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

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

Welcome to the accounting Technology Lab, sponsored by CPA practice advisor. With your hosts, Randy Johnston and Brian Tankersley,

Randy Johnston  00:10

welcome to the accounting Technology Lab. Brian and I would like to speak to you today about a reporting tool called sift analytics that’s spelled with a Y, sift analytics. Now, sift was founded in 2018 they really started as a solution to replace manual Excel models, trying to be more efficient. They were based in South Africa in their start, so you’ll see that they have a little bit more of a global bent as they go. They company offers a variety of tools for financial reports, dashboards, visualizations and KPI analysis, and they really are trying to break more into the forecasting area. Now the founders, Matt, Matt step off, who? And I’ll have trouble with the names, because they’re South African, eltherios karazinis and vengeless kirizinis. Okay, so there were two co founders in a and a chief product officer, but you can tell they’re somewhat related. These guys have built a pretty bloody impressive product. They are currently connected to about 150,000 entities. You don’t have to listen to us, though. You can actually try this in a 14 day trial if you choose. But what Brian and I would like to do is to take you through the basic attributes of SIFT and, you know, help you understand why it is worthy of being considered as a reporting tool. Now the last thing I want to say before I ask you, Brian to explain some of this, both of us have had the privilege of speaking at scaling new heights. And a lot of the scaling new heights attendees are using QuickBooks, and many are using zero and Zoho nowadays. And you know, if you think back, we’ve been teaching firms to do client accounting services for 25 pushing 30 years at this point, part of the issue is, if you’re trying to build a an effective cast or advisory service, it’s hard to to get your toolkit right. And as you and I both know, my last count was, I’m tracking 92 different QuickBooks reporting products alone. So how can our listeners pick the right product? And earlier this week, one of the scaling new heights, people said, you know, Randy in 2025 we’d really like you to do a session on reporting tools, and it’s like, oh my, as my friend George Takei would say, oh my, there’s that’s a big request. So I’ve been thinking about that request, but then it dawned on me that for our listeners here on the accounting Technology Lab, sift made some sense to discuss. So what would do you think our listeners should know about sift?

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  03:03

Well, it’s a tool that will do both online reporting, so it’s it. You know, we’ve talked about other other tools that will, that will deliver reports online, but this will do reports either in paper or or it’ll let folks access them through a portal. You can do collaboration, so you can ask questions on things. And again, it has a has, again, think of it like a kind of like a Facebook for financial information, so you have graphs, financials, forecast, budgets, other pieces like that. In here, you can again, export them to PDF, Excel or Word, if you want to. They have the you can white label it, so you can actually set up your own, your own look and feel, and make the financials look the way you want them to, as opposed to the way they look again. That’s a that’s a big problem a lot of people have with QuickBooks, is that it’s again. It does things at at one level, and if you don’t like that level, well, you got to click a lot. As we’re looking at this, though, it does, in addition to doing financials, it’ll do dashboards. It’ll do receivables and long term forecasting. It will do cash flow forecasting and also give you insights on customers and products. Now the thing about this is that it, you know, it does do consolidations. And so the consolidation, it will do consolidations for different tools, QuickBooks, online, zero, the and again, many, and I think they’ve got one or two others that they integrate with. But the idea is that you can do the eliminations. You can again, go through and and again, post your your your different purchase accounting things and your and again, those different pieces, they can actually there’s no fixed limit on how many things you can consolidate. And again, you can consolidate for things out of zero QuickBooks on. Line they list sage accounting. I’m assuming this is Sage Intacct, books, desktop NY will be exact, Fresh Books, free agents, tool used quite commonly in the UK vacuum, Attica, NetSuite, and again, Sage Intacct. So I’m it’ll also support Trial Balance uploads in Excel and other formats as well. So,

Randy Johnston  05:20

so, you know, as you were trying to, yeah, there’s a lot, as you were trying to name all those products, Brian, you know, there are products that they that you didn’t name that are included, the Myo bees, the exacts, the acumaticas. So, you know, I’m looking at this as a reporting tool that can connect to a wide variety of systems that you may choose to use in your cast product practice or your clients may be using, you know, Shopify and gusto and of course, they like many of these products, they’ve done the Zapier connections as well. So the integrations are interesting to start off. But the other thing that is absolutely available in this platform, which we recommend people always look for when they’re acquiring new entities or new products, is they have API access. So the APIs are very powerful and very comprehensive along the way. So you’re correct, lots of different reporting, lots of consolidations, lots of integrations. And, you know, as it turns out, the financial statements are, you know, pretty straightforward. I think because of their South African roots, they’ve done a lot of IFRS and gap so they can handle both. And I think their goal is to continue to expand their ledger integration footprint so they can continue to expand their financial reporting along the way. Now you know this system also does version control for disclosures and financial statements. They work with flexible time periods. For example, they have not for profit reporting spanning years and so forth. And there’s many other things that are, you know, very sophisticated for this class of product. So one other thing that you know a lot of accountants tend to use is that you can link any of the data, financial data, to Excel or Google Sheets. So you know, they’re basically playing those two worlds along the way. And certainly that is helpful. But there is another review of facility that I would call out. Again, I usually turn to you when I’m thinking about, you know, audit and fraud, because you just seem to have good insights in that area. But you know, the product claims to, you know, assist with checking your own data for errors, but also for fraud detection. So any particular call outs that you might have in this area. Brian, you

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  08:11

know, it will go through and identify over the receivables and payables. It will look for duplicates. It will look for it will look for things that are dormant, and it will try to clean up those things. You can do, sales tax, VAT, GST reports and reviews off of here and again. The the key things here is that it’s going through and it’s looking for the doing this anomaly detection, looking for things where you can actually go through and adjust the weighting of those of those factors and other things, but it, but it will go through and again and do things like allocations. So you got, you got a lot of interesting things, again, that can be done with this tool.

Randy Johnston  08:53

Yeah. So I’m, I’m actually laughing as you’re trying to explain that to me, because one of my original partners used to say we’d look for the dogs and the cats in the database, and I appreciate your sound effects with the dogs barking. So that was a nice little ad there. Dad, yeah,

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  09:11

well, you know, it’s when you got five dogs. They especially with those two, those two puppies we just got, they love to play, and they, I wondered if you could hear it, I’m sorry.

Randy Johnston  09:22

It’s actually all good. It’s the dogs and the cats and the financials forever now, so Well, let’s take a look, though, over at the pricing of this product. Because, you know, a lot of these accounting Technology Lab podcasts, we close up with the pricing piece, and this vendor has multiple levels of pricing, standard at $19, a month, plus at 39 advanced at 79 and scale at 119 and what I’d like for our listeners to consider is some of the features that are included in various programs. Now they’ve done a nine. Job on comparing their key features, on their plans, on their pricing page. For example, all levels of product include cloud accounting spreadsheets and consolidations, but the ERP products are only available in their scale their $119 product. But if you

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  10:23

can, there’s an additional four, 499, a month looks like exactly.

Randy Johnston  10:27

So there’s going to be some, you know, things that you’ll pay more for. But fundamentally, a whole lot of features are included across all the platforms. So let’s just call out one that’s not the style library and being able to put themes that’s not in the standard offering at 19. But if you go to the plus offering, you get it and it’s in all the others. And as we had already called out, the i person gap and the AI data review and the spreadsheet link, those are all additional charges at $125 a month to add those features. They are included in the scale option though on this product. So consolidations is really what separates most of these different levels of platform for this vendor, you can do consolidation across unlimited entities and do eliminations in the standard product. But if you’re going to do deal with currency or budgets and forecasts, disposals and so forth, you’re going to have to get up into the plus. And if you’re going to do division segmentation, you’re going to have to be in advanced and so forth. But again, very impressive. How much is included in the base products? I think maybe the last area I might have you call out Brian is the analytics section, because here transaction level drill down and business valuations and KPI and ratio analysis are in the standard product, but they are not but there are additional features not included in plus so,

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  12:11

so, so in the plus product, it that adds customer behavior and product and subscription analytics. And then when you move up to advanced, you get dynamic ledger tables, Conditional Formatting and industry benchmarking. The AI, again, is priced on a per entity basis at $9 $9 per entity per month, and the scale version actually includes 10 entities with it. They have, they have wide range of support options, including onboarding classes and implementation support. They also have, they also have single sign on integrations and and again, SOC, two GDPR reports. And again, you can, you can even set up your own hosted domain or sub domain to to handle this, if you white label, but the higher level and

Randy Johnston  13:04

your own dedicated server. So if you are you know of the type that you want to keep everything in house. That is also a feature that this product has. So you can hear listener Brian and I just cover things at a high level with you on this product. It’s a very interesting reporting product. It’s not your father’s automobile, as we might say. So, you know, I don’t know whether to really call this a mid market reporting product or a entry level product. We do know that a lot of the big firms, Grant Thornton and BDO and so forth, PKF and others are using the product. But we also know that at the price point that it is, you’re not really talking tons of dollars if you can use the standard or the Plus features inside the platform. So Brian, I wanted you know our listeners to at least be aware of SIFT I realized just how many reporting products that you and I probably need to cycle back through and say, Oh, here’s another one. Oh, here’s another one. We’ve done that early in the life of the technology lab, but there’s been so many developments because of AI, because of APIs, because of Zapier integrations and so forth. But this looks like a real deal. Yeah,

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  14:23

this transition to online reporting, I think, is, is a important one for firms to make, just because it’s, I think, you know the as we get into advisory, you know the need for real time data, and the need for real time financial reporting and transaction reporting, I think, is critical. And so this moving to online reporting is a is a very important thing you need to be looking at for your cash stack, even if you’re not going to do the transaction processing in real time. You know, through throughout the month, as opposed to in a batch at the end of the month, it’s still important to get this go. Doing so that you can, so that you can, again, effectively, do a better job with people and and do a better job with collaborating with people. And again, this gives you kind of a portal that will let you do just that.

Randy Johnston  15:13

Well. One final comment on my side is this platform also has limited benchmarking in it. They claim that they’ve got anonymized data from a couple of 1000 businesses in five industries. That’s still pretty thin. We have been we have dealt with other benchmarking products where there wasn’t enough data to be anonymized properly. But this, this vendor, is making a lot of progress. When you consider starting in 2018 where they are now, six years later, that’s very impressive progress. Again, many of you use native reports inside your accounting software system, and you’re struggling getting these reports done in Excel or Google Sheets. We’d really like to have the right type of reporting tool to automate the information for your firm and your clients, and we think sift is worth a look see. Well, we appreciate you listening in to Brian and I on this, and we will talk with you again very soon. Thank

Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA  16:16 you for sharing your time with us. We’ll be back next Saturday with a new episode of the technology lab from CPA practice advisor. Have a great week.

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