Brian Tankersley, CPA, and Randy Johnston review Soraban, an AI-powered system that revolutionizes your practice’s client data intake process by automating and simplifying every step.
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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 today’s accounting Technology Lab. I’m Randy Johnston with co host Brian Tankersley, we have had a series of podcasts on portals, and we’d like to speak about Sora band today. Now, Sora band itself claims that they have an intelligent client coordinator. And along the intelligent client coordinator phrase, they really suggest that they have three different classes of capabilities driven by AI. Now the so many of the products in the marketplace have aI washing. I think this one actually has AI in it, and they say that they can collect and deliver and connect, but the Connect is still in beta, so we do want to caution you on this particular product. It was started in roughly 2019 really became above the, you know, quiet stage in 2021 so we’re dealing with a product that’s about five years old. It’s really only been in the market for about three years, so still relatively new. They do do white labeling of their platform. You know, they do have integrations into a lot of the products that you would use, so Dropbox or share file or Pro Series tax. They are Zapier integrated. They integrate with Lacerte and Drake and ATX and tax wise and smart vault. But carbon just became available. But the the big boys, Thompson, Reuters and Walters Kluwer are not currently included in their list, so the target probably is a little further down market. With this we have, we want products that interface with all of your practice areas, and since we don’t get to talk to you and ask you this question directly, directly, we don’t know if you do tax or client accounting services or audit or other service areas, but we want you to look for portals that function in all of the areas. And this particular product seems very tax centric. It is, you know, a competitor against the Stanford taxes and the trusses, and maybe a little less so the licios that are out there. And so again, Brian, I’m sorry I went on such a long rant to start us off on today’s accounting Technology Lab. But what would you like our listeners to know about sore man?
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 02:42
Well, it’s a, it’s a portal solution, and it’s used by, it’s focused, like you mentioned, primarily on tax. It is a, it is a venture backed application, which means that they’re backed by venture capital. And so, you know, with with venture capital, sometimes it’s hot and sometimes it’s not. And so we have to, we have to just kind of acknowledge that, that again, if it’s a, that’s a that’s a choice they’ve made. So so we have that in here. It also looks
Randy Johnston 03:15
Brian, if I can interrupt on that thought, because I know where you’re going with that, and one of the things you and I are adamant about is we just don’t like, Oh well, I’m going to use your terms that you keep, keep teaching me new terms pimping out data, particularly pimping out client data. We don’t know that, in fact, is happening, but we do know that many of the privacy policies of products grant the software that you’re using permission to get to your data that has been done in non AI products. And I’ve even more concerned in AI based products. In other accounting Technology Labs, we’ve talked about the privacy of data. And one podcast we have not recorded yet that Brian and I have talked about more than once is the sub processors that are named and used. And in fact, I’ve been referring to those as the naughty and nice list. But I know, I know Brian, we’ve got to handle it the way the European Union does, where we have the high risk versus minimal impact classifications of four classifications. So we don’t know if that about Sora band, the founder of Enoch CO has been around this product since 2018 was when he incorporated. So you could read the story on the site for that. But basically they are in Silicon Valley, which has a lot of data harvesting going on in products that are in that area. Again, we don’t know that, in fact about Sora band, but there’s enough indicators in the license agreements that we suspect some of that is there you. Can
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 05:00
look at into its privacy policy and their pivot to acquire Credit Karma and to acquire Survey Monkey, and then some of the some of the things that they do to create their Gen OS. And, you know, again, the the thing about it here is that those venture capital folks are going to be likely trying to get something similar out of out of sorban. Yet again, I’m not saying that. I’m not I read their privacy policy, and it didn’t seem to have a whole lot in there, other than some marketing of non personal, non personal information. But you know, again, it, it looked pretty clean, but, but again, I think we have to be very careful whenever we get around venture capital, because they’re playing different games. Yeah,
Randy Johnston 05:51
well, and you know to be, to be specific on that, Brian, you know the privacy policy as the day of this recording was dated June one of 23 and it quite clearly says we may collect the following types of personal information from you, name and email address, your company’s name and physical address and phone number, the company type and industry unique identifier, such as account numbers and passwords, dates of birth, demographic information, information you choose to provide us and information in connection with your purchase of license of services, bank and brokerage numbers and so forth. Now notice that those claims then they we know they’re gathering it, but what was not clear is you know what’s being done with it after that, they do specifically say where they’ll use it. But you know, again, I don’t want to get too much on a privacy policy side on this, but we are always concerned for public practice, CPAs, accounting professionals. We just don’t want client data to be used by any of these platforms. And Brian has read many of these. And you know, again, I’m sorry to open that can of worms with you today, Brian, because we’re really trying to talk about sorban, but you and I both had that same what do you call it spidey sense? Come up on this one where we say it’s,
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 07:21
yeah, it’s the hair on the back of the neck standing up. But there’s just something about, something about Silicon Valley and data that’s, that’s, that’s, you know, and again, when you start getting AI, the upside of AI is that it will solve problems for the downside of AI is that sometimes your data will be used to train models, and that’s something that that we just have to kind of weigh in here. Now they have tools for collecting information, including a smart, dynamic questionnaire that, again, will convert uploads to PDF and and go through and put all this information together. It’ll also auto remind clients, so they’ve got kind of an auto nag like Lucio and some of the other products we talked about, and you can track the things fairly easily. Again, the the idea here is that they’re they’re utilizing mobile devices, kind of for authentication, and so it gives you a way to go in and provide easy document access, and kind of use that to take some of the difficulty of logging in and using their portal and push it over into the mobile device by sending text messages and things like that. It is fully white labeled, which is, I think, one of the reasons why we’ve seen the bigger firms looking at this, because the firms, most big firms, in particular, don’t want anybody to know the tools behind the scenes. You know, it’s a, you know, it’s a, it’s an important thing for them to have control of the platform and to for everybody to believe that they’re the wizard doing all the things, as opposed to putting together a bunch of Lego blocks. And so they sorban plays well inside that kind of strategy, you can see that there, you know. Now, as we as again, as we look at this, they have a SOC, two, they also have, they also have tools for delivering information. And then this Connect tool that they have, again, is designed to design, to go in and automate some of the lead sheet and other information for K ones and 1090, nines and and again, to do other things in getting the information into the returns and simplifying, simplifying review, and again, integrating with various tax softwares. So we’ve got a lot of things, a lot of things in here they are. I think they are kind of marketing to the public, as opposed to marketing to just the accounting trade press. And you can, you can see that they have a quote from TechCrunch on their website, which is more of a start. Startup, you know, kind of TechCrunch is kind of one of the publications you follow if you’re a startup and you’re trying to raise money, or you want to see who else is raising money, and, you know, deal with what’s going on in the valley, as opposed to, as opposed to that. And I’ll be honest with you, I haven’t seen much coverage of them in many of the trade press. So hopefully they’re, they’re figuring out how to interface with the with the profession better. Yeah, in
Randy Johnston 10:24
fact, that was part of the reason Brian and I wanted to talk about sorban today, because we’re tracking all these various portal products. And we’re, we know it is hard for you as a practitioner to evaluate the claims on many of these. And so when I look at what are, you know, kind of front end, back end claims, we just want to call some of those things out. But again, we think this particular tool, where they’ve been more on the tech side, as opposed to the accounting press side, might have some indicators on it. Now, sore bands, pricing is above competitors in general. They have collect, pricing, deliver pricing, or both collect and deliver. And so the collect is $25 a return, the deliver is $20 a return, and doing both is $40 a return, with a minimum purchase of 50 returns if you get more than 150 it looks like they have Enterprise pricing that they can use with you. So you know when I can contrast this to others, and again, I’m not asking you to buy on price. That’s That’s an unwise thing to do, but you know, in this particular case, you’re going to have front and back of $40 on this. And if you contrast that to, you know, established products life, say, like safe send, or like lisio, or like sure link. You know, this is that the higher end of the market. So I believe it is lower than, let’s say,
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 12:01
now, now, in fairness, they own you only pay for the active clients, active client engagements, and only pay for the clients that engage. So you could potentially, if you you know again, and I think everybody can stick demos on these things. If you took a demo on this and you saw extreme value in this for, let’s say, 50 of your 5000 clients, and you wanted to use this as a point solution for those 50 that maybe weren’t served well with a lower end portal tool, then that might be a particular strategy you look at. But again, that’s creating more complexity as opposed to less complexity in client relations. And so we’ve got to be very we’ve got to be very careful about that. You know, the again, the worst thing you ever did is buy something based solely on price, but, but as we’re looking at this again, it checks a lot of boxes. It’s got the it’s got the SOC two, it’s got, it’s got integrations into other applications. And we’re seeing, again, some adoption inside large firms. So we think this is something that potentially could have some legs, and that’s why we’re talking about it today.
Randy Johnston 13:07
Yeah, exactly, Brian, so thank you for all of those insights. Any other parting thoughts on sorban? Now you did call out the correct thing there? I I’m kind of of the school. I do not want multiple tools. Fewer tools is better for you, I believe, than more tools. And you know, a lot of firms have gotten a splinter in their finger and put a band aid on and gotten another Splinter, splinter in a different finger and put another band aid on. We don’t want you to do that. We want you to be thoughtful about the tool kit that you’re using. And over the next few years, as we transition further and further into SAS platforms, we’re going to have the major decision of, do I stick with my big publishers and be a one sweet type of shop, Walters, Kluwer Thompson, Reuters, or do I do a best of breed approach? But when you do best of breed, sometimes what you’re prone to do is picking lots of different tools, trying to solve the problem, which increases your operating expense, increases your training, increases the integration that has to be done, increases the maintenance. There’s some real tough soft costs when you get way too many tools. So Brian, other parting thoughts,
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 14:19
you know, and since I’m over 50 and my check engine light has come on, I have two or three doctors that I see from time to time, and between them, I have about seven portals that I have to deal with, okay. And that is not the experience that anybody wants, okay. So I would encourage you to try to standardize things. And again, if you can figure out, you know, again, if, if you can find the value proposition that works for all your clients, that’s great. This may be a fit for you, but you know, again, this is a premium product, and I would expect it to, I would expect that it would need to deliver on premium features and and other things. That it may or may not have at this point. So I would encourage you to look at it and again again. It’s, I think the right thing to do is to get the right interface for the level of client service. You want to be, you know, do you want to be Macy’s? Do you want to be Nordstroms? Or do you want to be, I don’t know, Walmart, okay, and it’s okay if you want to be Walmart, okay, this is not a Walmart product. This is more of a Nordstrom product. It’s priced Nordstrom, the feature set, you know, I’m not sure is, is much more than Macy’s at this point, but I encourage you to look at it, take the demo for yourself and see what you think about it.
Randy Johnston 15:39
Very good. Brian, well, we appreciate all of you listening in and we’ll talk to you again soon in another technology accounting lab. Good day.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 15:47
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. Have a great week.
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