Brian Tankersley, CPA, and Randy Johnston continue their travels to the largest conference for accounting professionals, and provide a recap of the 2024 Thomson Reuters Synergy user conference.
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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, welcome
Randy Johnston 00:11
to the accounting Technology Lab. I’m Randy Johnston with my co host Brian Tankersley, we were so pleased to be invited to Thomson Reuters Synergy Conference this year, but at the last minute, I had a personal family conflict and couldn’t go, so I asked Brian to cover the event for us. I was sad not to be there, very sad because there’s so many Thompson Reuters users that we get to meet face to face, and so many of the Thompson Reuters team, and there were some very important goings on. Brian gave me a call briefing. You know, the event, Dave Weil spoke to me after the event. In fact, reached out during the event, saying, I’m sorry you weren’t here. We need to talk. So we’ve got some insights for you that you only get by attending an event like this and by having long term relationships with so many of these people. So Brian, you know, when you were telling me all this, I was like, aghast, agaw at how much had changed.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 01:06
Talk to me about it. It was such a great conference, because I got to meet the new, the new people there. I saw some old friends, certainly, but I got to meet the new people there. And, you know, they’re really, they’re really shaking things up. You know, we hadn’t heard a whole lot. And you know, when you think about, when you think about Thompson, a lot of people think about Ultra tax, which is honestly one of the legacy products in their in their stack of applications. And so they did, they did end on vo tax a couple of years ago. That was their effort to get a cloud based tax application. And they’re, you know, again, but they are. They’re still innovating pretty heavily, you know, they’re, they’re doing great things in audit. They have, they have APIs available in their products, but not in the legacy CS apps. But again, they they’re actually looking at doing APIs into into the on premises Ultra tax application, kind of like sage has with sage, Sage business cloud, where they’ve got the add on, you know, they’ve got the API that kind of overarches the whole thing well. And
Randy Johnston 02:12
as you know, in April, I talked to our friend Louie, who’s managing go file room now, and the APIs are in go file room. So, you know, those APIs
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 02:19
have been around for a while, and they’re and the other cool thing is they’re not charging for APIs. You know, so many people are monetizing APIs today, and it increase, it increases the expense and and Louie, Louie, and again, everybody there said, No, we’re not. They wild too. Said, No, we’re not charging for APIs, which I, I think is great.
Randy Johnston 02:39
Yeah, yeah, I think that is great. Sorry, just talk over there. But you know that that’s exciting, as you can tell. You know, I couldn’t even hardly keep quiet for you to speak, because that’s a big deal. Now, why is it such a big deal? Listeners? Bottom line here is most of these major publishers, Walters, Kluwer, Thompson, Reuters, into it and the like, have all had on a walled garden mentality. You can’t get your data out of our garden, so they put up a wall. APIs are kind of a nice way to pass data in and out, and we are recommending that, particularly in bigger firms, that you leverage the APIs, as Brian would call them, digital plumbing. And you know he, he did get to speak with Dave while, who’s now the general manager for audit within Thompson Reuters tax and accounting. And remember that Dave while was the creator of what was epace became cch engagement, hand of sure prep, which was sold to Thomson Reuters for 500 million. So Dave is very innovative when it comes to technology, forward vision. And
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 03:44
the thing I’ll say here too is since he, since he sold sure prep for a half billion dollars to his partners at sure prep sold for a half billion dollars. The thing that I would just generally say is that Dave has the financial flexibility that that that he can say what needs to be done, and he doesn’t care. He doesn’t have to care if he hacks people off. Now he’s Dave’s, Dave’s a good enough business person. He’s not going to do that, but, but Dave, Dave has the flexibility to because he’s now the general manager of audit, and Dave now has the flexibility to really take a free hand, you know, so because the tax business and the research business, TR is is overshadowed by the by the light legal business, which is triple the revenue of tax in accounting, okay, but audit, there is no, there is no body else in audit. So Dave, kind of, you know, the way I look at it here is Dave, kind of has a blue ocean where he can go do what he needs to do and make audit great again. I guess is
Randy Johnston 04:49
there. And so, as you know, both of us always admired Melissa yard’s work creating advanced flow, which is now called Engagement Manager. And of course, we had. The evolution of the PPC smart aid tools into checkpoint engage, which is now called Guided assurance. And you know, this evolution of their cloud based platform with Dave driving that shows promises I would see it. And Dave and I did talk about quite a number of things that I would consider more confidential. But you know, when listening to his enthusiasm and vision and his independent nature that you’ve just described Brian, you know, he was, he was very clear about what he was going to try to do, and then that, that’s why I appreciated the conversation with him so much. But I
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 05:41
think he’s, you know, if I, if I had to compare him to a figure in technology, I think he’s close. I think he’s pretty close to the Steve Jobs of of accounting technology, you know, maybe I’m, you know, he’s, he’s a little offbeat, he’s a little different. He’s made some pretty amazing things happen, you know, with E pace, and with sure prep, and the sure prep outsource, and the methodologies you set up there, and now with some of the things you know, so I’m quite excited to see what the the and one more thing are going to be coming from him in the future. Yeah, yeah,
Randy Johnston 06:17
it’s, in fact, I, you and I both know about those at this point. But, you know, speaking of sure prep, what’s happening there?
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 06:23
Well, they’ve got auto categorization capabilities with AI and machine learning within tax caddy. This is a thing called review ready. It is in beta test this tax season, generally available mid year, next year. And and the beta test, you can contact your salesperson. They were signing up people. It was limited. They’re going to let people do about 100 returns through it per firm. And so it was a way to kind of pilot that and get that going. So it’s, it’s it. That was a very interesting tool here, that that that, again, gets them closer to some automated prep. Now, in 2024 they’re launching a smart launching later this year, they’re got a smart analysis capability to find anomalies or high risk transactions in the in the cloud audit suite. Okay, again, this is the Engagement Manager product Randy was just talking about. There is an AI test tool. Now we’ve heard us talk about both Validus and validate in previous Technology Labs, and I actually got a chance to talk to Jeff ramlich for a while at Synergy and and just to kind of talk to him, but it’s, it’s pretty amazing the things they’re doing and the things that are coming in fairly short order. So right now, they’re gonna, you know, basically, they’ve licensed the valid as platform, and they can, they can pull in all kinds of stuff out of out of most ERPs, and into Validus, and then they have validate that will that will get automate the testing and the confirmation, so it’s, there’s, there’s, there’s some pretty, some pretty cool stuff going on there. And again, that’s another place where they partnered.
Randy Johnston 07:59
And, you know, on this point, friends, Brian and I both got a briefing from Jeff at AICPA engage in mid 24 he’d given us the heads up on what was going to happen, and fundamentally, the Validus tool now can read financials in from any system we did assist as a point of disclosure, Validus manual methodologies to recommend which systems they interfaced. And they’ve been slogging along, kind of like we did with Avalara, who, you know, slugged along through 30 or 40 systems then, and found a way to really leverage it. They’ve got that leverage now. And this one two pair, you probably want to look at our other accounting Technology Lab on Validus and valid eight, just to get a sense what this is, but it’s a really good combination, and I
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 08:44
want you to get that these tools are not exclusive to TR so if you’re a CCA shop, you can use Validus and validate all day long every day. They just have licensed some of the technologies to help them ingest the data in from things. And right now, I think we
Randy Johnston 09:01
have recommended Validus and validate all day long. And you know the forensics capability of validate, when I first saw that I was in your office at the time, Brian, it was like, oh my, oh, oh my, my, George decay from Star Trek, oh my, that’s really good stuff, but Validus was good from the first time I saw two perfect, no, usable, yes, helpful, pretty sure so. And
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 09:26
they have gotten incrementally better and better and better over the what 10 years we’ve we’ve seen them. You know, they’re, they’re the overnight success that nobody knew about for the first 10 years of their existence. They they also have the checkpoint edge. CO counsel is generative, AI that works with the research in there. That’s that’s again, that’s again. We’ve talked about the CO counsel previously. So just note that’s there. There were a number of one source announcements for enterprises. Most of these are going to be for big clients, a tool for a. Tool for global minimum tax and tax provision, a tool for E invoice with pre built ERP integrations for folks that have that some product classification and mapping in one source, global trade, again, for the big companies. Now, I actually had a chance to talk for about about an hour to Elizabeth bistrom, the president of TR tax and accounting. And she was actually a, if I’m remembering correctly, she was a Deloitte auditor back in the day, and actually has a daughter, that is, that is at USC, that is interning at Deloitte now. So it’s, it’s an interesting, you know, she’s very interesting and a breath of fresh air in the as we discussed in here. You know, we had a, we had a, we had a very interesting conversation about the about the future of the profession, and kind of where, where she saw it going, but she heard, she generally said, as did Dave, she generally said that they couldn’t move fast enough internally. And so they have decided that they were going to get innovation wherever they could. And so if they could innovate internally and get it done, they were going to do it. And if they had to partner, they were going to do it. Because the profession is moving very rapidly, and they want to, they want to be the provider of choice.
Randy Johnston 11:12
And that is such a breath of fresh air, because I’ve actually heard it said so this is repeating conversations, not my opinion. You know, if it’s not invented in Dexter, it’s not squat. If we didn’t create a Nan Arbor, it’s no good.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 11:29
And we’ve seen, we’ve seen so many good pieces of technology where they didn’t have enough market, and instead of adopting the superior technology that didn’t, that didn’t get adopted in the market because they didn’t have the marketing muscle to do it. I to do it. Instead of doing that, we’ve seen stuff get killed off in favor of the legacy Thompson apps that were built in Dexter. And it’s, it’s such a breath, you’re right? It’s such a breath of fresh air to see, to see them going outside and just saying, Hey, we’re trying to put together the Super Friends. You know, we’re not trying to put together the mafia, where everybody’s related. We’re trying to put together the Super Friends. Yeah,
Randy Johnston 12:07
a good, a good example of that, frankly, became materia, which I met the founders earlier this year, and, you know, about 90 days ago, in the late third quarter, materia got an investment from Thompson Reuters, as I recall, about $4 million and from four under other investors for two and a half million dollars. Yet, Thompson then turned around and just bought the materia platform, which is an AI assistant generative AI platform that does a tax audit, accounting, summary of documentation, and you know, that’s a pretty interesting acquisition for them. I don’t know if you got to talk to many of the materia people, but I’ve known them for only about a year, but I was pretty impressed with what they had. But one of their restraints, as I saw it, is they had only licensed checkpoint content, which put them at risk, as I told them early in the year, I said, you know, that means your only path is an exit to Thompson, as I see it, because if Thompson won’t license the content to you, your platform will implode. And you know, I’m pleased that it’s evolved this way because it’s good bit of technology,
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 13:23
yeah, and it’s, it’s honestly something that this, this off the wall, moonshot thinking is something, you know, the personality type that does, that doesn’t go take a nine to five with a fortune 500 company like TR, I mean, they, they want to go do their thing, and they, they want to try new, new, Crazy things that don’t fit into into, you know, the consultant world. Now they also, this is a big deal for the people that are on virtual office. CS, I think, is that they moved over to the Microsoft Azure platform from Amazon Web Services. And they said they also, they actually had, in their opening keynote, they had almost an apology from the the CTO. I think it was that, you know, and he wasn’t there. He recorded a message, and he was staying man mining the shop, while everybody else was off at the off in Orlando, doing the meeting. But he said they, they had, they had set up to do much more load testing to validate that their services aren’t going to buckle under peak loads. And so that, I think, was a very big deal because of Microsoft’s I think Microsoft has a superior stack for, for machine learning and for for AI to what AWS has and what some of the others have. Furthermore, it integrates, it’s going to give them better integration, potentially, with Microsoft intra ID, formerly Active Directory. And I think the beautiful part about that is that it really, it really makes it a lot easier for everything to work truly seamlessly, because you’re dealing with the. Products that are you’re dealing with, the products that, again, that everybody’s using in the profession. Now, in the opening keynote, they had, again, they talked about an online client profile dashboard at Ultra tax.com an offline mode for single sign on, fillable PDF organizer. They had some new things in go sit in Ultra tax, in go system. They had a tax return, import, export feature and some increased help. Content, for sure, prep. They had a live sync with go system, tax, Rs, so, so again, they’re, they’re moving forward in those areas. An audit, they talked about the improved UI in the engagement manager, and formerly, again, advanced flow and guided assurance. And they’ve they’ve said that they’ve improved the speed of accessing and opening files. Again, this is another place where I think the Azure, Azure data centers generally seem to be from the folks I’ve talked to that are running them. They’re running on these platforms. The Azure things seem to be more robust in scaling in peak times. They also have the ability to edit PDFs directly in the application. Now. For the other things they talked about, they had some new 1040, resources for the practice forward advisory methodology that they’re teaching. And they actually said they wanted me to come to one of their practice award things, to talk to folks and learn more things about it on video. Had some new custom fields, dashboards and fillable PDFs. And then in go file room, our friend Louie has gone through it and set up that we have 50 steps now in a workflow, and they can also do self service document restore. So, so again, some, again, some, some pretty big deals here. And so, you know, again, as we, as we look at these, this is kind of, this slide is kind of my summary in here of the major announcements. Again, the new client dashboard, enhanced data, import, export and ultra tax in go system, better integration with Ultra tax, and the release of live sync for go system for audit intelligence. We talked about the alliances with Validus validate and an alliance with audit minor audit minor is, is, you know, the the lovely and talented Kelly man’s startup that that is rethinking everything surrounding DOL limited scope audits and is really making it possible to ingest and use trust statements that you get from from these financial institutions and really make these things, make these audits really much more automated. So it’s a very big deal there. They’ve announced APIs for engagement manager are going to be coming out in q1 2025 so now we’ll have a cloud based engage, cloud based engagement tool, the former advanced flow, now engagement manager that integrates with the guidance and has APIs at no charge. And so that’s a I think that’s a pretty big deal as well. They announced the review ready stuff, where it gets a new feature that includes the Gen AI assistance. They expect it to save a couple hours on every return. It incorporates data input using sure prep and uses the tax caddy, tax organizer. And then finally, they’re launching an advisory solution to help firms develop their advisory offerings. And again, the remaining remain strategies. Okay, so yeah,
Randy Johnston 18:18
so no, and listening to Brian summarized those a couple of key but points that he made, you know, being able to save a couple hours in a tax return. I heard a similar claim from Dave in the audit tools and the evolution of the advisory services. You know, Thompson led that at a point in time there are some misery strategies that others are trying to build, and Brian and I will talk to you about those in other technology labs we’ve done in the past, we’ll do in the future, but just recognize that I was really surprised at how many advisory platforms got created in the past Year, and many of those are now worthy of us, discussing them with you and suggesting that it’s time to adopt
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 19:08
now. The The other thing to move forward with Randy is going to be the the coke checkpoint edge co counsel, you know, this is their, this is their AI product, and this is kind of their that you know, this is a product that’s been in market for a while. It’s actually done quite well. It is on AWS right now. I don’t know if it’s going to migrate Azure or not. I suspect it will, but we’ll see where that goes. They do have a generative AI assistant so you can get answers to complex research things. They also have an AI assisted research skill on checkpoint edge. And again, they, they’ve, they’ve taken care here to make sure that this is, this is going to give, give the folks that have it answers that are correct. And so they’ve, they’ve kind of dialed down the, you know, the the hallucinations that are in that are so. Associated with some of the large language models, and they’ve set up a methodology that that is going to give more trusted, vetted content, as opposed to just making things up out of whole cloth, you know, like a eyes want to do now for simplification of tax research, they’ve gone through again, and there’s a dialog you can do with Gen AI. You can ask questions in everyday language. It’ll provide relative answers links in a formal, technical manner for sophisticated users, and it will also write client correspondence in a simplified manner. They again, the idea here, again, is to save that two hours, and so that’s the that’s in here. Now they also had a vision for what professional AI assistance, and this is, I think this is probably the, the the closing slide that we’re going to talk about today. But, but looking at this, though, the idea is that you have co counsel as your AI assistant, and then tax research. It is incorporated into that. With checkpoint edge. The tax workflow is incorporated in with review ready, the audit workflow automation, with audit intelligence, the advisory with CO counsel for tax planning, the skills where it can draft, communications, review, extract, summarize, do those kinds of things, and they’re working on more AI skills to come. It is, again, they’re, they they’re doing authoritative content that’s part of the checkpoint platform that is, again, that’s well respected, and one of the, one of the leading platforms in the industry. And again, they, they’re, they’re being very fastidious about the AI capabilities, the platforms and the securities they’re trying to get best, you know, the the best of all out there. And again, they’re, they’re doing this with free APIs, which I think is a pretty big deal, cause, again, you’re, you’re not going to solve every problem the way you want to with one firm, one organization solution. So you’re going to have some point solutions that you apply in different places. And this makes it, you know, the free APIs are going to make it quite a bit easier to do that. Yeah, so
Randy Johnston 22:07
for our listeners on this point, as you know, if you’re listening only, we do have video distribution on these on YouTube and other platforms if you’d like to see them that way. But also note that kind of a big, I’ll call it departure, strategic maneuver that Thompson has done. Brian and I were both fairly concerned with the dominance of legal, as he mentioned earlier in this episode, that legal would drive a lot of this, and that was true with the AI assisted research on Westlaw, I think it was called Westlaw precision, and we were afraid that this Westlaw legal AI would be the kind of the path forward for Thompson tax and accounting with the materia acquisition, which is doing those draft communications and reviews and extractions. The materia platform on AI seems to be a good accounting centric private AI platform. So like competitor, Walters Kluwer had built their own private AI platform out of Switzerland, in effect, Thomson Reuters moved fast by doing an acquisition of somebody who had built an AI centric platform. Now that may be a little overstated there, Brian, but that’s kind of my view of what’s happened here. And so instead of using the legal AI, there’s actually a accounting AI that is the building block going forward.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 23:36
And I think honestly that that is, that is, that is huge for TR, I think cause, and it’s huge for the profession, because we know legal and accounting are similar, but they’re they’re second cousins. They’re not brother and sister, okay? And so as as we look at this, I think it’s important that we get the right tool set for the profession, and that tool set is going to be different than the one that legal uses, because legal is just different,
Randy Johnston 24:07
just different. Yeah, and, you know, the other thing that I want to call out, and there’s lots of smart branding people out there, and through the years, we’ve watched a lot of brands get squandered. And, you know, over the past, recent past, we’ve talked about CS, the creative solutions, applications, and Thompson getting long in the tooth and getting replaced. We can see a trend line on that now. And the other thing to note is CO counsel is kind of an AI branding. So whenever you see AI or CO counsel in a Thompson name right now. That indicates there’s some AI assistance. Is really what’s in there. So, you know, this really leads me to be even more sad, Brian, that I wasn’t at synergy with you. Because, you know, being able to talk to, you know, Elizabeth Thompson, so you know, the new CEO, and.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 24:59
I didn’t give you the color commentary, all the color commentary I had, but I talked to the folks that were in charge of all the product lines, including the research, research product lines, and, you know, getting the tax products as well as the audit products, as well as the division president. And I’ve got to say that they’re all very impressive people. And I think they’ve, I think they get the message and they are going to move forward. You know, we really had a big changing in the guard over the last seven years or so at TR and it looks like they have and they had a huge reorg where they switched from being almost an autonomous business division to being part of the bigger entity, and we were quite anxious about how that was going to work out. And again, we thought that the legal was going to suck up all the resources, and then the accounting folks were going to be left with scraps. But then they acquired sure prep, and then they acquired materia, and they proved us wrong. And and now Dave is in charge. Dave, one of the most innovative folks in the industry, is in charge of audit, and so I’m, I’m quite excited about about where we’re headed, where they’re headed, and I think it’s, it’s going to be fun to watch Thompson cch into it and Iris duke it out over the next, over the next few years, because I think the winner is going to be the profession, Because the right tools are going to be created, because the competition is going to force everybody to bring their A game all day, every day.
Randy Johnston 26:28
Yeah. So you know, in this session, as you might know, Brian and I, well, we’ll use George Carlin’s word here. We get to learn some stuff, and as we learn stuff, we really like sharing stuff with you, but we try to be factual, but we also give you at least enough of our informed opinion of where we think things are going. It is such a pleasure to see Thomson Reuters make this turn, because when I see reputable companies stumbling, it bothers me. And it is so nice to see these guys walking steady and picking up the pace and starting to run
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 27:07
well, you know, just to, just to reinforce this, I will just say that the the best days of QuickBooks Online, the best days of Small Business Accounting were when zero and QBO were absolutely in that death, in that, in that, you know, war to try to take over that market. And you know, it’s that that is kind of waned, and it makes me sad right now, because, you know, the innovations aren’t happening as rapidly there, but, but the good news for everybody here is that the innovations are going to be coming fast and furious from everybody. And we are truly, you know, in addition to the changes because of private equity and consolidation and things like that, we are truly living in interesting times, and so stay tuned. We’ll try to keep you up to date to the extent we can on the podcast. Yeah,
Randy Johnston 27:52
and, you know, just two other kind of generic, non Thompson related comments of that same ilk. We are always excited when competitors are duking it out, when they’re fighting with each other, because, as you said, Brian, the profession wins. And the same thing is going on with AI platforms right now. We’re generally for CPA firms, recommending Microsoft copilot 365 because we believe it to be the safest platform with your data, as opposed to perplexity or Claude or Gemini or chat GPT or or llama, you know. But we like the competition, because the AIs are improving rapidly. And it makes me, you know, at this time of year reflective, because we are going to make forecasts for you in another accounting Technology Lab on the future, but it makes me reflective, because we’re turning into the 40th year of Microsoft Excel next year, and having been around with Dan Bricklin for visit Calc and helping create lotus, 123, and designing the Accounting format in Excel, I was thinking about Dorothy Lou just the other day in that conversation where nobody would use the Accounting format in Excel and pivot tables. What do you mean? People want something like that? Nah, I don’t think so. So we’ve been very fortunate to watch these products leapfrog each other through the years. I am super excited about the future, whereas I’ve been somewhat despondent about 2023 and 2024 because it was like so many of our friends and publishers were lost. I think maybe we’ve turned the corner that things are much brighter in the future. And so with that in mind, we hope that you’ll continue to revisit us. Remember you can see this cast on our video platforms as well, but in the meantime, we appreciate you listening in, and we’ll talk to you again very soon in another technology accounting lab. You have a great day. You.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 30:00
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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Tags: Accounting, Firm Management