ExCeL London and stopped anyone who would talk to them, with Ryan Pearcy waiting at the end on The Loop stand. Yogesh Patel opens with a phrase he had just heard on the main stage: the AI discount. If AI makes the work faster, how does a firm stop the saving going straight to the client as a lower fee? Indi then brings back the idea Dext pushed at its insider day, that the system of record does not have to be where the work happens. Alastair calls it the headless ledger, and Damon Anderson later tells us the AI-native ledger was the big story of the day, name-checking Digits, Light, Campfire, Rillet and DualEntry. He also gives the market a three to five year runway, because real firms have real people, real trust and HMRC to work with. Paul Layte from Ascendant walks through four versions of the firm delivery model, ending with a question nobody was asking two years ago: do we need offshore at all, or can AI agents do this? Andrew Douthwaite from Alliotts, part of the Shaw Gibbs Group, talks about life after a private equity deal and what he would build with a war chest. Daniel Rock from SuiteFiles previews the new connect portals and the agentic chasing on the way, and Trent McLaren from Vinyl explains why the real gain from an AI note taker is the mental load it lifts. Kate Hayward, Xero’s UK Managing Director, and Kendrick Hair from Fishbowl talk through a family-run yoghurt maker that has grown threefold in 18 months on Xero and Fishbowl. Kate brings the number of the day, two in five UK small businesses did not know if they were profitable last month, and news of a Xero and The Loop hackathon in November. Kendrick explains Fishbowl’s new accountant’s ledger. Katie Hawking from TaxAssist comes off a women in accountancy panel with SilverFin and a line worth taking back to the office: be the women we want to walk behind. Ryan closes it out at The Loop stand, giving compliance four years before the way firms deliver it changes completely. Also covered: James Howell and Dan Cockerton on putting on the show and taking it to the US and Barcelona, Phil Hobden on what Sage has been asked about Intacct and MTD, a new firm owner five months into practice, Lisa Marshall flying in from Canada and discovering FreeAgent, and why they walked straight past John Toon. Chapters 00:00 Intro, live from the Digital Accountancy Show 01:33 Employment Hero 02:10 Yogesh Patel on the AI discount 04:50 First time at the show 06:40 Why come to DAS, and skipping John Toon 07:47 James Howell on building the show 10:16 Dext and the headless ledger 12:21 £4m in fees from LinkedIn 15:57 People and agents in one org chart 18:36 Andrew Douthwaite on PE and a war chest 24:31 SuiteFiles and agentic chasing 26:06 What Baker Tilly does differently with AI 30:56 Phil Hobden at Sage 32:56 Five months into a new practice 35:56 Fractional CFO or outsourced finance function 38:06 Dan Cockerton on DAS in the US and Barcelona 42:56 Trent McLaren, Vinyl and the mental load 45:26 Paul Layte: do we need offshore at all? 48:26 Katie Hawking: be the women we want to walk behind 52:16 Damon Anderson and the AI-native ledger 55:09 Joiin 56:16 Xero and Fishbowl: two in five didn’t know 66:40 Lisa Marshall, all the way from Canada 69:35 Ryan Pearcy: plan now or have it thrust upon you 73:25 Outro

Billie McLoughlin, Eriona Bajrakurtaj and John Toon go a little AI heavy this week, with an MCP for AML checks, a decision-making model from TypeSafe and a new AI-native ledger from Briefcase, plus a chat with its co-founder Reuben Steenkamp. Billie welcomes Sage's free Period Review for MTD for Income Tax, and likes that Sage hasn't sold it as AI, but wishes it worked for clients on Xero, QuickBooks and FreeAgent too. Eriona expects to be asking clients the same questions every quarter regardless. John reckons the profession can be too precise, and Eriona shares the HMRC enquiry that came down to one missing £26 receipt. Intuit has cut 17% of its workforce while revenue grew 14% and QuickBooks Online Accounting grew 23%. Eriona asks where that leaves UK accountants now the accountants' council has gone. John questions how much revenue really comes through the accounting channel, and Billie thinks price rises explain a lot of the growth. DNA Payments has partnered with iwoca so merchants can borrow £1,000 to £1m from the DNA app. John asks whether borrowing to cover running costs is ever wise, Eriona talks business rates and 15% interest, and Billie wonders how many small businesses keep their books up to date enough for live-data lending. Eriona welcomes Sodium's FuseSign integration and wants one core system running the work. Billie explains MCP through Firmcheck's launch alongside its FYI and Sodium integrations, and asks whether firms will let AI change AML records. Eriona wonders what happens to software brands nobody logs into, and John worries about being spread too thin. John introduces TypeSafe's Jev, and Eriona asks how you tell a regulator "the AI did that". John then walks through Briefcase Ledger, compares it with Xero, QuickBooks and FreeAgent, and talks to Reuben Steenkamp about the launch at the Digital Accountancy Show. Also covered: Vinyl launches calendar booking, Joiin raises €1.5m of non-dilutive growth capital from Gilion, and Caseware brings Verity agents to Excel and client requests, along with John's Angry Audit Manager. 00:00 Intro 01:12 Fishbowl 02:19 Sage Period Review for MTD 13:11 Intuit cuts 17% while revenue grows 20:42 DNA Payments and iwoca Flexi Loans 26:35 Sodium integrates FuseSign 28:16 Firmcheck launches an MCP 37:52 TypeSafe launches Jev 42:57 Briefcase launches Briefcase Ledger 53:27 Vinyl launches calendar booking 56:48 Joiin raises €1.5m 1:01:10 Caseware Verity agents for audit 1:06:43 Outro

Indi Tatla, John Toon and Ryan Pearcy are back together for another OGs episode, with two lots of Apron news, a big raise in Germany and the full run-down of this year's Disruptor Awards. Xero has renamed Files to Documents and moved it into the Accounting menu, which John Toon calls the least controversial thing Xero has done in weeks. Ryan Pearcy links the change to Making Tax Digital for Income Tax. Indi Tatla then reads through a wave of Glassdoor reviews from Xero staff in Australia and New Zealand, and the panel talks about what they say about the culture, with some sympathy for the UK team. Glen Foster has joined Intuit to lead the mid-market and partner channel in the UK. Indi asks what he needs to get right. John Toon says QuickBooks has always felt like a sales conversation about licences, and Ryan Pearcy says the mid-market needs implementation partners and something closer to community. Apron has launched its QuickBooks Online integration, with supplier payments in 30 currencies and Virgin Points on the side, and Ryan wants to know whether it's truly embedded. Then Apron's new pricing from 1 December, tiered by document volume. Indi Tatla thinks the document limit is the lever bookkeepers will feel, while Ryan Pearcy likes that payments and documents stay unbundled. Limetax has raised €36m to bring German accounting firms onto an AI platform built on top of DATEV. John Toon explains why DATEV's cooperative set-up makes that approach clever, and Ryan Pearcy expects to see more tech companies buying firms in the UK. Also covered: Aqilla wins Best Cloud Service for Non-Profits and Charities at the Cloud Excellence Awards, Adfin launches card on file, and Indi runs through the Disruptor Awards winners, including Socket, Briefcase, Alexis Kingsbury, James Wright, The Modern Firm and Lucy Cohen, with thanks to partners Dext, Advancetrack, Accountex and Alternative Events. 00:00 Intro 03:25 FreeAgent 04:30 Xero renames Files to Documents 06:23 Xero's Glassdoor reviews 10:43 Glen Foster joins Intuit 14:40 Apron launches QuickBooks Online payments 17:53 Apron pricing changes from 1 December 22:12 Aqilla wins Best Cloud Service for Non-Profits 23:54 Limetax raises €36m 28:13 SuiteFiles 29:12 Adfin launches card on file 33:45 Disruptor Awards winners 42:19 Outro

Indi Tatla, John Toon and Ryan Pearcy are on the show together for the first time in months, and this week the AI conversation finally gets a bit more nuanced. Airwallex has launched T:0, an AI accounting platform for US startups that builds the chart of accounts as the business grows and reports burn and runway in real time. John Toon sees apps creeping into each other's patch. Ryan Pearcy thinks everyone's going after everything because it's so easy to build now, and it'll be the Wild West until the ones that work win on word of mouth. Aynsley Damery's Alldone claims a full set of UK limited company accounts in an hour or less, with the numbers calculated from the legislation and AI kept to the wording and mappings. Indi Tatla likes the cold review challenge. John Toon isn't convinced by a demo built on a perfect client, and Ryan Pearcy can't see small firms running two systems. Then John Toon's own OneSixth, which handles VAT margin schemes and partial exemption and posts the journals back to the ledger, is out in beta. AuditBot has launched AccountsBot, which reviews financial statements against a disclosure checklist from HAT Group. John Toon tried building the same thing with ChatGPT and couldn't get it past 80 per cent reliable. Intuit and Perplexity have connected QuickBooks and Mailchimp to Perplexity for US users, and John Toon wonders why they didn't make more of Perplexity's sourcing. Bill Gates picks accountancy as his example of a job AI will replace, which leads to the big question of the episode: if trainees skip the basic prep, how do they learn to check the bot's work? Ryan Pearcy brings in Michael Gould, co-founder of Anaplan, on swapping the spreadsheet nobody dared touch for an AI engine nobody can explain. John Toon doesn't think ticking boxes ever taught anyone much, and makes his case with a car analogy that even Indi Tatla likes. Also covered: a Startup Coalition report on the 11.2 million hours UK businesses spend each year proving who they are, and whether BizPass is digital ID by another name. And Joiin's new forecasting, with full three-way integration and the group consolidation John Toon is most excited about. 00:00 Intro 02:18 Advancetrack 02:56 Airwallex launches T:0 for US startups 07:56 Alldone: a full set of accounts in an hour 14:45 OneSixth: VAT margin schemes and partial exemption 21:09 AuditBot launches AccountsBot for disclosure checklists 23:49 Intuit and QuickBooks connect to Perplexity 27:11 Bill Gates on AI and accountancy: who trains the juniors? 30:00 Michael Gould on AI in finance and the spreadsheet problem 38:55 Startup Coalition: 11.2 million hours proving who you are 47:14 Joiin launches three-way forecasting 54:20 Outro

Ryan Pearcy is back in the chair, joined by Heather Smith and Indi Tatla for a bumper news episode, most of it about Xero and none of it comfortable. It starts with the reel. A paid influencer told her followers she had fed her Xero data into Claude and no longer needed the 800 pounds a month she spent on an accountant, and the community went off. Indi Tatla walks through the responses: Rachel Harris on how tightly brand partnerships are actually controlled, Alex Falcon arguing the profession should level up rather than take it personally, and Damon Anderson on the capability, accountability and trust clocks all running at different speeds. Ryan Pearcy has no sympathy for the influencer, then argues the thing that has really annoyed firms is not the advert. It is auto bank rec, and every vendor promising a business owner they can automate everything, leaving the firm to unpick it at the year end and charge more for the privilege. It was not a one-off week. Aaron Patrick found Syft Analytics reports going out under his practice's name without his approval, since switched off. Xero built accounts and tax filing into the product after Companies House closed the free route in March, then marketed it straight at business owners without telling the firms holding those clients. The panel keeps coming back to Ben Richmond on stage in New Orleans, promising Xero would never sell directly to your clients. Heather Smith brings in a long post from a former Xero employee arguing the board swallowed the Rule of 40 and built an executive incentive structure around it that cost them the customer. That runs into the AGM, where 70 per cent of shareholders voted against the remuneration report following an increase to Sukhinder Singh Cassidy's target pay. Ryan Pearcy thinks the restructure is defensible and the timing is what stings. Indi Tatla asks whether the conversation would be happening at all if the chief executive were a man. Xero gave the show its position directly, and it is read out in full. Elsewhere, Sage launched Salary Payments, so Sage Payroll customers can pay staff from their own bank account with no wallet and no second login, powered by Crezco, who now sit behind Xero, iplicit and Sage alike. Ryan Pearcy wonders what has happened to Modulr. Indi Tatla runs the employment law timetable, with the tribunal window doubling on 1 October, the duty to prevent third party harassment landing on 30 October and the unfair dismissal changes arriving in January 2027, and flags the Employment Hero webinar on it. Also covered: Heather Smith's ask of conference organisers to publish a harassment policy. Accrual acquiring Puzzle's accounting firm business on the same day as everything else, and almost nobody noticing. Private equity buying accounting firms alongside the software it already funds. And how a profession without a podcast is meant to make itself heard by the vendors. Chapters 00:00 Intro 02:45 Employment Hero 03:25 Influencer Gate: the Xero reel that blew up LinkedIn 08:52 Rachel Harris, Alex Falcon and Damon Anderson on being a paid partner 14:29 Why auto bank rec annoys firms more than the advert did 16:39 Heather Smith on who actually counts as an influencer 18:07 Syft Analytics reports sent to clients without approval 19:35 Xero markets accounts and tax filing direct to business owners 21:01 "We will never sell directly to your clients" 24:15 The Rule of 40 post from a former Xero employee 27:10 CEO pay and the 70 per cent shareholder vote 32:10 Xero's official position 35:41 Joiin 36:49 Sage Payroll Salary Payments, powered by Crezco 38:27 Employment law: October, and then January 2027 42:33 Harassment policies at accounting conferences 44:25 Accrual acquires Puzzle 47:06 Private equity moving into accounting firms 49:19 How should the community influence the vendors? 52:14 Disruptor Awards and outro

John Toon is joined by Kendrick Hair of Fishbowl and Leigh Stallard for a news episode about who ends up owning the client. Leigh opens on a LinkedIn post from Joshua at Reva, written after Starling took heat for putting books next to the current account. The more interesting move is embedding the service itself, advisers included, inside the platforms an SME already uses. Uprise is doing exactly that in the US. John's caveat is that nobody has done it at scale yet, although compliance is already being commoditised and Mazuma has been running like a software company with accountants attached for years. Kendrick brings the US lens on firms niching hard into tax as technology moves onto their patch. Fishbowl has bought Repfabric, and Kendrick takes the two questions customers actually ask after an acquisition. Does the brand disappear, and do the connections to competing products get switched off. His answers are no and no. Repfabric brings a decade of commissions, territories and multi-line sales work to sit in front of everything Fishbowl already does once the order lands. Kendrick then picks up Joiin Intelligence, which goes exception hunting rather than writing prose about revenue. Its agents clean the chart of accounts, build eliminations and diagnose a consolidated balance sheet that will not balance. John's angle is where the data physically goes once a firm hands it to a model, and why Joiin running on AWS matters to anyone with GDPR to answer to. He remembers early Jax being slower than clicking the report. Leigh follows with Joiin's new report pack sharing and the wider point underneath it. Firms do not adopt what they cannot picture themselves using, so a release that ships without a workflow attached quietly dies in the inbox. Then the Xero run. Engager, now part of TaxCalc, ships its August features, and John pushes back on listening to the loudest customer instead of leading. Kendrick covers BrightPay's Oscar onboarding assistant, Pay by Bank, and the cloud transition Bright had to pull and rebuild. Leigh takes Xero's developer growth programme for practice apps and John asks what it says about Xero Practice Manager. Back orders and prepayments land in the Xero API, which Kendrick has been waiting for and which Cin7, Katana and Fishbowl are not using yet, and Leigh explains why giving people back orders in core Xero is a dog on a half-submerged pontoon. Also covered: Trent McLaren's map of where there is still room to build in the Xero ecosystem, the test of whether a Xero product manager could describe your product in one sentence, and what it now costs vendors to keep the data flowing since Xero and Intuit both put a price on API access. This episode is brought to you by Fishbowl, inventory and manufacturing software for businesses that have outgrown spreadsheets but are not ready for full ERP. https://www.fishbowlinventory.com 00:00 Intro 02:14 Sponsor: Fishbowl 03:25 Accounting as a feature, and the fight for the client 09:57 Fishbowl buys Repfabric 19:45 Joiin Intelligence goes exception hunting 26:11 Joiin report packs, and why releases die in the inbox 29:38 Reporting people actually act on 33:22 Sponsor: SuiteFiles 34:21 Engager updates, and who you listen to 39:07 BrightPay, Oscar and the cloud move 44:06 Xero opens its growth programme to practice apps 46:46 Back orders and prepayments in the Xero API 53:45 Enough rope: back orders in core Xero 56:34 Where to build in the Xero ecosystem 01:08:19 Outro