Hello, my name is Vince Schembri. I’m the president of WOWzer technologies. I want to tell you today about the fakeness of the accounting and bookkeeping industry.
I’ve always had a love for numbers ever since I can remember. And when I was in high school in my later years, I was asked the question that most people, have been asked, “what do you want to be when you grow up?” I was asked, “what do you want to do when you’re out of school?”
Honestly, the only thing I could come up with is what could I do with numbers? And my, teacher at the time, she says, “well, you could go into sciences, mathematics.” And I had already looked at those possibilities and I just wasn’t interested. And then she said, “what about accounting?”
Numbers are like air in my lungs...
I realized, here was a way to predict a final outcomes...
I said, “what’s that?” She asked me to sit down and says, “let me show you what it is.” She brought out some, ledger paper, which had columns and rows. And she explained, how things are captured on this kind of paper. “Every day you list what the transactions are, and then you have totals at the end of the month.” I thought, okay this looks interesting.
She says, “here’s a suggestion; Why don’t you take a course and that we’re offering and see what you think of it?” Well, I took it and I loved it right off the bat. And there was the second course. I took that one too.
I loved that one even more, so much that I got straight A’s. All of a sudden, I realized here was a way to use numbers, to predict a final outcome over time. I recognized it right away because what I saw was the recording, the accounting for, people’s habits. People repeat themselves, whether it’s business or personal.
I got to see how accounting worked and sure enough, that’s the path that I went on. I was excited about being able to predict an outcome.
I started out with pen and paper and low and behold, spreadsheets came about and that was a revelation. The reason it was revelation is because when we create financial information, it’s not on one sheet it’s on multiple sheets. With pen and paper, my biggest issue was how do I make sure that a piece of information that’s on this piece of paper is transported correctly over to another piece of paper, and how that’s affected and so on and so on.
Well, spreadsheets resolved that issue because we have so many cross references to deal with. But, but the issue with spreadsheets was it didn’t have a systematized way to produce the information in a way that is recognized by everybody else. Well, that was solved with accounting and bookkeeping software, because now all you had to do is take the information, put it into the modules, and you could print out whatever reports you want.
...that was solved with accounting and bookkeeping software.
I got the the point where I felt like a fake..
I thought I had died and gone to heaven, to be honest with you. Now I had a way to enter my data and produce the reports for my clients. It started out really well, because what had happened is, I had a client and then I had two, then I had four, then I had eight, then I had 16, then I had 32 and then it just went on from there. The issue was, it’s still all based on manual labor and data entry, all the way through.
So even when we went from pen and paper to spreadsheets to accounting software, after a while, month after month, year after year, it kind of got to me. To be honest with you, I just wanted out, I got to the point where I felt like a fake.
What had happened is, I started out with the intent of producing data for my clients, that gave them the opportunity to see what was happening and therefore be able to predict the future. But over time as this went on and on and on and on, even though I had a team of people helping, the end user of our work, turned out to be the government entities. Who just wanted to know about my customers corporate income tax, their sales tax, their payroll tax, their other taxes and WCB and so on. With my client’s paying for it.
I thought, this isn’t right, this is fake. This is not as supposed to be, it’s supposed to be for my client, but I just couldn’t get it to them in a timely fashion to be beneficial. It wasn’t relevant at all. So, in fairness, the entire industry’s exactly the same it wasn’t any different.
I thought this isn't right, this is fake!
Everybody's doing exactly the same thing.
That’s what I mean by the fakeness of the accounting and bookkeeping industry. Everybody’s doing exactly the same thing. We’re reporting information, two months, three months, five months, six months behind. How relevant and useful is that to the client that we’re supposed to be serving? And who was paying for the bill.
It got to the point where I just had enough and I wanted out. That was it. I just wanted out, I wanted to change. Being a man of man of faith, I prayed about it said, Lord, show me a better way, or I’ll go find something else to do.
Sure enough, when I pray, those kinds of prayers, I get the answer. The answer came in the form of cloud accounting software. I happen to see it with Xero and I’m using them even to this day.
What I realized was that the software answered the question; “Can I produce relevant information, financial information that is useful to my client clients, that they can use to have an advantage in business and, or know where they are today when it’s information, that happened today?” And the answer is, YES, that is exactly what would happen.
I got really, really, really excited because all of a sudden, what I had envisioned in my youth was now available. But not only that, it was also relevant because the machines do the work. It’s not laborious anymore. If you code the information properly in this piece of software, it will produce what you want.
...you can have an advantage.
...those receipts, you can throw them away!
On top of that, now they have OCR technology. You can actually grab your receipt and use a piece of software called Hubdoc on your mobile phone, take a picture of that receipt and it reads the receipt. It reads the date, It reads where you went, it could be the vendor or a Starbucks. Wherever it is, it reads the amount and it also extracts the taxes and takes that receipted information and push it right over to the accounting software, so it matches with the bank feeds as well.
So now you’ve got information from the actual receipt to the accounting software and they match, and guess what you do with those receipts, you can throw them away. Another major hang-up gone, because now not only can it be automated, you could be paperless as well.
I’m sure clients don’t like building up all the receipts, putting them in a shoe box and then giving it to the bookkeepers and accountants. I don’t like it, accountants don’t like it. One of the reasons that we don’t like it is because it’s too much paper and all comes at once. How are we going to know what actually happened?
But…if information is gathered on an ongoing basis, as it’s happening, you can get those answers and your records can be done properly. That’s what I love about it. Not only that, the software allows us to also get what bank and credit card statements. It actually pulls them electronically as well. So if you, even if you don’t have paper receipts, it can also accept PDF copies and emails as well, and it’s able to extract the information.
Accountants don't like it.
Accountants and bookkeepers call it a "necessary evil."
Can you imagine that as a business owner? You never started in business to wear another hat an accounting, bookkeeping, hat, new software removes all those issues. In the past, I didn’t want to do bookkeeping, I practiced avoidance.
I’ve even heard people say accountants and bookkeepers say things like this, “it’s a necessary evil.” Can you imagine the foundation of numbers, of bookkeeping is viewed by accountants as a necessary evil or in my case, deal with it with avoidance?
Can you imagine it in the construction industry? If a contractor, who’s going to build a building, whether it’s a house, an apartment building, or a tower of some sort, and he’s avoiding the building of the foundation, worst of all, he calls it a necessary evil. How long would these buildings stand? Well, they wouldn’t.
Well, that’s true also in the paper world, in the financial world, if this is how you view it, how can you expect your end result to be any good? If your beginning is viewed as a necessary evil, or your account will be like me avoiding it, it won’t work.
So here’s what I’m saying to you, is that those tasks that you don’t want, we’ve bundled them together. You don’t have to worry about it, our offering not only provides you the software, but it provides you the actual bookkeeping too. We actually love to do it because, because the machines do the work and we just monitor it.
If this is something that you want to remove from your, from your plate, so when you’re done your work you can actually, instead of putting on another hat, you can just rest. That’s an novel concept. You can go and be with your family, another novel concept. You can actually take vacations, another novel concept. Oh, and actually put up your feet and do absolutely nothing wouldn’t that be great.
You can go and be with your family, take a vacation or do absolutely nothing...
Come join us, come find out what we can offer you so that you could actually have the life that you designed. As opposed to having to wear another cap on evenings and weekends to do accounting and bookkeeping, which we love to do. Thank you so much for listening. I can’t wait to talk to you further.
Sincerely,
Vince Schembri…