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

Randy Johnston  00:10

Welcome to today’s Accounting Technology Lab. I’m Randy Johnston with my co host, Brian Tankersley, we’re so pleased to have a special guest today, Chris Farrell of Liscio, the CEO. I’ve known Chris a long time, and you know, he’s a serial entrepreneur and CPA, and every time I listen to Chris, I learn something new about the market, the products available and so forth. It’s a it’s always good for me because I learned something new. But we’re going to talk a little bit about his current product, listio, it’s a portal product that has a lot of automation and provides a modern client experience. So Chris, could you give our listeners a little bit of background on yourself, please?

Chris Farrell  00:51

Little bit about Liscio is, we are a very focused provider of client experience, and I got my start really at Arthur Andersen, where I was an auditor, and our client experience at the time was 100% in person, so it was a great place to start my career. Very appreciative of it. I eventually moved on in industry, where I was the chief financial officer of a public company, and I got to sit on the other side of the client experience, not only as CFO, but also as an individual client of the firm. And one of the things I learned very quickly was the better client you are of a firm, the worse the client experience actually becomes, because you end up using so many more systems and so forth, and the more service lines you’re consuming, probably the more portals and communication channels you have open. So went into the accounting software world. Shortly after that, started a company called tally spring ahead, and we were really working on back office software. A few years later, it was pretty obvious that it was time, maybe, to move on into the client facing side, because we saw billions of dollars flowing into back office solutions and almost nothing to address the client experience. So we started working on that several years ago with an express premise to really make things wonderful for the firm internally to manage their clients, as well as for the clients themselves, to have a single point of entry, a single portal, if you will, just like a bank, and to bring the two together securely, so we didn’t have a lot of confidential information flying back and forth on email and text messages and so forth. So that’s how I got my start. And very happy to be here today.

Randy Johnston  02:33

Yeah. Well, thank you for that, Chris and gosh, I feel in the minority today with two auditors in the crowd. You know, Brian frequently refers to himself as a recovering auditor. Well, Brian, I know you know the Licio product pretty well because we have followed this product, uh, more or less since inception. We’ve watched the evolution of the features. So what do our listeners need to know about Liscio From your perspective?

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  02:56

So, so Licio is a, has been a started out is a secure client portal, and it has morphed into a whole tool set for client experience. It’s very focused on accounting professionals and their clients and the kinds of problems that they have, the kinds of needs that they have. You know, again, the the idea here is to make help clients and firms work better together without having to change the back end applications, and so it gives them a secure, modern client experience and puts everything in one place. Some of the features they’ve added of late include tax organizers, include business texting, and they’ve they’re one of the first organizations to have a strong mobile app for clients to use when communicating with us. Because, you know, again, we look at our email a few times a day. We look at our phones dozens of times a day. And so that’s, that’s kind of part of the way that that, I guess they’ve been, they’ve been attacking this problem set. Yeah,

Randy Johnston  04:00

so Brian, listening to you that about that, you’ve added to my vocabulary the term auto nag, because Licio was one of the first products that actually did a follow up with clients well, where it would monitor the inbound files and allow you to reject and request more and so forth. So, you know, again, we’re not trying to go feature by feature. But Chris, you know, from your perspective, obviously you’ve had a vision of your platform for some time. And do you mind just explaining to us and our listeners today some of the philosophy behind the product and part of what you’re trying to accomplish? Because I could speak for what I believe to be true, but I’d rather hear it from you today.

Chris Farrell  04:42

Sure thing, I think the premise of our business is very simple. Clients expect the modern Internet wherever they go. So you mentioned auto nag, for example, it’s no different than what happens if we book a restaurant reservation on, let’s say, open table, we get an auto nag. You. Your reservation is coming up, please show up. And that’s a lot easier and a lot better for everybody than having somebody call our phones saying, you know, like we used to do, hostess or host calls our phones saying, Are you going to show up tonight? And so when you think about the modern internet and every way in which it surrounds us, everywhere we go, it stands in stark contrast to how firms have been operating with their clients, which really hasn’t changed much in the last 20 and 30 years. Sure, there are some portals and so forth, but if we look at the traditional tax portal, for example, it really looks and feels as if it was developed a couple of decades ago. And I think if we look at it through the lens of, let’s say tax prep software, it’s pretty clear that tax prep software is extraordinarily complicated, and it was developed over very long time periods because of the complexity of the tax code. You have to be great at federal taxes. You have to understand all the complexity of state taxes, localities and municipalities as well. And so the software, as a result, has moved at a similar pace, leaving clients, in many cases, behind. And because of that, the ramifications for firms and their clients is significant. New college graduates will come out and we’ll take a look at tax software particularly, and many of them will just run away screaming, or they simply won’t even come into the profession anymore. And so I think we look at it also through the lens of a younger client or even an older client who’s accustomed to online banking, let’s say, and Randy pointed out we had a mobile app early. Well, it’s obvious that most people are doing just about everything on mobile devices. In fact, I think banks are getting more traffic on their mobile device by far now than on their website, and they offer wonderful websites and wonderful mobile apps, and so I think people are really expecting that more and more, both inside the firm and outside the firm. So that’s where we really are coming from and attacking the problem. And I think what sets us apart is we’re looking to create that bridge, or that layer for the client experience in between what firms are doing today internally, which is, you shouldn’t have to change yourself your tax software. You certainly shouldn’t have to change your practice management software. You shouldn’t have to go through all these gyrations. You should have something that, literally, you can turn on and start using and get a 10 times or better ROI in half of a day, because it’s good modern internet technology. That’s it. And so that’s really, that’s really what we’re working

Randy Johnston  07:33

on. So Chris, that’s that sounds super In fact, this bridge between what we have and what we need is actually a pretty interesting position, because you are correct. As I think about your platform, you can keep your existing DMS, if that’s what you want to do, and keep your existing practice management. You can keep your existing tax and the interfaces in the systems are all you know, usable, as we would see it. I’m also thinking about your latest innovations in the engagement organizers, you know, the completion rate in CPA firms has traditionally been low, and you know, if we could get an engagement organizer that’s completely filled out or more complete from clients, it allows us to pick up the work once and proceed that way. So very excited about what you’re doing there, but if I go back and just use a number for our listeners, there’s 48 portals that I’m tracking in the in the CPA, firm, public practice, marketplace, in the US market alone, and each one of them have features that I like. And you know, there’s other features that are missing. You seem to be particularly strong in tax and client accounting services, and seem to be, you know, morphing into larger firms and maybe a little bit of audit PVC, but the engagement organizer breakthrough that I think you’ve done is notable compared to every other one that I’m familiar with in the marketplace. Can you talk to us a little bit about what you were thinking there as you’ve tried to build that out, and some of the gyrations that you went through, because again, in other podcast episodes, in other accounting Technology Labs, we’ve tried to cover all of the dominant engagement organizers in the market. And at this point, I think list CEO’s approach is better than any others that I’m aware of.

Chris Farrell  09:26

Thank you, Randy. I think I want to credit our clients for really helping us with the organizer. And you know, if we look at pain points inside of firms, the number one pain point in just about every firm that has multiple service lines is the client, tax organizer, and particularly in and around forms 1040, you know, when we’re doing business taxes and so forth, a lot of times there’s a professional accountant on the other side, we get their books. It’s much easier, but gathering personal information from an individual is hard. I think most firms are. Right, really, at the point where it’s hours of work for them, and whether it’s printing and sending paper organizers, I think we see response rates to your point are very, very low, or whether it’s having to chase information down via email and phone calls, I think we see 96 97% of firms are doing a lot of that, and it’s the auto nagging for every single document incredibly difficult. And when we get the documents in, we have to match them against the list we received in the prior year to make sure we have reasonable comfort that the client has been able to get through and actually forward all the documents. That takes hours per tax return. And one of the things I think we also know and can recognize is that once we have all the data, the tax prep software is really going to be helpful there, right? It’s going to do a lot of the preparation work, if you will. So if we can gather the documents quickly, the question becomes, wouldn’t individual tax prep move from being a dreaded function to actually being a massive profit generator for every firm who does it. So I think there’s this world we can see, you know, that’s that’s pretty clear, if we make it easy enough for the client, and we get the information back using standard reminder type technology, it could potentially transform tax season from a million hours, you know, a day, every single day, for the season that wants that basically has been causing people to flee the profession into a no overtime. We have this under control. The systems are managing and gathering a lot of the collection there and making it really easy for the clients type of profitability center. So I think the ability for technology, standard good internet technology that consumers can actually use, can completely transform, really, what we view as potentially the most profitable part of accounting out there.

Randy Johnston  12:00

Yeah, and so Chris, just listening to this explanation, Brian and I in other accounting technology labs have talked about the end to end experience from being able to do an engagement letter on the front end, the PBC, gathering, the feeding it into the application, the delivery on the back end, the getting paid, kind of that end to end process going so smoothly. And as I think about the automation that you put in here, you know that’s that’s pretty impressive along the way, and just getting the vision when you’re you’re being a market makers so different. So now, Brian, as you think about the the months inside Licio, you know, they’ve added things like two way text inside the platform at a point in time and so forth. Are there other particular features that you believe would be useful for our attendees to know about? Because we’re in this arc of going from automation to AI, I believe,

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  13:04

well, I think the, I think, honestly, having the having electronic signature in there is important. I think the integration with text is extremely important, because there’s a whole generation that believes that text is the preferred way to communicate. They hate email, they hate phone calls. They don’t really they’re anxious about in person sometimes. And so it really keeps you from being it really keeps your firm from being perceived as an old guy firm by using those older communication methods, as opposed to using the modern ones, while still remaining secure. But again, I would say the, I’d say the business texting, the the auto NAG and the electronic signature, I think are the hallmark items. You know, the organ, the the tax organizer, is actually pretty amazing from the perspective that it will, it will pull data from quite a few different applications, and put it together. And it’s, it’s fairly automated. And so if you, if you think somebody will fill out the organizer, then you can, then you can send them one, and they can, can fill it out. And then you can make, make a much more you know, can take any engagement, make it much more profitable, simply because you’re more apt to have what you think you need, as opposed to just mailing out boxes and boxes of paper and coming back with maybe a few, maybe not. Yeah, so

Randy Johnston  14:37

you know your point? I think Alicia’s approach has been to have a an abbreviated organizer option as well as a comprehensive one, and the way it’s filled out, we’ll ask you about here in just a minute, Chris. But the other thing I know I learned from you this year, Chris, which was like an aha moment for me, was with the right automation, the 1040 tax and. And tax in general can be profitable, and so much of the time the relationship with the client comes from the business and personal tax returns. And so many of our firms have been abandoning this I can tell you, at the CCH user conference, I discussed that this year, and there’s other conferences where I’ve used your idea. So thank you for that, because I believe you are absolutely correct, particularly when we throw on the back end the automation of AI with a product like black or tax autopilot that can eliminate the outsourced labor and get a partner reviewable return. So I see, you know, Licio, providing all the engine to drive that particular automation. And in effect, you’ve been on a mission for a long, doggone time, trying to help the profession, at risk of putting words in your mouth, Chris. But just, just talk to us about this, you know, I’ll call it saving the profession. It’s almost like, feel like I’m saying saving the whales. You know, it’s that type of a comment, because I’ve heard you passionately talk about this in way too many contexts. We

Chris Farrell  16:09

just want to be helpful. Accounting is a profession I love. Will never leave it. Have stayed here my entire career. Always had an incredible belief that we add so much value to every business individually touch. I haven’t met any accountants who aren’t deeply caring about the success of everyone around them. And I think the ability for us to make a small dent in being helpful here is, is quite is very much there. So when we think about, you know, how to, how to really work on, you know, making our contribution to the profession, I think it’s just using the lens that, when we if we look at what most firms are doing from a tax perspective, and I’ll take a, I’ll take a view of maybe a very large firm, why does a very large firm with 500 employees do some number of individual taxes. It’s because the owners, the business owners are serving, need help too, right? They want to have a one stop shop. The big firms don’t make any money. It’s probably a loss leader for them, frankly. Right? To make sure that they can put the chairs around the very busy individuals to help them out. And you know, if we think about, you know, the the fact that it isn’t profitable for them and isn’t profitable for a lot of smaller providers who maybe have considered selling their firms at one time as revenue, even though they had to build that client base over decades, right? That that’s alarming, and I certainly don’t think it needs to be that way. And if I were on the other side, and I were a practitioner today, I would probably be buying up those firms, because if you can get a great client base at 1x revenue, that’s unheard of in most other professions, absolutely unheard of. And I think it’s simply a symptom of having to chase your clients all over, all over the place to get data. If you didn’t have to chase your clients, you could actually sit down do accounting work. How successful would you be? How successful Would you feel, both, you know, emotionally and financially? I think that’s where good modern technology, like getting an organizer back, or is is table stakes. And I’m glad you mentioned, you know, a simple versus maybe a standard or a more comprehensive organizer, a lot of firms would be incredibly successful just getting back a completed document request list with a few basic questions answered, right? And so I think one of the things maybe we can talk a little bit more about today, and maybe show you a bit, is, how do we do that? How do you make it really easy to get that kind of data back. Because I think very simple, very short moves that firms can implement in literally hours. One two hours is what can save many people, hundreds of hours when the chips are down during busy season. And I think this is, this is where we are in today’s modern technology environment.

Randy Johnston  19:00

Well, that sounds super Do you have the ability to show us a bit of that today? Chris,

Chris Farrell  19:04

I’d be happy to I think we can do it. I know we have a lot of people aren’t gonna be able to see screen, so I think we can do it in 30 seconds

Randy Johnston  19:10

or so. Yeah, that’d be great. Because, you know, we’ll, we’ll kind of do the voiceover, if you will, for those of you just listening to podcast version of the technology lab. But having seen this thing work, I’m thinking like my friend George Takei says, Oh my It is so, so good to watch it happen and again, so many of the portals that we have to deal with are so arcane. Having been designed 1015, 20 and 30 years ago, it’s hard to believe that I have to use the word 30 on a portal. Let’s

Chris Farrell  19:41

start with something that’s 30 years old. Shall we? I’m going to share my screen, and this should be coming through now. And we’re starting with a tax organizer that was largely designed 30 years ago. So you can see that here. Yeah, yes,

Randy Johnston  19:56

indeed. Thank you. Tremendous.

Chris Farrell  19:58

So. So most tax organizers haven’t changed for decades, and they don’t change year on year. What we do is we recognize that and work with most of the tax vendors out there. And if I take this organizer and I were to drag and drop it, I would just drag and drop it in the tax organizer section here, unless you that’s the move, what we do is we’ll read that tax organizer. And so what our clients will do is export hundreds of them at a time, 1000s, whatever it might be, and just put them here in batch, in large batches. So

Randy Johnston  20:31

in effect, what you’re saying Chris, instead of printing and assembling and putting them in envelopes and mailing them and all that hours of time and dollars of postage, you just print a batch and drop it into the CEO.

Chris Farrell  20:42

That’s right, it’s the same print process you do. Just instead of sending it to the printer, just send it to your drive and then drag and drop it into us. And what’s great about that is you’re basically done. We read the organizer. We match the organizer to the client using the email address, which is always unique inside, match it to the account and so forth. You can review it if you care to, and you hit send. The product of this is variable based on your needs. So on the right hand side here, this is what we would provide to the client. This would be a mobile view. We know more than half of people who are working with email and so forth. If the client has an email address, they’re probably on their whole phone, right? What you’re seeing here is we’ll summarize the personal information, contact information, the questionnaire, the documents, and a set of anything new type questions, very simple, a client can get through this in minutes and compare that to I have 175 page organizer here on the left. Compare that to the document request list we have for this individual. If I tap on it, it shows me they had a 1090 9r from so fi, the 1090 9r for fidelity and one from mass mutual. All that data is coming from the organizer we’ve pulled out and summarized the docket request list. This person was obviously retired, and they can go ahead click on any of these, upload the file. And if they click on this, they can even use our document scanner right on the phone. They can browse for files in their directory, or they can mark it as not applicable, meaning, when the firm gets this back. They know exactly where every document from the prior year stands. And of course, if they have additional questions about what might be new and so forth, we made it really easy. Did you work as an employee for any other employer during the past year? Or do you have gambling income? I’ll pick that one. They say yes to gambling income. We ask them for the W 2g right? If they don’t have gambling income, which I’ll go back out here, we would go ahead and simply have them say, No, we’ll skip the additional questions. So it’s really, really fast, really easy to get the information back. It comes with an auto nag feature. It comes with a text messaging feature, so if they’re not making any progress on it, and the firm can see exactly where the client is. Client is client doesn’t have to save or anything. There’s a progress bar that shows exactly where the client is in the process. So if they’re not getting anywhere and they might need to go an extension and not responsive, go ahead and text them using our business texting line. So it really kind of puts everything in one simple package, and that’s just for the organizer. We do the same thing for tax delivery, same thing for onboarding checklists. Same thing for monthly closed checklists. How easy Can you make it for the client? How easy can make it for yourself? Yeah,

Randy Johnston  23:27

so, Chris, your point there about all these different onboarding delivery and so forth. We could almost do a whole session on each one of those topics with Lucio. It’s part of the reason, over the past few years, Lucio has remained in my top three recommended portals consistently year to year to year. I believe your current pricing is about $40 for core functionality, about $60 for pro and if you’ve got a lot of seats, you’ve got enterprise pricing that can be done, but the pro version has the two way texting and this building your own requests and PDF editor. So again, from an affordability perspective, compared to the labor of the professionals, this is such a deal as I would see it. So Brian, I know you know I often ask you to just give us parting thoughts and special insights. You know, what else do you think we could have talked about on Licio today that we didn’t, or other things that you consider to be critical? I

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  24:33

just think it’s critical for all of everybody to know that the 90s called and they want their first gen portals back. And I think it’s, I think it’s critical that we get into the modern era with our portals and with our text messaging and other things like that. You know, I’ve got a, I’ve got a doctor appointment that actually showed up with the text message earlier today. And, you know, again, it’s not that. It’s not that a phone call is not good, but sometimes I can’t take a phone call. I can consume that text message whenever. And if I’ve got the mobile app, it will, which I do for this particular practice, it will pop up and remind me of things, even if I’ve blown it and put it on the wrong day in my calendar. So I think, I think taking this kind of experience that other that I think we’d all admit other professions have already embraced, and bringing it into the accounting profession is essential for its long term survival, and it’s essential for to to drive the adoption of accounting services by by folks that are younger, so that we can have a future profession that is, that is a good thing for everybody.

Randy Johnston  25:45

Super Well, Chris, your expertise and insights are valuable. Are there any other items that you wanted to make sure you got said before we conclude this today’s accounting technology lab, I wanted

Chris Farrell  25:58

to thank you both for everything you’ve done to help us along the way. I think the idea that all of us working together with firms, hand in hand to help get the insights and communicate them, learn and so forth, you all have done a tremendous job of that over over the years, and I really want to just thank you for everything you’ve done along the way, in our journey as well. So it’s been a pleasure.

Randy Johnston  26:25

Yeah, Chris, thank you for that. You know, Brian and I, like you said earlier, the accounting profession has been very good to us, and we have stayed in the saddle the whole way, and that’s our intent. So thank you for that. So for the listeners, we really appreciate you listening in. We will talk to you again soon in another technology accounting lab. Good day.

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  26:47 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.

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