Audit to Automation: Charting the Technology Landscape in Accounting with Matthew Priest

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Transcript:

Laura:
Welcome to the first episode of the dynamics unwrapped podcast. In these sessions, we’re going to hear from industry experts in the accounting and finance industry, as well as hear from experts in accounting software. But to kick us off joining us for our first session, we have Matthew Priest, a partner at the independent chartered accounting firm Forrester Boyd. Matthew has been in the industry for nearly 20 years, and he has a wealth of knowledge in managing accounts, advising businesses, tax planning, and prepping accounts. So Matthew, welcome.

Matthew Priest:
Thanks for having me. And I’m honoured to be the first guest. Hopefully, I live up to the introduction you’ve just given me I don’t disappoint!

Laura:
No, I don’t think you will, but thank you so much for being my first and as this obviously is my first podcast, and you’ve kindly agreed to be the first person, I will go easy with you on the first question. So obviously, accountants have a little bit of a reputation for not being the most exciting people in the world. So here’s your chance to tell me what you do outside of your day job just to bust that myth.

Matthew Priest:
Yeah, unfortunately, I don’t think I can bust that myth. I’d love to say I do something exciting, skydiving as a hobby, or whatever. But unfortunately, I don’t do anything that exciting. I’m sorry, to all the other accountants out there who wanted me to bust the myth. We’ve got two young boys at home. So they’re three and five, so they keep us busy, quite a lot of the time, although it’s getting a little bit easier than what it feels like we’ve got our own life a little bit again, now, to spend the time with the wife and the kids. And even given sort of the run up to Christmas, it’s even busier with them at the minute and trying to get everything sorted around the house. This weekend, I was actually putting up the Christmas streetlights. So we have like lights that go across the street from one house to another. So spent like three hours doing that only for us to realise that none of the lights work! It was working before we started but they’re not working now. So it looks like I might be spending time doing that this weekend. Other than that, I like my football, I’m a Liverpool fan, try to go out and watch them when I can go to the games. I try to go sort of five or six times a season. I do like to sort of go to the pub with my friends and watch them have a few beers. I do like to socialise where I can. And then just keeping fit really I’ve tried to do some exercise every morning trying to get my 10,000 steps a day in. Just find that really, really helps things. Yeah, that’s it in a nutshell. So no can’t bust the myth, unfortunately.

Laura:
Well, I mean, I might have to kick you out now that you’ve said you’re a Liverpool fan as I Am a Man United fan, so I don’t know about that! But yeah, I mean, it is interesting, you said about sort of the exercise and, you know, doing your 10,000 steps, because it is obviously so important to especially when you’re kind of in an office a lot. And I think getting out and doing some exercise, especially when it’s in a bit of a stressful environment is really important.

Matthew Priest:
Yeah, I’ve certainly found that I mean, I started sort of exercising, I don’t know probably when I was 19, or 20, like everyone does to try and look good. Really, I think I had a holiday coming up. And I thought I’ll try and sort of get in shape and I went a few weeks. And then I just stuck at it. And I actually sort of liked the way it made me feel. And that’s what made me continue with it. And I would say that people start off doing it to look good, but end up just doing it because it makes you feel good. And now it’s a big part of my life trying to do something every morning just to relax and make me feel good. And just to destress, decompress, and then work and I found that really helpful. Probably I’ve only really sort of started that much, the last couple of years. I’m sort of on target to hit my 10,000 steps a day average, which I haven’t done ever before. I think last year was only about 6000 a day, something like that. So taking a real step up this year. I really sort of enjoy it as a form of exercise, just completely switching off or putting on a podcast and trying to learn something new every lunchtime just to break up the day and just have that sort of time away from the office. I found myself coming back sort of with a bit more energy a bit more of a different outlook on things and just found it really helpful.

Laura:
Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s so important and I think that it is like a massive destressor. And I think that kind of leads me on to, what do you find is the most challenging aspect of your role?

Matthew Priest:
Yeah, I think, for me, the most challenging part is actually nothing particularly technical with the role. It’s more sort of managing time and managing everything trying to manage all the priorities. You’ve obviously got client work that needs to be done. Some clients want things done quickly, then it’s trying to look after the staff and trying to help them in managing their workloads, trying to help them in general, trying to help get the best out of them. And then there’s all the other things that a normal business would face as well sort of fitting in time for a bit of marketing, a bit of trying to grow the business as well and sort of think about other things, what might work, what might help to save time, what might help on efficiencies, and then things like that, and it’s just trying to make sure you’ve got the time to do all the things that are important.

Laura:
Yeah, it’s hard to prioritise sometimes when everything does feel like it’s a bit of a priority. But, what would you say, is kind of maybe the most time consuming aspect of your role?

Matthew Priest:
I don’t, that’s a difficult one to answer, because I think you could, you could work as long as you wanted, really, because there’s always things to do, there’s always emails coming through, there’s always bits you can do. And to me, what I’ve what found is trying to sort of put a bit of a limit on it, really, and what I actually do, and try not to get sucked into too much, because I’m aware of that I think it’s called Parkinson’s Law where sort of time expands to the length of time you give it. And for me, it’s quite an eye opener before I had kids because I used to, I’m not sure if I’m answering the question really, but I’ll carry on. So before I had kids, I used to probably work a lot more than what I did. And I would just take things on. And someone would say, can you help me with this, I’ll just do that. Or a client will ask for something and I will just do it myself. Rather than sort of asking other people to do it. I used to put in a heck of a lot more time. And then when my first kid was born, it was quite a big change for us. I can’t remember how old I was 30, maybe some 30 years of sort of doing what I want to then not being able to do what I want and all of a sudden we, me and my wife found it difficult. So it’d be a case of as soon as work finishes, I’m coming home and in the morning I need to be around to help with the baby. And all of a sudden the time at work became quite a lot less. And it’s like, well, how am I actually going to still do the same amount of stuff? How am I going to get through everything? And I’ve just sort of found a way by just looking at things differently in trying to be more organised and trying to delegate trying to delegate more than when maybe I thought people weren’t capable of taking on something, trying to help them. And I still put a bit of time into them to help them to do a task, but not as much as it would be to do yourself. That’s something I’ve been quite aware of over the last few years like so you can work as long as you want to work all day every day for you if you wanted to there’s enough sort of work there.

Laura:
Yeah, it’s getting that focus in isn’t. Especially when you have kids, I mean, obviously your priorities change when you have children. Not that I’d know, but you do have to change. So having that, becoming a lot more focused at work so that you can still get that work done, but in maybe a more limited timeframe, it’s really important.

Matthew Priest:
Yeah, that’s it. Sort of all the other tools, like trying to help maximise the time you have got. So if I’m working on something, I’m purely working on that, you know, I’m switching emails off for an hour or two, sometimes putting the Do Not Disturb on the phone. I’m just focused on getting something done. And I’ve found you can get through a lot when you’ve got that focus.

Laura:
Yeah, absolutely. And so I think suppose moving on to sort of like the technology aspects. How much of a role does technology play in your day to day job?

Matthew Priest:
I mean, technology is, is massive. I think we as a firm have come quite a long, way since COVID, which sort of forced us into it, and I think all the businesses have found the same thing as well, really, but so much reliance on software, which is why I suppose the technical side of the role isn’t as difficult as people might expect, because you’ve got the technology there to do it. You know, you’ve got technology that calculates the taxes someone’s got to pay, obviously, you still need to know what you’re doing in order to check things, or perhaps, I suppose, where the human element comes into it is looking at things that is sometimes missing, because the software can do the calculation. But if you’re missing some information out, the software is not going to know. But the technology plays a huge part. And it’s such a big area of our business, because everything relies on it. What we’re doing now, relies on it, everything we do, in terms of our accounts work, is relying on account software, tax software, payroll, payroll software. Such a huge part of the role. In fact, my youngest is getting to the stage where he’s doing quite well to be fair but he’s doing some adding up and multiplication and things. And I’ve realised I’ve lost the mental arithmetic skills I used to have, like, I used to be quite quick at adding, multiplying and all the rest of your stuff. And now because of the reliance on, you know, might be a calculator or spreadsheet, I’ve just lost the ability I used to have.

Laura:
Yeah, do you know what that’s so funny that you say that, because, I mean, I did my GCSEs about six years ago now, and I did really well in math then, and now I can’t even do basic math at all! So it’s completely gone from me as well!

Matthew Priest:
Yeah, I still do it, but I use technology to do it, so my head has lost it!

Laura:
Yeah, it’s funny how it works. But is there a particular software that you find that you use more than others?

Matthew Priest:
We use so much, really, so if we’re doing a set of accounts we use digital accounts production. I think what we are using more and more of is Xero at the minute and that has been quite a bit of a disrupter, I suppose, in that it used to always be Sage, what people would use to do their books and now Xero have come in, we’re finding a lot more clients using XERO. And we’re using it a lot more as well. And we’ve also found over the last few years that where clients used to do their own books, when I first started as an accountant a client would do their books, not particularly well, most of the time, and then they would give you them to do their accounts. And a lot of times that would be on Sage, or it might even be on a spreadsheet or something like that. So you’d have to turn that into a set of accounts. What we’re finding now is that clients seem to be less interested in doing that side of it and doing the bookkeeping. And we’re actually taking a lot more of that, for clients, I think particularly since COVID, where there’s sort of been a bit of a shift in mind-set of people valuing their time and thinking why am I sat here doing bookkeeping, and we’ve been able to take that on at quite a competitive price because of the technology behind Xero. So back in my day, if we was to do someone’s bookkeeping, because you’re charged for your time, it would be quite a costly thing for a client to pay for you to sit there and type out invoices and enter them into an into a piece of software. Now you’ve got AI what can scan the invoices, and it’s picking all that up. There’s no manual entry. So technology’s been a huge part of that. And so there’s been a shift from clients doing it in house themselves and now passing it over to us.

Laura:
Yeah, no, that’s really interesting you say that massive shift in mind-set, I think since COVID it is huge. But obviously you did mention AI and it is coming up everywhere at the moment. And it’s I don’t think it’s going anywhere. So how do you think AI is impacting your industry? Or is it even going to impact your industry?

Matthew Priest:
Well, I think it definitely will. And I think you’ve got to be of the thinking that it’s going to otherwise if you’re not and you’re burying your head in the sand, you’re going to miss opportunities with it really, in terms of the impact. I think there’s a lot of things we do that can be automated. So, for example, if you take a tax return, you might be putting details from someone’s P60. So their employment income and what tax they have paid and entering that into a piece of software. So in throws its entrance into preparing the personal tax return.

Where I think you’ll find AI coming in is that that should just be sort of automatically be put into that piece of software. So whether it’s collecting it from an email that the client sent you in automatically, sort of recognising that actually, this is the P60. For, Mr. Jones, and we’re going to automatically load that into his record. I think that’s where we’ll see AI. And I think that will help, that will help massively to cut down people’s time on what is effectively, I suppose, more admin tasks rather than accounts tax returns. So I think that’ll be an area of probably the starting point of where we’ll see it, it seems like the obvious place to start. And then like I said there will be time savings for us which I think is great because people had sort of worried that people are going to be out of jobs, but I think like I said before, there’s always so much to do. And a big problem at the minute in the accounts sector is recruiting. So if you can actually sort of reduce the need to recruit as much, then you’re actually going to be that position and use and use AI. And for me using AI to do the more admin bits, or admin parts of a set of accounts that are always the same, they’re always the repetitive bit, then that’s going to help and it’s going to help people want to be in the job more to me, because you actually are cutting out more than of the mundane and leaving them with the better stuff to do.

Laura:
I think that’s exactly what AI is. There’s definitely a lot of fear around it. But there’s also other people, and there’s a lot of people really excited about it, and it is cutting out those mundane tasks, so people can focus a lot more on kind of doing the things that they love. I mean, is there a particular area where you would wish that AI would kind of take that part of your job away? Is there a particular area, which you find is really time consuming, and you’d like it to help?

Matthew Priest:
I think it’s just for me, it’s probably less so because a lot of what I do, what I like to do is the advisory side of it. So getting a set of accounts. So the way we’ve worked with someone we’ll sort of prepare the accounts, and I will check over them and then pull the advice together and the tax planning side of that for clients. I don’t think that’s going to be replaced by AI, the advisory side. But like the things that are where it’s like a repetitive check, I think, yeah, there will be some mundane bits in there that I think yeah, I’d love to sort of let AI deal with that, you know. If a tax return comes to me, and I’m checking that the P60 is the same as what figure is on the tax computation, is that really something that you need to do, is that really something that you need to do for every tax return and checking them and checking those bits? So I’d love to sort of get rid of that more, because that’s yeah, the least fun part of the job.

Laura:
Yeah, yeah. And I definitely think you don’t want AI to take away from the more human to human interaction. I think there has to be that that kind of separation. I think that’s where some people get a little bit anxious around AI is thinking that it what will replace the more human to human interactions whereas really, what you want AI to do is to just kind of eliminate the mundane parts and help you improve your efficiency rather than eliminate, like you said, your advisory part which is a lot more human to human.

Matthew Priest:
Yeah, exactly. And even things I suppose where you sort of, you’ve pulled together the advice and you know, someone could save some money by X, Y, and Z, and I suppose then get AI to come up with an email to them to say, actually, you can save money … put together an email on how someone can save money doing this and that rather than me spending half an hour typing out the email, it comes up with it and that is the side of things where I think can be the timesaving. Yes, something for me where it’s like was, if I can do that what’s the point and be sat there typing out an email for thirty minutes?

Laura:
Yeah. And obviously you say about your advisory services and the way that’s kind of a lot about what you do. But where are you seeing your customers struggle? What are the biggest challenges that they’re facing at the moment?

Matthew Priest:
Recruitment, which I’ve mentioned has been tricky for accountants. Accountants have seemed to have disappeared since COVID. But recruitment, we’re finding a lot of businesses, especially given the location where we are sort of Lincolnshire and the Humber and competition from firms who are often more remote working or not more remote working, but someone can work for a bigger city and effectively live where we are, which is quite cheap, and quite cheap living to be fair, but they can get paid more money by working remotely, for an organisation in London, say, and they might not need to travel there or they might need to travel there for a day, a day a week or something like that. I think that’s not just us, that’s a problem businesses are facing, in general, where we are in the recruitment. And also just in skills, people just not finding skills available anymore. You know, I’ve had clients in hospitality saying there’s can’t find someone to be a pot washer nowadays, so it just seems to be a real lack of people.

I think link to that a bit which should really encourage people to stop doing that type of job is the minimum wage increase, which is just going up and up. And that puts a lot more pressure on the smaller businesses because it’s not just the staff on minimum wage that will get a pay rise, it’s you know, if you’ve got levels within your business, anyone who’s on just above minimum wage, if minimum wage goes up, you have to put their wage up. So then effectively, there’s a knock on effect for every wage bracket, where everyone has to get a pay rise, because the minimum wage goes up. And those sort of things are very, very costly and difficult for a small business to negotiate their way through. And it just seems to be a lot of things over the years, what falls to the smaller businesses to absorb so like I said the minimum wage increases. We had auto-enrolment five years ago where employees were then forced to pay into people’s stat pensions, which obviously, is a great thing, but it’s an extra cost to that business. And it’s extra compliance in terms of setting that pension scheme up and then complying with it every month every time they’re on the payroll. So I think recruitment, minimum wage and costs, in general, inflation’s come down a bit, but costs have increased massively, and sometimes businesses aren’t all that quick to increase their prices, which can be a quick win, if you’re comfortable enough to do it, to increase your prices. But I think a lot of business owners struggle with that side, they’re not quick to increase the prices. So they’re the areas we’re finding really.

Laura:
Yeah, it definitely does seem like there is a staffing issue, there’s a lack of talent, I think I’ve definitely seen that, and that people are struggling to actually get the staff. But, is there anything in particular when it actually comes to accounts or finances specifically, which people just struggle with, they just can’t get their head around it or it just takes them too long to do or, or anything like that, where it just always seems to be a real challenge.

Matthew Priest:
In terms of getting the quality of people getting the right people?

Laura:
Well, anything in finance, where people just can’t do it, they just really struggle with it, anything like where it could be its just too technical for them to do or it’s too hard to understand?

Matthew Priest:
I’d probably almost say the opposite to that actually, in my experience what I’ve found people struggle with is the other side to it, sort of managing the clients managing their own work, managing their own workload that becomes more difficult rather than the technical side and we see people that pass exams really well. So obviously, really intelligent but just struggle in the role of actually getting things done and meeting all the various expectations and deadlines because that’s what our job is really, managing clients expectations. And I think that, to me is probably where we find people struggle. So yeah, in my experience, but it would be interesting when you have a few more guests on see what their experiences are. But in my experience, it’s less so on the technical and the understanding and more just on the general stuff of managing expectations and managing clients and being able to deal with them. Because like I said that’s a big part of the role. And that’s probably more where the role is going to go, the more AI comes into it is the technical side will become less, and that side will become more important.

Laura:
Sure. I think that kind of leads nicely into sort of my next question, which is, obviously, you mentioned as well about companies struggle to recruit, and I suppose that’s why they do turn towards more accountants, but also, at a certain level, if a business gets to a certain level, they might want to try and keep some of that in house, or if they go to accountants, how would you think technology can help alleviate that gap between lacking staff and needing their accounts to be done? Do you think technology can help there?

Matthew Priest:
Yeah definitely. And it should do, because there’s less, the more technology does improve and can take away the sort of repetitive tasks, the less stuff you need. So like I said, back when I started, if you’d have had someone probably just sat there as a job processing invoices, so having a big pile of invoices and they would type the detail into the account software. So they would type out the supplier, what it is, the amount, the VAT, etc. So that would take a minute or whatever, per invoice. But now you’ve got a big stack of invoices, and they just go through the scanner, so you leave them on the scanner, you can be off doing something else. And all that information is then plugged into the software, really. And I think there’s a big opportunity for businesses as well to probably address that area and change the way they’re doing things. We’ve had it recently with a couple of clients who were just realising they’re spending quite a lot on the accounts department. And actually, it’s probably too much what they’re spending and they can save someone’s time and actually relocate them to another area of the business where the struggling to struggling to recruit.

Laura:
Yeah, yeah, I think that’s actually really interesting to say that I mean, that technology can almost not just bridge the gap or to save you money. Because you’re spending so much on a finance department, when actually technology, the automation that technology can provide, the AI parts now that save time, it can actually save you a lot of money as well as time and improve efficiency.

Matthew Priest:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And we have had that, we have had that case with a couple of couple of clients. To be fair, where things have got quicker, and it saved them. And it saved them money as well.

Laura:
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And are there any other areas where you think technology could save a bit of time or a bit of money? You know, you’ve obviously mentioned the invoices part but is there anything else, which you see people who maybe aren’t utilising as much technology, where else they can kind of save that time, or automation?

Matthew Priest:
It’s difficult to be specific, really, but I think you can go into a business and you can look at what people are doing and think like, I think you almost need a second pair of eyes to come in and look at the way people are doing things. Because when you’re in the business, you do things that have always been done. And you don’t question it, or you get too busy to question it anything like that can just keep going as it is. The thinking of, yeah that could be a bit more of an efficient way but it’s alright as it is. And I think it’s just having the time or having a second pair of eyes to just call them and be like, actually, you know, you don’t need to do that. You don’t need to do that like that.

Laura:
I mean, resistance to change is probably one of the biggest problems that a business has. I mean, change management is, I think something that we here at Creative push massively. Whenever anyone comes to do a migration over to BC, it’s always we are like, change management has to be in place, and you have got to have the time to invest in implementing the solution, because it’s all good and well, you know, having these inefficiencies, but if you want to actually change, you’ve got to invest that time to enable that change.

Matthew Priest:
Yeah definitely. It’s a good point because I think a lot of people would either sort of go through it and not do that not have that process and just end up upsetting staff and whatever and like we said, if finding staff is difficult, then the last thing we want to be doing is upsetting the staff. But change management needs to be a process, I think people will be put off, people just not implement the change, right and not do it. Right. And I think other people will just be sort of put off by the fact that they know the staff and think, well, they’re not going to do that. They’re not going to want to do that. And to just leave it at that rather than trying to actually do something about it. And like you said about the change management and actually doing it the right doing it the right way.

Laura:
Yeah, absolutely. Well I think that’s about all we have time for today. So Matthew, thank you ever so much for being my first guest and joining me, you’ve been brilliant really insightful. So thank you ever so much.

Matthew Priest:
Not a problem. Thanks for having me.

Laura:
Thank you so much.

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